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

that the deportation of Gypsies from the remainder of the Reich would be initiated

some three to four weeks later. 9

Between 20 and 28 October 4,700 Jews were transported to Nisko from Vienna,

Katowice, and Ostrava in a total of six transports. 10 Only a fraction of these people were deployed in the construction of the ‘transit camp’ on the bank of the San,

where they found a meadow churned up by months of rain. By far the greater

number of deportees were escorted a few kilometres away from the camp and then

driven away by force.

Shortly after the start of the ‘resettlement campaign’, on 18 October, 11 Müller informed Eichmann that it would be necessary to organize ‘the resettlement and

removal of Poles and Jews into the area of the future Polish rump state’ centrally,

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via the Reich Security Head Office (RSHA). On 20 October the RSHA issued an

order banning the transports; 12 Eichmann was permitted only one train from Ostrava, ‘in order to preserve the prestige of the local state police’. 13

The sudden suspension of the Nisko transports was in all probability due to the

fact that these deportations clashed with the large-scale resettlement of ethnic

Germans into the incorporated areas that Himmler began on 28 September and

with the simultaneous expulsion of Poles and Jews from these same areas. A

second reason for the abandonment of the Nisko experiment is probably to be

found in reservations on the part of military strategists: Hitler made it clear to

Keitel on 17 October that the future General Government ‘has military importance

for us as a form of advance glacis and can be exploited for the moving of troops’.

This perspective could evidently not be reconciled with the idea of a ‘Jewish

reservation’. However, according to Hitler, in the long term ‘the way this area is

run . . . must make it possible for us also to rid the territory of the Reich of Jews and Polacks’. 14

Despite the abrupt end of the Nisko campaign, the RSHA steadfastly stuck to its

plans for deporting Jews into the district of Lublin. The RSHA informed the SD

Main District of Vienna at the end of October that it was quite conceivable that

‘individual transports of Jews from Vienna’ might still be fitted in. 15 Even the Higher SS and Police Commander in the General Government, Friedrich Wilhelm

Krüger, referred on 1 November to plans still in place for a ‘particularly dense

concentration of Jews’. 16

Eichmann’s short-lived campaign was by no means a personal initiative on his

part to compete with Himmler’s resettlement project; it was quite clearly a

component of the broader resettlement plans that the Reichsführer SS had been

trying to introduce since the beginning of October on the basis of his new powers:

whilst Himmler was constructing a new organization in the two new Reichsgaus

in Poland, supported by the Higher SS and Police Commander, he transferred

responsibility for carrying out deportations in the other areas to existing author-

ities, in other words to the interlocking mechanisms of the Security Police, the SD,

and the emigration offices.

As the history of the Nisko campaign shows, the organs of the SS charged with

carrying out deportations very clearly did so with the aim of leaving the deported

Jews exposed, one way or another, helpless, and without any means of support, in

the Lublin ‘reservation’ and of abandoning them to their own devices or driving

them over the demarcation line into the occupied Soviet zone, which was common

practice in the district of Lublin at the end of 1939.17 The Nisko project represented an experiment intended to gain experience as a basis on which to deport all the

Jews from the area of the Reich within the pre-war boundaries (and from Upper

Silesia, which had been annexed). The somewhat improvised manner in which

this campaign was carried out was not merely the result of disorganized incom-

petence; there was method in its inadequacies. The experiment shows plainly what

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The Persecution of the Jews, 1939–1941

was envisaged within the SS by the idea of ‘resettling’ the Jews of the whole area of

the Reich in the ‘Lublin reservation’: it was seen as an illegal campaign of

expulsion into an area between the ‘Eastern Wall’ that was to be constructed

and the demarcation line with the Soviet Union. Deportation on such a scale,

based on the Nisko model, would have caused the deaths of a great many of those

deported; but in the longer term those who initially survived would not have

found adequate living conditions or conditions for reproduction and would

therefore have been condemned to extinction. The Nisko campaign therefore

permits the conclusion that the further-reaching Lublin project was a first version

of a ‘final solution’ policy since its aim was the physical termination of those Jews

living within the German sphere of influence.

The radical nature of these aims is confirmed by statements made by leading

representatives of the General Government and by other, well-informed National

Socialist functionaries. At a meeting of senior Kreis officials and city commis-

sioners from the district of Radom on 25 November, the Head of the General

Government, Hans Frank, announced that the majority of the Jews in the area of

the Reich would be deported into areas east of the Vistula, adding, ‘we should give

the Jews short shrift. It’s a pleasure finally to be able to get physical with the Jewish race. The more of them that die the better. To smash the Jews is a victory for our

Reich. The Jews should be made to feel that we have arrived.’18 The Propaganda Ministry issued ‘confidential information’ to the German press on 20 October 1939

which revealed that ‘measures have already been taken by the SS to ensure for

example that 20,000 Jews from Lodz will be forced this very week to begin their

march into the very heart of the country’. The same document makes the lapidary

comment that ‘no subsistence infrastructure is available for this mass migration’. 19

On the occasion of a visit to the ethnic German village of Cycow on 20 November

by a delegation of leading functionaries from the General Government authorities,

the District Chief responsible for Lublin explained, ‘this extremely marshy area

could . . . serve as a Jewish reservation, which in itself might lead to a sharp

reduction in the numbers of