Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (85 page)

inhabitants of the Lodz ghetto who were either unfit for work or no longer needed

from the viewpoint of the ghetto administration were murdered with gas vans in

the specially reactivated extermination camp at Chelmno. By mid-July 1944 more

than 7,000 people died this way. However, Himmler had presumably already

issued the order to dissolve the ghetto completely in May 1944. In August the great

Murders and Deportations, 1942–3

381

majority of the ghetto-dwellers, still more than 68,000, were deported to

Auschwitz, where all of them were murdered, apart from some 2,000 people

who were deployed as forced labourers. Around 1,300 ghetto-dwellers stayed

behind in Lodz for clearing-up work.
26

Between 16 and 23 August 1943 the Bialystok ghetto was finally liquidated. The

various Jewish resistance groups that had formed a united front only in July 1943,

fiercely resisted the ‘action’ and involved the German police in battles that lasted

five days. After the uprising was put down, 150 fighters managed to escape the

ghetto and join the partisans.
27

In August 1943 more than 25,000 people were deported from Bialystok either to

Treblinka, where they were murdered, or, if they were deemed to be ‘fit for work’,

deported to Majdanek, where they were deployed in forced labour. The complete

liquidation of the ghetto was run by Globocnik. Plans originally in place to

transfer the factories in the ghetto to Lublin had in the meantime been abandoned

by Globocnik; instead a unit of the Ostindustrie plundered the factories that still

existed in Bialystok. The over 1,000 Jews who had stayed in Bialystok after the

‘action’ were also deported to Lublin.
28

In 1942–3 tens of thousands, possibly as many as 100,000 Jews living in Poland

had managed to escape the ghetto liquidations and get away. Thus, in an extensive

study of escape from the Warsaw ghetto, Gunnar Paulsson reached the conclusion

that a total of some 28,000 Jews went into hiding outside the ghetto and of those

around 40 per cent, or 11,500, survived. The mass of escapes occurred after the big

deportations of 1942: of 55,000 to 60,000 remaining ghetto-dwellers more than

13,000 escaped. These people survived on the ‘Aryan’ side of Warsaw, either in

hiding-places or under false identities; as many Poles were living illegally in

Warsaw, a certain infrastructure of illegality had been created that made access

to fake papers relatively easy.
29

In the district of Galicia, particularly after 1943, thousands of Jews managed to

find refuge in hiding-places, mostly in the homes of non-Jewish acquaintances, far

more than 1,000 in Lemberg alone.
30
Other Jews used fake papers to find jobs as

‘Ostarbeiter’ in the Reich or at one of the building sites run by the Todt Organ-

isation in occupied Europe.
31

Other escapees tried to survive in forest camps that they had built themselves.
32

The Israeli historian Shmuel Krakowski estimates the number of Jews who

escaped into the forests in the four districts of the ‘old’ General Government

(i.e. without Galicia) in 1942–3 at 50,000 and in his seminal study of the Jewish

resistance in Poland he presents figures which suggest that the great majority of

these escapees were killed by German Jagdkommandos (Hunting Commandos).
33

After the liquidation of the ghettos, from the summer of 1943 the focus of the

persecution of the Jews in the General Government shifted clearly to the tracing of

these people who had fled into the forests or otherwise gone into hiding, often in

the wake of the anti-partisan campaigns that were now being intensified.
34

382

Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

In the district of Lublin these raids began in May 1943. The monthly surveys by

the district Commander of the Order Police indicate a total of 1,657 victims for the

period between May and October 1943, under the heading ‘Jews exterminated’.
35

In the district of Galicia, from July 1943 onwards, the police intensified their raids

in the forests and killed thousands of Jews.
36

Poles who offered Jews hiding-places were generally shot, in many cases the

whole family was murdered, in extreme cases the entire population of the village

in question. Conversely, denunciations of hidden Jews were rewarded with boun-

ties; the SSPF in the district of Lublin, for example, ordered that such informants

be given up to a third of the property of the Jewish victim who had been hunted

down.
37

Armed resistance in the ghetto clearances in Bialystok and Vilna, the mass

escape from Treblinka in August 1943, and particularly the prisoner revolt in

Sobibor on 14 October, in which eleven SS members had been killed,
38
all of this in the face of the threatened Soviet invasion, must have been what led Himmler to

give Krüger the order, in October 1943, to liquidate the most important camps still

in existence in the district in Lublin. Early in November the prisoners in the

Lublin camp complex were shot during a two-day massacre, under the code name

‘Harvest Festival’, and the same fate awaited the prisoners in the camps of

Trawniki and Poniatowa. The total number of victims reached around 42,000
.39

Sobibor extermination camp had also been dissolved after the attempted uprising

on 14 October. After this, in the district of Lublin there were only a few smaller

forced labour camps with several thousand Jewish prisoners, which were cleared

from February 1944; most of the prisoners were deported to the west.
40

During the Harvest Festival murders in the district of Lublin, at the beginning

of November 1943 the German police also murdered the Jewish inmates of the

Szenie labour camp in the district of Cracow (Krakau), and a few days later the

inmates of ZAL (labour camp) Plaszow in Cracow. On 19 November the Jewish

forced labourers in the Janowska camp in Lemberg (Lvov) were murdered.
41

In his notorious speech to the Reichs- and Gauleiters in Posen (Poznan) on

4 October 1943, Himmler gave an assurance that the ‘Jewish question in the

countries occupied by us . . . will be resolved by the end of the year’.
42

Occupied Soviet Territories

After the big wave of murders in Ukraine in 1942 Jews only lived in any numbers

in the occupied Soviet territories in Reichskommissariat Ostland. In summer 1943,

72,000 Jews still lived in this territory. According to the State Secretary, Alfred

Meyer, Rosenberg’s deputy in the Ministry of the East, 22,000 of these had already

been selected for ‘resettlement’, meaning murder.
43
Of the 30,000 or so Jews still living in the General Commissariat of White Ruthenia in 1943, the occupying

forces killed around half.
44

Murders and Deportations, 1942–3

383

Thus, on 8 February, the KdS station in Minsk murdered all the Jews in Slutsk

in the wake of an anti-partisan action; in view of the resistance of the ghetto-

dwellers, District Commissar Heinrich Carl ordered that the ghetto be burned

down along with its entrenched inhabitants—this was the same Carl who had

complained to his superiors about the cruel behaviour of Lithuanian auxiliary

police against the Jews of Slutsk.
45
About 3,000 people lost their lives in this action.

In the district of Vileyka, between February and April 1943, the members of the

local KdS station murdered almost all the Jews living there, around 5,000 people.

There was also a large number of Jewish people who tried to hide outside ghettos

and camps, and were hunted down and murdered by German units and their local

auxiliaries; according to the figures of the SSPF of White Ruthenia, Curt von

Gottberg, 11,000 were killed between November 1942 and March 1943 alone.
46

The remaining three ghettos in the General District of White Ruthenia were

destroyed between August and October 1943. On 13 August Himmler issued an

order to restrict the labour deployment of the Jews, which was adopted by the

OKH on 29 September as ‘binding for the whole of the field army in the East’. As a

result, interventions by Wehrmacht posts in favour of Jewish work commandos

were effectively scotched.
47

The ghetto of Glebokie near Vilna was liquidated on 20 August following a

further anti-partisan action. In August 1943 the inhabitants of the ghetto resisted

their planned deportation to Majdanek; the majority of the ghetto-dwellers,

between 2,000 and 3,000 people, lost their lives in the ghetto, which was set on

fire by German forces.
48
The ghetto of Lida was dissolved in September, and some 4,000 inhabitants were deported to the concentration camps of Sobibor and

Majdanek.
49

Finally, the Minsk ghetto was cleared in September in a number of stages. Some

of the 10,000 or so ghetto-dwellers still living there were sent to Auschwitz and

Sobibor extermination camps, others murdered on the spot, and yet others

deported to the district of Lublin for forced labour. In October 1943 the surviving

ghetto-dwellers were murdered in the extermination centre of Trostinets near

Minsk.
50

In Lithuania and Latvia, where there were still large numbers of Jews, Himmler

acted in 1943 as he had in occupied Poland: he endeavoured to turn those Jews

who were still ‘fit for work’ into concentration camp inmates, so that he would

have total control over their future fate.

On 2 April 1943, Himmler issued the order to build a concentration camp in

Riga, dated retrospectively to 13 March.
51
On 21 June, after a meeting with leading SS functionaries, Himmler ordered that ‘all remaining Jews in the territory of

Ostland be brought together in concentration camps’. At the same time, with

effect from 1 August 1943, he prohibited ‘the removal of Jews from concentration

camps for work’ and again issued the order for the construction of a concentration

camp near Riga. Those ‘members of the Jewish ghettos not required’, Himmler

384

Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

finally specified, were to be ‘evacuated to the East’, meaning murdered.
52
With this order Himmler gained total control over the Jewish forced labourers in the

Reichskommissariat of Ostland. This decision of Himmler’s was closely connected

with the order to conclude the ‘Final Solution’, which Hitler had given him two

days previously. It is also significant that, on 21 June, Himmler appointed Bach-

Zelewski as head of the anti-partisan units (Bandenkampfverbände), after Hitler

had extended his authority in this sphere. The internment of the surviving Jews in

concentration camps, constant selection of the Jewish forced labourers in the

concentration camps, and the hunting down of Jews in hiding under the cloak of

‘anti-partisan combat’—these, then, were the instruments with which Himmler

planned to bring the ‘Final Solution’ to its conclusion in the General Government

and in the Reichskommissariat Ostland. Moreover, immediately after the issuing

of the order on 21 June, the Security Police in Latvia began to withdraw the

workers who were, in their view, not important to the war effort, from individual

firms.

The Kaiserwald concentration camp, which had been built near Riga on

Himmler’s instructions, was to achieve a capacity of 2,000 inmates at the most;

in fact it was to act as a transit camp. Here labour columns were assembled which

were marched to the individual firms where they were lodged in primitive

accommodation, known as ‘barracks’, near the production facilities.
53
In these camps and in Kaiserwald continual selections of those unfit for work took place;

on 28 April 1944 the children were removed from all the camps and murdered.
54

The Riga ghetto was, by contrast, dissolved. As in the Kaiserwald camp and in

the ‘barracks’ only Jews who were actually in the ‘work programme’ were sup-

posed to live there. On 2 November the Security Police drove together the children

and the sick in the ghetto and deported them to Auschwitz.
55
After that the ghetto was gradually cleared once and for all. The two other large ghettos remaining in

the Baltic, the ghettos of Kaunas and Vilnius (Vilna), were removed in September

1943.

The Kaunas (Kovno) ghetto was turned into a concentration camp (‘KZ

Kauen’) on 15 September. By this point many of the ghetto-dwellers were already

living in work camps outside the ghetto, which were now subordinated to the

concentration camp. A total of 2,800 Jews were deported to Estonia and deployed

as forced labourers; those ‘unfit for work’ were murdered. On 27 March 1944

prisoners who were not used as slave labour, 1,800 children, and elderly people

were murdered.
56

In the spring of 1943 the smaller ghettos in the district of Vilnius were dissolved,

and the bulk of the inhabitants murdered, the smaller part interned in the Vilnius

ghetto, and in June and July the same thing happened to the labour camps in this

area.
57
In August and September the remaining 20,000 or so inhabitants of the ghetto were herded together; most of them were dispatched to Estonian and