Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (67 page)

murdered on arrival. Instead, it seems that Jeckeln acted on his own initiative, on

the assumption that the RSHA’s ‘guidelines’, which were drafted in general terms

and of which we are inadequately informed, permitted such action in view of the

extremely difficult situation in Latvia, where there was no available accommoda-

tion for the deportees who were arriving in quick succession.

There is some reason to believe that the rapid deportations to Riga, like those to

Lodz and Minsk, were deliberately used to create ‘intolerable situations’ as a way

of effectively forcing the local authorities to find more radical ‘solutions’. Greiser

in Lodz had responded with his proposal to murder 100,000 indigenous Jews and

the HSSPF for Russia-Centre had organized a mass murder in the Minsk ghetto.

300

Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941

However, while Jeckeln had reacted in the desired way with the liquidation of

the Riga ghetto, by executing the Central European Jews he had gone beyond the

desired goal (at this point). There was, though, a tension characteristic of the

process of putting the murder machinery in motion between general orders that

were to be understood intuitively, and independent initiatives on the part of the

local authorities, and on this occasion there had to be intervention from the top to

control matters. Himmler intervened, for once, in order to de-escalate the situ-

ation rather than—as with his other interventions—to radicalize it still further.

Himmler’s intervention had at first led to a complete halt to the systematic

murder of those deported to Latvia: the Jews of the next twenty-two transports

that arrived in Riga were confined in the Riga ghetto or the two camps of Salaspils

and Jungfernhof. There do seem, however, to have been two exceptions. Signifi-

cant indications suggest that, on 19 January 1942, most of the passengers of a

transport from Theresienstadt, more than 900 people, were shot immediately on

arrival, and that at the end of January around 500 Jews, from a transport either

from Berlin or Vienna, were also shot.
150
At the end of March and the beginning of April 1942, selections of Jews no longer fit for work also took place in the Riga

ghetto and Jungfernhof: the victims were mainly Jews from Vienna and Berlin. In

the ghetto we may assume that 3,000 died, and in the Jungfernhof, in an ‘action’

on 26 March, around 1,800 people.
151

‘Final Solution’ in Serbia, Autumn 1941

After the German military administration had ruled in May that Jews and

Gypsies were to be marked, dismissed from public service, deployed in forced

labour, and have their property confiscated,
152
the anti-Jewish policy was further intensified with the start of the attack on the Soviet Union. The Jewish community of Belgrade now had to supply forty hostages a day. From the beginning of

July onwards, hostages from this community, Communists and Jews, were shot

almost daily as ‘retaliation’ for acts of resistance.
153
In August, the arrests were extended to all Jewish men. In Serbia too, then, the ‘retaliatory measures’ were

directed against the hostile image of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’. In spite of these

shootings the Serbian resistance against the occupying power grew steadily.

When twenty-two German soldiers were killed in a further attack, on 4 October

the Plenipotentiary Commanding General in Serbia, Franz Böhme, ordered,
154
as

‘reprisal and atonement . . . that 100 Serbian prisoners be shot for every murdered

German soldier’. Those to be executed were prisoners from the concentration

camps in Sabac and Belgrade, ‘predominantly Jews and Communists’.
155
In fact, between 9 and 13 October some 2,000 Jews and 200 Gypsies from these camps

were shot.
156
Böhme had received express support for his policy of directing his retaliatory measures primarily against Jews from Martin Luther, the head of the

Autumn 1941: Deportation and Mass Murders

301

German department of the Foreign Ministry, and from Eichmann, the Jewish

specialist of the RSHA. In his memorandum to the AA representative in Bel-

grade, dated 16 September, Luther had recommended that the arrested Jewish

men be treated as hostages across the board,
157
and in a phone call to the Jewish expert of the Foreign Ministry on 13 September 1941 Eichmann had suggested

that this group be shot.
158

On 10 October Böhme issued a general order to shoot 100 prisoners or hostages

‘for every German soldier or ethnic German (men, women or children) killed or

murdered’, ‘for every wounded German soldier or ethnic German 50 prisoners or

hostages’. The following were to be ‘immediately’ arrested as hostages: ‘all Com-

munists, male inhabitants suspected of being so, all Jews, a certain number of

nationalist and democratically minded inhabitants’.
159

In accordance with this scheme, a few days later an additional 2,200 men, Jews

and Gypsies once again among them, were shot for 10 members of the Wehrmacht

killed in battle and 24 wounded.
160
In the two weeks following the order of 10 October, Wehrmacht units killed over 9,000 Jews, Gypsies, and other civilians.
161

At the beginning of November, 8,000 Jewish men, or almost all the Jewish men that

the occupying forces had been able to round up, were executed by the firing

squads.
162
The families of the victims were interned in a concentration camp during the winter and murdered the following spring, in gas vans.

During the ‘retaliatory actions’ Wehrmacht firing squads had also shot around

1,000 Roma. Unlike the Jewish minority, however, the Gypsies living in Serbia,

whose numbers far exceeded 100,000, were spared mass murders on this scale; this

clearly demonstrates the differences in the intensity of the persecution of the two

population groups.
163

Interim Conclusion: The Transition to Regional

Murder Actions

Taken as a whole, the decisions described above provide the following picture:

from the end of July the shootings in the Soviet Union were gradually extended to

include women and children, from August onwards certain places were made

judenfrei, and in October, in practically all parts of the occupied territory, the

policy of murdering the entire Jewish population apart from a small number of

people ‘fit for work’ was implemented. Late in August 1941 the ‘euthanasia

murders’ in the Reich came to an end in their existing form, which meant that

the staff were freed up and initially deployed on a short-term basis in the context

of action 14f13. Mid-September saw the gas experiments in Mogilev in which the

murderous technology of euthanasia was tried out in the Eastern territories for the

first time. Presumably towards the end of September the decision was made to

302

Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941

murder around 100,000 people from the Warthegau. At the beginning of October

the Security Police began large-scale mass shootings in the district of Galicia in

the territory of the General Government, in which murder was carried out just

as indiscriminately as in occupied Soviet territory. In parallel with this, the

Wehrmacht began systematically shooting Jewish men and Gypsies in Serbia.

In mid-October Globocnik received the assignment to build an extermination

camp (Belzec), and in the days that followed the government of the General

Government began organizational preparations for the mass murder of the Polish

Jews. The middle of October, however, was a particularly critical phase in Juden-

politik in the district of Lublin for a different reason. On 20 October Himmler

proposed to the Slovakian head of state that the Slovakian Jews be deported to a

particularly remote area within the General Government this may have been

the starting point for the construction of the second extermination camp at

Sobibor.
164
In November the T4 murder specialists were assigned to Globocnik.

In October preparations began for the construction of extermination camps in

Riga and presumably also in the area around Minsk (Mogilev); there are indica-

tions of similar plans for Lvov in November. Non-Jewish prisoners were first

murdered in Auschwitz with Zyklon B in September 1941. In the course of the

enlargement of the camp in October, a larger crematorium was ordered for

Auschwitz. In 1942 the cremation ovens originally intended for Mogilev were

diverted to Auschwitz. In November Reich German Jews were also shot during

the massacres of Lithuanian Jews by Security Police in Riga and Kaunas. However,

Himmler put a stop to this murderous practice, which was not in line with RSHA

policy at this point.

These events are so closely connected that they permit the following conclu-

sions to be drawn. In autumn 1941 the Nazi regime clearly decided to murder

several hundred thousand Jews deemed unfit for work in areas that seemed

particularly important from a strategic point of view. This decision followed on

directly from Hitler’s order, issued in mid-September, to deport the German Jews.

This swift radicalization of the decision-making process is connected with the

change in the original plan to deport 60,000 Jews to Lodz ghetto. This led to two

interrelated decisions: first, the gradual modification and extension of the deport-

ation programme. This was first directed to the ghettos of Minsk and Riga.

However, after October there are increasing signs that it was to be extended to

the district of Lublin and also to include Jews from outside the Reich. Secondly,

there was the bloody decimation of the reception areas (Lodz, Riga, Minsk,

Lublin) affected by the deportations. Conceivably, the decision made in autumn

1941—largely reconstructed from the course of events—may also have included

the district of Galicia. This is suggested by references to the planned construction

of an extermination camp in Lvov, but also by the particular role that Galicia was

to play in 1942 (alongside Lublin) in the implementation of the ‘Final Solution’

within the General Government. With this decision to carry out a mass murder of

Autumn 1941: Deportation and Mass Murders

303

the Jews in particular regions of Poland, the policy introduced shortly before in

the Soviet Union to create judenfrei areas, in which only a minority of forced

labourers confined in ghettos was left alive, was now extended to territories in

occupied Poland. The parallels with what was happening during October in

Serbia, where the Wehrmacht extended their reprisals to a comprehensive anni-

hilation campaign against the Jewish population, are quite plain. Moreover, it can

be no coincidence that, a short time later, the military administration in France

began directing its retaliatory programme against Jews who were to be transported

to the East as hostages. However, the reconstruction of these regional mass

murders, which were now being implemented or were in preparation, does not

allow us to conclude that a decision to murder immediately all European Jews had

been made in autumn 1941.
165
At that point the murder of hundreds of thousands of people was being prepared, but not of millions.

However, the politics of extermination had by now attained such a dynamic

momentum that the further extension of the murders to the whole of Europe was

the logical next step for those responsible. The further move to the mass murder of

all European Jews could only have been halted if the leadership of the regime had

now introduced a radical change of course—and that would have been precisely

the opposite of what Hitler intended at this point.

Thus, it would be a mistake to see the preparations for the regional mass

murders which began in autumn 1941 solely as a spontaneous reaction to the

obvious failure of a deportation programme to the Soviet Union, a territory which

had not yet, contrary to expectations, been conquered.
166
It was rather that events represented a logical continuation of the Judenpolitik that had been pursued so far.

For the comprehensive deportation programme for the European Jews, planned

since the beginning of 1941 and now under way, had been a ‘final solution’ policy

from the outset, that is to say it was the fixed aim to destroy those people who had

been deported to the occupied Soviet territories once the war was over. Thus, the

regional mass murders of those Jews who were ‘unfit for work’ represent a

radicalization and acceleration of that ‘final solution’ policy. In the wake of the

mass shootings in Eastern Europe, the idea of a ‘final solution’, still vague at first,

began to assume sharper outlines, while the original post-war prospect for this

‘final solution’ increasingly became a feasible project that was implemented on a

growing scale already during the course of the war. With the decision in Septem-

ber to carry out mass deportations from the Reich to ghettos that were already

appallingly overcrowded, this radicalization and acceleration were deliberately

introduced by the Nazi leadership: the authorities in the reception areas were quite

intentionally presented with ‘impossible situations’. More radical solutions were