Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (72 page)

deportations were in place.

Slovakia

In February 1942, in response to a request from Himmler, the Foreign Office sent a

request to the Slovakian government for 20,000 Jewish workers to be sent to the

Reich for deployment ‘in the East’.
60
This request, as we have seen, was preceded by an offer that Himmler made to the Slovakian head of state on 20 October 1941

Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

325

during a visit to the Führer’s headquarters, to the effect that the Slovakian Jews be

deported to a special territory in the General Government; in addition, the

Slovakian government had already declared its agreement that Slovakian nationals

be included in the deportations.
61
When the Slovakian government responded to the German request of February 1942, it was thus knowingly taking the first step

towards the deportation of all Slovakian Jews.

The Slovakian Jews who had been subjected to a special law and increasingly

excluded from public and business life since April 1939, in other words immedi-

ately after the foundation of the state,
62
were now recorded on police files; all people deemed to be ‘fit for work’ between the ages of 16 and 45 were registered

separately and gradually rounded up and put in special camps.
63
On 25 March the first 1,000 girls and young women were deported to Auschwitz to work as forced

labourers. The original deportation plan had allowed for the deportation of some

13,000 men to the Majdanek camp and 7,000 women to Auschwitz.
64
In fact, between 26 March and 7 April four transports of young women (about 3,800 in all)

arrived in Auschwitz and four transports with a total of 4,500 young men in

Majdanek.
65
On the basis of a request, issued by Himmler through the Foreign Office, the Slovakian government finally declared itself ready to deport all the

Slovakian Jews (another 70,000 people).
66

On 10 April Heydrich explained the deportation programme in Bratislava.
67

The following day the deportations of whole families began. Now the deport-

ation plan was changed: seven transports are known to have arrived in Ausch-

witz, where the deportees were deployed in forced labour; another thirty-four

transports set off for the district of Lublin at around the same time.
68
The subsequent fate of the people deported to this area is comparable with those

who were deported to the same area at the same time from the Reich. The

Slovakian Jews were mostly transported to places from which the indigenous

Jewish population had been taken to the extermination camps of Belzec and

Sobibor. Accommodation in these places—for which in general no preparations

whatsoever had been made—was in some cases only a brief stop before further

deportation to the extermination camps, in others it became an imprisonment

under wretched conditions that lasted for months and even years. Again, those

men who were fit for work were taken out of the transports that came via Lublin

and imprisoned in Majdanek camp; in all there may have been 8,500 men, of

whom 883 were still living in the camp in July 1943.
69

Since the beginning of June the inmates of a total of ten transports that were not

deemed ‘fit for work’ at the selection in Lublin and were not locked up in

Majdanek camp, women and children above all, had no longer been placed in a

ghetto, but rather taken directly to Sobibor extermination camp where they were

murdered. This meant that the Slovakian Jews too were now caught up in that

escalation of extermination to which the Jews deported to Minsk from the

‘Greater German Reich’ had fallen victim since mid-May. The last Sobibor

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

transport set off from Slovakia on 14 June, a day before the deportations from the

Reich to the district of Lublin were stopped.
70

After this all Slovakian transports came to Auschwitz where, beginning with the

train that arrived on 4 July 1942, a selection now regularly occurred on the ramp:

Jews who were ‘fit for work’ were sent to the camp, while those deemed ‘unfit for

work’, meaning in particular all children, their mothers, and elderly people, were

murdered in the gas chambers immediately after their arrival. By 21 October we

are able to identify eight transports from Slovakia whose inmates suffered

this fate.
71

But information and rumours about the fate of the deportees trickled in to

Slovakia and led to growing resistance against the continuation of the existing

Slovakian policy. The Catholic Church in Slovakia and the Vatican intervened,

leading politicians spoke out against a continuation of the deportations and

tried to sabotage any persecutory measures; dissent was also voiced by leading

representatives of business. The general contextual conditions in domestic

politics were favourable to this attitude of opposition: after Prime Minister

Tuka, the most important representative of a radical and unconditionally pro-

German policy, had been to a large extent deprived of power in the spring of

1942, within the Slovakian government there was a gradual transition to a more

moderate policy.
72

We should not ignore the fact that a significant role in the formation of this

increasing opposition to the continuation of a radical anti-Jewish policy was

played by a Jewish resistance group that had formed within Ustredna Zidov (the

central Jewish council), the official compulsory organization for the Slovakian

Jews: the so-called ‘subsidiary government’ around the Zionist youth leader Gisi

Fleischmann and the rabbi Michael Dor Weissmandel.
73
They systematically collected information concerning the fate of the deportees, used a great variety

of methods to stir up resistance to the deportations within influential Slovakian

circles, and made contact with Jewish and non-Jewish organizations abroad. The

‘subsidiary government’ went so far as to bribe the German ‘Jewish adviser’, Dieter

Wisliceny, with a considerable sum of dollars to bring the deportations to a

standstill; but the question of whether this method really played any part in the

decision to stop the deportations remains unresolved.

At the end of June—some 50,000 Slovakian Jews had been deported—it became

apparent that there were hardly any people left for further deportations. Of the

89,000-strong Jewish minority, a considerable proportion—more than 25,000—

had letters of protection from various offices or fell under particular exceptional

categories.
74
In July another four transports went off, two in September and one in October, then they were stopped by the Slovakian authorities. Altogether, almost

58,000 people had been deported in fifty-seven transports.
75

Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

327

France and the First Outlines of a Deportation Programme

for Western Europe

In the face of continuing attacks by the French resistance, at the end of 1941

the military administration in France continued its policy of reprisals: on 15

December 95 hostages, including 58 Jews, were shot, a high monetary penalty to

be paid by the Jewish population of the occupied zone had been established, and

1,000 Jews and 500 Communists designated for a transport ‘to the East’. In order

to fill this quota, the occupying forces, again with the support of the French police,

had arrested 743 Jewish men, who were held along with 300 men previously

arrested at the Compiègne camp: the actual deportation, however, was at first

delayed for lack of means of transportation.
76

After Eichmann had approved the deportation of these 1,000 people on

1 March,
77
according to information from Theodor Dannecker, the expert for Jewish affairs of the Gestapo, it was agreed at a meeting in the RSHA on 4 March

to suggest that the French government deport ‘some 5,000 Jews to the East’. These

were ‘initially to be male Jews who were fit for work, no older than 55’, who were

also French citizens.
78
Also according to Dannecker, Heydrich is supposed to have agreed at this discussion that after the first 1,000 people ‘another 5,000 Jews

were to be transported from Paris in the course of 1942’; for 1943 he had

announced ‘further major transports’.
79

The first ‘hostage transport’, totalling 1,112 people, of whom half were French

Jews and half Jews of other nationality, arrived in Auschwitz on 30 March.
80
For the deportation of a further 5,000 people, Eichmann had given more detailed

instructions to the commander of the Security Police in France, Helmut Knochen,

on 12 March: only Jews of German, French, formerly Polish, and Luxembourg

nationality were to be deported, of whom no more than 5 per cent were to be

women.
81
In March responsibility for all police matters and expressly all sanctions had been transferred to the newly created office of a Higher SS and Police

Commander in France; the position was occupied by Karl Oberg, the former

SSPF in the district of Radom.
82

By the end of May—as a response to further attacks by the resistance movement—

a further 471 people, Jews and Communists, had been shot in the occupied zone;

the military administration had also designated so many people for deportation

as a reaction to individual assassination attempts that the quota of 5,000 Jews set

out in the March deportation plans of the RSHA had already been reached.
83

On 13 May, Dannecker established at a meeting with the head of the railway

transport department, Lieutenant General Kohl, on 13 May, that he was an

‘uncompromising adversary of the Jews’ who ‘agrees 100 % to a final solution of

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

the Jewish question with the goal of the total extermination of the adversary’.
84

The next five transports, each with 1,000 people, left Compiègne between 5 June

and 17 July, destined for Auschwitz.

During a visit to Paris at the beginning of May, Heydrich is supposed to have

announced that ‘greater, more perfect, more numerically fruitful’ solutions were

in preparation to kill the Jews of Europe.
85
At the same time Heydrich objected to further hostage shootings in France, welcome news for the military, who assumed

that deportations from France would be less provocative to the Resistance than

executions in the country itself.
86

On 11 June 1942 a meeting was held in the RSHA attended by the ‘Jewish

experts’ in Paris, The Hague, and Brussels. Dannecker recorded that the meeting

concluded that ‘for military reasons’ ‘an evacuation of Jews from Germany to the

Eastern deportation zone’ could not be carried out during the summer. ‘RFSS has

therefore ordered that large numbers of Jews should be transferred either from

the South East (Serbia) or from the occupied Western territories to Auschwitz

concentration camp for the purposes of work. The fundamental condition is that

the Jews (of both sexes) are between the ages of 16 and 40. 10 % of Jews unfit for

work can be sent with them.’ At the meeting an agreement was reached about the

quotas from the occupied Western territories: according to this, 15,000 Jews were

to be deported from the Netherlands, 10,000 from Belgium, and 100,000 from

France, including from the unoccupied zone. ‘The transports are to start moving

from 13 July, about 3 per week.’
87

The original plans of early March, in which the RSHA had planned the deport-

ation of a total of 6,000 Jews from France for 1942, had thus been considerably

extended. The determining factor here was not only the ‘military grounds’, the

transport moratorium caused by the German summer offensive; it was rather that

in March/early April the RSHA’s plans had consolidated to such an extent that the

outlines of an initial Europe-wide deportation programme became visible, in the

context of which not only the Reich and Slovakia were to be made ‘Jew-free’, but a

considerable proportion of the Jews living in the occupied Western territories were

to be deported and murdered.

One important clue to the existence of such a programme is a minute
88

from the office of the Slovakian Prime Minister, Tuka, dated 10 April, con-

cerning a visit from Heydrich on the same day. On this occasion Heydrich

explained to Tuka that the planned deportation of the Slovakian Jews was

‘only part of the programme’. At that point a ‘resettlement’ of a total of ‘half a

million’ Jews was occurring ‘from Europe to the East’. Apart from Slovakia,

the Reich, the Protectorate, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France were

affected.

Now (at the meeting in the RSHA on 11 June) this programme was modified

and accelerated in view of the impending transport stoppage in June: now, within

a few weeks, the deportation of a total of 125,00 Jews from the occupied Western

Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

329

territories was to begin within a few weeks, and at the same time it was made clear

that this first big wave of deportations—like the agreements with Slovakia—was to

encompass the Jews (aged between 16 and 40) meant for the ‘work programme’ in