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

henceforth to murder Jews indiscriminately.

It can be assumed that in late April or May the Nazi regime made the decision

to extend the mass murder of the Jews, which was already in progress in the

districts of Lublin and Galicia, to the whole of the General Government. At the

same time, the decision must have been made to implement a mass murder

among the Jews of annexed Upper Silesia. The systematic mass murder of the

Jews in the General Government began in June, but was then interrupted for a few

weeks because of the transport ban. The transport ban, introduced because of the

offensive in the East, finally had a radicalizing effect on the extermination policy: it

accelerated the deportations from the Western territories, and, during this period,

the planners of the mass murder clearly had an opportunity to rethink and

consolidate their ideas so that the overall programme could resume in July with

much more devastating effect. It was during this phase that the SS took over

Jewish forced labour in the General Government and thus maintained control

over those prisoners who were ‘fit for work’ and so initially excluded from

extermination.

At around the same time as this fundamental decision regarding the Jews in the

General Government, at any rate before mid-May, significant decisions must have

been made as a result of which the operation of the extermination machinery was

further extended. On the one hand, it was decided that the deportations from the

Conclusion

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territory of the ‘Greater German Reich’ should be intensified beyond the quota set

in March, and on the other the regime now set about murdering either all or

almost all of the Jews deported from Central Europe when the transports arrived

at their destinations in Eastern Europe. This happened to Jews deported from the

Reich in Minsk from mid-May, and from early June in Sobibor to the Jews

deported from Slovakia.

It can be assumed that on 17 April 1942 Himmler had already ordered the

murder of over 10,000 Central European Jews still living in the Lodz ghetto, who

had been deported there in October 1941 and survived the inhuman conditions in

the ghetto.

With these decisions, probably made in the second half of April or early May,

which came into effect in May/June, the Nazi regime definitively abandoned the

idea of a ‘reservation’ in the eastern area of the General Government or

the occupied Eastern territories which had increasingly become a fiction given

the mass murder that was already under way. The link between this renewed

escalation of the extermination policy and military developments, in other words

the preparations for the summer offensive in the East, is just as apparent as the

fact that, in view of the mass recruitment of workers from the occupied Soviet

Union, in the spring of 1942 the Nazis believed they would soon be able to do

without Jewish forced labourers.

At the beginning of June a concrete programme of deportations was established

for the West, which according to the plan was to be realized within three months

beginning in mid-July. This meant that the ‘European’ plans first discernible in

early April were to be continued and adapted to the conditions set by the transport

ban in June/July. In June 1942, however, Himmler went a step further and called

for the rapid and complete deportation of all Jews from France.

The transports from Western Europe and—because of the transport ban—also

those from Slovakia were now directed to Auschwitz. There, from early June, the

great majority of deportees (as before in Minsk and Sobibor) fell victim to the new

and more radical variation of the extermination policy: immediately after their

arrival they were killed with poison gas, after a ‘selection’ had taken place on the

railway ramp.

In May 1942 the mass murder of the Soviet Jews, which had begun in the

summer of 1941, received a new impulse: the murders now resumed on a large

scale, before ending in the summer of 1942 in the complete extermination of the

indigenous Jewish population.

After the lifting of the transport ban in July 1942, the deportation and murder

programme was fully operational, and we know that Himmler insisted on con-

vincing himself of the functioning of the extermination programme by paying an

inspection visit. At the end of that inspection, on 19 July he issued the order that

the ‘resettlement’ of the entire Jewish population of the General Government was

to finish at the end of 1942.

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Conclusion

During the summer of 1942 the first preparations were made to organize larger

numbers of deportations from the West and the South-East of those parts of

Europe under the control of the ‘Third Reich’.

This acceleration and radicalization of the extermination programme in spring

and summer 1942 clearly reflected the decision of the Nazi leadership essentially to

implement the intended ‘Final Solution’ during the war. After the USA entered the

war the ‘Third Reich’ faced the necessity of waging a long-term war on several

fronts, and this new situation also necessarily altered the status of the systematic

mass murder of the Jews. With the extension of this last and most radical stage of

Judenpolitik to all the territories under German control, the entire German sphere

of influence was subjected to the hegemony of racism. The occupied and allied

states were drawn into the ‘New Order policy’ and, for better or worse bound to

the German leadership by their participation in an unparalleled crime. The

extermination policy thus came to underpin the German policy of occupation

and alliance. This central function of the mass murder of the Jews for the

maintenance of German rule on the continent also serves to explain the great

efforts made by the Nazi leadership to involve more and more countries in the

extermination programme by the end of the war.

During the second half of the war Judenpolitik—along with efforts to provide

political military and police security for the territory under German rule, and

alongside the issues of economic and food policy—became a major axis of

German occupation and alliance policy. The more the war advanced, the greater

the significance that the systematic murder of the Jews assumed, from the point of

view of the National Socialist leadership, for the cohesion of the German power

block. Because the executive organizations of the mass murders—whether they

were German occupying administrations, local auxiliaries, governments willing to

collaborate, or allies—were made henchmen and accomplices of the extermin-

ation policy, and bound to the engine of that policy, the leadership of