Heinrich Himmler : A Life (99 page)

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 Krüger, and on the following day went on to Lublin to meet Globocnik, the key figure in Jewish policy in the General Government.
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Immediately after his visit, between 16 March and 20 April, the ghetto in the city of Lublin, the district capital, was almost completely cleared.
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In the course of this bloody ‘action’, which took place in two stages, numerous
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.
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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’.
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In the neighbouring 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
.
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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 Theresienstadt by the autumn.
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The deportation trains destined for the district of Lublin
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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.
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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.
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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 resistance 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.
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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.
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On 10 April Heydrich visited Bratislava in order to explain the deportation programme.
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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.
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Here—like the people who were being deported from Germany at the same time—they were incarcerated in ghettos whose original inhabitants had been transported to the Belzec and Sobibor extermination camps shortly beforehand.
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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 Auschwitz; 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 programme of mass murder of Jews ‘incapable of work’ limited to a particular region to one that would encompass all European Jews. Himmler’s office
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 Führer’s headquarters.
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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 stepping-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 convincing. Subsequently, Himmler criticized his ‘very theatrical behaviour’. Having been put on the spot in this way, Frank had to make considerable political concessions: HSSPF Krüger 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-à-vis the civil administration.
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The agreements of the beginning of March concerning Krüger came into effect in May and June. On 7 May Krüger was appointed state secretary for security matters, and he became Himmler’s representative within the General Government in his role as settlement commissar. Moreover, Himmler was authorized to give him direct instructions concerning security and ethnic matters.
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Finally, under a supplementary decree of 3 June regulating his new position as state secretary, Krüger was expressly given the responsibility for all ‘Jewish affairs’.
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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.
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Ill. 26.
On 13 March 1942 Himmler, accompanied by HSSPF Krüger, 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’.

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.
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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.
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At the end of May deportations from the district of Cracow to Belzec began.
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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 November 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,
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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.
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The vast majority of those Jews who had been deported from the Reich to Ł
ó
ódź in autumn 1941 and who had survived the
catastrophic conditions—more than 10,000 people—were now deported to Chelmno between 4 and 13 May and murdered there.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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