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

along with the indigenous Jews and

murdered there. 45

But the actual turning point in the deportation practice occurred only in the

middle of June 1942: only from that point onwards were Jews on the trains from

the Reich, after the selection of those ‘fit for work’ in Lublin, generally sent directly to the extermination camps.

While the third wave continued, in May 1942 a fourth wave of deportations

arrived from the Reich, destined for the occupied Eastern regions. As already

described, the deportations to Minsk planned during the second wave were

interrupted in November 1941, and only continued until February 1942 in the

case of Riga. The transports to Minsk now resumed; between May and September,

in at least seventeen transports, 46 some 16,000 people were deported from the territory of the ‘Greater German Reich’, interrupted only from mid-June to

Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

323

mid-July by a military transport moratorium: now those deported to Minsk were

no longer confined to the ghetto, and instead the trains were moved on to a stop

near the estate of Maly Trostinets, where from 11 May 1942 almost all deportees

were shot on the spot or murdered in gas vans. 47 In April 1942 Heydrich is supposed to have announced the resumption of deportations and the impending

murders during a visit to Minsk. 48

Thus, with the deportations to Minsk in May and the transports to Sobibor in

mid-June, a new phase of the extermination policy began. Now the deportees were

no longer accommodated temporarily in ghettos or labour camps, before perish-

ing as a result of the disastrous living conditions, or being murdered in an

extermination camp on the grounds that they were no longer ‘fit for work’; now

the great majority of deportees were shot directly at the end of the journey or

suffocated in gas vans. The previous pattern, according to which the indigenous

Jews were deported to the extermination camps to ‘make room’ for the Jews

arriving from the Reich had thus been abandoned. The murder machinery was

thus completely freed from the context of ‘resettlement’, ‘expulsion’, and ‘work

programme’; the goal, the death of the deportees, thus emerged with even greater

clarity.

As long as the murder machinery was contained within the old pattern, it was at

least possible to maintain the fiction that the murders were the result of ‘factual

constraints’ produced by ‘resettlement’ and the ‘work programme’: the ‘clearing’

of the ghettos for the suddenly arriving deportees; execution of deportees from the

Reich because there were no adequate reception facilities (as in Riga and Kovno

(Kaunas) in late 1941); the selection of those no longer fit for work, as ‘room was

needed’ again, and ‘no food was available’; ruthless deployment for forced labour

in the service of the war economy; renewed selection. Because of the systematically

excessive demands made upon them the local offices of the civil administration

and the security police were placed in situations that spasmodically required more

and more radical solutions, or which offered them a framework of action in which

such radical solutions could be presented as ‘factually justified’.

The transport moratorium introduced for the West–East railway in June saw

the start of the deportations of those people from the Reich who, as Eichmann had

announced in January, had for various reason been exempted from the ‘Eastern

transports’; these were elderly and frail people, decorated veterans with their wives

and children under the age of 14, and Jewish spouses from a ‘mixed marriage’ that

no longer existed, who were freed from labelling regulations, as well as single ‘half-

breeds’ who were ‘deemed’ to be Jews under the Nuremberg Laws. These deport-

ations went to Theresienstadt, 49 which served not only as the ‘old people’s ghetto’

for German Jews, but also above all as a transit camp for those deported from the

Protectorate, who numbered around 74,000. 50

In June and July 1942 a total of sixteen special trains each carrying about 1,000

elderly people from the Reich set off for Theresienstadt; after a further timetable

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

programme decided in early August, twenty-one further special trains followed

between mid-August and early October. On top of this, because of the transport

moratorium that prevailed between June and July, the German authorities had

fallen back on coupling one or two passenger wagons, each carrying fifty passen-

gers to already scheduled trains; between June and October 1942, more than 100

such ‘small’ transports were organized. Overall during this period some 45,000

German and Austrian Jews were deported to the ‘old people’s ghetto’ of Ther-

esienstadt. 51 But even after this wave of deportations many smaller transports to Theresienstadt occurred throughout the winter of 1942–3. 52

In the second half of 1942 there were further deportations from the Reich which

went to Eastern European ghettos or directly to extermination camps. Various

references indicate that in July three smaller transports from the Reich with a total

of 700 passengers reached the Warsaw ghetto. Between August and October 1942

five deportations from Berlin and Theresienstadt went to Riga, as well as a further

deportation from these two places to Raasiku near Reval (Tallinn). 53

In September and October ten deportation trains travelled from Theresienstadt,

mostly with an average of 2,000 passengers, to Treblinka extermination camp, as

well as one train from Darmstadt. 54 Another three trains from Berlin, two from Vienna, and one from Theresienstadt, all of which travelled directly to Auschwitz

in the first half of 1942, can be confirmed with certainty. 55

In the last quarter of 1942 the regime intensified the pressure on those Jews

still present in the Reich. During the armaments discussion from 20 until 22

September 1942 Hitler spoke of the ‘importance of removing the Jews from the

armaments factories in the Reich’. 56 Some days later he told Goebbels of his resolution ‘to remove the Jews from Berlin at all cost’; Jewish workers were to

be replaced by foreigners. 57 At the same time Himmler agreed with Justice Minister Thierack to assume responsibility for all ‘asocial elements’, including

all Jews, Gypsies, Russians, and Poles, and their ‘extermination through work’. 58

On 5 November the RSHA announced an order from Himmler in which all

concentration camps in the Reich were to be made ‘Jew-free’, and all Jewish

prisoners were to be transferred to Auschwitz and Lublin. 59 However, it was only with the intensified recruitment of foreigners and prisoners of war for

armaments production after the beginning