http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de

Ulrich Herbert (ed.): National Socialist Extermination Policies. Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies, New York - Oxford: Berghahn Books 2000, 336 S., ISBN: 1-57181-750-6, Rezensiert fuer den Rezensionsdienst Humanities, Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte bei H-Soz-u-Kult von Charlotte Guthmann Opfermann <charlotteo@aol> San Jacinto College, Houston, Texas, USA and Nikolas Kopernikus University, Torun, Poland, and American Military University, Charles Town, WV.

This English language edition is Volume 2 of the series ‘War and Genocide’, general editor: Omer Bartov, Rutgers University. It was originally published 1998, Nationalsozialistische Vernichtungspolitik, 1939-1945: Neue Forschungen und Kontroversen © Fisher Taschenbuchverlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main

The collection is composed of a series of lectures offered 1996/1997 by the History Department of the Albert-Ludwigs University in Freiburg, some of them revised and expanded for this publication. For this reason, it does not include such relevant information as for example that which is provided by the Polish historian Bogdan Musial (known as a strong opponent and vocal critic of the exhibit ‘Crimes of the Wehrmacht’) in his new book Deutsche Zivilverwaltung und Judenverfolgung im Generalgouvernement, covering Lublin 1939-1944, and reviewed by Andrea Loew for H-Soz-u-Kult on October 5, 2000.

As indicated in the foreword, the topic of these lectures cover the developments in Poland, the Soviet Union, Serbia and France, prompting this reviewer to question whether the book's the title is well chosen -- because it presently does imply a greater geographic arena (for example: Germany) and a more extended time frame.

Regrettably, the countries studied and presented here by several eminent scholars ignore the earlier developments of the official ‘Extermination Policies’ inside the Grossdeutsche Reich proper, beginning in 1933 and which lead up to the extermination programs that were later executed mostly in the Polish, Soviet, Serbian, and many other occupied territories. The extermination policies did not begin with the invasion of Poland in 1939 or with Kristallnacht November 9/10, 1938 as is sometimes alleged.

Ulrich Herbert opens Chapter 1, “Extermination Policy, New Answers and Questions about the History of the “Holocaust” in German Historiography” (pps.1-52) with strong words of criticism regarding Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners (New York 1996), which focused on the eliminationist intentions of the perpetrators and the suffering of the victims. In contrast to Goldhagen’s work, the bulk of these lectures keep the deeds and the consequences in the crosshairs.

Some consider Goldhagen’s eliminationist theses inadequate in terms of scholarship. The authors of the lectures in this volume present the fruits of their considerable research, carefully refraining from emotional sensationalism. We are told that the lectures had generated ‘uncommon interest among both students and members of the general public’, but they can hardly have been a match for the enormous reaction which the Daniel Goldhagen book received at the time in Germany and in the US.

While Goldhagen concentrates on the role ordinary Germans played in the persecution of the Jews and evaluates how important the behavior of the broad masses of the population was to the outcome, the chapters of this collection

chapter 3 - the General Government chapter 4 - Galicia, chapter 5 - Paris and France, chapter 6 - Serbia, chapter 7 -Gypsies, chapter 8 - Belorussia, chapter 9 - Lithuania, chapter 10 - upper Silesia

describe the actual events, the procedures, the conditions and the time tables of the operation in the given areas.

Herbert points out that scholarly research into the murder of the European Jews began relatively late in Germany. He does not speculate as to the reason for this reluctance. He states that the Germans perceive(d) themselves as victims of historical developments, of the 1933 ‘assumption of power’ (Machtergreifung), of air attacks during World War Two, and the painful postwar expulsion of ethnic Germans from the border countries - which, of course, can hardly compare with the long years of ‘deportations’/brutal murder of the Jews and other victims of Germany’s extermination policies.

In this context, the metamorphosis of the word 'Machtergreifung' (assumption of power) in the last sixty years deserves mention: during the 1930s and 1940s, this word exemplified (politically correct) German strength and völkische power. It stood for German glory, German might, victory, a cleansing of the nation after the inglorious end of World War One and the shame of the Versailles Treaty endured by the proud German nation. In the course of later historic developments, the word has assumed the character of an external influence, it now stands for something that happened to the German nation.

According to Herbert there was no concern in Germany and no personal preoccupation with the past or the parents’ culpability until the late 1960s, the year of the student revolts. “Memories of the past were repressed for a second time - in the 1970s and early 1980s” (p.8). Important scholarly works that appeared in the United States, Israel and Poland went unpublished, unnoticed, and generally unread in that country. Raul Hilberg’s pioneer study The Destruction of the European Jews did not appear in a German translation until 1982 - more than twenty years after it was first published in the United States.

One might argue that this failure to deal with the history and this resistance to study the country’s past demonstrates an inability or unwillingness to accept responsibility, to identify with the deed, to denazify the country, or to re-educate the population. [1]

Unfortunately Herbert misquotes a couple of important details (page 24) in relation to the Kristallnacht event of November 9/10, 1938, the carefully orchestrated ‘spontaneous reaction’ to the murder of Legationsrat vom Rath (a minor German consular official) in Paris by a Jewish teenager of Polish extraction:

According to Herbert “... 91 Jews were murdered and more than 20,000 arrested”. In reality, the number of murdered Jews was substantially greater, and more than 30,000 were detained in the Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps (ca. 10,000 in each of these three institutions). Numerous other Jews were arrested locally, detained for shorter periods, severely beaten and released again for a variety of reasons. The correct information is readily available and should have been a part of the fact checking process for a book of this importance. [2]

Herbert explores the relationship between ideological factors (racism and antisemitism) to goal related motives (economic problems and food shortages). According to Herbert, the planning was totally removed from ideological considerations, involving regional German occupation authorities, military commands, the leadership of the Security and Sicherheits Dienst.

However, according to Jan Philipp Reemtsma, director of the Hamburg Institut for social research (Sozialforschung), the general perception was that the War in the East was a racial war, aimed to destroy (Rassen= und Vernichtungskrieg) from the very start.

Herbert develops a theory “...Jewish policy gradually became more radical due to the failure of alternative plans...” (p.13) that the murder of the Jews evolved as a consequence of the complete failure to resettle them or to enforce their emigration, without coming to the conclusion that -by implication- the refusal of other countries to accept these would-be immigrants could justify a theory of co-culpability.

He speaks of numerous German political, social, professional organisations which denied admission to Jews (Deutschnationale Volkspartei, Stahlhelm, Jungdeutscher Orden, Deutschnationaler Handlungsgehilfenverband, Reichslandbund, Turnerbund) and includes in this list the German Burschenschaften (fraternities) which, at least on paper, did not subscribe to such exclusionary policies.

In contrast to this, Victor Klemperer, speaks of the Burschenschaften in LTI (Reclam Verlag Leipzig, 1975, p. 177) and Arnhold Bauer, Aufbau, 1946, H.2 : “...blutmäßiger Anti-Semitismus .... in Deutschland nicht vorhanden...“; “..Die Burschenschaften ... lehnten bei der Gründung der Allgemeinen deutschen Burschenschaften die Taufbedingung ab...” (...bloodrelated antisemitism...not present in Germany...; ...the fraternities..declined a requirement of baptism when they founded the association of German fraternities...).

In actual fact, the Jewish student fraternities KC (Kartell Convent) were very active within the confines of the various German universities in the Germany of the 1920s and 1930s. If Klemperer’s and Bauer’s statements were accurate, the KC Jewish student fraternities’ patriotic/pro-German activities and social prominence would not have been possible in the years between the two Wars, after World War One and until their official dissolution by order of the Reich. [3] Herbert makes this important point: the deportation programs (and ultimate fate) of the Jews were being revised constantly, as was the resettlement of Poles, Russians and entire population groups in the countries occupied by the Wehrmacht to the east of the Reich. Only in the case of the Jews did the program metamorphose into genocide. Quoting from the well documented and much researched example of ‘aryanization’ procedures of Jewish property in Hamburg (p.29), he arrives at the conclusion that “..People did not want to know. And it was better not to ask.”

* * * Chapter 2: Götz Aly, “Jewish Resettlement” reflections on the Political Prehistory of the Holocaust’, deals with the bureaucratic details of the extermination, the planning and execution of the Final Solution (pp.53-84). Since 1997 Aly is editor of the Berliner Zeitung and author of a number of important publications on the subject of Nationalsocialism. In 1983 he and Karl Heinz Roth published a study of the Reichsmeldeordnung system which since 1933 had catalogued, identified and indexed every resident within the German sphere. This complex police system was of great value during the racially motivated extermination procedures. The study has been re-issued: Die restlose Erfassung. Volkszählen, Identifizieren, Nationalsozialismus by Götz Aly and Karl Heinz Roth, Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2000, 176 pp. SF 18.

Like Ulrich Herbert, Aly’s ‘prehistory’ starts in September 1939. This is an injustice inflicted by him upon the many victims of earlier individual murders -- as opposed to the wholesale/mass killings which did start approximately with Kristallnacht/November 10, 1938 or the beginning of World War Two, September 1, 1939. The prehistory of the Holocaust did not start with the invasion of Poland, even though -admittedly- the conquest of the lands to the east of the Reich provided a venue where the massacres could be carried out more easily than in the heart of German cities and towns, as heretofore.

The Reichsboykottag (April 1, 1933) was conducted in broad daylight in the heart of German cities and towns, in plain sight of the German population. The bookburnings in May 1933, the synagogue burnings (before and after November 10, 1938) took place in full view of all citizens, were viewed, photographed and participated in by many.

Aly ties the dispossession, displacement, enslavement and murder of millions of Jews to the politics of the ‘Home into the Reich’ (Heim ins Reich) program on behalf of approximately 500,000 ethnic Germans. As a teacher and as a Holocaust survivor, I have great difficulties with this view. This theory is not convincing -- the killing of millions of Jews in the entire European sphere under German influence cannot reasonably be linked to the resettling plans on behalf of several hundred thousand volksdeutsche citizens, a program which did not even start until the persecution and killing of the Jews was well under way.

As Aly reports, the program to strengthen the German Nation was under the leadership of Reichsführer SS and Chief of the German Police Heinrich Himmler in his capacity as Reichskommissar für die Festigung des deutschen Volkstums (Commissar for the strengthening of German identity). These resettled Germans were to receive the homes, the farms and businesses of Jews [and Poles] who had been expelled and ghettoized. (p.59-61). As a matter of record, however, the fruits of the ‘aryanization’ procedures were enjoyed by a much larger segment of the German (and German occupied population groups) neighbors and citizens, not just a half million repatriated ethnic Germans.

The byzantine confiscation apparatus [involving the Finanzamt/IRS government agency, among others] and the public auctions of Jewish property [usually supervised by the Gestapo who got first choice] was of enormous benefit to the entire population as well as to National Socialist party groups and government agencies such as the NS Volkswohlfahrt (welfare agency), Arbeitsamt, museums, and countless private enterprises. German citizens could and did register their interest in advance and received special consideration whenever Jewish property was auctioned off. [4]

Aly refers to Heydrich’s guidelines of September 21, 1939 according to which ‘...Every active participant was supposed to formulate his oconcrete practices...’ (p.55). This underscores the fact that this activity was not directed from above -as frequently claimed- imposed on a body of anonymous implementers and desktop perpetrators of the bureaucracy of death (Aly’s term). There were also conflicting orders, such as Hermann Göring’s order of February 12, 1940 prohibiting further deportations which seem to prove that the NS leadership was not united behind the program.

Aly quotes an anonymous SD man’s recommendation from May 1934 advocating ‘...to reinforce their (the Jews’) fear ... even by means of ...objectionable street methods...” (p.56). Accordingly, there seems to have been no unified strategy.

Aly points to the T4 program (which also included Jewish patients) as a dress-rehearsal for the extermination of the Jews, calling this program ‘Practicing Murder’ (p.67). At the moment, this interpretation is in vogue. But, we must not lose sight of the fact that Hitler planned, advocated and fully intended to kill ‘The Jews’ since his very first public utterances, 1918-1919. The destruction of ‘life unworthy of living’ or ‘useless feeders’ was just an incidental byproduct, not intended to perfect any planned methods or practice for the long-established, ultimate goal: the Final Solution.

Aly lists various communications between the perpetrators on many levels and concludes the chapter: “...what matters is to conceive comprehensively of the circumstances that finally led to its [the Holocaust’s] realization”.

Aly’s documentation is far removed in content and in scope from the Daniel Jonah Goldhagen theory. The frequent references to this work, here and elsewhere, remind this reader that the Goldhagen book and subsequent debates were a (long overdue) catalyst in Germany at the time.

* * *

Chapter 3: Dieter Pohl, ‘The Murder of Jews in the General Government’. (pp. 83-103) Mr. Pohl is a fellow at the Institut fuer Zeitgeschichte in Munich. He begins his chapter with the invasion of Poland in September 1939: “...a segment of Polish Jews were already condemned to death when the Wehrmacht marched in”. The seventeen pages between this and the closing statement: “The Polish people had no possibility of halting the mass murder” (p.100) leaves this reader puzzled. The question had not been asked. Perhaps it should have been posed. Did anyone expect the French, the Czech, the Dutch or any of the other occupied nations to resist?

As a matter of historical fact, most of the Danish Jews were saved by their fellow Danes (and the few Danish Jews who had been deported to Theresienstadt were released again before the end of World War Two at the insistence of the Danish King and the Danish Red Cross). The Bulgarian population resisted the German extermination plans of their country’s resident Jews.

Should an occupied country be expected to take meaningful responsibility for crimes against humanity committed on its soil? Does this view leave room for legal action? if so, against whom? Of course, there is an implied question (‘..could the Polish people have halted the mass murder which was being perpetrated in their midst...’). In Claude Lanzmann’s monumental/nine hour film documentary ‘Shoah’, the various interviews form an integral part of his report. And the totally unapologetic, even smug reaction of some of the witnesses whom he addresses speak volumes.

Pohl describes in detail four stages of the mass murders that were committed in the former Poland. Unfortunately, his reports do not touch on the debates which raged in the 1980s between ‘intentionalist versus functionalist theorists’ - perhaps because no consensus was ever reached between the different parties. [5]

* * *

Chapter 4: Thomas Sandkühler, ‘Anti-Jewish Policy and the Murder of the Jews in the District of Galicia, 1941/42’ (pp.104-127). Mr. Sandkühler was Associate Professor at the University of Bielefeld. He has published a book “Endlösung in Galizien, Judenmord in Ostpolen und die Rettungsinitiativen von Berthold Beitz”. The latter issue -in theory- might conceivably lend itself to a sequel to “Schindler’s List” at some future time, because Herr Beitz did protect some of ‘his’ Jewish slave workers from of the deportations. But no one who knows or knew Beitz can accuse him of liking (or having liked) Jews qua Jews. He wanted to meet his assigned oil production quota.

Sandkühler pointedly shifts the reader’s attention from the distracting and fruitless search for a formal Führerbefehl (command by the Führer) and he places the focus of his study instead on the initiatives in the regions, pointing to the fact that (p.110) the fate of the Jews lay in the hands of the various occupation functionaries.

One such region was the district of Galicia in the southeastern part of Poland, the region around the city of Lvov (Lemberg), which earlier in history had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The population of this area consisted of Poles and Ukrainians with strong nationalist, anti-capitalist, antisemitic tendencies. In the course of the war, there were substantial population shifts, as Poles and Jews fled east before the advancing Wehrmacht and their well-known murderous programs. The Soviet Secret Service (NKVD) deported tens of thousands of inhabitants from eastern Galicia to Siberia (p.106). The Einsatzgruppe C with assistance from the Wehrmacht, SD (Sicherheitsdienst), Security Police and the Ukrainian OUN militias rounded up Jewish men who were old enough to -potentially- serve in the military and shot them publicly (p.108/109). Many German functionaries, Ukrainian police and Ukrainian municipal administrators participated in the mass killings and in the deportations to the ghettos and, from there, to the extermination camps. There was a sense among all these perpetrators that the task, the challenge and the psychological strain connected with this work had to be endured for the sake of the fatherland (p.212).

On the next-to-last page, Sandkühler states (in reference to the then [in 1996-Germany] much-debated Daniel Goldhagen theory) that it is a gross oversimplification to ‘...attribute the extermination of the Jews to eliminationist antisemitism...” (p.122). He refers to the Ukrainian antisemitism of the auxiliary police and the generally prevailing greed motive for plunder. He refers to the carefully employed euphemistic cover-ups such as ‘work’, ‘resettlement’ -- all the early obfuscations which --to this day-- form the backbone of all Holocaust denier arguments.

Sandkühler concludes that it has been proven irrefutably that the impulses for radicalization of the persecution measures came ‘from below’.

* * *

Chapter 5: Ulrich Herbert, The German Military Command in Paris and the Deportation of the French Jews. (pp.128-162).

Herbert reminds us that much new information has recently become available with the opening of new archives in the former East Bloc, especially in the Soviet Union. These reveal clearly the role played by the Wehrmacht and the German nonmilitary occupation authorities.

The new documents have added to the historians’ perception of ‘presumed guilty’ when evaluating the participants. In view of this newly available evidence, the distinction between N.S. party leadership and Wehrmacht conscripts who were only ‘obeying orders in defense of the fatherland’ is getting blurred.

Herbert writes (p.129) : ‘...France was ... the most important western country under German occupation...” and there were “...disagreements between the German military command in Paris and the German central authorities...”.

He also points to the fact that the German military commander Otto von Stülpnagel resigned and to the important role played by German military personnel in Paris (next in importance to the planners in Berlin ) in the attempted (but failed) attackt on Hitler’s life on July 20, 1944, including Karl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel’s activities.

The Wehrmacht administrators in France prevented the Einsatzgruppen from establishing themselves in the manner in which they had become entrenched in the east. Consequently, the Jewish question was solved by Dr. Werner Best (about whom see Ulrich Herbert’s important book “Best”, Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft, 1903-1989’ Verlag J.H.W. Dietz Nachfolger 1996, ISBN 3-8012-5019-9) together with Otto Abetz, the confidant of Hitler’s Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, whose efforts had prepared the German invasion of France.

The cooperation between German occupation forces and French administrative institutions was smooth. German personnel enjoyed their thoroughly pleasant tours of duty, especially when comparing their life of luxury with the harshness and brutality of their colleagues’ existence in the east.

All this was to change drastically, at first with the preparations and, then, with the onset of the war against the Soviet Union. Also, in the course of increased French resistance activities and subsequent retaliatory assassinations, the atmosphere within occupied France became more oppressive. Shortly after Otto von Stülpnagel’s resignation, it became common practice to shoot hostages and deport Jews to their death in retaliation (p.143). When the first transport of French Jews left from Compiegne for Auschwitz on March 23, 1942, the Wehrmacht paid the cost of this transport. A ‘Central Office for Jewish Affairs’, directed and staffed by French teams, directed the campaign against the Jews with Germans serving in supervisory functions.

In view of the ongoing debate about Hitler’s consent to and knowledge (or not) of the persecution and extermination of Jews (the elusive official Führerbefehl), the author’s comment seems significant “...the case of France discussed here shows that the notion of an early, all-encompassing Führerbefehl has little to recommend it. Without exception, the initiatives leading to the deportation of the Jews came from below... and were generalized, coordinated, and organized by the central authority in Berlin” (pp.154-5).

* * * Chapter 6, Walter Manoschek, The Extermination of the Jews in Serbia. (pp.163-185). Depending upon whether the 80,000 Yugoslavian Jews lived under Bulgarian, Hungarian, Italian, or German occupation (after the German invasion in April 1941), or in the Croatian Ustasha state, they were exterminated at different times and under differing circumstances (p.163).

The extermination procedures followed the established format and the pattern of those which had earlier been practiced in the Reich and in the other occupied territories [though not necessarily in the same sequence]: registration, marking, deprivation, social exclusion. murder. Here, too, the Wehrmacht actively participated in and even initiated persecution measures. In this context, Manoschek points out that

“...the effect of the material deprivation of the Jews on the consciousness of Wehrmacht members should not be underestimated”.

And he supports this by quoting from letters home (pp.166, 167,168) written by soldiers and explains how the fight against partisans involved routine execution of innocent civilians, suspected communists, Jews, and suspected sympathizers, labeled as “measures of atonement” (p.170). These shootings of hostages shifted from Himmler’s special units to volunteer firing squads recruited from Wehrmacht soldiers. The executions were filmed and photographed (p.174) and reported on in great detail (p.175- 178).

“The Holocaust in Serbia...was a collective deed of all the occupation agencies,...as...immediate responsibility shifted from one agency to another” (p.182). * * * Chapter 7, Michael Zimmermann, The National Socialist “Solution of the Gypsy Question”. (pp.186-209)

Michael Zimmermann is one of the leading German experts on this subject. He begins this lecture by defining the terms ‘Gypsy’, ‘Roma’, ‘Sinti’ in Germany and other countries, based upon ‘ethnicity’ , ‘culture’ or ‘biology’, a racial concept or as a definition of a specific life style and culture. The concept itself, he explains, has undergone many changes in recent history, especially since the civil rights movement among Gypsies in Europe and in the United States.

Zimmermann points out (p.188) that ‘the Gypsy Question played a very subordinate role in Hitler’s world view’. We know that, by contrast, the ‘Jewish Question’, was uppermost in Hitler’s world view as early as 1919. On September 16th 1919 Hitler wrote a letter to Adolf Gemlich.

"Der Antisemitismus aus rein gefuehlsmaessigen Gruenden wird seinen letzten Ausdruck finden in der Form von Progromen. Der Antisemitismus der Vernunft jedoch muss fuehren zur planmaessigen gesetzlichen Bekaempfung der Vorrechte des Juden, die er zum Unterschied der anderen zwischen uns lebenden Fremden besitzt (Fremdengesetzgebung). Sein letztes Ziel aber muss unverrueckbar die Entfernung der Juden ueberhaupt sein."

(I would say that -emotionally speaking- antisemitism will find its ultimate expression in pogroms. Looking at it intellectually, [only] planned, legal programs against the privileges enjoyed by Jews, in contrast to other foreigners in our midst [will work]. The ultimate goal, however, must be total removal of Jews in their entirety.) [6]

Zimmermann refers to Hitler’s exchange of October 2, 1941 with Reinhard Heydrich concerning military service in Wehrmacht units for Gypsies. Some Gypsies were, indeed, later forced to fight at the front, however, at that time they were considered strictly cannonfodder, not a fighting force.

Historically, Gypsies were ‘vogelfrei’ (free as birds) and could be killed with impunity within the Habsburg Empire, until a decree in 1783 finally forbade such random killing.

According to German police records, a total of approximately 20,000 (not quite .03 percent of the population) Gypsies were documented inside the Reich at the start of the general Zigeunerbekämpfung (combat against Gypsies). As early as 1933, Gypsies were sterilized, following the passage of the Law to Prevent Genetically Deficient Offspring. [7]

With the outbreak of the War, Gypsies were deported to areas in Poland which were occupied or annexed from Poland. Shortly after Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union in summer 1941, the SS Einsatzgruppen routinely killed Gypsies along with Jews, Soviet Communist party functionaries, and partisans even though (p.197) the Einsatzgruppen and Sonderkommandos did not conduct systematic searches for Gypsies in the manner in which they tracked down Jews.

The Wehrmacht shot Gypsies and Jews as hostages in reprisal actions, retribution for attacks on German soldiers. In Serbia, this killing ratio was established at the rate of 100 hostages shot for each German soldier or ethnic German killed, 50 hostage victims for every wound sustained by a German.

Referring to the massive deportations of Gypsies, beginning in the spring of 1943 and continuing into the summer of 1944, the Zimmermann makes the comparison (p.201) that ‘Jews had been depersonalized , whereas the Gypsies were a small minority.’ This comparison is not quite apt: For centuries, the Gypsies had lived at the margin of German communal life, whereas Jews had been an integrated part of German society since the Emancipation. Zimmermann also states that ‘fewer voices were raised against their (the Gypsies) deportation than against that of the Jews’ and ‘they found neither helpers nor allies’. As a witness of this time, I disagree with this statement. (See “Stationen”, Fournier Verlag Wiesbaden, 1993).

There were no ‘voices raised against the deportation of the Jews’ to any noticeable extent -- except, perhaps, the well known and somewhat overrated ‘Rosenstrasse demonstration’ in Berlin. [7]

The role of the Gypsies in Germany was markedly different: There were some highly romanticized literary and musical treatments of Gypsy life (such as the popular operetta Der Zigeunerbaron, written by J. Strauss Jr.). The Gypsy population had not been settled, assimilated or become as much a part of German cultural, political, artistic and literary life as had the integrated and heavily intermarried German Jewish population (between 20 and 50% intermarriage).

Zimmermann states that local administrations demanded the ‘most complete deportation of local Sinti and Roma possible’. He shows that the Gypsy persecution measures went in a straight line from resisting their settlement during the Wilhelmine Empire and the Weimar Republic to ‘more consistent persecution measures’ in order to ‘solve the Gypsy Problem’.

‘The deportations to Auschwitz-Birkenau...found widespread approval among police and administration officials...’ (p.202). In this regard, the murder of Gypsies -which occured within a less formalized structure and over a much shorter period of time- does resemble the systematic killing of Jews. However, the latter started in January 1933 and was of enormous economic importance for the German population, industry and for the entire Reich.

Zimmermann recognizes that the German Criminal Police had attempted to rspect the Gypsy family traditions and moved, deported, evacuated, transported Gypsies as complete family/clan units. In contrast to this treatment, Jewish men and women were often deported individually and apart from the immediate family, later housed in separate sections (except for a small group in Auschwitz-Birkenau from the Ghetto-Camp Theresienstadt which were kept in a ‘family show camp’ for a very short time). However, the Jewish deportees usually had the option to volunteer for a given transport, in order to be (and die) with their loved ones.

Zimmermann states that National Socialist Gypsy Policy grouped the Gypsy population in three categories (similar to the Nürnberg Racial Laws):

• ‘racially pure’ and ‘good Mischlinge in a Gypsy sense’, • ‘socially adjusted Gypsy Mischlinge’ • ‘inferior’.

The first group was to have a future. The second group would be sterilized. (It is estimated that 500 were sterilized before 1943/44. After January 29, 1943, another 2000 are estimated to have been sterilized.) The third group was not to leave the camp alive.

In spring 1944 the 2,900 Gypsies still alive in Auschwitz-Birkenau were sent to the gaschambers because hundreds of thousands of newly arriving Jews from Hungary required space before they could be killed in turn. Altogether 22,600 Gypsies were in Auschwitz Birkenau, and 19,300 were killed. Like all Auschwitz prisoners (and those of most other concentration camps), the Gypsy survivors were forced to leave the Birkenau camp on the infamous death marches shortly before the end of the war. Many died and were killed en route.

In contrast to the Jews, Gypsies were entirely marginal to Hitler’s world-view and their numbers within the Reich were quite limited. Above all, there were no notions of ‘an international Gypsy conspiracy out to harm the German people’ such as the existing paranoia about ‘international world Jewry’. For centuries, local German authorities refused to permit Gypsies to settle anywhere, expelled them without offering an alternative. By contrast, Jews had been permitted to settle (usually extracting a fee for the privilege) for centuries and even ‘enjoyed’ the protection of the regional government.

In the end, the extermination machinery which Eichmann and Heydrich and their colleagues (office V of the RSHA) had created for the Jews, provided an alternative. By that time, the wanton killing of thousands, even millions of human beings had become an accepted solution to a perceived political, economic or other population problem. The death of thousands of Gypsies was the endresult of many generations of Zigeunerbekämpfung which Kaiser Josef II had tried to halt with the decree of 1783, at least within the realm of the Habsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire. [8]

* * * Chapter 8, Christian Gerlach, German Economic Interests, Occupation Policy, and the Murder of the Jews in Belorussia, 1941/43 (pp.211-239).

The author of this chapter is presently Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute in Rome, Italy. He was coeditor of the recently released calender of Heinrich Himmler 1941/42.

At the outset, Christian Gerlach informs us that Belorussia/Weißrussland was more severely affected by the German military and economic policies during World War Two than any other country under German influence at the time. The statistics are mind boggling: the Germans murdered about

700,000 Soviet prisoners of war, 500,000 to 550,000 Jews, 340,000 peasants, and about 100,000 members of other population groups

in the area of Belorussia/Weißrußland alone.

Gerlach’s focus is on the economic measures instituted by the German occupation authorities. The Generalkommissariat White Ruthenia administrative complex obtained the needed food supplies for the Reich and for the Wehrmacht units at the Eastern Front at the expense of the local population in the occupied territories. This particular program and the destruction of the Jewish segment of the Belorussian population went hand in hand. (pp.213-215) According to guidelines issued by the German General Quartermaster of the Army, General Eduard Wagner, the various countries occupied by the Wehrmacht were to be treated differently by February 1941. Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski [Higher SS and Police Leader of Russia Center] stated in his confessions at the post War Nürnberg Trial that Belorussia was to be handled ‘with particular harshness’ (p.215). According to him, Himmler instructed SS Group Leaders in June 1941 that the Soviet population would have to be ‘decimated by 30 million people’ (p.216), Bach-Zelewski did not say that the plan also called for the death of 20 million people in the region under his own command. The agriculture experts of the Wirtschaftsstab Ost indicated in the margins of the official planning charts “shall die” in reference to 6.3 million people in Belorussia.

Gerlach relates “...more than 90% of the Jews [in this area] lived in towns and cities; they comprised a good 30% of the population [....] In addition [...] the German leadership had the determined intention to kill the vast majority of all Soviet Jews who lived in the towns and cities of the western USSR ...” (p.216). The starvation plan was approved by Hitler, endorsed by Goering and the Wehrmacht leadership (OKW Keitel).

Since 1939, Germany had been almost entirely cut off from overseas transportation by the ocean blockade. Since Germany could no longer supply its own needs of grain, it became official policy to use criminal occupation policies (p.213) in order to obtain food stuffs at the expense of the occupied countries’ populations. The Reich Ministry of Food and Agriculture annual report for 1939-1940 set the ground rules.

Gerlach frames his lecture around three sections:

1) German plans to let millions of people in the Soviet Union starve to death, with corresponding implications for Belorussia, especially for Belorussian Jews. 2) German units began to systematically murder Belorussian Jews in 1941. 3) The liquidation campaigns in the different territories are described in detail, with special focus on the structure and the goals of the mass murder of the Jews. The connection between the occupation policies, their focus on economic interests, and the role played by the various occupation authorities are outlined in detail and explained.

A marginal referrence to the official German campaign of the time aimed at eliminating all chickens which laid less than 100 to 120 eggs per year -- draws attention to the obvious comparisons with the massive human slaughter undertaken at the same time.

Just one example of many shocking statistics offered by Gerlach: In July/August 1941, Einsatzkommando 9 of Einsatzgruppe B began killing Jewish women and children, murdering 15,000 people, 95% of them Jewish in the Baranovitchi and Pinsk region alone.

In conclusion, he makes five major points:

1) Belorussian Jews were killed close to where they had lived. Some were killed in gas vans. Thus their murder occured without involving transportation to other locations.

2) Economic interests and crises decided the rythm of the liquidation of the Jews.

3) The liquidation of the Jews was directly connected with the progress of the war.

4) The participating military and civil institutions were among the driving forces behind the murders.

5) The mass murders have, heretofore, been underrepresented. This program required local and regional planning in order to achieve the desired goal.

* * * Chapter 9, Christoph Dieckmann, The War and the Killing of the Lithuanian Jews (pp.240-275).

Dieckmann writes: “On 24 June 1941, only two days after the war with the Soviet Union began, in the small Lithuanian town of Gargzdai, the first killings of Jews in the German-occupied Soviet Union took place. That afternoon, a commando from the German Security Police and the security service (the SD) from Tilsit and a division of the Security Police from Memel shot 201 people. After this massacre of civilians, a series of shootings followed along the Lithuanian border. In this way, by July 18, 1941, more than 3,300 had been killed.”

Dr. Saul Issroff, independent scholar in London UK, informs me that these dates are not quite accurate: The mass murder instigated by Einsatzgruppe A started around 4 AM on June 22, 1941, and there were other, earlier killings during the week June 14 to June 22 in various parts of Lithuania, before the official arrival of the Einsatzgruppen.

The German historian Eberhard Jäckel has documented that Einsatzgruppe A under Dr. Walter Stahlecker killed men, women and children, after having received specific instructions from Reinhard Heydrich on June 17, 1941.

Dieckman reports the proceedings as occurring in two waves:

the first killing of 10,000-12,000 men, which -initially- excluded Jewish women and children, wheras the second wave, starting August 1941, included men, women and children and killed 120,000 Jews within a few short months.

It is regrettable that the various lectures and, especialy, this print version were not supported with any of the readily available illustrations from the period. The photographs from this time, showing for example civilian Lithuanian helpers clubbing Jewish men, women and children to death are among this War’s most shocking scenes and are available in many archives. [9]

* * * The last two chapters try to put the Extermination Policies and the tools used in this process into perspective:

Chapter 10, Sybille Steinbacher, “In the Shadow of Auschwitz” p.276-306

In fall 1939 some 7,000-8,000 Jews lived in Auschwitz, a city in Poland, near East Upper Silesia. Important arms production, iron, zinc, lead, copper, steel works and one of the largest coal fields in Europe in this area were of primary importance to the Reich.

This area covers roughly 48,000 square kilometers with -at the time- 7.46 million inhabitants, 5% of them Jewish. Guiding concerns here were economic, in addition to territorial conquest, resettlement (of ethnic Germans) and effective use of forced labor -- all these were functionally related to the policy on Jews and for the planned population transfers, part of the racial-biological restructuring of Europe under German hegemony.

The three-step master pan envisioned liquidation of the intellectual and political elite and property owners, as well as the expulsion of all Jews. The new settlers were to be German or of German descent. Gauleiter Josef Wagner (since 1939 Oberpräsident of Breslau, an Alte Kämpfer) developed the ambitious plans for the Germanization program together with Fritz Dietlof Graf von der Schulenberg (Wagner’s deputy in the Oberpräsident of Breslau capacity). The authority for this program came directly from Adolf Hitler. As quoted by Bormann, they contained specific admonitions that he [the Führer] did not care whether the methods employed to secure control [would be] nice or exactly legal. Gauleiter and Oberpräsident Wagner and von der Schulenburg were ultimately forced to relinquish their ruthless resettlement policy and turn the work over to the SS and to Himmler’s candidate, Fritz Bracht.

By October 1939, Wagner had already initiated the first deportation project (the Nisko Plan) as part of the Ghetto Lublin. Simultaneously, Adolf Eichmann (then stationed in Vienna) prepared the removal of 70,000-80,000 Jews from Vienna and Maehrisch-Ostrau. The entire plan collapsed within a month due to organizational and logistical difficulties. By the fall of 1940, Himmler and the SS were in control.

Steinbacher states ”...in other areas ‘Jewish [labor] investment’ was primarily an instrument of social isolation and humiliation, in East Upper Silesia its purpose from the very outset was to achieve economic efficiency.” This statement is in not quite correct: Forced labor assignments for Jews in the Reich began in December 1938. It involved not only Jews (men, women and children, starting at age 14) but also Aryan marriage partners of Jews, especially if there were no children in the household. [10]

In the light of this, the statement (p.286) “...the IG Farben Works in Auschwitz was the first private business to adopt the practice in the spring of 1941” is clearly incorrect.

Steinbacher’s comparison between the two geographic areas (the Reich and East Upper Silesia) and at the specific times (1938/1939) is correct insofar as there were (to my knowledge) no organized murders committed at that time in the course of this conscript labor (Arbeitseinsatz). The intent was strictly to obtain free or nearly free services. The ‘extermination through work’ was not openly practiced within the Reich or perceived here as an accepted means to murder the local Jews. Employers, neighbors, co-workers and Jewish workers all understood clearly that such killings were committed at some far away place ‘in the East’.

There is no detailed account of profitability of this forced labor program given in Steinbacher’s chapter, but the subject has been studied and deserves further attention.

The statement (p.287) ”...must adopt [...]...names of Sara and Israel...” is not accurate: the decree dated from August 1938, as stated, but was not effective until later.

Steinbacher’s enumeration of the various punitive and harassing decrees is important and interesting. Such a comparative table/timeline should probably be established for all the lands under German occupation -- where Jews were forbidden to ride buses, attend theaters, patronize shops, adhere to curfews, had to hand over bicycles, all this and many other measures, long before the mass killings started.

However, Steinbacher’s second theme (starting on p.287) is much more important, in spite of an erroneous sweeping introduction “...(U)p until then (the campaign against the Soviet Union) deportation and resettlement strategists had been forced to endure inertia, obstructions, and impasses in their planning...” (p.287, para.IV). Where the deportation and extermination of Jews was concerned, there was no resistance, only extensive support and cooperation, except for Denmark and Rumania.

However it IS true that the ‘gigantic empire in the East ’opened a new dimension’ as stated. Steinbacher describes the bottlenecks created by the deporting of Jews and the importing of ethnic populations. These resettlement efforts and the simultaneous, separate deportation and extermination programs of Jews got into one another’s way.

>From personal knowledge I can state categorically, that the haphazard-dilettante, totally unsynchronized deportation of stateless and Polish Jews ‘handled’ (or not) by the Reichsaußenministerium (Foreign Ministry) on October 27/28, 1938 was still the format pursued in later years. Then and later, there was no concern and no attempt to arrange housing or feeding for the deported Jews.

* * *

Chapter 11, Karin Orth, The Concentration Camp SS as a Functional Elite, (p. 306).

This final chapter tries to place the camp guards and administrators into perspective, while leaving out the (clearly implicated) Wehrmacht organization. Karin Orth has concentrated her research on the SS officers who were part of the concentration camp inspectorate (Inspektion der Konzentrationslager), the camp commanders whom the American historian Robert Lewis Koehl characterized as a ‘functional elite’.

The chapter tries to describe the group’s origins, the ‘self presentation of the group’ and its members’ careers after the end of World War Two.

“Most of the members of the KZ SS belonged to ‘youth of the wartime (WWI) generation’. Most grew up in middle class families. Most finished their education at the elementary (8 yrs) or middle school level (10-12 years). They came from the heart of the Weimar society. As youths, they had established contact with right wing circles. By their mid-twenties, every second member of the group was a member of the NSDAP and the SS by his mid-twenties.”

However, it would be impossible to actually chart the group’s psychological make-up, as here attempted, because the SS ranks contained men from all walks of life, gangsters, physicians, lawyers, bookkeepers, butchers, criminals and many others. One cannot generalize a proper psychiatric diagnosis on what is a social-psychological problem, to say nothing of the views of historians, anthropologists, political scientists, and criminologists.

Orth relates that the SS Death’s Head Division provided part of the occupation troops in southwest France, but were re-assigned in summer 1941 to assist with the invasion on the Eastern Front. Between the fall of 1941 and October 1942, the SS division was nearly completely wiped out in an area around Demjansk. It recorded death rates of 50 percent - disproportionately high compared to other German units.

The chapter ends with a brief review of the post-War career of these camp commander units and, also, brings up the ‘Goldhagen debate’. It closes with a quote from Auschwitz commandant Höß that the group aimed “..to fulfill the will of the ‘Führer’, or what they considered it to be.” It is also one of the weakest chapters of the entire book. Admittedly, the concept and imagery of ‘Auschwitz’ are so daunting that it might require a Homer or a Shakespeare to write about it to satisfy all.

* * * There seem to be two levels of consistent but (to this reader) false assumptions - amounting to a denial of historical facts: a) the Holocaust (supposedly) did not start until the ‘outbreak’ of World War Two, possibly leading to the conclusion that b) if it had not been for World War Two, there would not have been a Holocaust.

Such a perception establishes a personal distance between the scholar, the reader and historical fact. It is proof of an incomplete Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung (dealing with -Germany’s- past). The Holocaust crimes represent the psychosocial mortgage incurred by Germany as well as the countries under its influence during and before World War Two.

The respective countries’ participation in the ‘Final Solution’ (i.e. dispossessing, displacing, enslaving and murdering Jews within their borders) defines their place in history.

* * *

[1]This issue was extensively dealt with in the 1960s by i.a. Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich (“The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior”, now -regrettably- out of print); by Ralph Giordano (“Die Zweite Schuld” , out of print), by Jörg Friedrich (“Die Kalte Amnestie”, out of print) and more recently by Gitta Sereny “Albert Speer and His Battle with the Truth”, 1996, Vintage Books. The Mitscherlichs write “...It is illusory to assume that a young generation could discard the yoke of the past, abandon sacred traditions and prejudices [...] if there were a prescription against the continuation of subliminal motivations, it would be the promotion of a new emancipation [...] We are dealing with a collossus of guilt which resists such an orientation...”

[2] According to Michael Brocke and Aubrey Pomerance of the Salomon Ludwig Institut für deutsch-jüdische Geschichte at the Gerhard-Mercator-Universität Duisburg, the ‘Steinheim Institut’, July 20, 2000:

“... the number of persons killed during the November pogroms has not been precisely determined. In a letter to Göring on the 11th of November the head of the security police Heydrich wrote that 36 persons had been killed. This number was later “officially” raised to 91. That this figure is far too low is beyond doubt. In Düsseldorf alone seven persons were killed. The whole complex points to a failure on the part of historians: no attempt has ever been made to simply add together the manifold results of local and regional (partly amateur) historians. An unscholarly guess would arrive at a number of approximately 400 persons killed between November 9 and 11. To these must be added those who died in the days or weeks thereafter from their injuries and those who committed suicide, and in particular those men who were murdered in the concentration camps to where they were deported immediately following the pogroms and those who died shortly after their release. In the end, however, we will never know the “exact” number of victims.” To this day, historians are severely handicapped in the normal pursuit of their work by the strictly enforced provision of the Red Cross Suchdienst (search service) that ‘only relatives of the victims’ can obtain access to the available documents held by the Arolsen archives in Germany and, what’s more, the documents and the information given are not always accurate. Replies are slow in coming. cgo

[3] The intense friendships formed among members of these Jewish fraternities continued during the years of persecution and well into the incarceration in the death camps: members of the internal Ärztekammer (registration of medical doctors in the concentration camp Theresienstadt, where I was a prisoner) within the slave labor service (Arbeitseinsatz ) administration office of that camp would often identify their various KC student affiliations, counting -in vain- on the solidarity of and help from fellow inmates who may have belonged to the KC. However, regardless of professional training, the inmates were routinely assigned to manual labor. My mother, Claire Guthmann nee Michel, was assigned to work in this (registration of medical doctors) office. It was a very desirable desk job, much less strenuous than her earlier assignment in the mica production, in the summer of 1943. This was -indeed- a favor arranged for her by a fellow inmate, one of my father’s one-time student fraternity buddies. cgo

[4] see restitution records at the Hessische HauptStaatsArchiv Wiesbaden and the Frankfurt City Archive and many others

[5] Bogdan Musial, a Polish-German historian working in Warsaw who is well known within Germany for his strong critique of the exhibit ‘Crimes of the Wehrmacht’ has recently explored this phase at some length in a new book ‘Deutsche Zivilverwaltung und Judenverfolgung im Generalgouvernement.’, Harassowirtz Verlag, 1999, 435 pp., DM 58. Musial blames the retreating Russian army and the atrocities they committed for having -indirectly- caused the subsequent German Wehrmacht crimes. According to Musial, 20,000 to 30,000 Poles, Jews, Urkrainians, and other counterrevolutionary enemies of Russia were murdered by the NKVD in the summer of 1941 before they retreated East. According to his theory, the German Wehrmacht soldiers were profoundly shocked to see proof of such enormous cruelty committed against innocent people by the enemy that they immediately proceeded to do likewise.

[6] The letter is reproduced on pages 190 -- 193 of Detlev Claussen's "Vom Judenhass zum Antisemitismus" (2nd edition) Luchterhand, Darmstadt, 1988 ISBN 3-630-61677-1.

[7] In that particular instance, the wives protested against the deportation of their husbands, specifically, not in these men’s role as persecuted Jews. There were other, similar, individual reactions under like circumstances, for example Frau Margot Rubinstein in Wiesbaden and other Christian wives (and husbands) of Jewish husbands (and Jewish wives) who protested individually to local Gestapo agents in Wiesbaden and in Frankfurt that I know about. Inspektor Ernst Holland in Frankfurt routinely terminated such discussions by threatening the Aryan partner with arrest. That was the standard, most effective, and most successful way to end such discussions. [8] On April 6, 2000 The New York Times published a relatively small advertisement containing an "Appeal" to the Bavarian and German governments opposing "racist databases" assembled by the Bavarian police on Sinti and Roma. The protest was signed by Simon Wiesenthal, Ignatz Bubis, Gregory Peck, Armin Müller-Stahl, Klaus Staeck, Siegfried Lenz, Ralph Giordanno, Michael Verhoeven, Vanessa Redgrave, and many other German and international cultural luninaries and human rights activists. [...] during the 1990s the Bavarian police registered Sinti and Roma on special police forms without reason or legal basis, justifying this practice as vorbeugende Verbrechensbekämpfung (preventive activities against potential criminals) because they believed that "Gypsies" could become a public danger. Parenthetically, this is the exact language used by the police in the Nazi period. From: Sinti and Roma in Twentieth-Century Austria and Germany by Sybil Milton, Washington, D.C. in German Studies Review, Vol. XXIII, No.2, May 2000.

[9] Especially the catalog for the ‘Crimes of the Wehrmacht’ exhibit. It contains hundreds of pictures, letters, documents, in Vernichtungskrieg, Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941-1944, published by the Institut für Sozialforschung, Hamburg, Hamburger Verlagsges. mbH, 218 pp. ISBN 3-930908-24-7.

In her new book “Ikonen der Vernichtung” (icons of extermination), Akademie Verlag Berlin, ISBN 3-05-003211, DM 98.-- the author Cornelia Brink develops an interesting theory concerning the post-War use of photographs from National Socialist concentration camps after 1945. She coins the expression ‘failed optical denazification’ and reports that -according to her research- the viewers’ reaction equated ‘seeing’ with ‘being seen’ and, by way of denying facts and distancing themselves from this painful past history, left the issues unread, uncomprehended and unidentified. Consequently, barbed wire, watchtower, chimneys, barracks, crematoria and other symbols of the Shoah remain alien, frozen visions.

[10] In the towns where I am intimately acquainted with the events of that time (Wiesbaden, Frankfurt, Mainz, Giessen, Koblenz and others), there was no compensation paid for this work from the respective ‘employers’ whenever the work was done on behalf of a public institution -- cleaning streets, shoveling snow, tending the gardens of the Gestapo building, cleaning railroad cars, streetcars, busses, automobiles, running errands. In all these cases, minimum wages had to be paid out of the coffres of the local Jewish Congregation. Private employers and privately owned factories did pay their Jewish laborers at the existing minimum rate scale. Betw. RM 3.-- and 4.-- for women, RM 4.-- for men.

Also, see Der geschlossene Arbeitseinsatz deutscher Juden: Zur Zwangsarbeit als Element der Verfolgung. 1938-1943, Wolf Gruner, Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 1997.