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

be described in greater detail,

and little remains of the Jews themselves.’ Goebbels’s remark that ‘60% of them

must be liquidated, while only another 40% can be deployed in work’ provides a

significant indication of current German plans. The ghettos in the General

Government that were being ‘vacated’, Goebbels went on, would ‘now be filled

with Jews deported from the Reich, and the procedure is to be repeated there after

a certain time’. 102

A statement by Eichmann to the Israeli police also reveals that Globocnik had

been given the task of murdering the majority of the Jews in the district, namely

those ‘incapable of work’. According to Eichmann’s information, once the mass

murder had already begun, Globocnik had acquired Heydrich’s authorization to

kill a further 150,000, probably 250,000 people. 103 The statement by Christian Wirth’s adjutant, Joset Oberhauser, according to which initially only ‘Jews from

various ghettos who are unfit for work should be liquidated’, points in the same

direction, and it was only in April or May that Globocnik was given the order

‘systematically to exterminate the Jews’. 104

In parallel with the start of the clearance of the ghetto of Lublin came the

deportation of Jews from the Reich and Slovakia to the district of Lublin, which

had already been set aside for the planned ‘Jewish reservation’ since autumn 1939.

As we have already described, the people deported to the district were accommo-

dated in places from which the local Jews deemed ‘unfit for work’ were deported to

Belzec. These deportations from the rural areas of the district began on 24 March.

By mid-April some 14,000 Jews had been deported from these small communities

to Belzec; then the extermination camp was temporarily closed. The reasons for

this are not entirely clear. It is possible that Wirth, who had built the camp and

run it during its first phase, saw his task as over; he had at first only been delegated

to Globocnik by the T4 programme. 105

In mid-March, in the district of Galicia, too, a new wave of mass murders began

and, for the first time, deportations to extermination camps. From mid-March

until early April 1942 about 15,000 people, inhabitants of the ghetto of Lemberg

(Lvov) who were deemed ‘incapable of work’, were deported to Belzec. Further

332

Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

thousands of inhabitants from the smaller ghettos of the district took the same

journey between mid-March and around 8/9 April, while thousands more from

these ghettos were murdered on the spot. 106 These deportations were also directed by Globocnik’s staff.

The systematic clearance of the Kreise (counties) began in the district of Lublin,

independently of the arrival of Jews from other countries and even before the civil

administration could begin to record all Jews capable of work. The victims—apart

from about 2,000 forced labourers who were deported to Majdanek—were sent to

Sobibor, the second extermination camp in the General Government, which had

been built in the meantime and the construction and operation of which was

based on Belzec. 107 Belzec, on the other hand, as mentioned above, had initially been shut down in the middle of April. More than 55,000 people fell victim to this

wave of deportations, which was interrupted on 10 June. The deportations from

the district of Lublin would not be resumed until August/September. 108

Extension of the Murders to the Other Districts

The temporary stop to the deportations from the district of Lublin in early June is

likely to have been due to the decision to extend the mass murder of the Jews to the

whole of the General Government. The deportations now encompassed the district

of Cracow, while Globocnik’s specialists will probably already have been engaged

with the preparations for the deportations from other districts, namely Warsaw. This

decision quickly to extend mass murder to the other districts can only be recon-

structed on the basis of the course of the deportations. It must have happened

between the attack on Heydrich on 27 May and his death on 4 June. Himmler’s

address to SS and police leaders at Heydrich’s funeral in Berlin on 9 June contains an

important indication of such a momentous decision: ‘Within a year we will definitely

have completed the mass migration of the Jews; then no more will migrate.’ 109

With the appointment of HSSPF Krüger as state secretary for security issues in

the General Government in May 1942 the weight of the SS had decisively grown

compared to that of the civil administration. In particular, Krüger was assigned

responsibility for all ‘Jewish affairs’ by the implementation order of 3 June, which

concerned his new position as state secretary. 110 In this way, the SS had created the organizational preconditions for the murder of all the Jews in the General

Government by means of a combination of executions, deportations to particular

extermination camps, and forced labour.

The murder of the Jews throughout the General Government—like the mass

murders in the districts of Lublin and Galicia—was to be organized by Globocnik’s

staff. The whole campaign was run under the heading ‘Aktion Reinhardt’ or

‘Aktion Reinhard’, a posthumous tribute to Reinhard Heydrich, who had died on

4 June 1942 as the result of an assassination attempt some days previously. 111

Individually, the ‘Reinhardt Actions’ encompassed the extermination of the Jews

Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

333

of the General Government and the district of Bialystok in the three extermination

camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka as well as in Majdanek; it also included the

murder of other Jews in these camps as well as the utilization of the goods and

chattels of those who had been murdered, as well as the deployment of the Jews for

forced labour. 112

On 3 June 1942, the day when Krüger’s authority was decisively extended,

Globocnik sent Himmler several memos concerning ‘ethnic policy’ in the district

of Lublin. The content of these memos is not known in detail, but two of these

papers concerned the fate of the Jews, 113 another the issue of ‘German-ness’

(Deutschtum). Himmler only returned to these proposals during a further meeting

with Globocnik on 9 July. In the meantime—from about 19 June until 7 July—

because of the imminent offensives in the East a general transport moratorium

had been imposed, and Himmler was also preoccupied with other issues because

of the death of Heydrich. 114

On 18 June a police meeting in Cracow agreed, as Krüger put it, that the

‘problem of Jewish resettlement urgently requires a decision’. Once