Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (76 page)

In May and June it had still looked as if Jewish workers would continue to be

deployed on a large scale in the General Government, and as if the extension of

murder to the whole territory of the General Government would continue to

involve primarily those members of the Jewish population who were ‘unfit for

work’. The Senior Quartermaster of the military commander,
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State Secretary Dr Josef Bühler,
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and the director of the Labour Division of the General Government, Frauendorfer,
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the latter as late as 22 June, had insisted on receiving Jewish workers, and on 9 May HSSPF Krüger had issued a regulation intended to replace

Polish, Ukrainian, and other ‘Aryan non-German workers’ with Jewish specialists.

On 20 May HSSPF Krüger had promised the Wehrmacht Armaments Inspection

to replace Polish workforces deported to the Reich with 100,000 Jews.
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After HSSPF Krüger had become responsible for all ‘Jewish affairs’ at the

beginning of June, the Labour Administration informed the Labour Offices on

25 June that Jews could only be procured by agreement with the security and

police commanders. On 17 July Krüger informed the Armaments Inspection that

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

the previous agreements about workforce deployment were invalid, because

armaments factories would henceforth be supplied with Jewish forced labourers

who had been brought together in camps controlled by the Higher SS and Police

Commanders.
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Also in July, at the time when the deportations had been resumed, particularly from Warsaw, Krüger ordered that only Jews between the

ages of 16 and 35 could be used. This crucial restriction, which corresponded to an

instruction from Himmler probably issued in May 1942, amounted to a death

sentence for all people outside that age-group.
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After the incident in Przemysl (the local Wehrmacht commandant had pre-

vented the removal of the local Jewish workforce by closing a bridge
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), Krüger ordered all Jewish forced labour camps to be closed. On 5 September, the head of

OKW, Keitel, gave the order for all Jewish workforces in the General Government

to be replaced by Poles.
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The director of armaments inspection in the General Government, Curt Ludwig Freiherr von Gienanth, was dismissed for protesting

against this measure.
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However, during the armaments conferences that took place between 20 and

22 September 1942, in view of the dramatic labour shortage, Hitler declared

himself in agreement with Sauckel’s suggestion that, for the time being, qualified

Jewish specialist workers should continue to be employed in the General Govern-

ment.
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Himmler, who clearly discussed the consequences of this decision with Hitler on 22 September 1942,
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now revised the intention he had expressed in July 1942 to murder all the Jews in the General Government by the end of 1942. Instead,

on 9 October 1942, he ordered the ‘so-called armaments workers’ in textile

factories etc. in Warsaw and Lublin to be consigned to concentration camps.

The Jews working in the ‘real armaments factories’ were to be gradually removed

from these factories, so that in the end there would be ‘if possible only a few large

Jewish concentration camp concerns in the East of the General Government’.

‘However, there too, according to the Führer’s wishes the Jews are eventually to

disappear.’
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Police regulations issued in October and November 1942 ordained that

(apart from the forced labour camps), ‘Jewish residential districts’ might

only continue to exist in a total of fifty-four places.
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The Jews held there and in the camps were declared ‘labour prisoners’ of the Higher SS and Police

Commanders.
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Apart from these, there still existed the so-called ‘Jewish camps’ in the various armaments factories; the forced labourers imprisoned

there, according to an agreement between HSSPF Krüger and the commander

of the military district, were subject to the Wehrmacht armaments inspec-

tion.
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With these regulations the SS had created the crucial precondition for henceforth keeping alive only those Jews working in armaments production.

For all others, including the family members of the slave labourers, this

amounted to a death sentence.

Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

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The Annexed Polish Territories: Upper Silesia and the Warthegau

In the Polish territory directly annexed by the Reich, in Upper Silesia and the

Warthegau, the systematic murder of the Jewish population began in 1942.

It appears important for the overall development of the Holocaust that it was in

May, the point in time when the murders in the district of Lublin were extended,

that the SS set in motion a further ‘regional final solution’ on Polish territory: on

12 May 1942 Heydrich ordered the abolition of the police border which had until

then separated the western strip of Upper Silesia (the territory with a relatively

sizeable German population) from the eastern part (predominantly inhabited by

Poles) and offered a guarantee that the Jews forcibly ‘resettled’ from west to east

would not be able to return. With this decision on Heydrich’s part it was clear that

the ‘deportation territory’ would in future no longer be required. The same day

thousands of Jews unfit for work from Sosnowitz and Bendzin as well as a number

of other places were deported to Auschwitz and murdered there.
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On 12 August a selection of the Jews living in Sosnowitz and Bendzin began, and lasted several

days; some 11,000 people, the old and the sick and mothers with children, were

finally killed in Auschwitz, around 9,000 people were deported to the labour

camps of the Schmelt Organization . Between May and August 1942 a total of

around 38,000 Jews were deported from the ‘Eastern Strip’, about 20,000 to

Auschwitz, the rest to the Schmelt camps, in which a total of over 50,000 Jewish

slave labourers were deployed in January 1943, including several thousand Jewish

men, most of whom were taken from transports arriving from France in Kosel,

Silesia, in August, September, and October 1942. The deportations to Auschwitz

were organized by the Kattowitz (Katowice) Gestapo. It was not until October

1942 that, on the initiative of the city authorities, the Jewish residential districts in eastern Upper Silesia were turned into closed ghettos. Up until summer 1943,

however, the forced labour programme was maintained to its fullest extent.
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In the Warthegau, where 10,000 people had been deported from the Lodz

ghetto to Chelmno in January 1942,
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the mass murders had been continued in the first months of 1942. In February 7,025, in March another 24,687, and in

early April 2,349 people were deported to Chelmno and murdered in gas vans,

and then the deportations were at first suspended. The Security Police spread

the rumour that the resettled people had been lodged in a large camp in Kolo

(Warthbrücken).
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At the end of April, in response to demands from the German authorities,

Chaim Rumkowski, the head of the Jewish council in Lodz, announced the

‘resettlement’ of those Jews who had been deported to Lodz in the autumn of

the previous year. The recent deportations were to include, in particular, those

who ‘didn’t work’—and that was the great majority of this group of originally

20,000 people, more than 2,000 of whom had already succumbed to the terrible

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

living conditions in the ghetto.
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In fact, between 4 and 13 May, 10,914 of these

‘Reich Jews’ had been deported to Chelmno and murdered there.
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The dating indicates that this mass murder should be seen in a larger context. Since 11 May

1942, Jews had been systematically murdered in Maly Trostinets after their arrival

in Minsk. The first direct deportations to the Sobibor extermination camp began

in mid-June. All of this indicates that the systematic murder of the deported

German Jews, still forbidden by Himmler in November 1941, had received the go-

ahead by the central authorities around April 1942.

In Lodz the deportations were continued in September 1942 after a lengthy

pause. The first victims were the patients of the ghetto hospitals, which were

cleared by the Jewish police on the night of 31 August/1 September on German

instructions. On 4 September, Rumkowski announced that, at the request of the

German authorities, 25,000 ghetto-dwellers under the age of 10 and over the age

of 65 as well as all the sick had been evacuated from the ghetto. To make the

action possible, an ‘exit ban’, a prohibition on all travel, was imposed from 5 to

9 September. The Jewish police now searched the ghetto systematically block by

block and arrested children, the old, and the sick. By 12 September these

people—according to the statistics of the Council of Elders they numbered

15,685—were taken to collection points and deported to Chelmno, where they

were murdered.
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The official Ghetto Chronicle kept by the Jewish Council of Elders notes that

after the end of the action there were practically no children under 10 or old

people left in the ghetto.
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The number of inhabitants of the ghetto was now just 90,000—more than 70,000 fewer than at the beginning of the year.
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Auschwitz

We have already described how the SS set about extending Auschwitz concentra-

tion camp complex into a centre for systematic mass murder, independent of the

construction of the extermination camps in the context of Aktion Reinhardt.

In Auschwitz, from September 1941, thousands of prisoners, including Jewish

prisoners from Upper Silesia, had been murdered with Zyklon B. Since October 1941,

in the wake of the expansion of the camp complex, which was intended to receive

large numbers of Soviet prisoners, a new crematorium was planned, which was to

receive a considerably larger gas chamber than the ones subsequently built into the

old crematorium in Auschwitz ‘Stammlager’, the original camp. Finally, in January

1942, Himmler had ordered that Auschwitz should take large numbers of Jewish

forced labourers from the Reich, to replace the absent Soviet prisoners of war.

But the Jewish prisoners from the Reich failed to materialize. As we have seen,

from March onwards they had been deported to the district of Lublin, where those

who seemed to be ‘fit for work’ were held for forced labour in Majdanek camp.

Instead, in the spring of 1942 three groups of Jewish prisoners came to Auschwitz: the

Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

345

first mass transports of Jews to Auschwitz were made up of Slovakian Jews, of whom

four transports of young women, some 3,800 in total, arrived between 26 March and

7 April.
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They were followed by Jewish hostages from France who had been deported ‘to the East’ in reprisal for attacks by the French Resistance. The first

transport of 1,112 persons arrived in Auschwitz on 30 March and was followed by five

more between 7 June and 18 July.
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A third group of Jewish prisoners who came to Auschwitz were the Jews from the ghettos of annexed eastern Upper Silesia, from

Sosnowitz, Bendzin, and other places; these deportations began, as we have seen, in

mid-1942.
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Even before these transports from Slovakia, Upper Silesia, and France reached

Auschwitz, those in charge of Auschwitz concentration camp had set about

installing additional gas chambers, one after the other, in two farmhouses that

lay outside the camp itself, as the building work on the new crematorium had not

even begun. The first farmhouse, the ‘Red house’, or Bunker I, was used for the

first time on 20 March 1942 to kill people with Zyklon B: the victims were a further

transport of Jews ‘unfit for work’ from the Schmelt camps in Upper Silesia.

Afterwards, this building was used above all to murder the Jews of Upper Silesia.
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The second farmhouse, the ‘White house’ or Bunker II, was first used on 4 July

1942 to murder, in the same way, 628 people selected from a transport recently

arrived from Slovakia. From that day on, the selection of Jews ‘unfit for work’—

particularly children and their mothers—and their subsequent murder in the gas

chambers became standard practice in Auschwitz.

The Second Wave of Extermination in the Soviet Union

In the rear area of Army Group Centre, which essentially encompassed White

Russian and Russian territory, the great majority of Jews had already been

murdered in 1941. According to an official census, 22,267 Jews still lived in the

territory at the beginning of 1942, mostly in labour camps and remote towns. In

this military administrative area the murders were continued throughout the

whole of the winter and during the spring. By around the middle of the year

almost all the ghettos had been liquidated; the last ghetto to be exterminated in

this way was probably the one in Smolensk, where around 2,000 people were

killed on 15 July 1942. After this date, in the military administrative area Centre,

there were only a few thousand Jews who lived in camps or were hiding in the