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

Prague, and spoke in

general terms about the deportations:78 ‘SS Brigadeführer Nebe and Rasch could also take Jews into the camps for Communist prisoners within the area of military

operations. 79 This has already been introduced according to SS-Stubaf. [Sturmbannführer] Eichmann. . . . The Gypsies due for evacuation could be brought to Stahlecker

in Riga, whose camp is set up on the pattern of Sachsenhausen.’ Hitler wanted ‘the

Jews to be removed from German space if possible by the end of the year’.

Preparations for Deportations from France and Other

Territories under German Control

The example of occupied France makes it clear that the deportation measures

resumed in September 1941 very quickly acquired a Europe-wide dimension, that

in the wake of these preparations the initiative of the occupying authorities was

awakened, and the entire Judenpolitik was radicalized in this way. 80

The number of Jews living in France had increased, particularly through the

immigration from Eastern Europe of 80,000 at the end of the nineteenth century,

to around 260,000 in 1939.81 Because of the various war-related movements of 272

Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941

refugees, and the forced deportations from Alsace-Lorraine and the German Gaus

of Baden and Saar-Palatinate there were—according to German information—in

1941 some 165,000 Jews in the militarily occupied northern zone (around 90 per

cent of them in Paris) and around 145,000 in the unoccupied southern zone. 82

More than half of the Jews living in France were not French citizens, and many

who did have French citizenship had acquired it only in the period after the First

World War; the liberal naturalization law of 1927 was significant here. 83

In September 1940 the military government in the occupied zone introduced a

(religion-oriented) definition of Jews, had Jewish passports and shops specially

marked, and ordered a special registration of the Jews. In particular, this was to

serve as the basis for the ‘file on the Jews’ at the Paris Préfecture, on the basis of

which the large-scale arrests in the French capital were carried out. In November

1940 the military government introduced the ‘Aryanization’ of Jewish property,

which was also implemented from July 1941 by the Vichy government.

However, since the summer of 1940, the Vichy government had also passed

anti-Semitic legislation which applied to both zones. After July, when people not

descended from a ‘French father’ were dismissed from the civil service, with the

introduction of the Statut des Juifs in October the term ‘Jew’ was defined accord-

ing to the model of the Nuremberg Laws, and employment bans and restrictions

were passed.

In March 1941, at the prompting of the Germans, the Vichy government formed a

special Commissariat for the Jews, led by Xavier Vallat, a notorious anti-Semite. In

June 1941 the Vichy government introduced a second Statut des Juifs that tightened

the definition of Jews and extended the employment restrictions. In November 1941

the Vichy government forced the formation of a single Jewish organization, a

national Jewish council, the Union Générale des Israélites de France, which was

to serve over the next few years as a transmission belt for the Judenpolitik and an

umbrella organization for the total welfare of the Jews. As a result of the internment

of deportees from Germany, as well as other foreign or ‘stateless’ Jews, by 1941 there

were already over 20,000 Jews in camps in the southern zone. 84

As early as August 1940, the German embassy in Paris had applied to the

military administration to ‘prepare for the removal of all Jews from the occupied

territory,’85 and since January 1941 the representative of the Security Police in France had pursued the project of building concentration camps for German,

Austrian, and Czechoslovakian Jews. 86

In April 1941, far-reaching demands were formulated within the military

administration, addressed to Vallat, the Commissioner for the Jews in the Vichy

government: Jews of non-French nationality were to be expelled, 3,000–5,000 Jews

who were particularly ‘undesirable’ for political, criminal, or social reasons,

regardless of their nationality, were to be interned, further anti-Jewish laws were

to be passed, and preparations for the emigration of Jews of French nationality

were to begin. 87

Europe-Wide Deportation after Barbarossa

273

On 14 May the first stage in this plan was initiated: on that day, at the

instigation of the occupation authorities, the French police arrested more than

3,700 German, Polish, Czech, and Austrian Jews in Paris and interned them in

the camps of Pithiviers and Beaune La Rolande. Three months later, between 20

and 23 August 1941, the German occupation authorities, supported by the

French police, organized further raids in Paris, in the course of which more

than 4,000 foreign and French Jews were arrested and transported to a third

camp, Drancy. 88

During these raids, on 21 August, the resistance movement began to carry

out a series of attacks on members of the Wehrmacht. The occupation

authorities reacted initially with reprisals against arrested Communists,

some of whom were condemned to death by French courts, and some shot

by the military authorities, who had declared all the French prisoners in their

custody to be hostages. After further attacks in October these retaliatory

measures, which had hitherto taken ten lives, were considerably extended at

Hitler’s prompting. In October the occupation authorities carried out their

first mass executions: ninety-eight hostages were executed in retaliation for

two further fatal attacks. 89

The military administration, which thought further mass shootings of French

citizens were counter-productive, as they were likely to fan the flames of the

resistance, now hit on the idea of connecting the reprisals with the measures it

had already begun against the Jews: it deliberately extended the reprisals to Jews

and varied the methods used: apart from the shootings, collective fines were to

be imposed on the Jews, and a larger number of Communists and Jews

transported ‘to the East’ for forced labour. Thus, from December onwards,

Jews and Communists were selected en masse for deportations which, after

being initially postponed because of the poor transport situation, were to begin

in March 1942.90

Two considerations in particular must have had a considerable influence on

this decision by the military administration to direct the reprisals deliberately at

the Jewish part of the population. On the one hand, even the military saw ‘the

Jews’ at the centre of the Resistance, and thus equated Jews with all forms of anti-

German activity, as had occurred on a much larger scale in the East. On the other

hand, the military must have speculated that a reprisal directed against Jews, in

their eyes