Wednesday, 12 May 1999 1:30 May 10,
1999 Some Thoughts on
"Judenfrage | Als Partisanen auszurotten"
I WOULD like to take this opportunity to
ventilate my opinion on the by now well known
Heinrich Himmler daybook entry,
"Judenfrage | als Partisanen auszurotten."
The Christian Gerlach thesis
is that this entry
of December 18, 1941 indicates that Hitler gave
the order to exterminate the Jews a few days
prior. The thesis of Dr. John Fox, on the other
hand, is that the formulation pertains to the
future shooting of German Jews who were the first
deportees to the Eastern Marches. I find neither of these explanations
satisfactory, but in order to explain why, I would
like to explain a few other dates on the timeline
that are significant to me. The first of these are the various versions of
the Commissar Order, in the Spring of 1941, which
directed the Einsatzgruppen to destroy the
communist cadres of occupied Russia. It seems to me
that, given the tendency of the Nazis to identify
all Jews as "biological Bolsheviks" this order
easily could be interpreted to give license to any
Einsatzgruppen- or police commander to kill any
Jews at any time. The implementation of this order
would help explain why in fact many Jews -- chiefly
males in the first weeks -- were routinely
massacred. The next milestone is a bit harder to date but I
would place it around late August, and this
pertains to the extension of the killing of Jews
from males and some females to all Jews, including
men, women, and children. The most spectacular
murders in this respect appear to have taken place
in the Baltic states, and are summarized in the
"Jäger Report", which, as already indicated,
shows mostly men, and then women, and finally men,
women, and children to a total of about 140,000 by
the end of 1941. What was the purpose of this change of policy,
and who inaugurated it? I believe a key episode
concerns the massacre of about 90 Jewish children
in Byelaya Tserkov in Ukraine in the late Summer.
In this instance, the parents had been slain,
apparently as reprisal, or as hostages, or as a
punitive measure. But the children -- initially --
survived, and were crammed into an orphanage
without any care. Surviving documentation shows
that several Wehrmacht chaplains passed on the
complaints of the ordinary soldiers at such
maltreatment, then that the decision was made to
eliminate the children, and then that no one could
be found to perform the act, since the SS and the
SD both refused to do it. Post-war testimony in fact suggests that the
children were killed reluctantly by Ukrainian
auxiliaries. If there had been a general policy of
massacring Jewish children prior to Byelaya Tserkov
(which means "Whitechapel", by the way), then the
wide-spread demoralization among the ranks never
would have occurred, at the same time, precisely
because this episode did demoralize so many, one
can begin to see why the decision was made to
murder whole families in order to prevent any
further episodes of this kind. Therefore I believe the decision to massacre
whole Jewish families was made at about this time,
and was passed along orally, because the Jäger
Report indicates that the policy was soon
implemented with a vengeance in the Baltics soon
after. But who gave the order? I think it is rather
clear that the order came from Himmler, who at any
rate sanctioned it, if it first came from
below. In his Posen speeches of 1943 Himmler goes to
some trouble to justify the murder of whole Jewish
families with reference to the need to protect
against the children rising up to exact revenge in
their adulthood, and in later speeches in 1943 and
early 1944 Himmler also makes clear that these
whole family massacres are related to the
anti-partisan war. But most importantly, in all
cases, Himmler takes complete personal
responsibility for the decision: at no time does he
attribute it to Hitler, or to a
"Führer-Befehl", (Führer Order) although
it would be easy to do so; on the contrary it is
always described as "his" "difficult" decision. So far we can see how the original Commissar
Order mutated by the end of 1941 into an order
giving license to local commanders to massacre
Jewish men, women, and children with impunity, and
that this alteration -- though not documented --
appears to have come from, or been sanctioned by,
Himmler in late Summer of 1941. No doubt the rest of the anti-partisan war --
involving Jews or non-Jews -- was fought with
similar ferocity. The next matter that has to be engaged is the
question of the Jews deported to occupied Russia --
starting with German Jews, that is, Jews from the
1939 Reich, and extending in the Spring and Summer
of 1942 to Jews from Poland and Western Europe.
These deportations, to my mind, are best regarded
as the interim deportations of the Final Solution,
that is, the removal of the Jews from Europe but
not yet a truly Final Solution, insofar as the
warehousing of the Jews in the ghettos of the East
was not viewed as a permanent solution. The support for this interpretation of the
deportations and of the term "Final Solution" is
supported by a number of documents and references
that indicate that no one felt that the Final
Solution itself had been implemented even by July,
1942, while the deportations were in full swing but
rather that it was to be postponed for a later
time. This is the reason why I don't accept Dr. Fox's
interpretation, because like most students of the
Holocaust he tends to conflate the Wannsee
Conference (which describes the general policy of
deportation and forced labor) with the "Final
Solution" which he considers a code word for
gassing. But I do not consider the Final Solution to have
meant the final solution of the Jewish question
through extermination, but rather through post-war
expulsion, the wartime deportations to the East and
the forced labor utilization were, I believe, meant
to be provisional measures. Further on Dr. Fox's
interpretation, I cannot see how the "als
Partisanen auszurotten" is supposed to pertain to
the early waves of German Jews, since with the
exception of the November 30, 1941 transport, the
German deportees to the Baltic states were not
routinely massacred at all, but were rather
consigned to ghettos and work camps, such that
significant numbers were still around to be
evacuated back to Germany in late 1944 and early
1945. Therefore, I must conclude that "Judenfrage |
als Partisanen auszurotten" cannot pertain to
wholesale massacre of German (or other western)
Jews. But at the same time we have to note that the
harassment and occasional massacres of deported
western and Polish Jews continued periodically from
the beginning of the deportations right up to the
end of 1943, as such episodes as the "Ernte Fest"
shootings in the Lublin district indicate. On the other hand, Herr Gerlach's thesis, that
the order to exterminate all Jews was made around
December 12, 1941, and that this is the meaning of
Himmler's phrase, also makes little sense, because
it contradicts the aforementioned documentation
describing the implementation of forced Jewish
labor and the warehousing of Jews in the Eastern
ghettos well into the summer of 1943, when the
ghettos began to be disbanded before the advancing
Red Army. In fact, I would contend that the very existence
of these ghettos and work camps right up to just
before their capture by the Red Army is among the
strongest pieces of evidence to indicate that the
deportations and forced labor were in fact part of
an interim solution to the Final Solution of
continental expulsion, not part of a conspiratorial
plan to concentrate the Jews in the east before
secretly exterminating them with poison gas. If, by my reasoning, the interpretations of Fox
and Gerlach both founder on the documentary record,
what then is the meaning of "Judenfrage | als
Partisanen auszurotten"? I believe it means simply that, to the extent
that the Jews in the East pose a partisan threat,
to that extent they will be neutralized, either by
killing or confinement, but in any case the
possibility of a partisan threat from the Jewish
quarter must be nullified. This is the
interpretation that seems the most natural to
me... Samuel
Crowell |
write
to David Irving