subjecting this group to total tyranny.
After the November pogrom the Nazi regime proceeded to declare the Jews to
be hostages menaced by ‘destruction’ (Vernichtung). Remarkably, Hitler himself,
in referring to extermination in his speech of 30 January 1939, did not speak of the
German Jews but prophesied—expressly in the instance of a ‘global war’—the
‘destruction of the Jewish race in Europe’.
However, from the perspective of the National Socialists, the idea of exter-
mination was not a tactically motivated threat but the logical consequence of the
notion that dominated the whole of National Socialist policy, that the German
people were engaged in a struggle against ‘international Jewry’ in which their
very existence was at stake. The National Socialists saw war as the chance to
realize their utopian ideas of an empire ordered along racist lines. From their
point of view, war served to legitimate the idea of compensating for the loss of
the ‘racially valuable’ by extirpating the racially ‘inferior’ in the interests of
maintaining ‘ethnic biological’ equilibrium. It was the emergency of war that
produced the opportunity for such an unparalleled break with the humanitarian
tradition.
Even during the war against Poland, in mid-September 1939, the German
leadership began seriously to address their plans for Lebensraum by developing
a gigantic resettlement programme for the newly conquered territories. This
programme involved the deportation of all Jews living in territory under German
control to a ‘Jewish reservation’ in conquered Poland. These plans were actually
set in motion with the so-called ‘Nisko Action’ in October 1939, but had to be
suspended after a short time. In fact, however, the Nazi regime kept to the plan of
a ‘Jewish reservation’ in the district of Lublin and repeated fitful attempts were
made to achieve such a mass programme through small-scale deportations.
In fact the plan for a ‘Jewish reservation’ was aimed at concentrating the Jews
from the whole of the German sphere of influence in an area which lacked
adequate living conditions, and to cause the death of these more than two million
people through undernourishment, epidemics, low birth rates, and so on, possibly
over a period of several generations. Plainly such a long-term plan contained the
potential to blackmail the Western powers that the leadership of the ‘Third Reich’
needed in order to construct a Lebensraum empire without being disturbed by
outside intervention.
424
Conclusion
The plan for a reservation was thus an initial project for the ‘final solution of the
Jewish question’, a long-term plan involving the deaths of the great majority of
Jews living under the control of the Nazi regime. The radical nature of this project
becomes fully clear when one views it within the context of the mass murders that
the Nazi regime unleashed after the start of the war: the shootings of tens of
thousands of Polish civilians (including thousands of Jews), as well as the ‘eutha-
nasia’ programme, the murder of the sick and the disabled.
Over the next two years, the ‘Jewish reservation’ project was maintained (in
modified form). After the victory over France, the regime concentrated on
Madagascar, and early in 1941, as part of the preparations for ‘Barbarossa’, a
plan was developed to deport the Jews under German rule to the territories in
the East, which the Germans thought they were about to conquer. Common to all
these plans was the prospect of the physical ‘Final Solution’, even if this was to
extend over a long period of time.
Many historians have assumed that a fundamental decision to murder the Jews
was taken sometime during the course of 1941 and that therefore one can clearly
distinguish an early phase during which ‘territorial’ solutions were conceived from
a later ‘final solution phase’. However, this view fails to perceive what was at the
core of the plans of National Socialist Judenpolitik: the ‘territorial solution’ was
also always conceived as a ‘final solution’, because in the final analysis its goal was
the annihilation of the vast majority of the Jews.
By autumn 1939, then, the point had already been reached at which those
involved in Judenpolitik began to gear themselves up for the extermination of
the European Jews. The measures taken by the regime from 1941 onwards were
merely the concrete realization of the extermination already envisaged in 1939.
There were only vague ideas of how and over what period of time this extermin-
ation was to occur in practice. The ‘destruction of the Jewish race in Europe’,
threatened by Hitler on 30 January 1939, was initially an option, the realization of
which was still dependent on certain conditions. From 1941 onwards, when the
systematic destruction of the European Jews was actually realized, the idea of what
was meant by ‘Final Solution’ was to be radicalized. General notions of annihi-
lating the Jews within the German sphere of influence over the long term were
now developed by the National Socialist leadership into a comprehensive pro-
gramme of mass murder which was essentially to be implemented even before
the end of the war. The abstract concept of ‘destruction’ (Vernichtung) or ‘Final
Solution’ used by the perpetrators allowed them to develop their plans, which
since 1939 had been geared towards the death of the European Jews, in stages
towards this systematic murder programme. However, since 1939 extermination
and ‘Final Solution’ had equated to millions of deaths.
This radicalization of the process leading to systematic mass murder occurred
in the context of the expanding war. For the National Socialists, the racial war for
Lebensraum included from the outset the prospect of exterminating what they had
Conclusion
425
defined as the Jewish enemy, particularly when the war grew into a world war and
the dream of a Lebensraum empire was thus endangered.
This link between war and extermination policy does not represent an inevit-
able automatism, and it would be wrong to imagine that a ‘decision’ to murder the
European Jews was taken around the start of the war. The link was, in fact, the
result of National Socialist policy. For the extermination process to be actually set
in motion crucial preconditions had first to exist: the ‘reservation’ had to be
definitely determined and established. So long as this had not occurred, exter-
mination remained an intention that could also under certain circumstances be
revoked.
In the summer of 1941 the extermination policy reached the second stage of its
escalation with the murder of the Soviet Jews. While tens of thousands of Jewish
men eligible for military service had been shot during the first few weeks of the
war in Russia (and earlier in the mass executions in Poland), from the end of July,
but more intensively from August, September, and October 1941, hundreds of
thousands of men, women, and children were murdered. This transition from
a terroristic modus operandi to a murderous ‘ethnic cleansing’ cannot be
adequ
ately explained by the elation of victory, nor by a change of mood provoked
by the failure of the blitzkrieg strategy in autumn/winter 1941.
In fact, in the summer of 1941, the Germans began the ‘New Order’ (Neuord-
nung) of the conquered Lebensraum, precisely as originally planned without
waiting for military victory. However, while the war continued the planned
reordering of the ‘Ostraum’ had to be restricted to purely negative measures.
The mass murder of the Soviet civilian population, that is those who stood at the
lowest level of the Nazis’ racist hierarchy, and in their distorted perception formed
the chief supports of the Bolshevik system, was from the perspective of the
National Socialist leadership an anticipation of the plans discussed before the
start of the war, according to which millions of people on Soviet territory were to
fall victim to the ‘New Order’ of the Lebensraum.
One factor that may have been crucial to the initiation of genocide in Soviet
territory in late summer 1941, which had been planned since the beginning of the
same year, was an initiative by Himmler, who wished, through his brutal treat-
ment of the Jewish civilian population, to transfer his competencies as Reichs-
kommissar for the Strengthening of the German Nation to the newly conquered
territories, as was also finally sanctioned by Hitler. By ordering in July 1941 the
inclusion of elderly men, women, and children in the campaign of extermination
through shooting, Himmler was preparing the ground for the ‘ethnic cleansing’
that was intended to be carried out by the SS and was doing so even while the war
was still going on and before the apparatus of the occupying administration could
be consolidated. It is plain that in doing this Himmler was anticipating Hitler’s
intentions; Hitler himself had done everything he could to make sure even before
the beginning of the invasion that this war would have the character of a campaign
426
Conclusion
of racist extermination, and he was fully informed about the actions of the
Einsatzgruppen.
This is not to say, however, that the gradual extension of the murders to the
general Jewish civilian population can simply be seen as the result of an order
from the Führer or an independent initiative on the part of Himmler which had
been authorized by Hitler. The crucial point is that there was from the outset a
consensus among the decision makers that the persecution of the Jews should be
further and further radicalized in the further course of the war. On the basis of this
consensus, general instructions in line with the intuition of the subordinates were
issued in certain situations; in this way wider scope was given to independent
initiatives. In the end the entire process was coordinated and standardized at the
top. The leadership at the centre and the executive organizations on the periphery
radicalized one another through a reciprocal process.
The third stage of escalation in the transition to the systematic extermination of
the Jews occurred in the autumn of 1941. It consisted of two crucial decisions: on
the one hand Hitler’s decision made in mid-September 1941 to deport the Jews
from the whole of the Reich including the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, if
possible that same year, to the incorporated Polish territories, and further east-
wards the following spring. If the first step was originally seen as being the
deportation of 60,000 Jews to the Lodz ghetto, this intention was soon modified
and extended: now 25,000 Jews and Gypsies were to be deported to the ghettos of
Riga and Minsk. We know that at this point a third wave of deportations was
already planned for the start of the following year. Between September and
November, with the marking of the German Jews, the general prohibition on
emigration imposed upon Jews throughout the whole of the area under German
control, and the withdrawal of citizenship and the remaining property of those
deported from Germany, major administrative preparations for the deportation
had also been made.
Thus, in September 1941, Hitler set in motion the plan, made early in 1941, to
deport the European Jews to the territories of the Soviet Union that were soon to
be conquered, although without waiting for the victory over the Red Army. The
fact that, although the war was not going to plan, Hitler insisted on the imple-
mentation of the final variant of the reservation plan that had been pursued since
1939—with its genocidal consequences—seems to be more significant for the
analysis of the decision-making process than any additional factors (the issue of
accommodation, repression because of the deportations of the Volga Germans,
etc.), which, from the point of view of the Nazi leadership, argued in favour of the
instigation of the deportations in autumn 1941. As with the Nisko and Madagascar
plans, the Nazi leadership clearly associated the idea of ‘hostage-taking’ with the
first deportations. The United States were to be dissuaded from entering the war
through the more or less open threat to liquidate the deported Jews, entirely in the
spirit of Hitler’s prophecy of 30 January 1939.
Conclusion
427
The decision that Hitler made in autumn 1941 gradually to deport the Jews
under German rule to the East was linked to a second momentous decision (but
one which cannot be reconstructed in detail), namely to carry out the mass
murder of the indigenous Jews in the provisional reception areas. Now areas
‘free of Jews’ were also to be created in the occupied Polish territories, as they
had been in the Soviet Union since the end of the summer. With the
prospect of sending tens of thousands of Central European Jews to the already
completely overcrowded ghettos, more radical solutions were demanded of the
local authorities.
Reichsstathalter Greiser himself had proposed that the indigenous Jewish
population in the Warthegau should be ‘reduced’ by 100,000 ‘in compensation
for’ the reception of Jews from the Reich in Lodz, that is these people were to be
killed with gas vans. Further large-scale massacres were carried out until the end
of 1941 among the local Jewish population in the other sites destined to receive
Jews from the Reich, namely the ghettos of Minsk and Riga. When Einsatzkom-
mando 2 began shooting thousands of Jews deported from the Reich immediately
after their arrival in Riga or Kovno (Kaunas), the murder of the Reich German
Jews was suspended by a direct intervention from Himmler. Thus, a distinction
was still being made between the Eastern European and Central European Jews.
In the General Government too, particularly in the district of Lublin, prepar-
ations for a mass murder of the local Jewish population began in October 1941.
Previously, the government of the General Government had been informed that
they could not expect to deport any more Jews eastwards from that territory for
the foreseeable future. In October preparations began for the construction of the
first extermination camp at Belzec, and at, the same time, with the so-called
‘Schiessbefehl’ (order to shoot on sight) the death penalty was introduced for
> leaving the ghetto. The goal of these measures was to murder the Jewish popula-
tion that were ‘unfit to work’, initially in the district of Lublin. These plans may
also have applied to the district of Galicia, which had only been part of the General
Government since 1 August and where, like the Einsatzgruppen in the other
occupied territories, the Security Police had been carrying out similar massacres
among the Jewish civilian population since October. References to the construc-
tion of an extermination camp in Lemberg (Lvov) are significant in this context.
However, the construction of an extermination camp in Belzec (and possible plans
for Lemberg) cannot be seen as specifically intended for the murder of the entire
Jewish population of the General Government. The occupying forces initially
concentrated on making preparations for those Jews who were ‘unfit for work’
in the district of Lublin, where a third wave of deportations was expected the
following spring. Thus, in autumn 1941 the murder of hundreds of thousands of
people had been planned, but not yet of millions. As far as the fate of the
remaining Polish and other European Jews was concerned, the older plan of a
mass deportation to the Soviet Union (with ultimately genocidal consequences)
428
Conclusion
had not yet been abandoned. At any rate a dynamic of mass murder had now been
set in motion, which could only have been halted by a radical change of direction
in the regime’s Judenpolitik.
In the autumn/winter of 1941 facilities for killing with gas were established not
only in Belzec (and possibly in Lemberg) as they had been in Chelmno. Further
possible locations have been identified through plans for the installation of such
facilities in Riga, and corresponding references to Mogilev (not far from Minsk).
There is also the offer that Himmler made to the Slovakian head of state on
20 October, to deport Slovakian Jews to a particularly remote area of the General
Government, possibly the basis for the construction of the second extermination
camp at Sobibor. The use of gas as a means of killing had thus initially begun in
the planned deportation zones. Parallel with this we should consider the events in
Serbia, where the Wehrmacht began systematically shooting Jewish men and
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