Read Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews Online
Authors: Peter Longerich
murdered on arrival. Instead, it seems that Jeckeln acted on his own initiative, on
the assumption that the RSHA’s ‘guidelines’, which were drafted in general terms
and of which we are inadequately informed, permitted such action in view of the
extremely difficult situation in Latvia, where there was no available accommoda-
tion for the deportees who were arriving in quick succession.
There is some reason to believe that the rapid deportations to Riga, like those to
Lodz and Minsk, were deliberately used to create ‘intolerable situations’ as a way
of effectively forcing the local authorities to find more radical ‘solutions’. Greiser
in Lodz had responded with his proposal to murder 100,000 indigenous Jews and
the HSSPF for Russia-Centre had organized a mass murder in the Minsk ghetto.
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Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941
However, while Jeckeln had reacted in the desired way with the liquidation of
the Riga ghetto, by executing the Central European Jews he had gone beyond the
desired goal (at this point). There was, though, a tension characteristic of the
process of putting the murder machinery in motion between general orders that
were to be understood intuitively, and independent initiatives on the part of the
local authorities, and on this occasion there had to be intervention from the top to
control matters. Himmler intervened, for once, in order to de-escalate the situ-
ation rather than—as with his other interventions—to radicalize it still further.
Himmler’s intervention had at first led to a complete halt to the systematic
murder of those deported to Latvia: the Jews of the next twenty-two transports
that arrived in Riga were confined in the Riga ghetto or the two camps of Salaspils
and Jungfernhof. There do seem, however, to have been two exceptions. Signifi-
cant indications suggest that, on 19 January 1942, most of the passengers of a
transport from Theresienstadt, more than 900 people, were shot immediately on
arrival, and that at the end of January around 500 Jews, from a transport either
from Berlin or Vienna, were also shot.
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At the end of March and the beginning of April 1942, selections of Jews no longer fit for work also took place in the Riga
ghetto and Jungfernhof: the victims were mainly Jews from Vienna and Berlin. In
the ghetto we may assume that 3,000 died, and in the Jungfernhof, in an ‘action’
on 26 March, around 1,800 people.
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‘Final Solution’ in Serbia, Autumn 1941
After the German military administration had ruled in May that Jews and
Gypsies were to be marked, dismissed from public service, deployed in forced
labour, and have their property confiscated,
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the anti-Jewish policy was further intensified with the start of the attack on the Soviet Union. The Jewish community of Belgrade now had to supply forty hostages a day. From the beginning of
July onwards, hostages from this community, Communists and Jews, were shot
almost daily as ‘retaliation’ for acts of resistance.
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In August, the arrests were extended to all Jewish men. In Serbia too, then, the ‘retaliatory measures’ were
directed against the hostile image of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’. In spite of these
shootings the Serbian resistance against the occupying power grew steadily.
When twenty-two German soldiers were killed in a further attack, on 4 October
the Plenipotentiary Commanding General in Serbia, Franz Böhme, ordered,
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as
‘reprisal and atonement . . . that 100 Serbian prisoners be shot for every murdered
German soldier’. Those to be executed were prisoners from the concentration
camps in Sabac and Belgrade, ‘predominantly Jews and Communists’.
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In fact, between 9 and 13 October some 2,000 Jews and 200 Gypsies from these camps
were shot.
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Böhme had received express support for his policy of directing his retaliatory measures primarily against Jews from Martin Luther, the head of the
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301
German department of the Foreign Ministry, and from Eichmann, the Jewish
specialist of the RSHA. In his memorandum to the AA representative in Bel-
grade, dated 16 September, Luther had recommended that the arrested Jewish
men be treated as hostages across the board,
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and in a phone call to the Jewish expert of the Foreign Ministry on 13 September 1941 Eichmann had suggested
that this group be shot.
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On 10 October Böhme issued a general order to shoot 100 prisoners or hostages
‘for every German soldier or ethnic German (men, women or children) killed or
murdered’, ‘for every wounded German soldier or ethnic German 50 prisoners or
hostages’. The following were to be ‘immediately’ arrested as hostages: ‘all Com-
munists, male inhabitants suspected of being so, all Jews, a certain number of
nationalist and democratically minded inhabitants’.
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In accordance with this scheme, a few days later an additional 2,200 men, Jews
and Gypsies once again among them, were shot for 10 members of the Wehrmacht
killed in battle and 24 wounded.
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In the two weeks following the order of 10 October, Wehrmacht units killed over 9,000 Jews, Gypsies, and other civilians.
161
At the beginning of November, 8,000 Jewish men, or almost all the Jewish men that
the occupying forces had been able to round up, were executed by the firing
squads.
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The families of the victims were interned in a concentration camp during the winter and murdered the following spring, in gas vans.
During the ‘retaliatory actions’ Wehrmacht firing squads had also shot around
1,000 Roma. Unlike the Jewish minority, however, the Gypsies living in Serbia,
whose numbers far exceeded 100,000, were spared mass murders on this scale; this
clearly demonstrates the differences in the intensity of the persecution of the two
population groups.
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Interim Conclusion: The Transition to Regional
Murder Actions
Taken as a whole, the decisions described above provide the following picture:
from the end of July the shootings in the Soviet Union were gradually extended to
include women and children, from August onwards certain places were made
judenfrei, and in October, in practically all parts of the occupied territory, the
policy of murdering the entire Jewish population apart from a small number of
people ‘fit for work’ was implemented. Late in August 1941 the ‘euthanasia
murders’ in the Reich came to an end in their existing form, which meant that
the staff were freed up and initially deployed on a short-term basis in the context
of action 14f13. Mid-September saw the gas experiments in Mogilev in which the
murderous technology of euthanasia was tried out in the Eastern territories for the
first time. Presumably towards the end of September the decision was made to
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Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941
murder around 100,000 people from the Warthegau. At the beginning of October
the Security Police began large-scale mass shootings in the district of Galicia in
the territory of the General Government, in which murder was carried out just
as indiscriminately as in occupied Soviet territory. In parallel with this, the
Wehrmacht began systematically shooting Jewish men and Gypsies in Serbia.
In mid-October Globocnik received the assignment to build an extermination
camp (Belzec), and in the days that followed the government of the General
Government began organizational preparations for the mass murder of the Polish
Jews. The middle of October, however, was a particularly critical phase in Juden-
politik in the district of Lublin for a different reason. On 20 October Himmler
proposed to the Slovakian head of state that the Slovakian Jews be deported to a
particularly remote area within the General Government this may have been
the starting point for the construction of the second extermination camp at
Sobibor.
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In November the T4 murder specialists were assigned to Globocnik.
In October preparations began for the construction of extermination camps in
Riga and presumably also in the area around Minsk (Mogilev); there are indica-
tions of similar plans for Lvov in November. Non-Jewish prisoners were first
murdered in Auschwitz with Zyklon B in September 1941. In the course of the
enlargement of the camp in October, a larger crematorium was ordered for
Auschwitz. In 1942 the cremation ovens originally intended for Mogilev were
diverted to Auschwitz. In November Reich German Jews were also shot during
the massacres of Lithuanian Jews by Security Police in Riga and Kaunas. However,
Himmler put a stop to this murderous practice, which was not in line with RSHA
policy at this point.
These events are so closely connected that they permit the following conclu-
sions to be drawn. In autumn 1941 the Nazi regime clearly decided to murder
several hundred thousand Jews deemed unfit for work in areas that seemed
particularly important from a strategic point of view. This decision followed on
directly from Hitler’s order, issued in mid-September, to deport the German Jews.
This swift radicalization of the decision-making process is connected with the
change in the original plan to deport 60,000 Jews to Lodz ghetto. This led to two
interrelated decisions: first, the gradual modification and extension of the deport-
ation programme. This was first directed to the ghettos of Minsk and Riga.
However, after October there are increasing signs that it was to be extended to
the district of Lublin and also to include Jews from outside the Reich. Secondly,
there was the bloody decimation of the reception areas (Lodz, Riga, Minsk,
Lublin) affected by the deportations. Conceivably, the decision made in autumn
1941—largely reconstructed from the course of events—may also have included
the district of Galicia. This is suggested by references to the planned construction
of an extermination camp in Lvov, but also by the particular role that Galicia was
to play in 1942 (alongside Lublin) in the implementation of the ‘Final Solution’
within the General Government. With this decision to carry out a mass murder of
Autumn 1941: Deportation and Mass Murders
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the Jews in particular regions of Poland, the policy introduced shortly before in
the Soviet Union to create judenfrei areas, in which only a minority of forced
labourers confined in ghettos was left alive, was now extended to territories in
occupied Poland. The parallels with what was happening during October in
Serbia, where the Wehrmacht extended their reprisals to a comprehensive anni-
hilation campaign against the Jewish population, are quite plain. Moreover, it can
be no coincidence that, a short time later, the military administration in France
began directing its retaliatory programme against Jews who were to be transported
to the East as hostages. However, the reconstruction of these regional mass
murders, which were now being implemented or were in preparation, does not
allow us to conclude that a decision to murder immediately all European Jews had
been made in autumn 1941.
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At that point the murder of hundreds of thousands of people was being prepared, but not of millions.
However, the politics of extermination had by now attained such a dynamic
momentum that the further extension of the murders to the whole of Europe was
the logical next step for those responsible. The further move to the mass murder of
all European Jews could only have been halted if the leadership of the regime had
now introduced a radical change of course—and that would have been precisely
the opposite of what Hitler intended at this point.
Thus, it would be a mistake to see the preparations for the regional mass
murders which began in autumn 1941 solely as a spontaneous reaction to the
obvious failure of a deportation programme to the Soviet Union, a territory which
had not yet, contrary to expectations, been conquered.
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It was rather that events represented a logical continuation of the Judenpolitik that had been pursued so far.
For the comprehensive deportation programme for the European Jews, planned
since the beginning of 1941 and now under way, had been a ‘final solution’ policy
from the outset, that is to say it was the fixed aim to destroy those people who had
been deported to the occupied Soviet territories once the war was over. Thus, the
regional mass murders of those Jews who were ‘unfit for work’ represent a
radicalization and acceleration of that ‘final solution’ policy. In the wake of the
mass shootings in Eastern Europe, the idea of a ‘final solution’, still vague at first,
began to assume sharper outlines, while the original post-war prospect for this
‘final solution’ increasingly became a feasible project that was implemented on a
growing scale already during the course of the war. With the decision in Septem-
ber to carry out mass deportations from the Reich to ghettos that were already
appallingly overcrowded, this radicalization and acceleration were deliberately
introduced by the Nazi leadership: the authorities in the reception areas were quite
intentionally presented with ‘impossible situations’. More radical solutions were