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

of 1943 and the general toughening

of domestic policy after Stalingrad that the preconditions for this new phase in

deportations were in place.

Slovakia

In February 1942, in response to a request from Himmler, the Foreign Office sent a

request to the Slovakian government for 20,000 Jewish workers to be sent to the

Reich for deployment ‘in the East’. 60 This request, as we have seen, was preceded by an offer that Himmler made to the Slovakian head of state on 20 October 1941

Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

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during a visit to the Führer’s headquarters, to the effect that the Slovakian Jews be

deported to a special territory in the General Government; in addition, the

Slovakian government had already declared its agreement that Slovakian nationals

be included in the deportations. 61 When the Slovakian government responded to the German request of February 1942, it was thus knowingly taking the first step

towards the deportation of all Slovakian Jews.

The Slovakian Jews who had been subjected to a special law and increasingly

excluded from public and business life since April 1939, in other words immedi-

ately after the foundation of the state, 62 were now recorded on police files; all people deemed to be ‘fit for work’ between the ages of 16 and 45 were registered

separately and gradually rounded up and put in special camps. 63 On 25 March the first 1,000 girls and young women were deported to Auschwitz to work as forced

labourers. The original deportation plan had allowed for the deportation of some

13,000 men to the Majdanek camp and 7,000 women to Auschwitz. 64 In fact, between 26 March and 7 April four transports of young women (about 3,800 in all)

arrived in Auschwitz and four transports with a total of 4,500 young men in

Majdanek. 65 On the basis of a request, issued by Himmler through the Foreign Office, the Slovakian government finally declared itself ready to deport all the

Slovakian Jews (another 70,000 people). 66

On 10 April Heydrich explained the deportation programme in Bratislava. 67

The following day the deportations of whole families began. Now the deport-

ation plan was changed: seven transports are known to have arrived in Ausch-

witz, where the deportees were deployed in forced labour; another thirty-four

transports set off for the district of Lublin at around the same time. 68 The subsequent fate of the people deported to this area is comparable with those

who were deported to the same area at the same time from the Reich. The

Slovakian Jews were mostly transported to places from which the indigenous

Jewish population had been taken to the extermination camps of Belzec and

Sobibor. Accommodation in these places—for which in general no preparations

whatsoever had been made—was in some cases only a brief stop before further

deportation to the extermination camps, in others it became an imprisonment

under wretched conditions that lasted for months and even years. Again, those

men who were fit for work were taken out of the transports that came via Lublin

and imprisoned in Majdanek camp; in all there may have been 8,500 men, of

whom 883 were still living in the camp in July 1943. 69

Since the beginning of June the inmates of a total of ten transports that were not

deemed ‘fit for work’ at the selection in Lublin and were not locked up in

Majdanek camp, women and children above all, had no longer been placed in a

ghetto, but rather taken directly to Sobibor extermination camp where they were

murdered. This meant that the Slovakian Jews too were now caught up in that

escalation of extermination to which the Jews deported to Minsk from the

‘Greater German Reich’ had fallen victim since mid-May. The last Sobibor

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

transport set off from Slovakia on 14 June, a day before the deportations from the

Reich to the district of Lublin were stopped. 70

After this all Slovakian transports came to Auschwitz where, beginning with the

train that arrived on 4 July 1942, a selection now regularly occurred on the ramp:

Jews who were ‘fit for work’ were sent to the camp, while those deemed ‘unfit for

work’, meaning in particular all children, their mothers, and elderly people, were

murdered in the gas chambers immediately after their arrival. By 21 October we

are able to identify eight transports from Slovakia whose inmates suffered

this fate. 71

But information and rumours about the fate of the deportees trickled in to

Slovakia and led to growing resistance against the continuation of the existing

Slovakian policy. The Catholic Church in Slovakia and the Vatican intervened,

leading politicians spoke out against a continuation of the deportations and

tried to sabotage any persecutory measures; dissent was also voiced by leading

representatives of business. The general contextual conditions in domestic

politics were favourable to this attitude of opposition: after Prime Minister

Tuka, the most important representative of a radical and unconditionally pro-

German policy, had been to a large extent deprived of power in the spring of

1942, within the Slovakian government there was a gradual transition to a more

moderate policy. 72

We should not ignore the fact that a significant role in the formation of this

increasing opposition to the continuation of a radical anti-Jewish policy was

played by a Jewish resistance group that had formed within Ustredna Zidov (the

central Jewish council), the official compulsory organization for the Slovakian

Jews: the so-called ‘subsidiary government’ around the Zionist youth leader Gisi

Fleischmann and the rabbi Michael Dor Weissmandel. 73 They systematically collected information concerning the fate of the deportees, used a great variety

of methods to stir up resistance to the deportations within influential Slovakian

circles, and made contact with Jewish and non-Jewish organizations abroad. The

‘subsidiary government’ went so far as to bribe the German ‘Jewish adviser’, Dieter

Wisliceny, with a considerable sum of dollars to bring the deportations to a

standstill; but the question of whether this method really played any part in the

decision to stop the deportations remains unresolved.

At the end of June—some 50,000 Slovakian Jews had been deported—it became

apparent that there were hardly any people left for further deportations. Of the

89,000-strong Jewish minority, a considerable proportion—more than 25,000—

had letters of protection from various offices or fell under particular exceptional

categories. 74 In July another four transports went off, two in September and one in October, then they were stopped by the Slovakian