Bloodlands Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Unknown Author

Author:Unknown Author
Language: eng
Format: epub

The city of Lod? fell within the domain of Arthur Greiser, who headed the Wartheland, the largest district of Polish territory added to the Reich. Lod? had been the second-most populous Jewish city in Poland, and was now the most populous Jewish city in the Reich. Its ghetto was overcrowded before the arrival of the German Jews. It could be that the need to remove Jews from Lod? inspired Greiser, or the SS and Security Police

commanders of the Wartheland, to seek a more efficient method of murder. The Wartheland had always been at the center of the policy of “strengthening Germandom." Hundreds of thousands of Poles had been deported beginning in 1939, to be replaced by hundreds of thousands of Germans who arrived from the Soviet Union (before the German invasion of the USSR made shipping Germans westward utterly pointless). But the removal of the Jews, always a central element of the plan to make this new German zone racially German, had proven the hardest to implement. Greiser confronted a problem on the scale of his district that Hitler confronted on the scale of his empire: the Final Solution was officially deportation, but there was nowhere to send the Jews. By early December 1941 a gas van was parked

at Chehnno.^

Hitler’s deportation of German Jews in October 1941 smacked of improvisation at the top and uncertainty below. 206 German Jews sent to Minsk and Lod? were not themselves killed but, rather, placed in the ghettos. The German Jews sent to Kaunas were however killed upon arrival, as were those of the first transport sent to Riga. Whatever Hitler’s intentions, German Jews were now being shot. Perhaps Hitler had decided by this point to murder all of the Jews of Europe, including German Jews; if so, even Himmler had not yet grasped his intention. It was Jeckeln who killed the German Jews arriving in Riga, whom Himmler had not wished to murder.

Himmler did set in motion, also in October 1941, a search for a new and more effective way of killing Jews. He made contact with his client Odilo Globocnik, the SS and Police Leader for the Lublin district of the General Government, who immediately set to work on a new type of facility for the killing of Jews at a site known as Bel?ec. By November 1941 the concept was not entirely clear and machinery was not yet in place, but certain outlines of Hitler's final version of the Final Solution were visible. In the occupied Soviet Union, Jews were being killed by bullets on an industrial scale. In annexed and occupied Poland (in the Wartheland and in the General Government), gassing facilities were under construction (at Chelmno and Bel?ec). In Germany, Jews were being sent to the

east, where some of them had already been killed.^

The Final Solution as mass murder, initiated east of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, was spreading to the west.

In November 1941 Army Group Center was pushing toward Moscow, to win the delayed, but no less glorious, final victory:

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.