Holocaust by Longerich Peter;

Author:Longerich, Peter;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press

Extension of the Murders to the Other Districts

The temporary stop to the deportations from the district of Lublin in early June is likely to have been due to the decision to extend the mass murder of the Jews to the whole of the General Government. The deportations now encompassed the district of Cracow, while Globocnik’s specialists will probably already have been engaged with the preparations for the deportations from other districts, namely Warsaw. This decision quickly to extend mass murder to the other districts can only be reconstructed on the basis of the course of the deportations. It must have happened between the attack on Heydrich on 27 May and his death on 4 June. Himmler’s address to SS and police leaders at Heydrich’s funeral in Berlin on 9 June contains an important indication of such a momentous decision: ‘Within a year we will definitely have completed the mass migration of the Jews; then no more will migrate.’109

With the appointment of HSSPF Krüger as state secretary for security issues in the General Government in May 1942 the weight of the SS had decisively grown compared to that of the civil administration. In particular, Krüger was assigned responsibility for all ‘Jewish affairs’ by the implementation order of 3 June, which concerned his new position as state secretary.110 In this way, the SS had created the organizational preconditions for the murder of all the Jews in the General Government by means of a combination of executions, deportations to particular extermination camps, and forced labour.

The murder of the Jews throughout the General Government—like the mass murders in the districts of Lublin and Galicia—was to be organized by Globocnik’s staff. The whole campaign was run under the heading ‘Aktion Reinhardt’ or ‘Aktion Reinhard’, a posthumous tribute to Reinhard Heydrich, who had died on 4 June 1942 as the result of an assassination attempt some days previously.111 Individually, the ‘Reinhardt Actions’ encompassed the extermination of the Jews of the General Government and the district of Bialystok in the three extermination camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka as well as in Majdanek; it also included the murder of other Jews in these camps as well as the utilization of the goods and chattels of those who had been murdered, as well as the deployment of the Jews for forced labour.112

On 3 June 1942, the day when Krüger’s authority was decisively extended, Globocnik sent Himmler several memos concerning ‘ethnic policy’ in the district of Lublin. The content of these memos is not known in detail, but two of these papers concerned the fate of the Jews,113 another the issue of ‘German-ness’ (Deutschtum). Himmler only returned to these proposals during a further meeting with Globocnik on 9 July. In the meantime—from about 19 June until 7 July— because of the imminent offensives in the East a general transport moratorium had been imposed, and Himmler was also preoccupied with other issues because of the death of Heydrich.114

On 18 June a police meeting in Cracow agreed, as Krüger put it, that the ‘problem of Jewish resettlement urgently requires a decision’.

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