Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (94 page)

Jewish minority, a relatively large group of people had been left behind, which was

no longer in a position to emigrate. With war on the horizon, the regime set about

subjecting this group to total tyranny.

After the November pogrom the Nazi regime proceeded to declare the Jews to

be hostages menaced by ‘destruction’ (Vernichtung). Remarkably, Hitler himself,

in referring to extermination in his speech of 30 January 1939, did not speak of the

German Jews but prophesied—expressly in the instance of a ‘global war’—the

‘destruction of the Jewish race in Europe’.

However, from the perspective of the National Socialists, the idea of exter-

mination was not a tactically motivated threat but the logical consequence of the

notion that dominated the whole of National Socialist policy, that the German

people were engaged in a struggle against ‘international Jewry’ in which their

very existence was at stake. The National Socialists saw war as the chance to

realize their utopian ideas of an empire ordered along racist lines. From their

point of view, war served to legitimate the idea of compensating for the loss of

the ‘racially valuable’ by extirpating the racially ‘inferior’ in the interests of

maintaining ‘ethnic biological’ equilibrium. It was the emergency of war that

produced the opportunity for such an unparalleled break with the humanitarian

tradition.

Even during the war against Poland, in mid-September 1939, the German

leadership began seriously to address their plans for Lebensraum by developing

a gigantic resettlement programme for the newly conquered territories. This

programme involved the deportation of all Jews living in territory under German

control to a ‘Jewish reservation’ in conquered Poland. These plans were actually

set in motion with the so-called ‘Nisko Action’ in October 1939, but had to be

suspended after a short time. In fact, however, the Nazi regime kept to the plan of

a ‘Jewish reservation’ in the district of Lublin and repeated fitful attempts were

made to achieve such a mass programme through small-scale deportations.

In fact the plan for a ‘Jewish reservation’ was aimed at concentrating the Jews

from the whole of the German sphere of influence in an area which lacked

adequate living conditions, and to cause the death of these more than two million

people through undernourishment, epidemics, low birth rates, and so on, possibly

over a period of several generations. Plainly such a long-term plan contained the

potential to blackmail the Western powers that the leadership of the ‘Third Reich’

needed in order to construct a Lebensraum empire without being disturbed by

outside intervention.

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Conclusion

The plan for a reservation was thus an initial project for the ‘final solution of the

Jewish question’, a long-term plan involving the deaths of the great majority of

Jews living under the control of the Nazi regime. The radical nature of this project

becomes fully clear when one views it within the context of the mass murders that

the Nazi regime unleashed after the start of the war: the shootings of tens of

thousands of Polish civilians (including thousands of Jews), as well as the ‘eutha-

nasia’ programme, the murder of the sick and the disabled.

Over the next two years, the ‘Jewish reservation’ project was maintained (in

modified form). After the victory over France, the regime concentrated on

Madagascar, and early in 1941, as part of the preparations for ‘Barbarossa’, a

plan was developed to deport the Jews under German rule to the territories in

the East, which the Germans thought they were about to conquer. Common to all

these plans was the prospect of the physical ‘Final Solution’, even if this was to

extend over a long period of time.

Many historians have assumed that a fundamental decision to murder the Jews

was taken sometime during the course of 1941 and that therefore one can clearly

distinguish an early phase during which ‘territorial’ solutions were conceived from

a later ‘final solution phase’. However, this view fails to perceive what was at the

core of the plans of National Socialist Judenpolitik: the ‘territorial solution’ was

also always conceived as a ‘final solution’, because in the final analysis its goal was

the annihilation of the vast majority of the Jews.

By autumn 1939, then, the point had already been reached at which those

involved in Judenpolitik began to gear themselves up for the extermination of

the European Jews. The measures taken by the regime from 1941 onwards were

merely the concrete realization of the extermination already envisaged in 1939.

There were only vague ideas of how and over what period of time this extermin-

ation was to occur in practice. The ‘destruction of the Jewish race in Europe’,

threatened by Hitler on 30 January 1939, was initially an option, the realization of

which was still dependent on certain conditions. From 1941 onwards, when the

systematic destruction of the European Jews was actually realized, the idea of what

was meant by ‘Final Solution’ was to be radicalized. General notions of annihi-

lating the Jews within the German sphere of influence over the long term were

now developed by the National Socialist leadership into a comprehensive pro-

gramme of mass murder which was essentially to be implemented even before

the end of the war. The abstract concept of ‘destruction’ (Vernichtung) or ‘Final

Solution’ used by the perpetrators allowed them to develop their plans, which

since 1939 had been geared towards the death of the European Jews, in stages

towards this systematic murder programme. However, since 1939 extermination

and ‘Final Solution’ had equated to millions of deaths.

This radicalization of the process leading to systematic mass murder occurred

in the context of the expanding war. For the National Socialists, the racial war for

Lebensraum included from the outset the prospect of exterminating what they had

Conclusion

425

defined as the Jewish enemy, particularly when the war grew into a world war and

the dream of a Lebensraum empire was thus endangered.

This link between war and extermination policy does not represent an inevit-

able automatism, and it would be wrong to imagine that a ‘decision’ to murder the

European Jews was taken around the start of the war. The link was, in fact, the

result of National Socialist policy. For the extermination process to be actually set

in motion crucial preconditions had first to exist: the ‘reservation’ had to be

definitely determined and established. So long as this had not occurred, exter-

mination remained an intention that could also under certain circumstances be

revoked.

In the summer of 1941 the extermination policy reached the second stage of its

escalation with the murder of the Soviet Jews. While tens of thousands of Jewish

men eligible for military service had been shot during the first few weeks of the

war in Russia (and earlier in the mass executions in Poland), from the end of July,

but more intensively from August, September, and October 1941, hundreds of

thousands of men, women, and children were murdered. This transition from

a terroristic modus operandi to a murderous ‘ethnic cleansing’ cannot be

adequately explained by the elation of victory, nor by a change of mood provoked

by the failure of the blitzkrieg strategy in autumn/winter 1941.

In fact, in the summer of 1941, the Germans began the ‘New Order’ (Neuord-

nung) of the conquered Lebensraum, precisely as originally planned without

waiting for military victory. However, while the war continued the planned

reordering of the ‘Ostraum’ had to be restricted to purely negative measures.

The mass murder of the Soviet civilian population, that is those who stood at the

lowest level of the Nazis’ racist hierarchy, and in their distorted perception formed

the chief supports of the Bolshevik system, was from the perspective of the

National Socialist leadership an anticipation of the plans discussed before the

start of the war, according to which millions of people on Soviet territory were to

fall victim to the ‘New Order’ of the Lebensraum.

One factor that may have been crucial to the initiation of genocide in Soviet

territory in late summer 1941, which had been planned since the beginning of the

same year, was an initiative by Himmler, who wished, through his brutal treat-

ment of the Jewish civilian population, to transfer his competencies as Reichs-

kommissar for the Strengthening of the German Nation to the newly conquered

territories, as was also finally sanctioned by Hitler. By ordering in July 1941 the

inclusion of elderly men, women, and children in the campaign of extermination

through shooting, Himmler was preparing the ground for the ‘ethnic cleansing’

that was intended to be carried out by the SS and was doing so even while the war

was still going on and before the apparatus of the occupying administration could

be consolidated. It is plain that in doing this Himmler was anticipating Hitler’s

intentions; Hitler himself had done everything he could to make sure even before

the beginning of the invasion that this war would have the character of a campaign

426

Conclusion

of racist extermination, and he was fully informed about the actions of the

Einsatzgruppen.

This is not to say, however, that the gradual extension of the murders to the

general Jewish civilian population can simply be seen as the result of an order

from the Führer or an independent initiative on the part of Himmler which had

been authorized by Hitler. The crucial point is that there was from the outset a

consensus among the decision makers that the persecution of the Jews should be

further and further radicalized in the further course of the war. On the basis of this

consensus, general instructions in line with the intuition of the subordinates were

issued in certain situations; in this way wider scope was given to independent

initiatives. In the end the entire process was coordinated and standardized at the

top. The leadership at the centre and the executive organizations on the periphery

radicalized one another through a reciprocal process.

The third stage of escalation in the transition to the systematic extermination of

the Jews occurred in the autumn of 1941. It consisted of two crucial decisions: on

the one hand Hitler’s decision made in mid-September 1941 to deport the Jews

from the whole of the Reich including the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, if

possible that same year, to the incorporated Polish territories, and further east-

wards the following spring. If the first step was originally seen as being the

deportation of 60,000 Jews to the Lodz ghetto, this intention was soon modified

and extended: now 25,000 Jews and Gypsies were to be deported to the ghettos of

Riga and Minsk. We know that at this point a third wave of deportations was

already planned for the start of the following year. Between September and

November, with the marking of the German Jews, the general prohibition on

emigration imposed upon Jews throughout the whole of the area under German

control, and the withdrawal of citizenship and the remaining property of those

deported from Germany, major administrative preparations for the deportation

had also been made.

Thus, in September 1941, Hitler set in motion the plan, made early in 1941, to

deport the European Jews to the territories of the Soviet Union that were soon to

be conquered, although without waiting for the victory over the Red Army. The

fact that, although the war was not going to plan, Hitler insisted on the imple-

mentation of the final variant of the reservation plan that had been pursued since

1939—with its genocidal consequences—seems to be more significant for the

analysis of the decision-making process than any additional factors (the issue of

accommodation, repression because of the deportations of the Volga Germans,

etc.), which, from the point of view of the Nazi leadership, argued in favour of the

instigation of the deportations in autumn 1941. As with the Nisko and Madagascar

plans, the Nazi leadership clearly associated the idea of ‘hostage-taking’ with the

first deportations. The United States were to be dissuaded from entering the war

through the more or less open threat to liquidate the deported Jews, entirely in the

spirit of Hitler’s prophecy of 30 January 1939.

Conclusion

427

The decision that Hitler made in autumn 1941 gradually to deport the Jews

under German rule to the East was linked to a second momentous decision (but

one which cannot be reconstructed in detail), namely to carry out the mass

murder of the indigenous Jews in the provisional reception areas. Now areas

‘free of Jews’ were also to be created in the occupied Polish territories, as they

had been in the Soviet Union since the end of the summer. With the

prospect of sending tens of thousands of Central European Jews to the already

completely overcrowded ghettos, more radical solutions were demanded of the

local authorities.

Reichsstathalter Greiser himself had proposed that the indigenous Jewish