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

20,000 people, more than 2,000 of whom had already succumbed to the terrible

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

living conditions in the ghetto. 173 In fact, between 4 and 13 May, 10,914 of these

‘Reich Jews’ had been deported to Chelmno and murdered there. 174 The dating indicates that this mass murder should be seen in a larger context. Since 11 May

1942, Jews had been systematically murdered in Maly Trostinets after their arrival

in Minsk. The first direct deportations to the Sobibor extermination camp began

in mid-June. All of this indicates that the systematic murder of the deported

German Jews, still forbidden by Himmler in November 1941, had received the go-

ahead by the central authorities around April 1942.

In Lodz the deportations were continued in September 1942 after a lengthy

pause. The first victims were the patients of the ghetto hospitals, which were

cleared by the Jewish police on the night of 31 August/1 September on German

instructions. On 4 September, Rumkowski announced that, at the request of the

German authorities, 25,000 ghetto-dwellers under the age of 10 and over the age

of 65 as well as all the sick had been evacuated from the ghetto. To make the

action possible, an ‘exit ban’, a prohibition on all travel, was imposed from 5 to

9 September. The Jewish police now searched the ghetto systematically block by

block and arrested children, the old, and the sick. By 12 September these

people—according to the statistics of the Council of Elders they numbered

15,685—were taken to collection points and deported to Chelmno, where they

were murdered. 175

The official Ghetto Chronicle kept by the Jewish Council of Elders notes that

after the end of the action there were practically no children under 10 or old

people left in the ghetto. 176 The number of inhabitants of the ghetto was now just 90,000—more than 70,000 fewer than at the beginning of the year. 177

Auschwitz

We have already described how the SS set about extending Auschwitz concentra-

tion camp complex into a centre for systematic mass murder, independent of the

construction of the extermination camps in the context of Aktion Reinhardt.

In Auschwitz, from September 1941, thousands of prisoners, including Jewish

prisoners from Upper Silesia, had been murdered with Zyklon B. Since October 1941,

in the wake of the expansion of the camp complex, which was intended to receive

large numbers of Soviet prisoners, a new crematorium was planned, which was to

receive a considerably larger gas chamber than the ones subsequently built into the

old crematorium in Auschwitz ‘Stammlager’, the original camp. Finally, in January

1942, Himmler had ordered that Auschwitz should take large numbers of Jewish

forced labourers from the Reich, to replace the absent Soviet prisoners of war.

But the Jewish prisoners from the Reich failed to materialize. As we have seen,

from March onwards they had been deported to the district of Lublin, where those

who seemed to be ‘fit for work’ were held for forced labour in Majdanek camp.

Instead, in the spring of 1942 three groups of Jewish prisoners came to Auschwitz: the

Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

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first mass transports of Jews to Auschwitz were made up of Slovakian Jews, of whom

four transports of young women, some 3,800 in total, arrived between 26 March and

7 April. 178 They were followed by Jewish hostages from France who had been deported ‘to the East’ in reprisal for attacks by the French Resistance. The first

transport of 1,112 persons arrived in Auschwitz on 30 March and was followed by five

more between 7 June and 18 July. 179 A third group of Jewish prisoners who came to Auschwitz were the Jews from the ghettos of annexed eastern Upper Silesia, from

Sosnowitz, Bendzin, and other places; these deportations began, as we have seen, in

mid-1942. 180

Even before these transports from Slovakia, Upper Silesia, and France reached

Auschwitz, those in charge of Auschwitz concentration camp had set about

installing additional gas chambers, one after the other, in two farmhouses that

lay outside the camp itself, as the building work on the new crematorium had not

even begun. The first farmhouse, the ‘Red house’, or Bunker I, was used for the

first time on 20 March 1942 to kill people with Zyklon B: the victims were a further

transport of Jews ‘unfit for work’ from the Schmelt camps in Upper Silesia.

Afterwards, this building was used above all to murder the Jews of Upper Silesia. 181

The second farmhouse, the ‘White house’ or Bunker II, was first used on 4 July

1942 to murder, in the same way, 628 people selected from a transport recently

arrived from Slovakia. From that day on, the selection of Jews ‘unfit for work’—

particularly children and their mothers—and their subsequent murder in the gas

chambers became standard practice in Auschwitz.

The Second Wave of Extermination in the Soviet Union

In the rear area of Army Group Centre, which essentially encompassed White

Russian and Russian territory, the great majority of Jews had already been

murdered in 1941. According to an official census, 22,267 Jews still lived in the

territory at the beginning of 1942, mostly in labour camps and remote towns. In

this military administrative area the murders were continued throughout the

whole of the winter and during the spring. By around the middle of the year

almost all the ghettos had been liquidated; the last ghetto to be exterminated in

this way was probably the one in Smolensk, where around 2,000 people were

killed on 15 July 1942. After this date, in the military administrative area Centre,

there were only a few thousand Jews who lived in camps or were hiding in the

woods. These murders were carried out in particular by Einsatzkommandos 8 and

9, supported by the Order Police and Wehrmacht units. Thus in February alone,

according to a report, Wehrmacht troops killed 2,200 ‘Jews (Bolsheviks)’. The

sequence of actions was generally agreed with the leaders of the army rear area

and the local garrisons. 182

In the rear area of Army Group South, that is eastern Ukraine, there was a

similar picture. Here too the mass murders continued throughout the winter of

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1941/2, in Charkov, for example, where on 16 December the liquidation of

12,000–15,000 Jews began, in Stalino (now Donetsk) on 9 January, or in Zaporozhe

at the end of March. Early in the spring the majority of the Jews living in