Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (34 page)

national culture and its education system,
36
by plundering its economy and enslaving its workers,
37
by an arbitrary system of terrorization,
38
and finally via a ‘Germanization’ of those Poles who appeared appropriately receptive accompanied by the expulsion, displacement, and long-term decimation of the majority

of the population.
39

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The Persecution of the Jews, 1939–1941

‘Poland policy’ inaugurated a radicalization of National Socialist ‘race policy’.

The fact that in occupied Poland a regime maintained above all by Party and SS

functionaries could exercise arbitrary power on the basis of racist precepts made

the implementation of further radical measures easier in other areas of National

Socialist ‘race policy’.

Poland as the Object of German Judenpolitik

German ‘Jewish policy’ in Poland went through four phases between September

1939 and summer 1941. Initially ‘Jewish policy’ in Poland in September and

October 1939 was determined by plans and preparations for a ‘Jewish reservation’

(Judenreservat). A second phase, between autumn 1939 and spring 1940 saw the

first deportations of Central European Jews into the ‘reservation’, whilst funda-

mental anti-Jewish regulations were put in place by the occupying powers. In a

third phase, between the onset of war in the West and autumn 1940, the author-

ities in the General Government—in the context of the ‘Madagascar Project’—

made plans for deporting the Jews under German rule to an African colony. From

the end of 1940, ‘Jewish policy’ in the occupied areas was dominated by prepar-

ations for the war against the Soviet Union; deportations of Jews ‘to the East’

seemed therefore to have become a realistic possibility.

Early Plans for a ‘Jewish Reservation’ in Poland

The basis for Germany’s policy regarding the 1.7 million Polish Jews that were now

under its rule was evidently only put in place after the start of the war in

September and October 1939
.40
From mid-September initial consideration was being given by the German leadership to a huge ‘resettlement programme’ that

was to encompass the Jews of Poland as well as those in the areas of the German

Reich.

On 14 September Heydrich reported to a meeting of departmental heads of

the Security Police that ‘with regard to the Jewish problem in Poland . . . the

Reichsführer [Himmler] was presenting [Hitler] with suggestions that only the

Führer could decide upon since they had important foreign-policy ramifications’.
41

A week later, on 21 September, Heydrich told them that ‘the deportation of the Jews

(Juden-Deportation) into the foreign-language Reichsgau’ and ‘deportation

(Abschiebung) over the demarcation line’ had been authorized by Hitler. However,

this process was to be spread over a whole year: ‘Jews are to be collected together

into ghettos in the cities in order to permit greater control over them and later

better opportunities for getting rid of them.’ This ‘campaign’ was to be ‘carried out

within the next 3 to 4 weeks’. Heydrich summarized his instructions in the

following key phrases:

Occupation and Persecution of Jews in Poland, 1939–40/41 149

‘Jews into the cities as quickly as possible,

Jews out of the Reich into Poland,

the rest of the 30,000 Gypsies also into Poland,

systematic expulsion of the Jews from German areas in goods trains.’
42

On the same day Heydrich sent an express letter to the chiefs of the Security

Police Einsatzgruppen headed ‘Re: Jewish Question in the occupied areas’.
43
In this, one of the key documents of Germany’s Judenpolitik, Heydrich first drew the

attention of the Einsatzgruppen chiefs to the need to distinguish the ‘final goal

(which will take a long time)’ and ‘the stages by which this final goal will be

reached (which can be undertaken in shorter periods of time)’. The ‘overall

measures planned (in other words the final goal)’ was to be kept ‘strictly secret’.

The ‘instructions and guidelines’ that followed in Heydrich’s document contain

no direct references to the substance of the ‘final goal’, but instead merely

suggestions for the short-term measures to be taken in order to ‘encourage the

heads of the Einsatzgruppen to consider the practicalities’.

Heydrich’s ‘first prerequisite for the final goal’ was the instruction to concen-

trate ‘the Jews from the countryside into the larger towns and cities’. The terri-

tories annexed by the Reich would be the first to be ‘cleared of Jews’. A ‘council of

elders’ was to be established in all Jewish communities which was to be ‘made fully

responsible’ for the ‘precise and punctual implementation of all instructions that

have been or will be issued’. The fact that the places in which the Jews were to be

concentrated mostly lay near railway lines, and Heydrich’s further instruction to

the effect that these guidelines should not operate in the district for which

Einsatzgruppe 1 was responsible (the area east of Cracow) are important indica-

tions of the stage that RSHA planning had reached. Thereafter it was intended to

deport the Polish Jews into an area on the eastern border of occupied Poland,

where a ‘Jewish state under German administration’ was planned, as Heydrich

confirmed to Brauchitsch a day later.
44
The ‘final goal’ classed as ‘strictly secret’

will have involved the more extensive plan that Heydrich had explained to his

department heads on 21 September: the deportation of the Jews from the whole of

the area of the Greater German Reich into the ‘Jewish reservation’ and the

possibility of their being deported into the eastern Polish area occupied by the

Soviet Union, a plan that Hitler was to come back to several times in the days that

followed.

After the Soviet Union and Germany had reached agreement on 28 September

on the definitive demarcation line separating their zones of influence, and the area

between the Vistula and the Bug (later the district of Lublin in the General

Government) had been made a German area, the planned ‘reservation’ was to

be situated in this area. This ‘nature reserve’ or ‘Reich ghetto’, as Heydrich called

it, would not only take Jews but also ‘undesirable’ Poles from the eastern areas that

had been incorporated into the Reich.
45

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The Persecution of the Jews, 1939–1941

On 29 September Hitler told Rosenberg that he wanted the newly conquered

Polish territories to be divided into three strips: the area between the Vistula and

the Bug was for settling the Jews from the whole of the Reich and ‘all other

elements that are in any respect unreliable’; there was to be an ‘Eastern Wall’

erected along the Vistula, and on the old German–Polish border a ‘broad belt

of Germanization and colonization’, and between them a Polish ‘statehood’

(Staatlichkeit).
46
The idea of a ‘Jewish reservation’ was discussed relatively openly by the National Socialist leadership in the following weeks: Hitler mentioned it to

the Swedish manufacturer Dahlerus on 26 September,
47
whilst on 1 October he explained the idea of an ‘ethnic cleansing’ (volkliche Flurbereinigung) in the East

to the Italian Foreign Minister.
48
The German press was told of these plans in confidence and immediately speculation on the ‘reservation’ appeared in the

international press.
49
On 6 October Hitler explained in his speech to the Reichstag that the ‘most important task’ after the ‘collapse of the Polish state’ was ‘a new

order of ethnographic relations, which is to say a resettlement of nationalities’; in

the course of this ‘new order’ an attempt would be made ‘at ordering and

regulating the Jewish problem’.
50

On the following day, 7 October 1939, Hitler issued the decree for the ‘Strength-

ening of the German Nation’ and thereby gave Himmler the double task of, on the

one hand, ‘collecting and settling’ into the Reich ‘German people who have had to

live abroad, and, on the other, ‘arranging the settlement of the ethnic groups

within its sphere of interest so as to improve the lines of demarcation between

them’. Himmler was specifically to take responsibility: first, for the ‘repatriation’

(Rückführung) of Reich and ethnic Germans, second for the ‘exclusion of the

detrimental influence of those elements of the population who are ethnically alien

and represent a danger to the Reich and the community of Germans’ (for which

purpose, it went on to say, he would be allowed to assign the elements in question

particular areas to live in), and third for the ‘formation of new German settlement

areas through population transfer and resettlement’. The Reichsführer-SS was

instructed to make use of the ‘existing authorities and institutions’ in order to

implement these tasks.
51

Within the framework of these new responsibilities Himmler concentrated

first and foremost on organizing the ‘repatriation’ (Heimführung) of the ethnic

Germans from the Soviet Union and the Baltic states into the annexed areas of

Poland, which had been agreed on 28 September and over-hastily put into

practice, and at the same time set in train the large-scale ‘resettlement’ of Jews

and Poles.

chapter 9

DEPORTATIONS

Deportations Phase I: The Nisko–Lublin Plan

of October 1939

The so-called Nisko Project was the first concrete programme for deportation that

the SS organized in the context of the authority they had been given to ‘eliminate

the harmful influence of . . . elements of the population distinct from the German

people’ and to place them in ‘designated areas of settlement’.

On the day before the Decree for the Strengthening of the German Nation was

issued, on 6 October 1939, Heinrich Müller (the Head of the Gestapo) instructed

Adolf Eichmann (who was at that time Director of the Central Office for Jewish

Emigration (Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung) in Prague) to prepare

for the deportation of some 70,000–80,000 Jews from the region of Katowice

(Kattowitz), which had recently been formed from the annexed Polish areas. The

order also made provision for the deportation of Jews from Ostrava in Moravia

(Mährisch-Ostrau).
1
Both expulsion campaigns had already been initiated or planned by either the army or the Gestapo in the Protectorate (German-occupied

Czech territory) by the middle of September.
2
It was also on 6 October that Eichmann ordered the compilation in Berlin of a comprehensive list of all Jews,

who had hitherto been listed under the particular congregations of which they had

152

The Persecution of the Jews, 1939–1941

been members. This suggests that a much more comprehensive ‘resettlement

campaign’ was being planned.
3

In the days immediately afterwards Eichmann devoted great energy to the

organization of deportations not only from Ostrava and Katowice but from

Vienna, too. It is clear from a note sent by Eichmann to the Gauleiter of Silesia

that the former’s original instructions had in the meantime been extended.

Eichmann said that after the first four transports the ‘Head of the Security Police,

and the RFSS and Head of the German Police had to be presented with a progress

report which would then in all probability be passed on to the Führer. They should

then wait until the general removal of all Jews was ordered. The Führer has

initially directed that 300,000 Jews be transferred out of the Old Reich and the

Ostmark.’
4
Eichmann also mentioned this ‘order of the Führer’s’ on his visit to Becker, the Special Representative for Jewish Questions on Bürckel’s staff, noting

that those Jews still living in Vienna would be driven out in less than nine

months.
5

On 16 October, on a further visit to Vienna, Eichmann envisaged ‘2 transports

per week, each with 1,000 Jews’; on the same day he informed the Director of the

Reich Criminal Investigation Department, Artur Nebe, that the deportations

from the Old Reich would begin in three to four weeks.
6
Between 12 and 15

October, Dr Franz-Walther Stahlecker, the commander of the Security Police in

the Protectorate and Eichmann decided upon Nisko on the San as the target

station for these deportations and as the location for a ‘transit camp’. This camp,

situated right on the border with the district of Lublin, was evidently intended

to serve as a kind of filter through which the deportees would be moved to

the ‘Jewish reservation’. The transportees were promised accommodation in

barracks, for which plans were in fact originally made,
7
but these plans were now consciously abandoned.
8

The deportations were also to include Gypsies. When asked by Nebe as Head of

the Reich Criminal Investigation Department ‘when he could send the Berlin

Gypsies’, Eichmann responded that he intended to ‘add a few wagons of Gypsies’

to the transports from the district of Katowice and the Protectorate. He told Nebe

that the deportation of Gypsies from the remainder of the Reich would be initiated

some three to four weeks later.
9

Between 20 and 28 October 4,700 Jews were transported to Nisko from Vienna,