Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews

by Peter Longerich

  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

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  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.

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  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.

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  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