as possible must be seen as part of the escalation of the extermination policy
directed against the Jews throughout the whole of Europe; we have already
examined the measures that applied to the German Reich and Slovakia, and in
the following sections we shall describe the corresponding radicalization in
Eastern Europe.
On 27 June, Carltheo Zeitschel, the fanatical ‘Jewish expert’ within the German
embassy and liaison with the SD, noted of a conversation with Dannecker that
the latter required ‘50,000 Jews to be transported from the unoccupied territory
to the East as soon as possible’. 92 In negotiations with HSSPF Carl Oberg, the chief of police of the Vichy government, René Bousquet, declared himself willing,
at the beginning of July, to arrest stateless or foreign Jews in the unoccupied zone
as well as to make the police under his command available for the arrest of Jews
in the occupied zone; this collaboration, however, would also be limited to
foreign or stateless Jews. 93 (‘Stateless’ referred in particular to those Jews who had lost their citizenship as a result of German race legislation or the events of
the war.) The Vichy government acceded to this outcome of the negotions. 94 But at this point Dannecker, Eichmann’s Jewish expert in France, was working on the
assumption, as he reported to Berlin, that in a ‘2nd phase’ those Jews naturalized
as a result of the French immigration legislation of 1919 and 1927 ‘could be
tackled’. 95
330
Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945
The ‘Final Solution’ in Eastern Europe 1942
Poland
The Deportations from the Districts of Lublin and Galicia to the
Extermination Camps of Belzec and Sobibor
On 20 January 1942 the population and welfare department of the General
Government demanded that its offices attached to the district governors ‘send a
list of ghettos in their district as soon as possible’, and forward their population
figures. 96 These statistics had already been used in the preparation for the deportations in the districts of Lublin and Galicia.
They could start on this since Belzec extermination camp, the construction of
which had begun the previous November, was completed in March 1942. Belzec,
in the south-eastern part of the district of Lublin, directly on the railway line to
Lemberg (Lvov) was to be the prototype of the extermination camps built in the
General Government. It covered a relatively small area, a rectangle with sides
about 270 m long, and initially consisted of a barrack with three gas chambers.
The staff consisted of 20 to 30 Germans, and 90 to 120 so called ‘Trawnikis’: Soviet
prisoners of war, Ukrainians, and ethnic Germans who had passed through the
Trawniki SS training camp in the district of Lublin, run by Globocnik. Apart from
that, there was a Jewish work unit in Belzec whose members were repeatedly
replaced by newly arrived prisoners and murdered.
A spur line made it possible to move railway wagons directly into the camp.
Here the victims were led to believe that they were in a transit camp. Men,
woman, and children were separated; they had to undress, hand over their
valuable objects, women had their hair cut off. The people were then driven
naked along a narrow, fenced path, known as the ‘Schlauch’, or ‘tube’, to the gas
chambers, which were disguised as shower rooms. An engine produced the
deadly exhaust fumes which would generally kill the victims in an agonizing
way within 20 to 30 minutes. 97 Jewish forced labourers then had to take the corpses of the murdered people out of the gas chambers and transport them to
the large graves in the camp grounds, which had been dug by Jewish forced
labourers in 1940.
In the district of Lublin the deportations began in mid-March: between 16 March
and 20 April the ghetto in the district capital, Lublin, was almost completely cleared
in two phases. 98 This enterprise was run by SS and police chief Odilo Globocnik and by units of the Security Police, the Order Police, and Trawniki men, while the civil
administration provided essential support. 99 Himmler had stayed there immediately before the beginning of the clearance of the Lublin ghetto, which marks the
beginning of the systematic murder of the Jews in the General Government and
Extermination on a European Scale, 1942
331
became the model for many similar ‘campaigns’. He had met HSSPF Friedrich
Krüger in Lublin on 13 March, and Globocnik the following day. 100
During the clearance of the Lublin ghetto, many people had already been shot
within the ghetto; a few thousand people were retained in situ as a workforce, and
some 30,000 were deported to Belzec, where they were murdered. The fiction of a
‘resettlement’ to the occupied Eastern territories was outwardly maintained, but
within a short time information about the fate of the deportees within the whole of
the General Government filtered out into the Reich. 101 Thus, for example, the propaganda minister, Goebbels, was informed about the murders in the district of
Lublin as early as 27 March, as his diary reveals: ‘Starting with Lublin, the Jews are
now being deported from the General Government to the East. A rather barbaric
procedure is being applied, one which should not be described in greater detail,
and little remains of the Jews themselves.’ Goebbels’s remark that ‘60% of them
must be liquidated, while only another 40% can be deployed in work’ provides a
significant indication of current German plans. The ghettos in the General
Government that were being ‘vacated’, Goebbels went on, would ‘now be filled
with Jews deported from the Reich, and the procedure is to be repeated there after
a certain time’. 102
A statement by Eichmann to the Israeli police also reveals that Globocnik had
been given the task of murdering the majority of the Jews in the district, namely
those ‘incapable of work’. According to Eichmann’s information, once the mass
murder had already begun, Globocnik had acquired Heydrich’s authorization to
kill a further 150,000, probably 250,000 people. 103 The statement by Christian Wirth’s adjutant, Joset Oberhauser, according to which initially only ‘Jews from
various ghettos who are unfit for work should be liquidated’, points in the same
direction, and it was only in April or May that Globocnik was given the order
‘systematically to exterminate the Jews’. 104
In parallel with the start of the clearance of the ghetto of Lublin came the
deportation of Jews from the Reich and Slovakia to the district of Lublin, which
had already been set aside for the planned ‘Jewish reservation’ since autumn 1939.
As we have already described, the people deported to the district were accommo-
dated in places from which the local Jews deemed ‘unfit for work’ were deported to
Belzec. These deportations from the rural areas of the district began on 24 March.
By mid-April some 14,000 Jews had been deported from these small communities
to Belzec; then the extermination camp was temporarily closed. The reasons for
this are not entirely clear. It is possible that Wirth, who had built the camp and
run it during its first phase, saw his task as over; he had at first only been delegated
to Globocnik by the T4 programm
e. 105
In mid-March, in the district of Galicia, too, a new wave of mass murders began
and, for the first time, deportations to extermination camps. From mid-March
until early April 1942 about 15,000 people, inhabitants of the ghetto of Lemberg
(Lvov) who were deemed ‘incapable of work’, were deported to Belzec. Further
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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945
thousands of inhabitants from the smaller ghettos of the district took the same
journey between mid-March and around 8/9 April, while thousands more from
these ghettos were murdered on the spot. 106 These deportations were also directed by Globocnik’s staff.
The systematic clearance of the Kreise (counties) began in the district of Lublin,
independently of the arrival of Jews from other countries and even before the civil
administration could begin to record all Jews capable of work. The victims—apart
from about 2,000 forced labourers who were deported to Majdanek—were sent to
Sobibor, the second extermination camp in the General Government, which had
been built in the meantime and the construction and operation of which was
based on Belzec. 107 Belzec, on the other hand, as mentioned above, had initially been shut down in the middle of April. More than 55,000 people fell victim to this
wave of deportations, which was interrupted on 10 June. The deportations from
the district of Lublin would not be resumed until August/September. 108
Extension of the Murders to the Other Districts
The temporary stop to the deportations from the district of Lublin in early June is
likely to have been due to the decision to extend the mass murder of the Jews to the
whole of the General Government. The deportations now encompassed the district
of Cracow, while Globocnik’s specialists will probably already have been engaged
with the preparations for the deportations from other districts, namely Warsaw. This
decision quickly to extend mass murder to the other districts can only be recon-
structed on the basis of the course of the deportations. It must have happened
between the attack on Heydrich on 27 May and his death on 4 June. Himmler’s
address to SS and police leaders at Heydrich’s funeral in Berlin on 9 June contains an
important indication of such a momentous decision: ‘Within a year we will definitely
have completed the mass migration of the Jews; then no more will migrate.’ 109
With the appointment of HSSPF Krüger as state secretary for security issues in
the General Government in May 1942 the weight of the SS had decisively grown
compared to that of the civil administration. In particular, Krüger was assigned
responsibility for all ‘Jewish affairs’ by the implementation order of 3 June, which
concerned his new position as state secretary. 110 In this way, the SS had created the organizational preconditions for the murder of all the Jews in the General
Government by means of a combination of executions, deportations to particular
extermination camps, and forced labour.
The murder of the Jews throughout the General Government—like the mass
murders in the districts of Lublin and Galicia—was to be organized by Globocnik’s
staff. The whole campaign was run under the heading ‘Aktion Reinhardt’ or
‘Aktion Reinhard’, a posthumous tribute to Reinhard Heydrich, who had died on
4 June 1942 as the result of an assassination attempt some days previously. 111
Individually, the ‘Reinhardt Actions’ encompassed the extermination of the Jews
Extermination on a European Scale, 1942
333
of the General Government and the district of Bialystok in the three extermination
camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka as well as in Majdanek; it also included the
murder of other Jews in these camps as well as the utilization of the goods and
chattels of those who had been murdered, as well as the deployment of the Jews for
forced labour. 112
On 3 June 1942, the day when Krüger’s authority was decisively extended,
Globocnik sent Himmler several memos concerning ‘ethnic policy’ in the district
of Lublin. The content of these memos is not known in detail, but two of these
papers concerned the fate of the Jews, 113 another the issue of ‘German-ness’
(Deutschtum). Himmler only returned to these proposals during a further meeting
with Globocnik on 9 July. In the meantime—from about 19 June until 7 July—
because of the imminent offensives in the East a general transport moratorium
had been imposed, and Himmler was also preoccupied with other issues because
of the death of Heydrich. 114
On 18 June a police meeting in Cracow agreed, as Krüger put it, that the
‘problem of Jewish resettlement urgently requires a decision’. Once the transport
moratorium was over, ‘the Jewish campaign must be stepped up’. 115 At this meeting, representatives of the civil administration, the district chiefs Ludwig
Losacker (Galicia), Herbert Hummel (Warsaw), and Michael Oswald (Radom)
pressed for an acceleration of the deportations, particularly, as the arguments
presented had it, in order to tackle ‘smuggling’ more effectively, and avoid
in advance any problems with the imminent ‘harvesting’; Hummel wanted to
remove those Jews who were ‘unfit for work’ from the Warsaw ghetto ‘within a
reasonable time’, in order to increase the profits of the ghetto industry still further.
On 22 June, at a meeting of heads of the main departments, Krüger again urged
those in charge of the General Government to intensify measures against ‘the
Jews’; he encountered resistance from the head of the Main Labour Department,
Dr Max Frauendorfer, who warned that a ‘resettlement of the Jews’ will ‘have
profound effects on all sectors of public life’; in his plea for the preservation of
Jewish workers, Frauenhofer referred expressly to Himmler, Speer, and Sauckel. 116
The civil administration thus wanted to speed up the deportations for reasons of
food and ‘security’, but to keep the workers in the ghettos and camps. A few weeks
later Krüger was to take over the issue of Jewish forced labour in the General
Government and ignore such considerations.
A few days previously, on 12 June, Himmler had ordered that the measures
for the ‘Germanization’ of large areas in the East, including the General
Government, be implemented at a faster rate, within twenty years. Early in
July Krüger suggested that the General Government be designated for settlement
by Germans. 117
Meanwhile, since the end of May, and increasingly since the temporary sus-
pension of the deportations in Lublin district on 10 June, more than 16,000 Jews
had been deported from the district of Crakow to Belzec and murdered, until these
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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945
deportations were suspended because of the transport moratorium on 19 June. 118
In Belzec the murders had been resumed, after Wirth, who had left the camp in
April 1942, had returned to Belzec at the end of May; his return was clearly
connected with the assignment of additional T4 staff to the General Government
as agreed by Himmler and Brack with the Chancellery of the Führer of the
NSDAP. 119 In May, or by the beginning of June at the latest, work had begun on the th
ird extermination camp, Treblinka in the district of Warsaw. 120 In the district of Radom by mid-June all the preparations had been made for a
deportation of the Jews living there. 121
The murder of the Jews in the General Government had not by any means been
interrupted by the transport moratorium. In the district of Lublin, for example,
numerous small ‘actions’ took place, but also mass executions, as for example—
between June and September—in Tyszowcew, Josefow, Lomazy, Serokomla, and
Biala Podlaska with a total of 3,500 victims. 122 In the district of Galicia, too, the mass executions were continued. 123
The transport moratorium also meant the end of the deportations from the
Reich and Slovakia to the district of Lublin. All the transports from Slovakia now
went directly to Auschwitz, where the greater proportion of deportees, beginning
with the transport of 4 July, was directly murdered in the gas chambers without
even being admitted to the camp. After the lifting of the transport moratorium the
deportations from the Reich went above all to Minsk and, over the months that
followed, to Riga, Treblinka, and Auschwitz.
After the lifting of the transport moratorium the overall situation within the
General Government emerged as follows: in the second week of July, the trans-
ports from the district of Cracow to Belzec were resumed, after the transport
moratorium had been used to extend the capacity of the gas chambers there by a
considerable amount. On the other hand, Sobibor became inoperative because of
repairs on the railway tracks until the beginning of October, and here too the
pause was used to build additional gas chambers. 124 The transports from the district of Cracow lasted until November, with the bulk of the deportations
concentrated in August and September. 125
Meanwhile the decisive preconditions for the initiation of the deportations had
also been created in the other districts. Himmler played a central part in this. After
heralding, on 9 June, the end of the Jewish ‘mass migration’ within a year, he now
seemed to have staked everything on accelerating the murder of the Jews of the
Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews Page 59
