Heinrich Himmler : A Life (116 page)

The anti-Jewish measures had much more far-reaching consequences in the south of Europe, which the Germans feared might come to form the rear area for a new southern front of ‘Fortress Europe’. We have already seen from the example of Marseilles that, after the occupation of southern France by German and Italian troops on 11 November 1942, Himmler was determined to clear this area of Jews as well.
⁶⁷
In January and February Jews were arrested in large numbers in both northern and southern France, and in February the deportations were restarted. However, since on the one hand the Italian authorities were not prepared to support anti-Jewish measures in their occupation zone of south-east France and offered sanctuary to Jewish refugees, and on the other, the deportation of Jews with French citizenship threatened to disrupt the policy of collaboration, in March the security police developed a new strategy: they demanded that the French government strip those Jews who had acquired French citizenship of their nationality. The deportations were postponed for the time being, on the assumption that this would be approved.
⁶⁸

Italy’s attitude became a serious problem,
⁶⁹
as Himmler frequently explained to Ribbentrop. Their ally’s policy provided ‘the excuse for many circles in France and throughout Europe to stall over the Jewish question because they can point out that not even our Axis partner is prepared to cooperate over the Jewish question’.
⁷⁰
In February, therefore, he ‘urgently’ requested the Foreign Minister to approach the Italians and ‘urge them no longer to sabotage [ . . . ] the Reich Security Main Office’s Jewish measures. Our attempts to persuade the governments of Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Slovakia to deport the Jews in these countries are also facing serious difficulties because of the Italian government’s attitude.’
⁷¹

Nevertheless the RSHA increased the pressure on Bulgaria as well as on Greece. In February a special commando arrived in Saloniki to organize the deportation of the local Jewish community, which Himmler had already announced in November 1941. Between mid-March and mid-August 1943 a total of 45,000 Jews were deported from Saloniki and the adjacent Macedonian communities to Auschwitz, where almost all of them were murdered.
⁷²
The Bulgarian Jewish commissar, Alexander Belev, and the German Jewish adviser in Sofia, Dannecker, signed an agreement on 22
February that envisaged the deportation of 20,000 Jews by May 1943.
⁷³
In fact in March 1943 the over 3,000 Jews living in Thrace and the over 7,000 living in Macedonia—both territories had been occupied by Bulgaria—were arrested by the Bulgarians and deported to the General Government, where the majority were murdered in Treblinka.
⁷⁴
The deportation of the Jews from Old Bulgaria was thwarted by increasing opposition from within the country itself.
⁷⁵

At the beginning of 1943 the Nazi leadership had resumed on a large scale its extermination and deportation programme in the General Government. The ‘labour deployment’ in the Reich had been reorganized so that Jewish workers could now be dispensed with. For this reason, in February the SS removed the remaining German Jews still employed in armaments production in the Reich from their factories (‘Operation Factory’) and deported them to the east.
⁷⁶

In January 1943, while on a visit to Warsaw, Himmler ordered the dissolution of the Warsaw ghetto. Of the 40,000 Jews still living there 8,000 were to be ‘deported in the next few days’. The 16,000 people who at that time were still working in various plants were to be deported ‘to a KL, preferably Lublin’, and those plants that were actually involved in armaments production, but only these, should be ‘concentrated in some place in the General Government’.
⁷⁷
The others were to be closed. The transfer of production to Lublin at short notice proved impossible, however. On 15 February, therefore, Himmler ordered Pohl to establish a concentration camp within the ghetto itself for those ghetto inhabitants whom armaments plants claimed to need as workers.
⁷⁸
However, the deportation of those not required as workers ordered by Himmler began a few days after his visit. From 18 January onwards the transports from Warsaw to Treblinka were under way. Between 5,000 and 6,000 people arrived there during the following days.
⁷⁹

Then something completely unexpected happened. When, on 19 April, the occupation authorities set out finally to clear the Warsaw ghetto they were confronted by several hundred armed resisters. It took troops under the command of SS-Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop, who were heavily armed and far superior in numbers, four weeks to subdue the insurrection. On 16 May 1943 they managed to destroy the last pocket of resistance of the desperate Jewish fighters.
⁸⁰

The courage and stamina of the Jewish defenders surprised—indeed, shocked—the Nazi leadership. It was now that the decision was taken to
conclude the ‘final solution’—and not only in the General Government—as soon as possible and no longer to take into consideration the possible utility of Jewish labour. In May, before the end of the ghetto uprising, Himmler used the occasion of a presentation by Ulrich Greifelt, the head of his Main Office for Ethnic Issues, to insist that it was a ‘priority in the General Government [ . . . ] to remove the 300,000–400,000 Jews still living there’.
⁸¹
Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger, the HSSPF responsible for the General Government, explained on 31 May that he had ‘only recently received the order to carry out the dejewification in a very short period of time’. According to Krüger, Himmler also wanted to put an end to the employment of Jews in the armaments industry and in forced labour camps.
⁸²

Under the impact of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, from April 1943 onwards the SS accelerated the bloody liquidation of those ghettos that still existed as well as the small forced labour camps, a campaign that had begun in March. In May 1943 SSPF Katzmann ordered the dissolution of all ghettos in the district of Galicia.
⁸³
Between May and the end of June 1943 around 80,000 people fell victim to this mass murder, which was carried out with extreme brutality. At the end of June 1943 Katzmann reported to the HSSPF-East, Krüger, that ‘with effect from 23 June 1943 all Jewish quarters have been dissolved’ and, as a result, ‘apart from those Jews in the camps under the control of the SS and Police Leader, the district is now free of Jews’.
⁸⁴

In June 1943 only a few tens of thousands of Jews were still living in the General Government, mainly in forced labour camps, which were largely controlled by the SS. Nevertheless, on 19 June Himmler ordered that ‘the evacuation of the Jews must be carried out ruthlessly and must be got through despite the unrest that will occur during the next three to four months as a result’. Resistance in the area did increase—this provides part of the context for the declaration that the whole of the General Government was now a ‘bandit combat area’, by which Hitler increased Himmler’s freedom of action there.
⁸⁵

In order to pre-empt potential resistance from employers, who might insist on continuing to employ their Jewish workers, Himmler now pursued a policy of transforming the remaining ghettos and camps into concentration camps. This ensured that the inmates were now at last totally subject to the SS and prevented any attempt by other agencies to gain access to them. Himmler endeavoured to ensure that only those Jews could remain alive for the time being who, on the basis of the strictest criteria, really were essential to war production.

The Warsaw ghetto, which had already been declared a concentration camp in February 1943, was finally dissolved in June 1943. Moreover, Himmler ordered the removal of all traces of its existence.
⁸⁶
In July 1943 he also ordered that Sobibor extermination camp should be transformed into a concentration camp and that the prisoners should sort captured ammunition.
⁸⁷
Those Jews in the General Government who had survived June were concentrated in forced labour camps, most of which operated as satellite camps of Majdanek.
⁸⁸
In January 1944 the work camp Plaszow (near Cracow) as well as those in Lemberg, Lublin, and Radom were declared to be concentration camps.
⁸⁹

With his order of 21 May 1943 that all Jews from Reich territory, including the Protectorate, were to be deported ‘to the east’ or to Theresienstadt, Himmler closed the last bolt-hole for those Polish Jews who had hitherto been able to stay alive in Polish territories directly administered by the Reich, namely eastern Upper Silesia, the Warthegau, and the district of Bialystock.
⁹⁰
Between 22 and 24 June 1943 the SS deported 5,000 Jews from Sosnowitz and Bendzin to Auschwitz, and in the first half of August the last ghettos in Upper Silesia were cleared.
⁹¹
Himmler encountered difficulties, however, with the transformation of the Ł
ó
ódź ghetto into a concentration camp, for Arthur Greiser, the Reich Governor of the Warthegau, blocked the order which would have deprived him of ‘his ghetto’.
⁹²
The dispute lasted from June 1943 until February 1944, when Himmler and Greiser agreed to permit the ghetto to remain as a ‘Gau-ghetto’. However, only as many Jews were permitted to live there as had to be ‘definitely retained in the interests of the armaments economy’.
⁹³
On the other hand, Himmler’s order of August 1943 that the more than 100 Jewish forced labour camps in the Warthegau should be liquidated had been carried out by October.
⁹⁴
The Bialystock ghetto was also finally dissolved between 16 and 23 August, after Globocnik had reported to Himmler on 21 June that the workshops there were being transferred to Lublin. More than 25,000 people were deported to Treblinka or to Majdanek, where they were to be deployed as forced labour.
⁹⁵

However, it was not only the occupation authorities for whom the Warsaw ghetto uprising had acted as a wake-up call. Jewish resistance to the extermination policy now flared up in other places as well. The SS were faced with an armed resistance group when clearing the Bialystock ghetto,
⁹⁶
and the same thing happened in August in the Glubokoje ghetto near Vilnius.
⁹⁷
Moreover, in August there was an organized mass break-out
from Treblinka, and on 14 October the inmates of Sobibor revolted, killing eleven SS men.
⁹⁸
And this was happening against the background of the inexorable advance of the Soviet army. The Sobibor uprising probably gave Himmler the final impetus to order Krüger to liquidate the last important camps in the Lublin district. At the beginning of November the prisoners in the Lublin camps were shot in a massacre lasting two days, code-named ‘Harvest Festival’. The same thing was occurring simultaneously in other camps in the General Government. There were around 42,000 victims in the Lublin district alone.
⁹⁹

After the Warsaw ghetto uprising Himmler acted in the same way in the occupied Soviet territories, namely in the Reich Commissariat Ostland, where a significant number of Jews still remained. On 21 June 1943, after meeting with leading SS functionaries, he ordered that ‘all Jews living in ghettos in Ostland territory are to be placed in concentration camps’. At the same time he banned ‘Jews from leaving concentration camps for work’, and reiterated an order that he had already issued in April to build a concentration camp near Riga.
¹⁰⁰
Those ‘members of the Jewish ghetto not required’ were to be ‘evacuated to the east’, in other words, to be murdered.
¹⁰¹
This guaranteed Himmler total control over the Jewish forced workers in Reich Commissariat Ostland. One should recall in this context the commission to conclude the ‘final solution’ that he had been given by Hitler two days previously. Confining surviving Jews in concentration camps; continually selecting Jewish forced workers in the concentration camps for extermination; reducing the work opportunities for Jews outside the camps, for example with the Wehrmacht; and hunting for Jews in hiding under the cover of ‘combating partisans’ with the aid of von dem Bach-Zelewski, who, as already mentioned, on this very 21 June had been appointed head of the units for combating bandits—these were the methods with which Himmler hoped to carry out as quickly as possible Hitler’s commission in the General Government and in Reich Commissariat Ostland.
¹⁰²

In this way his extermination policy continued its merciless course in the Reich Commissariat. The two last large ghettos in the Baltic states apart from Riga, Kaunas
¹⁰³
and Vilnius,
¹⁰⁴
were liquidated in September 1943, their inhabitants deported to Estonian and Latvian work camps or murdered. Some of the inhabitants of the Kaunas ghetto, however, were retained by the SS and the ghetto was transformed into a concentration camp. Also in September, and linked to these measures, the KZ Valvara in
Estonia was established as a transit camp.
¹⁰⁵
The last three ghettos in the General District of White Ruthenia were destroyed between August and October 1943.
¹⁰⁶

The Warsaw ghetto uprising had an impact in other European countries dominated by Germany. In May 1943 another two transports left Croatia for Auschwitz, with around 2,000 people.
¹⁰⁷
In Slovakia the Germans pressed in June for deportations to be restarted, but their request fell on deaf ears.
¹⁰⁸
In May the RSHA ordered the number of those to be deported from the Netherlands to be suddenly increased. Between 18 May and 20 July almost 18,000 people were deported to Sobibor in eight transports. In Belgium the Gestapo office in Brussels informed Mecheln camp on 29 June that, following an order from Himmler, ‘now the Jews with Belgian nationality are to be immediately included in the deportation programme’.
¹⁰⁹
On 20 September 1943 the first deportation train left the country with only Belgian Jews on board. Five more were to follow by the end of the year. Almost 6,000 people were deported to Auschwitz.
¹¹⁰