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

the labour offices to report

all Jews registered as unemployed. 124 In Vienna several hundred Jews had been deployed since as early as October in closed columns working apart from other

workers; an extension of this ‘labour deployment’ in Austria—mostly in quarrying

and similar heavy labour—was planned. Entirely in the spirit of the forced labour

that was to come, in October the Reich Labour Exchange had rejected the

suggestion of allowing an autonomous Jewish labour exchange to come into

being. 125

After Goering had stated that he was fundamentally in favour of the establish-

ment of Jewish ‘labour formations’, at the meeting on 16 December Frick an-

nounced that in future all Jews without work and assets were to be deployed in

closed labour columns; those who still lived on their remaining assets, on the other

hand, represented a ‘valuable pawn’ and were not to be subjected to the new

compulsory measures. 126

Through a fundamental order of 20 December by the President of the Reich

Labour Exchange it was finally determined that ‘all unemployed Jews who were fit

for work should be employed at a faster rate’, and that to this end they should be

deployed ‘separately’ in public and private enterprises. 127

The German historian Gruner estimates128 that in May 1939 between 13,500 and 15,000 Jews were employed in the closed labour deployment, primarily for building work and communal work such as garbage removal, street cleaning, and so on.

In practice, however, it became apparent that the deployment possibilities for

Jewish workers in local government work were limited. 129

Given these limited possibilities, national deployment in the construction of

Autobahns and dams assumed growing importance; in the summer of 1939 more

than 20,000 Jews were deployed in such work. 130

In the face of this tendency to ‘erect camps for forced labour’ (Verlagerung), the

obvious idea was to put Jewish workers in barracks in the event of war. On

28 February 1939, under the chairmanship of the Interior Ministry’s ‘Jewish

expert’, Bernhard Lösener, representatives of the OKW, the Security Police, and

the Order Police, as well as the concentration camp inspectorate, met in the Reich

Ministry of the Interior to discuss the question of the ‘services to be performed by

Jews in the event of war’. 131

The immediate reason for this discussion was the planned exclusion of the Jews

from any form of military service. During the meeting it was agreed in principle

that in the event of war the German Jews aged between 18 and 55 should be

‘recorded’, which would involve the introduction of compulsory registration with

the police.

Lösener stated that the Jews should be employed ‘in columns, separate from the

“German-blooded” workers, primarily in road-building and the supply of the

requisite material (quarry work)’. Since ‘the work-related deployment’ of the Jews

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was to be seen as ‘a substitute for military service’, their ‘employment and

accommodation must also be tackled in a military form’. This was because ‘The

population would doubtless fail to understand if the Jews were able to pursue

their civilian jobs in war without any significant change in their living conditions,

while the German-blooded compatriots performed their military duties at the

front and at home.’

chapter 6

THE POLITICS OF ORGANIZED EXPULSION

The Extermination Announcements at the Turn

of the Year 1938–1939

Still under the immediate effect of the eruption of violence of the November

pogrom, towards the end of 1938/beginning of 1939, the declarations of leading

National Socialists and the commentaries of the Nazi press began to resonate with

threats of the ‘extermination’ of the Jews.

Thus an article in the SS journal, Schwarze Korps, of 24 November 1938 stated:

‘Least of all do we want to see these hundreds of thousands of impoverished Jews

as a breeding-ground for Bolshevism and a recruiting base for the political and

criminal subhumanity that, as a result of the selection process, is disintegrating

on the margins of our own nationhood. . . . In the event of such a development,

we would face the harsh necessity of wiping out the Jewish underworld just as we

are used to wiping out criminals in our orderly state: with fire and sword. The

result would be the actual and definitive end of Jewry in Germany, its total

extermination.’

After Goering had, at the meeting of 12 November, described ‘an important

reckoning with the Jews’ as ‘a foregone conclusion’, Hitler was also heard speaking

in similar terms on various occasions. When the South African Defence and

Economics Minister, Oswald Pirow, visited Hitler at the Berghof on 24 November,

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to offer him, amongst other things, his services as mediator in an international

solution of the German ‘Jewish question’, he learned from his host that the

‘problem of the Jews’ would ‘be solved in the near future’; this was his ‘unshake-

able will’. It was not only a ‘German, but a European problem’. 1 During the conversation, Hitler moved on to an open threat: ‘What do you think, Mr

Pirow, if I were to take my protecting hand away from the Jews, what would

happen in Germany? The world could not imagine it.’

The minutes of the reception of the Czechoslovak Foreign Minister Chvalk-

ovsky by Hitler on 21 January 1939 recorded the following statement by the

‘Führer’: ‘The Jews would be exterminated here. The Jews did not carry out 9

November 1918 in vain, that day would be avenged.’2

In his speech before the Reichstag on the sixth anniversary of the seizure of

power on 30 January 1939, Hitler finally expressed himself in a central, lengthy

passage on the ‘Jewish question’. 3

And there is one thing that I should like to state on this day, memorable perhaps for others as well as us Germans. In the course of my life I have very often been a prophet and was

generally laughed at for it. During my struggle for power it was in the first instance Jewish people who laughed at my prophecies that I would some day assume the leadership of the

state and thereby of the entire nation and then, among many other things, achieve a

solution of the Jewish problem. Their laughter was uproarious but I think that for some

time now the Jews have been laughing on the other side of their faces. Today I will be a

prophet again: if international Jewish financiers within Europe and abroad should succeed once more in plunging the nations into a world war, then the consequence