Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (71 page)

‘new reception possibilities [would be] worked on with the aim of deporting

further contingents of Jews’.

The dispatch also identified those groups of people who were not yet to be

deported: Jews living in ‘mixed marriages’, Jews of foreign citizenship (excluding

stateless Jews as well as those of former Polish and Luxembourg citizenship); ‘Jews

in closed strategic work programmes’ as well as the elderly and the frail. The

separation of married couples as well as the separation from their families of

children up to the age of 14 years was to be avoided.

On 6 March 1942 Eichmann held a meeting with the representatives of the

Gestapo headquarters or Gestapo offices which were entrusted with the task of

Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

321

carrying out the deportations. Here it became clear that by this time a further

Reich-wide deportation programme had been established.
36
Eichmann announced that at first 55,000 Jews would be deported from the Reich territory including the

‘Ostmark’ and the Protectorate: 20,000 Jews were to be evacuated from Prague,

18,000 from Vienna. ‘The size of the other transports conforms proportionally to

the numbers of Jews still present in each State Police office/headquarters precinct.’

Individually, the transports could not be assigned a precise time. All that was

available were ‘empty “Russian trains”/worker transports to the Old Reich, which

were going back empty to the General Government and will now be used by the

RSHA with the agreement of the OKH’.

Eichmann also announced that it was intended that most of the Jews left in

the Old Reich would in all likelihood be deported to Theresienstadt in the course

of the summer or the autumn. Theresienstadt was being cleared at the time,

and ‘15–20,000 Jews from the Protectorate could move there temporarily’. This

would be done, Eichmann added, in order to ‘preserve outward appearances’—a

reference to the fact that the RSHA had internally reached the conclusion that the

pretext for the deportations, the supposed ‘work programme’ in the East, could be

easily seen through if, as had happened previously, old people were also deported

to the East European ghettos.

The third wave of deportations from the Reich was in the end to last from

mid-March to mid-June, and there are at least forty-three transports that are

individually known about; it may, however, have been over sixty, so that, if we

assume an average of 1,000 people per transport, a figure on the scale cited by

Eichmann of 55,000 deportees would probably have been reached.
37

The identifiable transports came primarily from the areas of the Old Reich that

were considered to be in danger from air raids (twenty-three trains) and from the

Protectorate (fourteen trains from Theresienstadt as well as one from Prague).

They were destined for a series of ghettos in the district of Lublin (particularly

Izbica, Piaski, Zamozc), whose inhabitants had been murdered in Belzec a short

time previously. Four transports ended in the Warsaw ghetto.
38
As a rule the deportation trains from the Reich stopped in Lublin, where men who were

assessed as ‘fit for work’ were taken from the trains and brought to the Majdanek

camp.
39

Hence the pattern of deportations of the Central European Jews and the murder

of the Jews of Eastern Europe corresponded to events already described that took

place in Lodz, Riga, and Minsk. The living conditions in the ghettos of the General

Government led to the miserable death of by far the majority of deportees within a

few months. Those who did not die in the ghettos were generally deported to the

extermination camps in the General Government.

The surviving documents of the German administration in the district of Lublin

indicate that here—under the designation ‘Judenaustausch’ (exchange of Jews)—the

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

indigenous Jews were ‘taken out’ of the individual communities (i.e. sent to Belzec),

and replaced by ‘Reich Jews’.
40

The ‘Judenreferent’ (expert on Jewish affairs) of the SSPF Lublin and coordin-

ator of the deportation and extermination programme in the district, Hans Höfle,

asked the district administration on 16 March, in other words immediately before

the arrival of the first transports, ‘whether 60,000 Jews could be unloaded on the

stretch between Lublin and Trawniki’.
41
As surprising as this announcement was, over the next few months the district administration was only informed at short

notice about the arriving trains, whose inmates it then distributed summarily, and

in agreement with the SSPF (Höfle), to the Jewish residential quarters, which he

had recently ‘cleared’.
42
Through this improvised procedure and the chaotic conditions that prevailed as a result of it, the district administration was placed

under the pressure of artificially created ‘factual constraints’; the deportations of

the indigenous Jews, who had to make way for the impending arrival of the ‘Reich

Jews’, thus appeared as the inevitable consequence of a decision that had been

made outside their own sphere of responsibility.

Towards the end of the third wave of deportations, in June 1942, some trans-

ports had been assembled that deviated from the previous pattern: on 10 June 1942,

in ‘retaliation’ for the death of Heydrich, 1,000 Jews were deported from Prague

to Majdanek and placed both there and in the camps in the surrounding area.
43

Finally, from mid-June the last transports of the third wave were directed

towards Sobibor extermination camp, where the majority of deportees were

murdered in the gas chambers, after even smaller groups of people had been

taken off the trains during a stop in Lublin. This is attested with certainty for a

transport from Theresienstadt, one from Berlin and one from Vienna, which

arrived in Sobibor between 15 and 19 June. It is possible that exactly the same

fate befell the people on two further Theresienstadt transports which reached

the district of Lublin on 15 and 16 June.
44
As early as 18 May, however, half of a group of around 800 people who had been deported from Theresienstadt to

Siedliszcze, had been brought to Sobibor along with the indigenous Jews and

murdered there.
45

But the actual turning point in the deportation practice occurred only in the

middle of June 1942: only from that point onwards were Jews on the trains from

the Reich, after the selection of those ‘fit for work’ in Lublin, generally sent directly to the extermination camps.

While the third wave continued, in May 1942 a fourth wave of deportations

arrived from the Reich, destined for the occupied Eastern regions. As already

described, the deportations to Minsk planned during the second wave were

interrupted in November 1941, and only continued until February 1942 in the

case of Riga. The transports to Minsk now resumed; between May and September,

in at least seventeen transports,
46
some 16,000 people were deported from the territory of the ‘Greater German Reich’, interrupted only from mid-June to

Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

323

mid-July by a military transport moratorium: now those deported to Minsk were

no longer confined to the ghetto, and instead the trains were moved on to a stop

near the estate of Maly Trostinets, where from 11 May 1942 almost all deportees

were shot on the spot or murdered in gas vans.
47
In April 1942 Heydrich is supposed to have announced the resumption of deportations and the impending

murders during a visit to Minsk.
48

Thus, with the deportations to Minsk in May and the transports to Sobibor in

mid-June, a new phase of the extermination policy began. Now the deportees were

no longer accommodated temporarily in ghettos or labour camps, before perish-

ing as a result of the disastrous living conditions, or being murdered in an

extermination camp on the grounds that they were no longer ‘fit for work’; now

the great majority of deportees were shot directly at the end of the journey or

suffocated in gas vans. The previous pattern, according to which the indigenous

Jews were deported to the extermination camps to ‘make room’ for the Jews

arriving from the Reich had thus been abandoned. The murder machinery was

thus completely freed from the context of ‘resettlement’, ‘expulsion’, and ‘work

programme’; the goal, the death of the deportees, thus emerged with even greater

clarity.

As long as the murder machinery was contained within the old pattern, it was at

least possible to maintain the fiction that the murders were the result of ‘factual

constraints’ produced by ‘resettlement’ and the ‘work programme’: the ‘clearing’

of the ghettos for the suddenly arriving deportees; execution of deportees from the

Reich because there were no adequate reception facilities (as in Riga and Kovno

(Kaunas) in late 1941); the selection of those no longer fit for work, as ‘room was

needed’ again, and ‘no food was available’; ruthless deployment for forced labour

in the service of the war economy; renewed selection. Because of the systematically

excessive demands made upon them the local offices of the civil administration

and the security police were placed in situations that spasmodically required more

and more radical solutions, or which offered them a framework of action in which

such radical solutions could be presented as ‘factually justified’.

The transport moratorium introduced for the West–East railway in June saw

the start of the deportations of those people from the Reich who, as Eichmann had

announced in January, had for various reason been exempted from the ‘Eastern

transports’; these were elderly and frail people, decorated veterans with their wives

and children under the age of 14, and Jewish spouses from a ‘mixed marriage’ that

no longer existed, who were freed from labelling regulations, as well as single ‘half-

breeds’ who were ‘deemed’ to be Jews under the Nuremberg Laws. These deport-

ations went to Theresienstadt,
49
which served not only as the ‘old people’s ghetto’

for German Jews, but also above all as a transit camp for those deported from the

Protectorate, who numbered around 74,000.
50

In June and July 1942 a total of sixteen special trains each carrying about 1,000

elderly people from the Reich set off for Theresienstadt; after a further timetable

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

programme decided in early August, twenty-one further special trains followed

between mid-August and early October. On top of this, because of the transport

moratorium that prevailed between June and July, the German authorities had

fallen back on coupling one or two passenger wagons, each carrying fifty passen-

gers to already scheduled trains; between June and October 1942, more than 100

such ‘small’ transports were organized. Overall during this period some 45,000

German and Austrian Jews were deported to the ‘old people’s ghetto’ of Ther-

esienstadt.
51
But even after this wave of deportations many smaller transports to Theresienstadt occurred throughout the winter of 1942–3.
52

In the second half of 1942 there were further deportations from the Reich which

went to Eastern European ghettos or directly to extermination camps. Various

references indicate that in July three smaller transports from the Reich with a total

of 700 passengers reached the Warsaw ghetto. Between August and October 1942

five deportations from Berlin and Theresienstadt went to Riga, as well as a further

deportation from these two places to Raasiku near Reval (Tallinn).
53

In September and October ten deportation trains travelled from Theresienstadt,

mostly with an average of 2,000 passengers, to Treblinka extermination camp, as

well as one train from Darmstadt.
54
Another three trains from Berlin, two from Vienna, and one from Theresienstadt, all of which travelled directly to Auschwitz

in the first half of 1942, can be confirmed with certainty.
55

In the last quarter of 1942 the regime intensified the pressure on those Jews

still present in the Reich. During the armaments discussion from 20 until 22

September 1942 Hitler spoke of the ‘importance of removing the Jews from the

armaments factories in the Reich’.
56
Some days later he told Goebbels of his resolution ‘to remove the Jews from Berlin at all cost’; Jewish workers were to

be replaced by foreigners.
57
At the same time Himmler agreed with Justice Minister Thierack to assume responsibility for all ‘asocial elements’, including

all Jews, Gypsies, Russians, and Poles, and their ‘extermination through work’.
58

On 5 November the RSHA announced an order from Himmler in which all

concentration camps in the Reich were to be made ‘Jew-free’, and all Jewish

prisoners were to be transferred to Auschwitz and Lublin.
59
However, it was only with the intensified recruitment of foreigners and prisoners of war for

armaments production after the beginning of 1943 and the general toughening

of domestic policy after Stalingrad that the preconditions for this new phase in