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

Reich or at one of the building sites run by the Todt Organ-

isation in occupied Europe. 31

Other escapees tried to survive in forest camps that they had built themselves. 32

The Israeli historian Shmuel Krakowski estimates the number of Jews who

escaped into the forests in the four districts of the ‘old’ General Government

(i.e. without Galicia) in 1942–3 at 50,000 and in his seminal study of the Jewish

resistance in Poland he presents figures which suggest that the great majority of

these escapees were killed by German Jagdkommandos (Hunting Commandos). 33

After the liquidation of the ghettos, from the summer of 1943 the focus of the

persecution of the Jews in the General Government shifted clearly to the tracing of

these people who had fled into the forests or otherwise gone into hiding, often in

the wake of the anti-partisan campaigns that were now being intensified. 34

382

Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

In the district of Lublin these raids began in May 1943. The monthly surveys by

the district Commander of the Order Police indicate a total of 1,657 victims for the

period between May and October 1943, under the heading ‘Jews exterminated’. 35

In the district of Galicia, from July 1943 onwards, the police intensified their raids

in the forests and killed thousands of Jews. 36

Poles who offered Jews hiding-places were generally shot, in many cases the

whole family was murdered, in extreme cases the entire population of the village

in question. Conversely, denunciations of hidden Jews were rewarded with boun-

ties; the SSPF in the district of Lublin, for example, ordered that such informants

be given up to a third of the property of the Jewish victim who had been hunted

down. 37

Armed resistance in the ghetto clearances in Bialystok and Vilna, the mass

escape from Treblinka in August 1943, and particularly the prisoner revolt in

Sobibor on 14 October, in which eleven SS members had been killed, 38 all of this in the face of the threatened Soviet invasion, must have been what led Himmler to

give Krüger the order, in October 1943, to liquidate the most important camps still

in existence in the district in Lublin. Early in November the prisoners in the

Lublin camp complex were shot during a two-day massacre, under the code name

‘Harvest Festival’, and the same fate awaited the prisoners in the camps of

Trawniki and Poniatowa. The total number of victims reached around 42,000.39

Sobibor extermination camp had also been dissolved after the attempted uprising

on 14 October. After this, in the district of Lublin there were only a few smaller

forced labour camps with several thousand Jewish prisoners, which were cleared

from February 1944; most of the prisoners were deported to the west. 40

During the Harvest Festival murders in the district of Lublin, at the beginning

of November 1943 the German police also murdered the Jewish inmates of the

Szenie labour camp in the district of Cracow (Krakau), and a few days later the

inmates of ZAL (labour camp) Plaszow in Cracow. On 19 November the Jewish

forced labourers in the Janowska camp in Lemberg (Lvov) were murdered. 41

In his notorious speech to the Reichs- and Gauleiters in Posen (Poznan) on

4 October 1943, Himmler gave an assurance that the ‘Jewish question in the

countries occupied by us . . . will be resolved by the end of the year’. 42

Occupied Soviet Territories

After the big wave of murders in Ukraine in 1942 Jews only lived in any numbers

in the occupied Soviet territories in Reichskommissariat Ostland. In summer 1943,

72,000 Jews still lived in this territory. According to the State Secretary, Alfred

Meyer, Rosenberg’s deputy in the Ministry of the East, 22,000 of these had already

been selected for ‘resettlement’, meaning murder. 43 Of the 30,000 or so Jews still living in the General Commissariat of White Ruthenia in 1943, the occupying

forces killed around half. 44

Murders and Deportations, 1942–3

383

Thus, on 8 February, the KdS station in Minsk murdered all the Jews in Slutsk

in the wake of an anti-partisan action; in view of the resistance of the ghetto-

dwellers, District Commissar Heinrich Carl ordered that the ghetto be burned

down along with its entrenched inhabitants—this was the same Carl who had

complained to his superiors about the cruel behaviour of Lithuanian auxiliary

police against the Jews of Slutsk. 45 About 3,000 people lost their lives in this action.

In the district of Vileyka, between February and April 1943, the members of the

local KdS station murdered almost all the Jews living there, around 5,000 people.

There was also a large number of Jewish people who tried to hide outside ghettos

and camps, and were hunted down and murdered by German units and their local

auxiliaries; according to the figures of the SSPF of White Ruthenia, Curt von

Gottberg, 11,000 were killed between November 1942 and March 1943 alone. 46

The remaining three ghettos in the General District of White Ruthenia were

destroyed between August and October 1943. On 13 August Himmler issued an

order to restrict the labour deployment of the Jews, which was adopted by the

OKH on 29 September as ‘binding for the whole of the field army in the East’. As a

result, interventions by Wehrmacht posts in favour of Jewish work commandos

were effectively scotched. 47

The ghetto of Glebokie near Vilna was liquidated on 20 August following a

further anti-partisan action. In August 1943 the inhabitants of the ghetto resisted

their planned deportation to Majdanek; the majority of the ghetto-dwellers,

between 2,000 and 3,000 people, lost their lives in the ghetto, which was set on

fire by German forces. 48 The ghetto of Lida was dissolved in September, and some 4,000 inhabitants were deported to the concentration camps of Sobibor and

Majdanek. 49

Finally, the Minsk ghetto was cleared in September in a number of stages. Some

of the 10,000 or so ghetto-dwellers still living there were sent to Auschwitz and

Sobibor extermination camps, others murdered on the spot, and yet others

deported to the district of Lublin for forced labour. In October 1943 the surviving

ghetto-dwellers were murdered in the extermination centre of Trostinets near

Minsk. 50

In Lithuania and Latvia, where there were still large numbers of Jews, Himmler

acted in 1943 as he had in occupied Poland: he endeavoured to turn those Jews

who were still ‘fit for work’ into concentration camp inmates, so that he would

have total control over their future