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

first Treblinka held a building

with three gas chambers into which the deadly exhaust fumes were fed from a tank

engine. In autumn 1942 the murder capacity of Treblinka, like that of the two

other Aktion Reinhardt camps, was extended: a larger building was built, contain-

ing an estimated ten chambers. The staff of the camp consisted of about 30 to

40 SS men, mostly staff from Aktion T4 as well as between 90 and 120 Trawniki

men. There was also a work unit of Jewish prisoners who were within a very short

space of time ‘selected’, murdered, and replaced by new companions in misery.

In the first phase of the camp, dating from 23 July to 28 August 1942, the

murder of thousands of people every day had the qualities of a crazed massacre.

Many people who attempted to escape the trains as they approached the camp

were shot by the guards outside the camp. Often the shootings were continued

within the camp itself; if the gas chambers were not working or were over-

burdened, actual mass executions were carried out, and there were also numerous

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

random murders. Often people arriving in the camp were faced with indescrib-

able images. The arrival area was scattered with corpses. The guards reacted to the

panic that arose with further shootings. 145

These circumstances, but also the inability of the camp administration to

collect the valuable items stolen from the Jews and pass them on to Aktion

Reinhardt headquarters, led to an inspection of the camp and its temporary

closure.

The camp was now reorganized and rebuilt under the auspices of Christian

Wirth, the Inspector of the Sonderkommando Action Reinhardt; the previous

commander, Irmfried Eberl, was dismissed and replaced by Franz Stangl, the

commander of Sobibor extermination camp. 146 On 4 September the murder in Treblinka was resumed. To make it easier for people to leave the wagons a ramp

had been built, and with the corresponding erection of buildings the impression

was created of being in a railway station. Frail people who might have suffered

from the tempo of the murder process were now selected immediately after

their arrival and brought to the camp hospital, where they were shot. The

remaining crowd were told that they were now in a transit camp; after they

had undressed and handed over their valuables, they were driven down the

fenced-off and concealed ‘tube’ (Schlauch) to the gas chambers, where they were

murdered.

By the end of 1942 precisely 713,555 people had been murdered in Treblinka.

This figure appears in a telegram from Höfle that was found some years ago in the

decoding reports of the radio reconnaissance department of the British Secret

Service. 147 This document provides us with the figures of the victims who had been murdered in the other Aktion Reinhardt camps. According to this report, 434,598

persons had been murdered in Belzec by the end of 1942. Since Belzec was already

closed at this point, this represents the total number of murders for this exter-

mination camp. The corresponding figures for Sobibor and Lublin-Majdanek are

101,370 and 24,733 respectively. This brings the total number of people killed in the

Aktion Reinhardt camps at this point to 1,274,166. 148

By the end of 1942, according to official German figures, only 298,000 of

originally 2.3 million Jews were still living in the General Government. 149 If we assume that 300,000 Jews might have managed to escape from the German to the

Soviet sector after the occupation of the country, and if we also take into consid-

eration the figure of 100,000 Jews who were murdered in Galicia in the summer

and autumn of

150

1941 and the winter of 1941/2

as well as the increased mortality

rates151 in the ghettos before the start of the liquidations, we reach the conclusion that almost 1.5 million Polish Jews fell victim to the ghetto clearances of 1942.

It thus represents the largest single murder campaign within the Holocaust.

It is hardly comprehensible that this series of gigantic mass murders could have

been played out almost entirely according to plan, without its terrible course being

impeded by any external factors. Thus the ‘actions’ could be carried out in

Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

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the closed-off ghettos without any disturbances being feared from the Polish

population living in the immediate vicinity.

On the Jewish side there was practically no resistance. As we have seen, the

wave of ghetto liquidations caught the Jewish councils entirely unawares, they had

no chance of stopping the murder machinery or even obstructing its efficiency.

Since the start of the German occupation the Jewish councils had set about

ensuring as far as possible the survival of the population of the ghettos through

a policy of submissiveness to the German occupying forces. This attitude basically

ruled out any response of resistance.

But beyond this, apart from desperate individual acts of resistance, there

were clearly no organized groups or spontaneous initiatives within the Polish

ghettos that might even have attempted to resist the bloody actions. It was

only in the spring of 1942, in the wake of the first clearances, that the first

resistance groups came into existence, although they only resisted the defini-

tive liquidation of the ghettos the following year in Warsaw and a number of

other places. By this time, however, only a small minority of Polish Jews

remained alive. 152

The Takeover of Jewish Forced Labour by the SS

In parallel with the expansion of systematic mass murder to the whole territory

of the General Government, Himmler’s organization took on the entire respon-

sibility for Jewish forced labour, the sphere that had for a long time constituted

the only barrier against the complete murder of the Jewish population. In the

hands of the SS, forced labour—in the sense of ‘extermination through work’—

now became an integral component of the murder programme in the General

Government. 153

In May and June it had still looked as if Jewish workers would continue to be

deployed on a large scale in the General Government, and as if the extension of

murder to the whole territory of the General Government would continue to

involve primarily those members of the Jewish population who were ‘unfit for

work’. The Senior Quartermaster of the military commander, 154 State Secretary Dr Josef Bühler, 155 and the director of the Labour Division of the General Government, Frauendorfer, 156 the latter as late as 22 June, had insisted on receiving Jewish