Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews

by Peter Longerich

  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

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  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

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  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.

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  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