PETER LONGERICH

Table of Contents

Part 1
I. The genesis of the 'final solution' and historical research
II. The elements of the policy of annihilation

Part 2
III. Stages in the Nazi persecution of the Jews prior to the summer of 1941
IV. The transition to the policy of 'ethnic cleansing' in the summer of 1941

Part 3
V. Escalation in the autumn of 1941 and the start of the deportation of the German Jews
VI. Preparation for and postponement of the Wannsee Conference

Part 4
VII. The minutes of the Wannsee Conference
VIII The escalation of the annihilation policy immediately after the Wannsee Conference

Part 5
IX. Outlines of a pan-European deportation programme
X. Expansion of the deportations and the move to indiscriminate murder

Part 6
XI. Review of developments between the autumn of 1941 and the summer of 1942
XII. The Wannsee minutes as snapshot of a moment in a transition stage

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We do not know the precise wording of the statements made at the conference. Eichmann said in 1960 in Israel that he had to edit the minutes considerably at Heydrich’s insistence, and that the participants at the conference had used far more drastic language, and had spoken about deaths, elimination and annihilation (53). Eichmann possibly wanted thereby to divert attention from himself and incriminate third parties. In my opinion, the minutes should not therefore be read as a basis for speculation about what was 'actually' said at the conference, but as the guidelines authorized by Heydrich for the RSHA's allotted task of the 'final solution'. The starting-point for any interpretation of 'Jewish policy' at the beginning of 1942 should not be the actual proceedings of the conference, but rather their quintessence, which Heydrich presented to other supreme Reich authorities as the binding resolution of that meeting (54).

In the minutes produced, Heydrich had the results of the conference drawn up as follows. Firstly, he referred to his 'appointment' by Göring on 31 July as the 'official in charge of the preparations for the final solution of the European Jewish question'. He had already enclosed a copy of this document with his first letter of invitation, dated 29 Nov.  Before proceeding with the compilation of a 'draft of the organizational, factual and material interests involved in the final solution', he apparently explained to the conference that he wanted to agree the subsequent procedures with the 'central authorities involved'.

Next, the minutes go on to say, Heydrich gave an overview of the persecution of the Jews to date. The main aim of the 'Jewish policy', he said, was, firstly, forced migration, which had been stopped by Himmler ' in light of the dangers of a migration during the war, and with regard to the potential [for mass reception] of the east'. The minutes then continue with Heydrich’s remarks that 'instead of emigration, another possible solution, which has been given the relevant prior approval of the Fuehrer, is now the evacuation of the Jews to the east'. Such 'campaigns' were simply 'alternatives' wherein 'practical experience could be obtained' which would be 'of great significance as regards the coming final solution'.

The idea of a comprehensive deportation of the European Jews to the east had, as we have seen, been pursued by the RSHA throughout 1941. By the beginning of 1942, it was becoming ever clearer that such a programme could no longer be implemented. The deportations continued, however, mainly for the lack of any clear alternative proposals having been developed. Conspicuously, Heydrich did not explain in his speech what should happen to any Jews who were 'unfit for work', particularly children and mothers looking after them. (He merely said that any Jews over 65 should be taken to an 'old people's ghetto' – Theresienstadt). Conversely, it seems extremely unlikely that, by January 1942, Heydrich was already in possession of a complete plan to murder those Jews who were 'unfit for work' in extermination camps. No efforts can be detected prior to the spring of 1942 indicating any general build-up of the extermination camps for such a pan-European murder programme. On the other hand, the proposal for 'road-building' work-gangs who labored 'in the east' under murderous working conditions, was no figment of the imagination, as will be shown below.

VIII. The escalation of the annihilation policy immediately after the Wannsee Conference

In order to understand better the historical role of the Wannsee Conference, its immediate consequences should be examined. In the weeks following the conference, the policy of annihilation changed significantly. As announced in the autumn of 1941, the deportations were from then on extended to the entire area under German control; this will be examined in more detail in the next section. Moreover, the deportations and murders were carried out within the context of a comprehensive programme of forced labor.

Since the autumn of 1941, the SS had gone over to developing the perfidious system of 'annihilation through work' ('Vernichtung durch Arbeit'). This system meant that people were fatally exhausted under inhuman working conditions within the shortest time, that a threshold was established at which people who were no longer fit for work or who were deemed unusable would necessarily falter. Since the summer of 1941, the Einsatzgruppen had developed the policy of 'annihilation through work' in the occupied eastern territories. Einsatzgruppe C had explicitly formulated this concept in September, when it proposed the 'solution of the Jewish question through comprehensive use of the Jews as workers', which would 'result in the gradual destruction of Judaism' and would correspond to the 'economic conditions of the country' (55). In the occupied eastern territories, to some extent since July, and to a greater extent since August and September 1941, as part of the then systematic annihilation policy, the Einsatzgruppen went over to confining the adults and their dependants who were 'fit for work' in ghettos, and using them as a labor pool (56). In further selections in the ghettos, 'fitness for work' and demand for labor were the decisive criteria. The fact that the selection of 'those fit for work' was often completely arbitrary and chaotic evinces the real purpose lying behind this 'labor deployment': the murderous decimation of the Jews.

In January 1942, Himmler advised the Inspector of Concentration Camps, Richard Glücks, that – as 'no Russian prisoners of war were to be expected in the near future' – he would be 'sending to the camps a large number of Jews and Jewesses who had emigrated from Germany'. 'In the next four weeks', wrote Himmler, 'prepare to receive100,000 male Jews and up to 50,000 Jewesses in the concentration camps. In the next few weeks, the concentration camps will be faced with major economic tasks' (57). During the February - March 1942 period, the organizational foundations for the optimal exploitation of the prisoner workforce were laid by incorporating the Administration and Construction Department of the SS and the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps into the newly-formed SS Economic-Administration Head Office (WVHA). In an order dated 30 April 1942, the head of the WVHA, Oswald Pohl, made the camp commandants 'responsible for the use of the workforce'. This move was perfectly consistent with the increase in the prisoners’ performance ordered by Himmler: as Pohl continued, 'this [labor usage] must be exhausting in the true sense of the word, so as to achieve peak performance' (58).

Since the autumn of 1941, tens of thousands of Jewish workers had been used in the construction of 'transit route IV' ('Durchgangstrasse IV'), a strategically important supply route for conducting the war in the east which was scheduled to go from Lvov (Lemberg) deep into the Ukraine. The project was under the control of the regional SS and police leader and, since 1942, it had been assigned the highest priority as a result of a Fuehrer order (59). The high death rate in the camps on transit route IV suggests that the work gangs proposed by Heydrich at the Wannsee Conference, which were taken to the east 'for road building' and were thereby supposed to fall prey to 'natural reduction', were real enough entities. The transit route IV project was an important interim step in transferring the system of annihilation through work developed in the Soviet occupied areas to the Generalgouvernement. It was a kind of pilot project for the take-over by the SS of all forced labor in the Generalgouvernement in the spring and summer of 1942. Quite consistent with the idea of annihilation through work, this decision placed responsibility for the systematic murder of the Generalgouvernement's Jews in the same hands as the deployment of forced labor.

The shift to the concept of 'annihilation through work' did not follow any detailed plan, but was a modification of the existing annihilation policy under the conditions of the protracted war. Simply, the elimination of the maximum number of Jews had to be reconciled with the rising demand for labor. In this way, a system arose out of a 'use of labor' that frequently exceeded the bounds of physical capability, involving minimal food and care, and constant selections of Jews who were no longer 'fit for work' or no longer 'required'. The perfidy of the system of 'annihilation through work' was particularly obvious when there were very few compulsory work projects for Jews or none at all, as this provided a pretext for stamping 'unusable' Jews as 'superfluous'. Alongside the mass executions in the east, the continuing plans for deportations from central and western Europe, and the start made on building extermination camps in Poland, the murderous 'Jewish labor deployment' formed a fourth complementary element in the 'final solution'.

The deportations that were resumed on a larger scale in the spring of 1942 were preceded by a series of public speeches by Hitler in which he unequivocally returned to his 'prophecy' of January 1939 that, in the event of another 'world war', the Jews of Europe would be annihilated. Hitler's threat was underlined by the USA’s recent entry into the war, the expansion of the war into a world war, and the fact that the 'Fuehrer' deliberately falsified the date of his January 1939 prophecy as 1 September 1939.

In Hitler's new year address of 1942 he declared 'the Jew will not eradicate the European peoples, but will become the victim of his own assassination attempt' (60). In that speech in January 1942 in the Berlin Sportpalast, as an excuse for 'seizing power' on 30 January 1933, Hitler stated 'we are quite clear about the fact that the war can only end with either the eradication of the Aryan peoples or with Judaism disappearing from Europe' (61). In a declaration read out on 24 February 1942 on the occasion of the 22^nd anniversary of the foundation of the Party in the Munich Hofbräuhaus, Hitler had it announced once again that 'my prophecy will come true that Aryan mankind will not be destroyed by this war, but that the Jew will be eradicated' (62).


Notes
53   Institut für Zeitgeschichte, G 01 (trial transcript, German version), session of 24 July.
54   The only surviving copy of the 30 sets of minutes to have been issued is no.16, that of State Secretary Martin Luther (Foreign Office). The handwritten date of issue probably signifies that the minutes were sent out as a result of an inquiry. (See Peter Klein, Die Wannsee-Konferenz vom 20. Januar 1942. Analyse und Dokumentation, [Berlin: Edition Hentrich, no date], p14)
55   Institut für Zeitgeschichte, operational-situational report (‘Ereignismeldungen’) UdSSR, No.86.
56   This is revealed in the relevant Einsatzgruppen operational-situational reports.
57   Faschismus, p268.
58   Nuremberg document 129-R, IMT XXXVIII, p365ff.
59   Hermann Kaienburg, ‘Zwangsarbeitslager an der "Straße der SS"’, 1999, vol.11 (1996), 13-39.
60   Ibid, p1828f.
61   Verordnungsblatt, 26 February 1942; Domarus II, p1844.
62   Nuremberg document PS-1063, printed in: Peter Longerich (ed.), Die Ermordung der europäischen Juden. Eine umfassende Dokumentation des Holocaust, (Munich: Piper, 1989), p165f.

Part 5