Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (84 page)

the 16,000 workers there were to be deported ‘to a KL [Konzentrationslager ¼

concentration camp] ideally to Lublin’. The factories actually working for arma-

ments production were to be ‘centralized somewhere in the General Government’
.7

When the relocation of production to Lublin at short notice proved impossible,

on 15 February Himmler ordered a concentration camp to be built inside the

Warsaw ghetto, so that control could be exerted directly over those ghetto

inhabitants who had been claimed as workers by the armaments factories.
8

In the meantime, the SS had once again begun to deport Jews ‘unfit for work’

from the Warsaw ghetto: between 18 and 22 January around 5,000 to 6,000 people

were deported from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka and murdered there.
9

Murders and Deportations, 1942–3

377

In the months that followed concrete preparations were made within the SS

empire to bring about the planned transfer of the Jewish forced labourers. To this

end Globocnik negotiated with the WVHA to establish the ‘Ostindustrie’, which

was officially founded in March 1943. This holding company was an attempt to

create an armaments company run by the SS itself, which was to work with Jewish

forced labourers and Jewish property. In fact, over the next few months, the

Ostindustrie was to maintain various factories in the districts of Lublin and

Radom, and deploy around 10,000 Jewish workers who were interned in labour

camps. But they produced no armaments, only for the most part simple items of

everyday use.
10

In the spring of 1943, however, a development occurred which led the Nazi

leadership to the decision to conclude the ‘Final Solution’ in the General Govern-

ment as quickly as possible, and no longer to take Jewish workers into consider-

ation. This last escalation of Judenpolitik in the General Government was

prompted by the Warsaw ghetto uprising of April and May 1943.

Resistance organizations had formed in the Warsaw ghetto after the start of the

major deportations of summer 1942: the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa (ZOB,

Jewish combat organization), originally formed from three Zionist youth organ-

izations, later joined by other groups, some of them non-Zionist. At the same time

the revisionist wing of the Zionists formed an autonomous organization, the

Zydowski Zwiazek Wojskowy (ZZW, Jewish Military Association).

After the temporary halt to the deportations in October 1942 there were still

between 55,000 and 60,000 people in the ghetto. In view of the attitude of the

majority of ghetto-dwellers who could hardly have any illusions about their fate

any longer, the resistance had a good prospect of receiving wide support for a

revolt from the ghetto population.

When the Germans began a partial deportation of the ghetto-dwellers on

18 January, they encountered armed resistance by ZOB fighters, who were able

to disrupt the execution of the arrests to such an extent that with 5,000 to 6,000

deportees the Germans were able to deport fewer people than they had originally

intended.

Over the next few months the resistance fighters got ready for the final

engagement with the Germans: they got hold of more weapons and prepared

for a guerrilla war on the urban terrain by setting up fortified positions and escape

routes. The rest of the ghetto population, whose will to resist had been intensified

by the events of January, began to set up hiding-places, known as ‘bunkers’ in the

cellars of the houses.

When the Germans began the definitive clearance of the ghetto on 19 April,

they found themselves facing several hundred armed fighters, while most of the

ghetto population sought refuge in the bunkers.

It took the far superior and heavily armed troops, led by SS Brigadeführer

Jürgen Stroop, four weeks, until 16 May 1943, to put down the revolt. They only

378

Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

succeeded by using explosives and incendiary devices moving from house to

house, hiding-place to hiding-place. Despite putting up tremendous resistance,

the resistance groups were wiped out, apart from a small number who were able to

escape. Apart from this thousands of ghetto-dwellers were killed during the

fighting; the survivors were deported either to the gas chambers of Treblinka or

to labour camps. Their attackers suffered several dozen fatalities.

There is good reason to identify the revolt as a popular uprising: in the ruins

of the ghetto the fighters found support from the ghetto-dwellers, many of

whom shared the fate of the resistance fighters and perished under miserable

circumstances.
11

There was also armed resistance against the planned liquidation of ghettos in

other places. Thus in Czenstochowa a small group of Jewish fighters resisted the

attempted clearance of the ghetto on 25 June 1943 and went down fighting. In

Cracow, in the winter of 1942–3, a Jewish resistance group launched attacks on

German installations outside the ghetto; the group left the ghetto the following

spring as it was about to be liquidated. In a number of smaller ghettos armed

resistance groups formed, escaping into the surrounding forests in the face of

the imminent liquidation of the ghettos. In other places it can be shown that

preparations for armed resistance existed, but either came to nothing or is only

inadequately documented.
12

The Nazi leadership’s resolution, sparked by the Warsaw ghetto uprising, to

murder all the Jews in the General Government, is reflected in a series of sources

from between April and May 1943. Thus, for example, Goebbels’s diary entry for

25 April reads: it is high time ‘for us to remove the Jews as quickly as possible from

the General Government’. Himmler stressed in May, to Greifelt, the head of his

Central Office for Nationality Questions (Hauptamt für Volkstumsfragen), that it

was an ‘urgent task in the General Government . . . to remove the remaining

300,000–400,000 Jews there’.
13

HSSPF Krüger, who was responsible for the General Government, declared on

31 May that he had ‘only recently received the order to carry out the “Entjudung” ’;

according to Krüger, Himmler wanted the employment of Jews deployed in the

armaments industry to cease; a desire that Krüger did not think he was able to

fulfil because of irreplaceable skilled workers.
14

With the Warsaw ghetto uprising still fresh in the minds of the Germans, from

April 1943 the liquidation of the still existing ghettos and small labour camps in

the district of Lublin was intensified. The inmates were either shot on the spot

or deported to the larger labour camps, Majdanek above all. Most of these

‘resettlements’ occurred in May.

Also in May 1943 Katzmann ordered the dissolution of all still existing ghettos

in the district of Galicia and had a ‘general liquidation plan’ prepared to this end.
15

These mass murders were carried out with the utmost brutality between the end of

May and the end of June 1943; some 80,000 people fell victim to them. Apart from

Murders and Deportations, 1942–3

379

the mass executions, from the end of 1942 until June 1943 some 15,000–25,000

people were deported to Sobibor. At the end of June 1943 Katzmann reported that

‘all Jewish residential districts have been dissolved with effect from 23.6.43’. This

meant that the district of Galicia was ‘Jew-free apart from the Jews in camps

controlled by the SS and police commanders’. There were still twenty-one ‘Jewish

camps’ with a total of 21,156 inmates; the camps were, however, ‘still being

continually reduced’. In his concluding report Katzmann gave the figure of

434,329 Jews who had been ‘resettled’ between the spring of 1942 and 27 June

1943.
16

Accordingly, in June 1943 there were only a few tens of thousands of Jews in

labour camps in the General Government, which were largely controlled by the SS.

On 19 June, however, given the increase in resistance in the General Govern-

ment, Himmler received the order from Hitler ‘that the evacuation of the Jews was

to be radically enforced and seen through in spite of any unrest arising over the

next 3 to 4 months’. In addition, Hitler extended Himmler’s authority in the field

of partisan control, particularly by declaring the General Government to be a

‘Partisan Combat Zone’ (Bandenkampfgebiet). To rule out any possible resistance

from employers who still had Jews working for them, Himmler now deliberately

pursued the policy of declaring those ghettos and camps still in existence to be

concentration camps. This applied not only in the General Government, but also

in the Reichskommissariat Ostland, the other territory under German occupation

in which Jews lived in any significant numbers.
17

In the district of Lublin the Jewish labour deployment was massively reduced

between June and October 1943, and was now employed in principle only for the

needs of the Wehrmacht. The workers were barracked in SSPF labour camps which

were to be brought under the control of the WVHA and run as sub-camps of

Majdanek concentration camp.
18
This regulation, it was agreed early in September 1943 between Pohl, Krüger, and Globocnik, was to be applied to all labour camps in

the General Government. This was done in January 1944: now the still existing

labour camps in Plaszow (near Cracow) and the labour camps in Lemberg, Lublin,

and Radom were turned into concentration camps.
19
After the Warsaw ghetto, declared to be a concentration camp in January 1943, was finally dissolved on an

order from Himmler in June 1943, and all traces of its existence were removed,
20

there were concentration camps specially set up for Jewish forced labourers in each

of the four remaining district capitals of the General Government.

In the district of Galicia, in June and July 1943 SSPF Katzmann had almost all

the labour camps liquidated and their inmates murdered.
21
In July 1943 Himmler also ordered that Sobibor extermination camp be transformed into a concentration camp and that prisoners be used to sort captured ammunition.
22

The radicalization of German Judenpolitik after the Warsaw ghetto uprising,

and Hitler’s instruction to Himmler on 19 June also meant the end for by far the

majority of those Polish Jews who had so far managed to survive in the Polish

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

territories directly administered by the Reich—eastern Upper Silesia, Warthegau,

and the district of Bialystok.

In eastern Upper Silesia—paradoxically, in spite of its proximity to Auschwitz

extermination camp—a relatively large proportion of the Jewish population had

remained alive up until early summer 1943; the systematic forced labour deploy-

ment in the context of the ‘Schmelt Organization’ granted them the chance of

survival until that point. In early summer 1943, however, the civil administration

in Upper Silesia, which had always worked on the assumption that the Jewish

forced labour deployment was only a transitory phenomenon, prepared to replace

Jewish workers with non-Jews. The definitive decision to liquidate the ghetto was

also presumably made with the Warsaw ghetto uprising still in mind; it was

prompted by Himmler’s order on 21 May 1943 according to which all Jews in

the Reich, including the Protectorate, were to be deported ‘to the East’ or to

Theresienstadt by 30 June. This order contained a supplement according to which

Eichmann was to discuss the ‘Abbeförderung’ (transportation) of the Eastern

Silesian Jews on the spot with Schmelt. Between 22 and 24 June 1943, 5,000 Jews

from Sosnowitz and Bendzin were deported to Auschwitz. On 1 August the

liquidation of the two ghettos began: a total of over 30,000 Jews were transported

from Sosnowitz and Bendzin in around fourteen transports to Auschwitz, where

some 6,000 were deployed as forced labourers and the rest were murdered. On 16

August these two large ghettos were completely cleared. Ten days later the last

ghetto in Warthenau, holding a total of 5,000 people, was liquidated. Of the

100,000–120,000 Jews who had lived in Upper Silesia at the time of the German

invasion, at least 85,000 had been murdered by the end of the war.

On 11 June, Himmler ordered the Lodz ghetto to be turned into a concentration

camp; however, this order never came into effect.
23
The alternative attempts by Himmler and Pohl to achieve the transfer of the production capacity available in

the ghetto to Lublin were also defeated by Greiser’s resistance. In February 1944

the Gauleiter in the Warthegau, Artur Greiser, agreed with Himmler that the

ghetto should be retained as a ‘Gau-ghetto’; only as many Jews should be allowed

to live there as was ‘absolutely necessary for the interests of the armaments

economy’.
24

In August 1943 Himmler had ordered that the forced labour camps in the

Warthegau, of which there were still more than 100, be liquidated. This had

been done by October 1943: the forced labourers either ended up in Lodz ghetto

or were deported to Auschwitz and murdered there.
25
In June 1944, on the basis of an agreement that Himmler and Greiser had made in February 1944, those