Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (80 page)

General Government included the extension of Krüger’s powers in May/early

June and the start of the construction of Treblinka in May or June at the latest. So

the corresponding decisions must have been made before May. At about the same

time the decision must have been made to carry out a mass murder among the

Jews of annexed Upper Silesia, to which tens of thousands of people fell victim

between May and August. However, because of the transport moratorium, the

mass murder of the Jews of the General Government could not begin to its full

extent until July. Finally, the transport moratorium had a radicalizing effect on the

development of mass murder. It accelerated the deportations from the western

territories and the planners of the mass murder entered something like a phase of

consolidation after which the whole programme was resumed with much greater

impetus in July.

At around the same time as this fundamental decision concerning the Jews in the

General Government, at least before mid-May, a further momentous decision must

have been made: the deportations of Jews from Central Europe were increased

beyond the quota cited in March, and most or all of these people were murdered

when the transports arrived at their destinations. This was the fate suffered by the

Jews arriving from the Reich to Minsk from mid-May onwards, and the deportees

from Slovakia from the beginning of June in Sobibor. And the great majority of

those Jews who had been deported to Lodz from the Reich in autumn 1941 were

now, in the first half of May, deported to Chelmno in a series of transports and

murdered there.

Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

359

In parallel with these events, the mass murder of the Soviet Jews which had

begun in the summer of 1941 was given a fresh impulse in May 1942: now the

murders began on a large scale again, before leading in the summer to the total

extermination of the indigenous Jewish population.

The decision-making process underlying the systematic genocide remains

largely obscure and must be reconstructed from the course of events. The entries

in Himmler’s office diary for late April provide an initial clue: Himmler met

Heydrich a total of seven times over only eight days between late April and early

May 1942 in three different places (Berlin, Munich, and Prague). This unusually

intensive series of discussions is framed by two lengthy meetings that Himmler

had with Hitler on 23 April and 3 May 1942 in the Führer’s headquarters.
257
The attempt on Heydrich’s life and his subsequent death (27 May and 4 June) must

have had a further radicalizing effect on this decision-making process; we need

only recall Himmler’s announcement at Heydrich’s funeral on 4 June that he

would end the Jewish ‘migration’ within a year.

At the beginning of June the RSHA established a concrete deportation

programme for the West which was to be realized within three months from

mid-July. With this Western programme the plans which first became apparent

in early April were realized and adapted to the conditions introduced by the

transport moratorium in the East in June/July. But, as early as June 1942

Himmler demanded the speedy and complete deportation of all the Jews in

France.

The people in these transports from the West, the Slovakian Jews, who from

early July onwards were transported to Auschwitz in the wake of the transport

moratorium and those Jews from the Reich who, starting with the first transport

from Vienna on 17 July, arrived in Auschwitz, met with the same fate: from 4 July

onwards most of them were, in so far as they were ‘unfit for work’, murdered in

the two hastily erected makeshift gas chambers, Bunkers I and II.

In the middle of July, after the end of the transport moratorium, the deport-

ation and murder programme had been set fully in motion. Now, during a visit to

Globocnik on 19 July, Himmler established a concrete timetable for the major part

of this programme, the extermination of the Jews of the General Government.

This was a day after he had visited Auschwitz and three days after he had, at the

Führer’s headquarters, demanded increased transport opportunities from the

Reich railways. By the end of the year, the Jews of the General Government

would have been murdered, apart from a few people who were fit for work and

were to be placed under the control of the SS.

At about the same time, the decision must have been made to send almost all

further transports from the Reich directly to the extermination camps and no

longer to ghettos.

Finally, as will be outlined in the next section, already in the summer of 1942 the

Germans had introduced the crucial steps to extend the deportation programme

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

beyond Eastern Europe. While the occupation authorities in Western Europe set

about undertaking deportations beyond the quota of 125,000 people for 1942

decided in June, in July the German government approached its allies, Romania,

Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, and Finland, to secure the deportation of the Jews

living in those countries.

Deportations from the Occupied Western Territories

in the Second Half of 1942

Continuation of the Deportations from France

After six deportation trains carrying some 6,000 Jews had already set off from

France to Auschwitz between March and early July 1942, and with the SS having

established plans for the deportation of a total of 125,000 people from France,

Belgium, and the Netherlands in June, between 19 July and 7 August a further ten

transports carrying a total of around 10,000 people set off for Auschwitz. These

deportees, ‘stateless Jews’, had been arrested in Paris during a major raid on 16 and

17 July.
258
The age limit for the deportation had now been raised to 55 for women and 60 for men. The inmates of these transports were now, as the Jews from

Slovakia had been, subjected to a selection in Auschwitz; after that those people

deemed ‘unfit for work’ were murdered in the gas chambers immediately upon

their arrival.

In August, as agreed with the Vichy government in July, the deportations of the

stateless Jews from the unoccupied zone began (Transports 17–19). After Himmler

had agreed to a suggestion from the French Prime Minister, Pierre Laval, in early

July that children under the age of 16 should also be included in the deportations,

between 17 and 26 August over 2,000 children whose parents had already been

taken to Auschwitz in the previous transports were also deported with the

following five transports. Transports 24–39 (their departure dates were between

26 August and 30 September 1942) were stopped at Kosel in Silesia, where men

who were fit for work had to leave the trains to be deployed as forced labourers

with the ‘Schmelt Organization’.
259

At a meeting held in his office on 28 August Eichmann demanded that all

stateless Jews be removed from France by the end of October 1942 (after that the

deportations had to be postponed until February); along with the 25,000 people

deported already that meant a further 50,000 people. ‘The end of June ’43’,

Eichmann continued, was envisaged as a ‘final deadline for the evacuation of

the remaining foreign Jews’.
260

In order to guarantee this quota of deportations, at the end of August more than

6,500 stateless Jews had been arrested in the unoccupied zone, who were deported

during the following months, along with around 3,000 Jews of foreign origin who

Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

361

had been kept in internment camps in the south of France for a long time. These

included a large number of children who had been separated from their

mothers.
261
As these deportations met with strong hostility from the French population and led to the open opposition of the Church, at the beginning of

September 1942 the Vichy government made it clear to the Germans that further

arrests and deportations could no longer be carried out in the unoccupied zone.

Since HSSPF Oberg, in view of the general political situation in France, and with

regard for President Laval’s domestic prestige, had secured a decision from

Himmler that no French citizens were to be deported from the occupied zone

for the time being,
262
the occupation authorities now arrested foreign Jews in the occupied zone (Greeks and Romanians above all), who were deported in

November in four further transports. After this came the expected halt in deport-

ations until February 1943. The total figure of deportees from France for 1942 was

approximately 42,000
.263

Extension of the Deportations to the Netherlands and Belgium

Since the summer of 1940 the occupation administration had begun to introduce

the anti-Jewish measures customary in German-occupied territory into the

Netherlands as well: a definition of Jews on the model of the Nuremberg Laws

was introduced; Jewish officials were dismissed from public service, a Jewish

council (Joodse Rat) responsible for the execution of German orders was formed,

Jewish property was expropriated.
264
In March 1941 the German Security Police established the Central Office for Jewish emigration, which dealt at first with

those Jews living in the Netherlands. In May 1942 Jews were ordered to wear the

yellow star and, at the beginning of 1942, labour camps for Jews were set up, in

which ultimately some 15,000 people were held.
265

At the beginning of 1941, the first deportations of Dutch Jews had already

begun, at first (comparable to the situation in France at the end of the year) as

‘a reprisal’ for Dutch acts of resistance. By the end of the year 850 Dutch Jews had

been deported to Mauthausen concentration camp, where they had been subjected

to the most extreme hard labour; none was to survive to the end of the war.
266

Immediately after the RSHA’s decision in June 1942 to deport 40,000 Jews from

the Netherlands, preparations got under way. The representative of the Foreign

Ministry in the occupied Netherlands, Otto Bene, reported to Berlin early in July

1942 that the deportation of around 25,000 stateless Jews from the Netherlands

would begin in mid-July and take about four months; after that the deportation of

Jews with Dutch citizenship would begin.
267

As early as June 1942 the Central Office for Jewish emigration had informed the

chairman of the Dutch Jewish council of an imminent ‘police labour deployment’

of the Dutch Jews in Germany.
268
After the freedom of movement of the Jews had been greatly restricted by a series of regulations at the end of June, on 5 July 4,000

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

Jews, most of them living in Amsterdam, were summoned to report to Westerbork

transit camp to join the ‘labour deployment’. Only some of those summoned

actually appeared, but the occupation authorities managed to exert so much

pressure that enough Jews arrived in Westerbork to assemble the first two

transports to Auschwitz carrying over 2,000 Jewish men.

By 12 December, another forty transports were dispatched from Westerbork to

Auschwitz, so that by the end of the year about 38,000 people had been deported

and the quota announced by Eichmann in June had hence almost been reached.

As with the French transports, from the end of August many of the trains were

halted at Kosel in Silesia, where men who were ‘fit for work’ were separated from

the rest.

In no other country under German occupation did the Security Police manage

to carry out the arrests and deportations so smoothly as in the Netherlands.

Tellingly, the deportation victims were not generally captured in raids or ‘actions’,

but arrested in their homes. The relatively calm progression of the arrests and the

continuous course of the deportations may be explained by a series of factors that

played into the hands of the Germans: the relatively strong position of the SS and

radical Party forces in the occupation authorities, the comprehensive registration

of Jews living in the Netherlands and their relatively pronounced trust in the

measures of the authorities, the cooperative stance of the Dutch authorities and

parts of the police apparatus, an ingenious system of ‘exemptions’ from the

deportations that left the majority of Jews in relative safety at first, the fact that

a relatively large number of people had always been put in camps, the weakness of

the Dutch resistance, and other factors.
269

There were still about 52,000 Jews in Belgium at the end of 1940, only about

10 per cent of whom were Belgian citizens.
270
From October 1940, and more intensively in the spring of 1941, the German military administration introduced

the measures against the Jews that were customary in German occupied territory:

definition, registration, dismissal from state employment, and ‘Aryanization’; the

formation of a ‘Jewish council’, the Association des Juifs en Belgique.
271

In comparison with similar steps in the Netherlands, these measures were

carried out much more slowly and inefficiently, not least because the German