Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (35 page)

Katowice, and Ostrava in a total of six transports.
10
Only a fraction of these people were deployed in the construction of the ‘transit camp’ on the bank of the San,

where they found a meadow churned up by months of rain. By far the greater

number of deportees were escorted a few kilometres away from the camp and then

driven away by force.

Shortly after the start of the ‘resettlement campaign’, on 18 October,
11
Müller informed Eichmann that it would be necessary to organize ‘the resettlement and

removal of Poles and Jews into the area of the future Polish rump state’ centrally,

Deportations

153

via the Reich Security Head Office (RSHA). On 20 October the RSHA issued an

order banning the transports;
12
Eichmann was permitted only one train from Ostrava, ‘in order to preserve the prestige of the local state police’.
13

The sudden suspension of the Nisko transports was in all probability due to the

fact that these deportations clashed with the large-scale resettlement of ethnic

Germans into the incorporated areas that Himmler began on 28 September and

with the simultaneous expulsion of Poles and Jews from these same areas. A

second reason for the abandonment of the Nisko experiment is probably to be

found in reservations on the part of military strategists: Hitler made it clear to

Keitel on 17 October that the future General Government ‘has military importance

for us as a form of advance glacis and can be exploited for the moving of troops’.

This perspective could evidently not be reconciled with the idea of a ‘Jewish

reservation’. However, according to Hitler, in the long term ‘the way this area is

run . . . must make it possible for us also to rid the territory of the Reich of Jews and Polacks’.
14

Despite the abrupt end of the Nisko campaign, the RSHA steadfastly stuck to its

plans for deporting Jews into the district of Lublin. The RSHA informed the SD

Main District of Vienna at the end of October that it was quite conceivable that

‘individual transports of Jews from Vienna’ might still be fitted in.
15
Even the Higher SS and Police Commander in the General Government, Friedrich Wilhelm

Krüger, referred on 1 November to plans still in place for a ‘particularly dense

concentration of Jews’.
16

Eichmann’s short-lived campaign was by no means a personal initiative on his

part to compete with Himmler’s resettlement project; it was quite clearly a

component of the broader resettlement plans that the Reichsführer SS had been

trying to introduce since the beginning of October on the basis of his new powers:

whilst Himmler was constructing a new organization in the two new Reichsgaus

in Poland, supported by the Higher SS and Police Commander, he transferred

responsibility for carrying out deportations in the other areas to existing author-

ities, in other words to the interlocking mechanisms of the Security Police, the SD,

and the emigration offices.

As the history of the Nisko campaign shows, the organs of the SS charged with

carrying out deportations very clearly did so with the aim of leaving the deported

Jews exposed, one way or another, helpless, and without any means of support, in

the Lublin ‘reservation’ and of abandoning them to their own devices or driving

them over the demarcation line into the occupied Soviet zone, which was common

practice in the district of Lublin at the end of 1939
.17
The Nisko project represented an experiment intended to gain experience as a basis on which to deport all the

Jews from the area of the Reich within the pre-war boundaries (and from Upper

Silesia, which had been annexed). The somewhat improvised manner in which

this campaign was carried out was not merely the result of disorganized incom-

petence; there was method in its inadequacies. The experiment shows plainly what

154

The Persecution of the Jews, 1939–1941

was envisaged within the SS by the idea of ‘resettling’ the Jews of the whole area of

the Reich in the ‘Lublin reservation’: it was seen as an illegal campaign of

expulsion into an area between the ‘Eastern Wall’ that was to be constructed

and the demarcation line with the Soviet Union. Deportation on such a scale,

based on the Nisko model, would have caused the deaths of a great many of those

deported; but in the longer term those who initially survived would not have

found adequate living conditions or conditions for reproduction and would

therefore have been condemned to extinction. The Nisko campaign therefore

permits the conclusion that the further-reaching Lublin project was a first version

of a ‘final solution’ policy since its aim was the physical termination of those Jews

living within the German sphere of influence.

The radical nature of these aims is confirmed by statements made by leading

representatives of the General Government and by other, well-informed National

Socialist functionaries. At a meeting of senior Kreis officials and city commis-

sioners from the district of Radom on 25 November, the Head of the General

Government, Hans Frank, announced that the majority of the Jews in the area of

the Reich would be deported into areas east of the Vistula, adding, ‘we should give

the Jews short shrift. It’s a pleasure finally to be able to get physical with the Jewish race. The more of them that die the better. To smash the Jews is a victory for our

Reich. The Jews should be made to feel that we have arrived.’
18
The Propaganda Ministry issued ‘confidential information’ to the German press on 20 October 1939

which revealed that ‘measures have already been taken by the SS to ensure for

example that 20,000 Jews from Lodz will be forced this very week to begin their

march into the very heart of the country’. The same document makes the lapidary

comment that ‘no subsistence infrastructure is available for this mass migration’.
19

On the occasion of a visit to the ethnic German village of Cycow on 20 November

by a delegation of leading functionaries from the General Government authorities,

the District Chief responsible for Lublin explained, ‘this extremely marshy area

could . . . serve as a Jewish reservation, which in itself might lead to a sharp

reduction in the numbers of Jews’.
20
The Chief of Police from the Upper Silesian industrial areas, Wilhelm Metz, spoke in his December situation report to the

District President of the ‘battle against the Jews who must be exterminated here

most urgently’.
21
Furthermore, Odilo Globocnic, SS and Police Commander in the Lublin District, suggested at a meeting held on 14 February 1940 that the ‘evacuated Jews and Poles’ in his district ‘should feed themselves and obtain support

from their people because those Jews have plenty. If this should not succeed, they

should be left to starve.’
22
Frank made a similar statement on 23 April at a meeting with the State Secretary, Backe, who was responsible for matters of food and diet:

‘I’m not remotely interested in the Jews. Whether they have something to eat or

not is the last thing on earth I care about.’
23

The list of pertinent quotations could be extended. Eduard Könekamp, a

speaker at the German Foreign Institute (Auslandsinstitut), sent a report to his

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155

colleagues from occupied Poland in December 1939 about the situation of the

Jews: ‘the annihilation of this sub-human group would be in the interests of the

whole world. Such a destruction is, however, one of our greatest problems. It can’t

be done by shooting them. You can’t allow people to shoot down women and

children either. You can count on losses in the course of evacuation transports

here and there, and of the transport of 1,000 Jews that marched out from Lublin

450 are said to have died.
’24
Albrecht Haushofer, who was at this point employed in the information office of the Foreign Office, reported in a letter to his mother

on 13 December that he was sitting ‘at table with the man whose systematic task it

will be to leave a substantial number of the Jews who are to be freighted out into

the Lublin ghetto to freeze to death and starve there’.
25

Deportations Phase II: Autumn 1939 to Spring 1940

Further planning for the deportation of Poles and Jews from the area of the Reich,

and in particular from the newly annexed areas, was significantly influenced after

October 1939 by the various waves of ‘returning settlers’, ethnic Germans entering

the Reich from the Baltic.
26

Himmler, who styled himself Reichskommissar for the Strengthening of

the German Nation (Reichskommissar für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums)

after the authorization issued by Hitler on 7 October—but without any official

conferment of this title—announced the first comprehensive programme for the

‘resettlement’ of Poles and Jews from the annexed territories on 30 October 1939.
27

In the days that followed this plan was modified, as we learn from Bruno

Streckenbach, the commander of the Security Police in the General Government

who was charged with the ‘central planning of settlement or evacuation in the

eastern territories’. On 8 November, in Cracow, he informed the Higher SS and

Police Leaders responsible for carrying out the deportations that, by the end of

February 1940, ‘all Jews and Congress Poles from the Reichgaus of Danzig and

Posen as well as from Upper Silesia and South-East Prussia will be evacuated’ and

the remainder of the Polish population there would be categorized either as

‘Poles’, ‘Ethnic Germans’, or ‘Poles still wanted’. In all it was now planned to

‘evacuate approximately 1,000,000 Jews and Poles from the Old Reich’—Germany

in the borders of 1937—‘or the newly occupied Eastern areas . . . in the first instance

by the end of February 1940’.
28
In detail this meant ‘400,000 Poles, including Jews’

from West Prussia and 200,000 Poles and 100,000 Jews from the Warthegau,
29

which meant that deportations of the order of some 300,000 people from the area

of the Old Reich were envisaged, as they were during the Nisko project.

However, the whole ‘resettlement programme’ was put under pressure by the

streams of ethnic Germans entering the Reich. At the end of October the RSHA had

set up a coordination point for the planned resettlement programme jointly

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The Persecution of the Jews, 1939–1941

with Special Department III ES (immigration and settlement),
30
and by November it was attempting to master the increasingly confused situation with the help of a

comprehensive clearance plan. It established a so-called long-range plan (Fernplan),

according to which all the Jews and any politically undesirable Poles would initially

be moved into the General Government, to be followed later, after a ‘racial assess-

ment’, by the mass of the Polish population. There were no longer plans for a special

‘Jewish reservation’. Moreover, the ‘long-range plan’ was not now aimed at the Jews

of the Old Reich area, but for the most part matched considerations of ‘ethnicity

politics’ being worked out simultaneously by the Racial Policy Office of the

NSDAP.
31
At the same time a ‘short-term plan’ was established, according to which 80,000 Jews and Poles were to be removed from the Warthegau in order to

house the Baltic Germans who were then in provisional accommodation in camps.
32

And indeed, according to the Higher SS and Police Commander, Wilhelm Koppe’s

concluding report, between 1 and 17 December there were more than 87,000 people

deported from the Warthegau into the General Government,
33
‘politically incriminated Poles, Jews, Polish intelligentsia, criminal and asocial elements’.
34

Although the original intention of deporting the Jews from the whole of the

area of the Reich into occupied Poland was not part of the long-range plan, the

RSHA had by no means given up this goal. A note about the ‘final solution to the

Jewish problem’ from the Jewish Affairs Department of the SD dated 19 December

1939 worked on the basis of two possible alternatives:
35
either a ‘Jewish reservation’

would be created in Poland or the Jews transported from the area of the Reich

would ‘be accommodated in the future Gouvernement of Poland’. The author of

this note also asks the question of whether the ‘emigration of the Jews should not

still be carried out with a view to creating a reservation’, whereby in foreign-policy

terms the reservation would constitute a ‘good means of bringing pressure to bear

on the Western powers’: ‘perhaps it could be used to raise the question of a

worldwide solution at the end of the war’.

On 21 December Heydrich announced that he had appointed Eichmann his

‘special expert’ for ‘dealing with the centralized security police arrangements as

the clearance of the Eastern territories was carried out’,
36
and made him responsible for all the deportations planned for occupied Poland. These were initially to

be put into effect using additional ‘short-term plans’.

To start with, a second short-term plan made provision for transporting

600,000 people, all without exception Jews, into the General Government between