Read Heinrich Himmler : A Life Online
Authors: Peter Longerich
There was also a domestic-policy motive for the deportations. By being carried out in public and placed in context by propaganda, they could be used to denounce and punish the Jews as ‘the people who were pulling the strings behind the air raids’,
11
while the household goods of the deportees could be donated to the non-Jewish victims of air raids and to other people who were in need who could also be assigned ‘Jewish housing’.
12
The calculation behind it was that the numerous beneficiaries of the deportations would thereby make themselves complicit in the Jewish policy. However, there are various indications that the deportation of the central European
Jews was intended right from the beginning to be the first step on the way to a programme involving the deportation of all European Jews.
13
The background to this was provided by the reaction of the occupiers to the growing resistance in the territory under their control. The German attack on the Soviet Union resulted in the mobilization of resistance to the hated occupation throughout German-occupied Europe. In particular, the communist underground movement gradually overcame the paralysis that had been caused by the Hitler–Stalin pact of August 1939. In the summer and even more in the autumn of 1941 the Germans experienced an increasing number of acts of sabotage and assassinations. As a result they increased their repressive measures.
Thus, the military commander in Serbia had already begun shooting hostages in large numbers in July as a ‘reprisal’ for acts of resistance.
14
In France such executions took place for the first time on 6 September, and then, on Hitler’s instructions, increasingly in October; in Belgium on the 15 and 26 September; and in Norway, after strikes in Oslo, also in the middle of September.
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In Norway Reich Commissar Terboven imposed a civil state of emergency on the district of greater Oslo on 10 September 1941. On the same day he asked Himmler whether SS and police jurisdiction could not be extended to the whole of the Norwegian population, in order to prevent ‘German justice in the form represented by the Ministry of Justice from taking root here’. Himmler agreed by return of post and, only five days later, transferred judicial responsibility for the Norwegian population to HSSPF Friedrich Rediess. By 17 September, when the new arrangement came into effect, Terboven had achieved his goal.
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After the attack on the Soviet Union the commander of the security police and SD in the Netherlands, Wilhelm Harster, ordered mass arrests of communists.
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On 16 September the OKW issued an order that in general the execution of fifty to 100 communists was to be considered ‘appropriate’ in reprisal for the assassination of one German soldier.
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Heydrich, who had become deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia at the end of September, imposed a civil state of emergency immediately following his appointment and introduced courts martial; 404 men and women were shot during the period of the state of emergency.
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The resistance movement in Greece carried out a number of assassinations at the end of August and in September.
20
In response, at a meeting with Hitler at the beginning of November, Himmler proposed punishing
the large Jewish community in Saloniki and deporting it.
21
In his presentation Himmler made the following points: first, he spoke generally about ‘moving people of alien race (Jews)’, mentioned the cities of Riga, Reval (Talinn), and Minsk as ‘main centres’, and finally referred to Saloniki, where he saw a particular ‘threat because of the links between Jews and Levantines’. His presentation clearly shows that at this point he already conceived the deportations in terms of a Europe-wide project. Hitler approved Himmler’s presentation and assigned him the task of removing the ‘Jewish element’ from Saloniki. In fact, the deportations of the Jews from Saloniki did not take place until 1943.
22
Himmler was not alone in wanting to focus reprisals on the Jews. Since the autumn of 1941 the military occupation authorities in Serbia and France had been taking the initiative to concentrate their reprisals on the Jewish minority. In October 1941 the Wehrmacht in Serbia began systematically shooting Jewish men, whom they had targeted for internment since August, as ‘a reprisal’ for assassinations. By the beginning of November 8,000 Jews had already fallen victim to these murders; their dependants were interned during the winter and murdered in gas trucks the following spring.
23
The military authorities in France had been arresting thousands of mainly foreign Jews since spring 1941. In December 1941 they no longer responded to assassinations with the shooting of hostages but began to threaten to deport a number of communists and Jews ‘to the east’. At first, however, the threat could not be implemented because of the transport situation. The first transport of a thousand hostages to Auschwitz left France only in March 1942.
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From the point of view of the Nazi leadership, the intensification and expansion of repressive measures against the Jews was only logical. As they worked on the assumption that communism and the Jews were substantially identical, they imagined that it was the Jewish minorities who were mainly behind the resistance activity even outside eastern Europe. Thus, the fact that the Nazi leadership was so determined to initiate the deportation of the Jews in the late summer of 1941 was no doubt due in part to the spectre of a Jewish–communist resistance movement.
To start with, however, it proved extremely difficult to carry out the deportations. At the beginning of October the plan to place 60,000 Jews in the Ł
ó
ódź ghetto met with strong opposition, not only from Georg Thomas, the head of the Wehrmacht Armaments’ Office,
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but also from the district governor, Friedrich Uebelhoer, putting him in bad odour with
Himmler as a result.
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According to Uebelhoer, the Ł
ó
ódź ghetto was not a ‘decimation ghetto’ into which one could pack more and more people, but a ‘work ghetto’.
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The Reich Governor’s office eventually worked out a deal with Eichmann reducing the original figure of 60,000 to 25,000 Jews and Gypsies. Himmler had evidently offered Greiser a deal: ‘in return’ he could murder no fewer than 100,000 indigenous Jews.
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At the beginning of October the Reich Security Main Office also gave orders that the Riga and Minsk ghettos would have to take 50,000 people between them.
29
On 6 October Hitler announced to his luncheon guests that all Jews had to be ‘removed’ from the Protectorate and the Jews from Vienna and Berlin should ‘disappear’ simultaneously with the ‘Protectorate Jews’.
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Four days later, on 10 October, Heydrich announced the deportation of the first 5,000 Jews from Prague.
31
They could be ‘put in [ . . . ] the camps with the communist prisoners’ in the eastern territories.
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On the same occasion Heydrich stated that Hitler wanted ‘the Jews to be removed from German territory, if possible by the end of the year’.
From the spring of 1941 the government of the General Government was also aiming to have ‘their’ Jews deported in the course of the year to the Soviet territory that was going to be conquered. However, in mid-October Rosenberg made it clear to Frank that for the time being there was no chance of that happening. As a result the government of the General Government began to contemplate ‘solving’ the ‘Jewish question’ in its own territory.
33
That same month Governor-General Frank held a series of meetings in the capitals of the various districts, at which Jewish policy was discussed in distinctly radical terms. It was decided that in future the death penalty would be imposed on people who left ghettos. This inaugurated a manhunt directed at all Jews who were outside the ghettos.
34
On 1 August 1941 Galicia was incorporated into the General Government. During the weeks prior to its being absorbed the so-called Einsatzkommando z.b.V (‘for special assignments’) had launched a campaign of terror in the district, targeted in particular at Jewish men, especially those in prominent positions. After the incorporation of Galicia into the General Government this commando, which in the meantime had been designated as the headquarters of the commander of the security police in Galicia, did not let up in its campaign of terror.
35
From the beginning of October the security police in Galicia applied their murderous policy to all Jews without distinction, as the other Einsatzkommandos were doing at the same time in the Soviet districts. Terrible massacres were taking place week after week.
36
Thus the practice of systematic mass murder had already reached the General Government at the same time as Rosenberg was giving his negative response to Frank.
In the same period concrete preparations were being made for the systematic murder of Jews in the district of Lublin bordering on Galicia, in other words, the district that in 1939 had been envisaged as forming the ‘Jewish reservation’ (and in spring 1942 was actually to serve as the reception area for the Jews deported from the Reich). A central role was played by the local SS and police leader Odilo Globocnik, to whom three months earlier Himmler had assigned vital tasks in the future ethnic reorganization of the east. On 13 October Globocnik met his Reichsführer
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in order to discuss a proposal made two weeks before to restrict the ‘influence of the Jews’, who must be ‘targeted’ for the sake of political security’.
38
It can definitely be assumed that Globocnik proposed the construction of a primitive extermination camp and that Himmler gave him permission.
39
This meeting marked a turning-point. Two or three weeks later, at the beginning of November—in the meantime the ‘Jewish question’ had been discussed at several government meetings in the General Government—work began on the construction of Belzec extermination camp.
40
The fact that its capacity was initially restricted and that no further extermination camps were built in the General Government before spring 1942 indicates that in autumn 1941 Globocnik had not yet received the order to prepare for the extermination of all the Jews in the General Government. His commission concerned the district of Lublin and possibly also that of Galicia.
41
On 20 October 1941, a week after his conversation with Globocnik, Himmler, together with Ribbentrop, met a high-level Slovakian delegation at the Führer’s headquarters consisting of the President, Josef Tiso, Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Vojtech Tuka, as well as Interior Minister Alexander Mach. Himmler used the occasion to offer the Slovakian leadership the possibility of deporting ‘their’ Jews to a specially designated territory in the General Government. His proposal received a unanimously positive response.
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There are indications that, as a result of this meeting, the construction of a second extermination camp was initiated in the district of Lublin–Sobibor.
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It was probably during his visit to Minsk in mid-August or shortly thereafter that Himmler issued his instructions to find a method of killing that exposed his men to less stress than the massacres.
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A few days after Himmler had witnessed a mass shooting there, von dem Bach-Zelewski
tried—probably in vain—to get Herbert Lange, the chief of the SS Sonderkommando that for some time had been murdering patients in the Warthegau in gas vans, to give a demonstration in Minsk.
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Arthur Nebe, the commander of Einsatzgruppe B, who was probably present during Himmler’s visit, also initiated experiments. Following attempts to kill mental patients through the use of explosives,
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patients from asylums in Mogilev and Novinki near Minsk (which Himmler had visited on 15 August) were killed in hermetically sealed rooms through car-exhaust fumes introduced from outside.
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Finally, the decision was made in favour of using gas vans. Before the end of the year all four Einsatzgruppen were using this method.
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From November 1941 onwards gas vans were also deployed in the Warthegau, where from mid-October to 9 November
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20,000 Jews arrived from the Reich as well as 5,000 Gypsies from the Burgenland, in a total of twenty-five transports. The gas vans were used for murdering indigenous Jews as had been agreed, ‘in return’ for the deportations. There is evidence for the use of gas vans in Chelmno from 8 December, where in the meantime a base for gas vans had been established.
50
This was the first extermination camp to begin its fearful work, and from January 1942 inhabitants of the Ł
ó
ódź ghetto were being killed in Chelmno.
51
Alongside the development of gas vans, in the autumn of 1941 gas chambers were being installed in occupied eastern Europe. On 25 October Erhard Weitzel, the desk officer for racial questions in the Ministry of the Eastern Territories, informed Reich Commissar Hinrich Lohse of the construction of such a gas chamber: Oberdienstleiter Brack of the Chancellery of the Führer of the NSDAP, the organizer of the ‘Euthanasia’ programme, would soon be coming to Riga in order to make the necessary preparations.
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However, the announcement was premature: the murders in Riga were carried out in gas vans, not gas chambers.
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In the General Government, as we have seen, the construction of Belzec extermination camp had begun at the start of November and a second extermination camp (Sobibor) may have been prepared at the end of 1941.
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Brack played a role here. He met Himmler on 14 December and agreed to send his specialists to the General Government to help establish and run the extermination camps. By the summer of 1942 Brack had assigned a total of ninety-two specialists in murder.
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