perpetrators.
So the pattern of ‘major actions’ running according to plan and almost entirely
smoothly, which characterized the liquidations of the Polish ghettos in 1942,
would not be repeated in the occupied Soviet territories. Just as resistance on a
large scale was only possible here because of the experiences of the first wave of
murders that happened in 1941, in Poland the experiences of 1942 resulted during
the following year in the final ‘liquidations’ of the ghettos also encountering
massive resistance in some cases. Thus, the crucial precondition for the emergence
of an armed resistance movement was always the particular concrete experience of
the German policy of extermination.
Interim Summary: The Escalation of the Extermination
Policy in Spring/Summer 1942
In describing events in Eastern Europe we have already cast our eye over the whole
of 1942, as the wave of murders that began in the spring, was intensified through-
out the rest of the year, and finally encompassed almost the whole of German-
occupied Polish and Soviet territory, had to be seen in context. In this context we
should like to return once more to the first months of 1942 and analyse the way in
which this wave of killing was set in motion and attempt to reconstruct the
decision-making process underlying these events.
For spring and summer 1942 a chain of events and developments may be
reconstructed which, seen in context, represent a crucial escalation of anti-
Semitic policy: the mass murders already under way or definitely planned in
the Soviet Union and in certain other regions (Warthegau, the districts of
Lublin and Galicia, Serbia), and the deportations that had been started or
prepared since autumn 1941 were now linked together and extended into a
Europe-wide programme of the systematic murder of all Jewish people living
in that space.
Since autumn 1941, a general rethink had begun among those involved in
Judenpolitik in a process that can no longer be fathomed in all its details: reacting
to the mass murders in Eastern Europe, the main players reached the conviction
that the ‘Final Solution’, which had originally been envisaged as the European
Jews slowly dying out in an inhospitable territory somewhere in the ‘East’, could
be at least partially carried out during the war, that it could be anticipated by
killing as many Jews as possible through a combination of inhuman living and
working conditions and direct murder actions. During the winter of 1941/2 and
Extermination on a European Scale, 1942
357
the spring of 1942 the comprehensive plan emerged, presumably in stages, to kill
all the Jews in Europe if possible during the war. In parallel with this establish-
ment of the temporal horizon, ideas crystallized about where and how this
genocide was to occur: in occupied Poland, with the aid of poison gas.
We can reconstruct three stages in the process by which the genocidal ideas
assumed concrete form: between December 1941 and January 1942 Hitler gave
clear signals that after the war had expanded into a world war Judenpolitik should
be further radicalized to include the ‘extermination’ of the Jews on a large scale.
During the Wannsee Conference, Heydrich still assumed a gigantic deportation
programme towards the occupied Eastern territitories, which could only be
realized to its full extent after the end of the war. But his address also reveals
that the leadership’s ideas of how the deportees would die had in the meantime
assumed concrete form: from now on the plan included a combination of ‘exter-
mination through work’ and mass murder of those who survived the exertions
and clearly also those who were ‘unfit for work’. Apart from this, there had already
been talk at the Wannsee Conference of taking the Polish Jews out of the planned
deportation programme and murdering them on the spot, and the murder
methods had also been discussed.
The second stage of this radicalization process can be dated to March. Now the
policy of systematic extermination that had also been introduced in Poland in
autumn 1941 was extended to the district of Lublin and to Galicia, while at the
same time the deportations, which had also begun in autumn 1941, were extended
to other territories in Central and Western Europe.
In the middle of March 1942 the murder of the majority of the Jews in the
districts of Lublin and Galicia was set in motion. Here the murder quota of 60 per
cent cited by Goebbels is particularly important. Globocnik had already begun the
corresponding preparatory work—the construction of Belzec extermination
camp—in October 1941. The mass murder of the Jews of the Warthegau had
also been initiated in October 1941, the murders in Chelmno began at the
beginning of December. In both cases the mass murders occurred in connection
with the deportations from the Reich. In the meantime, at the latest by the
beginning of March, the RSHA had established an initial plan for a third wave
of deportations for the Jews of the Reich (including the Protectorate), to occur in
early March; in the course of this a total of 55,000 people were to be deported to
the General Government, particularly the district of Lublin. This programme
began in March.
In parallel with this, in February, Germany developed a programme together
with Slovakia that was initially to cover the deportation of 20,000 Jews, but which
was extended at the end of March, at Himmler’s urging, to all the Jews living in
that country. The destinations of the deportations were the district of Lublin and
Auschwitz concentration camp. The Jewish hostages from France were also
deported to Auschwitz from March onwards.
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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945
Clearly the mass murders in the district of Lublin and the deportations from the
Reich and Slovakia to that area were linked. The old ‘reservation plan’ had been
revived, according to which ‘room was made’ in the ghettos of the district through
mass murders. A decision to link deportations and mass murder in this way must
at any rate have been made before the beginning of March.
From Heydrich’s statements during his visit to Tuka in early April we know
that the deportations from the Reich and Slovakia were already part of an overall
plan, presumably developed in March, for the deportation of around 500,000
people from Central and Western Europe, for which, however, no concrete time
frame can be demonstrated at this point.
Even more serious, however, is the third stage of this process of radicalization,
which was prepared at the end of April and came into full effect in May and June.
Only now were the regional murders linked into a programme of systematic
murder of the European Jews covering the whole of Europe.
In early May the deportations from the district of Lublin were expanded with
the systematic clearance of the counties (Kreise). At the end of May, with the
deportations from the district of Krakau (Gracow), there began the extension of
the murders to the other territories within the General Government, until in July
and August the di
stricts of Warsaw and Radom were also included. The signifi-
cant preparatory measures for this extension of the murders to the whole of the
General Government included the extension of Krüger’s powers in May/early
June and the start of the construction of Treblinka in May or June at the latest. So
the corresponding decisions must have been made before May. At about the same
time the decision must have been made to carry out a mass murder among the
Jews of annexed Upper Silesia, to which tens of thousands of people fell victim
between May and August. However, because of the transport moratorium, the
mass murder of the Jews of the General Government could not begin to its full
extent until July. Finally, the transport moratorium had a radicalizing effect on the
development of mass murder. It accelerated the deportations from the western
territories and the planners of the mass murder entered something like a phase of
consolidation after which the whole programme was resumed with much greater
impetus in July.
At around the same time as this fundamental decision concerning the Jews in the
General Government, at least before mid-May, a further momentous decision must
have been made: the deportations of Jews from Central Europe were increased
beyond the quota cited in March, and most or all of these people were murdered
when the transports arrived at their destinations. This was the fate suffered by the
Jews arriving from the Reich to Minsk from mid-May onwards, and the deportees
from Slovakia from the beginning of June in Sobibor. And the great majority of
those Jews who had been deported to Lodz from the Reich in autumn 1941 were
now, in the first half of May, deported to Chelmno in a series of transports and
murdered there.
Extermination on a European Scale, 1942
359
In parallel with these events, the mass murder of the Soviet Jews which had
begun in the summer of 1941 was given a fresh impulse in May 1942: now the
murders began on a large scale again, before leading in the summer to the total
extermination of the indigenous Jewish population.
The decision-making process underlying the systematic genocide remains
largely obscure and must be reconstructed from the course of events. The entries
in Himmler’s office diary for late April provide an initial clue: Himmler met
Heydrich a total of seven times over only eight days between late April and early
May 1942 in three different places (Berlin, Munich, and Prague). This unusually
intensive series of discussions is framed by two lengthy meetings that Himmler
had with Hitler on 23 April and 3 May 1942 in the Führer’s headquarters. 257 The attempt on Heydrich’s life and his subsequent death (27 May and 4 June) must
have had a further radicalizing effect on this decision-making process; we need
only recall Himmler’s announcement at Heydrich’s funeral on 4 June that he
would end the Jewish ‘migration’ within a year.
At the beginning of June the RSHA established a concrete deportation
programme for the West which was to be realized within three months from
mid-July. With this Western programme the plans which first became apparent
in early April were realized and adapted to the conditions introduced by the
transport moratorium in the East in June/July. But, as early as June 1942
Himmler demanded the speedy and complete deportation of all the Jews in
France.
The people in these transports from the West, the Slovakian Jews, who from
early July onwards were transported to Auschwitz in the wake of the transport
moratorium and those Jews from the Reich who, starting with the first transport
from Vienna on 17 July, arrived in Auschwitz, met with the same fate: from 4 July
onwards most of them were, in so far as they were ‘unfit for work’, murdered in
the two hastily erected makeshift gas chambers, Bunkers I and II.
In the middle of July, after the end of the transport moratorium, the deport-
ation and murder programme had been set fully in motion. Now, during a visit to
Globocnik on 19 July, Himmler established a concrete timetable for the major part
of this programme, the extermination of the Jews of the General Government.
This was a day after he had visited Auschwitz and three days after he had, at the
Führer’s headquarters, demanded increased transport opportunities from the
Reich railways. By the end of the year, the Jews of the General Government
would have been murdered, apart from a few people who were fit for work and
were to be placed under the control of the SS.
At about the same time, the decision must have been made to send almost all
further transports from the Reich directly to the extermination camps and no
longer to ghettos.
Finally, as will be outlined in the next section, already in the summer of 1942 the
Germans had introduced the crucial steps to extend the deportation programme
360
Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945
beyond Eastern Europe. While the occupation authorities in Western Europe set
about undertaking deportations beyond the quota of 125,000 people for 1942
decided in June, in July the German government approached its allies, Romania,
Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, and Finland, to secure the deportation of the Jews
living in those countries.
Deportations from the Occupied Western Territories
in the Second Half of 1942
Continuation of the Deportations from France
After six deportation trains carrying some 6,000 Jews had already set off from
France to Auschwitz between March and early July 1942, and with the SS having
established plans for the deportation of a total of 125,000 people from France,
Belgium, and the Netherlands in June, between 19 July and 7 August a further ten
transports carrying a total of around 10,000 people set off for Auschwitz. These
deportees, ‘stateless Jews’, had been arrested in Paris during a major raid on 16 and
17 July. 258 The age limit for the deportation had now been raised to 55 for women and 60 for men. The inmates of these transports were now, as the Jews from
Slovakia had been, subjected to a selection in Auschwitz; after that those people
deemed ‘unfit for work’ were murdered in the gas chambers immediately upon
their arrival.
In August, as agreed with the Vichy government in July, the deportations of the
stateless Jews from the unoccupied zone began (Transports 17–19). After Himmler
had agreed to a suggestion from the French Prime Minister, Pierre Laval, in early
July that children under the age of 16 should also be included in the deportations,
between 17 and 26 August over 2,000 children whose parents had already been
taken to Auschwitz in the previous transports were also deported with the
following five transports. Transports 24–39 (their departure dates were between
26 August and 30 September 1942) were stopped at Kosel in Silesia, where men
who were fit for work had to leave the trains to be deployed as forced labourers
with the ‘Schmelt Organization’. 259
At a meeting held in his office on 28 August Eichmann demanded that all
stateless Jews be removed from France by the end of October 1942 (after that the
deportations had to be
postponed until February); along with the 25,000 people
deported already that meant a further 50,000 people. ‘The end of June ’43’,
Eichmann continued, was envisaged as a ‘final deadline for the evacuation of
the remaining foreign Jews’. 260
In order to guarantee this quota of deportations, at the end of August more than
6,500 stateless Jews had been arrested in the unoccupied zone, who were deported
during the following months, along with around 3,000 Jews of foreign origin who
Extermination on a European Scale, 1942
361
had been kept in internment camps in the south of France for a long time. These
included a large number of children who had been separated from their
mothers. 261 As these deportations met with strong hostility from the French population and led to the open opposition of the Church, at the beginning of
September 1942 the Vichy government made it clear to the Germans that further
arrests and deportations could no longer be carried out in the unoccupied zone.
Since HSSPF Oberg, in view of the general political situation in France, and with
regard for President Laval’s domestic prestige, had secured a decision from
Himmler that no French citizens were to be deported from the occupied zone
for the time being, 262 the occupation authorities now arrested foreign Jews in the occupied zone (Greeks and Romanians above all), who were deported in
November in four further transports. After this came the expected halt in deport-
ations until February 1943. The total figure of deportees from France for 1942 was
approximately 42,000.263
Extension of the Deportations to the Netherlands and Belgium
Since the summer of 1940 the occupation administration had begun to introduce
the anti-Jewish measures customary in German-occupied territory into the
Netherlands as well: a definition of Jews on the model of the Nuremberg Laws
was introduced; Jewish officials were dismissed from public service, a Jewish
council (Joodse Rat) responsible for the execution of German orders was formed,
Jewish property was expropriated. 264 In March 1941 the German Security Police established the Central Office for Jewish emigration, which dealt at first with
those Jews living in the Netherlands. In May 1942 Jews were ordered to wear the
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