Hitler's Hangman (64 page)

he ordered that their identification cards be marked with a ‘Z’ for
Zigeuner
,

the German word for ‘Gypsy’. In total, 6,500 people in the Protectorate

fel into this category. At least 3,000 of them were murdered in the Gypsy

camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and a further 533 died in special camps

in Lety and Hodonín in the Protectorate.180 Yet Heydrich’s energetic

drive for the total extermination of the Protectorate’s Gypsies was the

exception rather than the rule in Nazi-occupied Europe. Right up to

the end of the war, it remained uncertain whether al Gypsies within the

German sphere of influence would be murdered. In the summer of 1942,

for example, Himmler gave an explicit order that in the case of Gypsies

with permanent homes in the General Government ‘police intervention’

was unnecessary.181

The accelerated speed of the implementation of Nazi anti-Gypsy and

anti-Jewish policies was largely due to Heydrich’s own activism, spurred

on by Hitler’s decision, in mid-September 1941, ‘to make the Old Reich

as well as the Protectorate, from east to west, as Jew-free as soon as

possible’. However, Hitler insisted that the progress of deportations be

dependent on the further development of the military situation.182

Heydrich nonetheless hoped to be able to resettle the Jews from the Old

Reich and the Protectorate temporarily in the former Polish territories,

R E I C H P R OT E C TO R

259

particularly in the Łódź ghetto, and then more permanently further east

as soon as the military situation allowed them to do so.183

In view of the hopeless overcrowding of the ghetto and strong protests

from the local German authorities, only 20,000 Jews and 5,000 Gypsies

from the Protectorate, Berlin and Vienna were actually deported to Łódź

in the second half of October. During the following three months, 30,000

more Jews were deported to Minsk and Riga. What happened to them

was extremely variable. Those sent to Łódź were interned in the ghetto

where living conditions were appalling, but inmates were not immediately

murdered. The Jews dispatched to Riga, on the other hand, arrived before

the ghetto construction was completed. The five transports were therefore

sent on to Kaunas in Lithuania where all of the deportees were murdered

on arrival in the infamous Fort IX.184

At a meeting of the Protectorate’s leading SS representatives on

10 October 1941, further measures for the solution of the Jewish question

were discussed. Under Heydrich’s chairmanship and in the presence of his

chief adviser on Jewish matters, Eichmann, the meeting established that

roughly 88,000 Jews were still living in the Protectorate, roughly half of

them in Prague. At this stage Heydrich still thought that he could evac-

uate 50,000 of the Protectorate’s most ‘burdensome’ Jews – those least

capable of work – to Riga and Minsk. He further believed that Arthur

Nebe and Otto Rasch, the heads of two of the four
Einsatzgruppen
oper-

ating in occupied Soviet territory, could concentrate some of the deported

Jews ‘in the camps for Communist prisoners in the operational area’.

For Jews not on the first deportation lists, Heydrich planned to create

separate ghettos for those able to work and those dependent on relief

(
Versorgungslager
). He clearly anticipated very low survival rates, envis-

aging that the remaining Jewish communities would suffer high mortality

rates even before they eventually boarded the trains to the East.185

One week later, on 17 October, Heydrich first introduced the idea of

converting the garrison town of Theresienstadt into a temporary collection

point and transit camp for deported Jews, demanding that ‘under no

circumstances should even the smallest detail’ of this plan become known

to the general public.186 The barracks of the town would be evacuated and

its civilian population resettled. Heydrich confidently expected that the

evacuation of the Jews from the Protectorate to Theresienstadt would

happen quickly. Every day, two or three trains would depart for the

camp each carrying 1,000 Jewish deportees. Heydrich assumed that

Theresienstadt would be able ‘comfortably’ to accommodate 50,000 to

60,000 Jews, but by the end of the year only 7,350 persons were ‘resettled’

in Theresienstadt. Aside from the Jews who had been deported to Łódź,

only a single transport – from Brünn to Minsk – could be dispatched.187

260

HITLER’S HANGMAN

Before the first Jewish deportees arrived in Theresienstadt on 24 November,

another idea regarding the future function of this ghetto had begun to take

shape in Heydrich’s mind. As Goebbels noted on 18 November 1941,

fol owing a meeting with him in Berlin, the Reich Protector planned to

establish Theresienstadt as an ‘old-age ghetto’ for German Jews whose depor-

tation continued to pose ‘unforeseen difficulties’.188

The Wannsee Conference of January 1942 confirmed this role for

Theresienstadt. German and Austrian Jews aged over sixty-five years,

Jewish war invalids and decorated Jewish veterans from the First World

War would not be ‘evacuated’ to the East but rather ‘transferred’ to the

old-age ghetto in Theresienstadt. This solution would solve the foreseeable

problem of interventions and objections from within the German popula-

tion. Furthermore, the establishment of an old-age ghetto would deceive

the inmates of Theresienstadt about their future fate. Theresienstadt was

still intended only as a transit camp from which prisoners would be

deported to the East in order to murder them or use them as forced

labour. Indeed, the first transport eastward from Theresienstadt had left

on 9 January 1942. Of the nearly 87,000 Theresienstadt inmates deported

to the East, roughly 84,000 died before the end of the war.189

Shortly after the beginning of deportations from Theresienstadt, the

Nazis’ extermination policy against the Jews escalated further. Up to this

point, systematic and indiscriminate mass murders of Jews had been

restricted to certain geographical areas, particularly to Serbia and the

territories of the Soviet Union, where, by the end of 1941, between

500,000 and 800,000 Jews of all ages and both sexes had been murdered

by the Germans and their local helpers.190

In the spring of 1942, the pan-European implementation of the

Holocaust began to take shape. Heydrich and Himmler are likely to have

sought Hitler’s authorization for a ‘third wave’ of deportations from the

Reich into the Lublin district during their meeting with the Führer on

30 January 1942. No record of this meeting has survived, but only one day

after the meeting, in an express letter to all Gestapo branch offices, Adolf

Eichmann announced that ‘the recent evacuations of Jews from individual

areas to the East’ marked ‘the beginning of the final solution to the Jewish

question’ in the Reich and the Protectorate.191

By early March, Eichmann had refined the plans for these deportations.

During a meeting at Gestapo headquarters in Berlin on 9 March, he

explained that over the course of the next few months 55,000 Jews would

be deported from the Reich and the Protectorate to a number of ghettos

in the Lublin district. He also announced that most of the remaining,

elderly German Jews would be deported from the Reich to Theresienstadt

over the course of the summer or the autumn of 1942.192 Heydrich, who

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261

had just returned from a relaxing skiing holiday with his family in the

Bavarian Alps, was happy with the progress made in his absence.193 On

11, 12, and 13 March, he and Himmler discussed the progress of the solu-

tion to the Jewish problem. Just before the deportation trains arrived, the

SS and Police Leader in the Lublin district, Odilo Globocnik, cleared

the Lublin ghetto of its inhabitants, shooting thousands of Polish Jews on

the spot between 16 March and 20 April and deporting a further 30,000

to Belzec where they were gassed.194

The miserable living conditions in the ghettos around Lublin – in

Izbica, Piaska, Zamocs and Trawniki – meant that a great majority of the

German, Austrian and Slovak deportees died within a few months of their

arrival. Those Jews who had been deported to Łódź from the Reich during

the previous autumn, and had survived the devastating conditions in the

Łódź ghetto – almost 11,000 people in total – were deported to Chelmno

between 4 and 15 May and murdered in stationary gas vans.195 Heydrich,

in the meantime, decided to begin the clearing of the Theresienstadt

ghetto, primarily to create space for new arrivals.196

In March 1942, the deportations were also extended to Slovakia and

France. According to the terms of an agreement with Slovakia, some

4,500 young Jews ‘fit to work’ were deported to Majdanek in the Lublin

district and an additional four trainloads of young women were sent

to Auschwitz between 26 March and 7 April.197 On 10 April, Heydrich

travelled to Bratislava to meet with the Slovak Prime Minister, Vojtech

Tuka, who declared his government’s willingness to deport
all
of Slovakia’s

more than 70,000 Jews. The deportations from Slovakia began the

following day – a significant event as Slovakia was the first state outside

direct German control to agree to the deportation of its Jewish citizens.

By 20 June, seven trains from Slovakia had arrived at Auschwitz where

the deportees were used as slave labourers. A further thirty-four transports

were sent to ghettos in the district of Lublin where the Slovakian

deportees replaced those Jewish inhabitants who had previously been sent

to the extermination camps of Sobibor and Belzec. As Heydrich explained

to Tuka during his visit to Bratislava, the deportation of Jews from

Slovakia was only part of a much wider programme of resettlement

that would affect not only Slovakia, the Reich and the Protectorate

but also Western Europe, including the Netherlands, Belgium and

France.198

In France, from where 1,000 Jewish hostages were deported to

Auschwitz on 30 March in retaliation for bombing attacks by the French

Resistance, Heydrich pressed his Jewish expert, Theodor Dannecker, to

step up the pace. While still negotiating with the German military admin-

istration over the eastward deportation of Jewish hostages in early March

262

HITLER’S HANGMAN

1942, Dannecker recorded Heydrich’s determination to have ‘further Jews

deported in the course of 1942’.199

These major pan-European waves of deportations coincided with the

completion of construction works on various extermination sites in the

General Government. By mid-March 1942, camp officials at Auschwitz-

Birkenau had converted a former peasant hut into a gas chamber and

started to murder Jews incapable of work that summer with Zyklon B. In

May, the extermination camp Sobibor was opened, while the first exter-

mination camp, Belzec, underwent construction work that summer to

extend its killing capacity. At the same time, in the district of Warsaw,

construction work began on a further extermination camp, Treblinka.200

Simultaneously, in May 1942, Heydrich’s
Einsatzgruppen
in the Soviet

Union resumed the mass murders of Soviet Jews, which had begun in the

summer of the previous year. This was particularly the case in Ukraine and

Belorussia, where Heydrich’s brief visit to Minsk in April and his

announcement that those deported from the Reich were to be liquidated

upon arrival appear to have triggered a renewed wave of mass shootings

with more than 15,000 Jewish victims.201 But this was merely the tip of

the iceberg. Heydrich’s
Einsatzgruppen
and special SS ‘anti-partisan’ units

shot at least 360,000 Jews in the Ukraine and Belorussia during the spring

and summer of 1942.202

The decision-making process that led to this further escalation of anti-

Jewish extermination policies and the beginning of a ful -blown, pan-

European genocide is difficult to pin down with any certainty. At the

Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942, two proposals had been made for

solving the Jewish question on a European scale. Apart from Heydrich’s older

notion of deporting European Jews to the occupied Soviet territories, where

they would be decimated by a combination of forced labour and ‘special treat-

ment’, a new option had been discussed: the systematic murder of those Jews

incapable of work in the General Government which was, with 1.7 mil ion

people, by far the largest community of Jews under German control. This was

to be achieved through gassing facilities in Belzec and Auschwitz, which