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

stereotypes were now part of

the basic stock of journalism.

The whole process of the exclusion of the Jews from the economy, which—

guided by the Four-Year Plan Office—served, on the one hand, to finance rearma-

ment, and, on the other, served the needs of a National Socialist clientele, proved

to be a wide gateway for state interventions in the economic sphere, the starting

point for the National Socialist command economy established during the war. By

excluding the Jews from qualified professions and using the same circle of people

for unskilled work in labour columns (like, for example, the detention of the

‘work-shy’ in concentration camps), the labour market was transformed into

‘labour deployment’ (Arbeitseinsatz), organized not least along racist lines; here

important foundations were laid for the slave labour of ‘those of alien race’ during

the war.

The strict prohibitions on everyday contact with Jews could only function with

the help of an extensive system of espionage which, in view of the relatively small

numbers in the Gestapo and the SD, depended upon the support of the population

and in fact functioned so effectively that it inevitably tended towards an abolition

of the private sphere. One other consequence of the gradual implementation of

anti-Jewish policies was that the open terror of the Party activists was finally

acknowledged and legitimized as an appropriate instrument for the implementa-

tion of a policy of exclusion.

In the wake of National Socialist Judenpolitik, between 1933 and 1939 a widely

ramified apparatus of persecution had been constructed. Apart from the special

departments of the Gestapo and the SD and the relevant Party offices (such as the

Office of Racial Policy or Rosenberg’s Institute for Research into the Jewish

Question), within the Reich ministries (as for example the Interior Ministry, the

Foreign Office or the Propaganda Ministry, special Jewish desks, for the purposes

of the ‘de-Judaization’ (Entjudung) of the economy) an extensive apparatus had

been set up, and local government had bureaucratically confirmed discrimination

against the Jews down to the bottom level of the administration.

The implementation of Judenpolitik occurred, as we have seen, in phases, with a

certain tension between the NS government, the state bureaucracy, police appar-

atus, and Party base, and frictions appeared concerning the pace and methods of

anti-Jewish policy: the leadership of the regime allowed a great deal of scope for

initiative on the part of the various institutions involved in Judenpolitik. If these

initiatives proved inadequate or if they went too far, the centre intervened

correctively. But concerning the bottom line of this policy, the gradual exclusion

of the Jews from German society, there was considerable consensus.

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Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

With the total exclusion of the Jewish minority from German society Juden-

politik had, by the start of the war, reached a certain end point. A further

intensification of discrimination, a continuation of Entjudung was now no longer

possible; after six years of active Judenpolitik it was hardly the time from a

propaganda point of view to treat those Jews who had remained in the country

as dangerous adversaries.

The war, however, was to provide entirely new possibilities for a radicalizing

‘Jewish and racial policy’: in the context of the conquest and penetration of the

European continent, new functions within National Socialist policy fell to the

‘Jewish race in Europe’ and ‘world Jewry’ (so named by Hitler in his Reichstag

speech on 30 January 1939): the National Socialist idea of taking the Jews hostage

was now extended across the whole of the continent: the Jewish minorities in the

conquered countries became important objects of the German policy of occupa-

tion and alliance, and it was at their expense that the ‘new order’ of the ‘new

Lebensraum’ of the German Volk was primarily to be achieved. Where Juden-

politik had until 1939 been one of the most important instruments of the power-

political penetration of German society, the extension of persecution to the entire

European area and its gradual further radicalization performed in the eyes of the

NS regime a key function for the control of the ‘new Europe’.

PART II

THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS,

1939–1941

The Politics of Annihilation and the War

The beginning of the Second World War saw the inauguration of the National

Socialist regime’s systematic politics of racial annihilation. The start of the war

also marked the start of the physical annihilation of ‘alien races’ and the ‘racially

inferior’ on a vast scale. In 1939 the National Socialist regime set in train two

extensive programmes of mass murder, the so-called ‘euthanasia’ programme, or

the systematic murder of sick and disabled inmates of psychiatric institutions, and

the mass murder of members of the Polish elite, including many Jews. The

institution of a terrorist regime in Poland, organized on racist lines, established

a framework for further murder on a huge scale. This is the context, too, for the

extensive deportation programmes that were being developed from the autumn of

1939 onwards and which made provision for the ‘resettlement’ of all Jews under

German rule into a ‘reservation’ in Poland. In the long term, given the inadequate

conditions there, those transported to this ‘reservation’ were intended eventually

to die.

The radicalization of the politics of annihilation at the outset of the war is

linked to the key function that the war had within National Socialism: war was

synonymous with the opportunity to realize the National Socialist utopia of a

comprehensive new social order conceived on racial lines:

Attaining Lebensraum (living space) in the East would create the conditions for

a ‘biological revolution’, which could be achieved via a huge increase in the birth

rate amongst the ‘racially valuable’ sections of the population. It would also

comprise the permanent extirpation of racially undesirable elements within the

National Socialist sphere of influence.

Territorial expansion and the establishment of occupying regimes dominated

by the radical elements of the Party and the SS meant a further increase in

National Socialist power. By radicalizing policy on the fringes, German society

could be converted more rapidly into a racially homogeneous Volksgemeinschaft

(national community) and the principle of ‘selection’ (in the form of ‘extirpation’)

could be established as a permanent and all-embracing process.

From the point of view of the National Socialists war represented a means of

racial selection, a method for maintaining the ‘racially valuable’ and thus an

important instrument in the establishment of a social order that was able to

stand up for itself. The loss of ‘racially valuable’ individuals in the war also

legitimated the violent destruction of large numbers of ‘inferior specimens’ in

order to restore a