Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (3 page)

political activity. It penetrated them and radically transformed them. The National

Socialists tended to understand traditional political fields (such as foreign, social, and labour policy) in a racist manner and to redefine them along racist lines. Their starting point was the assumption that there was something akin to an ‘international Jewish

problem’ that foreign policy had to focus on; they assumed that social policy in the

Nazi state took the form of welfare provision for ‘Aryans’ alone and not for the

‘racially inferior’; they took it as read that Jewish labour was essentially unproductive and parasitic and therefore, as a matter of principle, only used Jewish people for

particularly onerous and humiliating physical work. Similarly they organized their

policies on nutrition and housing, the occupation of conquered territory, and other

policy areas according to racially determined hierarchies and racially determined

conceptual approaches in which anti-Semitism always played a major role.

Introduction

5

Finally the overall political context changed with time, and during the war did so

with ever-increasing speed. Nazi Judenpolitik thus took on quite different forms in

different phases of the progress of the ‘Third Reich’. For tactical reasons it was

modified, retracted, or accelerated; at critical points it developed erratically, disjoint-edly, and in sequences of action that developed their own internal dynamics. This

kind of development cannot be fully grasped by a conventional model of understand-

ing political decision-making (which stresses the formulation of political goals, the

process of decision-making itself, and the implementation of those decisions). The

implementation of Judenpolitik took on its own dynamic such that decision-making

and even the formulation of political aims were subsumed within it.

Judenpolitik was subject to sudden shifts; it developed contradictorily, within a

complex series of linkages and without any form of precedent. It could not be

implemented by people who were merely following orders but required active

protagonists who could operate on their own initiative and understand intuitively

what the leadership required of them. Judenpolitik is characterized by the rela-

tively large scope afforded to the activities of those who put it into practice. This

system could only function if the most important aspects of Judenpolitik com-

manded a consensus amongst those involved with it. It would only function if it

was actively supported by at least part of the population, the active adherents of

National Socialism. It was thus necessary to be able to communicate the aims and

mechanisms of Judenpolitik to the public at all times and with varying degrees of

openness. Judenpolitik was thus publicly disseminated, debated, and legitimated—

albeit often in a disguised manner.
21

What seems to me to be crucial to any analysis of this complex phenomenon is

the fact that Judenpolitik was central to the whole National Socialist movement,

indeed that the very aims, the distinctiveness, and the uniqueness of National

Socialism as a historical phenomenon were determined by its Judenpolitik. This

can be clarified in a number of ways.

The basic aim of the Nazi movement was a racially homogeneous national

community (Volksgemeinschaft) in which the potential for creative energy inher-

ent in the German people could at last come to fruition and where the German

people could achieve full self-realization. The Nazi view was that the harmony of

the national community to which they aspired would permit the resolution of

virtually all the major problems of their age, whether they were aspects of foreign

or domestic policy, social, economic, or cultural in nature. It was not possible to

establish such a racially homogeneous community because it was based on

erroneous beliefs about the division of humanity into different ‘races’, so Nazi

racism could only operate negatively: via negative measures, via discrimination,

exclusion, elimination, via the removal of alien elements—in which process, for

historical reasons, anti-Jewish measures took on a central role. In the course of

this process of exclusion the NSDAP was supposed to succeed in bringing under

its control those areas of life that needed to be ‘made Jew-free’ (entjudet). Thus for

6

Introduction

the Nazis anti-Semitic policies became the key to gaining control first over

German society and later over almost the whole of Europe. Their anti-Semitic

ideology was not a mere Weltanschauung, a hotchpotch of aberrant and perverse

ideas, but the very basis of the Nazis’ claims for total domination.

This means, I believe, that we should abandon the notion that it is historically

meaningful to try to filter the wealth of available historical material and pick out a

single decision that led to the ‘Final Solution’. This approach is pointless not only

because the debate on the ‘Final Solution’ has evidently reached the limits of what

is provable but above all because any attempt to identify a decision taken at a

single moment in time runs counter to the extreme complexity of the processes

that were in fact taking place. The truth is that those with political responsibility

propelled forward, step by step, a highly complicated decision-making process in

which a series of points where it was escalated can be identified.

This has a number of consequences for a depiction of the genesis of the ‘Final

Solution’. First, if we abandon the model that sees a single decision as the trigger

for the murder of the European Jews and if we advance beyond the notion of a

cumulative process of radicalization that had got out of control and could no

longer be steered by anyone, then the various phases in Nazi Judenpolitik take on

new significance. New perspectives are revealed that show the years 1939 to 1941

as a phase in which the National Socialist regime was already considering

genocidal projects against the Jews that appear all the more sinister in the light

of the racially motivated programmes of mass murder that were already been

carried out against the Polish population and the ‘congenitally ill’. It also becomes

clearer how in the period from spring 1942 onwards the lives of several million

Jewish people depended on how the Nazis’ Judenpolitik developed. Large Jewish

communities could be saved (as they were in France, Italy, Denmark, Old

Romania, and Bulgaria) or they were lost (as in Hungary and Greece). Bitter

conflicts were also fought over the fate of Jewish forced labour groups. It needs to

be made clear that even after the Europe-wide ‘Final Solution’ had been initiated

the continuing development of Judenpolitik depended on a chain of decisions and

did not merely consist in the ‘implementation’ of a single decision that had

already been taken.

However, when we treat the period 1939 to 1945 as one in which a series of

decisions regarding Judenpolitik were being taken rather than restricting our

analysis to a ‘decision-making period’ of a few months, then we also need to

take the years 1933 to 1939 into consideration as a preparatory period for the phase

in which the annihilation of the Jews took place. In the years preceding the war the

institutions were created that were to organize the genocide during the war, and

this was the period in which Judenpolitik was developed and radicalized and in

which the regime learned how to deploy this new field of politics in a variety of

ways for its own purposes.

Introduction

7

The second effect of seeing the emergence of the ‘Final Solution’ as a complex

process rather than as the outcome of a single decision, if we follow the suggestions of

Gerlach, Aly, and others and take into consideration new thematic approaches to the

analysis of the persecution of the Jews, is that it becomes necessary to see Judenpolitik as systematically interlinked with the other central thematic areas, notably in

domestic policy but ultimately also with German hegemony on the continent of

Europe. For the war years this means that we need to take account of German

policies on alliances and inner repression across the whole of Europe, and of the

issues of work, food production, and financing the war. It is necessary to show how

these areas were redefined in a racist and specifically anti-Semitic sense, and to show

how even during the war the Nazi system was attempting to establish the basis for a

racist Imperium in which the murder of the Jews was the lowest common denom-

inator in a series of alliances led by Germany. This implies, of course, a very broad

programme of research that would exceed the scope of a single monograph. The

present study will restrict itself to exploring in outline how such linkages functioned.

Thirdly, if we accept that the decision-making process within Nazi Judenpolitik

did not come to an end after the ‘Final Solution’ had been determined upon in

principle but that after 1942 decisions were continually being reached that affected

the lives of millions of people—in this case it is clear that the implementation of

Judenpolitik was not only the result of priorities set by the leadership but was

increasingly influenced by the behaviour of German allies, by the way that the

local administration in occupied territories acted, and not least by the attitude of

the local populations and the behaviour of Germany’s enemies.

There is a further key factor to be considered, too. The Jewish population that in

1941 faced the plans being made for the ‘Final Solution’ was defenceless and wholly

unprepared, but in the second half of the war it too became an element that

influenced the way the perpetrators proceeded. By fleeing, by seeking to escape

persecution by living in a hide-away or underground, but also by negotiating with

individuals or bribing them, they were attempting to slow down the inexorable

process of annihilation and thereby—if only to a limited extent—influencing the

behaviour of the perpetrators.

Here research into the perpetrators reaches its limits, or in other words the

further into the war is the stage that research concentrates on, the more difficult it

becomes to reconstruct the development of the persecution and annihilation of

the European Jews by concentrating exclusively on persecutors and their activities.

This is not to say that concentrating on the persecutors in the period after 1942 is

historiographically impossible or pointless, but that it is important to make

precisely clear what the parameters are within which the perpetrators were able

to act autonomously.

Fourthly, if the history of the final solution is seen as a chain of ongoing

decisions that together come to make up the full context of Judenpolitik, then

the fate of the other groups persecuted by the Nazis must also be considered, or

8

Introduction

considered at least in so far as they reveal direct comparisons with or information

about the National Socialists’ Judenpolitik.

These, then, are the fundamental ideas around which this book’s depiction of

Judenpolitik in the years between 1933 and 1945 will be oriented. There is one

further significant angle that needs to be considered in more detail, and it

concerns the tricky nature of the available sources.

As far as possible this study is based on primary sources. Alongside the

documentary holdings of the German administrative departments that are housed

in well-known archives in Germany and outside, this study will also consider the

holdings of archives in the former Warsaw Pact states that since the 1990s have

become accessible to scholars. In practical terms this primarily means Moscow’s

‘Special Archive’ where two collections have been used in some detail: the papers

of the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith—the Central-

verein Deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (hereafter referred to simply as

the Centralverein)—which permits a far more detailed picture of the Nazis’

persecution of the Jews in the period from 1933 to 1938 than has hitherto been

available; and the papers of the Security Service of the SS (the Sicherheitsdienst, or

SD), which cover the period from 1935 to 1940. In addition, papers from various

other former Soviet, Polish, and Czech archives are considered, some of which

were consulted from copies in Yad Vashem or the US Holocaust Museum in

Washington.

For my investigation of the radicalization of Jewish persecution in the occupied

Soviet zones in the second half of 1941 I have made extensive use of papers from

the Central Office for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Ludwigsburg (properly

known as the Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen zur Aufklärung nation-

alsozialistischer Verbrechen) via the branch office there of the Bundesarchiv, or

Federal Archive of Germany.

Despite what is an almost unmanageably large quantity of documents available

for the reconstruction of Nazi Judenpolitik, from the point of view of the central

decision-making processes for the ‘Final Solution’ the state of source material can

only be described as ‘patchy’. This is because the most important decisions that led