Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (70 page)

Himmler on 30 April: according to this report, the ‘preservation of prisoners only

for reasons of security, education, or prevention is no longer the priority’; it was

rather that the ‘emphasis [had] shifted to the economic side’.
13
In an order issued the same day
14
Pohl made the concentration camp commandants ‘responsible for the deployment of the workforce. This deployment must be exhausting in the true

sense of the word in order to achieve the greatest possible performance.’

It is quite plain that the ‘exhausting’ work programme of the prisoners was an

obstacle to their economically effective use in the armaments industry, which

also proceeded correspondingly slowly in the spring of 1942. Because of under-

nourishment, the disastrous living conditions in the camps, and constant exces-

sive physical demands as well as the security provisions that obstructed the

running of the work programme, the prisoners were comparatively unproduct-

ive; despite low wages (which were to be paid to the SS), the deployment of

prisoners was relatively unprofitable from the point of view of the armaments

industry.
15
The SS did not take the route of encouraging greater output from prisoners by offering incentives, as had been successfully attempted with Soviet

prisoners in 1942.
16
The prevalent idea was to terrorize the prisoners into Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

317

achieving higher performance rates before replacing the soon exhausted slave

labourers by new workers.

This unproductive, lethal deployment of forced labourers in a time of mounting

labour shortages is often seen as confirmation of the unconditional precedence of

ideological motives over economic considerations within the Nazi system, and is

singled out for its profoundly irrational and self-destructive character. But iden-

tifying such an evident ‘discrepancy between the physical extermination of the

ideological adversary and the exploitation of his workforce to develop the arma-

ments industry
’17
assumes a bipolarity between ‘world-view’ and ‘rationality’ that was alien to the world of the SS. If instead we start with the idea prevalent among

the SS leadership around the end of 1941 and beginning of 1942 that the occupation

and reordering of the ‘Ostraum’ was imminent, then the interconnection of terror

and total exploitation to death, the system of ‘extermination through work’

appears as a horribly consistent anticipation of the barbaric methods of rule

intended for the East. Just as the planned conquest in the East, which was to

ensure the rule of the ‘Aryan race’ for centuries to come, destroyed any economic

calculations, concerning the work of the prisoners too, the SS went far beyond any

considerations of profitability. This was made easier by the fact that the initial plan

was to deploy the prisoners for SS projects above all; at first the idea was

construction, then later SS armaments production.
18

From the point of view of the SS, mass murder and mass production were easily

linked with the system of ‘extermination through work’. The concentration camp

system could also be extended, and the proof for its adaptability to the conditions

of war demonstrated. Above all, ‘extermination through work’ could be used to

defuse the argument repeatedly levelled against the SS during their murder

campaigns in the Soviet Union: the ‘pointlessness’ of the extermination of

urgently required manpower. This was because with ‘extermination through

work’ a context was established that provided an ‘objective’ justification for the

extermination of people ‘unfit for work’.

When the plans for the deployment of prisoners as forced labourers became

gradually more concrete around the end of 1941 and the beginning of 1942,
19

Himmler showed himself determined to deploy a large number of Jewish

prisoners above all, especially in order to find a quick replacement for the Soviet

prisoners of war who were by now exhausted. In preparation for the planned

major construction and armaments tasks, on 26 January 1942 Himmler briefed the

head of Department D of the WVHA on its new tasks: ‘Since no more Russian

prisoners of war may be expected in the near future, I will send a large number of

Jews who have been emigrated [sic!] from Germany to the camps. Prepare to

receive 100,000 male and up to 50,000 female Jews in the concentration camps

within the next four weeks. Major economic tasks will confront the concentration

camps in the weeks to come.
’20
Over the next few months, in fact, the deportations from the Reich were to go to the district of Lublin, where some of those Jews

318

Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

‘capable of work’ had to perform forced labour in Majdanek and other camps. On

the other hand, several thousand Slovakian Jews were to be deported chiefly to

Auschwitz, where they were also to be deployed in forced labour projects.
21
Both camps had originally been intended to receive a large number of Soviet prisoners

of war. But it was to become apparent that apart from the goal of the economic

exploitation of the Jewish prisoners, Himmler achieved one thing above all with

this new policy: he created a pretext for the murder of the prisoners who were now

‘superfluous’, who were not used for the ‘work programme’.

We have access to a key document that reveals especially clearly the close

connection between ‘extermination through work’ and the murder of those

‘unfit for work’. It is a letter from the chief of the Gestapo, Müller, to the

commander of the Security Police in Riga, Karl Jäger, written on 18 May 1942.

In it he says that because of a ‘general (!) decree by the Reichsführer SS and head of

the German police’, ‘Jews between the ages of 16 and 32 are to be excluded from

the implementation of special measures until further instructions. These Jews are

to be added to the closed work programme. Concentration camp or labour camp.’

This exemption implicitly contains a reference to the fundamental guidelines that

existed for the treatment of older prisoners, younger prisoners unfit for work, and

children within the concentration camp system at this point in time: they were

subject to the ‘special measures’. We do not know whether Himmler’s order,

which Müller quotes here, the original of which has not yet been found, is more

precise with regard to the group of people to whom the exemption did not apply.

We will return to this subject elsewhere.
22

This order by Himmler came at a time when pressure on Jews still working in

German industry was constantly mounting. In March 1942, Goering had forbid-

den the deportation of this group,
23
but his prohibition had had very little effect, since the Reich Security Head Office (RSHA) interpreted the exemptions for those

Jews in the ‘closed strategic work programme vital to the war effort’ in an

increasingly restrictive way.
24
Goebbels’s diary entry for 29 May reveals that Hitler responded to the Propaganda Minister’s urging to commission Speer ‘to ensure as

quickly as possible that Jews employed in the German armaments business be

replaced by foreign workers’.
25
In view of the transport moratorium imposed in mid-June, the RSHA initially deported mainly elderly Jews to Theresienstadt, but

in September 1942 Hitler was to stress once again, at a conference on armaments,

that ‘withdrawing the Jews from the armaments factories in the Reich’ was of

prime importance.
26

But it was not only the concentration camp system that was restructured

through the policy of ‘extermination through work’ between autumn 1941 and

spring 1942. The impact of the new policy may also be observed in occupied

Poland, both in annexed Upper Silesia and in the General Government.

We have already described how in the camps of the Schmelt Organization in

Upper Silesia, which held 30,000 to 40,000 Jewish forced labourers in spring 1942,

Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

319

selections had been carried out since November 1941, sporadically at first, but soon

systematically, and those no longer fit for work were brought to Auschwitz, where

they were murdered.
27

In the ghettos and labour camps of the General Government there had also

been high mortality rates before, but that had been part of the German policy of

general decimation of the Jewish population, in which the ‘Final Solution’ had

been deferred until the post-war period. Initially from autumn 1941, but more

intensively from spring 1942, the system of ‘extermination through work’, along-

side the gas chambers, executions, and deportations, became a leading element in

the systematic murder of the Jews of the General Government.

In autumn 1941 in the district of Galicia, the SS launched what was probably

the largest forced labour project in which a Jewish labour-force was deployed:

the expansion of the strategically important road connection from Lemberg

(Lvov) towards the Donets basin, known as Durchgangsstrasse (transit road)

IV (DG IV).
28
In October 1941 Fritz Katzmann, the SSPF of the district of Galicia, had thousands of Jews put in concentration camps to work on road

construction under the most severe conditions. Katzmann’s verbal instruction to

the director of the camp was to shoot any Jews who were unfit for work or who

tried to escape, and to kill hostages for any escapees who were not caught; the

number of victims was a matter of indifference. Early in 1942 Himmler trans-

ferred to a series of SSPFs responsibility for the extension of further sections of

DG IV in the Ukraine, and on 7 February he transferred the overall running of

the project to the HSSPF of Ukraine and southern Russia, Prützmann. An order

issued by the Führer on 19 February placed extremely high priority on the

expansion of major communications, including the DG IV.

Using key German workers, members of the OT, about 50,000 Ukrainian

forced labourers, as many prisoners of war, and some 10,000 Jews were deployed

on DG IV in 1942. The existence of some thirty camps for Jewish workers in the

construction sector has been demonstrated, and some twenty more on the

Ukrainian part of the road.
29
The running of the extremely primitive camps, in which disastrous conditions prevailed, was placed in the hands of members of the

SS and the police; in some cases it was also exercised by OT staff, and the camps

were guarded by police and local guard units. After all those new prisoners who

arrived in the camp who were ‘not fit for work’ (old people, children, the sick) had

been singled out and murdered, camp inmates were constantly being shot for

inadequate levels of work, minor infringements of camp regulations, or purely on

a whim. When the work came to an end late in 1943/early in 1944, other large-scale

shootings occurred. Eighty-four shootings have been identified, in which some

25,000 Jews were murdered.
30

The forced labour project for the expansion of DG IV can be seen as a

pilot project for the takeover of all the forced labour in the General Government

by the SS and police leaders in spring/summer 1942. As we will show,
31

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

the ‘deployment’ of Jewish workers did not, from the point of view of

the SS leadership, contradict the extermination policy, but formed an integral

part of it.

Deportations from Central and Western Europe

The deportations which resumed on a large scale in 1942 were preceded in January

and February 1942 by a series of public declarations by Hitler, in which he

unambiguously recalled his ‘prophecy’ of January 1939, that in the event of a new

‘world war’ the Jews would be ‘exterminated’. Pertinent passages appear both in his

New Year proclamation,
32
his speech in the Sportpalast on the anniversary of the

‘seizure of power’,
33
and in his declaration on the occasion of the celebration of the twenty-second anniversary of the Party’s Foundation on 24 February 1942
.34
The fact that with America’s entry into the war National Socialist Germany was

actually waging a world war, Hitler’s constant habit of dating his prophecy to

the day of the outbreak of war, and the fact that he now no longer spoke of

‘destroying’ (vernichten), but of ‘exterminating’ (ausrotten), gave his threat a

particular emphasis.

The Third and Fourth Wave of Deportation from the

Greater German Reich

The further deportations from the Reich, which began in substantial numbers in

the spring of 1942, were announced in a dispatch from Eichmann to the Gestapo

regional and district headquarters dated 31 January 1942
.35
In it he wrote that the

‘recent evacuation of Jews to the East carried out in individual areas’ represented

‘the beginning of the final solution of the Jewish question in the Old Reich, the

Ostmark, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia’. However, at that point,

‘only some state police [Gestapo] headquarters could be involved in view of

limited reception possibilities in the East and difficulties with transport’. But