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

have meant one thing: the

construction of extermination camps in the district of Lublin: Belzec was already

under construction, while Sobibor may have been at the planning stage. However,

the minutes do not provide any evidence that any decision was taken on the

proposals of Meyer and Bühler at the conference itself.

In fact the Wannsee Conference took place at a watershed. The original plan,

for which concrete steps had already been taken, for the comprehensive deport-

ation and annihilation of the Jews in camps in the occupied Soviet territories

(‘road-building’ as a synonym for forced labour in inadequate conditions) was still

being adhered to. However, at the same time it had become clear that the

precondition for this, an impending victory, could not be expected at least in

the short term, while in the meantime hundreds of thousands of people had been

killed in the occupied Polish territories, in Serbia, and the Soviet Union, and there

were plans to extend these massacres.

Thus, the Wannsee minutes that have survived provide a snapshot of a stage

reached in a process in the course of which the SS leadership had shifted its

perspective away from the idea of a post-war ‘final solution’ to the new aim of

implementing ever more stages of the ‘Final Solution’ during the war, in other

words to ‘anticipate’ it, while at the same time this new perspective still included

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Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941

the post-war period. During this critical period, the deportation to the occupied

Soviet territories increasingly became a fiction, while mass murder in the

General Government increasingly became reality. During the greatest crisis of

the war so far, the ‘Final Solution’ of the ‘Jewish question’ that had originally

been intended, namely the mass deportations to the occupied Soviet territories,

was becoming increasingly illusory. In this context Heydrich wished to convey

the impression to those responsible for the persecution of the Jews that the

RSHA had a plan whereby the mass murders which had begun in different ways

in various occupied territories, which represented a hitherto unimaginable

realization of state terror, could lead to a ‘total solution’ that could be imple-

mented in the long term.

While Heydrich adhered to the scheme of deportations to the occupied Eastern

territories and allowed no doubts that the deportees would be violently killed

there, the minutes of the discussion make it clear that other solutions had already

been considered, namely the possibility of murdering all the Jews in the General

Government in situ. This idea was plainly accepted after the Wannsee Conference,

and it also became gradually accepted that the deportations from the rest of

Europe, originally planned for the occupied Soviet territories, were to be diverted

to the extermination sites under construction in the General Government. On 20

January 1942, Heydrich had two chief concerns: the deportations had to be

accepted (everything that happened after the deportations was an internal SS

matter, and no longer had to be agreed with other institutions). Secondly, the

category of those to be deported had to be established: the status of Mischlinge and

those married to non-Jews had to be clarified.

This latter issue was dealt with in the second part of the conference. Heydrich

suggested that ‘Mischlinge of the first degree’ who were married to ‘Aryans’ were

as a rule to be deported or dispatched to a ‘ghetto for the aged’. Heydrich pointed

out that the complicated classification of Mischlinge by the Nazi racial laws would

have required numerous individual decisions. The State Secretary in the Reich

Ministry of the Interior, Wilhelm Stuckart, objected to the ‘endless administrative

work’ that this would inevitably produce, and suggested ‘a move to compulsory

sterilization’. This disagreement could not be settled at the conference, and was

thus to be addressed in several subsequent meetings, albeit without any conclusive

results. 14

However, by being included in the detailed discussion of the problems sur-

rounding Mischlinge and ‘mixed marriages’, the representatives of the ministerial

bureaucracy came to share both knowledge of and responsibility for the ‘Final

Solution’. For, with the concerns they raised against the inclusion of marginal

groups in the deportations, the representatives of the ministerial bureaucracy had

made it plain that they had no concerns about the principle of deportation per se.

This was indeed the crucial result of the meeting and the main reason why

Heydrich had detailed minutes prepared and widely circulated.

Part V

THE EXTERMINATION OF THE EUROPEAN

JEW, 1942–1945

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chapter 17

THE BEGINNING OF THE EXTERMINATION

POLICY ON A EUROPEAN SCALE IN 1942

By the middle of 1942, the Nazi regime was to consolidate and unify the mass

murders that it had begun in the occupied Soviet territories in the summer of 1941,

and in certain other regions of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, into a com-

prehensive programme for the systematic murder of the Jews under German rule.

The authorities gradually moved away from the idea that the mass murders were

anticipations of the ‘Final Solution’ that was to be carried out to its full extent only

after the end of the war; instead, in the middle of 1942, the conviction had become

established that the ‘Final Solution’ could be achieved by an intensification and

expansion of these murders during the war itself.

This transition to the systematic and comprehensive extermination of all Jews

under German rule contained a radical change in the idea of the temporal

sequence of the ‘Final Solution’, but at the same time it meant a change in the

context of justification into which the murders were placed. If the mass murder of

the Soviet Jews had originally been justified with reference to the extermination of

the Jewish-Bolshevik complex, as the war progressed the idea became increasingly

established that the systematic ‘cleansing’ of the country of all Jews was a first step

in the construction of an empire of Lebensraum built on a foundation of racism.

The deportation of the Jews of Central and Western Europe since autumn 1941

had in turn created ‘factual constraints’ in the deportation zones where there were

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

no possibilities of accommodation and these, as we have seen, were used to justify

the murder of indigenous Jews.

Even during these first waves of murder in Eastern Europe a distinction had

been introduced between those elements who were ‘capable of work’ and those

who were not, and thus had begun in this way to erect a further context of

justification for the mass murders which was, from the spring of 1942, transferred

to the