Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (64 page)

property before the beginning of the deportation; with the final notification of

the transport date the victims were then informed that their property had been

retrospectively confiscated. Here too efforts had been made to close any legal

loopholes. Thus, for example, transfers of property were expressly forbidden.

According to the 11th decree implementing the Reich Citizenship Law, this

confiscated property was assigned to the Reich as soon as the transport crossed

the German border.
70

The prospective deportees had to turn up a few days before the departure of the

train at collection points, where a meticulous check occurred. It was painstakingly

established what the deportees were allowed to take with them; their luggage—

they were allowed 50 kg per person—was searched, and many items were often

confiscated at random. Body searches were also performed. The property lists

were examined, and the victims had to hand over any valuable objects or personal

papers. Finally a bailiff from the local court arrived to issue stateless Jews, who

were not covered by the 11th ordinance, an order for the confiscation of their

property. In this way the legal appearance of these expropriations was preserved.
71

The collection points were rooms belonging to the Jewish communities, market

or exhibition halls, gastronomic enterprises, abandoned factories, and so on, often

building complexes in the centre of town. The way from the collection point to the

station was often covered on foot in closed columns, or on open trucks.
72
This often occurred in broad daylight, as many surviving photographs confirm.
73
The first part of the deportations thus occurred ‘in full view’; it was often the subject of

lively debates.
74

The victims had to pay a special fee for the transport; only a fragment was

actually used for the costs arising, most of it disappearing on arrival. On the

pretext of covering the costs for indigent fellow travellers, in the run-up to the

deportation the Jews who still had property had been obliged to hand over a

quarter of their property as a ‘donation’ to a special RSHA account. This

transfer had nothing to do with the actual costs of the transport either, but

merely served, from the perspective of the RSHA, to keep part of the Jewish

property out of the clutches of the financial administration and use it for their

own ends.
75
The carefully examined luggage that was loaded separately onto goods wagons before the start of the journey generally disappeared, never to be

seen again.
76

288

Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941

The property left behind was exploited by the financial administration. Thus

household goods were given away to the poor, sold, or auctioned.
77
The apartments were taken over by the local administrations and rented out; these ‘Jewish

apartments’ were in great demand.
78
In many places there was a regular run on these desirable properties.

So the whole process was geared towards the careful erasure of the complete

social existence of the deportees, while at the same time maintaining the appear-

ance of legality and making sure not only that the victims themselves paid for their

own deportation, but that the RSHA, the state administration, and many private

citizens profited from Jewish property.

Although the deportations occurred in public, and the population paid close

attention to them, state propaganda was silent about these mass deportations,

about their destinations and the fate that awaited the deportees. The negative

reception from parts of the population, particularly in Berlin, to the compulsory

identification of the Jews, which was noted with irritation by the Propaganda

Ministry, may have been responsible for this silence. A police decree, the full text

of which was not published but the content of which was announced via the

media, forbade the population—under threat of imprisonment in a concentration

camp—to have any public contact with Jews. Repression had to stand in for

propaganda, which was plainly ineffective. Against the background of these

experiences, on 23 October Goebbels ordered that the deportations were no longer

to be mentioned in home propaganda. Anti-Semitic propaganda was now inten-

sified once more, but concrete details were no longer to be revealed.
79

We have already referred to the deportation of 5,000 Burgenland Gypsies to

Lodz early in November 1941, a procedure that makes it especially clear that the

story of the Holocaust cannot be written without an eye for other groups who

were persecuted for racist reasons, since important parallels exist with the perse-

cution of the Jews. As regards the deportation from Burgenland, which had been

planned since April 1940, this was not the first deportation of Gypsies. As early as

May 1940 2,370 Gypsies had been deported from the Reich to various parts of the

General Government. Plainly the occupying authorities had no idea what to do

with the Gypsies: some gave them private accommodation, some used them

as forced labourers, some left them to their own devices. The majority of the

Gypsies perished as a result of poor conditions, others were executed, some

managed to return illegally to the Reich, some somehow survived in the General

Government.
80

The Gypsies deported to Lodz in November 1941 were confined to a special,

separate section of the Lodz ghetto. The ones who survived the appalling condi-

tions in this camp were murdered in Chelmno in January 1942.

The deportation to Lodz was followed early in 1942 by a further mass deport-

ation of Gypsies: in February 1942, 2,000 East Prussian Gypsies were deported to

Bialystok. Some members of the group, deemed to be ‘assimilated’, were sent back

Autumn 1941: Deportation and Mass Murders

289

to East Prussia in the course of 1942, on condition that they agreed to be sterilized.

The rest were deported in the autumn of 1942 to the Brest-Litovsk ghetto, whose

inhabitants had been murdered a short time previously. In the spring of 1944 these

people were deported to Auschwitz.
81

Announcements of Extermination

In the autumn of 1941, many statements were issued by leading National Socialists

or well-informed functionaries deliberately addressing the imminent ‘extermin-

ation’ of the Jews. Thus, for example, the foreign political editor of Der Stürmer,

Paul Wurm, wrote on 23 October to his old acquaintance Rademacher, the Jewish

expert at the Foreign Ministry:
82
‘On my way back from Berlin, I met an old Party member who is working on the settlement of the Jewish question in the East. Soon

some of the Jewish vermin will be exterminated by special measures.’

In his table-talk on 25 October Hitler once again recalled the ‘prophecy’ he had

made on 30 January 1939, adding the following train of thought: ‘This race of

criminals has the two million dead from the World War on its conscience and

now hundreds of thousands more. Let nobody say to me: we can’t send them into

the swamps [in Russia]! Who’s worrying about our people? It’s good if the fear

that we are exterminating the Jews goes before us.’
83
On 16 November 1941, under the heading ‘The Jews are to blame’, Goebbels published a leading article in which

he also returned to Hitler’s prophecy of 30 January 1939: ‘At present we are

experiencing the realisation of this prophecy, and in the process Jewry is suffering

a fate, which may be harsh but is more than deserved. Pity or regret is entirely

inappropriate in this case.’
84
With his formulation that ‘world Jewry’ was now suffering ‘a gradual process of extermination’, Geobbels made clear which fate

finally awaited the Jews whose deportation from the German cities had been

under way for some weeks. Two days later Rosenberg spoke at a press conference

about the imminent ‘eradication’ (Ausmerzung) of the Jews of Europe: ‘Some six

million Jews still live in the East, and this question can only be solved by a

biological extermination of the whole of Jewry in Europe. The Jewish question

will only be solved for Germany when the last Jew has left German territory, and

for Europe when not a single Jew stands on the European continent as far as the

Urals . . . And to this end it is necessary to force them beyond the Urals or

otherwise bring about their eradication.’
85

On 18 November 1941, at a meeting with the Great Mufti of Jerusalem, who had

fled to the camp of the Axis powers, Hitler had announced that Germany was

‘resolved to urge one European nation after the other, step by step, to contribute to

the solution of the Jewish problem, and when the time comes to turn to non-

European peoples with a similar appeal’. He would ‘carry on the fight until the total

destruction of the Jewish-Communist European empire’, and in the ‘not too distant

290

Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941

future’ reach the southern tip of the Caucasus. Germany was not, however, pursu-

ing imperial goals in the Arabian world, but was working for the liberation of the

Arabs. ‘The German objective would be solely the destruction of Jews residing in the

Arab sphere under the protection of British power.’
86
While this statement must admittedly be interpreted from a tactical perspective, it also shows that Hitler’s

fantasies of extermination already reached beyond the European sphere.

These quotations may of course be interpreted in different ways. If we consider

them in connection with the expansion of the mass murders in certain regions

which had already begun at the same time, or were under preparation, in my

opinion they represent components of a process of radicalization that had been set

in motion. The quotations make it clear that the Nazi leadership was in the

process of further escalating the original intention to deport the Jews under

German rule to the East where they were to die out under unbearable conditions.

In view of the comprehensive mass murders in the occupied Eastern territories,

which were also extended to Galicia in October, and with the first preparations for

the systematic murder of the Jews by gas in certain regions of Poland, the

organizers of the Judenpolitik developed increasingly terrible ideas of how

the ‘extermination’ or ‘Final Solution’ of the European Jews, envisaged since the

beginning of the war, was to be understood in concrete terms. A programme or a

plan for the systematic murder of all European Jews is admittedly not yet

discernible at this point, but the atmosphere for turning such a monstrous

intention into action was unambiguously present.

A Regional ‘Final Solution’ in the Warthegau, Late 1941

From mid-October onwards, a total of 25,000 Jews and Gypsies from across the

Reich were transported to the already overcrowded Lodz ghetto.

At around the same time, presumably still in October 1941, the mass murder of

indigenous Jews began in the district of Konim in the southern Warthegau.
87
In late November, in an ‘action’ lasting several days, 700 Jews were murdered in gas

vans in the Bornhagen (Kozminek) camp in the district of Kalisch.
88
The unit deployed was the ‘Sonderkommando’ Lange under HSSPF Warthegau Koppe,

which had already murdered thousands of inmates of institutions for the mentally

ill in the annexed Polish territories in 1939/40 and again in June/July 1941.
89
In October 1941 Lange’s unit had been summoned to Novgorod by Himmler to

murder patients in mental institutions there.
90
His driver confirmed that in autumn 1941 Lange had himself driven through the Warthegau to find a suitable

location for a stationary killing installation. Once an appropriate building had

been found in Chelmno, on 8 December Lange’s unit started using gas vans to

murder Jews there. At first most of the victims were indigenous Jews deported to

Chelmno from various ghettos in the Warthegau.

Autumn 1941: Deportation and Mass Murders

291

From January 1942, those murdered in Chelmno were primarily inhabitants of

the Lodz ghetto.
91
In a first wave of deportations, between 16 and 29 January, the first 10,000 inhabitants of the ghetto were deported to Chelmno. Chaim Rumkowski, who performed his office as Jewish Elder in an autocratic fashion, had

managed to halve the figure of 20,000 people demanded by the Germans, and to

keep the selection of this group—‘undesirable elements’, Polish Jews who had

recently arrived in the ghetto from the provinces, and others—under his own

control.
92
Over the months that followed, however, it would prove that these

‘successes’ were mercilessly exploited by the Germans to involve the apparatus of

the Lodz Jewish council more and more closely in the machinery of deportation.

A letter dated 1 May 1942 to Himmler from Artur Greiser, the Gauleiter for the

Warthegau,
93
provides a major clue for the reconstruction of the decision to wreak mass murder among the Jews of the Warthegau. In this letter Greiser informed the

Reichsführer SS that the ‘action concerning the special treatment of some 100,000

Jews in my Gau territory, authorized by you in agreement with the head of the