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

moratorium was over, ‘the Jewish campaign must be stepped up’. 115 At this meeting, representatives of the civil administration, the district chiefs Ludwig

Losacker (Galicia), Herbert Hummel (Warsaw), and Michael Oswald (Radom)

pressed for an acceleration of the deportations, particularly, as the arguments

presented had it, in order to tackle ‘smuggling’ more effectively, and avoid

in advance any problems with the imminent ‘harvesting’; Hummel wanted to

remove those Jews who were ‘unfit for work’ from the Warsaw ghetto ‘within a

reasonable time’, in order to increase the profits of the ghetto industry still further.

On 22 June, at a meeting of heads of the main departments, Krüger again urged

those in charge of the General Government to intensify measures against ‘the

Jews’; he encountered resistance from the head of the Main Labour Department,

Dr Max Frauendorfer, who warned that a ‘resettlement of the Jews’ will ‘have

profound effects on all sectors of public life’; in his plea for the preservation of

Jewish workers, Frauenhofer referred expressly to Himmler, Speer, and Sauckel. 116

The civil administration thus wanted to speed up the deportations for reasons of

food and ‘security’, but to keep the workers in the ghettos and camps. A few weeks

later Krüger was to take over the issue of Jewish forced labour in the General

Government and ignore such considerations.

A few days previously, on 12 June, Himmler had ordered that the measures

for the ‘Germanization’ of large areas in the East, including the General

Government, be implemented at a faster rate, within twenty years. Early in

July Krüger suggested that the General Government be designated for settlement

by Germans. 117

Meanwhile, since the end of May, and increasingly since the temporary sus-

pension of the deportations in Lublin district on 10 June, more than 16,000 Jews

had been deported from the district of Crakow to Belzec and murdered, until these

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

deportations were suspended because of the transport moratorium on 19 June. 118

In Belzec the murders had been resumed, after Wirth, who had left the camp in

April 1942, had returned to Belzec at the end of May; his return was clearly

connected with the assignment of additional T4 staff to the General Government

as agreed by Himmler and Brack with the Chancellery of the Führer of the

NSDAP. 119 In May, or by the beginning of June at the latest, work had begun on the third extermination camp, Treblinka in the district of Warsaw. 120 In the district of Radom by mid-June all the preparations had been made for a

deportation of the Jews living there. 121

The murder of the Jews in the General Government had not by any means been

interrupted by the transport moratorium. In the district of Lublin, for example,

numerous small ‘actions’ took place, but also mass executions, as for example—

between June and September—in Tyszowcew, Josefow, Lomazy, Serokomla, and

Biala Podlaska with a total of 3,500 victims. 122 In the district of Galicia, too, the mass executions were continued. 123

The transport moratorium also meant the end of the deportations from the

Reich and Slovakia to the district of Lublin. All the transports from Slovakia now

went directly to Auschwitz, where the greater proportion of deportees, beginning

with the transport of 4 July, was directly murdered in the gas chambers without

even being admitted to the camp. After the lifting of the transport moratorium the

deportations from the Reich went above all to Minsk and, over the months that

followed, to Riga, Treblinka, and Auschwitz.

After the lifting of the transport moratorium the overall situation within the

General Government emerged as follows: in the second week of July, the trans-

ports from the district of Cracow to Belzec were resumed, after the transport

moratorium had been used to extend the capacity of the gas chambers there by a

considerable amount. On the other hand, Sobibor became inoperative because of

repairs on the railway tracks until the beginning of October, and here too the

pause was used to build additional gas chambers. 124 The transports from the district of Cracow lasted until November, with the bulk of the deportations

concentrated in August and September. 125

Meanwhile the decisive preconditions for the initiation of the deportations had

also been created in the other districts. Himmler played a central part in this. After

heralding, on 9 June, the end of the Jewish ‘mass migration’ within a year, he now

seemed to have staked everything on accelerating the murder of the Jews of the

General Government as far as possible.

On 9 July Himmler discussed with Krüger and Globocnik the latter’s sugges-

tions (which have not survived) of 3 June, which we know focused on Judenpolitik

in the district. 126 After Himmler had met Hitler several times on 11, 12, and 14 July, he pressed for greater transport capacities. In response to a request from Karl

Wolff, the chief of his personal staff, the state secretary in the ministry of

transport, Albert Ganzenmüller, assured him at the end of July that, since

Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

335

22 July, a ‘train carrying 5,000 Jews has been travelling from Warsaw to Treblinka

every day, and twice a week a train from Przemysl (district of Lublin) to Belzec’. 127

On 17 and 18 July Himmler visited Auschwitz, where he was shown people being

murdered in a gas chamber. 128 Statements that he made with visible satisfaction on the evening of 17 July at a reception given by the Gauleiter of Upper Silesia led one

of his listeners to conclude that the Nazi leadership had now decided to murder

the European Jews, information that was passed on to Switzerland and from there

reached the West through the telegram from Gerhart Riegner, the representative

of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva. 129 After his stay in Auschwitz on 18 July Himmler visited Globocnik in Lublin and on 19 July, from Lublin, he gave HSSPF

Krüger the crucial order that the ‘resettlement of the entire Jewish population of

the General Government should have been implemented and completed by 31

December 1942’. After this date, no Jews were to be able to stay in the General

Government, apart from the ‘assembly camps’ of Warsaw, Tschenstochau (Czes-

tochowa), Cracow, and Lublin. 130 This meant that he had set a time limit for the extermination of the great majority of the Polish Jews.

Warsaw

After the completion of Treblinka extermination camp, 50 km