Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (83 page)

the persecution of the Jews would encounter indifference and resistance.
331
The deportations that had originally been planned were thus, as in the case of

Romania, postponed to the following year.

In late September 1942 Luther also took the initiative with the Hungarian

government.
332
On 5 October, unofficially at first, he put the German demands about the ‘Jewish question’ to the Hungarian Ambassador in Berlin, Dominik

Sztojay. The Hungarian government was to declare itself in agreement with the

deportation of the Hungarian Jews from Germany and the occupied countries, or

fetch them back to Hungary by 31 December 1942. At the same time, Luther drew

up a comprehensive programme for the ‘treatment of the Jewish question in

Hungary’, including the deportation of the Hungarian Jews.
333

At this meeting Sztojay pointed out amongst other things that the Hungarian

Prime Minister, Miklos Kállay, was particularly interested to learn ‘whether the

Jews would be able to go on living after their evacuation to the East’. In this

context certain rumours were circulating, which he himself, of course, considered

unbelievable, but which concerned Kállay. He did not want ‘to be accused of

handing over the Hungarian Jews after their evacuation to misery or worse’.

Sztojay seemed content with Luther’s answer that all evacuated Jews would

‘initially find employment in road-building’, and would later be ‘accommodated

in a Jewish reservation’.

On 17 October, the German ambassador in Budapest handed over the German

demands in an official form.
334
Within the Foreign Ministry, however, it soon became clear that the Hungarian government was far from willing to start the

deportation of the Hungarian Jews.
335
However, towards the end of November, Himmler assumed that the deportations could soon be set in motion. To this end,

he suggested to Ribbentrop that he send an experienced adviser, Wisliceny

perhaps, to the German embassay in Budapest as a ‘consultant on Jewish ques-

tions’.
336
As a ‘first instalment’ one could deport 100,000 Jews from the annexed Slovakian and Romanian territories, a suggestion already made to Wisliceny by a

Hungarian contact when he was staying in Budapest in October.
337

But this suggestion contradicted the official Hungarian position, which was

hardening at this time. In a note of 2 December 1942, the Hungarian ambassador

in Berlin summed up his government’s attitude to the German proposals of

17 October.
338
According to this, the Hungarian government was only prepared to withdraw its Jews from the German sphere of influence if all foreign Jews also

living there were forced to take the same step. The labelling of Jews living in

Hungary, or indeed their deportation, was for various reasons impossible at the

present time.

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

Luther’s attempts, beginning in October 1942, to clarify the further stance of the

Italians with regard to the deportation of Croatian Jews from Italy’s occupied

zone, also did not lead to the desired outcome.
339
Although Mussolini had, in August 1942, agreed with the German demand to hand over the Jews living in the

Italian occupied zone, senior Italian officers and officials were determined to

prevent this from happening.
340

While these initiatives were still fully under way, on 22 October Luther pre-

sented Ribbentrop with a lengthy paper containing the suggestion that Italy be

addressed about the ‘Jewish question’ at the level of Foreign Ministers or the

Heads of State. The Italians should be exhorted to agree to the deportation of all

Italian Jews from the whole of the German sphere of influence; to draw up Jewish

legislation on the German model and coordinate their position vis-à-vis other

states with Germany.
341

In fact, however, the Italian occupation authorities would not hand over the

Jews living in their zone; instead, from October 1942 they began interning them,

more than 2,600 people according to official Italian figures. Jews who had or

who could claim Italian citizenship were brought to Italian territory, and the

others were accommodated on the Croatian coast, away from the hands of the

Germans.
342

Ribbentrop’s directive of September 1942, to demand of the Danish government

the deportation of Jews living there, is probably directly traceable to the extraor-

dinary displeasure with which Hitler reacted to developments in that country in

September 1942. For a time, Hitler expressed the view that the particularly

restrained form of German occupation in that country should be radically

changed, and it should henceforth be ruled with an iron fist as a ‘hostile country’.

The first consequence was that SS Gruppenführer Werner Best was appointed

Reich Plenipotentiary in Denmark. However, Best also represented a relatively

elastic policy in Denmark, one irreconcilable with the demand for the handover of

the Jews living in the country.
343

It seems possible that the deportation of the Norwegian Jews in the autumn of

1942, which had plainly been prepared in a rush, and the history of which cannot

be reconstructed in detail, formed a kind of second-best solution given that the

deportation of the Danish Jews was undesirable for general political reasons to do

with the occupation of the country. Some 2,000 Jews were living in Norway at the

end of 1942. By that point they had been subjected to the usual measures, such as

removal from public service, confiscation of property, stamping of passports, and

other things besides. From autumn 1942 a statistical office set up by Quisling’s

party began drawing up a list of Norwegian Jews.
344
Thus the technical preconditions for deportation were in place, and in October 1942 the RSHA, clearly on

the spur of the moment (the lack of preparations concerning the preparation of

transport capacity indicates as much) decided to go ahead with it. On 23 October

the Norwegian police received the order to prepare for the detention of all Jews.

Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

373

On 26 October the arrest of all Jewish men between the ages of 15 and 54 began,

on 25 November that of the women and children. The next day a German

transport ship containing 532 Jews set sail for Stettin (Sczeczin).
345
Further deportations occurred in November 1942, in February 1943 and 1944, bringing

the total numbers of deportees to 770. Ninehundred and thirty Norwegian Jews

had fled to Sweden.
346

chapter 18

THE FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF THE POLICY

OF EXTERMINATION AFTER THE TURNING OF

THE WAR IN 1942–1943: CONTINUATION OF

THE MURDERS AND GEOGRAPHICAL

EXPANSION OF THE DEPORTATIONS

In the second half of the war—apart from the efforts to secure the space controlled

by Germany in a political, military, and police sense, and alongside the complex of

economic and food policy—Judenpolitik was a main axis of Germany’s occupation

and alliance policies. In the view of the National Socialist leadership the more the

war advanced the greater the significance of the systematic murder of the Jews for

the solidarity of the German power bloc. This increasingly important alteration in

the function of Judenpolitik provides a significant explanation for the fact that the

murder of millions in the second half of the war was not only continued, but even

expanded.

Under military pressure, Nazi Germany was less and less in a position to draft

even sketchily the main features of a ‘New Europe’ in accordance with racial

principles. If it had seriously made such an attempt, the issue of the racial

‘inequality’ of the peoples living on the continent, the core element of National

Socialism, would inevitably have been raised, and the numerous unresolved

Murders and Deportations, 1942–3

375

questions of borders and minorities would have come onto the agenda. If, on

the one hand, the National Socialists did not want to abandon their claim to open

the door to a completely new kind of order for the European continent, but, on the

other, did not want to abandon the way in which this project was to be realized,

they had no other option but concretely to anticipate their racist utopia in a

negative way. From this point of view the Entjudung of the German sphere of

influence represented the claim to be the start of a comprehensive racist new

order, but was actually—because of the inconsistency and impracticability of a

‘positive’ racial policy—the substitute for the unfeasible ‘new order’ on a racial

basis.

In the second half of the war, the continuation and radicalization of Juden-

politik, the only practicable element of the racist utopia of the National Socialists,

became the iron band with which the ‘Third Reich’ held together the power bloc

that it dominated. For with the implementation of the murder of the Jews within

the German power bloc, the executive organizations—German occupying admin-

istrations, local auxiliary organizations, collaborative governments or allies—were

turned into lackeys and accomplices of the extermination policy and, given the

unprecedented nature of this crime, irretrievably bound to the engine of this

policy, the leadership of National Socialist Germany.

In addition to this, there was the fact that any further radicalization of perse-

cution was bound to strengthen the power of the SS and radical Party forces

within the occupying administrations or the German diplomatic apparatus and,

via the periphery of the German sphere of rule, alter the overall character of the

regime in favour of those forces. The implementation of Judenpolitik within the

German sphere of influence thus amounted to the definitive realization of

National Socialism’s total claim to power. But this was, from the perspective of

National Socialism, the sole key to success in this war.

If we see Judenpolitik at the intersection of these considerations, it becomes

clear that from the perverted perspective of the Nazi leadership, it had effectively

become a guarantee for the complete victory of the National Socialist Revolution.

Continuation of the Policy of Extermination

in Eastern Europe

Poland

In October and November 1942, HSSPF Krüger had, through police decree,

defined a total of fifty-four ‘Jewish residential districts’
1
in the General Government, most of them parts of earlier ghettos. Alongside these, there was a large

number of camps for Jewish forced labourers. At this point, the deportations to

the extermination camps were temporarily shelved.

376

Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

At the beginning of 1943, however, the mass murders and deportations in the

General Government began again on a large scale. By deciding to reorganize the

‘labour deployment’ the Nazi leadership believed that they would be able largely to

do without the Jewish workforce. Those ghettos that still existed were liquidated in

the course of 1943 (apart from Lodz), the people still living there were shot on the

spot or deported to the extermination camps; a minority were sent to forced

labour camps. The SS also took control of Jewish forced labour, thus ensuring that

the only Jews who would remain temporarily alive were those who were absolutely

required for war production.

In the district of Galicia the mass murders resumed at the beginning of 1943,

after a decision by HSSPF Krüger, which he must have made at the end of 1942.
2

In January, SSPF Katzmann had some 10,000 people shot in an ‘action’. They were

from the Lemberg ghetto, in which around 24,000 people had lived up to that

point. Subsequently the reduced ghetto was run as a ‘Jewish camp’; further

shootings occurred regularly. After the Lemberg massacre the office of the KdS

Lemberg ravaged the smaller ghettos and labour camps in the district, where

massacres leading to thousands of fatalities were carried out. From March 1943

onwards an increasingly large number of ‘actions’ took place in the smaller

ghettos of the district. These mass murders were accelerated still further from

the end of March.
3

In the district of Radom the last deportations occurred in January 1943. They

affected the town of Radom as well as Szydlowiec, Sandomierz Radomsko, and

Ujazd; the victims were deported to Treblinka.
4
All that existed now in the district of Radom was labour camps under the control of the SS and police commanders,

as well as so-called ‘Jewish camps’ directly attached to armaments factories, for

which the armaments inspection department of the Wehrmacht was responsible.

In the district of Krakau (Cracow), in March 1943, the ghetto in the city of Cracow

was the last ghetto to be definitively cleared. Those ‘fit for work’ ended up in

Plaszow labour camp (ZAL Plaszow).
5
Also in January the deportations from Warsaw to Treblinka resumed after their interruption in November.
6

In January 1943, after a visit to Warsaw, Himmler ordered that the ghetto there

be destroyed. Some of those factories that still existed were to be dissolved, and