Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Peter Longerich [essential books to read TXT] 📗

Introduction

7

The second effect of seeing the emergence of the ‘Final Solution’ as a complex

process rather than as the outcome of a single decision, if we follow the suggestions of

Gerlach, Aly, and others and take into consideration new thematic approaches to the

analysis of the persecution of the Jews, is that it becomes necessary to see Judenpolitik as systematically interlinked with the other central thematic areas, notably in

domestic policy but ultimately also with German hegemony on the continent of

Europe. For the war years this means that we need to take account of German

policies on alliances and inner repression across the whole of Europe, and of the

issues of work, food production, and financing the war. It is necessary to show how

these areas were redefined in a racist and specifically anti-Semitic sense, and to show

how even during the war the Nazi system was attempting to establish the basis for a

racist Imperium in which the murder of the Jews was the lowest common denom-

inator in a series of alliances led by Germany. This implies, of course, a very broad

programme of research that would exceed the scope of a single monograph. The

present study will restrict itself to exploring in outline how such linkages functioned.

Thirdly, if we accept that the decision-making process within Nazi Judenpolitik

did not come to an end after the ‘Final Solution’ had been determined upon in

principle but that after 1942 decisions were continually being reached that affected

the lives of millions of people—in this case it is clear that the implementation of

Judenpolitik was not only the result of priorities set by the leadership but was

increasingly influenced by the behaviour of German allies, by the way that the

local administration in occupied territories acted, and not least by the attitude of

the local populations and the behaviour of Germany’s enemies.

There is a further key factor to be considered, too. The Jewish population that in

1941 faced the plans being made for the ‘Final Solution’ was defenceless and wholly

unprepared, but in the second half of the war it too became an element that

influenced the way the perpetrators proceeded. By fleeing, by seeking to escape

persecution by living in a hide-away or underground, but also by negotiating with

individuals or bribing them, they were attempting to slow down the inexorable

process of annihilation and thereby—if only to a limited extent—influencing the

behaviour of the perpetrators.

Here research into the perpetrators reaches its limits, or in other words the

further into the war is the stage that research concentrates on, the more difficult it

becomes to reconstruct the development of the persecution and annihilation of

the European Jews by concentrating exclusively on persecutors and their activities.

This is not to say that concentrating on the persecutors in the period after 1942 is

historiographically impossible or pointless, but that it is important to make

precisely clear what the parameters are within which the perpetrators were able

to act autonomously.

Fourthly, if the history of the final solution is seen as a chain of ongoing

decisions that together come to make up the full context of Judenpolitik, then

the fate of the other groups persecuted by the Nazis must also be considered, or

8

Introduction

considered at least in so far as they reveal direct comparisons with or information

about the National Socialists’ Judenpolitik.

These, then, are the fundamental ideas around which this book’s depiction of

Judenpolitik in the years between 1933 and 1945 will be oriented. There is one

further significant angle that needs to be considered in more detail, and it

concerns the tricky nature of the available sources.

As far as possible this study is based on primary sources. Alongside the

documentary holdings of the German administrative departments that are housed

in well-known archives in Germany and outside, this study will also consider the

holdings of archives in the former Warsaw Pact states that since the 1990s have

become accessible to scholars. In practical terms this primarily means Moscow’s

‘Special Archive’ where two collections have been used in some detail: the papers

of the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith—the Central-

verein Deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (hereafter referred to simply as

the Centralverein)—which permits a far more detailed picture of the Nazis’

persecution of the Jews in the period from 1933 to 1938 than has hitherto been

available; and the papers of the Security Service of the SS (the Sicherheitsdienst, or

SD), which cover the period from 1935 to 1940. In addition, papers from various

other former Soviet, Polish, and Czech archives are considered, some of which

were consulted from copies in Yad Vashem or the US Holocaust Museum in

Washington.

For my investigation of the radicalization of Jewish persecution in the occupied

Soviet zones in the second half of 1941 I have made extensive use of papers from

the Central Office for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Ludwigsburg (properly

known as the Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen zur Aufklärung nation-

alsozialistischer Verbrechen) via the branch office there of the Bundesarchiv, or

Federal Archive of Germany.

Despite what is an almost unmanageably large quantity of documents available

for the reconstruction of Nazi Judenpolitik, from the point of view of the central

decision-making processes for the ‘Final Solution’ the state of source material can

only be described as ‘patchy’. This is because the most important decisions that led

to the murder of the European Jews were not usually written down; the perpet-

rators also systematically attempted to destroy documents that reflected these

decisions, and were largely successful in doing so. Documents that have nonetheless

survived are scattered between archives in several different countries. In addition,

documents relating to the murder of the Jews are written in a language designed to

veil their true purpose. And finally, bringing these fragments together is a process

that leaves plenty of room for interpretation: in my view the decisive question that

such an interpretation has to address is that of the role of Judenpolitik within the

overall political activity of the regime.

Given these difficulties with source material, a precise reconstruction of the

individual complexes of events and actions—including executions, deportations,

Introduction

9

murders in the concentration camps, and so on—that together constitute the

genocide perpetrated against the European Jews is indispensable for any analysis

of the decision-making process. The disparate nature of the sources leaves us no

alternative but to draw conclusions about decisions from a reconstruction of the

individual acts that they gave rise to. Since this