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

July 1942 Jews who were unemployed and who did not have Belgian citizenship were summoned to report to the collection camp of Malines for ‘labour

deployment in the East’. When this did not occur on the desired scale, raids were

carried out. 274

The first transport left Malines on 4 August 1942, heading for Auschwitz. By the

end of October 1942, a total of sixteen further transports had followed, so that the

quota of 10,000 people specified by the RSHA was already reached by 15 September

and the Security Police set themselves a goal of 20,000 deportees by the end of

1942. 275 By the end of 1942, 16,882 Jews had been deported from Belgium, all the foreign or stateless Jews. As in the case of the deportations from France and the

Netherlands, in a series of transports workers were taken off the trains at Kosel in

Silesia.

After the first deportations of 6,000 hostages from France the deportations in

the second half of 1942 were extended to the whole of the occupied Western

territories and set in motion on a large scale. The following overview may further

clarify this development:

After Heydrich’s statement in April 1942 that a deportation of a total of ‘half a

million’ Jews from the Protectorate, Slovakia, Belgium, France, and the Netherlands

was taking place, in June the RSHA had established concrete deportation quotas

until the end of the year for France (100,000), the Netherlands (15,000), and

Belgium (10,000). In July these numbers had been altered, because of difficulties

arising in France, to 40,000 each for France and the Netherlands and 10,000 for

Belgium.

In July the order was issued that in the next four months 25,000 stateless Jews

were to be deported from the Netherlands. In mid-December 38,000 people

overall were to be deported. In Belgium the originally specified quota of 10,000

people had already been filled in September, and towards the end of the year

considerably exceeded with far more than 16,000 victims. At the end of August

Eichmann pursued the intention of deporting a total of 75,000 people from France

by the end of October, and all ‘foreign’ Jews by the end of June 1943. In fact, by the

end of the year 42,000 people had been deported from France.

Efforts to Involve Germany’s Allies in the

Deportation Programme (Summer 1942)

After the deportations from Central and Western Europe to the extermination

camps had begun in July 1942, the RSHA immediately set about involving other

German allies in the murder programme above all in South-Eastern Europe, apart

from Slovakia, which had agreed to the deportation of Jews living in the country.

The Foreign Ministry was heavily involved in this policy.

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

As a general rule the Germans initially—as a first step to the involvement of the

allies in the extermination programme—tried to win the consent of the countries

in question to the deportation of their Jewish citizens living in the Reich or in the

occupied territories. The governments of Romania, Croatia, and Slovakia had

already declared their agreement with this process at the end of 1941. 276

A second batch of such requests followed in the summer of 1942. In July, the

Foreign Ministry managed to win the consent of the Bulgarian government to

the deportation of its Jews living in the Reich by responding to a suggestion from

the Bulgarian Foreign Minister Popoff in 1941 that henceforth all Jews with

European citizenship should be treated the same. 277 The deportation of Bulgarian Jews was quickly extended to the occupied Western territories. 278 In August 1942

the Romanian government again expressly declared its agreement with the inclu-

sion of the country’s Jews in the German deportation measures. The Romanian

government had in fact already given such a declaration in November 1941, but in

the meantime it had become concerned about the possible worse treatment of

Romanian Jews in comparison with Hungarian Jews in a similar position. How-

ever, the German Foreign Ministry had been able to allay these concerns. 279

In contrast, in August 1942 the Hungarian government resisted the German

deportation plan. In response, the Germans asked Hungary to withdraw Jews of

Hungarian citizenship from the whole of the German sphere of influence by the

end of the year; this deadline was later extended a number of times. 280

Also, in August 1942, the Foreign Ministry approached the Italian government

with a request either to agree to include the Italian Jews in Germany’s Jewish

persecution measures, or to withdraw this group of people from the occupied

Western territories by the end of the year. 281 In their reply, on 10 October 1942, the Italians made it clear that they had to protect Jews with Italian citizenship in the

Mediterranean area because of their important economic role for reasons of

national interest. Involvement in the German deportation programme in the

occupied Western territories would weaken this position and must therefore be

rejected. 282

The willingness on the part of the allies to consent to the inclusion of their Jews

living in Germany or in the occupied territories in the German deportation

programme was to smooth the way to bringing about a general agreement on

the part of the allies to hand over their Jews. As early as the end of 1941, in the

‘wishes and suggestions’ that he had noted as part of the preparations for the

Wannsee Conference, the desk officer for Jewish affairs in the Foreign Ministry

had stressed to the RSHA that they should ‘express their willingness to the

Romanian, Slovakian, Croatian, Bulgarian and Hungarian governments to evacu-

ate to the East the Jews living in those countries as well.’283

While the deportation of the Slovakian Jews had already begun in the spring

of 1942, the Germans did not develop any initiatives towards the other four

countries named (Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Croatia) during the next six

Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

365

months. On the contrary, a suggestion by the Foreign Ministry’s Jewish desk

officer, Rademacher, in May 1942, concerning the ‘Abtransport’ (transporting

away) of the Croatian Jews received a negative response from the RSHA284 and in June 1942 the German embassy in Sofia received the instruction to give a

basically positive response to any wishes by the Bulgarians concerning the de-

portation of their Jews, but to point out that this could not occur in the course of

the current year. 285 In July 1942, however, this picture would fundamentally change.

In July 1942 the German