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

prisoners were saved in the end, namely

more than 20,000 people, including several thousand Jews. 262

However, contrary to Himmler’s pledge, the camps of Dora-Mittelbau and

Buchenwald—on the express orders of the Reichsführer SS—were not handed

over to the Allies, but also cleared at the beginning of April. The SS managed to

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417

bring around 28,000 from a total of 48,000 prisoners in Buchenwald out of the

camp, at least a third of whom had lost their lives by the end of the war. 263

The camp of Bergen-Belsen with its 60,000 prisoners, around 90 per cent of

them Jewish, was handed over to the British army by the SS on 15 April 1945.

Food supplies in the camp had completely collapsed, and there had been an

outbreak of typhus. Between January and the liberation of the camp, 35,000

prisoners had lost their lives, and a further 14,000 died in the first five days after

the liberation. 264

Also in mid-April, the department responsible for the concentration camps

held one last conference in which—in accordance with Himmler’s order—the

evacuation of the last concentration camps not liberated by the Allies must have

been discussed: these were Sachsenhausen, Dachau, Neuengamme, Flossenbürg,

and Ravensbrück. In mid-April there is evidence that Himmler directly instructed

Flossenbürg camp that no prisoners could fall alive into the hands of the enemy,

an order that must also have applied to other camps. Over the next few days the SS

leadership refused to comply with the requests from the International Red Cross

and hand over the last camps. 265

The last death marches went in two directions: the prisoners from the

camps of Flossenbürg and Dachau marched southwards, those from Ravens-

brück, Sachsenhausen, and Neuengamme northwards, according to the div-

ision of the still unoccupied Reich territory into two parts, which was still

under way. The motives for these last violent marches are unclear: perhaps

the objective was to deploy the prisoners as slave labourers in the construc-

tion of fortresses (for example, for a planned alpine fortress that was never

realized), and another factor must have been the SS’s intention to hand over

as few prisoners as possible, but instead to take them along on the retreat for

as long as possible, to be able to use them as hostages in last-minute

negotiations.

On 19 April 25,000–30,000 prisoners set off on a march towards Dachau, which

only some of the prisoners reached, while the remaining columns remained stuck

in the chaos prevailing in Upper Bavaria. 266 Of the 32,000 Dachau prisoners more than 8,500 were driven towards Austria, and at least 1,000 died. On 2 May the

guards left and the camp was liberated by American troops. 267

In the overcrowded Mauthausen camp and its sub-camps, which held many

Jewish prisoners, some 41,000 prisoners died in the first months of 1945 leading up

to the camp’s liberation in early May. In addition, around 2,000 people were

murdered in the gas chambers of Mauthausen camp. 268

The Sachsenhausen prisoners, 33,000 of them, were forced to march towards

Schleswig-Holstein on 20 April, and from Ravensbrück 20,000 prisoners were also

sent northwards towards Schleswig-Holstein on 18 and 24 April. In the chaos of

collapse, however, the marching columns gradually dissolved, the guards disap-

peared, and the hour of the prisoners’ liberation had arrived. 269

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

The clearance of Neuengamme began on 19 April: 9,000 prisoners also had to

march to Schleswig-Holstein. Prisoners deemed ‘unfit to march’ and ‘sick’ were

murdered in the camp itself. 270

Finally, on 25 April, the seaborne transport of the surviving 4,500 prisoners

from Stutthof began. The ships travelled to Neustadt in the Bay of Lübeck, where

the prisoners from Neuengamme had already been shipped in on three passenger

boats, possibly a measure that had something to do with the release of prisoners to

Sweden. Two of these ships were, however, set on fire by a British air attack, and

most of the prisoners were killed, while those who were able to escape were killed

on the beach, as were the Stutthof prisoners who were camped there, completely

exhausted.

Estimates suggest that between a third and a half of the 714,000 and more

people who were in the concentration camp system at the beginning of 1945 fell

victim to the clearances. 271 Of the 714,000 prisoners at the beginning of 1945, some 200,000 were Jews; the number of Jewish victims in the final phase of the ‘Third

Reich’ is estimated to be somewhere between 70,000 and 100,000. In that last

phase there was no comprehensive and deliberate policy to murder all Jewish

prisoners still held, and Himmler’s negotiations did not lead to a consistent policy

of sparing Jewish hostages. Rather, the last phase of the Holocaust, marked by

the clearance of the concentration camps and the death marches, but also by the

efforts—successful on a smaller scale—to release prisoners, shows that until the

very last days of the war the fate of the European Jews under the SS terror regime

depended on very contradictory decisions made at various levels of the SS

hierarchy. This, once again, makes it clear that the murder of the European Jews

was not an automatic programme of murder set in motion by a single order issued

from behind a desk, but rather that the implementation of the general decision to

practice systematic murder was repeatedly frustrated by different intentions and

thus distracted and delayed. Accordingly, it becomes apparent that it took a vast

amount of initiative and energy at all levels of the SS hierarchy actually to

implement the systematic murder of the European Jews—and that the desire to

destroy was still present through to the last days of the war.

The Nazi Regime’s Policy Towards the Gypsies in the

Second Half of the War: Parallels with and

Differences from the ‘Final Solution’

At the end of 1942 the Nazi regime proceeded to step up the persecution of the

Gypsies in a decisive fashion. Up until this point the Zigeunerpolitik (policy

towards the gypsies) had been marked by ‘unsimultaneities and contradictions’. 272

The overview below should make this clear.

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419

In the Netherlands the Gypsies, a group comprising only a few hundred people,

had at first been subjected to certain residence restrictions and intensified police

checks, and finally, in 1943, as part of the measures directed against the entire

‘travelling’ population, held at collection points. The measures against the equally

small group of Gypsies in Belgium and northern France were limited