Longerich Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

demanded that Kammler should be more ambitious. The latter responded by

proposing to spend the incredible-sounding sum of 20 to 30 billion Reich

marks—among other things, for building extensive settlements in ‘the east’—

involving the deployment of 175,000 forced labourers: ‘Prisoners, POWs,

Jews, etc.’

At the end of March 1942 Himmler gave his views on Kamm-

ler’s plans. Among other things, he criticized his assumption that a prisoner’s

productivity would be only half that of a German worker. Himmler in-

structed Pohl that the ‘biggest reserve of labour power was contained’ in the

prospect of increasing the productivity of the individual prisoner. ‘By being

given responsibility for the Concentration Camp Inspectorate, the head of

the Business and Administration Main Ofﬁce has been provided with the

opportunity of achieving that.’

The message was clear: with the aid of

terror to get the maximum productivity out of the prisoners with the

minimum expenditure. The prisoners, who in a short time would be worked

to death, were to be replaced by new slave labour.

Oswald Pohl, the head of the WVHA, hurried to prove to Himmler that

he had understood what was expected of him. In a report of 30 April

he emphasized that ‘keeping prisoners on the grounds of security, re-

education, or prevention was no longer the priority’; the ‘main emphasis’

had ‘shifted towards economics’.

In an order from the same day Pohl

made KZ commandants ‘responsible for labour deployment. In order to

achieve maximum performance this deployment must be exhausting in the

truest sense of the word.’

Thus, as part of the preparations for the ‘ﬁnal solution’ that were already

under way, Himmler geared his organization to combine mass murder and

mass production in the form of ‘extermination through labour’. This move

not only enabled him to expand the concentration camp system but also to

demonstrate its compatibility with the conditions created by the war.

Himmler hoped above all to counter the accusation that was being increas-

ingly levelled, given the deteriorating war situation, that the SS was point-

lessly eliminating labour that was urgently needed. The new plan explained

the extermination of people who were ‘incapable of work’ as a ‘practical’

necessity.

This maxim had already been applied in the occupied Soviet territories

from the late summer of 1941 onwards. The Einsatzgruppen allowed only

those Jews to live who were ‘capable of work’. They then died in the camps,

debilitated from forced labour and as a result of the catastrophic living

conditions. In the forced-labour camps in Upper Silesia under the direction

560 the murder of the european jews

of the Breslau police chief Albrecht Schmelt, from November 1941

onwards selections were being carried out among the Jewish forced la-

bourers, initially sporadically but soon systematically. Those no longer

capable of work were deported to Auschwitz and murdered.

In the autumn of 1941 the SS had initiated a huge forced-labour project

in the district of Galicia in the General Government, in which, apart from

Ukrainians and Soviet POWs, large numbers of Jews were deployed. This

was the road linking Lemberg (Lvov) and the Donets basin, the so-called

Transit Road IV, and can be described as a pilot project for the new policy.

In the camps set up for the forced labourers living conditions were terrible

and a brutal regime was enforced. There were continual selections of those

incapable of work, particularly among the Jewish forced workers, who

were then murdered. Here the scenario which Heydrich had outlined at

the Wannsee conference of Jewish labour columns ‘building roads’ had long

been reality.

The turning-points in spring 1942

At the Wannsee conference of 20 January 1942, apart from the old plan of

deporting the European Jews to the occupied Soviet territories and killing

them there through forced labour and ‘special treatment’, another variation

of systematic mass murder had been discussed: the killing of the Jews living

in the General Government in situ with the means that were available, in

other words, in gas chambers such as had already been built in Belzec and

Auschwitz.

Initially Himmler aimed, with the aid of Globocnik, to continue in the

spring of 1942 the mass murders in the districts of Lublin and Galicia for

which preparations had been made or which had already begun in the

autumn of 1941. Belzec extermination camp, which he had ordered to be

built the previous October, was completed in March 1942; it was to become

the prototype for the extermination camps in the General Government. On

13 March Himmler travelled to Cracow, had discussions with HSSPF

Kru

ger, and on the following day went on to Lublin to meet Globocnik,

the key ﬁgure in Jewish policy in the General Government.

Immediately after his visit, between 16 March and 20 April, the ghetto in

the city of Lublin, the district capital, was almost completely cleared.

the course of this bloody ‘action’, which took place in two stages, numerous

the murder of the european jews 561

people were shot in the ghetto itself; a few thousand were kept in Lublin as

workers, and around 30,000 were deported to Belzec where they were

murdered. On 24 March deportations from the rural parts of the district of

Lublin began, from which Globocnik and his people selected some 14,000

Jews for Belzec. Then the camp was temporarily closed so that it could be

extended.

There is a variety of evidence to show that at this time Globocnik had

instructions from Himmler to murder all the Jews from the district who

were ‘incapable of work’. Thus, on 27 March Goebbels made a note in his

diary concerning the Lublin Jews that ‘60% of them will have to be

liquidated while only 40% can be deployed for work’.

In the neighbour-

ing district of Galicia, between mid-March and the beginning of April 1942

Globocnik’s staff also deported around 15,000 inhabitants of the Lemberg

ghetto who were deemed ‘incapable of work’ to Belzec. Thousands of

people from the smaller ghettos in the district were forced to follow

the same path, while further thousands were murdered in situ.

Thus

Globocnik’s orders did not apply only to Lublin.

The deportation of Jews from the Reich and Slovakia to the district of

Lublin, which had already been designated as a ‘Jewish reservation’ in

September 1939, began simultaneously with the clearing of the Lublin

ghetto. By the beginning of March 1942 Eichmann had concocted a

programme according to which 55,000 Jews would be deported from the

Reich, a number which presumably had been reached by June. At the same

time he had announced that, as had been agreed at the Wannsee conference,

the intention was to deport most of the remaining elderly Jews to There-

sienstadt by the autumn.

The deportation trains destined for the district of

Lublin

usually stopped in the capital, Lublin, where the men judged

‘capable of work’ were separated out and sent on to the Majdanek camp.

The other people were put in the ghetto that had just been cleared where, as

a result of the miserable conditions, the majority did not survive the coming

weeks and months.

In February 1942 Himmler repeated the offer that he had made to the

Slovak leadership in October of the previous year.

He sent a request to the

Slovak government via the Foreign Ministry for it to send 20,000 workers to

the Reich for deployment ‘in the east’, to which the Skovaks agreed.

Between 26 March and 7 April four transports with a total of 4,500 young

men arrived in Majdanek and four transports with a total of 4,500 young

women arrived in Auschwitz, who were all deployed as forced labour.

562 the murder of the european jews

On 30 March, in addition to the transports from Slovakia, the ﬁrst

transport of Jewish hostages from France arrived in Auschwitz . They had

been deported ‘to the east’ in ‘retaliation’ for attacks by the French resis-

tance movement. While the preparations for this transport were being

made, Heydrich announced the deportation to Auschwitz of a further

5,000 Jewish hostages from France during the coming months.

Apart from that, transports from the forced-labour camps of the ‘Schmelt

Organization’ in Upper Silesia were continually arriving in Auschwitz.

Anyone who worked for it and was considered no longer ﬁt to work was

killed. For this purpose, during the spring and summer of 1942—following

the experiments with Zyklon B on non-Jewish prisoners the previous

autumn—the camp authorities constructed gas chambers in two farmhouses

that lay on the edge of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. The process of

transforming it into a proper extermination camp with four more gas

chambers and crematoria had not even begun yet. On 20 March 1942 the

ﬁrst of these converted farmhouses, the so-called Red House or Bunker

I, was used for the ﬁrst time for murdering Jews from the Schmelt camps

who were ‘incapable of work’. During the following weeks and months it

was above all Jews from Upper Silesia who were being gassed here.

In the meantime Himmler had once again used the Foreign Ministry to

get the Slovak government to agree to deliver up all its Jews (a further

70,000 people) to Germany.

On 10 April Heydrich visited Bratislava in

order to explain the deportation programme.

Already on the following

day a transport with entire Jewish families left Slovakia. By 20 June seven

more transports had arrived in Auschwitz, where the deportees were

deployed as forced labour; during the same period a further thirty-four

transports arrived in the district of Lublin.

Here—like the people who

were being deported from Germany at the same time—they were incar-

cerated in ghettos whose original inhabitants had been transported to the

Belzec and Sobibor extermination camps shortly beforehand.

Thus, in April 1942 three major deportation programmes were in

operation: the Jews from Lublin and Galicia were being deported to Belzec;

those from the Reich and Slovakia were being sent to Lublin and Ausch-

witz; and the deportations to Auschwitz from France had begun. At this

point Himmler and Heydrich intervened once more: in April they made

decisive preparations for the expansion of what had hitherto been a progra-

mme of mass murder of Jews ‘incapable of work’ limited to a particular

region to one that would encompass all European Jews. Himmler’s ofﬁce

the murder of the european jews 563

diary for this period contains references to a remarkable series of meetings:

within a period of eight days, between the end of April and the beginning

of May, Himmler met Heydrich a total of seven times in three different places

(Berlin, Munich, and Prague). On either side of these unusually intensive

exchanges there occurred two lengthy meetings between Himmler and

Hitler, which took place on 23 April and 3 May in the Fu

hrer’s headquar-

ters.

Even if we know nothing about the content of these meetings, the

chronology of the events that followed, which will be outlined below,

indicates that it was during these days that Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich

established the essential parameters for a Europe-wide extermination

programme that was to be put into effect from May–June 1942 onwards.

But why at this point in time? The essential precondition for the step-

ping-up of the policy of murder appears to have been the fact that in the

spring of 1942 Himmler was able to bring Jewish policy in the General

Government under his control, and so could authorize Globocnik to go

beyond his function as HSSPF in the district of Lublin and to organize mass

murder throughout the General Government, in other words, in an area

inhabited by approximately 1.7 million Jews. In no other area under

German control was there anything like that number of Jews.

By the beginning of March Governor-General Frank had already had to

cede important responsibilities for the police to Himmler. This was

prompted by Frank’s involvement in a serious corruption scandal. When

he was subjected to ‘personal and comradely’ interrogation by Himmler,

Bormann, and Lammers on 5 March, his response was not especially con-

vincing. Subsequently, Himmler criticized his ‘very theatrical behaviour’.

Having been put on the spot in this way, Frank had to make considerable

political concessions: HSSPF Kru

ger was made state secretary for ‘all matters

concerning the police and the consolidation of the ethnic German nation’,

and in this role was answerable to Himmler. Furthermore, Globocnik

was to be appointed governor of the district of Lublin. In fact this

never happened, because evidently Frank’s agreement to it was enough to

enhance Globocnik’s position vis-a

-vis the civil administration.

The agreements of the beginning of March concerning Kru

ger came into

effect in May and June. On 7 May Kru

ger was appointed state secretary for

security matters, and he became Himmler’s representative within the Gen-

eral Government in his role as settlement commissar. Moreover, Himmler

was authorized to give him direct instructions concerning security and

ethnic matters.

Finally, under a supplementary decree of 3 June regulating

564 the murder of the european jews

Ill. 26. On 13 March 1942 Himmler, accompanied by HSSPF Kru

ger, inspected a

police unit in Cracow. On the following day he travelled on to Lublin where he

met Globocnik, who two days later initiated the ﬁrst ‘ghetto action’.

the murder of the european jews 565

his new position as state secretary, Kru

ger was expressly given the responsi-

bility for all ‘Jewish affairs’.

At the same time, in May or June a start was

made on the construction of the largest extermination camp in the General

Government, Treblinka.

In the light of these impending developments, at the end of April and

beginning of May Himmler and Heydrich decided to include large areas of

occupied Poland in the mass murder of the Jews. Given his central role in

Jewish policy and the fact that he was kept closely informed during these

weeks, we have good reason for assuming that Hitler was in agreement.

From 5 May onwards the rural districts of Lublin were systematically

‘cleared’ of Jews irrespective of whether or how many Jews were arriving

from other countries. By 10 June more than 55,000 people had been

deported to Sobibor, the second extermination camp in the General

Government, which had been completed in the meantime.

In the

middle of May Upper Silesia was caught up in the murder programme.

By August 1942 20,000 people from Sosnowitz, Bendzin, and other places

had been deported straight to Auschwitz and murdered there, and around

18,000 people had been sent to the forced-labour camps of the Schmelt

organization.

At the end of May deportations from the district of

Cracow to Belzec began.

These dramatic developments in occupied Poland were bound to have an

impact on Jewish policy as a whole. While the programme of murder in the

General Government was stepped up, the deportations of Jews from

the Reich and Slovakia to this region were increased beyond the totals

agreed in March. Moreover, the deportees were no longer incarcerated in

ghettos; the majority were murdered when the transports arrived at their

destinations in the east. Thus Himmler had evidently revoked his ban on

the murder of German Jews from the Reich issued at the end of Novem-

ber 1941.

To summarize, the following major changes in policy towards the

German Jews occurred during May and June 1942: in May a fourth wave

of deportations from the Reich began. By September 1942 around 16,000

people had been deported to Minsk,

where they were no longer put in the

ghetto, as had occurred in the winter of 1941, but forced to leave the trains

at a stop near the estate of Maly Trostinez. Here, from 11 May 1942

onwards, almost everybody arriving on the transports was either shot or

murdered in gas vans.

The vast majority of those Jews who had been

deported from the R eich to Ło

in autumn 1941 and who had survived the

566 the murder of the european jews

catastrophic conditions—more than 10,000 people—were now deported to

Chelmno between 4 and 13 May and murdered there.

From mid-June

onwards the last transports of the third wave of deportations from the

Reich were generally sent to Sobibor extermination camp, where the

majority were gassed.

Moreover, in the middle of May, for the ﬁrst

time people who had been deported from Theresienstadt to the General

Government were murdered in Sobibor.

From June 1942 onwards the

same thing happened with people who were in deportation trains coming

from the Reich; there is reliable evidence for this occurring in the middle of

the month.

Moreover, from the beginning to the middle of June the

members of a total of ten transports from Slovakia, who had been designated

as ‘incapable of work’ at the selection in Lublin—in other words, mainly

women and children—were no longer accommodated in a ghetto but

deported straight to the Sobibor extermination camp and murdered there.

In the spring of 1942 Himmler also made great efforts to reduce the

number of Jews who were ‘deployed in work’ and therefore for the time

being still protected. The fact that he issued an order to this effect is revealed

in a letter that the Gestapo chief Mu

ller wrote to the commander of the

security police in Riga, Karl Ja

ger, on 18 May. Mu

ller wrote that, in

accordance with a ‘general order from the Reichsfu

hrer and Chief of the

German Police’, ‘Jews and Jewesses aged 16 to 32 who are capable of work

are to be excluded from special measures until further notice. These Jews are

to be put to work en bloc. KZ or labour camp.’

The letter makes it clear

that the ‘special measures’—in other words, the murder of the prisoners—

was now the rule, ‘deployment for work’, which was ultimately designed to

be equally lethal, the exception.

At the same time, the pressure on the Jews still working in the Reich

increased still further. The Reich Security Main Ofﬁce interpreted the

special regulations for the Jews who were ‘deployed in work vital for the

war effort’ with increasing strictness,

and on 28 May Hitler promised

Goebbels that he would request Speer ‘to ensure that Jews employed in the

German armaments industry are replaced by foreign workers as soon as

possible’.

It was only a lack of transport that prevented this order from

being implemented in the summer, and in the autumn Hitler once again

urged that it should be carried out.

At the same time as these events were occurring the Einsatzgruppen

resumed on a large scale the mass murder of Soviet Jews that had begun

the previous summer. This applied in particular to Byelorussia, where

the murder of the european jews 567

Heydrich, on a visit to Minsk in April,

evidently provided the impetus for

it, as he did for the Reichskommissariat Ukraine.

However, while the Jewish persecution, which had followed the

turning-points that took place during the last days of April and the ﬁrst

days of May, was still escalating an event occurred that within weeks led to a

further radicalization of the whole extermination process and to Himmler

showing his determination to murder the vast majority of European Jews in

the course of 1942: the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler’s most

important aide in the organization of the Holocaust.

The Assassination of Heydrich

On 27 May 1942 two Czech agents, who had been trained by the British

Secret Service and dropped by parachute in the Protectorate, carried out an

assassination attempt on the deputy Reich Protector, Heydrich, seriously

injuring him, though at ﬁrst it appeared that the injuries were not life-

threatening.

On the same day as the assassination attempt Hitler ordered that anyone

who had assisted the assassins should be ‘shot together with his whole

family’. Furthermore, 10,000 Czechs who were suspect or politically

incriminated should be arrested or, if they were already in custody, ‘shot

in the concentration camps’.

On the same evening Himmler pressed for

‘the whole of the opposition intelligentsia to be arrested’. That same night

‘the hundred most important’ opposition ﬁgures should be executed.

state of emergency was declared for Prague, and a few hours later this was

extended to cover the whole of the Protectorate.

Daluege had already arrived in Prague on the afternoon of 27 May, and

that evening he received instructions to take over the work of the Reich

Protector which hitherto had been being carried out by Heydrich for von

Neurath. Substantial units of the order police entered the Protectorate the

following day and carried out raids lasting for days. However, on 28 May

Hitler revoked his order to shoot 10,000 Czechs after Karl Hermann Frank,

HSSPF in the Protectorate, advised him against it.

Although seriously injured, Heydrich appeared to be recovering until,

after a few days, septicaemia set in and he died on 4 June. On 31 May

Himmler said his farewells to the dying man and then, on 4 June, immedi-

ately after his death, once again visited Prague in order to see the deceased

568 the murder of the european jews

for the last time and to meet his widow. On 7 June he attended the

funeral there.

On 9 June Hitler received the Czech government of the Protectorate in

the presence of Frank, Himmler, Bormann, and others. After receiving its

declaration deploring the assassination, Hitler gave an address which culmi-

nated in the threat ‘to resettle a few million Czechs [ . . . ] if necessary during

the war’,

a plan that was as impossible to carry out as the mass shooting of

Czechs that had already been dismissed. Instead of that, it was decided to

focus Germany’s revenge on a particular place, but to do so with extreme

brutality.

Immediately after the meeting with Hitler, Frank ordered the commander

of the security police in Prague ‘to shoot [ . . . ] all the male inhabitants’ of

the village of Liditz (Lidice) and to ‘transfer all the women [ . . . ] to a

concentration camp’. The children should be ‘collected and, in the case of

those who are ﬁt to be Germanized, should be given to SS families in the

Reich’; the village itself should be ‘burnt down and razed to the ground’.

The fact that Frank issued this order expressly ‘on the basis of a meeting with

the Fu

hrer’ indicates that this idea of carrying out an act of revenge came

from the senior SS functionaries who were closeted with Hitler at this

juncture. It is not clear why the village of Lidice near Kladno was selected.

No particular link with the assassins could be proved. Nevertheless, as

Frank had ordered, 199 men were shot, the women were deported to

Ravensbru

ck concentration camp, and after a few of the ninety-eight

children had been selected as ‘racially valuable’ the rest were murdered in

Chelmno extermination camp.

A further ‘act of retaliation’ was aimed directly at the Prague Jews: on 10

June 1942 thousands of them were deported to Majdanek and held here and

in surrounding camps.

Nevertheless, at this time the Nazi leadership must

have had the idea of exacting even harsher retaliation on ‘the Jews’ for

Heydrich’s death. The decision-making process can no longer be recon-

structed in detail. However, the numerous meetings between Hitler and

Himmler at the end of May and beginning of June suggest that the intensi-

ﬁcation of Jewish persecution that was to occur was worked out in close

agreement between the two men.

The fact that the head of the security apparatus and absolute ruler of the

Protectorate should have been the victim of an assassination came as a

serious shock to the Nazi leadership. There was a mood for revenge. On

9 June Heydrich received a pompous state funeral (see Ill. 13). The service

the murder of the european jews 569