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

a foreign body in French society, would be more easily accepted. In

addition, thousands of Jews had already been interned in overcrowded camps, and

it was known that their deportation to the East was in any case envisaged in the

long term. Bringing these deportations forward and declaring them a ‘reprisal’

was, from the perspective of the military administration, merely anticipating the

‘emigration’ of the French Jews, which had been planned in any case.

On the other hand, however, through this linking of reprisals and

deportations the military administration provided the RSHA with an excellent

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Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941

legitimation for the start of the deportations, which could now be described as a

deportation of particularly dangerous elements who had been imprisoned a long

time previously. It thereby joined the many institutions which had, in the

second half of 1941, urged an acceleration of the deportations and thus contrib-

uted to a radicalization of the persecution of the Jews. It also appears remark-

able that, by concentrating reprisals against Jews, the German military in France

was assuming precisely the attitude adopted by the military administration in

Serbia at the same time. 91 If we also take into account the indiscriminate murder of the Jewish population in the occupied Soviet territories in the

autumn of 1941 (word of which spread quickly in Wehrmacht circles, through

personnel transfers etc.), the attitude of the military in Paris does not seem

coincidental. 92

However, in August 1941—at the time of the large-scale anti-Jewish raids in

Paris—the expert on Jewish affairs at the German embassy and its contact

with the SD, Carltheo Zeitschel, had begun to present his ambassador with

increasingly radical suggestions for the ‘solution of the Jewish question’. After

a suggestion that all Jews under German rule be sterilized, 93 on 22 August he requested that Jews from the whole of Europe be deported to the

occupied Eastern lands, as ‘it was anticipated that a special territory was

being created for indigenous Jews’. Zeitschel asked the ambassador, Otto

Abetz, to present this idea to Ribbentrop and ask him to discuss this project

with Rosenberg and Himmler. Zeitschel knew that the latter was ‘at the

moment very receptive about the Jewish problem’, and, ‘given his current

attitude and in the light of his experience of the Eastern campaign, could

provide extraordinarily strong support for the implementation of the idea

that has just been developed’. 94

On 16 September, Abetz met Himmler and the latter agreed, as Zeitschel had

suggested, to the eastward deportation of the Jews interned in occupied France as

soon as the necessary means of transport were available. 95

Zeitschel’s request reached Himmler when the decision to deport the

Central European Jews was immediately imminent. The same day, according

to his diary, Himmler discussed the subjects ‘Jewish question. Resettlement to

the East’ with Ulrich Greifelt, the chief of staff of his agency for the Strength-

ening of the German Nation, and with Konrad Meyer, his Chief of Planning

for Eastern Settlement. Also, on the same day, Abetz met Hitler, who on this

occasion held forth in extravagant and extraordinarily brutal fantasies about

the configuration of his future empire in the East. 96 At the same time, as we have already said, Hitler had been presented with Rosenberg’s suggestion for

the ‘deportation of all the Jews of Central Europe’, which he presumably

discussed with Ribbentrop on 17 September. Also, on 18 September, at Hitler’s

request, Himmler informed Greiser about the imminent deportation of

60,000 Jews to Lodz. 97

Europe-Wide Deportation after Barbarossa

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Apart from Himmler’s ready undertaking to Abetz to deport the Jews in France

as well, various indications suggest that, in the eyes of the Nazi leadership, the

beginning of the deportation to Lodz actually represented the starting point for

the launch of the long-planned deportation of all Jews within the German sphere

of influence to Eastern Europe.

On 20 October 1941 Himmler made an offer to the Slovakian head of state to

deport the Slovakian Jews to Poland. 98 Heydrich, in turn, explained in a letter to the army Quartermaster General on 6 November 1941, that a series of bombings of

Paris synagogues on the night of 2 to 3 October was carried out by a French anti-

Semitic group with the consent of his Paris office. Permission had only been

granted for this after he had heard ‘from the top as well—expressed in the

strongest terms—that Jewry was identified as the responsible arsonist in Europe,

who must vanish from Europe once and for all’. 99 On 4 October, at a meeting in the Eastern Ministry, Heydrich warned that Jews would continue to be claimed to

be indispensable workers. This, according to Heydrich, ‘would scupper the plan

for a total resettlement of the Jews from our occupied territories’. 100 The Foreign Ministry’s Jewish expert, Franz Rademacher, still assumed in a letter of October

1941 that those Serbian Jews who survived the reprisals of the Wehrmacht ‘would

be deported along the waterways to the reception camps in the East’, as soon as

‘the technical possibility’ for this existed ‘within the context of the total solution of the Jewish question’. 101

A further reference to the planned extension of the deportation programme

is contained in a note from Hitler’s army adjutant, Major Engel, concerning a

meeting in the Führer’s headquarters on 2 November 1941, in which, amongst

others, Hitler, Himmler, and General Jodl took part. According to this note,

Himmler spoke of the ‘displacement of those of other races (Jews)’, in this

context mentioning Riga, Reval (Tallinn), and Minsk as ‘main points’ and

stressed the Jewish population of Thessaloniki as a particular source of danger;

a series of assassinations had in fact occurred in the Thessaloniki area. Hitler

had agreed with him and demanded ‘that the Jewish element be removed from

T’ and went on to issue the special powers Himmler had demanded. In fact,

however, the deportation of the Jews from Thessaloniki would not occur until

1943. 102 Finally, Christopher Browning has drawn attention to reports by a Dutch SS informant, according to which he was already aware early in

December 1941 that the deportation of the German Jews, also to Eastern

Poland, which ‘meant a partial extermination of Jewry’, would occur the

following spring. 103

Overall, this chapter presents us with the following picture: in September and

October 1941 Hitler made the decision that there should be extensive deport-

ations from the German-dominated sphere, particularly from Central and

Western Europe. On the