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

concerned, it has become clear that Judenpolitik produced a particularly high

percentage of victims in those areas in which a civilian administration was

preparing the construction of a ‘Greater German Reich’ with the support of the

Conclusion

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SS. This applies to the Reich, including the annexed territories, the Protectorate,

Bohemia and Moravia, Poland and the occupied Soviet territories, but particularly

also to the Netherlands. The Jews living there only had a chance of survival if they

managed to escape before the start of the murders; there were also limited

possibilities of surviving by going into hiding, which increased towards the

end of the war. But the numbers of victims were also very high in two territories

which were controlled by a military administration and were not the target of a

Germanization policy: in Greece and Serbia. In Belgium there was a German

military administration and the country was also the target of German ideas of

Germanization; but the percentage of Jewish victims was—if compared with the

Netherlands—considerably lower, which may be down to the lower pressure of

persecution, the sluggish Belgian authorities, the more cautious behaviour of the

victims, and the helpfulness of the Belgian population. Norway was also consid-

ered a ‘Germanic’ country, and ruled by a civilian administration, but more than

half of the small Jewish minority managed to escape the deportations in the

autumn of 1942.

This brief survey of the fate of the Jews in the countries occupied by and allied

with Germany shows once again that the German persecution of the Jews pro-

ceeded in very different ways in the individual territories within the German

sphere of influence in the second half of the war. A large number of factors

affected Judenpolitik, which for these reasons could be accelerated, slowed down,

modified, and suspended. It was, among other things, because of this flexibility,

the ability to adapt to rapidly changing conditions, that the persecution of the

European Jews by the Nazi regime produced such terrible results.

Notes

Introduction

1. Among the most important contributions to Holocaust research by the intentionalists

were: Helmut Krausnick, ‘The Persecution of the Jews’, in Hans Buchheim et al.,

Anatomy of the SS-State (London, 1968), 1–124; Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the Final

Solution (London 1984); and Andreas Hillgruber, ‘Die ideologisch-dogmatische Grund-

lage der nationalsozialistische Politik der Ausrottung der Juden in den besetzten

Gebieten der Sowjetunion und ihre Durchführung, 1941–1944’, German Studies Review

2 (1979), 263–96. See also Lucy Dawidowicz, The War against the Jews 1933–1945

(London, 1975). For brief discussions of the intentionalist/functionalist debate as it

related to the Holocaust see the chapter on the Holocaust in Ian Kershaw, The Nazi

Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, 4th edn (London, 2000); and

the chapters ‘Hitler and the Third Reich’ and ‘The Decision-Making Process’, in Dan

Stone, ed., The Historiography of the Holocaust (London, 2004).

2. Helmut Krausnick, the leading representative of the intentionalists, worked on the

assumption that a decision by Hitler on the ‘Final Solution’ had been made in conjunc-

tion with the decision to commit genocide on the European Jews, which he placed in

spring 1941. See Krausnick, ‘The Persecution of the Jews’, 59 ff. A similar position is taken by Hermann Graml, who assumes that Himmler and Heydrich had learned of Hitler’s

intention to murder the European Jews in the first half of June 1941. See Hermann

Graml, Reichskristallnacht. Antisemitismus und Judenverfolgung im Dritten Reich (Mun-

ich, 1988), 222–3. In Der Holocaust (Munich, 1995), 50 ff., Wolfgang Benz sees the ‘genesis of the final solution’ as early as the time of the Madagascar Plan. More recently the idea of an early decision has been revisited by Richard Breitman who, working against the

tide of current research, dates a decision by Hitler and Himmler at the beginning of 1941.

See Richard Breitman, The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution

(London, 1991), 146 ff.

3. Uwe Adam, Die Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich (Düsseldorf, 1972), 312, places the timing of the decision between September and November 1941 as a ‘way out’ of a ‘dead-end

situation’ for everyone since, although the German leadership had begun deporting

the Jews from Germany, the original intention of ‘moving the deportees into the

conquered areas of Russia’ could not be realized because of the stage the war was at.

Philippe Burrin favoured dating the decision to murder the European Jews between the

middle of September and October: he emphasized its link to the critical military

Notes to page 2

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situation. See Philippe Burrin, Hitler and the Jews: The Genesis of the Holocaust (London, 1994), 115 ff. Christopher Browning had also placed the decision in the same period,

although in contrast to Burrin he regarded the victory over Russia that the Nazis felt was imminent as a decisive factor. Browning has always stressed the close connection

between the decision to murder the European Jews and the decision to murder all the

Soviet Jews in July 1941, as in his latest contribution to the topic in The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy 1939–1942 (London, 2004), 426–7. In

this excellent work he has differentiated his position still further and here argues that in mid-September (in connection with the start of deportations) Hitler decided in principle

to murder the deportees and that by the end of October the course had been set. In

arguing in this manner, Browning is closer to the idea of a process of decision-making

seen as a fluid continuum (see pp. 532 ff.). Götz Aly has also indicated a preference for seeing the early part of October as the critical period in which ‘an official decision may have been made’. See Götz Aly, ‘Final Solution’: Nazi Population Policy and the Murder

of the European Jews (London, 1999), 231.

4. See Wolfgang Scheffler, Judenverfolgung im Dritten Reich, 1933–1945 (Berlin, 1960).

5. See Martin Broszat, ‘Hitler and the Genesis of the “Final Solution”: An Assessment of

David Irving’s Theses’, in H. W. Koch, ed., Aspects of the Third Reich (Basingstoke, 1985), 390–429, 405. This develops the hypothesis that the annihilation of the Jews developed

‘not only as a prior will to destruction but also as a “way out” of a cul-de-sac that they had manoeuvred themselves into’. He goes on to argue that ‘once it had been begun and

institutionalized, the practice of liquidation nonetheless took over and in the end de

facto turned into an all-encompassing “programme” ’. Hans Mommsen makes