Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (79 page)

first wave of murders in the summer and autumn of 1941.
245

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

The pattern of these resistance activities was, in spite of the isolation of the

ghettos, always the same: small resistance groups organized a few weapons and

prepared to confront a new German ‘action’. In part, these preparations were also

backed by the Jewish council and the Jewish police, in part they occurred without

their support or even against their will.

In fact this resistance tactic was applied in a large number of ghettos: resistance

groups attacked the German police and native auxiliary forces as they made their

way into the ghetto, and set the ghetto itself on fire. Shielded by the flames, the

inhabitants of the ghetto attempted a mass break-out; this always cost a large

number of Jewish people their lives. Apart from such mass break-outs, fleeing

secretly into the forests, individually or in groups, presented the most significant

opportunity to escape mass murder; as such it also represented a form of resist-

ance against the German policy of extermination. Overall, only a small minority

managed to escape into the forests, where few in turn survived.

Apart from such organized, violent acts of resistance, and flight, there were

many other forms of individual resistance: ghetto-dwellers refused to follow

instructions from the Germans, tried to hide in their houses or to barricade

them up; in many cases spontaneous attacks by individuals on policemen have

also been demonstrated.
246
Shalom Cholawsky and Shmuel Spector have reconstructed individual acts of resistance for White Russia and Volhynia. Spector has

assembled figures for twenty-seven towns in Volhynia for which, in the period

between May and September 1942, the mass flight of several hundred or several

thousand people is documented in each place, particularly in the towns of

Dubrovitsa, Rokitno, Tuchin, and Luck as well as in the camps of Poleska and

Kostopol. In Tuchin the resistance group set up by the head of the Jewish council

set fire to the ghetto and carried out an armed resistance for several days; there

were similar revolts in several other places.
247
Spector estimates that mass escapes were successful in another twenty places, and gives the overall figure for people

who sought to escape being murdered through flight or by building hiding-places

(so-called ‘bunkers’) as 47,500, or a quarter of the total Jewish population of

Volhynia at the start of 1942. In spite of this considerable degree of resistance

and flight, the forests gave the fleeing Jews little protection; by far the majority

of escapees died as a consequence of the completely inadequate living conditions,

or were tracked down and killed by the occupiers or by indigenous forces.

Cholawsky’s findings for western Belarus, a territory that had belonged to

Poland until 1939 and was occupied by the Soviet Union from 1939 until 1941,

are as follows: in Neswiecz (Nesvizh) on 21 July 1942 a Jewish resistance group

responded with organized armed resistance to an attempt by German occupying

forces to carry out a selection; the ghetto was set on fire and some fighters

managed to escape into the forests.
248
The following day another resistance group in Kletsk managed to resist a German ‘action’ along similar lines.
249
In Lakhva, at the beginning of September, a similar act of resistance against the

Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

355

planned liquidation of the ghetto was followed by a successful mass break-out.
250

Cholawsky also assembled information on over a dozen Belarus towns which

show that underground groups there were attempting in a similar way to respond

to the German ‘actions’ with organized resistance and mass break-outs, which

were in many cases successful, and in other cases failed for various reasons.
251

Finally, in a series of other Belarus towns groups of ghetto-dwellers managed to

escape to the forests.
252

A resistance group had also formed in the town of Slonim, Polish until 1939,

then occupied by the Soviets, and incorporated since August 1941 into the German

General District of Belarus. In June 1942 it opened fire on the marching SS and

police and killed five Germans. Other Jewish resistance fighters from the territory

of Slonim, who had joined the partisans to form an autonomous fighting group,

took part in an attack on the occupying troops in Kosovo near Slonim, which

prevented the planned liquidation of the ghetto there.
253

The resistance group which had formed in Baranowicze, also in western

Belarus, was on the other hand taken by surprise by the German ‘action’ at the

end of September/beginning of October 1942, and was unable to launch the

planned revolt; several dozen resistance fighters managed to escape into the

forests.
254

In Minsk, on former Soviet territory, a resistance group was already forming in

August 1941, which concentrated on getting the greatest possible number of

ghetto-dwellers suitable for partisan warfare into the forests. Over the years up

to 10,000 people were taken out of the ghetto in small groups; about 5,000

survived. This was only made possible by the close collaboration with the resist-

ance movement in the city of Minsk as well as with Soviet partisan units operating

in the area of Minsk, and because of general support by the indigenous popula-

tion, in which anti-Semitism was not very widespread.
255

The number of Jews who escaped into the forests throughout the whole

territory of Belarus is estimated at between 30,000 and 50,000 people, or

between 6 and 10 per cent of the whole Jewish population that had remained

in place.
256

The resistance actions were unable to prevent the mass murders, but they did

contribute to the fact that thousands of Jewish people survived, albeit mostly in

terrible conditions, and they did serve a significant symbolic purpose: a consid-

erable proportion of the Jewish population resisted their murderers or avoided

mass murder through flight. The fact that at least some of the victims were capable

of reacting actively to the German policy of extermination was not only of great

significance for the self-perception of the victims, but also had consequences for

the perpetrators: they had to acknowledge that they could not massacre defence-

less people without encountering resistance and putting themselves in danger.

Dozens of German policemen and their indigenous helpers lost their lives as a

result of acts of resistance, and tracking down escaped Jews absorbed considerable

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

resources of the occupying forces. In reality, then, it became apparent that the

omnipotent delusion of the calculable total extermination of an entire population

group could not be carried out without consequences. It became spasmodically

apparent that the reaction of the victims was able to set limits on the actions of the

perpetrators.

So the pattern of ‘major actions’ running according to plan and almost entirely

smoothly, which characterized the liquidations of the Polish ghettos in 1942,

would not be repeated in the occupied Soviet territories. Just as resistance on a

large scale was only possible here because of the experiences of the first wave of

murders that happened in 1941, in Poland the experiences of 1942 resulted during

the following year in the final ‘liquidations’ of the ghettos also encountering

massive resistance in some cases. Thus, the crucial precondition for the emergence

of an armed resistance movement was always the particular concrete experience of

the German policy of extermination.

Interim Summary: The Escalation of the Extermination

Policy in Spring/Summer 1942

In describing events in Eastern Europe we have already cast our eye over the whole

of 1942, as the wave of murders that began in the spring, was intensified through-

out the rest of the year, and finally encompassed almost the whole of German-

occupied Polish and Soviet territory, had to be seen in context. In this context we

should like to return once more to the first months of 1942 and analyse the way in

which this wave of killing was set in motion and attempt to reconstruct the

decision-making process underlying these events.

For spring and summer 1942 a chain of events and developments may be

reconstructed which, seen in context, represent a crucial escalation of anti-

Semitic policy: the mass murders already under way or definitely planned in

the Soviet Union and in certain other regions (Warthegau, the districts of

Lublin and Galicia, Serbia), and the deportations that had been started or

prepared since autumn 1941 were now linked together and extended into a

Europe-wide programme of the systematic murder of all Jewish people living

in that space.

Since autumn 1941, a general rethink had begun among those involved in

Judenpolitik in a process that can no longer be fathomed in all its details: reacting

to the mass murders in Eastern Europe, the main players reached the conviction

that the ‘Final Solution’, which had originally been envisaged as the European

Jews slowly dying out in an inhospitable territory somewhere in the ‘East’, could

be at least partially carried out during the war, that it could be anticipated by

killing as many Jews as possible through a combination of inhuman living and

working conditions and direct murder actions. During the winter of 1941/2 and

Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

357

the spring of 1942 the comprehensive plan emerged, presumably in stages, to kill

all the Jews in Europe if possible during the war. In parallel with this establish-

ment of the temporal horizon, ideas crystallized about where and how this

genocide was to occur: in occupied Poland, with the aid of poison gas.

We can reconstruct three stages in the process by which the genocidal ideas

assumed concrete form: between December 1941 and January 1942 Hitler gave

clear signals that after the war had expanded into a world war Judenpolitik should

be further radicalized to include the ‘extermination’ of the Jews on a large scale.

During the Wannsee Conference, Heydrich still assumed a gigantic deportation

programme towards the occupied Eastern territitories, which could only be

realized to its full extent after the end of the war. But his address also reveals

that the leadership’s ideas of how the deportees would die had in the meantime

assumed concrete form: from now on the plan included a combination of ‘exter-

mination through work’ and mass murder of those who survived the exertions

and clearly also those who were ‘unfit for work’. Apart from this, there had already

been talk at the Wannsee Conference of taking the Polish Jews out of the planned

deportation programme and murdering them on the spot, and the murder

methods had also been discussed.

The second stage of this radicalization process can be dated to March. Now the

policy of systematic extermination that had also been introduced in Poland in

autumn 1941 was extended to the district of Lublin and to Galicia, while at the

same time the deportations, which had also begun in autumn 1941, were extended

to other territories in Central and Western Europe.

In the middle of March 1942 the murder of the majority of the Jews in the

districts of Lublin and Galicia was set in motion. Here the murder quota of 60 per

cent cited by Goebbels is particularly important. Globocnik had already begun the

corresponding preparatory work—the construction of Belzec extermination

camp—in October 1941. The mass murder of the Jews of the Warthegau had

also been initiated in October 1941, the murders in Chelmno began at the

beginning of December. In both cases the mass murders occurred in connection

with the deportations from the Reich. In the meantime, at the latest by the

beginning of March, the RSHA had established an initial plan for a third wave

of deportations for the Jews of the Reich (including the Protectorate), to occur in

early March; in the course of this a total of 55,000 people were to be deported to

the General Government, particularly the district of Lublin. This programme

began in March.

In parallel with this, in February, Germany developed a programme together

with Slovakia that was initially to cover the deportation of 20,000 Jews, but which

was extended at the end of March, at Himmler’s urging, to all the Jews living in

that country. The destinations of the deportations were the district of Lublin and

Auschwitz concentration camp. The Jewish hostages from France were also

deported to Auschwitz from March onwards.

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Clearly the mass murders in the district of Lublin and the deportations from the

Reich and Slovakia to that area were linked. The old ‘reservation plan’ had been

revived, according to which ‘room was made’ in the ghettos of the district through

mass murders. A decision to link deportations and mass murder in this way must

at any rate have been made before the beginning of March.

From Heydrich’s statements during his visit to Tuka in early April we know

that the deportations from the Reich and Slovakia were already part of an overall

plan, presumably developed in March, for the deportation of around 500,000

people from Central and Western Europe, for which, however, no concrete time

frame can be demonstrated at this point.

Even more serious, however, is the third stage of this process of radicalization,

which was prepared at the end of April and came into full effect in May and June.

Only now were the regional murders linked into a programme of systematic

murder of the European Jews covering the whole of Europe.

In early May the deportations from the district of Lublin were expanded with

the systematic clearance of the counties (Kreise). At the end of May, with the

deportations from the district of Krakau (Gracow), there began the extension of

the murders to the other territories within the General Government, until in July

and August the districts of Warsaw and Radom were also included. The signifi-

cant preparatory measures for this extension of the murders to the whole of the