Gypsies in October. In November the military administration in France also
began deliberately to direct their retaliatory measures against Jews, who were to
be transported to the East as hostages. In October, November, and December
threatening statements by National Socialists also accumulated concerning the
deadly fate that awaited the Jews.
As confusing as the overall picture may seem at first sight, it does become clear
that, within the space of a few weeks in autumn 1941, German organizations in
various occupied territories began to react with remarkable similarity to the new
situation in Judenpolitik created by Hitler’s September decision to deport the
German and Czech Jews, by organizing mass shootings (Galicia, Serbia), deploy-
ing gas vans (Warthegau) or preparing the construction of extermination camps
(district of Lublin, Auschwitz, Riga, possibly Mogilev-Belarus).
If we see these activities in context, it becomes irrefutably clear that the German
power holders on the ‘periphery’ were always acting in the context of an overall
policy guided by the ‘centre’, meaning Hitler and the SS leadership. The centre was
always in a position to prevent an escalation of a policy which it found undesir-
able, as is demonstrated for example by Himmler putting a halt to the murders of
Reich German Jews in the Ostland in late November 1941.
However, the centre was only able to guide this process and set it in motion
because it knew that impulses issuing from the centre were picked up with great
independent initiative by the authorities in the ‘periphery’. Just as the extension of
the shootings to women and children in the Soviet Union from the summer of
1941 onwards was not simply ordered, the extension of the mass murders to
particular regions of occupied Europe in autumn 1941 also required a very
complicated interaction between the centre and the executive organizations,
involving orders and guidelines from the centre, as well as independent initiatives
and intuition on the part of the regional power holders, which were finally
channelled and coordinated by the centre, albeit at a much higher level of
radicalization.
Conclusion
429
The Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942 provides an important insight into
the RSHA’s policy of consolidating the various approaches for an extension of the
murders and thereby designing a comprehensive programme for the impending
‘Final Solution’. While, on the one hand, the Germans continued to adhere to the
old programme of deporting all Jews to the occupied Eastern territories after the
end of the war, they were already engaging with the new prospect of implementing
ever larger stages of the ‘Final Solution’ even during the war, although the murder
method was not yet entirely clear. The idea of a gigantic forced labour programme
developed by Heydrich, with deadly consequences for those affected, may well in
fact have reflected ideas actually held within the RSHA.
From the autumn of 1941 the SS had also developed the perfidious system of
‘extermination through work’. Within this system, not only were many people
worked to death in a very short time, but it also meant that a hurdle had been
erected that those people who were no longer fit for work, or who were not capable
of being deployed, were unable to surmount. The perfidious nature of the system
of ‘extermination through work’ was also particularly apparent where there were
only a few forced labour projects for Jews, or none at all, as it provided a pretext
for marking out those Jews who were ‘non-deployable’ as ‘superfluous’. Jewish
‘work deployment’ formed an important complementary element in the early
phase of the ‘Final Solution’.
In the first months of 1942, the deportations were extended in accordance with
the declarations of intent made at the Wannsee Conference. In March 1942
Eichmann announced a third wave of deportations involving a total of 55,000
people from the territory of the ‘Greater German Reich’. This third wave actually
began on 20 March 1942 and lasted until the end of June. Its destination was
ghettos in the district of Lublin, the original ‘Jewish reservation’.
Now, at the beginning of March 1942, a decision must again have been made to
practice mass murder in the reception zone, in the district of Lublin. This decision
also applied to the adjacent district of Galicia. In the eyes of the Nazi leadership
Galicia represented something like an advance base for the planned New Order of
Lebensraum in the East and, since the autumn of the previous year, had been
already the scene of large-scale mass shootings.
The statement in Goebbels’s diaries that the intention was to murder 60 per
cent of the Jews living in the two districts is particularly important here. The
decision to implement mass murder in the two districts, made early in March, had
been prepared since October 1941 by SSPF Globocnik, who was responsible for
this mass murder in both districts. The measures taken in the district of Lublin
demonstrate important parallels with the mass murder of the Jews in the Warthe-
gau, which was also introduced in autumn 1941, although unlike Greiser Globoc-
nik used stationary gas chambers. As in the Warthegau, and as in Riga and Minsk,
the mass murder of the indigenous Jews in the district of Lublin was directly
linked to the deportations from the Reich.
430
Conclusion
With the start of the third wave of deportations to the district of Lublin and the
completion of the first extermination camp in the General Government the option
of a later resettlement to the East had been definitively abandoned. Most of the
people deported to the district of Lublin died miserably in the ghettos after a short
time, or were also deported to extermination camps. However the façade of a
programme of resettlement and work deployment was maintained. During this
third wave of deportations, which occurred between March and June, the RSHA
prepared a Europe-wide deportation programme conceived on a much larger
scale.
Between 25 March 1942 and the end of June, 50,000 Jews were deported from
Slovakia to Auschwitz concentration camp on the basis of the agreements with the
Slovakian government. The deportation of hostages from France to Auschwitz
also began in March 1942.
It is clear from a remark by Heydrich to Tuka on 10 April that these first
deportations from territories outside the ‘Greater German Reich’ were already
part of a Europe-wide programme. According to this, it was planned initially to
deport to the East half a million Jews from Slovakia, the Reich, the Protectorate,
The Netherlands, Belgium, and France.
This introduced the fourth stage of escalation in the transition to the ‘Final
Solution’. Now, in spring 1942, the previous scheme for the deportation of Central
European Jews to particular areas in which the indigenous Jews had first been
murdered was abandoned. In late April/early May the decision must evidently
have been made henceforth to murder Jews indiscriminately.
It can be assumed that in late April or May the Nazi regime made t
he decision
to extend the mass murder of the Jews, which was already in progress in the
districts of Lublin and Galicia, to the whole of the General Government. At the
same time, the decision must have been made to implement a mass murder
among the Jews of annexed Upper Silesia. The systematic mass murder of the
Jews in the General Government began in June, but was then interrupted for a few
weeks because of the transport ban. The transport ban, introduced because of the
offensive in the East, finally had a radicalizing effect on the extermination policy: it
accelerated the deportations from the Western territories, and, during this period,
the planners of the mass murder clearly had an opportunity to rethink and
consolidate their ideas so that the overall programme could resume in July with
much more devastating effect. It was during this phase that the SS took over
Jewish forced labour in the General Government and thus maintained control
over those prisoners who were ‘fit for work’ and so initially excluded from
extermination.
At around the same time as this fundamental decision regarding the Jews in the
General Government, at any rate before mid-May, significant decisions must have
been made as a result of which the operation of the extermination machinery was
further extended. On the one hand, it was decided that the deportations from the
Conclusion
431
territory of the ‘Greater German Reich’ should be intensified beyond the quota set
in March, and on the other the regime now set about murdering either all or
almost all of the Jews deported from Central Europe when the transports arrived
at their destinations in Eastern Europe. This happened to Jews deported from the
Reich in Minsk from mid-May, and from early June in Sobibor to the Jews
deported from Slovakia.
It can be assumed that on 17 April 1942 Himmler had already ordered the
murder of over 10,000 Central European Jews still living in the Lodz ghetto, who
had been deported there in October 1941 and survived the inhuman conditions in
the ghetto.
With these decisions, probably made in the second half of April or early May,
which came into effect in May/June, the Nazi regime definitively abandoned the
idea of a ‘reservation’ in the eastern area of the General Government or
the occupied Eastern territories which had increasingly become a fiction given
the mass murder that was already under way. The link between this renewed
escalation of the extermination policy and military developments, in other words
the preparations for the summer offensive in the East, is just as apparent as the
fact that, in view of the mass recruitment of workers from the occupied Soviet
Union, in the spring of 1942 the Nazis believed they would soon be able to do
without Jewish forced labourers.
At the beginning of June a concrete programme of deportations was established
for the West, which according to the plan was to be realized within three months
beginning in mid-July. This meant that the ‘European’ plans first discernible in
early April were to be continued and adapted to the conditions set by the transport
ban in June/July. In June 1942, however, Himmler went a step further and called
for the rapid and complete deportation of all Jews from France.
The transports from Western Europe and—because of the transport ban—also
those from Slovakia were now directed to Auschwitz. There, from early June, the
great majority of deportees (as before in Minsk and Sobibor) fell victim to the new
and more radical variation of the extermination policy: immediately after their
arrival they were killed with poison gas, after a ‘selection’ had taken place on the
railway ramp.
In May 1942 the mass murder of the Soviet Jews, which had begun in the
summer of 1941, received a new impulse: the murders now resumed on a large
scale, before ending in the summer of 1942 in the complete extermination of the
indigenous Jewish population.
After the lifting of the transport ban in July 1942, the deportation and murder
programme was fully operational, and we know that Himmler insisted on con-
vincing himself of the functioning of the extermination programme by paying an
inspection visit. At the end of that inspection, on 19 July he issued the order that
the ‘resettlement’ of the entire Jewish population of the General Government was
to finish at the end of 1942.
432
Conclusion
During the summer of 1942 the first preparations were made to organize larger
numbers of deportations from the West and the South-East of those parts of
Europe under the control of the ‘Third Reich’.
This acceleration and radicalization of the extermination programme in spring
and summer 1942 clearly reflected the decision of the Nazi leadership essentially to
implement the intended ‘Final Solution’ during the war. After the USA entered the
war the ‘Third Reich’ faced the necessity of waging a long-term war on several
fronts, and this new situation also necessarily altered the status of the systematic
mass murder of the Jews. With the extension of this last and most radical stage of
Judenpolitik to all the territories under German control, the entire German sphere
of influence was subjected to the hegemony of racism. The occupied and allied
states were drawn into the ‘New Order policy’ and, for better or worse bound to
the German leadership by their participation in an unparalleled crime. The
extermination policy thus came to underpin the German policy of occupation
and alliance. This central function of the mass murder of the Jews for the
maintenance of German rule on the continent also serves to explain the great
efforts made by the Nazi leadership to involve more and more countries in the
extermination programme by the end of the war.
During the second half of the war Judenpolitik—along with efforts to provide
political military and police security for the territory under German rule, and
alongside the issues of economic and food policy—became a major axis of
German occupation and alliance policy. The more the war advanced, the greater
the significance that the systematic murder of the Jews assumed, from the point of
view of the National Socialist leadership, for the cohesion of the German power
block. Because the executive organizations of the mass murders—whether they
were German occupying administrations, local auxiliaries, governments willing to
collaborate, or allies—were made henchmen and accomplices of the extermin-
ation policy, and bound to the engine of that policy, the leadership of Nazi
Germany. The altered and more important role given to Judenpolitik provides a
significant explanation for the fact that the murder of millions in the second half
of the war was not only continued but even extended.
During the war something that we have already been able to observe in
Germany during the 1930s was repeated on a European scale. Just as it had been
impossible to implement a racist policy in a ‘positive’ way within the German
Reich, during the war the Nazi regime was in no position to introduce its planned
racist ‘reorganiz
ation’ of Europe through constructive measures. All the measures
taken in this direction either failed pitifully or laid bare the absurdity of National
Socialist ideas of race.
If the National Socialists did not wish to abandon their aspiration to start the
racist reorganization of the European continent even during the war, they were
obliged to undertake concrete measures in anticipation of their racist utopia in a
negative way. The Entjudung of the German sphere of influence—because of the
Conclusion
433
inconsistency and lack of feasibility of a ‘positive’ racial policy—became the
substitute for the unrealizable racial ‘New Order’.
There was an additional effect that we have also been able to observe since 1933
with regard to Judenpolitik in Germany: the further radicalization of the persecu-
tion reinforced the power of the SS and the radical Party forces within the
occupying administrations and finally led to an overall gain in importance for
these forces within the Nazi system of rule. The total implementation of the
Judenpolitik within the entire German territory was thus tantamount to the
definitive realization of National Socialism’s total claim to power. However,
from the perspective of the National Socialists, Judenpolitik was far more than a
mere instrument for the extension of their power: they saw its radical implemen-
tation as a matter of their own survival.
Even though all the major decisions concerning the National Socialist Europe-
wide ‘Final Solution’ programme had been made by mid-1942, in the time
remaining until the end of the war it turned out that the implementation of the
mass murders, because of the central role occupied by the Judenpolitik within
Germany’s occupation and alliance policy, made great additional demands on the
Nazi leadership. Judenpolitik was not a programme that ran automatically, but a
series of systematically organized mass murders that could only be implemented if
the National Socialist regime created the appropriate preconditions.
It is possible to identify three further periods during the second half of the war
in which the Nazi regime further escalated its Judenpolitik: the phase between the
Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews Page 77
