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

countries under German rule; after 1942 there were no

deportations whose goal was the immediate murder of the deportees in extermin-

ation camps. On the other hand the persecution of the Gypsies reveals numerous

parallels with the persecution of the Jews; the fate of the Gypsies makes it plain

that Judenpolitik was part of a more widely based Rassenpolitik.

CONCLUSION

In this study we have made an attempt to interpret the decision-making process

leading to the systematic murder of the Jews of Europe within the wider context of

German Judenpolitik. As a result we have identified four distinct stages of escal-

ation between the start of the war and the summer of 1942, in the course of which

the Nazi leadership developed and set in motion a programme for the systematic

murder of the European Jews. We have argued that the decisive turning point

leading to the ‘Final Solution’ occurred as early as autumn 1939 and we have

shown that the radicalization of Judenpolitik occurred within the context of a

Rassenpolitik, but that no other group was persecuted with the same relentlessness

and the same disastrous consequences as the Jews of Europe.

In the years between 1933 and 1939 Judenpolitik within the German Reich

remained closely associated with the National Socialist seizure and maintenance

of power. The ‘de-jewification’ (Entjudung) of German society, in the broader

sense the implementation of a racist policy, provided the Nazis with the instru-

ment for gradually penetrating the individual spheres of life in German society

and subjecting them to their total claim to power. In the years between 1933 and

1939, not only did this key function of Judenpolitik become apparent, but it also

became evident that a particular tactic for the phased implementation of the

policy was being developed: the regime leadership set general goals and

the subordinate organizations utilized the broad scope they were given for the

exercise of considerable individual initiative and did so to a degree in competition

with one another. But the frictions and tensions that arose could not disguise the

fact that the goal of the expulsion of the Jews from German society was based on a

broad consensus within the National Socialist movement. The initiation and

radicalization of the persecution of the Jews cannot simply be traced back to a

chain of decisions taken at the top of the Nazi regime; it would be more accurate to

say that a new political field was constituted and developed, in which complex

structures and autonomous dynamics then developed, without the leaders of the

regime losing control of the overall process of Judenpolitik.

This policy was clearly exhausted with the November pogrom and the subse-

quent legal measures. After the German Jews had been reduced to the status of a

Conclusion

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plundered minority, completely stripped of its rights, even Nazi propaganda had

difficulty evoking dangers that this completely powerless minority could have

represented; it was barely possible to supply motives for further anti-Semitic

‘actions’.

On the other hand, however, the Nazi regime had not managed to expel all the

German Jews. Now it became apparent that, as a result of the plundering of the

Jewish minority, a relatively large group of people had been left behind, which was

no longer in a position to emigrate. With war on the horizon, the regime set about

subjecting this group to total tyranny.

After the November pogrom the Nazi regime proceeded to declare the Jews to

be hostages menaced by ‘destruction’ (Vernichtung). Remarkably, Hitler himself,

in referring to extermination in his speech of 30 January 1939, did not speak of the

German Jews but prophesied—expressly in the instance of a ‘global war’—the

‘destruction of the Jewish race in Europe’.

However, from the perspective of the National Socialists, the idea of exter-

mination was not a tactically motivated threat but the logical consequence of the

notion that dominated the whole of National Socialist policy, that the German

people were engaged in a struggle against ‘international Jewry’ in which their

very existence was at stake. The National Socialists saw war as the chance to

realize their utopian ideas of an empire ordered along racist lines. From their

point of view, war served to legitimate the idea of compensating for the loss of

the ‘racially valuable’ by extirpating the racially ‘inferior’ in the interests of

maintaining ‘ethnic biological’ equilibrium. It was the emergency of war that

produced the opportunity for such an unparalleled break with the humanitarian

tradition.

Even during the war against Poland, in mid-September 1939, the German

leadership began seriously to address their plans for Lebensraum by developing

a gigantic resettlement programme for the newly conquered territories. This

programme involved the deportation of all Jews living in territory under German

control to a ‘Jewish reservation’ in conquered Poland. These plans were actually

set in motion with the so-called ‘Nisko Action’ in October 1939, but had to be

suspended after a short time. In fact, however, the Nazi regime kept to the plan of

a ‘Jewish reservation’ in the district of Lublin and repeated fitful attempts were

made to achieve such a mass programme through small-scale deportations.

In fact the plan for a ‘Jewish reservation’ was aimed at concentrating the Jews

from the whole of the German sphere of influence in an area which lacked

adequate living conditions, and to cause the death of these more than two million

people through undernourishment, epidemics, low birth rates, and so on, possibly

over a period of several generations. Plainly such a long-term plan contained the

potential to blackmail the Western powers that the leadership of the ‘Third Reich’

needed in order to construct a Lebensraum empire without being disturbed by

outside intervention.

424

Conclusion

The plan for a reservation was thus an initial project for the ‘final solution of the

Jewish question’, a long-term plan involving the deaths of the great majority of

Jews living under the control of the Nazi regime. The radical nature of this project

becomes fully clear when one views it within the context of the mass murders that

the Nazi regime unleashed after the start of the war: the shootings of tens of

thousands of Polish civilians (including thousands of Jews), as well as the ‘eutha-

nasia’ programme, the murder of the sick and the disabled.

Over the next two years, the ‘Jewish reservation’ project was maintained (in

modified form). After the victory over France, the regime concentrated on

Madagascar, and early in 1941, as part of the preparations for ‘Barbarossa’, a

plan was developed to deport the Jews under German rule to the territories