Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (73 page)

particular.

But the quota of 100,000 Jews to be deported from France, cited on 11 June, could

not be reached, as Dannecker wrote to the RSHA, saying that there was no

‘definitive clarity about the number of Jews to be taken on from the unoccupied

zone, and he was now only in a position’ ‘of being able to name departure stations

for c.40,000 Jews’.
89
Eichmann informed Rademacher about the new changes in the deportation plans on 22 June 1942. According to these, from mid-July or

early August, in daily transports of 1,000 people each, ‘first of all 40,000 Jews

from the French occupied zone, 40,000 Jews from the Netherlands and 10,000

Jews from Belgium are to be transported for the work programme to Auschwitz

camp’.
90
According to this plan, these transports were estimated to take three months.

However, the next day, 23 June, the RSHA Jewish desk received a new

instruction from Himmler, as Dannecker learned in Paris from Eichmann at

the beginning of July. This stated: ‘all Jews resident in France are to be deported

as soon as possible.’ The ‘previously planned rate (3 transports each of 1,000

Jews every week)’ must ‘be significantly raised within a short time . . . with the

goal of freeing France entirely of Jews as soon as possible’.
91
This order from Himmler to implement the ‘Final Solution’ in France completely and as quickly

as possible must be seen as part of the escalation of the extermination policy

directed against the Jews throughout the whole of Europe; we have already

examined the measures that applied to the German Reich and Slovakia, and in

the following sections we shall describe the corresponding radicalization in

Eastern Europe.

On 27 June, Carltheo Zeitschel, the fanatical ‘Jewish expert’ within the German

embassy and liaison with the SD, noted of a conversation with Dannecker that

the latter required ‘50,000 Jews to be transported from the unoccupied territory

to the East as soon as possible’.
92
In negotiations with HSSPF Carl Oberg, the chief of police of the Vichy government, René Bousquet, declared himself willing,

at the beginning of July, to arrest stateless or foreign Jews in the unoccupied zone

as well as to make the police under his command available for the arrest of Jews

in the occupied zone; this collaboration, however, would also be limited to

foreign or stateless Jews.
93
(‘Stateless’ referred in particular to those Jews who had lost their citizenship as a result of German race legislation or the events of

the war.) The Vichy government acceded to this outcome of the negotions.
94
But at this point Dannecker, Eichmann’s Jewish expert in France, was working on the

assumption, as he reported to Berlin, that in a ‘2nd phase’ those Jews naturalized

as a result of the French immigration legislation of 1919 and 1927 ‘could be

tackled’.
95

330

Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

The ‘Final Solution’ in Eastern Europe 1942

Poland

The Deportations from the Districts of Lublin and Galicia to the

Extermination Camps of Belzec and Sobibor

On 20 January 1942 the population and welfare department of the General

Government demanded that its offices attached to the district governors ‘send a

list of ghettos in their district as soon as possible’, and forward their population

figures.
96
These statistics had already been used in the preparation for the deportations in the districts of Lublin and Galicia.

They could start on this since Belzec extermination camp, the construction of

which had begun the previous November, was completed in March 1942. Belzec,

in the south-eastern part of the district of Lublin, directly on the railway line to

Lemberg (Lvov) was to be the prototype of the extermination camps built in the

General Government. It covered a relatively small area, a rectangle with sides

about 270 m long, and initially consisted of a barrack with three gas chambers.

The staff consisted of 20 to 30 Germans, and 90 to 120 so called ‘Trawnikis’: Soviet

prisoners of war, Ukrainians, and ethnic Germans who had passed through the

Trawniki SS training camp in the district of Lublin, run by Globocnik. Apart from

that, there was a Jewish work unit in Belzec whose members were repeatedly

replaced by newly arrived prisoners and murdered.

A spur line made it possible to move railway wagons directly into the camp.

Here the victims were led to believe that they were in a transit camp. Men,

woman, and children were separated; they had to undress, hand over their

valuable objects, women had their hair cut off. The people were then driven

naked along a narrow, fenced path, known as the ‘Schlauch’, or ‘tube’, to the gas

chambers, which were disguised as shower rooms. An engine produced the

deadly exhaust fumes which would generally kill the victims in an agonizing

way within 20 to 30 minutes.
97
Jewish forced labourers then had to take the corpses of the murdered people out of the gas chambers and transport them to

the large graves in the camp grounds, which had been dug by Jewish forced

labourers in 1940.

In the district of Lublin the deportations began in mid-March: between 16 March

and 20 April the ghetto in the district capital, Lublin, was almost completely cleared

in two phases.
98
This enterprise was run by SS and police chief Odilo Globocnik and by units of the Security Police, the Order Police, and Trawniki men, while the civil

administration provided essential support.
99
Himmler had stayed there immediately before the beginning of the clearance of the Lublin ghetto, which marks the

beginning of the systematic murder of the Jews in the General Government and

Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

331

became the model for many similar ‘campaigns’. He had met HSSPF Friedrich

Krüger in Lublin on 13 March, and Globocnik the following day.
100

During the clearance of the Lublin ghetto, many people had already been shot

within the ghetto; a few thousand people were retained in situ as a workforce, and

some 30,000 were deported to Belzec, where they were murdered. The fiction of a

‘resettlement’ to the occupied Eastern territories was outwardly maintained, but

within a short time information about the fate of the deportees within the whole of

the General Government filtered out into the Reich.
101
Thus, for example, the propaganda minister, Goebbels, was informed about the murders in the district of

Lublin as early as 27 March, as his diary reveals: ‘Starting with Lublin, the Jews are

now being deported from the General Government to the East. A rather barbaric

procedure is being applied, one which should not be described in greater detail,

and little remains of the Jews themselves.’ Goebbels’s remark that ‘60% of them

must be liquidated, while only another 40% can be deployed in work’ provides a

significant indication of current German plans. The ghettos in the General

Government that were being ‘vacated’, Goebbels went on, would ‘now be filled

with Jews deported from the Reich, and the procedure is to be repeated there after

a certain time’.
102

A statement by Eichmann to the Israeli police also reveals that Globocnik had

been given the task of murdering the majority of the Jews in the district, namely

those ‘incapable of work’. According to Eichmann’s information, once the mass

murder had already begun, Globocnik had acquired Heydrich’s authorization to

kill a further 150,000, probably 250,000 people.
103
The statement by Christian Wirth’s adjutant, Joset Oberhauser, according to which initially only ‘Jews from

various ghettos who are unfit for work should be liquidated’, points in the same

direction, and it was only in April or May that Globocnik was given the order

‘systematically to exterminate the Jews’.
104

In parallel with the start of the clearance of the ghetto of Lublin came the

deportation of Jews from the Reich and Slovakia to the district of Lublin, which

had already been set aside for the planned ‘Jewish reservation’ since autumn 1939.

As we have already described, the people deported to the district were accommo-

dated in places from which the local Jews deemed ‘unfit for work’ were deported to

Belzec. These deportations from the rural areas of the district began on 24 March.

By mid-April some 14,000 Jews had been deported from these small communities

to Belzec; then the extermination camp was temporarily closed. The reasons for

this are not entirely clear. It is possible that Wirth, who had built the camp and

run it during its first phase, saw his task as over; he had at first only been delegated

to Globocnik by the T4 programme.
105

In mid-March, in the district of Galicia, too, a new wave of mass murders began

and, for the first time, deportations to extermination camps. From mid-March

until early April 1942 about 15,000 people, inhabitants of the ghetto of Lemberg

(Lvov) who were deemed ‘incapable of work’, were deported to Belzec. Further

332

Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

thousands of inhabitants from the smaller ghettos of the district took the same

journey between mid-March and around 8/9 April, while thousands more from

these ghettos were murdered on the spot.
106
These deportations were also directed by Globocnik’s staff.

The systematic clearance of the Kreise (counties) began in the district of Lublin,

independently of the arrival of Jews from other countries and even before the civil

administration could begin to record all Jews capable of work. The victims—apart

from about 2,000 forced labourers who were deported to Majdanek—were sent to

Sobibor, the second extermination camp in the General Government, which had

been built in the meantime and the construction and operation of which was

based on Belzec.
107
Belzec, on the other hand, as mentioned above, had initially been shut down in the middle of April. More than 55,000 people fell victim to this

wave of deportations, which was interrupted on 10 June. The deportations from

the district of Lublin would not be resumed until August/September.
108

Extension of the Murders to the Other Districts

The temporary stop to the deportations from the district of Lublin in early June is

likely to have been due to the decision to extend the mass murder of the Jews to the

whole of the General Government. The deportations now encompassed the district

of Cracow, while Globocnik’s specialists will probably already have been engaged

with the preparations for the deportations from other districts, namely Warsaw. This

decision quickly to extend mass murder to the other districts can only be recon-

structed on the basis of the course of the deportations. It must have happened

between the attack on Heydrich on 27 May and his death on 4 June. Himmler’s

address to SS and police leaders at Heydrich’s funeral in Berlin on 9 June contains an

important indication of such a momentous decision: ‘Within a year we will definitely

have completed the mass migration of the Jews; then no more will migrate.’
109

With the appointment of HSSPF Krüger as state secretary for security issues in

the General Government in May 1942 the weight of the SS had decisively grown

compared to that of the civil administration. In particular, Krüger was assigned

responsibility for all ‘Jewish affairs’ by the implementation order of 3 June, which

concerned his new position as state secretary.
110
In this way, the SS had created the organizational preconditions for the murder of all the Jews in the General

Government by means of a combination of executions, deportations to particular

extermination camps, and forced labour.

The murder of the Jews throughout the General Government—like the mass

murders in the districts of Lublin and Galicia—was to be organized by Globocnik’s

staff. The whole campaign was run under the heading ‘Aktion Reinhardt’ or

‘Aktion Reinhard’, a posthumous tribute to Reinhard Heydrich, who had died on

4 June 1942 as the result of an assassination attempt some days previously.
111

Individually, the ‘Reinhardt Actions’ encompassed the extermination of the Jews

Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

333

of the General Government and the district of Bialystok in the three extermination

camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka as well as in Majdanek; it also included the

murder of other Jews in these camps as well as the utilization of the goods and

chattels of those who had been murdered, as well as the deployment of the Jews for

forced labour.
112

On 3 June 1942, the day when Krüger’s authority was decisively extended,

Globocnik sent Himmler several memos concerning ‘ethnic policy’ in the district

of Lublin. The content of these memos is not known in detail, but two of these

papers concerned the fate of the Jews,
113
another the issue of ‘German-ness’

(Deutschtum). Himmler only returned to these proposals during a further meeting

with Globocnik on 9 July. In the meantime—from about 19 June until 7 July—

because of the imminent offensives in the East a general transport moratorium