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

applied to all labour camps in

the General Government. This was done in January 1944: now the still existing

labour camps in Plaszow (near Cracow) and the labour camps in Lemberg, Lublin,

and Radom were turned into concentration camps. 19 After the Warsaw ghetto, declared to be a concentration camp in January 1943, was finally dissolved on an

order from Himmler in June 1943, and all traces of its existence were removed, 20

there were concentration camps specially set up for Jewish forced labourers in each

of the four remaining district capitals of the General Government.

In the district of Galicia, in June and July 1943 SSPF Katzmann had almost all

the labour camps liquidated and their inmates murdered. 21 In July 1943 Himmler also ordered that Sobibor extermination camp be transformed into a concentration camp and that prisoners be used to sort captured ammunition. 22

The radicalization of German Judenpolitik after the Warsaw ghetto uprising,

and Hitler’s instruction to Himmler on 19 June also meant the end for by far the

majority of those Polish Jews who had so far managed to survive in the Polish

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

territories directly administered by the Reich—eastern Upper Silesia, Warthegau,

and the district of Bialystok.

In eastern Upper Silesia—paradoxically, in spite of its proximity to Auschwitz

extermination camp—a relatively large proportion of the Jewish population had

remained alive up until early summer 1943; the systematic forced labour deploy-

ment in the context of the ‘Schmelt Organization’ granted them the chance of

survival until that point. In early summer 1943, however, the civil administration

in Upper Silesia, which had always worked on the assumption that the Jewish

forced labour deployment was only a transitory phenomenon, prepared to replace

Jewish workers with non-Jews. The definitive decision to liquidate the ghetto was

also presumably made with the Warsaw ghetto uprising still in mind; it was

prompted by Himmler’s order on 21 May 1943 according to which all Jews in

the Reich, including the Protectorate, were to be deported ‘to the East’ or to

Theresienstadt by 30 June. This order contained a supplement according to which

Eichmann was to discuss the ‘Abbeförderung’ (transportation) of the Eastern

Silesian Jews on the spot with Schmelt. Between 22 and 24 June 1943, 5,000 Jews

from Sosnowitz and Bendzin were deported to Auschwitz. On 1 August the

liquidation of the two ghettos began: a total of over 30,000 Jews were transported

from Sosnowitz and Bendzin in around fourteen transports to Auschwitz, where

some 6,000 were deployed as forced labourers and the rest were murdered. On 16

August these two large ghettos were completely cleared. Ten days later the last

ghetto in Warthenau, holding a total of 5,000 people, was liquidated. Of the

100,000–120,000 Jews who had lived in Upper Silesia at the time of the German

invasion, at least 85,000 had been murdered by the end of the war.

On 11 June, Himmler ordered the Lodz ghetto to be turned into a concentration

camp; however, this order never came into effect. 23 The alternative attempts by Himmler and Pohl to achieve the transfer of the production capacity available in

the ghetto to Lublin were also defeated by Greiser’s resistance. In February 1944

the Gauleiter in the Warthegau, Artur Greiser, agreed with Himmler that the

ghetto should be retained as a ‘Gau-ghetto’; only as many Jews should be allowed

to live there as was ‘absolutely necessary for the interests of the armaments

economy’. 24

In August 1943 Himmler had ordered that the forced labour camps in the

Warthegau, of which there were still more than 100, be liquidated. This had

been done by October 1943: the forced labourers either ended up in Lodz ghetto

or were deported to Auschwitz and murdered there. 25 In June 1944, on the basis of an agreement that Himmler and Greiser had made in February 1944, those

inhabitants of the Lodz ghetto who were either unfit for work or no longer needed

from the viewpoint of the ghetto administration were murdered with gas vans in

the specially reactivated extermination camp at Chelmno. By mid-July 1944 more

than 7,000 people died this way. However, Himmler had presumably already

issued the order to dissolve the ghetto completely in May 1944. In August the great

Murders and Deportations, 1942–3

381

majority of the ghetto-dwellers, still more than 68,000, were deported to

Auschwitz, where all of them were murdered, apart from some 2,000 people

who were deployed as forced labourers. Around 1,300 ghetto-dwellers stayed

behind in Lodz for clearing-up work. 26

Between 16 and 23 August 1943 the Bialystok ghetto was finally liquidated. The

various Jewish resistance groups that had formed a united front only in July 1943,

fiercely resisted the ‘action’ and involved the German police in battles that lasted

five days. After the uprising was put down, 150 fighters managed to escape the

ghetto and join the partisans. 27

In August 1943 more than 25,000 people were deported from Bialystok either to

Treblinka, where they were murdered, or, if they were deemed to be ‘fit for work’,

deported to Majdanek, where they were deployed in forced labour. The complete

liquidation of the ghetto was run by Globocnik. Plans originally in place to

transfer the factories in the ghetto to Lublin had in the meantime been abandoned

by Globocnik; instead a unit of the Ostindustrie plundered the factories that still

existed in Bialystok. The over 1,000 Jews who had stayed in Bialystok after the

‘action’ were also deported to Lublin. 28

In 1942–3 tens of thousands, possibly as many as 100,000 Jews living in Poland

had managed to escape the ghetto liquidations and get away. Thus, in an extensive

study of escape from the Warsaw ghetto, Gunnar Paulsson reached the conclusion

that a total of some 28,000 Jews went into hiding outside the ghetto and of those

around 40 per cent, or 11,500, survived. The mass of escapes occurred after the big

deportations of 1942: of 55,000 to 60,000 remaining ghetto-dwellers more than

13,000 escaped. These people survived on the ‘Aryan’ side of Warsaw, either in

hiding-places or under false identities; as many Poles were living illegally in

Warsaw, a certain infrastructure of illegality had been created that made access

to fake papers relatively easy. 29

In the district of Galicia, particularly after 1943, thousands of Jews managed to

find refuge in hiding-places, mostly in the homes of non-Jewish acquaintances, far

more than 1,000 in Lemberg alone. 30 Other Jews used fake papers to find jobs as

‘Ostarbeiter’ in the