Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews Peter Longerich (grave mercy .TXT) 📖

himself concedes. 28 His subsequent visit to Minsk, where he witnessed a shooting, would then have occurred in the

spring of 1942, as Christian Gerlach has suggested. 29 His account of being sent to Auschwitz by Heydrich around four weeks after the issuing of the Führer command, where he visited the gas chambers in the so-called ‘bunkers’ (converted

farmhouses), 30 also shows how confused his memory of the chronology was.

These gas chambers were similarly only finished in the spring of 1942. His

memories of these journeys are thus not only unclear, but it is possible that he

has conflated various different journeys.

There is also a second argument for mistrusting Eichmann’s statements.

Eichmann had a fundamental reason for providing the earliest possible date for

the journey, and representing it as the consequence of an unambiguous decision

on the part of the Führer to murder all European Jews, but at the same time

making it appear purely a matter of information.

There is in fact much to suggest that Eichmann was sent to the extermination

sites, the destinations of the deportations that he had organized, in order to assess

the murder capacity of the camps and then to establish the pace and extent of the

deportation. It is also conceivable that the result of his inspection trips was itself

the precondition for the decision to begin the deportations on a European scale.

At any rate, after the war one would have been able to draw the conclusion from

his travels that he played a far more active part in the ‘Final Solution’ than he,

always presenting himself as a subordinate receiver of orders, was prepared to

admit. Thus, Eichmann placed great emphasis on representing his journeys as the

consequence of an order from the Führer that had already been made. He had to

make them appear to have taken place in 1941 and he had to stress that they were

not connected to any concrete commissions. But there is much to suggest that he

made these journeys predominantly at a later point in time, in the spring of 1942,

when the deportations were initiated on a larger scale. 31

Eichmann’s statements are in my view completely unsuited as evidence of a

Führerbefehl for the murder of the European Jews in the summer or late summer

of 1942.

In a critical reading, then, three of the main sources on which research into the

reconstruction of the genesis of the ‘Final Solution’ relied until a few years ago—

Goering’s empowerment of 31 July 1941 and the statements of Eichmann and

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Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941

Höß—can no longer be seen as key documents. But in the sections below we will see

that entirely different sources, neglected or even unknown in earlier research, can be

used to reconstruct the decision-making process that led to the ‘Final Solution’.

Reflections on the Fate of the Polish Jews

in the Summer of 1941

Various indications suggest that—with the beginnings of the mass murder of the

Soviet Jews fresh in their minds—during the summer of 1941 the German occu-

pying authorities in Poland were working on more radical ‘solutions’ for the

‘Jewish question’.

On 16 July the director of SD-Section Posen, Rolf Höppner, sent Eichmann a

note in which he had summed up ‘various meetings in the Reichsstatthalterei here’

(in the immediate entourage of Gauleiter Greiser). 32 In this a series of suggestions for the ‘solution of the Jewish question in the Reichsgau’ had been made, which in

Höppner’s view sounded ‘to some extent fantastical’, but which were feasible

nonetheless.

These suggestions included on the one hand the idea of building a camp for

300,000 Jews in the Warthegau. There those Jews who were fit for work were to be

put into work gangs; all Jewish women still capable of childbearing were to be

sterilized. But Höppner made one other suggestion: ‘This winter there is a danger

that it will no longer be possible to feed all the Jews. It should seriously be

considered whether it would not be the most humane solution to finish off

those Jews not fit for work by some quick-acting means. At any rate this would

be more pleasant than letting them starve to death.’

Four days later, on 20 July 1941, Himmler commissioned Globocnik, alongside

construction and settlement projects, to build a concentration camp for 20,000–

25,000 prisoners as well as the expansion of SS and police bases in the district; 33 a few days previously, on 17 July, he had made him responsible for the construction

of SS and police bases throughout the whole of the new Eastern sphere. 34

In the district of Lublin, the territory originally planned as a ‘Jewish reservation’,

Globocnik already maintained a considerable number of labour camps, and in the

spring of 1941 was busy having Jewish forced labourers carry out extensive earthworks.

Both of Himmler’s commissions to Globocnik were clearly directly connected

with the Führer’s decree of 17 July, in which Hitler transferred the ‘police security

of the newly occupied Eastern territories’ to Himmler. 35 Globocnik was accordingly the man chosen to establish the district of Lublin as a basis for the future

Eastern empire of the SS. Globocnik now had much more room to play with, and

he was to use it for the organizational preparations for mass murder.

After the start of the Russian campaign, Governor General Frank saw the

deportation of the Jews in his territory as imminent. Hitler had granted him

Europe-Wide Deportation after Barbarossa

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permission for this, on 19 June,even before the start of the war. Frank, therefore,

forbade the further formation of ghettos in his territory, which would in future ‘be

more or less nothing but a transit camp’. 36

After Galicia had been allocated to the General Government by a decree from

the Führer, the following day Frank applied—unsuccessfully—to Lammers for the

annexation of the Pripet Marshes as well as the area around Bialystok. By way of

justification he said that the ‘Pripet Marshes offered the possibility of involving

workers usefully in cultivation work on a large scale. As a model for this, Frank

must have been thinking about the improvement work in the district of Lublin, for

which a large number of Jewish forced labourers had been used. 37 Quite plainly Frank was thinking of realizing the old idea of a ‘Jewish reservation’, in a territory

in which from July onwards thousands of indigenous Jews would be murdered in

large ‘cleansing actions’. On 22