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

been reporting these procedures in detail since the start

of the deportations, corresponded to Hitler’s intention to exert pressure on the

United States. 62

The second set of reasons behind the decision to start the deportations con-

cerned the internal political situation. As a result of the deportations of the Jews

from the largest cities of the Reich, which was accompanied by a further intensi-

fied anti-Jewish propaganda campaign63, ‘the Jews’ were to be named and shamed to the general population as the ‘wire-pullers’ behind the bombing raids on the

German cities. They were to be demonstratively punished for that, while at the

same time the inhabitants of those cities immediately benefited from that pun-

ishment through the ‘liberation’ of Jewish apartments. 64 Admittedly the bombing raids in the autumn of 1941 were still—compared with later raids—on a relatively

small scale, 65 but in view of the lack of military success in the East they were a major source of unease; and that unease was to to be discharged in anti-Jewish

emotions as a form of psychological unburdening. As a result of this, a particular

situation came about, whereby, on the one hand, the perception of the public was

to be specially directed by anti-Semitic propaganda to the openly implemented

deportations, while, on the other hand the propaganda concerning the deport-

ations themselves, their goal, and the fate of the deportees was kept completely

silent.

The aerial war gave the regime the excuse to speed up the process of evicting the

Jews from their apartments, which had already been intensified in the summer of

1941.66 It is quite possible that this local policy of displacement had an additional influence on the central decision-making process. 67 But it was only through the 270

Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941

specifically National Socialist linking of a housing shortage with ‘Jewish policy’

(and not, for example, the absence of housing itself), that an ‘inherent necessity’

(Sachzwang) had been created which triggered the displacement policy in the

cities.

The linking of deportation and housing must also be seen as an attempt on the

part of the regime to popularize the evictions from which many people immediately

profited or hoped to profit by means of a certain complicity. The situation was

similar with regard to the utilization of household goods from the former Jewish

households to the advantage of those who had been bombed out of their houses.

The third collection of motives has to do with the difficulties with which the

German occupying authorities in various European countries found themselves

confronted in the late summer of 1941. Three months after the start of the war

against the Soviet Union the primarily Communist resistance movement began to

form and become active against the occupying power. The occupying authorities

generally reacted by shooting hostages.

The military commander in Serbia had already begun shooting hostages on a

large scale since July. 68 Shootings as reprisals for attacks by the resistance first occurred in France on 6 September, in Belgium on 15 and 26 September, and in

Norway also in mid-September. 69 Heydrich, who had been deputy Reich Protector in Prague since late September, even declared a civil state of emergency after

taking office, and set up summary courts martial. During the emergency, between

27 September and 29 November, 404 people (men and women) were shot. 70 In Greece the resistance movement also carried out a series of attacks at the end of

August and in September. 71

The escalation of the German hostage policy was expressed in the order

issued by the OKW on 16 September concerning the ‘Communist resistance

movement in the occupied territories’. This decreed that as atonement for one

German soldier killed the death penalty for 50–100 Communists must be seen

‘as appropriate’. 72

However, since the National Socialist leadership largely assumed an identity

between Communism and Jewry, from their point of view in an increasingly

brutal war it was entirely consistent to act more harshly against the Jewish

minorities even outside Eastern Europe, if it was assumed that they were primarily

the ones offering support to the resistance movement. That the Nazi leadership

proved so determined to start the deportations of European Jews in late summer

1941 must, therefore, also be due to the phantom of a Europe-wide Jewish-

Communist resistance movement. As we shall see, in the autumn of 1941 various

occupying authorities were independently to concentrate the policy of reprisals

for attacks by the resistance movement on the Jewish minority: in October 1941 in

Serbia, the Wehrmacht began systematically shooting the male Jewish population

in ‘retaliation’ for attacks, and in November in France the military authorities

began primarily arresting Jews and Communists rather than shooting hostages.

Europe-Wide Deportation after Barbarossa

271

If the various motives behind the decision to start the deportations are so

extraordinarily complex, one thing connected them: in autumn 1941 the Nazi

leadership began to fight the war on all levels as a war ‘against the Jews’. Above all

the leadership proved determined not to be diverted by the course of the war from

their original intention, pursued since autumn 1939, to deport the Jews in their

sphere of influence to the East and leave them there to their fate.

The implementation of the deportations at first encountered great difficulties.

Early in October, the plan to send 60,000 people to the Lodz ghetto met with massive

resistance from the head of the Wehrmacht Armaments Office, Georg Thomas73 and the responsible District President Friedrich Uebelhör, an attitude that was to provoke

Himmler’s anger. 74 The Lodz ghetto, according to Uebelhör, was not a ‘decimation ghetto’ into which more people could be crammed, but a ‘work ghetto’. 75

The office of the Reich governor in the Warthegau, Artur Greiser, after negoti-

ations with Eichmann, managed to limit the originally planned number of 60,000

deportees to Lodz to 25,000 Jews and Gypsies. Early in October 1941, the RSHA

agreed to deport a further 50,000 people to the ghettos of Riga and Minsk. 76

On 6 October Hitler announced over lunch that all Jews were to be ‘removed’

from the Protectorate, not only to the General Government, but ‘immediately

further eastwards’. At the time, however, this was not possible because of the lack

of transport space. At the same time as the ‘Protectorate Jews’, the Jews were to

‘disappear’ from Vienna and Berlin. 77

In Prague four days later, on 10 October, Heydrich announced—in Eichmann’s

presence—the deportation of the first 5,000 Jews from