Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (38 page)

days later,
105
Hitler had assured him that no further deportations into the General Government would take place, in view of the Madagascar Project. On 9 July

Himmler made the definitive end to deportations into Frank’s area known

internally.
106

Besides putting an end to the deportations, the war in the West had other

consequences for the German occupation of Poland. From September 1939 to

April 1940 the occupying power in Poland had carried out mass executions of

people who had been held in the context of the so-called ‘intelligentsia campaign’

or the waves of regional arrests;
107
now, after May 1940, such executions were to be continued on a much greater scale as part of the so-called ‘AB campaign’ (where

AB stands for Außerordentliche Befriedungsaktion or ‘extraordinary pacification

campaign’). As Frank explained to representatives of the police at the end of May,

the beginning of the war in the West had presented them with a chance ‘of

finishing off the mass of seditious resistance politicians and other politically

suspect individuals in our area and at the same time of eliminating the inheritance

of earlier Polish criminality’. Frank stated quite explicitly that this campaign

would ‘cost a few thousand Polish lives, above all those from the leading intellec-

tual cadres of Poland’ and in this context he cited Hitler when he said, ‘the

elements of the Polish leadership that we have now identified are to be liquid-

ated’.
108
This is in fact what happened: during the ‘AB campaign’ some 3,500

members of the intelligentsia and political functionaries, as well as about 3,000

people who had been designated criminals were killed. This policy of the system-

atic mass murder of the Polish elites was itself bound to have a radicalizing effect

on the persecution of the Jews.

After the Department for the Internal Administration of the General Governor

had in August 1940 already confirmed the necessity of establishing ghettos that

were, however, not to be hermetically sealed,
109
the construction of new ghettos in the General Government evidently gained further impetus in autumn 1940. In

166

The Persecution of the Jews, 1939–1941

Warsaw
110
and other cities further closed Jewish quarters were set up
111
after the legal basis for such action had been established in September when the Order

concerning Domicile Restrictions was issued.
112
However, the formation of ghettos did not follow a unified plan; local authorities’ need to gain control was the

decisive factor, rather than the failure of the Madagascar Plan. The establishment

of ghettos or the designation of certain quarters or areas of a city as Jewish

represent only one of the measures that the occupying administration used to

deal with the astonishing lack of living accommodation for the Jewish population.

Since the occupying power usually tackled its need for space at the expense of the

Jews—and moreover undertook several ‘deportations’ (Aussiedlungen) to the

‘capital’ of the General Government, Cracow, for example, or to recreational

resorts—it found itself repeatedly forced to intervene in Jewish living arrange-

ments in a regulatory fashion. This trend increased after spring 1941 when more

space was needed to accommodate the eastern army marching into Poland.
113
The original aim for ‘concentrating’ Jews in larger cities was often not achieved,

however; on the contrary, Jews were deported from such places and divided

between the surrounding smaller towns.
114

In the rationing scheme for foodstuffs Jews were in the lowest of ten consumer

groups. These rations, which often only existed on paper, were already set at such

a low level that they did not permit survival.
115
In order to survive the Jewish population was dependent on smuggling and the black market; the danger of the

‘Jewish black market’ was a further reason for the occupation administration to

intensify their control over the Jewish population and step up their persecution of

the Jews.

Until autumn 1941 the authorities generally continued to count on the Jews

soon being removed, which is why most anti-Jewish measures were essentially

provisional. The situation of the Jews did not worsen as the result of a carefully

planned set of policies on the part of the Germans but because of the cumulative

effect of inadequate support measures and a regime fundamentally uninterested in

their fate. Even the establishment of ghettos was carried out so haphazardly and

slowly that it would be wrong to see it as a systematic policy ultimately aimed at

the physical annihilation of the Jews. It is quite clear that there was no uniform

and unified policy towards the inhabitants of the ghettos. Using the examples of

the Lodz and Warsaw ghettos, the historian Christopher Browning has shown

that there were two contrasting positions represented simultaneously within the

German departments responsible: according to one view, the population of the

ghettos should be left to starve, whilst according to the other, opportunities for

employment had to be created in order to give the Jews the possibility of sustain-

ing themselves—although in this case the motive was less humanitarian than

connected with the fear of disease.
116
In both ghettos the ‘productive’ line of argument prevailed over the argument for starving the Jews to death. However,

it is significant that in the course of this discussion the possibility of gradually

Deportations

167

annihilating the Jews physically via hunger or disease was openly considered as

a serious option that was eventually rejected overwhelmingly on grounds of

expediency.

In the summer of 1940 responsibility for enforced labour in the General

Government passed from the SS, who had failed in this area, to the civilian

administration, which began to regulate the Jewish workers centrally. The main

focus of Jewish forced labour in the General Government gradually became the

district of Lublin, where Jews (including those from other districts) were assigned

by preference to major projects and given rough and ready accommodation and

wholly inadequate subsistence.
117
The path of Jewish forced labour took a particular turn in eastern Upper Silesia, where Himmler appointed the Breslau Police

Commander Albrecht Schmelt as Director of an office to oversee ‘the registration

and direction of workforces composed of foreign peoples’. Schmelt systematically

set about collecting the Jews ‘concentrated’ in certain towns in the eastern part of

eastern Upper Silesia and deploying them in forced labour groups for road-

building and industrial manufacture. In occupied Poland forced labourers’

wages were usually either wholly withheld or paid only in very small part; across

the camps conditions were appalling, accommodation, food, and medical care

were catastrophically bad, and the camp authorities deployed rigid means of

repression.
118

Life in the Ghettos

The situation in the closed ghettos and those areas of towns specially assigned to

Jews was characterized by extreme congestion (in the Warsaw ghetto, for example,

according to German estimates, using an ‘occupancy’ figure of 6 to 7 persons per

room,
119
there were between 410,000 and 590,000 people living in a little more than 4 square kilometres), by disastrously bad hygiene, wholly inadequate supplies

of foodstuffs, by disease, and therefore by a high death rate.
120
For these reasons approximately a quarter of the populations of the two largest Polish ghettos,

Warsaw and Lodz, died of ‘natural’ causes.
121
Raul Hilberg estimates that the total of Polish Jews killed prior to and during the period of ghettoization before

the violent ghetto clearances began was approximately 500,000.
122

The Jewish minority of Poland that was penned into the ghettos in this manner

was neither an amorphous mass nor a homogeneous community. The great social

differences that existed in the pre-war period, the diverse political trends and the

differences in attitudes to religion amongst Jews were maintained under ghetto

conditions and even intensified. However, a sociology of ghetto society highlights

new phenomena, including the rise of a social class of newly rich and privileged

people, the rapid degradation of the intelligentsia, the reduction of the Jewish

middle class to an army of slave workers and the tense relationship between the

original inhabitants of the ghettos and the newcomers forced to enter them.
123

168

The Persecution of the Jews, 1939–1941

The lives of those locked in the ghettos was completely dominated by the daily

struggle for survival, which was above all the problem of somehow finding

something to eat. Hunger was the leitmotif of ghetto life. Hunger changed both

individual and collective behaviour and forced people to cross the boundaries of

dignity and to transgress moral norms.

There were various attempts made by the inhabitants of the ghettos to resist the

rapid erosion of the standards of civilization. Jewish social self-help organizations

were active across a broad range of areas,
124
and religious, educational, and cultural activities offered the possibility of retaining a vestige of human dignity

and self-respect. There is evidence of activities such as these, to various degrees, in

a series of ghettos; they were partly organized officially by Jewish councils and

tolerated by the Germans, but to a large extent they took place ‘underground’

despite being forbidden by the authorities.
125

Whatever efforts the Jewish councils and individual inhabitants of the ghettos

made to make their lives a little more tolerable, however, they were made within

the context of a dyamic of power that consisted of near-omnipotence on the

German side and total impotence on the Jewish side. The German authorities

nonetheless succeeded to a certain extent both in concealing the reality of this

dynamic by forming the Jewish councils as organs of an (in reality non-existent)

autonomous administration and in maintaining the illusion of some room for

manoeuvre on the Jewish side.

The decisive factor in internal relationships in the ghettos was the omnipotence

of the German side, which decided on the extent to which the ghettos were

supplied with food and essentials in exchange for goods, objects of value, and

money, but which ensured that the conflicts emerging from the inadequate con-

ditions there were resolved by the inhabitants themselves. The German occupying

power usually left it to the Jewish councils to distribute the deliveries of foodstuffs,

always too small and usually of poor quality. Distribution took place in different

ways: ration cards were introduced, free market trade was permitted or meals were

served in canteens, the latter often with the support of Jewish self-help organiza-

tions. However it was organized, the result was always to privilege those groups

that the Jewish councils considered of particular importance for the continuing

survival of the ghettos. These included the members of the extensive bureaucratic

apparatus created by the Jewish councils but also, and increasingly as time went

on, the workforces involved in manufacturing the goods to be supplied to the

Germans. In most of the Polish ghettos 1941 marked the point where most of the

inhabitants had exchanged virtually all the goods and objects of value they had

brought into the ghetto for foodstuffs and other essentials and when more and

more people were attempting to survive by working in the ghetto workshops, the

so-called ‘shops’ that produced goods for the Germans.
126
The Jewish councils began to support these plans to make the ghettos ‘productive’, especially as the shift

of emphasis towards work in the ghettos seemed advantageous in comparison with

Deportations

169

the appalling conditions in the forced labour camps—a contrast sharpened as

the occupying power began a new work initiative in spring 1941
.127
It appears that it was not least the initiatives of the Jewish councils that attracted the attention of the Germans to the idea of making the Jews ‘productive’, in contrast to the

Nazi stereotype, according to which Jews were essentially always ‘parasitical’ and

‘unproductive’.

Additional essential supplements to the provisions within the ghettos were

obtained via smuggling and the black market, on which the last goods and chattels

of the Jews were exchanged for foodstuffs. These methods were officially pros-

ecuted by the Jewish councils, under pressure from the Germans, but in reality

were frequently ignored. Despite their merciless persecution of smugglers, the

Germans were to some extent forced to accept the existence of the phenomenon in

the interests of maintaining the ghetto economy itself. However, smuggling

and the black market both eventually contributed to an increased distortion in

the equality of distribution for essential goods within the ghettos and thus to

sharpening the tensions between ghetto inhabitants themselves.
128