Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (75 page)

clearance of the biggest ghetto in the district, Tschenstochau, between 22 September

and 7 October, in which 33,000 people were deported to Treblinka. At the end of

October some transports from this district were also sent to Belzec. At the beginning

of November the clearances in the district of Radom were concluded. In toto, more

than 300,000 people from this district were murdered in less than three months.
137

After systematic preparations in the second half of July, at the instigation of

SSPF Katzmann, in late July the mass murder of the Jewish population of Galicia

was resumed with the deportations from Przemysl to Belzec. In Lemberg (Lvov)

alone, in the big ‘August action’ between 10 and 25 August we may assume that

more than 40,000 Jews, about half of the then Jewish population of the city, were

arrested and deported to Belzec in goods trains, into each of which about 5,000

people were crammed, and murdered there.
138
During this action, in which hundreds of people were murdered on the spot, including the patients in the

hospitals and the children in the Jewish orphanage, Himmler and Globocnik

stayed in the city on 17 August.
139
Initially those spared from deportation involved many fit for work, mostly men and women under the age of 35. They were now

locked up in a ghetto in which there were 36,000 Jews in September. The

‘selections’, however, had been carried out under such chaotic conditions that

we cannot speak of a systematic separation of Jews who were ‘fit for work’ from

those who were not.

The deportations from the counties (Kreise) of the district of Galicia were also

resumed at the end of July and—interrupted by a fourteen-day pause during the

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

Lvov campaign—systematically continued.
140
Again, thousands of people were shot on the spot, but the largest part of the Jewish population was deported to

Belzec. In most county towns ghettos were now set up for the surviving Jews,

where they had not existed before. Between the end of July and the beginning of

September 140,000 Jews had been murdered in the district of Lublin. At the

beginning of October 1942, however, the regular deportations to Belzec extermin-

ation camp came to a standstill, as the murder machinery could no longer keep

pace with the large number of deportees. The gas chambers had been extended,

but the area of the camp proved too small and threatened to collapse under the

large number of murder victims.

In October a second wave of murders began in the district of Lublin, in which

the Jewish communities were almost entirely wiped out.
141
It would seem that Krüger and Katzmann made considerable efforts, precisely because of the growing

difficulties—the halt in deportations to Belzec, the constant arguments with army

headquarters and the civil administration over the question of preserving Jewish

workers, the increasing number of Jews escaping as knowledge about the mass

murder spread—to achieve by any means the goal set by Himmler of finishing the

murder campaigns by the end of the year, not least by intensifying the mass

executions. In December Belzec extermination camp had to be closed because of

the difficulties that had been becoming apparent for some time, and between

15 December and 15 January a transport moratorium was imposed. In 1942 a total

of 300,000 Jews must have been murdered in eastern Galicia, since according to

German data 161,000 Jews were still alive.
142

Seen overall, we have the following picture: while after the lifting of the

transport moratorium in July and Himmler’s order of 19 July the deportations

were first channelled from the district of Warsaw to Treblinka and from the

district of Cracow to Belzec, the focus of the mass murders was shifted from late

summer and in autumn 1942 to the districts of Galicia, Radom, and Lublin.

The actions in which the majority of the Jewish population of the General

Government were murdered between the spring and autumn of 1942 followed a

consistent pattern that had first been applied in the clearance of the ghetto of

Lublin and had been constantly refined since then. These operations were run by a

special ‘resettlement staff’ and carried out by the Security Police and the Order

Police, with the Trawniki generally deployed to cordon off the actions. The civil

administration performed indispensable services in the preparation of the actions:

it produced the statistics of the Jewish population, moved the rural population to

certain collecting ghettos, and issued identification papers for those Jewish work-

ers who were still required. Equally indispensable was the close collaboration with

the Reich railways, which had to ensure the regular availability of the deportation

trains.

The effectiveness of the campaigns themselves was based on the element of

surprise and calculated terror, designed to throw the population of the ghetto into

Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

339

a panic and prevent any resistance. The Jewish councils were informed a short time

before the imminent ‘resettlement’, and the Jewish police were forced to help drag

the people from the houses, usually in the early hours of the morning. If the clearing

of a ghetto lasted days or even weeks, an attempt was made to conceal the planned

extent of the overall operation and cover the ghetto with a series of shock oper-

ations. The people driven to collection points were always subjected to a selection: it

decided who was to be sent in packed goods trains to the extermination camps. The

selection process was often quite capricious, and those who had been selected for

work were often designated for transport to the extermination camps. If those

responsible for the mass murder had initially used the slogan that those ‘unfit for

work’ were to be removed, in order to create the impression that the murder was

based on a rational calculation, this claim was now in practice rendered absurd.

Throughout the entire process people who hid or failed to follow instructions

were shot, but also often murdered on an utter whim. After the execution of the

‘actions’ the streets of the ghettos were often scattered with corpses.

A Jewish work troop immediately had to start clearing up; at the same time any

valuable objects or other property that were found were collected and sorted. The

exploitation of the personal belongings of the victims was an integral component

of ‘Aktion Reinhardt’.
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Treblinka

In the second half of 1942 the Treblinka camp was to assume a central role in the

extermination process in comparison with the two other extermination camps,

Belzec and Sobibor.

The camp complex covered an area of around 20 hectares and, in a densely

forested setting, was screened off from the eyes of the outside world.
144
Having its own spur line made it possible to drive the deportation trains, each crammed with

6,000 or 7,000 people, directly into the camp. At first Treblinka held a building

with three gas chambers into which the deadly exhaust fumes were fed from a tank

engine. In autumn 1942 the murder capacity of Treblinka, like that of the two

other Aktion Reinhardt camps, was extended: a larger building was built, contain-

ing an estimated ten chambers. The staff of the camp consisted of about 30 to

40 SS men, mostly staff from Aktion T4 as well as between 90 and 120 Trawniki

men. There was also a work unit of Jewish prisoners who were within a very short

space of time ‘selected’, murdered, and replaced by new companions in misery.

In the first phase of the camp, dating from 23 July to 28 August 1942, the

murder of thousands of people every day had the qualities of a crazed massacre.

Many people who attempted to escape the trains as they approached the camp

were shot by the guards outside the camp. Often the shootings were continued

within the camp itself; if the gas chambers were not working or were over-

burdened, actual mass executions were carried out, and there were also numerous

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

random murders. Often people arriving in the camp were faced with indescrib-

able images. The arrival area was scattered with corpses. The guards reacted to the

panic that arose with further shootings.
145

These circumstances, but also the inability of the camp administration to

collect the valuable items stolen from the Jews and pass them on to Aktion

Reinhardt headquarters, led to an inspection of the camp and its temporary

closure.

The camp was now reorganized and rebuilt under the auspices of Christian

Wirth, the Inspector of the Sonderkommando Action Reinhardt; the previous

commander, Irmfried Eberl, was dismissed and replaced by Franz Stangl, the

commander of Sobibor extermination camp.
146
On 4 September the murder in Treblinka was resumed. To make it easier for people to leave the wagons a ramp

had been built, and with the corresponding erection of buildings the impression

was created of being in a railway station. Frail people who might have suffered

from the tempo of the murder process were now selected immediately after

their arrival and brought to the camp hospital, where they were shot. The

remaining crowd were told that they were now in a transit camp; after they

had undressed and handed over their valuables, they were driven down the

fenced-off and concealed ‘tube’ (Schlauch) to the gas chambers, where they were

murdered.

By the end of 1942 precisely 713,555 people had been murdered in Treblinka.

This figure appears in a telegram from Höfle that was found some years ago in the

decoding reports of the radio reconnaissance department of the British Secret

Service.
147
This document provides us with the figures of the victims who had been murdered in the other Aktion Reinhardt camps. According to this report, 434,598

persons had been murdered in Belzec by the end of 1942. Since Belzec was already

closed at this point, this represents the total number of murders for this exter-

mination camp. The corresponding figures for Sobibor and Lublin-Majdanek are

101,370 and 24,733 respectively. This brings the total number of people killed in the

Aktion Reinhardt camps at this point to 1,274,166.
148

By the end of 1942, according to official German figures, only 298,000 of

originally 2.3 million Jews were still living in the General Government.
149
If we assume that 300,000 Jews might have managed to escape from the German to the

Soviet sector after the occupation of the country, and if we also take into consid-

eration the figure of 100,000 Jews who were murdered in Galicia in the summer

and autumn of

150

1941 and the winter of 1941/2

as well as the increased mortality

rates
151
in the ghettos before the start of the liquidations, we reach the conclusion that almost 1.5 million Polish Jews fell victim to the ghetto clearances of 1942.

It thus represents the largest single murder campaign within the Holocaust.

It is hardly comprehensible that this series of gigantic mass murders could have

been played out almost entirely according to plan, without its terrible course being

impeded by any external factors. Thus the ‘actions’ could be carried out in

Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

341

the closed-off ghettos without any disturbances being feared from the Polish

population living in the immediate vicinity.

On the Jewish side there was practically no resistance. As we have seen, the

wave of ghetto liquidations caught the Jewish councils entirely unawares, they had

no chance of stopping the murder machinery or even obstructing its efficiency.

Since the start of the German occupation the Jewish councils had set about

ensuring as far as possible the survival of the population of the ghettos through

a policy of submissiveness to the German occupying forces. This attitude basically

ruled out any response of resistance.

But beyond this, apart from desperate individual acts of resistance, there

were clearly no organized groups or spontaneous initiatives within the Polish

ghettos that might even have attempted to resist the bloody actions. It was

only in the spring of 1942, in the wake of the first clearances, that the first

resistance groups came into existence, although they only resisted the defini-

tive liquidation of the ghettos the following year in Warsaw and a number of

other places. By this time, however, only a small minority of Polish Jews

remained alive.
152

The Takeover of Jewish Forced Labour by the SS

In parallel with the expansion of systematic mass murder to the whole territory

of the General Government, Himmler’s organization took on the entire respon-

sibility for Jewish forced labour, the sphere that had for a long time constituted

the only barrier against the complete murder of the Jewish population. In the

hands of the SS, forced labour—in the sense of ‘extermination through work’—

now became an integral component of the murder programme in the General

Government.
153