Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews
Page 61
Wirth, the Inspector of the Sonderkommando Action Reinhardt; the previous
commander, Irmfried Eberl, was dismissed and replaced by Franz Stangl, the
commander of Sobibor extermination camp. 146 On 4 September the murder in Treblinka was resumed. To make it easier for people to leave the wagons a ramp
had been built, and with the corresponding erection of buildings the impression
was created of being in a railway station. Frail people who might have suffered
from the tempo of the murder process were now selected immediately after
their arrival and brought to the camp hospital, where they were shot. The
remaining crowd were told that they were now in a transit camp; after they
had undressed and handed over their valuables, they were driven down the
fenced-off and concealed ‘tube’ (Schlauch) to the gas chambers, where they were
murdered.
By the end of 1942 precisely 713,555 people had been murdered in Treblinka.
This figure appears in a telegram from Höfle that was found some years ago in the
decoding reports of the radio reconnaissance department of the British Secret
Service. 147 This document provides us with the figures of the victims who had been murdered in the other Aktion Reinhardt camps. According to this report, 434,598
persons had been murdered in Belzec by the end of 1942. Since Belzec was already
closed at this point, this represents the total number of murders for this exter-
mination camp. The corresponding figures for Sobibor and Lublin-Majdanek are
101,370 and 24,733 respectively. This brings the total number of people killed in the
Aktion Reinhardt camps at this point to 1,274,166. 148
By the end of 1942, according to official German figures, only 298,000 of
originally 2.3 million Jews were still living in the General Government. 149 If we assume that 300,000 Jews might have managed to escape from the German to the
Soviet sector after the occupation of the country, and if we also take into consid-
eration the figure of 100,000 Jews who were murdered in Galicia in the summer
and autumn of
150
1941 and the winter of 1941/2
as well as the increased mortality
rates151 in the ghettos before the start of the liquidations, we reach the conclusion that almost 1.5 million Polish Jews fell victim to the ghetto clearances of 1942.
It thus represents the largest single murder campaign within the Holocaust.
It is hardly comprehensible that this series of gigantic mass murders could have
been played out almost entirely according to plan, without its terrible course being
impeded by any external factors. Thus the ‘actions’ could be carried out in
Extermination on a European Scale, 1942
341
the closed-off ghettos without any disturbances being feared from the Polish
population living in the immediate vicinity.
On the Jewish side there was practically no resistance. As we have seen, the
wave of ghetto liquidations caught the Jewish councils entirely unawares, they had
no chance of stopping the murder machinery or even obstructing its efficiency.
Since the start of the German occupation the Jewish councils had set about
ensuring as far as possible the survival of the population of the ghettos through
a policy of submissiveness to the German occupying forces. This attitude basically
ruled out any response of resistance.
But beyond this, apart from desperate individual acts of resistance, there
were clearly no organized groups or spontaneous initiatives within the Polish
ghettos that might even have attempted to resist the bloody actions. It was
only in the spring of 1942, in the wake of the first clearances, that the first
resistance groups came into existence, although they only resisted the defini-
tive liquidation of the ghettos the following year in Warsaw and a number of
other places. By this time, however, only a small minority of Polish Jews
remained alive. 152
The Takeover of Jewish Forced Labour by the SS
In parallel with the expansion of systematic mass murder to the whole territory
of the General Government, Himmler’s organization took on the entire respon-
sibility for Jewish forced labour, the sphere that had for a long time constituted
the only barrier against the complete murder of the Jewish population. In the
hands of the SS, forced labour—in the sense of ‘extermination through work’—
now became an integral component of the murder programme in the General
Government. 153
In May and June it had still looked as if Jewish workers would continue to be
deployed on a large scale in the General Government, and as if the extension of
murder to the whole territory of the General Government would continue to
involve primarily those members of the Jewish population who were ‘unfit for
work’. The Senior Quartermaster of the military commander, 154 State Secretary Dr Josef Bühler, 155 and the director of the Labour Division of the General Government, Frauendorfer, 156 the latter as late as 22 June, had insisted on receiving Jewish workers, and on 9 May HSSPF Krüger had issued a regulation intended to replace
Polish, Ukrainian, and other ‘Aryan non-German workers’ with Jewish specialists.
On 20 May HSSPF Krüger had promised the Wehrmacht Armaments Inspection
to replace Polish workforces deported to the Reich with 100,000 Jews. 157
After HSSPF Krüger had become responsible for all ‘Jewish affairs’ at the
beginning of June, the Labour Administration informed the Labour Offices on
25 June that Jews could only be procured by agreement with the security and
police commanders. On 17 July Krüger informed the Armaments Inspection that
342
Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945
the previous agreements about workforce deployment were invalid, because
armaments factories would henceforth be supplied with Jewish forced labourers
who had been brought together in camps controlled by the Higher SS and Police
Commanders. 158 Also in July, at the time when the deportations had been resumed, particularly from Warsaw, Krüger ordered that only Jews between the
ages of 16 and 35 could be used. This crucial restriction, which corresponded to an
instruction from Himmler probably issued in May 1942, amounted to a death
sentence for all people outside that age-group. 159
After the incident in Przemysl (the local Wehrmacht commandant had pre-
vented the removal of the local Jewish workforce by closing a bridge160), Krüger ordered all Jewish forced labour camps to be closed. On 5 September, the head of
OKW, Keitel, gave the order for all Jewish workforces in the General Government
to be replaced by Poles. 161 The director of armaments inspection in the General Government, Curt Ludwig Freiherr von Gienanth, was dismissed for protesting
against this measure. 162
However, during the armaments conferences that took place between 20 and
22 September 1942, in view of the dramatic labour shortage, Hitler declared
himself in agreement with Sauckel’s suggestion that, for the time being, qualified
Jewish specialist workers should continue to be employed in the General Govern-
ment. 163 Himmler, who clearly discussed the consequences of this decision with Hitler on 22 September 1942, 164 now revised the intention he had expressed in July 1942 to murder all the Jews in the General Government by the end of 1942. Instead,
>
on 9 October 1942, he ordered the ‘so-called armaments workers’ in textile
factories etc. in Warsaw and Lublin to be consigned to concentration camps.
The Jews working in the ‘real armaments factories’ were to be gradually removed
from these factories, so that in the end there would be ‘if possible only a few large
Jewish concentration camp concerns in the East of the General Government’.
‘However, there too, according to the Führer’s wishes the Jews are eventually to
disappear.’165
Police regulations issued in October and November 1942 ordained that
(apart from the forced labour camps), ‘Jewish residential districts’ might
only continue to exist in a total of fifty-four places. 166 The Jews held there and in the camps were declared ‘labour prisoners’ of the Higher SS and Police
Commanders. 167 Apart from these, there still existed the so-called ‘Jewish camps’ in the various armaments factories; the forced labourers imprisoned
there, according to an agreement between HSSPF Krüger and the commander
of the military district, were subject to the Wehrmacht armaments inspec-
tion. 168 With these regulations the SS had created the crucial precondition for henceforth keeping alive only those Jews working in armaments production.
For all others, including the family members of the slave labourers, this
amounted to a death sentence.
Extermination on a European Scale, 1942
343
The Annexed Polish Territories: Upper Silesia and the Warthegau
In the Polish territory directly annexed by the Reich, in Upper Silesia and the
Warthegau, the systematic murder of the Jewish population began in 1942.
It appears important for the overall development of the Holocaust that it was in
May, the point in time when the murders in the district of Lublin were extended,
that the SS set in motion a further ‘regional final solution’ on Polish territory: on
12 May 1942 Heydrich ordered the abolition of the police border which had until
then separated the western strip of Upper Silesia (the territory with a relatively
sizeable German population) from the eastern part (predominantly inhabited by
Poles) and offered a guarantee that the Jews forcibly ‘resettled’ from west to east
would not be able to return. With this decision on Heydrich’s part it was clear that
the ‘deportation territory’ would in future no longer be required. The same day
thousands of Jews unfit for work from Sosnowitz and Bendzin as well as a number
of other places were deported to Auschwitz and murdered there. 169 On 12 August a selection of the Jews living in Sosnowitz and Bendzin began, and lasted several
days; some 11,000 people, the old and the sick and mothers with children, were
finally killed in Auschwitz, around 9,000 people were deported to the labour
camps of the Schmelt Organization . Between May and August 1942 a total of
around 38,000 Jews were deported from the ‘Eastern Strip’, about 20,000 to
Auschwitz, the rest to the Schmelt camps, in which a total of over 50,000 Jewish
slave labourers were deployed in January 1943, including several thousand Jewish
men, most of whom were taken from transports arriving from France in Kosel,
Silesia, in August, September, and October 1942. The deportations to Auschwitz
were organized by the Kattowitz (Katowice) Gestapo. It was not until October
1942 that, on the initiative of the city authorities, the Jewish residential districts in eastern Upper Silesia were turned into closed ghettos. Up until summer 1943,
however, the forced labour programme was maintained to its fullest extent. 170
In the Warthegau, where 10,000 people had been deported from the Lodz
ghetto to Chelmno in January 1942, 171 the mass murders had been continued in the first months of 1942. In February 7,025, in March another 24,687, and in
early April 2,349 people were deported to Chelmno and murdered in gas vans,
and then the deportations were at first suspended. The Security Police spread
the rumour that the resettled people had been lodged in a large camp in Kolo
(Warthbrücken). 172
At the end of April, in response to demands from the German authorities,
Chaim Rumkowski, the head of the Jewish council in Lodz, announced the
‘resettlement’ of those Jews who had been deported to Lodz in the autumn of
the previous year. The recent deportations were to include, in particular, those
who ‘didn’t work’—and that was the great majority of this group of originally
20,000 people, more than 2,000 of whom had already succumbed to the terrible
344
Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945
living conditions in the ghetto. 173 In fact, between 4 and 13 May, 10,914 of these
‘Reich Jews’ had been deported to Chelmno and murdered there. 174 The dating indicates that this mass murder should be seen in a larger context. Since 11 May
1942, Jews had been systematically murdered in Maly Trostinets after their arrival
in Minsk. The first direct deportations to the Sobibor extermination camp began
in mid-June. All of this indicates that the systematic murder of the deported
German Jews, still forbidden by Himmler in November 1941, had received the go-
ahead by the central authorities around April 1942.
In Lodz the deportations were continued in September 1942 after a lengthy
pause. The first victims were the patients of the ghetto hospitals, which were
cleared by the Jewish police on the night of 31 August/1 September on German
instructions. On 4 September, Rumkowski announced that, at the request of the
German authorities, 25,000 ghetto-dwellers under the age of 10 and over the age
of 65 as well as all the sick had been evacuated from the ghetto. To make the
action possible, an ‘exit ban’, a prohibition on all travel, was imposed from 5 to
9 September. The Jewish police now searched the ghetto systematically block by
block and arrested children, the old, and the sick. By 12 September these
people—according to the statistics of the Council of Elders they numbered
15,685—were taken to collection points and deported to Chelmno, where they
were murdered. 175
The official Ghetto Chronicle kept by the Jewish Council of Elders notes that
after the end of the action there were practically no children under 10 or old
people left in the ghetto. 176 The number of inhabitants of the ghetto was now just 90,000—more than 70,000 fewer than at the beginning of the year. 177
Auschwitz
We have already described how the SS set about extending Auschwitz concentra-
tion camp complex into a centre for systematic mass murder, independent of the
construction of the extermination camps in the context of Aktion Reinhardt.
In Auschwitz, from September 1941, thousands of prisoners, including Jewish
prisoners from Upper Silesia, had been murdered with Zyklon B. Since October 1941,
in the wake of the expansion of the camp complex, which was intended to receive
large numbers of Soviet prisoners, a new crematorium was planned, which was to
receive a considerably larger gas chamber than the ones subsequently built into the
old crematorium in Auschwitz ‘Stammlager’, the original camp. Finally, in January
1942, Himmler had ordered that Auschwitz should take large numbers of Jewish
forced labourers from the Reich, to replace the absent Soviet prisoners of war.<
br />
But the Jewish prisoners from the Reich failed to materialize. As we have seen,
from March onwards they had been deported to the district of Lublin, where those
who seemed to be ‘fit for work’ were held for forced labour in Majdanek camp.
Instead, in the spring of 1942 three groups of Jewish prisoners came to Auschwitz: the
Extermination on a European Scale, 1942
345
first mass transports of Jews to Auschwitz were made up of Slovakian Jews, of whom
four transports of young women, some 3,800 in total, arrived between 26 March and
7 April. 178 They were followed by Jewish hostages from France who had been deported ‘to the East’ in reprisal for attacks by the French Resistance. The first
transport of 1,112 persons arrived in Auschwitz on 30 March and was followed by five
more between 7 June and 18 July. 179 A third group of Jewish prisoners who came to Auschwitz were the Jews from the ghettos of annexed eastern Upper Silesia, from
Sosnowitz, Bendzin, and other places; these deportations began, as we have seen, in
mid-1942. 180
Even before these transports from Slovakia, Upper Silesia, and France reached
Auschwitz, those in charge of Auschwitz concentration camp had set about
installing additional gas chambers, one after the other, in two farmhouses that
lay outside the camp itself, as the building work on the new crematorium had not
even begun. The first farmhouse, the ‘Red house’, or Bunker I, was used for the
first time on 20 March 1942 to kill people with Zyklon B: the victims were a further
transport of Jews ‘unfit for work’ from the Schmelt camps in Upper Silesia.
Afterwards, this building was used above all to murder the Jews of Upper Silesia. 181
The second farmhouse, the ‘White house’ or Bunker II, was first used on 4 July
1942 to murder, in the same way, 628 people selected from a transport recently
arrived from Slovakia. From that day on, the selection of Jews ‘unfit for work’—
particularly children and their mothers—and their subsequent murder in the gas
chambers became standard practice in Auschwitz.
The Second Wave of Extermination in the Soviet Union
In the rear area of Army Group Centre, which essentially encompassed White