National Socialist sphere of influence.
Territorial expansion and the establishment of occupying regimes dominated
by the radical elements of the Party and the SS meant a further increase in
National Socialist power. By radicalizing policy on the fringes, German society
could be converted more rapidly into a racially homogeneous Volksgemeinschaft
(national community) and the principle of ‘selection’ (in the form of ‘extirpation’)
could be established as a permanent and all-embracing process.
From the point of view of the National Socialists war represented a means of
racial selection, a method for maintaining the ‘racially valuable’ and thus an
important instrument in the establishment of a social order that was able to
stand up for itself. The loss of ‘racially valuable’ individuals in the war also
legitimated the violent destruction of large numbers of ‘inferior specimens’ in
order to restore a ‘national biological balance’. Such a radical, dehumanizing
approach only had a chance of being put into practice in wartime, in a more
generally brutalizing atmosphere in which the existence of the individual was
already to an extent devalued.
chapter 7
THE PERSECUTION OF JEWS IN THE
TERRITORY OF THE REICH, 1939–1940
In the first months of the war there was a characteristic concentration of the
jurisdiction of the Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei) with respect to the ‘Jewish
question’. The Gestapo and the Security Police were merged under the Reich
Security Head Office (RSHA) in October 1939 and from the beginning of 1940
responsibility for Jewish affairs was concentrated in a new Department, IV D 4
(Emigration and Evacuation), which was altered shortly afterwards to IV B 4
(Jewish Affairs and Evacuation Matters). 1
Amongst other things, this Department oversaw the Reich Association of Jews
in Germany (Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland), founded in July 1939, in
respect of which the responsible officials performed their duties in the pettiest,
most intransigent, and least cooperative manner possible. 2 The Reich Association of Jews oversaw existing communities and administered them as branch or district
associations. 3 The Jewish institutions that still existed (associations, organizations, foundations) were gradually dissolved and their functions incorporated into the
responsibilities of the Reich Association. 4
In autumn 1939 the Jewish schools that were still in existence were also
assimilated into the remit of the Reich Association, which was by then heavily
overburdened. In October 1939 there were still 9,555 Jewish pupils in a total of 126
schools, including 5 secondary schools, 1 middle school, and a secondary modern.
134
The Persecution of the Jews, 1939–1941
Two years later, in the autumn of 1941, there were 74 schools remaining for some
7,000 Jewish children of school age, of which only one was a secondary school. By
the end of 1941 teaching was impossible in practical terms because of the deport-
ations and numerous other restrictions in the lives of the Jewish population. 5 In 1942 the whole network of Jewish schools was dissolved on the orders of the
Gestapo. 6 The existing centres for the education of the Jewish population in agricultural and technical professions, in preparation for their emigration, not
only survived but were positively encouraged by the RSHA. However, after the
summer of 1941 it pushed for a reduction in their number, and by the end of that
year it was aiming to shut them down altogether. 7
In the first months of the war Jews were almost wholly excluded from German
society. 8 The collection of documents edited by Joseph Walk reveals that between the November pogroms and the outbreak of war 229 anti-Jewish regulations were
issued, rising to 253 between 1 September 1939 and the beginning of the deport-
ations in October 1941. In September 1939, for example, an (unpublished) general 8
p.m. curfew was imposed on Jews, 9 their radios were confiscated, 10 and their telephones were disconnected in summer 1940. 11 In June 1940 they were excluded from the National Air-Raid Protection League (Reichsluftschutzbund), 12 and an order of the Aviation Ministry of 7 October 1940 assigned them separate air-raid
shelters or ensured that they would be kept apart from other inhabitants in the
event of an air raid. 13 Jews’ ration cards were marked with a ‘J’, 14 they were only permitted to use certain shops, 15 and the times when they were permitted to shop were strictly regulated by the municipality (and often limited to one hour a day). 16
Jews were systematically discriminated against in the distribution of rations, and
by turn refused the right to buy luxury foods17 and then clothing. 18 These drastic measures had the effect of starving the Jewish population and ensuring that they
devoted most of their energies to obtaining food. 19
In addition, since the summer of 1939 many cities had taken their own measures
to stop Jews from moving in. 20 Jews were being driven out of their homes in increasing numbers since the war had begun and were taken into designated
‘Jewish houses’. 21 From May 1941 Gestapo units started to erect special ‘Jewish camps’ on the outskirts of the municipalities. 22
After the war started the so-called forced-labour deployment of German Jews in
segregated work brigades (or geschlossener Arbeitseinsatz) was extended. Hitherto,
enforced employment had only affected people registered as without an income or
in receipt of benefits, but in the spring of 1940 it was extended to include all Jews
‘capable of work’, which meant above all women. Jews were deployed chiefly in
industrial production. In February 1941 41,000 people were involved in this
geschlossener Arbeitseinsatz, and the regime had thereby effectively exhausted
the working potential of the Jewish population. 23
At the same time the regime continued with its policy of forcing the Jewish
minority into exile. In a keynote speech before the Gauleiters held on 29 February
Persecution of Jews in the Reich, 1939–40
135
1940 Himmler declared that the continuation of emigration measures was one of
his priorities for the rest of that year. 24 According to the reports of the SD, 10,312
Jews emigrated from Germany in the first quarter of 1940.25 On 24 April the RSHA informed the Gestapo regional offices that they should ‘continue to press ahead
with Jewish emigration from the territory of the Reich even during the war’. 26 In the process it was important to ensure that ‘Jews fit for military service or for
work’ should if possible not be allowed to emigrate to another European country,
and under no circumstances into enemy states.
Euthanasia Programmes
In spring and summer 1939—not coincidentally at a time when intensive prepar-
ations for war were under way—the National Socialist regime began to make
concrete arrangements for the systematic ‘annihilation of lives unfit for further
existence’. Such plans had long been the subject of discussion by specialists, with
the constant support of the NSDAP. 27 In the field of psychiatry ideas on racial hygiene had been making headway since 1933, and in particular long-term patients
thought to be suffering from hereditary deficiencies, resistant to treatment, and
otherwise unproductive were not only the preferred targets of enforced steriliza-
‘non-contributive mouths to feed’. 28
A background such as this certainly contributed to the receptiveness among
psychiatrists—and the state bureaucracy concerned with psychiatric care—to the
idea of systematic ‘annihilation’ of patients in psychiatric institutions. However,
the decision to put this radical idea into practice was intimately linked to the
regime’s wider orientation towards war. From the perspective of the ‘national
biological’ (volksbiologisch) considerations of radical National Socialists, it was not
merely legitimate but necessary to compensate for the potential loss of ‘healthy’
national biological substance (Volkssubstanz) due to the war by ‘eradicating’ the
least ‘desirable’ elements of the population at the same time. Such a drastic
intervention could only be contemplated within an atmosphere in which human
life was more generally brutalized and devalued, in other words when faced by the
vast scale of killing and death that a war represented. Only in the exceptional
situation that the war represented was it possible to conceal mass murder behind
the façade of supposedly ‘war-related’ measures, such as the ‘freeing up’ of the
psychiatric institutions for purposes connected with the war, saving the costs of
care, and so forth. Justifications with this kind of functionalist rationale were
supplied from various branches of the administration, each from its own particu-
lar perspective, and were to play a significant role when the ‘euthanasia pro-
grammes’ were eventually carried out. However, historical analysis runs the risk
of regarding these apparently ‘rational’ motives as cumulatively constituting a
136
The Persecution of the Jews, 1939–1941
multi-dimensional context of justification for ‘euthanasia’ and thus losing sight of
the true starting point for the murders—the fact that the National Socialists used
the war as a welcome opportunity to put their ideologically founded ‘biological
revolution’ project into practice more radically than had hitherto been possible.
The planning and preparation phase for the ‘euthanasia programmes’ can only
be partially reconstructed, mostly on the basis of statements by those involved
made after the end of the war. The mass murder of the disabled and the sick began
with a distinct programme of children’s ‘euthanasia’. 29 It has long been clear that an individual case played an important role in triggering this programme of
murders: on the basis of a petition from one set of parents Hitler gave his personal
physician, Karl Brandt, the authority to have a severely handicapped child killed.
According to more recent research the killing of this child, who had been born in
the Leipzig area on 20 February 1939, took place on 25 July 1939.30 Most probably contemporaneously with this individual case Hitler had charged his personal
physician, Karl Brandt, and Philipp Bouhler, the Head of the Chancellery of the
Führer of the NSDAP, with devising a process for proceeding in the same manner
with similar cases in the future. The Chancellery convened a small group of
experts, who established the procedures for the ‘euthanasia’ of small children.
To facilitate their implementation a front organization was formed under the
name of the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of Severe Illnesses
with Hereditary or Predisposed Causes (Reichsausschuss zur wissenschaftlichen
Erfassung von erb- und anlagebedingten schweren Leiden).
The deliberations of this group must have taken place in July at the latest, since
on 18 August 1939 the Reich Minister of the Interior used an unpublished circular
decree to introduce a Requirement to Report Newborn Children with any form of
Handicap (Meldepflicht über misgestaltete usw. Neugeborene). This constrained
medical personnel to report all children who displayed ‘severe hereditary illnesses’
before the end of their third year to the Health Authorities, who would pass the
information forward to the Reich Committee. The Committee submitted the
report forms to three experts, who each gave their assessment in turn. If their
conclusions were negative, as soon as the parents had given their consent to
hospitalization, the children were transferred to one of the approximately thirty
so-called ‘specialist children’s clinics’ where they were killed by means of tablets,
injections, or by starvation. It is thought that children’s ‘euthanasia’ claimed some
5,000 victims in all.
The fact that the first ‘euthanasia’ murder took place at the end of July 1939 (and
not early in 1939 as has previously been assumed) makes necessary a partial
revision of the prehistory of the whole ‘euthanasia’ programme. Hitler’s instruc-
tion to carry out adult ‘euthanasia’ is evidently to be seen in closer chronological
connection to the beginning of children’s ‘euthanasia’ than it has been hitherto,
and an interpretation of the whole ‘euthanasia’ complex in the context of direct
preparations for the war is therefore much more plausible. From the new dating
Persecution of Jews in the Reich, 1939–40
137
for the killing of the child in Leipzig it emerges that the decisive discussions during
which Hitler, in the presence of Bormann, Lammers, and Leonardo Conti (State
Secretary for Health in the Ministry of the Interior and Director of the NSDAP’s
Main Office for the People’s Health), gave instructions for the systematic murder
of adult psychiatric institution inmates took place before Hitler personally
authorized the first individual ‘euthanasia’ case and not, as has hitherto been
supposed, several months afterwards. It now seems highly probable that Hitler’s
instructions for the ‘euthanasia’ of children and adults were chronologically in
very close proximity, and that they were issued in June or early July 1939. In any
case Bouhler and Brandt, who had rapidly conceived a programme for the murder
of children on the basis of the Leipzig precedent, succeeded relatively quickly in
taking over the task of adult ‘euthanasia’ from Conti.
It was probably at the end of July that Bouhler arranged a meeting with some
fifteen to twenty doctors at which the plans for ‘euthanasia’ were established on
the basis of the supposed necessity of freeing up psychiatric institutions and carers
for war-related purposes. With the help of the Technological Institute of the Reich
Criminal Investigation Department (Reichskriminalpolizeiamt), which had
already developed appropriate poisons for children’s ‘euthanasia’, an apparently
suitable method of killing was found: asphyxiation by carbon monoxide. 31 It was significant that during the preparations for ‘euthanasia’ an instruction for
enforced sterilization that had been issued on 31 August (thus immediately before
the start of the war) was officially suspended except F-cases, which were seen as
particularly serious. 32
At a meeting of leading ‘euthanasia’ doctors held on 9 October it was agreed to
kill approximately every fifth psychiatric in-patient, or some 65,000–70,000 indi-
viduals. 33 Also in October 1939, it seems that Hitler issue
d a document on his personal notepaper in which he instructed Bouhler and Brandt ‘to extend the remit
of certain named doctors to grant those who are as far as anyone can humanly
judge incurably sick a merciful death (Gnadentod) after critical investigation of
their state of health’. With this document, which Hitler significantly backdated to 1
September 1939, the activities of those who were responsible for the ‘euthanasia’
programme and who had so far been acting without any legal basis were legitim-
ized. Terms such as ‘critical investigation’ and ‘merciful death’ were intended to
obscure the fact that what was being organized was in fact mass murder. 34
From October 1939 psychiatric institutions were asked to indicate on special
forms those patients who were suffering from certain serious psychological
conditions and who were ‘unemployable or only able to fulfil mechanical tasks’.
In addition, without reference to health profile or capacity for work, registration
was required for all patients who had been in an institution for more than five
years, who had been detained as criminally insane, or who ‘do not possess German
citizenship or are not of German or similar blood’: this formulation referred to
patients who were of Jewish, Gypsy, or non-European origin. 35
138
The Persecution of the Jews, 1939–1941
However, even before the mass murders of the T4 Programme had begun,
patients in institutions for the mentally ill had already been systematically killed,
especially in the annexed areas of Poland but also within the Old Reich, in
Pomerania. At least 7,700 people fell victim to this programme of mass murder.
From the end of September to December members of the Eimann Special Guard
Division (Wachsturmbann Eimann)—a unit made up of SS members from
Danzig, ethnic German Self-Defence Corps (volksdeutscher Selbstschutz) and
members of Einsatzgruppen (task forces) in the new Reichsgau of Danzig-West-
Prussia—shot thousands of the inmates of psychiatric institutions, most notably
patients in the Kocborowo (Conradstein) Mental Hospital. The victims were
people incapable of work or those of Polish or Jewish ethnicity. 36
Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews Page 25
