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

only practicable element of the racist utopia of the National Socialists,

became the iron band with which the ‘Third Reich’ held together the power bloc

that it dominated. For with the implementation of the murder of the Jews within

the German power bloc, the executive organizations—German occupying admin-

istrations, local auxiliary organizations, collaborative governments or allies—were

turned into lackeys and accomplices of the extermination policy and, given the

unprecedented nature of this crime, irretrievably bound to the engine of this

policy, the leadership of National Socialist Germany.

In addition to this, there was the fact that any further radicalization of perse-

cution was bound to strengthen the power of the SS and radical Party forces

within the occupying administrations or the German diplomatic apparatus and,

via the periphery of the German sphere of rule, alter the overall character of the

regime in favour of those forces. The implementation of Judenpolitik within the

German sphere of influence thus amounted to the definitive realization of

National Socialism’s total claim to power. But this was, from the perspective of

National Socialism, the sole key to success in this war.

If we see Judenpolitik at the intersection of these considerations, it becomes

clear that from the perverted perspective of the Nazi leadership, it had effectively

become a guarantee for the complete victory of the National Socialist Revolution.

Continuation of the Policy of Extermination

in Eastern Europe

Poland

In October and November 1942, HSSPF Krüger had, through police decree,

defined a total of fifty-four ‘Jewish residential districts’1 in the General Government, most of them parts of earlier ghettos. Alongside these, there was a large

number of camps for Jewish forced labourers. At this point, the deportations to

the extermination camps were temporarily shelved.

376

Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

At the beginning of 1943, however, the mass murders and deportations in the

General Government began again on a large scale. By deciding to reorganize the

‘labour deployment’ the Nazi leadership believed that they would be able largely to

do without the Jewish workforce. Those ghettos that still existed were liquidated in

the course of 1943 (apart from Lodz), the people still living there were shot on the

spot or deported to the extermination camps; a minority were sent to forced

labour camps. The SS also took control of Jewish forced labour, thus ensuring that

the only Jews who would remain temporarily alive were those who were absolutely

required for war production.

In the district of Galicia the mass murders resumed at the beginning of 1943,

after a decision by HSSPF Krüger, which he must have made at the end of 1942. 2

In January, SSPF Katzmann had some 10,000 people shot in an ‘action’. They were

from the Lemberg ghetto, in which around 24,000 people had lived up to that

point. Subsequently the reduced ghetto was run as a ‘Jewish camp’; further

shootings occurred regularly. After the Lemberg massacre the office of the KdS

Lemberg ravaged the smaller ghettos and labour camps in the district, where

massacres leading to thousands of fatalities were carried out. From March 1943

onwards an increasingly large number of ‘actions’ took place in the smaller

ghettos of the district. These mass murders were accelerated still further from

the end of March. 3

In the district of Radom the last deportations occurred in January 1943. They

affected the town of Radom as well as Szydlowiec, Sandomierz Radomsko, and

Ujazd; the victims were deported to Treblinka. 4 All that existed now in the district of Radom was labour camps under the control of the SS and police commanders,

as well as so-called ‘Jewish camps’ directly attached to armaments factories, for

which the armaments inspection department of the Wehrmacht was responsible.

In the district of Krakau (Cracow), in March 1943, the ghetto in the city of Cracow

was the last ghetto to be definitively cleared. Those ‘fit for work’ ended up in

Plaszow labour camp (ZAL Plaszow). 5 Also in January the deportations from Warsaw to Treblinka resumed after their interruption in November. 6

In January 1943, after a visit to Warsaw, Himmler ordered that the ghetto there

be destroyed. Some of those factories that still existed were to be dissolved, and

the 16,000 workers there were to be deported ‘to a KL [Konzentrationslager ¼

concentration camp] ideally to Lublin’. The factories actually working for arma-

ments production were to be ‘centralized somewhere in the General Government’.7

When the relocation of production to Lublin at short notice proved impossible,

on 15 February Himmler ordered a concentration camp to be built inside the

Warsaw ghetto, so that control could be exerted directly over those ghetto

inhabitants who had been claimed as workers by the armaments factories. 8

In the meantime, the SS had once again begun to deport Jews ‘unfit for work’

from the Warsaw ghetto: between 18 and 22 January around 5,000 to 6,000 people

were deported from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka and murdered there. 9

Murders and Deportations, 1942–3

377

In the months that followed concrete preparations were made within the SS

empire to bring about the planned transfer of the Jewish forced labourers. To this

end Globocnik negotiated with the WVHA to establish the ‘Ostindustrie’, which

was officially founded in March 1943. This holding company was an attempt to

create an armaments company run by the SS itself, which was to work with Jewish

forced labourers and Jewish property. In fact, over the next few months, the

Ostindustrie was to maintain various factories in the districts of Lublin and

Radom, and deploy around 10,000 Jewish workers who were interned in labour

camps. But they produced no armaments, only for the most part simple items of

everyday use. 10

In the spring of 1943, however, a development occurred which led the Nazi

leadership to the decision to conclude the ‘Final Solution’ in the General Govern-

ment as quickly as possible, and no longer to take Jewish workers into consider-

ation. This last escalation of Judenpolitik in the General Government was

prompted by the Warsaw ghetto uprising of April and May 1943.

Resistance organizations had formed in the Warsaw ghetto after the start of the

major deportations of summer 1942: the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa (ZOB,

Jewish combat organization), originally formed from three Zionist youth organ-

izations, later joined by other groups, some of them non-Zionist. At the same time

the revisionist wing of the Zionists formed an autonomous organization, the

Zydowski Zwiazek Wojskowy (ZZW, Jewish Military Association).

After the temporary halt to the deportations in October 1942 there were still

between 55,000 and