Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews

by Peter Longerich

  moratorium that prevailed between June and July, the German authorities had

  fallen back on coupling one or two passenger wagons, each carrying fifty passen-

  gers to already scheduled trains; between June and October 1942, more than 100

  such ‘small’ transports were organized. Overall during this period some 45,000

  German and Austrian Jews were deported to the ‘old people’s ghetto’ of Ther-

  esienstadt. 51 But even after this wave of deportations many smaller transports to Theresienstadt occurred throughout the winter of 1942–3. 52

  In the second half of 1942 there were further deportations from the Reich which

  went to Eastern European ghettos or directly to extermination camps. Various

  references indicate that in July three smaller transports from the Reich with a total

  of 700 passengers reached the Warsaw ghetto. Between August and October 1942

  five deportations from Berlin and Theresienstadt went to Riga, as well as a further

  deportation from these two places to Raasiku near Reval (Tallinn). 53

  In September and October ten deportation trains travelled from Theresienstadt,

  mostly with an average of 2,000 passengers, to Treblinka extermination camp, as

  well as one train from Darmstadt. 54 Another three trains from Berlin, two from Vienna, and one from Theresienstadt, all of which travelled directly to Auschwitz

  in the first half of 1942, can be confirmed with certainty. 55

  In the last quarter of 1942 the regime intensified the pressure on those Jews

  still present in the Reich. During the armaments discussion from 20 until 22

  September 1942 Hitler spoke of the ‘importance of removing the Jews from the

  armaments factories in the Reich’. 56 Some days later he told Goebbels of his resolution ‘to remove the Jews from Berlin at all cost’; Jewish workers were to

  be replaced by foreigners. 57 At the same time Himmler agreed with Justice Minister Thierack to assume responsibility for all ‘asocial elements’, including

  all Jews, Gypsies, Russians, and Poles, and their ‘extermination through work’. 58

  On 5 November the RSHA announced an order from Himmler in which all

  concentration camps in the Reich were to be made ‘Jew-free’, and all Jewish

  prisoners were to be transferred to Auschwitz and Lublin. 59 However, it was only with the intensified recruitment of foreigners and prisoners of war for

  armaments production after the beginning of 1943 and the general toughening

  of domestic policy after Stalingrad that the preconditions for this new phase in

  deportations were in place.

  Slovakia

  In February 1942, in response to a request from Himmler, the Foreign Office sent a

  request to the Slovakian government for 20,000 Jewish workers to be sent to the

  Reich for deployment ‘in the East’. 60 This request, as we have seen, was preceded by an offer that Himmler made to the Slovakian head of state on 20 October 1941

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  325

  during a visit to the Führer’s headquarters, to the effect that the Slovakian Jews be

  deported to a special territory in the General Government; in addition, the

  Slovakian government had already declared its agreement that Slovakian nationals

  be included in the deportations. 61 When the Slovakian government responded to the German request of February 1942, it was thus knowingly taking the first step

  towards the deportation of all Slovakian Jews.

  The Slovakian Jews who had been subjected to a special law and increasingly

  excluded from public and business life since April 1939, in other words immedi-

  ately after the foundation of the state, 62 were now recorded on police files; all people deemed to be ‘fit for work’ between the ages of 16 and 45 were registered

  separately and gradually rounded up and put in special camps. 63 On 25 March the first 1,000 girls and young women were deported to Auschwitz to work as forced

  labourers. The original deportation plan had allowed for the deportation of some

  13,000 men to the Majdanek camp and 7,000 women to Auschwitz. 64 In fact, between 26 March and 7 April four transports of young women (about 3,800 in all)

  arrived in Auschwitz and four transports with a total of 4,500 young men in

  Majdanek. 65 On the basis of a request, issued by Himmler through the Foreign Office, the Slovakian government finally declared itself ready to deport all the

  Slovakian Jews (another 70,000 people). 66

  On 10 April Heydrich explained the deportation programme in Bratislava. 67

  The following day the deportations of whole families began. Now the deport-

  ation plan was changed: seven transports are known to have arrived in Ausch-

  witz, where the deportees were deployed in forced labour; another thirty-four

  transports set off for the district of Lublin at around the same time. 68 The subsequent fate of the people deported to this area is comparable with those

  who were deported to the same area at the same time from the Reich. The

  Slovakian Jews were mostly transported to places from which the indigenous

  Jewish population had been taken to the extermination camps of Belzec and

  Sobibor. Accommodation in these places—for which in general no preparations

  whatsoever had been made—was in some cases only a brief stop before further

  deportation to the extermination camps, in others it became an imprisonment

  under wretched conditions that lasted for months and even years. Again, those

  men who were fit for work were taken out of the transports that came via Lublin

  and imprisoned in Majdanek camp; in all there may have been 8,500 men, of

  whom 883 were still living in the camp in July 1943. 69

  Since the beginning of June the inmates of a total of ten transports that were not

  deemed ‘fit for work’ at the selection in Lublin and were not locked up in

  Majdanek camp, women and children above all, had no longer been placed in a

  ghetto, but rather taken directly to Sobibor extermination camp where they were

  murdered. This meant that the Slovakian Jews too were now caught up in that

  escalation of extermination to which the Jews deported to Minsk from the

  ‘Greater German Reich’ had fallen victim since mid-May. The last Sobibor

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  Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

  transport set off from Slovakia on 14 June, a day before the deportations from the

  Reich to the district of Lublin were stopped. 70

  After this all Slovakian transports came to Auschwitz where, beginning with the

  train that arrived on 4 July 1942, a selection now regularly occurred on the ramp:

  Jews who were ‘fit for work’ were sent to the camp, while those deemed ‘unfit for

  work’, meaning in particular all children, their mothers, and elderly people, were

  murdered in the gas chambers immediately after their arrival. By 21 October we

  are able to identify eight transports from Slovakia whose inmates suffered

  this fate. 71

  But information and rumours about the fate of the deportees trickled in to

  Slovakia and led to growing resistance against the continuation of the existing

  Slovakian policy. The Catholic Church in Slovakia and the Vatican intervened,

  leading politicians spoke out against a continuation of the deportations and

  tried to sabotage any persecutory measures; dissent was also voiced by leading

  representatives of business. The general contextual conditions in domestic

  politics were favourable to this attitude of opposition: af
ter Prime Minister

  Tuka, the most important representative of a radical and unconditionally pro-

  German policy, had been to a large extent deprived of power in the spring of

  1942, within the Slovakian government there was a gradual transition to a more

  moderate policy. 72

  We should not ignore the fact that a significant role in the formation of this

  increasing opposition to the continuation of a radical anti-Jewish policy was

  played by a Jewish resistance group that had formed within Ustredna Zidov (the

  central Jewish council), the official compulsory organization for the Slovakian

  Jews: the so-called ‘subsidiary government’ around the Zionist youth leader Gisi

  Fleischmann and the rabbi Michael Dor Weissmandel. 73 They systematically collected information concerning the fate of the deportees, used a great variety

  of methods to stir up resistance to the deportations within influential Slovakian

  circles, and made contact with Jewish and non-Jewish organizations abroad. The

  ‘subsidiary government’ went so far as to bribe the German ‘Jewish adviser’, Dieter

  Wisliceny, with a considerable sum of dollars to bring the deportations to a

  standstill; but the question of whether this method really played any part in the

  decision to stop the deportations remains unresolved.

  At the end of June—some 50,000 Slovakian Jews had been deported—it became

  apparent that there were hardly any people left for further deportations. Of the

  89,000-strong Jewish minority, a considerable proportion—more than 25,000—

  had letters of protection from various offices or fell under particular exceptional

  categories. 74 In July another four transports went off, two in September and one in October, then they were stopped by the Slovakian authorities. Altogether, almost

  58,000 people had been deported in fifty-seven transports. 75

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  France and the First Outlines of a Deportation Programme

  for Western Europe

  In the face of continuing attacks by the French resistance, at the end of 1941

  the military administration in France continued its policy of reprisals: on 15

  December 95 hostages, including 58 Jews, were shot, a high monetary penalty to

  be paid by the Jewish population of the occupied zone had been established, and

  1,000 Jews and 500 Communists designated for a transport ‘to the East’. In order

  to fill this quota, the occupying forces, again with the support of the French police,

  had arrested 743 Jewish men, who were held along with 300 men previously

  arrested at the Compiègne camp: the actual deportation, however, was at first

  delayed for lack of means of transportation. 76

  After Eichmann had approved the deportation of these 1,000 people on

  1 March, 77 according to information from Theodor Dannecker, the expert for Jewish affairs of the Gestapo, it was agreed at a meeting in the RSHA on 4 March

  to suggest that the French government deport ‘some 5,000 Jews to the East’. These

  were ‘initially to be male Jews who were fit for work, no older than 55’, who were

  also French citizens. 78 Also according to Dannecker, Heydrich is supposed to have agreed at this discussion that after the first 1,000 people ‘another 5,000 Jews

  were to be transported from Paris in the course of 1942’; for 1943 he had

  announced ‘further major transports’. 79

  The first ‘hostage transport’, totalling 1,112 people, of whom half were French

  Jews and half Jews of other nationality, arrived in Auschwitz on 30 March. 80 For the deportation of a further 5,000 people, Eichmann had given more detailed

  instructions to the commander of the Security Police in France, Helmut Knochen,

  on 12 March: only Jews of German, French, formerly Polish, and Luxembourg

  nationality were to be deported, of whom no more than 5 per cent were to be

  women. 81 In March responsibility for all police matters and expressly all sanctions had been transferred to the newly created office of a Higher SS and Police

  Commander in France; the position was occupied by Karl Oberg, the former

  SSPF in the district of Radom. 82

  By the end of May—as a response to further attacks by the resistance movement—

  a further 471 people, Jews and Communists, had been shot in the occupied zone;

  the military administration had also designated so many people for deportation

  as a reaction to individual assassination attempts that the quota of 5,000 Jews set

  out in the March deportation plans of the RSHA had already been reached. 83

  On 13 May, Dannecker established at a meeting with the head of the railway

  transport department, Lieutenant General Kohl, on 13 May, that he was an

  ‘uncompromising adversary of the Jews’ who ‘agrees 100 % to a final solution of

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  Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

  the Jewish question with the goal of the total extermination of the adversary’. 84

  The next five transports, each with 1,000 people, left Compiègne between 5 June

  and 17 July, destined for Auschwitz.

  During a visit to Paris at the beginning of May, Heydrich is supposed to have

  announced that ‘greater, more perfect, more numerically fruitful’ solutions were

  in preparation to kill the Jews of Europe. 85 At the same time Heydrich objected to further hostage shootings in France, welcome news for the military, who assumed

  that deportations from France would be less provocative to the Resistance than

  executions in the country itself. 86

  On 11 June 1942 a meeting was held in the RSHA attended by the ‘Jewish

  experts’ in Paris, The Hague, and Brussels. Dannecker recorded that the meeting

  concluded that ‘for military reasons’ ‘an evacuation of Jews from Germany to the

  Eastern deportation zone’ could not be carried out during the summer. ‘RFSS has

  therefore ordered that large numbers of Jews should be transferred either from

  the South East (Serbia) or from the occupied Western territories to Auschwitz

  concentration camp for the purposes of work. The fundamental condition is that

  the Jews (of both sexes) are between the ages of 16 and 40. 10 % of Jews unfit for

  work can be sent with them.’ At the meeting an agreement was reached about the

  quotas from the occupied Western territories: according to this, 15,000 Jews were

  to be deported from the Netherlands, 10,000 from Belgium, and 100,000 from

  France, including from the unoccupied zone. ‘The transports are to start moving

  from 13 July, about 3 per week.’87

  The original plans of early March, in which the RSHA had planned the deport-

  ation of a total of 6,000 Jews from France for 1942, had thus been considerably

  extended. The determining factor here was not only the ‘military grounds’, the

  transport moratorium caused by the German summer offensive; it was rather that

  in March/early April the RSHA’s plans had consolidated to such an extent that the

  outlines of an initial Europe-wide deportation programme became visible, in the

  context of which not only the Reich and Slovakia were to be made ‘Jew-free’, but a

  considerable proportion of the Jews living in the occupied Western territories were

  to be deported and murdered.

  One important clue to the existence of such a programme is a minute88

  from the office of the Slovakian Prime Minister, Tuka, dated 10 April, con-


  cerning a visit from Heydrich on the same day. On this occasion Heydrich

  explained to Tuka that the planned deportation of the Slovakian Jews was

  ‘only part of the programme’. At that point a ‘resettlement’ of a total of ‘half a

  million’ Jews was occurring ‘from Europe to the East’. Apart from Slovakia,

  the Reich, the Protectorate, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France were

  affected.

  Now (at the meeting in the RSHA on 11 June) this programme was modified

  and accelerated in view of the impending transport stoppage in June: now, within

  a few weeks, the deportation of a total of 125,00 Jews from the occupied Western

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  329

  territories was to begin within a few weeks, and at the same time it was made clear

  that this first big wave of deportations—like the agreements with Slovakia—was to

  encompass the Jews (aged between 16 and 40) meant for the ‘work programme’ in

  particular.

  But the quota of 100,000 Jews to be deported from France, cited on 11 June, could

  not be reached, as Dannecker wrote to the RSHA, saying that there was no

  ‘definitive clarity about the number of Jews to be taken on from the unoccupied

  zone, and he was now only in a position’ ‘of being able to name departure stations

  for c.40,000 Jews’. 89 Eichmann informed Rademacher about the new changes in the deportation plans on 22 June 1942. According to these, from mid-July or

  early August, in daily transports of 1,000 people each, ‘first of all 40,000 Jews

  from the French occupied zone, 40,000 Jews from the Netherlands and 10,000

  Jews from Belgium are to be transported for the work programme to Auschwitz

  camp’. 90 According to this plan, these transports were estimated to take three months.

  However, the next day, 23 June, the RSHA Jewish desk received a new

  instruction from Himmler, as Dannecker learned in Paris from Eichmann at

  the beginning of July. This stated: ‘all Jews resident in France are to be deported

  as soon as possible.’ The ‘previously planned rate (3 transports each of 1,000

  Jews every week)’ must ‘be significantly raised within a short time . . . with the

  goal of freeing France entirely of Jews as soon as possible’. 91 This order from Himmler to implement the ‘Final Solution’ in France completely and as quickly