Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews

by Peter Longerich

  General Government as far as possible.

  On 9 July Himmler discussed with Krüger and Globocnik the latter’s sugges-

  tions (which have not survived) of 3 June, which we know focused on Judenpolitik

  in the district. 126 After Himmler had met Hitler several times on 11, 12, and 14 July, he pressed for greater transport capacities. In response to a request from Karl

  Wolff, the chief of his personal staff, the state secretary in the ministry of

  transport, Albert Ganzenmüller, assured him at the end of July that, since

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  22 July, a ‘train carrying 5,000 Jews has been travelling from Warsaw to Treblinka

  every day, and twice a week a train from Przemysl (district of Lublin) to Belzec’. 127

  On 17 and 18 July Himmler visited Auschwitz, where he was shown people being

  murdered in a gas chamber. 128 Statements that he made with visible satisfaction on the evening of 17 July at a reception given by the Gauleiter of Upper Silesia led one

  of his listeners to conclude that the Nazi leadership had now decided to murder

  the European Jews, information that was passed on to Switzerland and from there

  reached the West through the telegram from Gerhart Riegner, the representative

  of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva. 129 After his stay in Auschwitz on 18 July Himmler visited Globocnik in Lublin and on 19 July, from Lublin, he gave HSSPF

  Krüger the crucial order that the ‘resettlement of the entire Jewish population of

  the General Government should have been implemented and completed by 31

  December 1942’. After this date, no Jews were to be able to stay in the General

  Government, apart from the ‘assembly camps’ of Warsaw, Tschenstochau (Czes-

  tochowa), Cracow, and Lublin. 130 This meant that he had set a time limit for the extermination of the great majority of the Polish Jews.

  Warsaw

  After the completion of Treblinka extermination camp, 50 km from Warsaw, near

  the railway line to Bialystok, 131 from 22 July deportations began from the Warsaw ghetto to what was the biggest death factory in the General Government. There

  were more than 350,000 people in the Warsaw ghetto at this point, more than in

  any other ghetto in Eastern Europe. By 12 September the Germans had managed

  to deport more than 250,000 from Warsaw to Treblinka, to murder them in the

  gas chambers there—an average of 5,000 people every day. How was it possible to

  murder a quarter of a million people in only seven weeks without encountering

  any notable resistance? Israel Gutman, who as a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto

  has made research into the subject his life’s work, has tried to answer this

  question by describing the events of the summer of 1942 as a process set in

  motion with diabolical skill by the Germans and then continuously radicalized. 132

  The original order for the deportation that the Jewish council announced with a

  billposting campaign in response to German demands, provided for numerous

  exceptions: these applied in particular to those working for the extensive admin-

  istration of the Jewish council, who were in employment or even only fit for work,

  and they were supposed to apply both to the immediate members of these people’s

  families and to people in poor health who were unable to travel. This gave the

  majority of ghetto-dwellers the illusion that they could escape deportation. This

  illusion must have been fed by the fact that in the previous few months the

  German ghetto administration had made considerable efforts to make the ghetto

  economy more productive, thus giving the impression that it was banking on the

  continuing existence of the ghetto in the medium term. 133 That such considerations 336

  Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

  had by now been replaced by a strategy of the systematic extermination of Jews

  living in Europe was not apparent to the inhabitants of the ghetto.

  The first actions were carried out by the Jewish ghetto police. The German

  forces remained in the background, while the Polish police began the outward

  cordoning-off of the ghetto. Gradually individual blocks and streets within the

  ghetto were cordoned off, the people from the houses were driven to a central

  collecting point, the ‘Umschlagplatz’, where the selection took place. People with

  work permits were generally not designated for deportation; the rest were trans-

  ported to Treblinka on goods trains. In this way the Germans had managed to set

  the deportation process in motion with the help of the authority of the Jewish

  council and the Jewish police.

  From the beginning of August the method used by the Germans began to

  change: German police and their Ukrainian and Latvian auxiliary troops inter-

  vened increasingly in events, they became more brutal in their approach, the

  selection was performed more and more indiscriminately, identification papers

  were ignored more and more often. The only thing that mattered now was to fill

  the daily deportation quota. The Jewish council—the chairman, Czerniakow, had

  committed suicide on the second day of the deportations—was completely mar-

  ginalized, indeed it was forced in August to draw up deportation lists of its

  members and their relatives; the Jewish ‘police’ were forced to join in by means

  of very severe punitive measures.

  It seems that the great majority of ghetto inhabitants, in the face of the plainly

  irresistible events and the power of their tormentors, either fell into resignation

  and apathy or yielded to mostly illusory hopes of survival. They clung to the hope

  that they would not be caught up in the actions or would survive the selection.

  Information about the mass murder in Treblinka that was circulating in the ghetto

  was overlaid with different-sounding, more optimistic rumours, according to

  which the ‘resettlement’ led only to a camp where one could go on living. 134 The generally disastrous living conditions—during the actions no food entered the

  ghetto—clearly reinforced the tendency to succumb to an unavoidable fate.

  Exhortations from the Germans, to the effect that those who reported voluntarily

  for deportation would be rewarded with extra rations, proved successful in this

  situation.

  Finally, in early September, an extensive selection took place lasting several days

  of all those people remaining in the ghetto, in which 35,000 people—10 per cent of

  the original population of the ghetto—were selected out as a usable workforce.

  They were now, along with 20,000 to 25,000 people who stayed hidden in the

  ghetto, to form the population of the Warsaw ghetto. The rest were deported.

  Among the last to be deported were the great majority of the approximately 2,000

  members of the Jewish police. Apart from the 250,000 people murdered in

  Treblinka, 11,000 more were deported to labour camps, and about 10,000 were

  murdered during the actions in the ghetto.

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  337

  After the halt to the deportations from Warsaw, the bulk of deportations within

  the district of Warsaw shifted to the smaller communities from which tens of

  thousands of people had also been deported to Treblinka by the beginning of

  October. 135

  The Deportations from the Other Districts

  in Summer and Autumn 1942<
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  In August the deportations in the district of Lublin were resumed. The purpose

  now was the complete murder by the end of the year of those Jews in the district

  who were ‘not fit for work’. 136 In August the death transports went above all to Treblinka, in September they were largely interrupted, and in October/November

  (after the halt to the deportations from the district of Warsaw) they were brought

  to their conclusion with the utmost energy, with the trains travelling to Treblinka,

  to Sobibor (which could be reached by rail again after 8 October), and to Belzec

  (which was closed in December).

  At the beginning of August the deportations to Treblinka began in the district of

  Radom as well: first of all there were two actions in the town of Radom itself on

  4 and 5 August, and on 16 and 17 August; from 20 August the ghettos in the

  administrative district were cleared. These actions reached their climax with the

  clearance of the biggest ghetto in the district, Tschenstochau, between 22 September

  and 7 October, in which 33,000 people were deported to Treblinka. At the end of

  October some transports from this district were also sent to Belzec. At the beginning

  of November the clearances in the district of Radom were concluded. In toto, more

  than 300,000 people from this district were murdered in less than three months. 137

  After systematic preparations in the second half of July, at the instigation of

  SSPF Katzmann, in late July the mass murder of the Jewish population of Galicia

  was resumed with the deportations from Przemysl to Belzec. In Lemberg (Lvov)

  alone, in the big ‘August action’ between 10 and 25 August we may assume that

  more than 40,000 Jews, about half of the then Jewish population of the city, were

  arrested and deported to Belzec in goods trains, into each of which about 5,000

  people were crammed, and murdered there. 138 During this action, in which hundreds of people were murdered on the spot, including the patients in the

  hospitals and the children in the Jewish orphanage, Himmler and Globocnik

  stayed in the city on 17 August. 139 Initially those spared from deportation involved many fit for work, mostly men and women under the age of 35. They were now

  locked up in a ghetto in which there were 36,000 Jews in September. The

  ‘selections’, however, had been carried out under such chaotic conditions that

  we cannot speak of a systematic separation of Jews who were ‘fit for work’ from

  those who were not.

  The deportations from the counties (Kreise) of the district of Galicia were also

  resumed at the end of July and—interrupted by a fourteen-day pause during the

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  Lvov campaign—systematically continued. 140 Again, thousands of people were shot on the spot, but the largest part of the Jewish population was deported to

  Belzec. In most county towns ghettos were now set up for the surviving Jews,

  where they had not existed before. Between the end of July and the beginning of

  September 140,000 Jews had been murdered in the district of Lublin. At the

  beginning of October 1942, however, the regular deportations to Belzec extermin-

  ation camp came to a standstill, as the murder machinery could no longer keep

  pace with the large number of deportees. The gas chambers had been extended,

  but the area of the camp proved too small and threatened to collapse under the

  large number of murder victims.

  In October a second wave of murders began in the district of Lublin, in which

  the Jewish communities were almost entirely wiped out. 141 It would seem that Krüger and Katzmann made considerable efforts, precisely because of the growing

  difficulties—the halt in deportations to Belzec, the constant arguments with army

  headquarters and the civil administration over the question of preserving Jewish

  workers, the increasing number of Jews escaping as knowledge about the mass

  murder spread—to achieve by any means the goal set by Himmler of finishing the

  murder campaigns by the end of the year, not least by intensifying the mass

  executions. In December Belzec extermination camp had to be closed because of

  the difficulties that had been becoming apparent for some time, and between

  15 December and 15 January a transport moratorium was imposed. In 1942 a total

  of 300,000 Jews must have been murdered in eastern Galicia, since according to

  German data 161,000 Jews were still alive. 142

  Seen overall, we have the following picture: while after the lifting of the

  transport moratorium in July and Himmler’s order of 19 July the deportations

  were first channelled from the district of Warsaw to Treblinka and from the

  district of Cracow to Belzec, the focus of the mass murders was shifted from late

  summer and in autumn 1942 to the districts of Galicia, Radom, and Lublin.

  The actions in which the majority of the Jewish population of the General

  Government were murdered between the spring and autumn of 1942 followed a

  consistent pattern that had first been applied in the clearance of the ghetto of

  Lublin and had been constantly refined since then. These operations were run by a

  special ‘resettlement staff’ and carried out by the Security Police and the Order

  Police, with the Trawniki generally deployed to cordon off the actions. The civil

  administration performed indispensable services in the preparation of the actions:

  it produced the statistics of the Jewish population, moved the rural population to

  certain collecting ghettos, and issued identification papers for those Jewish work-

  ers who were still required. Equally indispensable was the close collaboration with

  the Reich railways, which had to ensure the regular availability of the deportation

  trains.

  The effectiveness of the campaigns themselves was based on the element of

  surprise and calculated terror, designed to throw the population of the ghetto into

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  339

  a panic and prevent any resistance. The Jewish councils were informed a short time

  before the imminent ‘resettlement’, and the Jewish police were forced to help drag

  the people from the houses, usually in the early hours of the morning. If the clearing

  of a ghetto lasted days or even weeks, an attempt was made to conceal the planned

  extent of the overall operation and cover the ghetto with a series of shock oper-

  ations. The people driven to collection points were always subjected to a selection: it

  decided who was to be sent in packed goods trains to the extermination camps. The

  selection process was often quite capricious, and those who had been selected for

  work were often designated for transport to the extermination camps. If those

  responsible for the mass murder had initially used the slogan that those ‘unfit for

  work’ were to be removed, in order to create the impression that the murder was

  based on a rational calculation, this claim was now in practice rendered absurd.

  Throughout the entire process people who hid or failed to follow instructions

  were shot, but also often murdered on an utter whim. After the execution of the

  ‘actions’ the streets of the ghettos were often scattered with corpses.

  A Jewish work troop immediately had to start clearing up; at the same time any

  valuable objects or other propert
y that were found were collected and sorted. The

  exploitation of the personal belongings of the victims was an integral component

  of ‘Aktion Reinhardt’. 143

  Treblinka

  In the second half of 1942 the Treblinka camp was to assume a central role in the

  extermination process in comparison with the two other extermination camps,

  Belzec and Sobibor.

  The camp complex covered an area of around 20 hectares and, in a densely

  forested setting, was screened off from the eyes of the outside world. 144 Having its own spur line made it possible to drive the deportation trains, each crammed with

  6,000 or 7,000 people, directly into the camp. At first Treblinka held a building

  with three gas chambers into which the deadly exhaust fumes were fed from a tank

  engine. In autumn 1942 the murder capacity of Treblinka, like that of the two

  other Aktion Reinhardt camps, was extended: a larger building was built, contain-

  ing an estimated ten chambers. The staff of the camp consisted of about 30 to

  40 SS men, mostly staff from Aktion T4 as well as between 90 and 120 Trawniki

  men. There was also a work unit of Jewish prisoners who were within a very short

  space of time ‘selected’, murdered, and replaced by new companions in misery.

  In the first phase of the camp, dating from 23 July to 28 August 1942, the

  murder of thousands of people every day had the qualities of a crazed massacre.

  Many people who attempted to escape the trains as they approached the camp

  were shot by the guards outside the camp. Often the shootings were continued

  within the camp itself; if the gas chambers were not working or were over-

  burdened, actual mass executions were carried out, and there were also numerous

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  random murders. Often people arriving in the camp were faced with indescrib-

  able images. The arrival area was scattered with corpses. The guards reacted to the

  panic that arose with further shootings. 145

  These circumstances, but also the inability of the camp administration to

  collect the valuable items stolen from the Jews and pass them on to Aktion

  Reinhardt headquarters, led to an inspection of the camp and its temporary

  closure.

  The camp was now reorganized and rebuilt under the auspices of Christian