some of the Jewish vermin will be exterminated by special measures.’
In his table-talk on 25 October Hitler once again recalled the ‘prophecy’ he had
made on 30 January 1939, adding the following train of thought: ‘This race of
criminals has the two million dead from the World War on its conscience and
now hundreds of thousands more. Let nobody say to me: we can’t send them into
the swamps [in Russia]! Who’s worrying about our people? It’s good if the fear
that we are exterminating the Jews goes before us.’83 On 16 November 1941, under the heading ‘The Jews are to blame’, Goebbels published a leading article in which
he also returned to Hitler’s prophecy of 30 January 1939: ‘At present we are
experiencing the realisation of this prophecy, and in the process Jewry is suffering
a fate, which may be harsh but is more than deserved. Pity or regret is entirely
inappropriate in this case.’84 With his formulation that ‘world Jewry’ was now suffering ‘a gradual process of extermination’, Geobbels made clear which fate
finally awaited the Jews whose deportation from the German cities had been
under way for some weeks. Two days later Rosenberg spoke at a press conference
about the imminent ‘eradication’ (Ausmerzung) of the Jews of Europe: ‘Some six
million Jews still live in the East, and this question can only be solved by a
biological extermination of the whole of Jewry in Europe. The Jewish question
will only be solved for Germany when the last Jew has left German territory, and
for Europe when not a single Jew stands on the European continent as far as the
Urals . . . And to this end it is necessary to force them beyond the Urals or
otherwise bring about their eradication.’85
On 18 November 1941, at a meeting with the Great Mufti of Jerusalem, who had
fled to the camp of the Axis powers, Hitler had announced that Germany was
‘resolved to urge one European nation after the other, step by step, to contribute to
the solution of the Jewish problem, and when the time comes to turn to non-
European peoples with a similar appeal’. He would ‘carry on the fight until the total
destruction of the Jewish-Communist European empire’, and in the ‘not too distant
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future’ reach the southern tip of the Caucasus. Germany was not, however, pursu-
ing imperial goals in the Arabian world, but was working for the liberation of the
Arabs. ‘The German objective would be solely the destruction of Jews residing in the
Arab sphere under the protection of British power.’86 While this statement must admittedly be interpreted from a tactical perspective, it also shows that Hitler’s
fantasies of extermination already reached beyond the European sphere.
These quotations may of course be interpreted in different ways. If we consider
them in connection with the expansion of the mass murders in certain regions
which had already begun at the same time, or were under preparation, in my
opinion they represent components of a process of radicalization that had been set
in motion. The quotations make it clear that the Nazi leadership was in the
process of further escalating the original intention to deport the Jews under
German rule to the East where they were to die out under unbearable conditions.
In view of the comprehensive mass murders in the occupied Eastern territories,
which were also extended to Galicia in October, and with the first preparations for
the systematic murder of the Jews by gas in certain regions of Poland, the
organizers of the Judenpolitik developed increasingly terrible ideas of how
the ‘extermination’ or ‘Final Solution’ of the European Jews, envisaged since the
beginning of the war, was to be understood in concrete terms. A programme or a
plan for the systematic murder of all European Jews is admittedly not yet
discernible at this point, but the atmosphere for turning such a monstrous
intention into action was unambiguously present.
A Regional ‘Final Solution’ in the Warthegau, Late 1941
From mid-October onwards, a total of 25,000 Jews and Gypsies from across the
Reich were transported to the already overcrowded Lodz ghetto.
At around the same time, presumably still in October 1941, the mass murder of
indigenous Jews began in the district of Konim in the southern Warthegau. 87 In late November, in an ‘action’ lasting several days, 700 Jews were murdered in gas
vans in the Bornhagen (Kozminek) camp in the district of Kalisch. 88 The unit deployed was the ‘Sonderkommando’ Lange under HSSPF Warthegau Koppe,
which had already murdered thousands of inmates of institutions for the mentally
ill in the annexed Polish territories in 1939/40 and again in June/July 1941. 89 In October 1941 Lange’s unit had been summoned to Novgorod by Himmler to
murder patients in mental institutions there. 90 His driver confirmed that in autumn 1941 Lange had himself driven through the Warthegau to find a suitable
location for a stationary killing installation. Once an appropriate building had
been found in Chelmno, on 8 December Lange’s unit started using gas vans to
murder Jews there. At first most of the victims were indigenous Jews deported to
Chelmno from various ghettos in the Warthegau.
Autumn 1941: Deportation and Mass Murders
291
From January 1942, those murdered in Chelmno were primarily inhabitants of
the Lodz ghetto. 91 In a first wave of deportations, between 16 and 29 January, the first 10,000 inhabitants of the ghetto were deported to Chelmno. Chaim Rumkowski, who performed his office as Jewish Elder in an autocratic fashion, had
managed to halve the figure of 20,000 people demanded by the Germans, and to
keep the selection of this group—‘undesirable elements’, Polish Jews who had
recently arrived in the ghetto from the provinces, and others—under his own
control. 92 Over the months that followed, however, it would prove that these
‘successes’ were mercilessly exploited by the Germans to involve the apparatus of
the Lodz Jewish council more and more closely in the machinery of deportation.
A letter dated 1 May 1942 to Himmler from Artur Greiser, the Gauleiter for the
Warthegau, 93 provides a major clue for the reconstruction of the decision to wreak mass murder among the Jews of the Warthegau. In this letter Greiser informed the
Reichsführer SS that the ‘action concerning the special treatment of some 100,000
Jews in my Gau territory, authorized by you in agreement with the head of the
Reich Security Head Office, SS Obergruppenführer Heydrich [could be] con-
cluded in the next 2–3 months’. If Himmler and Heydrich had to ‘authorize’
this mass murder, we can assume that the suggestion must substantially have
come from Greiser. 94 The planned number of 100,000 Jews ‘unfit for work’ and thus abandoned to murder can also be identified in another document from
January 1942.95 Presumably, then, the murder of the 100,000 people (Polish Jews
‘unfit for work’) was the ‘service in return’ that Greiser had demanded from
Himmler if he was to receive 25,000 Jews and Gypsies (rather than the 60,000
people originally stated by Himmler) into the Lodz ghetto. Some months later—
some time in summer or autumn 1942—Hitler gave Greiser, when he again
addressed the ‘Jewish question’ in his Gau, a free hand—
special authorization
was no longer required to murder a certain number of people.
Eastern Upper Silesia: Forced Labour and Murder
of Jews ‘Unfit for Work’
As in the Warthegau, in eastern Upper Silesia the extensive resettlement plans that
Himmler had introduced in 1939 in his capacity as Reichskommisar for the
Strengthening of the German Nation, had been suspended in the spring of 1941
because of the concentration of troops in the East. Until then, some 38,000 ethnic
Germans had been settled in this area and more than 81,000 indigenous people,
including an unknown number of Jews, had been expelled to the General Gov-
ernment. After the suspension of the resettlement, in the eastern part of the
annexed territory, predominantly settled by Poles, we have the following picture:
while, since 1940, the Jewish population from the whole of eastern Upper Silesia
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Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941
had been concentrated in certain towns in this ‘eastern strip’ of the province,
thousands of Poles who had been driven from their homes were stuck in ‘Polish
camps’, and there were also thousands of ethnic Germans who could not be
accommodated in ‘transit camps’.
The idea of work deployment was very much a central pillar of Judenpolitik in
eastern Upper Silesia at this time. In October 1940 Albrecht Schmelt, the Police
President of Breslau (also president of the district (Regierungspräsident) since May
1941) had received a special commission from Himmler to organize the work
deployment of the ‘ethnic aliens’ (meaning Jews) in eastern Upper Silesia. A
priority of this was work on the Silesian section of the Berlin–Cracow autobahn
as well as deployment in the munitions industry and in Wehrmacht manufactur-
ing plants. In autumn 1941 Schmelt had 17,000 Jewish forced labourers under him,
most of them in camps. 96
The priority given to work deployment had an ambivalent effect on Judenpolitik
in eastern Upper Silesia: the aim of intensively exploiting the prisoners did initially
protect those Jews who were ‘fit for work’—but only until their remaining energy
had been exhausted by disastrous accommodation, undernourishment, overexer-
tion, and so on. The fact that only Jews who were ‘fit for work’ were needed gave
those responsible a ‘rational’ reason for the removal of those who were not. From
mid-November 1941 the Schmelt Organization proceeded to separate out those
prisoners in the camps who could not be used for work, sporadically at first but
then systematically, to transport them to Auschwitz, and have them killed there in
Krematorium I. So these murders began in that crucial part of the history of the
camp, when mass murders with Zyklon B were beginning there. 97 The ‘work deployment’ of the Jews thus created the reason for the selection of those ‘fit for
work’ and those ‘unfit for work’, and that distinction was an important step in the
transition to the policy of systematic extermination. At the same time, however, it
is completely unclear whether the murder of prisoners who were no longer fit for
work derived from an initiative from the Schmelt Organization, whether those
responsible were acting on instructions from above, or whether those at the centre
of the decision-making process and those at the periphery encouraged one another.
At any rate, the exploitation of the Jewish workforce was not the opposite pole of
extermination policy, but an integral component of it.
The General Government: Escalation of the Murders
in Galicia and Preparation of ‘Aktion Reinhard’ in
the District of Lublin
From the spring of 1941 the government of the General Government had
worked on the basis that the Jews living there would be expelled to the
Autumn 1941: Deportation and Mass Murders
293
conquered Soviet territories. On 13 October, in a personal conversation, Frank
once again suggested to Rosenberg that the ‘Jewish population of the General
Government be [deported] to the occupied Eastern territories’. Rosenberg
replied that at that time there was no possibility ‘for the implementation of
resettlement plans of this kind’. However Rosenberg did declare himself willing
in future ‘to encourage Jewish emigration to the East, particularly since the
intention existed to send asocial elements within the Reich to the thinly
inhabited Eastern regions’. 98 From that point onwards the government of the General Government began to think about a ‘final solution’ of the ‘Jewish
question’ in their own territory.
One important factor in the general radicalization of Judenpolitik in the Gen-
eral Government was a series of sessions of the region’s administration which
Frank held in the district capitals after his return from the Reich (14–16 October in
Warsaw, 17 October in Globocnik’s district of Lublin, 18 October in Radom,
20 October in Cracow and in Lvov (Lemberg) for the first time on 21 October).
The session in Lublin on 17 October discussed the ‘third decree’ on residence
restrictions in the General Government, which was issued a few days later and
introduced the death penalty for those who left the ghetto. 99 This effectively launched a manhunt for those Jews living outside the ghetto. The impending
‘evacuation’ of the Jews from the city of Lublin was also discussed; initially ‘1,000
Jews [were to be] moved across the Bug’. 100 On 20 October, at the government meeting in Cracow, Governor Wächter indicated ‘that an ultimately radical
solution to the Jewish Question was unavoidable, and that no allowances of any
kind—such as special exemptions for craftsmen—could be made’. 101 At the meeting on 12 October in Lvov, Eberhard Westerkamp, the Head of the Department for
the Interior of the General Government, announced that ‘the isolation of the Jews
from the rest of the population’ should be enforced as soon and as thoroughly as
possible. On the other hand, however, Westerkamp pointed out that ‘a govern-
ment order has prohibited the establishment of new ghettos, since there was hope
that the Jews would be deported from the General Government in the near future’,
even though a few days previously Rosenberg had declared that ‘hope’ to be an
illusion. 102
The attitude prevailing amongst the German ruling class in occupied Poland
may be fairly represented by statements made by the head of the office of health of
the government of the General Government, Jost Walbaum, at a doctors’ confer-
ence held between 13 and 16 October: ‘There are only two ways: we condemn the
Jews in the ghetto to death by starvation or we shoot them. ’103
While the treatment of the ‘Jewish question’ at these meetings suggests that the
government of the General Government pursued a uniform anti-Jewish policy
throughout the whole of the territory under its control, two districts played a
pioneering part in the implementation of the ‘Final Solution’ in the General
Government.
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Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941
An important factor in the preparations for the ‘Final Solution’ in the General
Government was the incorporation of Galicia, a territory where large-scale
exec
utions had already been carried out and continued to take place, into the
General Government on 1 August 1941. Until September, the Special Purpose
Einsatzkommando operating in this territory was exclusively directed against a
vaguely defined Jewish upper class. This unit was to form the office of the
Commander of the Security Police in the district of Galicia, after its incorporation
into the General Government on 1 August 1941. 104 From early October, however, the Security Police in Galicia began murdering members of the Jewish population
indiscriminately. In Nadworna on 6 October, for example, 2,000 women, men,
and children were murdered by members of the Stanislau branch of the Security
Police. 105 According to the head of the Security Police in Stanislau, Krüger, this
‘action’ had been previously planned down to the smallest details at a meeting
with the commander of the Security Police in Lvov, Fritz Katzmann. 106 From early October such massacres occurred almost every week. The massacre among the
Jews of Stanislau on 12 October 1941 (the so-called ‘Bloody Sunday’, in which
around 10,000–12,000 people were murdered) is particularly noteworthy. 107 The Security Police in Galicia were thus, independent of their political status, following
the same pattern of radicalization as the units in the occupied Eastern territories.
These mass executions would inevitably further radicalize the ‘Jewish policy’
throughout the whole of the General Government.
Concrete preparations for mass murder of the Jews in the General Government
had also been undertaken since October in the neighbouring district of Lublin, the
territory which had been set aside in 1939 as a ‘Jewish reservation’, and which was
to serve in the spring of 1942 as a reception zone for the third wave of deportations
from the Reich, as well as for deportations from Slovakia.
The SS Police Commander of the district of Lublin, Odilo Globocnik, played a
key role in the preparations for the murder of the Jews of the district. On 13
October, the same day as Rosenberg disappointed Frank’s hopes of quick deport-
ations to the occupied Eastern territories, Globocnik108 met Himmler, to speak to him about the proposal he had made two weeks earlier, to limit the ‘influence of
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