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

on arrival. On the

pretext of covering the costs for indigent fellow travellers, in the run-up to the

deportation the Jews who still had property had been obliged to hand over a

quarter of their property as a ‘donation’ to a special RSHA account. This

transfer had nothing to do with the actual costs of the transport either, but

merely served, from the perspective of the RSHA, to keep part of the Jewish

property out of the clutches of the financial administration and use it for their

own ends. 75 The carefully examined luggage that was loaded separately onto goods wagons before the start of the journey generally disappeared, never to be

seen again. 76

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Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941

The property left behind was exploited by the financial administration. Thus

household goods were given away to the poor, sold, or auctioned. 77 The apartments were taken over by the local administrations and rented out; these ‘Jewish

apartments’ were in great demand. 78 In many places there was a regular run on these desirable properties.

So the whole process was geared towards the careful erasure of the complete

social existence of the deportees, while at the same time maintaining the appear-

ance of legality and making sure not only that the victims themselves paid for their

own deportation, but that the RSHA, the state administration, and many private

citizens profited from Jewish property.

Although the deportations occurred in public, and the population paid close

attention to them, state propaganda was silent about these mass deportations,

about their destinations and the fate that awaited the deportees. The negative

reception from parts of the population, particularly in Berlin, to the compulsory

identification of the Jews, which was noted with irritation by the Propaganda

Ministry, may have been responsible for this silence. A police decree, the full text

of which was not published but the content of which was announced via the

media, forbade the population—under threat of imprisonment in a concentration

camp—to have any public contact with Jews. Repression had to stand in for

propaganda, which was plainly ineffective. Against the background of these

experiences, on 23 October Goebbels ordered that the deportations were no longer

to be mentioned in home propaganda. Anti-Semitic propaganda was now inten-

sified once more, but concrete details were no longer to be revealed. 79

We have already referred to the deportation of 5,000 Burgenland Gypsies to

Lodz early in November 1941, a procedure that makes it especially clear that the

story of the Holocaust cannot be written without an eye for other groups who

were persecuted for racist reasons, since important parallels exist with the perse-

cution of the Jews. As regards the deportation from Burgenland, which had been

planned since April 1940, this was not the first deportation of Gypsies. As early as

May 1940 2,370 Gypsies had been deported from the Reich to various parts of the

General Government. Plainly the occupying authorities had no idea what to do

with the Gypsies: some gave them private accommodation, some used them

as forced labourers, some left them to their own devices. The majority of the

Gypsies perished as a result of poor conditions, others were executed, some

managed to return illegally to the Reich, some somehow survived in the General

Government. 80

The Gypsies deported to Lodz in November 1941 were confined to a special,

separate section of the Lodz ghetto. The ones who survived the appalling condi-

tions in this camp were murdered in Chelmno in January 1942.

The deportation to Lodz was followed early in 1942 by a further mass deport-

ation of Gypsies: in February 1942, 2,000 East Prussian Gypsies were deported to

Bialystok. Some members of the group, deemed to be ‘assimilated’, were sent back

Autumn 1941: Deportation and Mass Murders

289

to East Prussia in the course of 1942, on condition that they agreed to be sterilized.

The rest were deported in the autumn of 1942 to the Brest-Litovsk ghetto, whose

inhabitants had been murdered a short time previously. In the spring of 1944 these

people were deported to Auschwitz. 81

Announcements of Extermination

In the autumn of 1941, many statements were issued by leading National Socialists

or well-informed functionaries deliberately addressing the imminent ‘extermin-

ation’ of the Jews. Thus, for example, the foreign political editor of Der Stürmer,

Paul Wurm, wrote on 23 October to his old acquaintance Rademacher, the Jewish

expert at the Foreign Ministry:82 ‘On my way back from Berlin, I met an old Party member who is working on the settlement of the Jewish question in the East. Soon

some of the Jewish vermin will be exterminated by special measures.’

In his table-talk on 25 October Hitler once again recalled the ‘prophecy’ he had

made on 30 January 1939, adding the following train of thought: ‘This race of

criminals has the two million dead from the World War on its conscience and

now hundreds of thousands more. Let nobody say to me: we can’t send them into

the swamps [in Russia]! Who’s worrying about our people? It’s good if the fear

that we are exterminating the Jews goes before us.’83 On 16 November 1941, under the heading ‘The Jews are to blame’, Goebbels published a leading article in which

he also returned to Hitler’s prophecy of 30 January 1939: ‘At present we are

experiencing the realisation of this prophecy, and in the process Jewry is suffering

a fate, which may be harsh but is more than deserved. Pity or regret is entirely

inappropriate in this case.’84 With his formulation that ‘world Jewry’ was now suffering ‘a gradual process of extermination’, Geobbels made clear which fate

finally awaited the Jews whose deportation from the German cities had been

under way for some weeks. Two days later Rosenberg spoke at a press conference

about the imminent ‘eradication’ (Ausmerzung) of the Jews of Europe: ‘Some six

million Jews still live in the East, and this question can only be solved by a

biological extermination of the whole of Jewry in Europe. The Jewish question

will only be solved for Germany when the last Jew has left German territory, and

for Europe when not a single Jew stands on the European continent as far as the

Urals . . . And to this end it is necessary to force them beyond the Urals or

otherwise bring about their eradication.’85

On 18 November 1941, at a meeting with the Great Mufti of Jerusalem, who had

fled to the camp of the Axis