Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (65 page)

Reich Security Head Office, SS Obergruppenführer Heydrich [could be] con-

cluded in the next 2–3 months’. If Himmler and Heydrich had to ‘authorize’

this mass murder, we can assume that the suggestion must substantially have

come from Greiser.
94
The planned number of 100,000 Jews ‘unfit for work’ and thus abandoned to murder can also be identified in another document from

January 1942
.95
Presumably, then, the murder of the 100,000 people (Polish Jews

‘unfit for work’) was the ‘service in return’ that Greiser had demanded from

Himmler if he was to receive 25,000 Jews and Gypsies (rather than the 60,000

people originally stated by Himmler) into the Lodz ghetto. Some months later—

some time in summer or autumn 1942—Hitler gave Greiser, when he again

addressed the ‘Jewish question’ in his Gau, a free hand—special authorization

was no longer required to murder a certain number of people.

Eastern Upper Silesia: Forced Labour and Murder

of Jews ‘Unfit for Work’

As in the Warthegau, in eastern Upper Silesia the extensive resettlement plans that

Himmler had introduced in 1939 in his capacity as Reichskommisar for the

Strengthening of the German Nation, had been suspended in the spring of 1941

because of the concentration of troops in the East. Until then, some 38,000 ethnic

Germans had been settled in this area and more than 81,000 indigenous people,

including an unknown number of Jews, had been expelled to the General Gov-

ernment. After the suspension of the resettlement, in the eastern part of the

annexed territory, predominantly settled by Poles, we have the following picture:

while, since 1940, the Jewish population from the whole of eastern Upper Silesia

292

Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941

had been concentrated in certain towns in this ‘eastern strip’ of the province,

thousands of Poles who had been driven from their homes were stuck in ‘Polish

camps’, and there were also thousands of ethnic Germans who could not be

accommodated in ‘transit camps’.

The idea of work deployment was very much a central pillar of Judenpolitik in

eastern Upper Silesia at this time. In October 1940 Albrecht Schmelt, the Police

President of Breslau (also president of the district (Regierungspräsident) since May

1941) had received a special commission from Himmler to organize the work

deployment of the ‘ethnic aliens’ (meaning Jews) in eastern Upper Silesia. A

priority of this was work on the Silesian section of the Berlin–Cracow autobahn

as well as deployment in the munitions industry and in Wehrmacht manufactur-

ing plants. In autumn 1941 Schmelt had 17,000 Jewish forced labourers under him,

most of them in camps.
96

The priority given to work deployment had an ambivalent effect on Judenpolitik

in eastern Upper Silesia: the aim of intensively exploiting the prisoners did initially

protect those Jews who were ‘fit for work’—but only until their remaining energy

had been exhausted by disastrous accommodation, undernourishment, overexer-

tion, and so on. The fact that only Jews who were ‘fit for work’ were needed gave

those responsible a ‘rational’ reason for the removal of those who were not. From

mid-November 1941 the Schmelt Organization proceeded to separate out those

prisoners in the camps who could not be used for work, sporadically at first but

then systematically, to transport them to Auschwitz, and have them killed there in

Krematorium I. So these murders began in that crucial part of the history of the

camp, when mass murders with Zyklon B were beginning there.
97
The ‘work deployment’ of the Jews thus created the reason for the selection of those ‘fit for

work’ and those ‘unfit for work’, and that distinction was an important step in the

transition to the policy of systematic extermination. At the same time, however, it

is completely unclear whether the murder of prisoners who were no longer fit for

work derived from an initiative from the Schmelt Organization, whether those

responsible were acting on instructions from above, or whether those at the centre

of the decision-making process and those at the periphery encouraged one another.

At any rate, the exploitation of the Jewish workforce was not the opposite pole of

extermination policy, but an integral component of it.

The General Government: Escalation of the Murders

in Galicia and Preparation of ‘Aktion Reinhard’ in

the District of Lublin

From the spring of 1941 the government of the General Government had

worked on the basis that the Jews living there would be expelled to the

Autumn 1941: Deportation and Mass Murders

293

conquered Soviet territories. On 13 October, in a personal conversation, Frank

once again suggested to Rosenberg that the ‘Jewish population of the General

Government be [deported] to the occupied Eastern territories’. Rosenberg

replied that at that time there was no possibility ‘for the implementation of

resettlement plans of this kind’. However Rosenberg did declare himself willing

in future ‘to encourage Jewish emigration to the East, particularly since the

intention existed to send asocial elements within the Reich to the thinly

inhabited Eastern regions’.
98
From that point onwards the government of the General Government began to think about a ‘final solution’ of the ‘Jewish

question’ in their own territory.

One important factor in the general radicalization of Judenpolitik in the Gen-

eral Government was a series of sessions of the region’s administration which

Frank held in the district capitals after his return from the Reich (14–16 October in

Warsaw, 17 October in Globocnik’s district of Lublin, 18 October in Radom,

20 October in Cracow and in Lvov (Lemberg) for the first time on 21 October).

The session in Lublin on 17 October discussed the ‘third decree’ on residence

restrictions in the General Government, which was issued a few days later and

introduced the death penalty for those who left the ghetto.
99
This effectively launched a manhunt for those Jews living outside the ghetto. The impending

‘evacuation’ of the Jews from the city of Lublin was also discussed; initially ‘1,000

Jews [were to be] moved across the Bug’.
100
On 20 October, at the government meeting in Cracow, Governor Wächter indicated ‘that an ultimately radical

solution to the Jewish Question was unavoidable, and that no allowances of any

kind—such as special exemptions for craftsmen—could be made’.
101
At the meeting on 12 October in Lvov, Eberhard Westerkamp, the Head of the Department for

the Interior of the General Government, announced that ‘the isolation of the Jews

from the rest of the population’ should be enforced as soon and as thoroughly as

possible. On the other hand, however, Westerkamp pointed out that ‘a govern-

ment order has prohibited the establishment of new ghettos, since there was hope

that the Jews would be deported from the General Government in the near future’,

even though a few days previously Rosenberg had declared that ‘hope’ to be an

illusion.
102

The attitude prevailing amongst the German ruling class in occupied Poland

may be fairly represented by statements made by the head of the office of health of

the government of the General Government, Jost Walbaum, at a doctors’ confer-

ence held between 13 and 16 October: ‘There are only two ways: we condemn the

Jews in the ghetto to death by starvation or we shoot them.
’103

While the treatment of the ‘Jewish question’ at these meetings suggests that the

government of the General Government pursued a uniform anti-Jewish policy

throughout the whole of the territory under its control, two districts played a

pioneering part in the implementation of the ‘Final Solution’ in the General

Government.

294

Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941

An important factor in the preparations for the ‘Final Solution’ in the General

Government was the incorporation of Galicia, a territory where large-scale

executions had already been carried out and continued to take place, into the

General Government on 1 August 1941. Until September, the Special Purpose

Einsatzkommando operating in this territory was exclusively directed against a

vaguely defined Jewish upper class. This unit was to form the office of the

Commander of the Security Police in the district of Galicia, after its incorporation

into the General Government on 1 August 1941.
104
From early October, however, the Security Police in Galicia began murdering members of the Jewish population

indiscriminately. In Nadworna on 6 October, for example, 2,000 women, men,

and children were murdered by members of the Stanislau branch of the Security

Police.
105
According to the head of the Security Police in Stanislau, Krüger, this

‘action’ had been previously planned down to the smallest details at a meeting

with the commander of the Security Police in Lvov, Fritz Katzmann.
106
From early October such massacres occurred almost every week. The massacre among the

Jews of Stanislau on 12 October 1941 (the so-called ‘Bloody Sunday’, in which

around 10,000–12,000 people were murdered) is particularly noteworthy.
107
The Security Police in Galicia were thus, independent of their political status, following

the same pattern of radicalization as the units in the occupied Eastern territories.

These mass executions would inevitably further radicalize the ‘Jewish policy’

throughout the whole of the General Government.

Concrete preparations for mass murder of the Jews in the General Government

had also been undertaken since October in the neighbouring district of Lublin, the

territory which had been set aside in 1939 as a ‘Jewish reservation’, and which was

to serve in the spring of 1942 as a reception zone for the third wave of deportations

from the Reich, as well as for deportations from Slovakia.

The SS Police Commander of the district of Lublin, Odilo Globocnik, played a

key role in the preparations for the murder of the Jews of the district. On 13

October, the same day as Rosenberg disappointed Frank’s hopes of quick deport-

ations to the occupied Eastern territories, Globocnik
108
met Himmler, to speak to him about the proposal he had made two weeks earlier, to limit the ‘influence of

the Jews’ against whom it was necessary to take steps ‘of a security policy

nature’.
109
It was probably at this meeting that Globocnik received the assignment to build Belzec extermination camp.
110

A personal letter sent by a colleague of Globocnik’s, Hauptsturmführer Hellmuth

Müller, on 15 October 1941 to the head of the Main Office for Race and Settlement,

Otto Hofmann, makes it clear that decisions concerning Globocnik’s radical plans

for the future of Judenpolitik in his district were actually made in mid-October.

Müller wrote that Globocnik saw ‘the political conditions in the GG basically as a

transitional stage’. Globocnik, who was strongly opposed to the governor of the

district in this respect, considered the ‘gradual cleansing of the entire GG of Jews

and also of Poles for the purpose of securing the Eastern territories etc. to be

Autumn 1941: Deportation and Mass Murders

295

necessary. He is, in this connection, full of good and far-reaching plans the

implementation of which is hampered only by the, in this respect, limited influence

of his current office. For, before he can act he needs the support of the civil offices

and authorities of the GG, which will only cooperate on the basis of existing laws

and decrees.
’111

Müller’s letter, which corresponds to the state of information before Globocnik’s

trip to Berlin, thus shows that Globocnik had at this point not yet been given any

extensive authorization to implement the destruction of the Jews. That changed

fundamentally, however, after Globocnik had returned from his trip to the Reich,

and Frank had been informed by Rosenberg that a deportation of the Jews from the

General Government to the occupied Soviet territories was illusory. Müller’s letter

also makes it clear that, as far as Globocnik was concerned, the mass murder of

Jews in his district was only the first step to a far more comprehensive ‘new order’

in terms of population policy in the district of Lublin, aimed at the settlement of

ethnic Germans and the expulsion of the Polish population.
112
In the short term, however, the plans for the mass murder of indigenous Jews were to be used

primarily to free up accommodation in the overcrowded ghettos of the district,

which was to be filled with Jews from the Reich and Slovakia.

Subsequent events make it plain that the meeting between Himmler and

Globocnik on 13 October 1941 was actually of considerable importance in terms

of the transition to mass murder. At the beginning of November and two to three

weeks after the meeting, after the ‘Jewish question’ had been discussed several

times at the meetings of the government of the General Government, work began

on the construction of the first extermination camp, Belzec, a relatively small

collection of barracks.
113
From December 1941 onwards, the euthanasia staff assigned to the T4 organization began arriving in Lublin.
114