However, while Jeckeln had reacted in the desired way with the liquidation of
the Riga ghetto, by executing the Central European Jews he had gone beyond the
desired goal (at this point). There was, though, a tension characteristic of the
process of putting the murder machinery in motion between general orders that
were to be understood intuitively, and independent initiatives on the part of the
local authorities, and on this occasion there had to be intervention from the top to
control matters. Himmler intervened, for once, in order to de-escalate the situ-
ation rather than—as with his other interventions—to radicalize it still further.
Himmler’s intervention had at first led to a complete halt to the systematic
murder of those deported to Latvia: the Jews of the next twenty-two transports
that arrived in Riga were confined in the Riga ghetto or the two camps of Salaspils
and Jungfernhof. There do seem, however, to have been two exceptions. Signifi-
cant indications suggest that, on 19 January 1942, most of the passengers of a
transport from Theresienstadt, more than 900 people, were shot immediately on
arrival, and that at the end of January around 500 Jews, from a transport either
from Berlin or Vienna, were also shot. 150 At the end of March and the beginning of April 1942, selections of Jews no longer fit for work also took place in the Riga
ghetto and Jungfernhof: the victims were mainly Jews from Vienna and Berlin. In
the ghetto we may assume that 3,000 died, and in the Jungfernhof, in an ‘action’
on 26 March, around 1,800 people. 151
‘Final Solution’ in Serbia, Autumn 1941
After the German military administration had ruled in May that Jews and
Gypsies were to be marked, dismissed from public service, deployed in forced
labour, and have their property confiscated, 152 the anti-Jewish policy was further intensified with the start of the attack on the Soviet Union. The Jewish community of Belgrade now had to supply forty hostages a day. From the beginning of
July onwards, hostages from this community, Communists and Jews, were shot
almost daily as ‘retaliation’ for acts of resistance. 153 In August, the arrests were extended to all Jewish men. In Serbia too, then, the ‘retaliatory measures’ were
directed against the hostile image of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’. In spite of these
shootings the Serbian resistance against the occupying power grew steadily.
When twenty-two German soldiers were killed in a further attack, on 4 October
the Plenipotentiary Commanding General in Serbia, Franz Böhme, ordered, 154 as
‘reprisal and atonement . . . that 100 Serbian prisoners be shot for every murdered
German soldier’. Those to be executed were prisoners from the concentration
camps in Sabac and Belgrade, ‘predominantly Jews and Communists’. 155 In fact, between 9 and 13 October some 2,000 Jews and 200 Gypsies from these camps
were shot. 156 Böhme had received express support for his policy of directing his retaliatory measures primarily against Jews from Martin Luther, the head of the
Autumn 1941: Deportation and Mass Murders
301
German department of the Foreign Ministry, and from Eichmann, the Jewish
specialist of the RSHA. In his memorandum to the AA representative in Bel-
grade, dated 16 September, Luther had recommended that the arrested Jewish
men be treated as hostages across the board, 157 and in a phone call to the Jewish expert of the Foreign Ministry on 13 September 1941 Eichmann had suggested
that this group be shot. 158
On 10 October Böhme issued a general order to shoot 100 prisoners or hostages
‘for every German soldier or ethnic German (men, women or children) killed or
murdered’, ‘for every wounded German soldier or ethnic German 50 prisoners or
hostages’. The following were to be ‘immediately’ arrested as hostages: ‘all Com-
munists, male inhabitants suspected of being so, all Jews, a certain number of
nationalist and democratically minded inhabitants’. 159
In accordance with this scheme, a few days later an additional 2,200 men, Jews
and Gypsies once again among them, were shot for 10 members of the Wehrmacht
killed in battle and 24 wounded. 160 In the two weeks following the order of 10 October, Wehrmacht units killed over 9,000 Jews, Gypsies, and other civilians. 161
At the beginning of November, 8,000 Jewish men, or almost all the Jewish men that
the occupying forces had been able to round up, were executed by the firing
squads. 162 The families of the victims were interned in a concentration camp during the winter and murdered the following spring, in gas vans.
During the ‘retaliatory actions’ Wehrmacht firing squads had also shot around
1,000 Roma. Unlike the Jewish minority, however, the Gypsies living in Serbia,
whose numbers far exceeded 100,000, were spared mass murders on this scale; this
clearly demonstrates the differences in the intensity of the persecution of the two
population groups. 163
Interim Conclusion: The Transition to Regional
Murder Actions
Taken as a whole, the decisions described above provide the following picture:
from the end of July the shootings in the Soviet Union were gradually extended to
include women and children, from August onwards certain places were made
judenfrei, and in October, in practically all parts of the occupied territory, the
policy of murdering the entire Jewish population apart from a small number of
people ‘fit for work’ was implemented. Late in August 1941 the ‘euthanasia
murders’ in the Reich came to an end in their existing form, which meant that
the staff were freed up and initially deployed on a short-term basis in the context
of action 14f13. Mid-September saw the gas experiments in Mogilev in which the
murderous technology of euthanasia was tried out in the Eastern territories for the
first time. Presumably towards the end of September the decision was made to
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Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941
murder around 100,000 people from the Warthegau. At the beginning of October
the Security Police began large-scale mass shootings in the district of Galicia in
the territory of the General Government, in which murder was carried out just
as indiscriminately as in occupied Soviet territory. In parallel with this, the
Wehrmacht began systematically shooting Jewish men and Gypsies in Serbia.
In mid-October Globocnik received the assignment to build an extermination
camp (Belzec), and in the days that followed the government of the General
Government began organizational preparations for the mass murder of the Polish
Jews. The middle of October, however, was a particularly critical phase in Juden-
politik in the district of Lublin for a different reason. On 20 October Himmler
proposed to the Slovakian head of state that the Slovakian Jews be deported to a
particularly remote area within the General Government this may have been
the starting point for the construction of the second extermination camp at
Sobibor. 164 In November the T4 murder specialists were assigned to Globocnik.
In October preparations began for the construction of extermination camps in
Riga and presumably also in the area around Minsk (Mogilev); there are indica-
tions of similar plans for Lvov in November. Non-Jewish prisoners were first
murdered in Auschwitz
with Zyklon B in September 1941. In the course of the
enlargement of the camp in October, a larger crematorium was ordered for
Auschwitz. In 1942 the cremation ovens originally intended for Mogilev were
diverted to Auschwitz. In November Reich German Jews were also shot during
the massacres of Lithuanian Jews by Security Police in Riga and Kaunas. However,
Himmler put a stop to this murderous practice, which was not in line with RSHA
policy at this point.
These events are so closely connected that they permit the following conclu-
sions to be drawn. In autumn 1941 the Nazi regime clearly decided to murder
several hundred thousand Jews deemed unfit for work in areas that seemed
particularly important from a strategic point of view. This decision followed on
directly from Hitler’s order, issued in mid-September, to deport the German Jews.
This swift radicalization of the decision-making process is connected with the
change in the original plan to deport 60,000 Jews to Lodz ghetto. This led to two
interrelated decisions: first, the gradual modification and extension of the deport-
ation programme. This was first directed to the ghettos of Minsk and Riga.
However, after October there are increasing signs that it was to be extended to
the district of Lublin and also to include Jews from outside the Reich. Secondly,
there was the bloody decimation of the reception areas (Lodz, Riga, Minsk,
Lublin) affected by the deportations. Conceivably, the decision made in autumn
1941—largely reconstructed from the course of events—may also have included
the district of Galicia. This is suggested by references to the planned construction
of an extermination camp in Lvov, but also by the particular role that Galicia was
to play in 1942 (alongside Lublin) in the implementation of the ‘Final Solution’
within the General Government. With this decision to carry out a mass murder of
Autumn 1941: Deportation and Mass Murders
303
the Jews in particular regions of Poland, the policy introduced shortly before in
the Soviet Union to create judenfrei areas, in which only a minority of forced
labourers confined in ghettos was left alive, was now extended to territories in
occupied Poland. The parallels with what was happening during October in
Serbia, where the Wehrmacht extended their reprisals to a comprehensive anni-
hilation campaign against the Jewish population, are quite plain. Moreover, it can
be no coincidence that, a short time later, the military administration in France
began directing its retaliatory programme against Jews who were to be transported
to the East as hostages. However, the reconstruction of these regional mass
murders, which were now being implemented or were in preparation, does not
allow us to conclude that a decision to murder immediately all European Jews had
been made in autumn 1941. 165 At that point the murder of hundreds of thousands of people was being prepared, but not of millions.
However, the politics of extermination had by now attained such a dynamic
momentum that the further extension of the murders to the whole of Europe was
the logical next step for those responsible. The further move to the mass murder of
all European Jews could only have been halted if the leadership of the regime had
now introduced a radical change of course—and that would have been precisely
the opposite of what Hitler intended at this point.
Thus, it would be a mistake to see the preparations for the regional mass
murders which began in autumn 1941 solely as a spontaneous reaction to the
obvious failure of a deportation programme to the Soviet Union, a territory which
had not yet, contrary to expectations, been conquered. 166 It was rather that events represented a logical continuation of the Judenpolitik that had been pursued so far.
For the comprehensive deportation programme for the European Jews, planned
since the beginning of 1941 and now under way, had been a ‘final solution’ policy
from the outset, that is to say it was the fixed aim to destroy those people who had
been deported to the occupied Soviet territories once the war was over. Thus, the
regional mass murders of those Jews who were ‘unfit for work’ represent a
radicalization and acceleration of that ‘final solution’ policy. In the wake of the
mass shootings in Eastern Europe, the idea of a ‘final solution’, still vague at first,
began to assume sharper outlines, while the original post-war prospect for this
‘final solution’ increasingly became a feasible project that was implemented on a
growing scale already during the course of the war. With the decision in Septem-
ber to carry out mass deportations from the Reich to ghettos that were already
appallingly overcrowded, this radicalization and acceleration were deliberately
introduced by the Nazi leadership: the authorities in the reception areas were quite
intentionally presented with ‘impossible situations’. More radical solutions were
demanded of them, while at the same time various institutions (the Institute of
Criminal Technology, the T4 organization, the Lange gas-van unit and Auschwitz
camp leadership) offered different variants of one such radical solution; the mass
murder of people with poison gas.
304
Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941
What were the crucial impulses behind this process of radicalization? Was it
primarily the policy from the centre—in other words from Hitler’s manic obses-
sion, increased in various ways by the course of the war, to create a Europe free of
Jews—or was it above all independent initiatives on the part of the various power
holders that advanced the radicalization process, as a series of major studies of the
Holocaust in various Eastern European regions suggest? 167
The independent initiatives on the part of figures on the periphery—Greiser in
the Warthegau, Globocnik in Lublin, Jeckeln and Lange in the Ostland, the
Security Police in Galicia, the Wehrmacht in Serbia and others—should not be
underestimated. However, if we see the simultaneous activities of these various
agents in context, it becomes clear that they were acting within the framework of
an overall policy that was always directed from the centre. The initiatives eman-
ating from them, which led either to shootings or to the provision of gas vans or
the construction of extermination camps to murder a large number of Jews, were
responses to a policy dictated by the centre, and the centre was always in a
position to prevent too great an escalation of this policy, as the suspension of
the murders of Reich German Jews in the Ostland by Himmler at the end of
November 1941 demonstrates.
Thus, it would seem pointless to try to debate whether the policies of the centre
and the initiatives of the periphery were crucial for the unleashing of the Holo-
caust. It would be more true to say that they stood in a dialectical relationship to
one another, that is, that the centre could only act because it knew that its
impulses would fall on fertile ground at the periphery, and the decision makers
at the periphery based their own actions on the assumption that they were in
harmony with the policy pursued by the centre.
In other words: just as th
e extension of the shootings to women and children in
the Soviet Union from the summer of 1941 onwards could not simply have been
ordered, the extension of mass murders to particular regions of occupied Europe
in the autumn of 1941 required a very complicated interaction between headquar-
ters and the executive organizations, a mélange of orders and intentions on the
part of the central authorities and independent initiatives and intuition on the part
of the regional powerholders, which could finally be channelled and rendered
uniform by the centre, albeit at a far higher level of radicalization. However, we
have been familiar with the essential elements of this radicalization process,
particularly the interaction between the centre and the executive organizations,
since the beginning of National Socialist policy towards the Jews in the 1930s.
In late 1941, once again, it was the centre that began to combine the various
approaches into an extension of the murders and draw up a unified programme
for the destruction of all European Jews which was to assume form in the spring
and summer of 1942.
chapter 16
THE WANNSEE CONFERENCE
On 29 November, when Heydrich invited a number of state secretaries, senior
officials, and SS officers to a meeting on 9 December, 1 at which he wished to discuss the planned ‘overall solution of the Jewish question in Europe’, the original
intention of the Nazi leadership to undertake the ‘Final Solution’ of the ‘Jewish
question’ after the end of the war had already been superseded: the Nazi regime
had by then killed several hundred thousand people, although in official parlance
Judenpolitik had not reached the stage of the ‘Final Solution’.
With the conference Heydrich plainly intended to outline the mass murders in
the various occupied territories to a number of senior officials of the Party and the
SS as well as leading civil servants as part of a ‘solution to the European Jewish
question’ ordered by Hitler and directed by the RSHA, and to ensure that they,
and especially the ministerial bureaucracy, would share both knowledge of and
responsibility for this policy.
The fact that on 8 December Heydrich was forced by the events of the war to
Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews Page 54
