order of ethnographic relations, which is to say a resettlement of nationalities’; in
the course of this ‘new order’ an attempt would be made ‘at ordering and
regulating the Jewish problem’. 50
On the following day, 7 October 1939, Hitler issued the decree for the ‘Strength-
ening of the German Nation’ and thereby gave Himmler the double task of, on the
one hand, ‘collecting and settling’ into the Reich ‘German people who have had to
live abroad, and, on the other, ‘arranging the settlement of the ethnic groups
within its sphere of interest so as to improve the lines of demarcation between
them’. Himmler was specifically to take responsibility: first, for the ‘repatriation’
(Rückführung) of Reich and ethnic Germans, second for the ‘exclusion of the
detrimental influence of those elements of the population who are ethnically alien
and represent a danger to the Reich and the community of Germans’ (for which
purpose, it went on to say, he would be allowed to assign the elements in question
particular areas to live in), and third for the ‘formation of new German settlement
areas through population transfer and resettlement’. The Reichsführer-SS was
instructed to make use of the ‘existing authorities and institutions’ in order to
implement these tasks. 51
Within the framework of these new responsibilities Himmler concentrated
first and foremost on organizing the ‘repatriation’ (Heimführung) of the ethnic
Germans from the Soviet Union and the Baltic states into the annexed areas of
Poland, which had been agreed on 28 September and over-hastily put into
practice, and at the same time set in train the large-scale ‘resettlement’ of Jews
and Poles.
chapter 9
DEPORTATIONS
Deportations Phase I: The Nisko–Lublin Plan
of October 1939
The so-called Nisko Project was the first concrete programme for deportation that
the SS organized in the context of the authority they had been given to ‘eliminate
the harmful influence of . . . elements of the population distinct from the German
people’ and to place them in ‘designated areas of settlement’.
On the day before the Decree for the Strengthening of the German Nation was
issued, on 6 October 1939, Heinrich Müller (the Head of the Gestapo) instructed
Adolf Eichmann (who was at that time Director of the Central Office for Jewish
Emigration (Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung) in Prague) to prepare
for the deportation of some 70,000–80,000 Jews from the region of Katowice
(Kattowitz), which had recently been formed from the annexed Polish areas. The
order also made provision for the deportation of Jews from Ostrava in Moravia
(Mährisch-Ostrau). 1 Both expulsion campaigns had already been initiated or planned by either the army or the Gestapo in the Protectorate (German-occupied
Czech territory) by the middle of September. 2 It was also on 6 October that Eichmann ordered the compilation in Berlin of a comprehensive list of all Jews,
who had hitherto been listed under the particular congregations of which they had
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The Persecution of the Jews, 1939–1941
been members. This suggests that a much more comprehensive ‘resettlement
campaign’ was being planned. 3
In the days immediately afterwards Eichmann devoted great energy to the
organization of deportations not only from Ostrava and Katowice but from
Vienna, too. It is clear from a note sent by Eichmann to the Gauleiter of Silesia
that the former’s original instructions had in the meantime been extended.
Eichmann said that after the first four transports the ‘Head of the Security Police,
and the RFSS and Head of the German Police had to be presented with a progress
report which would then in all probability be passed on to the Führer. They should
then wait until the general removal of all Jews was ordered. The Führer has
initially directed that 300,000 Jews be transferred out of the Old Reich and the
Ostmark.’4 Eichmann also mentioned this ‘order of the Führer’s’ on his visit to Becker, the Special Representative for Jewish Questions on Bürckel’s staff, noting
that those Jews still living in Vienna would be driven out in less than nine
months. 5
On 16 October, on a further visit to Vienna, Eichmann envisaged ‘2 transports
per week, each with 1,000 Jews’; on the same day he informed the Director of the
Reich Criminal Investigation Department, Artur Nebe, that the deportations
from the Old Reich would begin in three to four weeks. 6 Between 12 and 15
October, Dr Franz-Walther Stahlecker, the commander of the Security Police in
the Protectorate and Eichmann decided upon Nisko on the San as the target
station for these deportations and as the location for a ‘transit camp’. This camp,
situated right on the border with the district of Lublin, was evidently intended
to serve as a kind of filter through which the deportees would be moved to
the ‘Jewish reservation’. The transportees were promised accommodation in
barracks, for which plans were in fact originally made, 7 but these plans were now consciously abandoned. 8
The deportations were also to include Gypsies. When asked by Nebe as Head of
the Reich Criminal Investigation Department ‘when he could send the Berlin
Gypsies’, Eichmann responded that he intended to ‘add a few wagons of Gypsies’
to the transports from the district of Katowice and the Protectorate. He told Nebe
that the deportation of Gypsies from the remainder of the Reich would be initiated
some three to four weeks later. 9
Between 20 and 28 October 4,700 Jews were transported to Nisko from Vienna,
Katowice, and Ostrava in a total of six transports. 10 Only a fraction of these people were deployed in the construction of the ‘transit camp’ on the bank of the San,
where they found a meadow churned up by months of rain. By far the greater
number of deportees were escorted a few kilometres away from the camp and then
driven away by force.
Shortly after the start of the ‘resettlement campaign’, on 18 October, 11 Müller informed Eichmann that it would be necessary to organize ‘the resettlement and
removal of Poles and Jews into the area of the future Polish rump state’ centrally,
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153
via the Reich Security Head Office (RSHA). On 20 October the RSHA issued an
order banning the transports; 12 Eichmann was permitted only one train from Ostrava, ‘in order to preserve the prestige of the local state police’. 13
The sudden suspension of the Nisko transports was in all probability due to the
fact that these deportations clashed with the large-scale resettlement of ethnic
Germans into the incorporated areas that Himmler began on 28 September and
with the simultaneous expulsion of Poles and Jews from these same areas. A
second reason for the abandonment of the Nisko experiment is probably to be
found in reservations on the part of military strategists: Hitler made it clear to
Keitel on 17 October that the future General Government ‘has military importance
for us as a form of advance glacis and can be exploited for the moving of troops’.
This perspective could evidently not be reconciled with the idea of a ‘Jewish
reservation’. However, a
ccording to Hitler, in the long term ‘the way this area is
run . . . must make it possible for us also to rid the territory of the Reich of Jews and Polacks’. 14
Despite the abrupt end of the Nisko campaign, the RSHA steadfastly stuck to its
plans for deporting Jews into the district of Lublin. The RSHA informed the SD
Main District of Vienna at the end of October that it was quite conceivable that
‘individual transports of Jews from Vienna’ might still be fitted in. 15 Even the Higher SS and Police Commander in the General Government, Friedrich Wilhelm
Krüger, referred on 1 November to plans still in place for a ‘particularly dense
concentration of Jews’. 16
Eichmann’s short-lived campaign was by no means a personal initiative on his
part to compete with Himmler’s resettlement project; it was quite clearly a
component of the broader resettlement plans that the Reichsführer SS had been
trying to introduce since the beginning of October on the basis of his new powers:
whilst Himmler was constructing a new organization in the two new Reichsgaus
in Poland, supported by the Higher SS and Police Commander, he transferred
responsibility for carrying out deportations in the other areas to existing author-
ities, in other words to the interlocking mechanisms of the Security Police, the SD,
and the emigration offices.
As the history of the Nisko campaign shows, the organs of the SS charged with
carrying out deportations very clearly did so with the aim of leaving the deported
Jews exposed, one way or another, helpless, and without any means of support, in
the Lublin ‘reservation’ and of abandoning them to their own devices or driving
them over the demarcation line into the occupied Soviet zone, which was common
practice in the district of Lublin at the end of 1939.17 The Nisko project represented an experiment intended to gain experience as a basis on which to deport all the
Jews from the area of the Reich within the pre-war boundaries (and from Upper
Silesia, which had been annexed). The somewhat improvised manner in which
this campaign was carried out was not merely the result of disorganized incom-
petence; there was method in its inadequacies. The experiment shows plainly what
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The Persecution of the Jews, 1939–1941
was envisaged within the SS by the idea of ‘resettling’ the Jews of the whole area of
the Reich in the ‘Lublin reservation’: it was seen as an illegal campaign of
expulsion into an area between the ‘Eastern Wall’ that was to be constructed
and the demarcation line with the Soviet Union. Deportation on such a scale,
based on the Nisko model, would have caused the deaths of a great many of those
deported; but in the longer term those who initially survived would not have
found adequate living conditions or conditions for reproduction and would
therefore have been condemned to extinction. The Nisko campaign therefore
permits the conclusion that the further-reaching Lublin project was a first version
of a ‘final solution’ policy since its aim was the physical termination of those Jews
living within the German sphere of influence.
The radical nature of these aims is confirmed by statements made by leading
representatives of the General Government and by other, well-informed National
Socialist functionaries. At a meeting of senior Kreis officials and city commis-
sioners from the district of Radom on 25 November, the Head of the General
Government, Hans Frank, announced that the majority of the Jews in the area of
the Reich would be deported into areas east of the Vistula, adding, ‘we should give
the Jews short shrift. It’s a pleasure finally to be able to get physical with the Jewish race. The more of them that die the better. To smash the Jews is a victory for our
Reich. The Jews should be made to feel that we have arrived.’18 The Propaganda Ministry issued ‘confidential information’ to the German press on 20 October 1939
which revealed that ‘measures have already been taken by the SS to ensure for
example that 20,000 Jews from Lodz will be forced this very week to begin their
march into the very heart of the country’. The same document makes the lapidary
comment that ‘no subsistence infrastructure is available for this mass migration’. 19
On the occasion of a visit to the ethnic German village of Cycow on 20 November
by a delegation of leading functionaries from the General Government authorities,
the District Chief responsible for Lublin explained, ‘this extremely marshy area
could . . . serve as a Jewish reservation, which in itself might lead to a sharp
reduction in the numbers of Jews’. 20 The Chief of Police from the Upper Silesian industrial areas, Wilhelm Metz, spoke in his December situation report to the
District President of the ‘battle against the Jews who must be exterminated here
most urgently’. 21 Furthermore, Odilo Globocnic, SS and Police Commander in the Lublin District, suggested at a meeting held on 14 February 1940 that the ‘evacuated Jews and Poles’ in his district ‘should feed themselves and obtain support
from their people because those Jews have plenty. If this should not succeed, they
should be left to starve.’22 Frank made a similar statement on 23 April at a meeting with the State Secretary, Backe, who was responsible for matters of food and diet:
‘I’m not remotely interested in the Jews. Whether they have something to eat or
not is the last thing on earth I care about.’23
The list of pertinent quotations could be extended. Eduard Könekamp, a
speaker at the German Foreign Institute (Auslandsinstitut), sent a report to his
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155
colleagues from occupied Poland in December 1939 about the situation of the
Jews: ‘the annihilation of this sub-human group would be in the interests of the
whole world. Such a destruction is, however, one of our greatest problems. It can’t
be done by shooting them. You can’t allow people to shoot down women and
children either. You can count on losses in the course of evacuation transports
here and there, and of the transport of 1,000 Jews that marched out from Lublin
450 are said to have died. ’24 Albrecht Haushofer, who was at this point employed in the information office of the Foreign Office, reported in a letter to his mother
on 13 December that he was sitting ‘at table with the man whose systematic task it
will be to leave a substantial number of the Jews who are to be freighted out into
the Lublin ghetto to freeze to death and starve there’. 25
Deportations Phase II: Autumn 1939 to Spring 1940
Further planning for the deportation of Poles and Jews from the area of the Reich,
and in particular from the newly annexed areas, was significantly influenced after
October 1939 by the various waves of ‘returning settlers’, ethnic Germans entering
the Reich from the Baltic. 26
Himmler, who styled himself Reichskommissar for the Strengthening of
the German Nation (Reichskommissar für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums)
after the authorization issued by Hitler on 7 October—but without any official
conferment of this title—announced the first comprehensive programme for the
‘resettlement’ of Poles and Jews from the annexed territories on 30 October 1939. 27
In the days that followed this plan was modified, as we learn from Bruno
&
nbsp; Streckenbach, the commander of the Security Police in the General Government
who was charged with the ‘central planning of settlement or evacuation in the
eastern territories’. On 8 November, in Cracow, he informed the Higher SS and
Police Leaders responsible for carrying out the deportations that, by the end of
February 1940, ‘all Jews and Congress Poles from the Reichgaus of Danzig and
Posen as well as from Upper Silesia and South-East Prussia will be evacuated’ and
the remainder of the Polish population there would be categorized either as
‘Poles’, ‘Ethnic Germans’, or ‘Poles still wanted’. In all it was now planned to
‘evacuate approximately 1,000,000 Jews and Poles from the Old Reich’—Germany
in the borders of 1937—‘or the newly occupied Eastern areas . . . in the first instance
by the end of February 1940’. 28 In detail this meant ‘400,000 Poles, including Jews’
from West Prussia and 200,000 Poles and 100,000 Jews from the Warthegau, 29
which meant that deportations of the order of some 300,000 people from the area
of the Old Reich were envisaged, as they were during the Nisko project.
However, the whole ‘resettlement programme’ was put under pressure by the
streams of ethnic Germans entering the Reich. At the end of October the RSHA had
set up a coordination point for the planned resettlement programme jointly
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The Persecution of the Jews, 1939–1941
with Special Department III ES (immigration and settlement), 30 and by November it was attempting to master the increasingly confused situation with the help of a
comprehensive clearance plan. It established a so-called long-range plan (Fernplan),
according to which all the Jews and any politically undesirable Poles would initially
be moved into the General Government, to be followed later, after a ‘racial assess-
ment’, by the mass of the Polish population. There were no longer plans for a special
‘Jewish reservation’. Moreover, the ‘long-range plan’ was not now aimed at the Jews
of the Old Reich area, but for the most part matched considerations of ‘ethnicity
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