Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews
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which the various agents, SSPF Globocnik, Gauleiter Greiser in the Warthegau,
the camp leadership of Auschwitz, as well as the Security and Criminal Police were
all clearly working independently and in a largely uncoordinated fashion. All
of this shows that in the autumn of 1941 no overall plan for the murder of
the European Jews had been set in motion step by step, but that subordinate
organizations—albeit within the context of a centrally controlled policy—were
largely developing their own initiatives.
284
Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941
At the start of this part we closely examined Eichmann’s statements about the
journeys he made between the autumn of 1941 and the spring of 1942 to the
extermination sites. Even if we have reached the conclusion that these statements
cannot be a key source for the dating of the ‘Führer’s decision’ to implement the
‘Final Solution’, it does seem remarkable that at this crucial time Eichmann, who
was responsible for the deportations, visited the places in which extermination
camps were built: Belzec, Chelmno, Treblinka, and Minsk. For Lemberg (Lvov),
which he also visited, there is also, as we have already described, an indication of
the planned construction of an extermination camp. Three of these extermination
camps—Belzec, Chelmno, and Minsk—were directly linked with the deportations
from the German Reich. 40 Presumably Eichmann’s journeys were part of the efforts of the RSHA to coordinate the various initiatives for the implementation
of the mass murder programmes in the various regions with the plans of head
office.
Administrative Preparations for the Deportations
The RSHA deportation programme for the Jews of the German Reich and the
continuing plans for the deportation of Jews from the whole area under German
control were safeguarded from late summer 1941 by a series of administrative
measures.
One major precondition for the implementation of the deportations was the
visible identification of Jews. But the introduction of the yellow ‘Jewish star’ on 19
September 1941, which German Jews had to wear visibly on pain of punishment,
was primarily motivated by the wish more easily to exclude the Jews from certain
locations, from the purchase of certain goods, and from the acceptance of certain
services. 41 This form of identification had already been carried out for a long time by various offices within the Third Reich. 42 In August 1941 Goebbels took up this project, which was also pursued at the same time by other senior Nazis, 43 with renewed vigour. By marking out the Jews as an ‘internal enemy’ he hoped to lend
additional weight to a propaganda campaign designed to inculcate in the popu-
lation an understanding that Germany was in a global conflict with ‘the Jews’. 44
After agreement had been reached concerning the identification of the Jews at an
inter-ministerial meeting in the Propaganda Ministry on 15 August, 45 on 17 August Hitler granted Goebbels permission for this identification, 46 which was ordered on 5 September by police decree. 47
The decree of 3 October 1941 concerning the employment of Jews48 as well as the Implementation Order of the Reich Minister of Labour on 31 October49
followed the trend of withdrawing almost all kinds of employment protection
from those Jews still in work. On 23 October, at a meeting with Eichmann and
Lösener, representatives of the Economy and Armament Office of the OKW won
Autumn 1941: Deportation and Mass Murders
285
the agreement that the Jews still in ‘closed work deployment’ would not be
deported for the time being. 50
Early in November 1941 the Reich Finance Ministry passed regulations about
the removal of the property of ‘Jews who are due for deportation to a town in the
Eastern territories within the next few months’. 51 The relatively complicated procedure for property removal set out in this decree was considerably simplified
by the Eleventh Implementation Decree of the Reich Citizenship Law passed on
25 November:52 a Jew ‘whose normal residence is abroad’ (that is, ‘who resides there under circumstances which show that he is not only temporary staying
there’) would lose German citizenship. His property ‘falls to the Reich with the
loss of his citizenship’. According to a supplementary ruling by the Reich
Ministry of the Interior in December, ‘abroad’ referred to all occupied territories,
particularly the General Government and the Reichskommissariats of Ostland
and Ukraine. 53
On 18 October Himmler discussed the planned emigration ban in a telephone
conversation with Heydrich. 54 Finally, on 23 October a decree from the RSHA in Himmler’s name generally prohibited the emigration of Jews from the German
sphere of influence; exceptions from this general prohibition were, however,
allowed. 55
While these administrative measures affected the Jews in the Reich, the ban
on the emigration of Jews issued in October 1941 already affected all Jews within
the German sphere of influence. 56 Two memoranda from the head of the German department in the Foreign Ministry, Martin Luther, mark the period
in which a basic decision against further emigration must have been made. On
13 October Luther noted that the suggestion of deporting Spanish Jews residing
in France to Spanish Morocco was ‘a suitable contribution to the solution of the
Jewish question in France’. Four days later, however, on 17 October, Luther
maintained that the RSHA had opposed this deportation ‘because of the meas-
ures to be taken after the end of the war for the fundamental solution of the
Jewish question’. 57 The decision to ban emigration was thus made at precisely the same time as the deportation of the Jews from the Reich began. It was a
crucial precondition for the existing plan of the total deportation of all
Jews under German rule to the occupied Eastern territories after the end of
the war.
Immediately after the emigration ban the Germans began to put in place
the necessary preconditions to involve the allied nationals living in the Reich in
the deportations: in November the Foreign Ministry officially asked the govern-
ments of Slovakia, Croatia, and Romania whether they had any objections to the
deportation of their Jewish nationals living in Germany. The governments of all
three countries replied positively; but the Slovakian government agreed only after
lengthy hesitation, and made it an express condition that its claims to the property
of its deported nationals were entirely secured. 58
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Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941
The First and Second Waves of Deportation from the
‘Greater German Reich’
In fact the deportations from the Reich began in mid-October. 59 In a first wave, between 15 October and 9 November, some 25,000 people were taken to Lodz in
twenty-five transports, 10,000 Jews from the Old Reich, 5,000 each from the
Protectorate and Vienna and 5,000 Gypsies from the Burgenland. Between
8 November and 6 February a total of thirty-four transports went to Riga, 60
Kovno (Kaunas), 61 and Minsk. 62 Originally this wave of deportations was supposed to have ended by the beginning of December, and to have involved 50,000 people. 63
The deportations to Minsk had to be interrupted at the end of November beca
use
of transport problems; by this time some 8,000 people had been deported to the
ghetto there. The deportations to Riga and Kovno (Kaunas) were suspended in
early February, when the planned figure of 25,000 people had almost been reached.
However, as early as November 1941, the RSHA assumed that the deportations
which could not be completed, as originally planned, in the course of that year
would be continued the following spring with a third wave of deportations. This
appears in a note from Goebbels concerning a discussion with Heydrich on 17
November:64 ‘Heydrich tells me about his intentions regarding the deportation of the Jews from the Reich . . . In the third instalment, which becomes due at the
beginning of next year, it should follow the procedure that I have suggested,
clearing city by city, so that when the evacuation begins in one city it is also
brought to an end as quickly as possible and the disturbance of public opinion
caused by it does not have too long and damaging an effect. Heydrich is also acting
very consistently with regard to this issue.’ In his entry for 22 November 1941
Goebbels noted in his diary that Hitler had agreed to ‘city-by-city’ deportation.
The deportations were organized by Eichmann’s ‘special department’ in the
RSHA, which was now responsible for ‘Jewish matters and Evacuation Affairs’; by
the spring of 1941 it already had a staff of 107.65
Responsibility for the implementation of the deportations lay with the regional
Gestapo offices, or with the Central Offices for Jewish Emigration in Austria and
in the Protectorate, which were controlled by the Gestapo. In larger cities the
Gestapo themselves organized the deportations, while in smaller towns and in the
countryside, where the Gestapo did not have offices of its own, it was the duty
of the local authorities, mayors, and district administrators, to implement the
deportations. Generally speaking, the administrative apparatus of the Jewish
communities was used to assemble the deportation lists and information about
the victims. 66
The deportations required considerable bureaucratic effort, and many offices
were involved. 67 Arrangements had to be made with the Reich railways concerning Autumn 1941: Deportation and Mass Murders
287
the provision of special trains, the fixing of timetables, and the calculation of travel
costs. 68 The deportation trains, most of which consisted of goods wagons, at first generally carried 1,000 people; later, attempts were made to increase the number of
passengers. In accordance with an agreement reached in September, the uniformed
Order Police were assigned to guard the trains. 69
Special efforts were made to seize any remaining property from the victims of
the deportations; this called for close collaboration with the financial authorities.
The people selected for deportation had to make a complete declaration of their
property before the beginning of the deportation; with the final notification of
the transport date the victims were then informed that their property had been
retrospectively confiscated. Here too efforts had been made to close any legal
loopholes. Thus, for example, transfers of property were expressly forbidden.
According to the 11th decree implementing the Reich Citizenship Law, this
confiscated property was assigned to the Reich as soon as the transport crossed
the German border. 70
The prospective deportees had to turn up a few days before the departure of the
train at collection points, where a meticulous check occurred. It was painstakingly
established what the deportees were allowed to take with them; their luggage—
they were allowed 50 kg per person—was searched, and many items were often
confiscated at random. Body searches were also performed. The property lists
were examined, and the victims had to hand over any valuable objects or personal
papers. Finally a bailiff from the local court arrived to issue stateless Jews, who
were not covered by the 11th ordinance, an order for the confiscation of their
property. In this way the legal appearance of these expropriations was preserved. 71
The collection points were rooms belonging to the Jewish communities, market
or exhibition halls, gastronomic enterprises, abandoned factories, and so on, often
building complexes in the centre of town. The way from the collection point to the
station was often covered on foot in closed columns, or on open trucks. 72 This often occurred in broad daylight, as many surviving photographs confirm. 73 The first part of the deportations thus occurred ‘in full view’; it was often the subject of
lively debates. 74
The victims had to pay a special fee for the transport; only a fragment was
actually used for the costs arising, most of it disappearing on arrival. On the
pretext of covering the costs for indigent fellow travellers, in the run-up to the
deportation the Jews who still had property had been obliged to hand over a
quarter of their property as a ‘donation’ to a special RSHA account. This
transfer had nothing to do with the actual costs of the transport either, but
merely served, from the perspective of the RSHA, to keep part of the Jewish
property out of the clutches of the financial administration and use it for their
own ends. 75 The carefully examined luggage that was loaded separately onto goods wagons before the start of the journey generally disappeared, never to be
seen again. 76
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Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941
The property left behind was exploited by the financial administration. Thus
household goods were given away to the poor, sold, or auctioned. 77 The apartments were taken over by the local administrations and rented out; these ‘Jewish
apartments’ were in great demand. 78 In many places there was a regular run on these desirable properties.
So the whole process was geared towards the careful erasure of the complete
social existence of the deportees, while at the same time maintaining the appear-
ance of legality and making sure not only that the victims themselves paid for their
own deportation, but that the RSHA, the state administration, and many private
citizens profited from Jewish property.
Although the deportations occurred in public, and the population paid close
attention to them, state propaganda was silent about these mass deportations,
about their destinations and the fate that awaited the deportees. The negative
reception from parts of the population, particularly in Berlin, to the compulsory
identification of the Jews, which was noted with irritation by the Propaganda
Ministry, may have been responsible for this silence. A police decree, the full text
of which was not published but the content of which was announced via the
media, forbade the population—under threat of imprisonment in a concentration
camp—to have any public contact with Jews. Repression had to stand in for
propaganda, which was plainly ineffective. Against the background of these
experiences, on 23 October Goebbels ordered that the deportations were no longer
to be mentioned in home propaganda. Anti-Semitic propaganda was now inten-
sified once more, but concrete details were no longer to be revealed. 79
We have already referred to the deportation of 5,000 Burgenl
and Gypsies to
Lodz early in November 1941, a procedure that makes it especially clear that the
story of the Holocaust cannot be written without an eye for other groups who
were persecuted for racist reasons, since important parallels exist with the perse-
cution of the Jews. As regards the deportation from Burgenland, which had been
planned since April 1940, this was not the first deportation of Gypsies. As early as
May 1940 2,370 Gypsies had been deported from the Reich to various parts of the
General Government. Plainly the occupying authorities had no idea what to do
with the Gypsies: some gave them private accommodation, some used them
as forced labourers, some left them to their own devices. The majority of the
Gypsies perished as a result of poor conditions, others were executed, some
managed to return illegally to the Reich, some somehow survived in the General
Government. 80
The Gypsies deported to Lodz in November 1941 were confined to a special,
separate section of the Lodz ghetto. The ones who survived the appalling condi-
tions in this camp were murdered in Chelmno in January 1942.
The deportation to Lodz was followed early in 1942 by a further mass deport-
ation of Gypsies: in February 1942, 2,000 East Prussian Gypsies were deported to
Bialystok. Some members of the group, deemed to be ‘assimilated’, were sent back
Autumn 1941: Deportation and Mass Murders
289
to East Prussia in the course of 1942, on condition that they agreed to be sterilized.
The rest were deported in the autumn of 1942 to the Brest-Litovsk ghetto, whose
inhabitants had been murdered a short time previously. In the spring of 1944 these
people were deported to Auschwitz. 81
Announcements of Extermination
In the autumn of 1941, many statements were issued by leading National Socialists
or well-informed functionaries deliberately addressing the imminent ‘extermin-
ation’ of the Jews. Thus, for example, the foreign political editor of Der Stürmer,
Paul Wurm, wrote on 23 October to his old acquaintance Rademacher, the Jewish
expert at the Foreign Ministry:82 ‘On my way back from Berlin, I met an old Party member who is working on the settlement of the Jewish question in the East. Soon