Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews

by Peter Longerich

  leadership proceeded on the Night of Broken Glass (Reichskristallnacht); we

  shall encounter this tactic of relying on the initiative and intuition of the junior

  leaderships again when we come to the nature of instructions given to

  Occupation and Persecution of Jews in Poland, 1939–40/41 145

  the Einsatzgruppen shortly before the beginning of the war against the Soviet

  Union.

  These Einsatzgruppen were supported above all by the ethnic German Self-

  Defence Corps (volksdeutscher Selbstschutz), a militia formed after the start of the

  war from overwhelmingly National Socialist members of the German minority

  and integrated into the regular police force (Ordnungspolizei). 11 Both Einsatzgruppen and the Self-Defence Corps—but also the regular police, the military arm of

  the SS (Waffen-SS), and army units—shot thousands of Polish civilians during the

  war, often in the course of retaliation measures against supposed or actual attacks

  on German troops. 12 In the month of September alone, according to post-war investigations undertaken by the Poles, more than 16,000 people fell victim to

  such executions. 13 In the course of this massive outbreak of violence against the civilian population hundreds of Polish Jews were arbitrarily murdered by the

  police, the Self-Defence Corps, and members of the army, and in a series of cases

  locked into synagogues and burned alive. 14 These murders were part of a wave of anti-Semitic violence that the German occupying forces unleashed on the Jews of

  Poland from the very beginning of the war and which also manifested itself as

  looting, mistreatment, rape, public mockery, and more. It should also be empha-

  sized that after September 1939 the Einsatzgruppen and the army forcibly drove

  tens of thousands of Polish Jews across the line of demarcation into the Soviet-

  occupied areas. 15

  After the end of the war this wave of terror became more systematized. From

  late October on Einsatzgruppen and Selbstschutz carried out the ‘intelligentsia

  campaign’ organized by the RSHA, 16 in which groups such as teachers, academics, former officers, and civil servants, the clergy, landowners, and leading members of

  Polish national organizations, as well as Jews and the inmates of mental institu-

  tions became the victims of large-scale mass arrests and executions. Some of the

  victims were transported to camps, where they either died from the conditions

  obtaining there or were murdered in mass executions that took place up to the

  spring of 1940.17

  There were sometimes other groupings involved in extensive campaigns such as

  this, just as they were in the murders of civilians during the war. They included the

  National Socialist Motor Corps, 18 the Paramilitary Police (Schutzpolizei), 19 the Waffen-SS, 20 but above all units from the army itself. 21 In the first four months of German occupation tens of thousands of people were murdered in this way, with a

  notable focus on the new Reichsgau of Danzig-West-Prussia, where at least ten

  towns or camps can be identified with certainty, in each of which more than a

  thousand civilians were shot between autumn 1939 and spring 1940.22

  In the course of these events in Danzig-West-Prussia in autumn 1939, as well as

  members of the Polish elites, Jews and the inmates of mental hospitals, in many

  towns there were smaller groups of ‘a-social’ individuals killed, including prosti-

  tutes, women said to be suffering from sexually transmitted diseases, and Gypsies.

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  The Persecution of the Jews, 1939–1941

  These murders will have been committed for the most part on the authority of

  lower-ranking policemen, SS, and Selbstschutz functionaries, who had on their

  own initiative amplified the orders they had received in the spirit of ‘racially

  hygienic cleansing’. 23

  In the newly formed Warthegau, too, Germans were shooting people from the

  same groups as in Danzig-West-Prussia, beginning in September and continuing

  throughout October and November, albeit on a smaller scale. 24 More executions occurred in the Polish areas attached to East Prussia, in Upper Silesia and the

  central and eastern Polish districts. 25 A report made by the commanders of Einsatzgruppe 16 to the Central Office of the SD on 20 October makes it clear

  just how systematically these murders were being carried out: the planned liquid-

  ation of ‘radical Polish elements’, who the report’s author regretted were already

  largely in detention, could only be continued for a short time, which meant that

  the number of dead in East Prussia could ‘only’ reach about 20,000. 26

  The role of the army in these systematic murders was not only restricted to

  participating in executions or to attacks by individual soldiers. More significant

  is the fact that the leadership of the army had accepted a ‘division of labour’ with

  the SS and the police at the beginning of the campaign. When the Head of

  Military Intelligence (Abwehr), Canaris, alerted the Head of the OKW, Keitel,

  on 12 September to the plans for sweeping, comprehensive executions in Poland,

  Keitel replied that ‘this matter has already been decided by the Führer’ and that

  Hitler had made it clear that ‘if the army does not want to have anything to do

  with this, it will have to accept the SS and the Gestapo working visibly alongside

  them’. 27 After a meeting with Hitler, Brauchitsch, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army (ObdH), informed his senior officers that the Einsatzgruppen in

  Poland would have ‘certain tasks concerning ethnic politics’ the fulfilment of

  which would lie outside the army’s areas of responsibility. The army thereby

  created the parameters for a war that was already being waged in part as an

  ideological campaign of annihilation, but without itself having to carry out the

  mass murder of civilians.

  Whilst the army tolerated the murder by Einsatzgruppen and during the war

  against Poland carried out considerable numbers of executions, after the end of

  the war the resistance of the military (and the civilian administration) to the

  uncontrollable activities of the Einsatzgruppen and the Selbstschutz began to

  grow. 28 Again and again there were awkward confrontations between the Self-Defence Corps or Einsatzgruppe units and army officers. In the middle of

  November the commander of the new military district (Wehrkreis) of Danzig,

  Lieutenant General von Bock, complained to Gauleiter and Reichstatthalter For-

  ster about the continuation of murders by the Selbstschutz, 29 despite an undertaking to desist given in mid-October. 30 Even though the Self-Defence Corps was supposed to have been dissolved after autumn 1939, in some areas this process

  was drawn out until spring 1940.31 In February 1940 Blaskowitz, the Military Occupation and Persecution of Jews in Poland, 1939–40/41 147

  Commander (Militärbefehlshaber) for the East, protested to the Commander-in-

  Chief of the Army about the murders of Jewish and non-Jewish Poles. 32

  The racist policies of the National Socialist regime in Poland were also exp-

  ressed in the separation of Jewish prisoners of war (estimated at some 60,000–

  65,000) from non-Jewish prisoners, and in the fact that they were treated worse

  than their Polish comrades, who themselves lived under much more miserable

  conditions than their Western counterparts. The consequence was a much higher

  mortality rate amongst Jewish prisoners. 33

>   Establishing German Rule in the Occupied Territories

  After a short-lived intermediate period of military administration, the fundamen-

  tal decisions regarding the future governance of Poland were taken in October

  1939: extensive areas of Poland were annexed by the Reich; the ‘General Govern-

  ment’ was established in central Poland and the extent of the eastern Polish areas

  to be ceded to the Soviet Union was definitively agreed. 34

  In Poland the National Socialists attempted to put into direct practice their

  utopian dream of a form of rule that was founded on the principle of racial

  inequality: a relatively narrow section of ethnic Germans and occupying forces

  from the area of the Reich subjugated the mass of the Polish population, whose

  Jewish minority was further sharply segregated as a lowest-ranking social group

  without rights of any kind. 35 After the extension of the General Government to cover eastern Polish areas in the summer of 1941 the Ukrainians and White

  Russians living there were generally better off than the Polish population.

  Within this differentiated system of racist rule the persecution of the Polish

  Jews must always be seen within the context of ‘Poland policy’ in general, but also

  at the same time it should be distinguished from the overall repression of occupied

  Poland. The gradual intensification of Jewish persecution (expropriation, expul-

  sion, ghettoization, enforced labour, and finally systematic mass murder) was only

  possible because the mass of the remaining population was extensively terrorized

  and deprived of its rights. On the other hand, from the perspective of the

  occupying powers, the persecution of the Jews in Poland represented the decisive

  starting point for the whole-scale restructuring of Poland along racist lines.

  Germany’s Polenpolitik aimed at the complete annihilation of every form

  of Polish statehood or national identity. This goal was to be achieved via the

  systematic mass murder of the Polish elites, by the destruction of Poland’s

  national culture and its education system, 36 by plundering its economy and enslaving its workers, 37 by an arbitrary system of terrorization, 38 and finally via a ‘Germanization’ of those Poles who appeared appropriately receptive accompanied by the expulsion, displacement, and long-term decimation of the majority

  of the population. 39

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  The Persecution of the Jews, 1939–1941

  ‘Poland policy’ inaugurated a radicalization of National Socialist ‘race policy’.

  The fact that in occupied Poland a regime maintained above all by Party and SS

  functionaries could exercise arbitrary power on the basis of racist precepts made

  the implementation of further radical measures easier in other areas of National

  Socialist ‘race policy’.

  Poland as the Object of German Judenpolitik

  German ‘Jewish policy’ in Poland went through four phases between September

  1939 and summer 1941. Initially ‘Jewish policy’ in Poland in September and

  October 1939 was determined by plans and preparations for a ‘Jewish reservation’

  (Judenreservat). A second phase, between autumn 1939 and spring 1940 saw the

  first deportations of Central European Jews into the ‘reservation’, whilst funda-

  mental anti-Jewish regulations were put in place by the occupying powers. In a

  third phase, between the onset of war in the West and autumn 1940, the author-

  ities in the General Government—in the context of the ‘Madagascar Project’—

  made plans for deporting the Jews under German rule to an African colony. From

  the end of 1940, ‘Jewish policy’ in the occupied areas was dominated by prepar-

  ations for the war against the Soviet Union; deportations of Jews ‘to the East’

  seemed therefore to have become a realistic possibility.

  Early Plans for a ‘Jewish Reservation’ in Poland

  The basis for Germany’s policy regarding the 1.7 million Polish Jews that were now

  under its rule was evidently only put in place after the start of the war in

  September and October 1939.40 From mid-September initial consideration was being given by the German leadership to a huge ‘resettlement programme’ that

  was to encompass the Jews of Poland as well as those in the areas of the German

  Reich.

  On 14 September Heydrich reported to a meeting of departmental heads of

  the Security Police that ‘with regard to the Jewish problem in Poland . . . the

  Reichsführer [Himmler] was presenting [Hitler] with suggestions that only the

  Führer could decide upon since they had important foreign-policy ramifications’. 41

  A week later, on 21 September, Heydrich told them that ‘the deportation of the Jews

  (Juden-Deportation) into the foreign-language Reichsgau’ and ‘deportation

  (Abschiebung) over the demarcation line’ had been authorized by Hitler. However,

  this process was to be spread over a whole year: ‘Jews are to be collected together

  into ghettos in the cities in order to permit greater control over them and later

  better opportunities for getting rid of them.’ This ‘campaign’ was to be ‘carried out

  within the next 3 to 4 weeks’. Heydrich summarized his instructions in the

  following key phrases:

  Occupation and Persecution of Jews in Poland, 1939–40/41 149

  ‘Jews into the cities as quickly as possible,

  Jews out of the Reich into Poland,

  the rest of the 30,000 Gypsies also into Poland,

  systematic expulsion of the Jews from German areas in goods trains.’42

  On the same day Heydrich sent an express letter to the chiefs of the Security

  Police Einsatzgruppen headed ‘Re: Jewish Question in the occupied areas’. 43 In this, one of the key documents of Germany’s Judenpolitik, Heydrich first drew the

  attention of the Einsatzgruppen chiefs to the need to distinguish the ‘final goal

  (which will take a long time)’ and ‘the stages by which this final goal will be

  reached (which can be undertaken in shorter periods of time)’. The ‘overall

  measures planned (in other words the final goal)’ was to be kept ‘strictly secret’.

  The ‘instructions and guidelines’ that followed in Heydrich’s document contain

  no direct references to the substance of the ‘final goal’, but instead merely

  suggestions for the short-term measures to be taken in order to ‘encourage the

  heads of the Einsatzgruppen to consider the practicalities’.

  Heydrich’s ‘first prerequisite for the final goal’ was the instruction to concen-

  trate ‘the Jews from the countryside into the larger towns and cities’. The terri-

  tories annexed by the Reich would be the first to be ‘cleared of Jews’. A ‘council of

  elders’ was to be established in all Jewish communities which was to be ‘made fully

  responsible’ for the ‘precise and punctual implementation of all instructions that

  have been or will be issued’. The fact that the places in which the Jews were to be

  concentrated mostly lay near railway lines, and Heydrich’s further instruction to

  the effect that these guidelines should not operate in the district for which

  Einsatzgruppe 1 was responsible (the area east of Cracow) are important indica-

  tions of the stage that RSHA planning had reached. Thereafter it was intended to

  deport the Polish Jews into an area on the eastern border of occupied Poland,

  where a ‘Je
wish state under German administration’ was planned, as Heydrich

  confirmed to Brauchitsch a day later. 44 The ‘final goal’ classed as ‘strictly secret’

  will have involved the more extensive plan that Heydrich had explained to his

  department heads on 21 September: the deportation of the Jews from the whole of

  the area of the Greater German Reich into the ‘Jewish reservation’ and the

  possibility of their being deported into the eastern Polish area occupied by the

  Soviet Union, a plan that Hitler was to come back to several times in the days that

  followed.

  After the Soviet Union and Germany had reached agreement on 28 September

  on the definitive demarcation line separating their zones of influence, and the area

  between the Vistula and the Bug (later the district of Lublin in the General

  Government) had been made a German area, the planned ‘reservation’ was to

  be situated in this area. This ‘nature reserve’ or ‘Reich ghetto’, as Heydrich called

  it, would not only take Jews but also ‘undesirable’ Poles from the eastern areas that

  had been incorporated into the Reich. 45

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  The Persecution of the Jews, 1939–1941

  On 29 September Hitler told Rosenberg that he wanted the newly conquered

  Polish territories to be divided into three strips: the area between the Vistula and

  the Bug was for settling the Jews from the whole of the Reich and ‘all other

  elements that are in any respect unreliable’; there was to be an ‘Eastern Wall’

  erected along the Vistula, and on the old German–Polish border a ‘broad belt

  of Germanization and colonization’, and between them a Polish ‘statehood’

  (Staatlichkeit). 46 The idea of a ‘Jewish reservation’ was discussed relatively openly by the National Socialist leadership in the following weeks: Hitler mentioned it to

  the Swedish manufacturer Dahlerus on 26 September, 47 whilst on 1 October he explained the idea of an ‘ethnic cleansing’ (volkliche Flurbereinigung) in the East

  to the Italian Foreign Minister. 48 The German press was told of these plans in confidence and immediately speculation on the ‘reservation’ appeared in the

  international press. 49 On 6 October Hitler explained in his speech to the Reichstag that the ‘most important task’ after the ‘collapse of the Polish state’ was ‘a new