Hitler's Hangman (40 page)

combination of forced expulsion into the Soviet-occupied zone and the

resettlement of Jews within a specially established district, possibly in

Galicia. The remaining ‘Polish Jews’ living in Germany, including those

with German citizenship, were also to be expelled eastwards as quickly as

possible. Immediately after this meeting, the Security Police were ordered

to implement this policy by arresting and confiscating the property of all

male Polish Jews still living in Germany. These orders noted that ‘in as far

as it is possible, detained Jews who formerly held Polish citizenship will

be at some point pushed into the non-occupied regions of Poland’.44

More concrete and far-reaching proposals emerged over the following

two weeks. In a meeting with his senior staff on 14 September, Heydrich

reported that Hitler was currently considering SS proposals regarding ‘the

Jewish problem in Poland’.45 Central to these proposals remained

Heydrich’s plan for the establishment of a reservation in Poland for all the

Jews under German control, an idea that was further discussed by

Heydrich and Göring two days later.46 On 20 September, during a

meeting with Himmler, Heydrich, and the Gauleiter of Danzig, Albert

Forster, Hitler approved the proposals.47 The following day, Heydrich was

consequently able to report to his senior officers that the Führer had made

a decision on the issue. Polish Jews were to be concentrated in urban

ghettos, facilitating their future deportation to a yet unknown destination,

while an unspecified number were to be deported immediately across the

new German–Soviet demarcation line into Soviet-occupied Eastern

Poland. Once these immediate aims had been achieved, Heydrich hoped

to commence the deportation of Germany’s Jews and Gypsies into

Poland, a process he believed could be achieved within one year.48

Heydrich’s meeting with the
Einsatzgruppen
leaders on 21 September

marked the starting point of more systematic Nazi anti-Jewish policies in

Poland, policies that differed from the random kil ings of the previous

weeks of the war. Heydrich’s idea of concentrating Jews in ghettos in larger

cities for the purpose of subsequent deportation was to become a crucial

E x P E R I M E N T S W I T H M A S S M U R D E R

155

component of Nazi anti-Jewish policy. Yet he never gave much thought to

how Jewish life in the envisaged urban ghettos was to be organized. He

noted that the ‘concentrations of Jews in the cities for general reasons of

security wil probably bring about orders forbidding Jews from entering

certain quarters of the cities altogether, and that – in view of economic

necessity – they cannot for instance leave the ghetto, they cannot go out

after designated hours, etc’. But these were suggestions, not explicit orders.

‘Obviously the tasks at hand cannot be laid out in detail from here,’ he

conceded in a statement that would hold true not only for ghettoization

but also for many other future measures of Nazi anti-Jewish policy.49

Heydrich’s lack of interest in the implementation details of this policy

partly stemmed from the fact that ghettoization was never intended to be

a permanent solution. It was merely a precondition to facilitate the future

deportations of Jews to an as yet undetermined territory on the furthest

extremity of the German sphere of influence. At the same time, Heydrich

did not care enough for the victims of the deportations to be encumbered

by the ‘petty details’ of ghettoization. He preferred to think in grand terms

and to leave the implementation of policies to his eager underlings or the

local authorities.

On the same day, in an attempt to document the SS’s active implemen-

tation of Hitler’s anti-Jewish visions, Heydrich sent a courier letter

expanding on the meeting’s most important decisions to all task-force

commanders as well as to several central agencies of the Third Reich,

including Göring’s Office of the Four-Year Plan, the Ministry of the

Interior, the Army High Command and the designated heads of the civil

administration in occupied Poland. In his letter, Heydrich clearly distin-

guished between ‘short-term measures’, notably the concentration of

Polish Jews, and the ‘long-term goal’: the deportation and expulsion of all

Jews in the region. Short-term measures meant that the Sipo would group

together Jews into ghettos in the ‘fewest possible numbers of towns’ along

main railway lines in order to facilitate future deportations. For the time

being, each community was to set up ‘councils of Jewish Elders’ composed

of twenty-four men in each community, who were to be held ‘fully respon-

sible’ for the execution of German orders. All measures were to be carried

out in close agreement with the army and local German authorities. The

‘final goal’ was to be kept ‘strictly secret’.50

Although Heydrich’s letter did not specify what this ‘final aim’ might

be, he made clear to his closest associates that he was planning the depor-

tation of all Jews from the Greater German Reich into a Jewish reserva-

tion and, eventually, their expulsion into Eastern Poland.51 Danzig-West

Prussia, Posen (Poznań) and East Upper Silesia were to be ‘cleared of Jews’

as soon as possible, while in the rest of occupied Poland, not yet needed

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

for German settlement, ‘cruder’ measures would suffice. To be excluded

from these orders was the area east of Kraków, an area which Heydrich at

this point believed to be the location for the future Jewish reservation.52

The hastily drafted orders of September 1939 il ustrate both continuities

and new departures in Heydrich’s thinking about the Jewish problem. On

the one hand, emigration from Germany and deportation from its newly

occupied territories, not systematic mass murder, remained the overal policy

line. On the other hand, under the impact of war, Heydrich was increasingly

prepared to tolerate, and even encourage, the murder of individual Polish

Jews if it served to frighten or terrorize others into flight across the German–

Soviet demarcation line. But it quickly became clear that piecemeal expul-

sions were no longer adequate to deal with the huge numbers of Polish Jews

with which Heydrich was confronted. By late September 1939, the ‘final aim’

of SS anti-Jewish policy entailed a combination of ghettoization and depor-

tations into a future ‘Jewish state under German administration’.53

As the implementation of this goal was largely dependent on factors

beyond Heydrich’s control – from foreign policy considerations to the

extensive and jealously guarded powers given by Hitler to the new civilian

administrations in Poland – the following months entailed countless

setbacks and adjustments of SS plans to new realities. If, for example,

Heydrich had still envisaged the area east of Kraków as the future Jewish

reservation on 22 September, his plans had to be modified following

German–Soviet negotiations about the future borders between both

states. When on 25 September Stalin offered to transfer control over

the area around the city of Lublin (then east of the German–Soviet

demarcation line) to Germany in exchange for Soviet control over

Lithuania, he opened up the prospect of creating a Jewish reservation on

Germany’s new border with the Soviet Union. Moreover, it was agreed

that ethnic Germans in the Soviet sphere would be repatriated to German

territory.54

On 29 September, only one day after the formal ratification of the

German–Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty, Heydrich explained to

his closest subordinates in Berlin that plans for a Jewish district in Galicia

had been abandoned in favour of a new idea: the establishment of a Reich

Ghetto in the Lublin district. The Reich Ghetto was to become the new

home for ‘undesirable’ Poles and ‘all political and Jewish elements’.55

Heydrich’s revised plan constituted an immediate translation of Hitler’s

wishes, the Führer having explained that same day to the head of the Nazi

Party’s Foreign Policy Office, Alfred Rosenberg, that the newly conquered

territories should be divided into three zones: the Jews were to be settled

along with other ‘unreliable elements’ between the rivers Vistula and Bug

on the new German–Soviet demarcation line, with an Eastern Wall on

E x P E R I M E N T S W I T H M A S S M U R D E R

157

the Vistula ‘protecting’ the areas further west. In Western Poland, along

the former German–Polish border, he wished to establish a broad area of

German colonization and settlement. An as yet undefined Polish state in

the territory in between was to become the General Government.56

Although authorized by Hitler, the deportation and settlement plans

remained difficult to implement as long as the army was the sole executive

authority in the occupied territories, and as long as Brauchitsch objected

to a swift removal of the Jews ‘for economic reasons’. In reality, Heydrich’s

Einsatzgruppen
tended to ignore the army leadership’s objections, but

army intervention often meant that they could not carry out his orders as

quickly as they would have liked.57 Thousands of Polish Jews were none-

theless forcibly expelled over the San river into Soviet-occupied territory

before the end of the military administration, often with the active

support of local army commanders. The deportations ended only in

November, after repeated complaints from the Soviet authorities, who

now made the emigration of ethnic German settlers dependent on the end

of Jewish deportations into their territory.58

On 30 September parallel talks were held between Himmler and

Brauchitsch, on the one hand, and Heydrich and the army’s Chief of Staff,

Franz Halder, on the other. Both Halder and Brauchitsch complained

about continuous disruptions caused by the rapid deportation of Polish

Jews into cities.59 Heydrich bowed to army pressure and reiterated his

orders of 21 September in another letter to his
Einsatzgruppen
commanders:

all measures were to be taken in closest co-operation with the local mili-

tary authorities. The decision over the timing and the intensity of the

deportation and concentration of Jews still remained in the hands of the

Einsatzgruppen
commanders, but they had to be ‘unobtrusive’.60

Although these concessions merely affected the time-frame of the

planned ethnic reordering of Poland and not the policies as such, Heydrich

was deeply dissatisfied. On 3 October, he spoke to his
Einsatzgruppen

commanders of the ‘old army–SD problem’ which had ‘re-emerged in all

its seriousness’.61 Three days later, a more important issue arose. On

6 October, Heydrich’s apparatus received orders from Hitler that the first

major wave of deportations – the expulsion of the Jews of Kattowitz

(Katowice) in East Upper Silesia – should begin immediately. That same

day, Adolf Eichmann, then Director of the Central Office for Jewish

Emigration in Prague, was ordered to prepare the eastward expulsion of

up to 80,000 Jews from East Upper Silesia over the Vistula river. Jews

from nearby Moravia-Ostrava, a town in the eastern corner of the

Protectorate, were to be included in the deportations.62

The deportation of the Jews of East Upper Silesia was intended only as

a trial run for a much larger deportation scheme. In a conversation with a

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

col eague in Vienna on 7 October, and again two days later during a

meeting with the Silesian Gauleiter, Josef Wagner, Eichmann reported that

Hitler had a made a decision in principle to deport 300,000 Jews from the

Old Reich and Austria. Eichmann had been ordered, or so he told Wagner,

to prepare a report for Heydrich on the first experimental deportations

from Silesia. On the basis of that report Hitler would then issue a definitive

order for a large-scale ‘general removal’ of the Jews from the Reich.63

Before this massive deportation plan could be implemented, Eichmann

had to find a suitable location for his ‘transit camp’. On 12 October, he

and the commander of the Security Police in the Protectorate, Walter

Stahlecker, drove eastwards from Warsaw in search of an appropriate

location. Three days later, Eichmann reported back to Berlin that they had

found it on the western border of the Lublin district, around the little

town of Nisko on the River San.64

On 17 October the first transport with nearly 1,000 Jews left Moravia-

Ostrava for Nisko. Two days later the first train from Vienna arrived

carrying 912 Austrian Jews, followed by a second transport from the

former Austrian capital with 672 deportees. Two further trainloads of