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

envisaged: ‘As part of the develop-

ment of the final solution the Jews are now to be put to work in a suitable

manner under the appropriate leadership. Organized into large work gangs and

segregated according to sex, those Jews fit for work will be led into these areas as

road-builders, in the course of which, no doubt, a large number will be lost by

natural wastage.’ The ‘remainder who will inevitably survive’ will, ‘since they are

the ones with the greatest powers of endurance’, ‘have to be dealt with accord-

ingly’ to prevent their becoming ‘the germ cell of a new Jewish regeneration’.

Initially the Jews were to be taken to ‘transit-ghettos’, from which they were to

be ‘transported further towards the East’.

Heydrich thus developed the conception of a gigantic deportation programme

which would only be fully realizable in the post-war period. Those Jews who were

deported ‘to the East’ were to be worked to death through forced labour or, if they

should survive these tribulations, they would be murdered. The fate of those ‘unfit

for work’, children and mothers in particular, was not further elucidated by

Heydrich. In the context of the speech as a whole, however, and of the murderous

practice that had predominated for months in the occupied Soviet territories, and

since the beginning of December in Chelmno, it is clear that they too were to be

killed, because Heydrich wanted to prevent the survival of the ‘germ cell of a new

Jewish regeneration’ at all costs.

Heydrich’s statement indicates that the RSHA was at this time still proceeding

according to the plan, followed since the beginning of 1941, of implementing the

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Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941

‘Final Solution’ of the Jewish question after the end of the war in the occupied

Eastern territories. Heydrich also made it clear what was understood by the

phrase ‘Final Solution’: the Jews were to be annihilated by a combination of

forced labour and mass murder. The fact that it was Jewish forced labour that

gained importance early in 1942 suggests that Heydrich’s remarks should be taken

literally. 10 Tellingly, only a few days before the Wannsee Conference, on 12

January 1942, the HSSPF Ukraine instructed the Commissars General in Brest-

Litovsk, Zhitomir, Nikolayev, Dnepropetrovsk, and Kiev to start immediately

preparing for the establishment of ghettos so that ‘Jews from the Old Reich

could be accommodated in the course of 1942’. 11 By contrast, there is no evidence that there was any plan at this point to deport the Jews from Central and Western

Europe directly to extermination camps on Polish soil. On the contrary, the first

deportations from countries outside Germany, those from Slovakia and France,

which began in the spring of 1942, as well as the ‘third-wave’ deportations from

the Reich, which were taking place at the same time, did not lead directly to the

gas chambers of the extermination camps. It was not immediately before or after

the Wannsee Conference, but in the spring of 1942 that the capacity of the

extermination camps was hastily extended at very short notice.

The minutes of the Wannsee Conference do, however, make it clear that, on the

one hand, the idea of a post-war solution was being firmly adhered to, while at the

same time there was a debate over the proposal to exempt the Jews in the General

Government and the occupied Soviet territories from this general plan and kill

them in the short term.

Five weeks before the Wannsee Conference, Governor General Frank had

already learned that the deportation of the Jews from the General Government

could not be counted on even in the medium-to-long term. 12 He drew the conclusions from this knowledge at a meeting on 16 December:13

In Berlin they said to us, ‘Why are people making such a fuss? We can’t do anything with

them in the Ostland or in the Reichsommissariat either; liquidate them yourselves!’

Gentlemen, I must ask you to resist any sense of compassion. We must annihilate the

Jews wherever we find them and whenever this is at all possible, in order to maintain here the whole structure of the Reich.

However, the method and time-frame for this mass murder were still undecided

in mid-December 1941, as we can see from Frank’s further remarks:

We can’t shoot these 3.5 million Jews, we can’t poison them, but we will be able to intervene in a way that will somehow lead to their successful extermination—in the context of the

greater measures that are to be discussed in relation to the Reich. The General Government must become just as free of Jews [judenfrei] as the Reich. Where and how that happens is a matter for the official bodies that we must set up and deploy here, and in due course I shall let you know how effective they are being.

The Wannsee Conference

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The determination of the leadership of the General Government to achieve this

‘successful extermination’ in the short term provides the context for the remarks

made by the State Secretary, Bühler,the representative of the government of the

General Government, towards the end of the Wannsee Conference. Bühler stated

that the General Government would ‘welcome it if the final solution to this

question could begin in the General Government, because, in the first place, the

problem of transportation does not play a decisive role here and because these

measures will not be obstructed by issues involving labour deployment’. More-

over, the approximately 2.5 million Jews who were to be removed from the

General Government ‘as soon as possible’ were overwhelmingly ‘unfit for work’.

Thus Bühler was clearly proposing that the majority of the Jews in the General

Government should be murdered within the General Government itself, and that

they should no longer be used, as Heydrich had suggested, ‘to build roads’ in the

occupied Eastern territories.

Then the conference participants went a step further, and discussed the

question of how the Jews in the General Government and the occupied Soviet

territories were actually to be ‘removed’—in other words they talked in concrete

terms about the method for murder: ‘In the concluding stages different possible

solutions were discussed. Both Gauleiter Dr Meyer [the representative of the

Eastern Ministry] and State Secretary Dr Bühler argued that certain preliminary

measures for the final solution should immediately be taken in the relevant area

itself, although in such a way as to avoid causing disquiet among the local

population.’

These ‘preliminary measures’, however, can only