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

areas (Lodz, Riga, Minsk,

Lublin) affected by the deportations. Conceivably, the decision made in autumn

1941—largely reconstructed from the course of events—may also have included

the district of Galicia. This is suggested by references to the planned construction

of an extermination camp in Lvov, but also by the particular role that Galicia was

to play in 1942 (alongside Lublin) in the implementation of the ‘Final Solution’

within the General Government. With this decision to carry out a mass murder of

Autumn 1941: Deportation and Mass Murders

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the Jews in particular regions of Poland, the policy introduced shortly before in

the Soviet Union to create judenfrei areas, in which only a minority of forced

labourers confined in ghettos was left alive, was now extended to territories in

occupied Poland. The parallels with what was happening during October in

Serbia, where the Wehrmacht extended their reprisals to a comprehensive anni-

hilation campaign against the Jewish population, are quite plain. Moreover, it can

be no coincidence that, a short time later, the military administration in France

began directing its retaliatory programme against Jews who were to be transported

to the East as hostages. However, the reconstruction of these regional mass

murders, which were now being implemented or were in preparation, does not

allow us to conclude that a decision to murder immediately all European Jews had

been made in autumn 1941. 165 At that point the murder of hundreds of thousands of people was being prepared, but not of millions.

However, the politics of extermination had by now attained such a dynamic

momentum that the further extension of the murders to the whole of Europe was

the logical next step for those responsible. The further move to the mass murder of

all European Jews could only have been halted if the leadership of the regime had

now introduced a radical change of course—and that would have been precisely

the opposite of what Hitler intended at this point.

Thus, it would be a mistake to see the preparations for the regional mass

murders which began in autumn 1941 solely as a spontaneous reaction to the

obvious failure of a deportation programme to the Soviet Union, a territory which

had not yet, contrary to expectations, been conquered. 166 It was rather that events represented a logical continuation of the Judenpolitik that had been pursued so far.

For the comprehensive deportation programme for the European Jews, planned

since the beginning of 1941 and now under way, had been a ‘final solution’ policy

from the outset, that is to say it was the fixed aim to destroy those people who had

been deported to the occupied Soviet territories once the war was over. Thus, the

regional mass murders of those Jews who were ‘unfit for work’ represent a

radicalization and acceleration of that ‘final solution’ policy. In the wake of the

mass shootings in Eastern Europe, the idea of a ‘final solution’, still vague at first,

began to assume sharper outlines, while the original post-war prospect for this

‘final solution’ increasingly became a feasible project that was implemented on a

growing scale already during the course of the war. With the decision in Septem-

ber to carry out mass deportations from the Reich to ghettos that were already

appallingly overcrowded, this radicalization and acceleration were deliberately

introduced by the Nazi leadership: the authorities in the reception areas were quite

intentionally presented with ‘impossible situations’. More radical solutions were

demanded of them, while at the same time various institutions (the Institute of

Criminal Technology, the T4 organization, the Lange gas-van unit and Auschwitz

camp leadership) offered different variants of one such radical solution; the mass

murder of people with poison gas.

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Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941

What were the crucial impulses behind this process of radicalization? Was it

primarily the policy from the centre—in other words from Hitler’s manic obses-

sion, increased in various ways by the course of the war, to create a Europe free of

Jews—or was it above all independent initiatives on the part of the various power

holders that advanced the radicalization process, as a series of major studies of the

Holocaust in various Eastern European regions suggest? 167

The independent initiatives on the part of figures on the periphery—Greiser in

the Warthegau, Globocnik in Lublin, Jeckeln and Lange in the Ostland, the

Security Police in Galicia, the Wehrmacht in Serbia and others—should not be

underestimated. However, if we see the simultaneous activities of these various

agents in context, it becomes clear that they were acting within the framework of

an overall policy that was always directed from the centre. The initiatives eman-

ating from them, which led either to shootings or to the provision of gas vans or

the construction of extermination camps to murder a large number of Jews, were

responses to a policy dictated by the centre, and the centre was always in a

position to prevent too great an escalation of this policy, as the suspension of

the murders of Reich German Jews in the Ostland by Himmler at the end of

November 1941 demonstrates.

Thus, it would seem pointless to try to debate whether the policies of the centre

and the initiatives of the periphery were crucial for the unleashing of the Holo-

caust. It would be more true to say that they stood in a dialectical relationship to

one another, that is, that the centre could only act because it knew that its

impulses would fall on fertile ground at the periphery, and the decision makers

at the periphery based their own actions on the assumption that they were in

harmony with the policy pursued by the centre.

In other words: just as the extension of the shootings to women and children in

the Soviet Union from the summer of 1941 onwards could not simply have been

ordered, the extension of mass murders to particular regions of occupied Europe

in the autumn of 1941 required a very complicated interaction between headquar-

ters and the executive organizations, a mélange of orders and intentions on the

part of the central authorities and independent initiatives and intuition on the part

of the regional powerholders, which could finally be channelled and rendered

uniform by the centre, albeit at a far higher level of radicalization. However, we

have been familiar with the essential elements of this radicalization process,

particularly the interaction between the centre and the executive organizations,

since the beginning of National Socialist policy towards the Jews in the 1930s.

In late 1941, once again,