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

a radicalizing effect on the

development of mass murder. It accelerated the deportations from the western

territories and the planners of the mass murder entered something like a phase of

consolidation after which the whole programme was resumed with much greater

impetus in July.

At around the same time as this fundamental decision concerning the Jews in the

General Government, at least before mid-May, a further momentous decision must

have been made: the deportations of Jews from Central Europe were increased

beyond the quota cited in March, and most or all of these people were murdered

when the transports arrived at their destinations. This was the fate suffered by the

Jews arriving from the Reich to Minsk from mid-May onwards, and the deportees

from Slovakia from the beginning of June in Sobibor. And the great majority of

those Jews who had been deported to Lodz from the Reich in autumn 1941 were

now, in the first half of May, deported to Chelmno in a series of transports and

murdered there.

Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

359

In parallel with these events, the mass murder of the Soviet Jews which had

begun in the summer of 1941 was given a fresh impulse in May 1942: now the

murders began on a large scale again, before leading in the summer to the total

extermination of the indigenous Jewish population.

The decision-making process underlying the systematic genocide remains

largely obscure and must be reconstructed from the course of events. The entries

in Himmler’s office diary for late April provide an initial clue: Himmler met

Heydrich a total of seven times over only eight days between late April and early

May 1942 in three different places (Berlin, Munich, and Prague). This unusually

intensive series of discussions is framed by two lengthy meetings that Himmler

had with Hitler on 23 April and 3 May 1942 in the Führer’s headquarters. 257 The attempt on Heydrich’s life and his subsequent death (27 May and 4 June) must

have had a further radicalizing effect on this decision-making process; we need

only recall Himmler’s announcement at Heydrich’s funeral on 4 June that he

would end the Jewish ‘migration’ within a year.

At the beginning of June the RSHA established a concrete deportation

programme for the West which was to be realized within three months from

mid-July. With this Western programme the plans which first became apparent

in early April were realized and adapted to the conditions introduced by the

transport moratorium in the East in June/July. But, as early as June 1942

Himmler demanded the speedy and complete deportation of all the Jews in

France.

The people in these transports from the West, the Slovakian Jews, who from

early July onwards were transported to Auschwitz in the wake of the transport

moratorium and those Jews from the Reich who, starting with the first transport

from Vienna on 17 July, arrived in Auschwitz, met with the same fate: from 4 July

onwards most of them were, in so far as they were ‘unfit for work’, murdered in

the two hastily erected makeshift gas chambers, Bunkers I and II.

In the middle of July, after the end of the transport moratorium, the deport-

ation and murder programme had been set fully in motion. Now, during a visit to

Globocnik on 19 July, Himmler established a concrete timetable for the major part

of this programme, the extermination of the Jews of the General Government.

This was a day after he had visited Auschwitz and three days after he had, at the

Führer’s headquarters, demanded increased transport opportunities from the

Reich railways. By the end of the year, the Jews of the General Government

would have been murdered, apart from a few people who were fit for work and

were to be placed under the control of the SS.

At about the same time, the decision must have been made to send almost all

further transports from the Reich directly to the extermination camps and no

longer to ghettos.

Finally, as will be outlined in the next section, already in the summer of 1942 the

Germans had introduced the crucial steps to extend the deportation programme

360

Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

beyond Eastern Europe. While the occupation authorities in Western Europe set

about undertaking deportations beyond the quota of 125,000 people for 1942

decided in June, in July the German government approached its allies, Romania,

Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, and Finland, to secure the deportation of the Jews

living in those countries.

Deportations from the Occupied Western Territories

in the Second Half of 1942

Continuation of the Deportations from France

After six deportation trains carrying some 6,000 Jews had already set off from

France to Auschwitz between March and early July 1942, and with the SS having

established plans for the deportation of a total of 125,000 people from France,

Belgium, and the Netherlands in June, between 19 July and 7 August a further ten

transports carrying a total of around 10,000 people set off for Auschwitz. These

deportees, ‘stateless Jews’, had been arrested in Paris during a major raid on 16 and

17 July. 258 The age limit for the deportation had now been raised to 55 for women and 60 for men. The inmates of these transports were now, as the Jews from

Slovakia had been, subjected to a selection in Auschwitz; after that those people

deemed ‘unfit for work’ were murdered in the gas chambers immediately upon

their arrival.

In August, as agreed with the Vichy government in July, the deportations of the

stateless Jews from the unoccupied zone began (Transports 17–19). After Himmler

had agreed to a suggestion from the French Prime Minister, Pierre Laval, in early

July that children under the age of 16 should also be included in the deportations,

between 17 and 26 August over 2,000 children whose parents had already been

taken to Auschwitz in the previous transports were also deported with the

following five transports. Transports 24–39 (their departure dates were between

26 August and 30 September 1942) were stopped at Kosel in Silesia, where men

who were fit for work had to leave the trains to be deployed as forced labourers

with the ‘Schmelt Organization’. 259

At a meeting held in his office on 28 August Eichmann demanded that all

stateless Jews be removed from France by the end of October 1942 (after that the

deportations had to be postponed until February); along with the 25,000 people

deported already that meant a further 50,000 people. ‘The end of June ’43’,

Eichmann continued, was