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

wrote to the RSHA, saying that there was no

‘definitive clarity about the number of Jews to be taken on from the unoccupied

zone, and he was now only in a position’ ‘of being able to name departure stations

for c.40,000 Jews’. 89 Eichmann informed Rademacher about the new changes in the deportation plans on 22 June 1942. According to these, from mid-July or

early August, in daily transports of 1,000 people each, ‘first of all 40,000 Jews

from the French occupied zone, 40,000 Jews from the Netherlands and 10,000

Jews from Belgium are to be transported for the work programme to Auschwitz

camp’. 90 According to this plan, these transports were estimated to take three months.

However, the next day, 23 June, the RSHA Jewish desk received a new

instruction from Himmler, as Dannecker learned in Paris from Eichmann at

the beginning of July. This stated: ‘all Jews resident in France are to be deported

as soon as possible.’ The ‘previously planned rate (3 transports each of 1,000

Jews every week)’ must ‘be significantly raised within a short time . . . with the

goal of freeing France entirely of Jews as soon as possible’. 91 This order from Himmler to implement the ‘Final Solution’ in France completely and as quickly

as possible must be seen as part of the escalation of the extermination policy

directed against the Jews throughout the whole of Europe; we have already

examined the measures that applied to the German Reich and Slovakia, and in

the following sections we shall describe the corresponding radicalization in

Eastern Europe.

On 27 June, Carltheo Zeitschel, the fanatical ‘Jewish expert’ within the German

embassy and liaison with the SD, noted of a conversation with Dannecker that

the latter required ‘50,000 Jews to be transported from the unoccupied territory

to the East as soon as possible’. 92 In negotiations with HSSPF Carl Oberg, the chief of police of the Vichy government, René Bousquet, declared himself willing,

at the beginning of July, to arrest stateless or foreign Jews in the unoccupied zone

as well as to make the police under his command available for the arrest of Jews

in the occupied zone; this collaboration, however, would also be limited to

foreign or stateless Jews. 93 (‘Stateless’ referred in particular to those Jews who had lost their citizenship as a result of German race legislation or the events of

the war.) The Vichy government acceded to this outcome of the negotions. 94 But at this point Dannecker, Eichmann’s Jewish expert in France, was working on the

assumption, as he reported to Berlin, that in a ‘2nd phase’ those Jews naturalized

as a result of the French immigration legislation of 1919 and 1927 ‘could be

tackled’. 95

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

The ‘Final Solution’ in Eastern Europe 1942

Poland

The Deportations from the Districts of Lublin and Galicia to the

Extermination Camps of Belzec and Sobibor

On 20 January 1942 the population and welfare department of the General

Government demanded that its offices attached to the district governors ‘send a

list of ghettos in their district as soon as possible’, and forward their population

figures. 96 These statistics had already been used in the preparation for the deportations in the districts of Lublin and Galicia.

They could start on this since Belzec extermination camp, the construction of

which had begun the previous November, was completed in March 1942. Belzec,

in the south-eastern part of the district of Lublin, directly on the railway line to

Lemberg (Lvov) was to be the prototype of the extermination camps built in the

General Government. It covered a relatively small area, a rectangle with sides

about 270 m long, and initially consisted of a barrack with three gas chambers.

The staff consisted of 20 to 30 Germans, and 90 to 120 so called ‘Trawnikis’: Soviet

prisoners of war, Ukrainians, and ethnic Germans who had passed through the

Trawniki SS training camp in the district of Lublin, run by Globocnik. Apart from

that, there was a Jewish work unit in Belzec whose members were repeatedly

replaced by newly arrived prisoners and murdered.

A spur line made it possible to move railway wagons directly into the camp.

Here the victims were led to believe that they were in a transit camp. Men,

woman, and children were separated; they had to undress, hand over their

valuable objects, women had their hair cut off. The people were then driven

naked along a narrow, fenced path, known as the ‘Schlauch’, or ‘tube’, to the gas

chambers, which were disguised as shower rooms. An engine produced the

deadly exhaust fumes which would generally kill the victims in an agonizing

way within 20 to 30 minutes. 97 Jewish forced labourers then had to take the corpses of the murdered people out of the gas chambers and transport them to

the large graves in the camp grounds, which had been dug by Jewish forced

labourers in 1940.

In the district of Lublin the deportations began in mid-March: between 16 March

and 20 April the ghetto in the district capital, Lublin, was almost completely cleared

in two phases. 98 This enterprise was run by SS and police chief Odilo Globocnik and by units of the Security Police, the Order Police, and Trawniki men, while the civil

administration provided essential support. 99 Himmler had stayed there immediately before the beginning of the clearance of the Lublin ghetto, which marks the

beginning of the systematic murder of the Jews in the General Government and

Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

331

became the model for many similar ‘campaigns’. He had met HSSPF Friedrich

Krüger in Lublin on 13 March, and Globocnik the following day. 100

During the clearance of the Lublin ghetto, many people had already been shot

within the ghetto; a few thousand people were retained in situ as a workforce, and

some 30,000 were deported to Belzec, where they were murdered. The fiction of a

‘resettlement’ to the occupied Eastern territories was outwardly maintained, but

within a short time information about the fate of the deportees within the whole of

the General Government filtered out into the Reich. 101 Thus, for example, the propaganda minister, Goebbels, was informed about the murders in the district of

Lublin as early as 27 March, as his diary reveals: ‘Starting with Lublin, the Jews are

now being deported from the General Government to the East. A rather barbaric

procedure is being applied, one which should not