Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (69 page)

Government and the occupied Soviet territories from this general plan and kill

them in the short term.

Five weeks before the Wannsee Conference, Governor General Frank had

already learned that the deportation of the Jews from the General Government

could not be counted on even in the medium-to-long term.
12
He drew the conclusions from this knowledge at a meeting on 16 December:
13

In Berlin they said to us, ‘Why are people making such a fuss? We can’t do anything with

them in the Ostland or in the Reichsommissariat either; liquidate them yourselves!’

Gentlemen, I must ask you to resist any sense of compassion. We must annihilate the

Jews wherever we find them and whenever this is at all possible, in order to maintain here the whole structure of the Reich.

However, the method and time-frame for this mass murder were still undecided

in mid-December 1941, as we can see from Frank’s further remarks:

We can’t shoot these 3.5 million Jews, we can’t poison them, but we will be able to intervene in a way that will somehow lead to their successful extermination—in the context of the

greater measures that are to be discussed in relation to the Reich. The General Government must become just as free of Jews [judenfrei] as the Reich. Where and how that happens is a matter for the official bodies that we must set up and deploy here, and in due course I shall let you know how effective they are being.

The Wannsee Conference

309

The determination of the leadership of the General Government to achieve this

‘successful extermination’ in the short term provides the context for the remarks

made by the State Secretary, Bühler,the representative of the government of the

General Government, towards the end of the Wannsee Conference. Bühler stated

that the General Government would ‘welcome it if the final solution to this

question could begin in the General Government, because, in the first place, the

problem of transportation does not play a decisive role here and because these

measures will not be obstructed by issues involving labour deployment’. More-

over, the approximately 2.5 million Jews who were to be removed from the

General Government ‘as soon as possible’ were overwhelmingly ‘unfit for work’.

Thus Bühler was clearly proposing that the majority of the Jews in the General

Government should be murdered within the General Government itself, and that

they should no longer be used, as Heydrich had suggested, ‘to build roads’ in the

occupied Eastern territories.

Then the conference participants went a step further, and discussed the

question of how the Jews in the General Government and the occupied Soviet

territories were actually to be ‘removed’—in other words they talked in concrete

terms about the method for murder: ‘In the concluding stages different possible

solutions were discussed. Both Gauleiter Dr Meyer [the representative of the

Eastern Ministry] and State Secretary Dr Bühler argued that certain preliminary

measures for the final solution should immediately be taken in the relevant area

itself, although in such a way as to avoid causing disquiet among the local

population.’

These ‘preliminary measures’, however, can only have meant one thing: the

construction of extermination camps in the district of Lublin: Belzec was already

under construction, while Sobibor may have been at the planning stage. However,

the minutes do not provide any evidence that any decision was taken on the

proposals of Meyer and Bühler at the conference itself.

In fact the Wannsee Conference took place at a watershed. The original plan,

for which concrete steps had already been taken, for the comprehensive deport-

ation and annihilation of the Jews in camps in the occupied Soviet territories

(‘road-building’ as a synonym for forced labour in inadequate conditions) was still

being adhered to. However, at the same time it had become clear that the

precondition for this, an impending victory, could not be expected at least in

the short term, while in the meantime hundreds of thousands of people had been

killed in the occupied Polish territories, in Serbia, and the Soviet Union, and there

were plans to extend these massacres.

Thus, the Wannsee minutes that have survived provide a snapshot of a stage

reached in a process in the course of which the SS leadership had shifted its

perspective away from the idea of a post-war ‘final solution’ to the new aim of

implementing ever more stages of the ‘Final Solution’ during the war, in other

words to ‘anticipate’ it, while at the same time this new perspective still included

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Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941

the post-war period. During this critical period, the deportation to the occupied

Soviet territories increasingly became a fiction, while mass murder in the

General Government increasingly became reality. During the greatest crisis of

the war so far, the ‘Final Solution’ of the ‘Jewish question’ that had originally

been intended, namely the mass deportations to the occupied Soviet territories,

was becoming increasingly illusory. In this context Heydrich wished to convey

the impression to those responsible for the persecution of the Jews that the

RSHA had a plan whereby the mass murders which had begun in different ways

in various occupied territories, which represented a hitherto unimaginable

realization of state terror, could lead to a ‘total solution’ that could be imple-

mented in the long term.

While Heydrich adhered to the scheme of deportations to the occupied Eastern

territories and allowed no doubts that the deportees would be violently killed

there, the minutes of the discussion make it clear that other solutions had already

been considered, namely the possibility of murdering all the Jews in the General

Government in situ. This idea was plainly accepted after the Wannsee Conference,

and it also became gradually accepted that the deportations from the rest of

Europe, originally planned for the occupied Soviet territories, were to be diverted

to the extermination sites under construction in the General Government. On 20

January 1942, Heydrich had two chief concerns: the deportations had to be

accepted (everything that happened after the deportations was an internal SS

matter, and no longer had to be agreed with other institutions). Secondly, the

category of those to be deported had to be established: the status of Mischlinge and

those married to non-Jews had to be clarified.

This latter issue was dealt with in the second part of the conference. Heydrich

suggested that ‘Mischlinge of the first degree’ who were married to ‘Aryans’ were

as a rule to be deported or dispatched to a ‘ghetto for the aged’. Heydrich pointed

out that the complicated classification of Mischlinge by the Nazi racial laws would

have required numerous individual decisions. The State Secretary in the Reich

Ministry of the Interior, Wilhelm Stuckart, objected to the ‘endless administrative

work’ that this would inevitably produce, and suggested ‘a move to compulsory

sterilization’. This disagreement could not be settled at the conference, and was

thus to be addressed in several subsequent meetings, albeit without any conclusive

results.
14

However, by being included in the detailed discussion of the problems sur-

rounding Mischlinge and ‘mixed marriages’, the representatives of the ministerial

bureaucracy came to share both knowledge of and responsibility for the ‘Final

Solution’. For, with the concerns they raised against the inclusion of marginal

groups in the deportations, the representatives of the ministerial bureaucracy had

made it plain that they had no concerns about the principle of deportation per se.

This was indeed the crucial result of the meeting and the main reason why

Heydrich had detailed minutes prepared and widely circulated.

Part V

THE EXTERMINATION OF THE EUROPEAN

JEW, 1942–1945

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chapter 17

THE BEGINNING OF THE EXTERMINATION

POLICY ON A EUROPEAN SCALE IN 1942

By the middle of 1942, the Nazi regime was to consolidate and unify the mass

murders that it had begun in the occupied Soviet territories in the summer of 1941,

and in certain other regions of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, into a com-

prehensive programme for the systematic murder of the Jews under German rule.

The authorities gradually moved away from the idea that the mass murders were

anticipations of the ‘Final Solution’ that was to be carried out to its full extent only

after the end of the war; instead, in the middle of 1942, the conviction had become

established that the ‘Final Solution’ could be achieved by an intensification and

expansion of these murders during the war itself.

This transition to the systematic and comprehensive extermination of all Jews

under German rule contained a radical change in the idea of the temporal

sequence of the ‘Final Solution’, but at the same time it meant a change in the

context of justification into which the murders were placed. If the mass murder of

the Soviet Jews had originally been justified with reference to the extermination of

the Jewish-Bolshevik complex, as the war progressed the idea became increasingly

established that the systematic ‘cleansing’ of the country of all Jews was a first step

in the construction of an empire of Lebensraum built on a foundation of racism.

The deportation of the Jews of Central and Western Europe since autumn 1941

had in turn created ‘factual constraints’ in the deportation zones where there were

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

no possibilities of accommodation and these, as we have seen, were used to justify

the murder of indigenous Jews.

Even during these first waves of murder in Eastern Europe a distinction had

been introduced between those elements who were ‘capable of work’ and those

who were not, and thus had begun in this way to erect a further context of

justification for the mass murders which was, from the spring of 1942, transferred

to the overall European extermination programme that was under way. The

idea—ignoring realities—of a gigantic Jewish ‘workforce’ provided a seemingly

rational justification for mass murder in two respects: Jews who were ‘capable of

work’ were ruthlessly deployed in forced labour in camps and ghettos until they

were fatally exhausted, while those Jews who were ‘incapable of work’ or ‘not

deployable’ were immediately killed as ‘useless mouths’.

The launch of the systematic Europe-wide murder of the Jews was a complex

process. In order to make it more comprehensible, in this chapter we will first

give an account of two interlinking processes that led to the extension of the

murders to the whole of Europe in the first months of 1942: first of all the

intention pursued by the SS since the beginning of 1942 to deploy Jews in large

numbers as forced labourers, and thus to kill them (‘extermination through

labour’); secondly, the intention closely connected with this, to murder Jews in

Poland who were ‘incapable of work’, an intention that had been realized in the

districts of Lublin and Galicia since March 1942 with the help of stationary gas

chambers; thirdly, the beginning of the deportations of the Jews from Central and

Western Europe from the spring of 1942 onwards, to the district of Lublin, the

zone which was at this time the centre of the extermination of the Polish Jews

and—where individuals ‘capable of work’ were concerned—to Majdanek and

Auschwitz concentration camps.

As we shall see in the course of this chapter, from May and June 1942 a series of

further developments began which made a crucial contribution to the further

intensification of the mass murders that had already begun, and to their extension

into the whole of Europe: first of all, the systematic murder of Jews from Central

and Eastern Europe who were not capable of work; secondly, the extension of

systematic mass murder to the whole of Poland and the renewal of major murder

actions in the occupied Soviet territories; thirdly, the spread of the deportations to

the extermination camps to the rest of Europe.

‘Extermination through Labour’

The SS had already developed the basis for a policy of ‘extermination through

work’
1
in the late summer of 1941 in the occupied Soviet territories. The concept had been explicitly formulated by Einsatzgruppe C in September 1941, when they

suggested the ‘solution of the Jewish question by a large-scale work deployment

Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

315

of the Jews’, which would lead to ‘a gradual liquidation of Jewry’, and corre-

sponded to the ‘economic conditions of the country’.
2
In fact the Einsatzgruppen in the occupied Eastern territories had proceeded, to some extent since July and

more intensively since August and September 1941, to confine some of the Jewish

population in ghettos as part of the now systematic extermination policy, and to

use them as a labour pool.

This policy did not follow a fixed and detailed plan, but was a modification of

the extermination policy under the conditions of the protracted war; the removal

of the greatest possible number of Jews was to be harmonized with the rising

demand for labour. In this way a variant on the extermination policy came into

being: part of the Jewish population was progressively decimated by ‘work details’

that exceeded their physical capacities, by minimal food and care, and by constant

selection of those who were no longer ‘capable of work’ or no longer ‘needed’.

From autumn 1941, more intensively from spring 1942, the SS transferred this

system to other areas of their empire, namely the prisoners within the concentra-

tion camp system and the Jews in occupied Poland. With the beginning of the

‘Final Solution’—alongside the mass executions in the East, the progressive plans

for deportations from Central and Western Europe, and the ongoing construction

of extermination camps in Poland—a fourth complementary element was formed:

the murderous Jewish Arbeitseinatz (work programme), which became a pillar of

the extermination policy.

In autumn 1941 Himmler began to toy with the idea of mobilizing the potential

labour-force in the concentration camps with a view to the SS’s gigantic building

projects in the ‘Ostraum’.
3
On the one hand, he introduced measures to make forced labour in the concentration camps, which had hitherto constituted above

all a repressive measure, effective in economic terms.
4
On the other hand, in September 1941 Himmler received the Wehrmacht’s agreement that a large number of Soviet prisoners of war would be handed over to the SS; accordingly, he

ordered the expansion of the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Lublin-Majdanek concen-

tration camps to receive prisoners of war.
5
These prisoners were to be used for forced labour.

However, because of the mass deaths of the exhausted prisoners (a considerable

number of whom had also been executed in the wake of the camp selections

described above6) these plans collapsed. From late 1941 Himmler received no more

prisoners of war from the Wehrmacht.
7
After Hitler’s corresponding decision of general principle in October 1941, Soviet prisoners of war were indeed to be

deployed on a large scale in the German arms industry, but not within the

concentration camps.
8

But at the same time the SS saw an ever greater need for manpower, first

in connection with their peacetime construction programme, which will be

described below, and from the spring of 1942 increasingly also for the construction

of their own armaments production—a project that would finally fail in the face of

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

resistance from industry.
9
Accordingly, the SS pressed ahead with revision of the whole work programme of concentration camp inmates towards a more efficient

exploitation of the inmate workforce. The organizational foundations for this

project were laid between January and March 1942, through the incorporation of

the two Main Offices, Budget and Buildings Main Office and Administration and

Business Main Office, and the Concentration Camp Inspectorate into the newly

formed SS Business and Administration Main office (WVHA) under Oswald

Pohl.
10

Around the New Year in 1942, the plans of the Budget and Buildings Main

Office were gradually taking shape for the peacetime building programme of the

SS and the police. Prompted by Himmler to plan as generously as possible, the SS

Main Office chief, Hans Kammler, submitted a building programme costing in the

region of 20 to 30 billion Reichsmarks, containing, in particular, the planned

settlements in the ‘Ostraum’. To be able to realize this programme, Kammler

planned to set up SS construction brigades consisting of ‘prisoners, prisoners of

war, Jews etc.’ totalling 175,000 men.
11

Himmler set out his ideas for an ‘economization’ of the concentration camp in a

note written in late March 1942, responding to statements by Kammler, now

director of construction in the WVHA. Here Himmler criticized the fact, for

example, that Kammler had set the work performance of a prisoner at only 50 per

cent of that of a German worker. It was precisely in the raising of the individual

performance rates of the prisoner workers, Himmler stressed, that ‘the greatest

pool of labour resides. The chance to extract it is given to the head of the ‘Business

and Administration Main Office’.
12
The WVHA’s director, Pohl, stressed this change in the concentration camp system, by now under way, in a report for