Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (74 page)

had been imposed, and Himmler was also preoccupied with other issues because

of the death of Heydrich.
114

On 18 June a police meeting in Cracow agreed, as Krüger put it, that the

‘problem of Jewish resettlement urgently requires a decision’. Once the transport

moratorium was over, ‘the Jewish campaign must be stepped up’.
115
At this meeting, representatives of the civil administration, the district chiefs Ludwig

Losacker (Galicia), Herbert Hummel (Warsaw), and Michael Oswald (Radom)

pressed for an acceleration of the deportations, particularly, as the arguments

presented had it, in order to tackle ‘smuggling’ more effectively, and avoid

in advance any problems with the imminent ‘harvesting’; Hummel wanted to

remove those Jews who were ‘unfit for work’ from the Warsaw ghetto ‘within a

reasonable time’, in order to increase the profits of the ghetto industry still further.

On 22 June, at a meeting of heads of the main departments, Krüger again urged

those in charge of the General Government to intensify measures against ‘the

Jews’; he encountered resistance from the head of the Main Labour Department,

Dr Max Frauendorfer, who warned that a ‘resettlement of the Jews’ will ‘have

profound effects on all sectors of public life’; in his plea for the preservation of

Jewish workers, Frauenhofer referred expressly to Himmler, Speer, and Sauckel.
116

The civil administration thus wanted to speed up the deportations for reasons of

food and ‘security’, but to keep the workers in the ghettos and camps. A few weeks

later Krüger was to take over the issue of Jewish forced labour in the General

Government and ignore such considerations.

A few days previously, on 12 June, Himmler had ordered that the measures

for the ‘Germanization’ of large areas in the East, including the General

Government, be implemented at a faster rate, within twenty years. Early in

July Krüger suggested that the General Government be designated for settlement

by Germans.
117

Meanwhile, since the end of May, and increasingly since the temporary sus-

pension of the deportations in Lublin district on 10 June, more than 16,000 Jews

had been deported from the district of Crakow to Belzec and murdered, until these

334

Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

deportations were suspended because of the transport moratorium on 19 June.
118

In Belzec the murders had been resumed, after Wirth, who had left the camp in

April 1942, had returned to Belzec at the end of May; his return was clearly

connected with the assignment of additional T4 staff to the General Government

as agreed by Himmler and Brack with the Chancellery of the Führer of the

NSDAP.
119
In May, or by the beginning of June at the latest, work had begun on the third extermination camp, Treblinka in the district of Warsaw.
120
In the district of Radom by mid-June all the preparations had been made for a

deportation of the Jews living there.
121

The murder of the Jews in the General Government had not by any means been

interrupted by the transport moratorium. In the district of Lublin, for example,

numerous small ‘actions’ took place, but also mass executions, as for example—

between June and September—in Tyszowcew, Josefow, Lomazy, Serokomla, and

Biala Podlaska with a total of 3,500 victims.
122
In the district of Galicia, too, the mass executions were continued.
123

The transport moratorium also meant the end of the deportations from the

Reich and Slovakia to the district of Lublin. All the transports from Slovakia now

went directly to Auschwitz, where the greater proportion of deportees, beginning

with the transport of 4 July, was directly murdered in the gas chambers without

even being admitted to the camp. After the lifting of the transport moratorium the

deportations from the Reich went above all to Minsk and, over the months that

followed, to Riga, Treblinka, and Auschwitz.

After the lifting of the transport moratorium the overall situation within the

General Government emerged as follows: in the second week of July, the trans-

ports from the district of Cracow to Belzec were resumed, after the transport

moratorium had been used to extend the capacity of the gas chambers there by a

considerable amount. On the other hand, Sobibor became inoperative because of

repairs on the railway tracks until the beginning of October, and here too the

pause was used to build additional gas chambers.
124
The transports from the district of Cracow lasted until November, with the bulk of the deportations

concentrated in August and September.
125

Meanwhile the decisive preconditions for the initiation of the deportations had

also been created in the other districts. Himmler played a central part in this. After

heralding, on 9 June, the end of the Jewish ‘mass migration’ within a year, he now

seemed to have staked everything on accelerating the murder of the Jews of the

General Government as far as possible.

On 9 July Himmler discussed with Krüger and Globocnik the latter’s sugges-

tions (which have not survived) of 3 June, which we know focused on Judenpolitik

in the district.
126
After Himmler had met Hitler several times on 11, 12, and 14 July, he pressed for greater transport capacities. In response to a request from Karl

Wolff, the chief of his personal staff, the state secretary in the ministry of

transport, Albert Ganzenmüller, assured him at the end of July that, since

Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

335

22 July, a ‘train carrying 5,000 Jews has been travelling from Warsaw to Treblinka

every day, and twice a week a train from Przemysl (district of Lublin) to Belzec’.
127

On 17 and 18 July Himmler visited Auschwitz, where he was shown people being

murdered in a gas chamber.
128
Statements that he made with visible satisfaction on the evening of 17 July at a reception given by the Gauleiter of Upper Silesia led one

of his listeners to conclude that the Nazi leadership had now decided to murder

the European Jews, information that was passed on to Switzerland and from there

reached the West through the telegram from Gerhart Riegner, the representative

of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva.
129
After his stay in Auschwitz on 18 July Himmler visited Globocnik in Lublin and on 19 July, from Lublin, he gave HSSPF

Krüger the crucial order that the ‘resettlement of the entire Jewish population of

the General Government should have been implemented and completed by 31

December 1942’. After this date, no Jews were to be able to stay in the General

Government, apart from the ‘assembly camps’ of Warsaw, Tschenstochau (Czes-

tochowa), Cracow, and Lublin.
130
This meant that he had set a time limit for the extermination of the great majority of the Polish Jews.

Warsaw

After the completion of Treblinka extermination camp, 50 km from Warsaw, near

the railway line to Bialystok,
131
from 22 July deportations began from the Warsaw ghetto to what was the biggest death factory in the General Government. There

were more than 350,000 people in the Warsaw ghetto at this point, more than in

any other ghetto in Eastern Europe. By 12 September the Germans had managed

to deport more than 250,000 from Warsaw to Treblinka, to murder them in the

gas chambers there—an average of 5,000 people every day. How was it possible to

murder a quarter of a million people in only seven weeks without encountering

any notable resistance? Israel Gutman, who as a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto

has made research into the subject his life’s work, has tried to answer this

question by describing the events of the summer of 1942 as a process set in

motion with diabolical skill by the Germans and then continuously radicalized.
132

The original order for the deportation that the Jewish council announced with a

billposting campaign in response to German demands, provided for numerous

exceptions: these applied in particular to those working for the extensive admin-

istration of the Jewish council, who were in employment or even only fit for work,

and they were supposed to apply both to the immediate members of these people’s

families and to people in poor health who were unable to travel. This gave the

majority of ghetto-dwellers the illusion that they could escape deportation. This

illusion must have been fed by the fact that in the previous few months the

German ghetto administration had made considerable efforts to make the ghetto

economy more productive, thus giving the impression that it was banking on the

continuing existence of the ghetto in the medium term.
133
That such considerations 336

Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

had by now been replaced by a strategy of the systematic extermination of Jews

living in Europe was not apparent to the inhabitants of the ghetto.

The first actions were carried out by the Jewish ghetto police. The German

forces remained in the background, while the Polish police began the outward

cordoning-off of the ghetto. Gradually individual blocks and streets within the

ghetto were cordoned off, the people from the houses were driven to a central

collecting point, the ‘Umschlagplatz’, where the selection took place. People with

work permits were generally not designated for deportation; the rest were trans-

ported to Treblinka on goods trains. In this way the Germans had managed to set

the deportation process in motion with the help of the authority of the Jewish

council and the Jewish police.

From the beginning of August the method used by the Germans began to

change: German police and their Ukrainian and Latvian auxiliary troops inter-

vened increasingly in events, they became more brutal in their approach, the

selection was performed more and more indiscriminately, identification papers

were ignored more and more often. The only thing that mattered now was to fill

the daily deportation quota. The Jewish council—the chairman, Czerniakow, had

committed suicide on the second day of the deportations—was completely mar-

ginalized, indeed it was forced in August to draw up deportation lists of its

members and their relatives; the Jewish ‘police’ were forced to join in by means

of very severe punitive measures.

It seems that the great majority of ghetto inhabitants, in the face of the plainly

irresistible events and the power of their tormentors, either fell into resignation

and apathy or yielded to mostly illusory hopes of survival. They clung to the hope

that they would not be caught up in the actions or would survive the selection.

Information about the mass murder in Treblinka that was circulating in the ghetto

was overlaid with different-sounding, more optimistic rumours, according to

which the ‘resettlement’ led only to a camp where one could go on living.
134
The generally disastrous living conditions—during the actions no food entered the

ghetto—clearly reinforced the tendency to succumb to an unavoidable fate.

Exhortations from the Germans, to the effect that those who reported voluntarily

for deportation would be rewarded with extra rations, proved successful in this

situation.

Finally, in early September, an extensive selection took place lasting several days

of all those people remaining in the ghetto, in which 35,000 people—10 per cent of

the original population of the ghetto—were selected out as a usable workforce.

They were now, along with 20,000 to 25,000 people who stayed hidden in the

ghetto, to form the population of the Warsaw ghetto. The rest were deported.

Among the last to be deported were the great majority of the approximately 2,000

members of the Jewish police. Apart from the 250,000 people murdered in

Treblinka, 11,000 more were deported to labour camps, and about 10,000 were

murdered during the actions in the ghetto.

Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

337

After the halt to the deportations from Warsaw, the bulk of deportations within

the district of Warsaw shifted to the smaller communities from which tens of

thousands of people had also been deported to Treblinka by the beginning of

October.
135

The Deportations from the Other Districts

in Summer and Autumn 1942

In August the deportations in the district of Lublin were resumed. The purpose

now was the complete murder by the end of the year of those Jews in the district

who were ‘not fit for work’.
136
In August the death transports went above all to Treblinka, in September they were largely interrupted, and in October/November

(after the halt to the deportations from the district of Warsaw) they were brought

to their conclusion with the utmost energy, with the trains travelling to Treblinka,

to Sobibor (which could be reached by rail again after 8 October), and to Belzec

(which was closed in December).

At the beginning of August the deportations to Treblinka began in the district of

Radom as well: first of all there were two actions in the town of Radom itself on

4 and 5 August, and on 16 and 17 August; from 20 August the ghettos in the

administrative district were cleared. These actions reached their climax with the