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

of particular interest. Since June 1938 they had been separated

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The Persecution of the Jews, 1939–1941

from the other inmates and were collected together in special institutions from

1940 onwards. From there they were all deported to the killing centres, without

regard to medical diagnosis or capacity to work, including the aged and infirm.

The systematic murder of some 4,000 to 5,000 Jewish patients thus represents an

important ‘bridge’ between ‘euthanasia’ and the later annihilation of the whole

Jewish population. 51

chapter 8

GERMAN OCCUPATION AND THE

PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS IN POLAND,

1939–1940/1941: THE FIRST VARIANT OF

A ‘TERRITORIAL SOLUTION’

Mass Shootings of Poles and Jews in Autumn 1939

Alongside the ‘euthanasia’ programme it was above all with the politics of the

occupation of Poland that the National Socialist regime made its decisive step

towards a racially motivated policy of annihilation at the beginning of the Second

World War. 1

As early as 23 May Hitler had made a speech to the army top brass in which he

spoke of the necessity to achieve ‘an extension of our living space in the East’ via a

war with Poland, 2 and on 22 August, again before members of the army’s most senior ranks, he had given the following guidelines: ‘Destruction of Poland

a priority. Goal is removal of vital forces not reaching a given line. . . . Close hearts to sympathy. Proceed brutally. 80 mill. people must get what is theirs. Their

existence must be secured. Right is with the stronger. Greatest rigour.’3 On 2 October Hitler went on to say how it was vital to ensure that ‘there must be

no Polish leaders, where Polish leaders exist they must be killed, however harsh

that sounds’. 4 At a meeting of departmental heads on 7 September, the Chief of 144

The Persecution of the Jews, 1939–1941

the Security Police and the SD, Reinhard Heydrich, gave instructions to the effect

that ‘the higher echelons of the Polish population need to be rendered as good as

harmless’, and on 14 October, to the same body, he made the demand that the

‘liquidation of leading Poles’ that had already begun be concluded by 1 November

at the latest. 5

In the spirit of these instructions, which could hardly have been expressed more

clearly, during the war and the first months of occupation 10,000 Polish citizens

were murdered by German units. The pretext for these murders was atrocities that

the Poles were said to have perpetrated and which German propaganda claimed

had cost the lives of more than 50,000 people. It is true that during the war

between 4,500 and 5,500 ethnic Germans lost their lives, partly as members of the

Polish army, partly as the civilian victims of acts of war, but some were also

transported by order of the Polish authorities, executed by the Polish military, or

the victims of violent attack by civilians. The peak was the so-called ‘Bloody

Sunday of Bromberg’, which claimed about a hundred lives and was depicted by

Nazi propaganda as a massacre with thousands left dead. 6

The systematic mass murder of certain sectors of the Polish population, pre-

sented as ‘retribution’ for these attacks, was directed and implemented to a large

extent by so-called Einsatzgruppen, ‘task forces’ or ‘death squads’. As in the case of

the annexation of Austria, the Sudetenland, and Czechoslovakia, special groups

were set up for the war against Poland consisting of members of the SS, the SD,

and the police. Initially there were five Einsatzgruppen (two more were added after

the start of the war) and they were each assigned to one of the armies; in total, the

seven units comprised some 2,700 men. 7 According to an agreement reached with OKH (Army High Command) in July, these Einsatzgruppen officially had the role

of dealing with all ‘elements hostile to the Reich and to Germany in enemy

territory behind the troops engaged in combat’. In addition, as a file note by

Heydrich from July 1940 establishes, they received instructions that were ‘extra-

ordinarily radical (e.g. the order to liquidate numerous Polish ruling circles, which

affected thousands)’. In concrete terms this meant that they had the authority to

murder members of the intelligentsia, the clergy, and the nobility, as well as Jews

and the mentally ill. 8 Corresponding lists of targets had been drawn up by the Reich Security Head Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt) as early as May 1939.9

When the additional instructions that Heydrich referred to were issued is not

clear. Various statements by the Einsatzgruppe leadership suggest that they had

already had a meeting with Himmler and Heydrich by August in which they had

been told that how they should eliminate the Polish intelligentsia was up to

them. 10 This form of highly generalized instruction, giving the junior leadership considerable room for manoeuvre, matches the way the National Socialist

leadership proceeded on the Night of Broken Glass (Reichskristallnacht); we

shall encounter this tactic of relying on the initiative and intuition of the junior

leaderships again when we come to the nature of instructions given to

Occupation and Persecution of Jews in Poland, 1939–40/41 145

the Einsatzgruppen shortly before the beginning of the war against the Soviet

Union.

These Einsatzgruppen were supported above all by the ethnic German Self-

Defence Corps (volksdeutscher Selbstschutz), a militia formed after the start of the

war from overwhelmingly National Socialist members of the German minority

and integrated into the regular police force (Ordnungspolizei). 11 Both Einsatzgruppen and the Self-Defence Corps—but also the regular police, the military arm of

the SS (Waffen-SS), and army units—shot thousands of Polish civilians during the

war, often in the course of retaliation measures against supposed or actual attacks

on German troops. 12 In the month of September alone, according to post-war investigations undertaken by the Poles, more than 16,000 people fell victim to

such executions. 13 In the course of this massive outbreak of violence against the civilian population hundreds of Polish Jews were arbitrarily murdered by the

police, the Self-Defence Corps, and members of the army, and in a series of cases

locked into synagogues and burned alive. 14 These murders were part of a wave of anti-Semitic violence that the German occupying forces unleashed on the Jews of

Poland from the very beginning of the war and which also manifested itself as

looting, mistreatment, rape, public mockery, and more. It should also be empha-

sized that after September 1939 the Einsatzgruppen and the army forcibly drove

tens of thousands of