Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (93 page)

Finally, on 25 April, the seaborne transport of the surviving 4,500 prisoners

from Stutthof began. The ships travelled to Neustadt in the Bay of Lübeck, where

the prisoners from Neuengamme had already been shipped in on three passenger

boats, possibly a measure that had something to do with the release of prisoners to

Sweden. Two of these ships were, however, set on fire by a British air attack, and

most of the prisoners were killed, while those who were able to escape were killed

on the beach, as were the Stutthof prisoners who were camped there, completely

exhausted.

Estimates suggest that between a third and a half of the 714,000 and more

people who were in the concentration camp system at the beginning of 1945 fell

victim to the clearances.
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Of the 714,000 prisoners at the beginning of 1945, some 200,000 were Jews; the number of Jewish victims in the final phase of the ‘Third

Reich’ is estimated to be somewhere between 70,000 and 100,000. In that last

phase there was no comprehensive and deliberate policy to murder all Jewish

prisoners still held, and Himmler’s negotiations did not lead to a consistent policy

of sparing Jewish hostages. Rather, the last phase of the Holocaust, marked by

the clearance of the concentration camps and the death marches, but also by the

efforts—successful on a smaller scale—to release prisoners, shows that until the

very last days of the war the fate of the European Jews under the SS terror regime

depended on very contradictory decisions made at various levels of the SS

hierarchy. This, once again, makes it clear that the murder of the European Jews

was not an automatic programme of murder set in motion by a single order issued

from behind a desk, but rather that the implementation of the general decision to

practice systematic murder was repeatedly frustrated by different intentions and

thus distracted and delayed. Accordingly, it becomes apparent that it took a vast

amount of initiative and energy at all levels of the SS hierarchy actually to

implement the systematic murder of the European Jews—and that the desire to

destroy was still present through to the last days of the war.

The Nazi Regime’s Policy Towards the Gypsies in the

Second Half of the War: Parallels with and

Differences from the ‘Final Solution’

At the end of 1942 the Nazi regime proceeded to step up the persecution of the

Gypsies in a decisive fashion. Up until this point the Zigeunerpolitik (policy

towards the gypsies) had been marked by ‘unsimultaneities and contradictions’.
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The overview below should make this clear.

Murders and Deportations, 1942–3

419

In the Netherlands the Gypsies, a group comprising only a few hundred people,

had at first been subjected to certain residence restrictions and intensified police

checks, and finally, in 1943, as part of the measures directed against the entire

‘travelling’ population, held at collection points. The measures against the equally

small group of Gypsies in Belgium and northern France were limited to certain

prohibitions and intensified control.
273

As in the Netherlands and Belgium, in France the Gypsies, along with the rest of

the non-sedentary population, had been driven out of the security zone by the

Atlantic coast or the Channel. In October 1940 the military administration had

ordered the construction of collection camps for Gypsies in the occupied northern

zone. Several thousand people not following a settled way of life, Gypsies and

others, ended up in these camps. In the unoccupied southern zone the prohibition

on wandering, passed in April 1940, continued to be applied in principle.

In the occupied Soviet Union, in Poland and Serbia, Gypsies had already been

murdered in their thousands in 1942. But the comparison with the persecution of

the Jews shows the different degrees of intensity of the extermination policy:

Gypsies tended to be killed in the wake of the ‘actions’ against the Jews, a policy

of systematic and total murder of the Gypsies cannot be demonstrated in these

three Eastern or South-Eastern European countries.

The regimes in the South-East European satellite states pursued their own

‘Gypsy policy’. In May 1942 the Croatian Security Police ordered the arrest of all

Gypsies, except those of the Muslim religion. The Gypsies were concentrated in

the camp of Jasenovac; there those ‘unfit for work’ were literally slaughtered, while

those ‘fit for work’, where they did not fall victim to the unimaginably terrible

conditions of imprisonment, were also murdered in large numbers. The precise

figure of victims is unknown, as are the numbers for the Gypsy population; the

estimates for Jasenovac vary between 10,000 and 40,000, for the whole of Croatia

between 25,000 and 50,000 dead.
274

In Romania, where a Gypsy minority of around 300,000 people existed, in 1942

on the orders of the Romanian government between 20,000 and 26,000 Gypsies

were deported to Transnistria. By far the greatest number of them died as a result

of the devastating conditions there.
275

In Slovakia Gypsies, like Jews, were excluded from citizenship in 1939 if they

behaved in a socially maladjusted way, that is, if they did not belong to families

following a settled way of life or in regular work. Measures introduced as early as

1941 for the arrest of Gypsies seem to have been pursued seriously only after the

German intervention in the summer of 1944. After that point the German

Einsatzgruppe H murdered Gypsies in larger numbers, possibly as many as

1,000 people.
276

Under the rule of the Arrow Cross Party, many Roma were arrested in Hungary

at the end of 1944 and deported to concentration camps in the Reich, where they

were used as forced labourers.
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420

Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

At the end of 1942, the SS and police apparatus came to the conclusion that, as

far as the Gypsies living in Germany were concerned, henceforth distinctions were

to be made between, on the one hand, the ‘racially pure’ Sinti and Lalleri

(including the ‘half-breeds’ (Mischlinge) in those groups capable of assimilation)

and, on the other, the Roma and other ‘half-breeds’, and that this second group

was to be systematically murdered. The ‘racially pure’ Gypsies were to be taken to

a ‘reservation’ in the General Government after the end of the war and there,

pursuing their ‘racially specific’ way of life in isolation, be returned to their

allegedly ‘Aryan’ roots. The remaining Gypsies, on the other hand, were to be

deported to camps. On 16 December 1942, Himmler, after rebutting initial con-

cerns on the part of Hitler and the Party Chancellery, issued the order that ‘Gypsy

half-breeds, Roma Gypsies, and members of Gypsy clans of Balkan origin not of

German blood’ be sent to concentration camps. This decision coincided directly

with the preparation of the last major wave of Jewish deportation from the Reich,

which the Nazi regime had plainly been preparing since December 1942, and the

deportation of even non-Jewish prisoners in concentration camps also ordered by

Himmler in December. In view of the mass recruitment of new foreign workers

these intensified deportations did not seem to represent a notable risk for arma-

ments production. Added to this was the fact that after the turning point in the

war introduced by the Allied landing in North Africa, the Germans intensified

Judenpolitik in various countries on the new ‘southern front’ (in France, Greece,

and Bulgaria). This may have contributed to a general radicalization of the

decision-making process and the accelerated implementation of further deport-

ations.
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‘Socially adjusted’ Gypsies were not to be deported, although the criteria for this selection remain unclear.
279

The deportation of the Gypsies involved the ‘Greater German Reich’, including

the Protectorate and the district of Bialystok, Belgium, and the Netherlands.

The first Gypsy transport from the Reich arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau on

26 February 1943; by July 1944 around 23,000 people had been deported to the

Gypsy camp (which was not segregated according to sex).
280

From April 1944 those Gypsies still ‘fit for work’ were moved from Birkenau to

concentration camps in the Reich, some 1,600 people in all. Of the other Gypsies

deported to Birkenau around 6,000 were still alive in the spring of 1944. In May

1944 the camp authorities decided to liquidate the Gypsy camp in view of the

immediately impending extermination action against the Hungarian Jews. After a

first attempt in May had been defeated by the resistance of the camp inmates, on

2 and 3 August almost 300 Gypsies were murdered in the gas chambers in

Auschwitz; only around 1,600 people, former soldiers and the relatives of soldiers,

were spared.
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Of the 22,600 people originally confined in the Gypsy camp 19,300

perished.

The sterilization of ‘maladjusted’ Gypsy half-breeds in the Reich was system-

atically undertaken by the Criminal Police in 1944. The written agreement of the

Murders and Deportations, 1942–3

421

victims was often forced with threats of deportation. Overall an estimated

2,000–2,500 Gypsies were sterilized.
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The figure for Gypsies murdered on racial grounds under German rule can no

longer be established with any kind of precision. In Germany an estimated 15,000

people were killed as Gypsies or Gypsy half-breeds, in Austria around 8,000, and in

Czechoslovakia around 35,000. In Belgium/northern France and the Netherlands

it must have been several hundred people; in the occupied Soviet territories at

least 10,000, possibly very many more, and in Poland around 8,000.
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These figures themselves show that the Roma were not persecuted with any-

thing like the same intensity as the Jews. Neither did the persecution of the

Gypsies include all the countries under German rule; after 1942 there were no

deportations whose goal was the immediate murder of the deportees in extermin-

ation camps. On the other hand the persecution of the Gypsies reveals numerous

parallels with the persecution of the Jews; the fate of the Gypsies makes it plain

that Judenpolitik was part of a more widely based Rassenpolitik.

CONCLUSION

In this study we have made an attempt to interpret the decision-making process

leading to the systematic murder of the Jews of Europe within the wider context of

German Judenpolitik. As a result we have identified four distinct stages of escal-

ation between the start of the war and the summer of 1942, in the course of which

the Nazi leadership developed and set in motion a programme for the systematic

murder of the European Jews. We have argued that the decisive turning point

leading to the ‘Final Solution’ occurred as early as autumn 1939 and we have

shown that the radicalization of Judenpolitik occurred within the context of a

Rassenpolitik, but that no other group was persecuted with the same relentlessness

and the same disastrous consequences as the Jews of Europe.

In the years between 1933 and 1939 Judenpolitik within the German Reich

remained closely associated with the National Socialist seizure and maintenance

of power. The ‘de-jewification’ (Entjudung) of German society, in the broader

sense the implementation of a racist policy, provided the Nazis with the instru-

ment for gradually penetrating the individual spheres of life in German society

and subjecting them to their total claim to power. In the years between 1933 and

1939, not only did this key function of Judenpolitik become apparent, but it also

became evident that a particular tactic for the phased implementation of the

policy was being developed: the regime leadership set general goals and

the subordinate organizations utilized the broad scope they were given for the

exercise of considerable individual initiative and did so to a degree in competition

with one another. But the frictions and tensions that arose could not disguise the

fact that the goal of the expulsion of the Jews from German society was based on a

broad consensus within the National Socialist movement. The initiation and

radicalization of the persecution of the Jews cannot simply be traced back to a

chain of decisions taken at the top of the Nazi regime; it would be more accurate to

say that a new political field was constituted and developed, in which complex

structures and autonomous dynamics then developed, without the leaders of the

regime losing control of the overall process of Judenpolitik.

This policy was clearly exhausted with the November pogrom and the subse-

quent legal measures. After the German Jews had been reduced to the status of a

Conclusion

423

plundered minority, completely stripped of its rights, even Nazi propaganda had

difficulty evoking dangers that this completely powerless minority could have

represented; it was barely possible to supply motives for further anti-Semitic

‘actions’.

On the other hand, however, the Nazi regime had not managed to expel all the

German Jews. Now it became apparent that, as a result of the plundering of the