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

was also a plan for the ‘Final Solution’, the

physical destruction of the European Jews. However, it was a plan that was to be

realized in the long term and not primarily through actions of direct murder. At

this point, the plans to murder people with gas concerned hundreds of thou-

sands, not millions of people.

The fact that the agents in question had still not received an order by late

summer and autumn 1941 to kill all European Jews with gas as quickly as possible,

but that this plan only took shape over the course of the next few months, clarifies,

amongst other things, the complicated story of the transfer of the murder tech-

nology. From 1940 onwards, in the context of the ‘Euthanasia’ programme, a ‘tried

and tested’ technology and a complex organization for the implementation of

mass murder had been developed, which, from August 1941, was available for

other purposes. Instead of transferring this well-practised and available apparatus

to Eastern Europe in one piece, and deploying it for the systematic murder of the

Jews, only part of the staff of the T4 organization was gradually deployed, or

even—as in the case of Riga—offered in vain, while with the gas vans an essentially

already familiar technology was redeveloped and in Auschwitz completely new

purposes were found for the use of Zyklon B. This was a complicated process in

which the various agents, SSPF Globocnik, Gauleiter Greiser in the Warthegau,

the camp leadership of Auschwitz, as well as the Security and Criminal Police were

all clearly working independently and in a largely uncoordinated fashion. All

of this shows that in the autumn of 1941 no overall plan for the murder of

the European Jews had been set in motion step by step, but that subordinate

organizations—albeit within the context of a centrally controlled policy—were

largely developing their own initiatives.

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Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941

At the start of this part we closely examined Eichmann’s statements about the

journeys he made between the autumn of 1941 and the spring of 1942 to the

extermination sites. Even if we have reached the conclusion that these statements

cannot be a key source for the dating of the ‘Führer’s decision’ to implement the

‘Final Solution’, it does seem remarkable that at this crucial time Eichmann, who

was responsible for the deportations, visited the places in which extermination

camps were built: Belzec, Chelmno, Treblinka, and Minsk. For Lemberg (Lvov),

which he also visited, there is also, as we have already described, an indication of

the planned construction of an extermination camp. Three of these extermination

camps—Belzec, Chelmno, and Minsk—were directly linked with the deportations

from the German Reich. 40 Presumably Eichmann’s journeys were part of the efforts of the RSHA to coordinate the various initiatives for the implementation

of the mass murder programmes in the various regions with the plans of head

office.

Administrative Preparations for the Deportations

The RSHA deportation programme for the Jews of the German Reich and the

continuing plans for the deportation of Jews from the whole area under German

control were safeguarded from late summer 1941 by a series of administrative

measures.

One major precondition for the implementation of the deportations was the

visible identification of Jews. But the introduction of the yellow ‘Jewish star’ on 19

September 1941, which German Jews had to wear visibly on pain of punishment,

was primarily motivated by the wish more easily to exclude the Jews from certain

locations, from the purchase of certain goods, and from the acceptance of certain

services. 41 This form of identification had already been carried out for a long time by various offices within the Third Reich. 42 In August 1941 Goebbels took up this project, which was also pursued at the same time by other senior Nazis, 43 with renewed vigour. By marking out the Jews as an ‘internal enemy’ he hoped to lend

additional weight to a propaganda campaign designed to inculcate in the popu-

lation an understanding that Germany was in a global conflict with ‘the Jews’. 44

After agreement had been reached concerning the identification of the Jews at an

inter-ministerial meeting in the Propaganda Ministry on 15 August, 45 on 17 August Hitler granted Goebbels permission for this identification, 46 which was ordered on 5 September by police decree. 47

The decree of 3 October 1941 concerning the employment of Jews48 as well as the Implementation Order of the Reich Minister of Labour on 31 October49

followed the trend of withdrawing almost all kinds of employment protection

from those Jews still in work. On 23 October, at a meeting with Eichmann and

Lösener, representatives of the Economy and Armament Office of the OKW won

Autumn 1941: Deportation and Mass Murders

285

the agreement that the Jews still in ‘closed work deployment’ would not be

deported for the time being. 50

Early in November 1941 the Reich Finance Ministry passed regulations about

the removal of the property of ‘Jews who are due for deportation to a town in the

Eastern territories within the next few months’. 51 The relatively complicated procedure for property removal set out in this decree was considerably simplified

by the Eleventh Implementation Decree of the Reich Citizenship Law passed on

25 November:52 a Jew ‘whose normal residence is abroad’ (that is, ‘who resides there under circumstances which show that he is not only temporary staying

there’) would lose German citizenship. His property ‘falls to the Reich with the

loss of his citizenship’. According to a supplementary ruling by the Reich

Ministry of the Interior in December, ‘abroad’ referred to all occupied territories,

particularly the General Government and the Reichskommissariats of Ostland

and Ukraine. 53

On 18 October Himmler discussed the planned emigration ban in a telephone

conversation with Heydrich. 54 Finally, on 23 October a decree from the RSHA in Himmler’s name generally prohibited the emigration of Jews from the German

sphere of influence; exceptions from this general prohibition were, however,

allowed. 55

While these administrative measures affected the Jews in the Reich, the ban

on the emigration of Jews issued in October 1941 already affected all Jews within

the German sphere of influence. 56 Two memoranda from the head of the German department in the Foreign Ministry, Martin Luther, mark the period

in which a basic decision against further emigration must have been made. On

13 October Luther noted that the suggestion of deporting Spanish Jews residing

in France to Spanish Morocco was ‘a suitable contribution to