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“FINAL SOLUTION”: NAZI GHETTOIZATION POLICY in POLAND (1940–1941) Christopher R

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“FINAL SOLUTION”: NAZI GHETTOIZATION POLICY in POLAND (1940–1941) Christopher R BEFORE THE “FINAL SOLUTION”: NAZI GHETTOIZATION POLICY IN POLAND (1940–1941) Christopher R. Browning On August 2, 1941, Hinrich Lohse, the Reichskommisar Ostland, sent to Higher SS and Police Leader North Hans-Adolf Prützmann a draft of “temporary guidelines for treatment of the Jews.” Jews were to be cleared from the countryside and concentrated in those sections of cities where the predominate portion of the Jewish population already resided. “There ghettos were to be created” and those Jews capable of work were to be put to forced labor as needed.1 When Franz Stahlecker―chief of Einsatzgruppe A in the Baltic―received a copy of these guidelines, his reaction was immediate and negative. The guidelines were not compatible with orders that he had received governing the treatment of Jews. Lohse, he noted, was obviously seeking to regulate the Jewish question in the Ostland that corresponded to the situation that had been created in the General Government, and thereby failed to take into account the radical treatment of the Jewish question now possible for the first time in the East. Stahlecker considered a discussion with Lohse to be imperative, “all the more because the draft to a great extent touches on general orders from a higher authority to the Security Police that cannot be discussed in writing.”2 For Stahlecker, Lohse’s proposal for the construction of ghettos was perceived as a measure that would hinder rather than facilitate the mass murder of the Jews. Stahlecker subsequently advised his Einsatzkommandos that the “Final Solution” to the Jewish question was to be achieved “with utterly different means than those envisaged by the Reichkommissar.”3 When the ghetto managers in Łódź learned in mid-September 1941 that they were to receive 60,000 Jews from the Reich, they protested to Heinrich Himmler. “If the Łódź ghetto were a pure decimation ghetto, then one could contemplate a greater concentration of Jews,” but the ghetto was a “finely tuned and thereby extremely sensitive component of the defense economy.”4 Their protest was to no avail. Shortly thereafter, when the Gestapo and Labor Office in Łódź wished to take Jewish workers from the ghetto for their own purposes, ghetto administrators again protested, this time noting that “the Łódź ghetto as a pure decimation ghetto can give up no Jews, because they are needed for its own military production.”5 Given the anticipated decimation of 2 • BEFORE THE “FINAL SOLUTION” the ghetto population in Łódź, ghetto administrators now argued that at least in terms of working Jews, they had not too many but too few. At a meeting of German occupation officials in Warsaw on October 15, 1941, the man in charge of the ghetto’s economic affairs, Max Bischof, confessed that the Warsaw ghetto’s economy was a “field of ruins.” Therefore he urged emphatically that the ghettoized Jews “should be integrated into economic life” as “extensively as possible,” both to harness their labor to the war effort and relieve the Germans of the need to subsidize the ghetto. In addition to removing the policies and practices that stood in the way of German and Jewish entrepreneurship in the ghetto, Bischof argued that it was “above all necessary” that working Jews be sufficiently fed. If his recommendations were adopted, it was still possible that Jewish labor could serve “the urgent needs of the Reich in the final battle for the future.”6 Bischof’s boss and commissar of the Warsaw ghetto, Heinz Auerswald, also spoke. He asked, “So long as the Jews cannot be completely removed from . the General Government, does the construction of Jewish quarters actually constitute the advisable solution to the Jewish question?” Auerswald answered his question affirmatively under two conditions―that all ghettos were hermetically sealed on the Warsaw model, and that a food supply sufficient for at least subsistence existence be provided. Only then could the spread of epidemics be prevented and Jewish labor be harnessed to production. Indeed, these policies should be pursued regardless of whether “the Jews could be deported out of the General Government already in the coming year.”7 At the same time that officials of the district government were meeting in Warsaw, the public health officials of the General Government were meeting at the mountain resort of Bad Krynica to discuss the threat of epidemics spread by starving Jews fleeing the ghettos. Dr. Jost Walbaum, Hans Frank’s head of public health, concluded brutally: Naturally it would be best and simplest to give the people sufficient provisions, but that cannot be done. Thus shooting will be employed when one comes across a Jew outside the ghetto without special permission. One must, I can say it quite openly in this circle, be clear about it. There are only two ways. We sentence the Jews in the ghetto to death by hunger or we shoot them. Christopher R. Browning • 3 Walbaum’s remarks were greeted with “applause, clapping.”8 It is worth noting that the views of Lohse and Stahlecker were exchanged just days after Himmler visited the Baltic and just days before Karl Jäger’s Einsatzkommando 3 altered its targeting and began the systematic mass murder of Jewish women and children on August 15. The reactions of the Łódź ghetto administrators occurred in the first days of October, when both the deportation of Reich Jews and the founding of the death camp at Chełmno were imminent; the speeches in the General Government were presented just two days after Himmler met with Odilo Globocnik on October 13 and approved the construction of the death camp at Bełżec, and two weeks before the construction of that camp began. This array of contradictory German perceptions and attitudes on the very eve of the Final Solution illustrates that among the Germans themselves, there was no clear perception about the relationship between ghettoization and the ensuing mass murder of Jews. HISTORIOGRAPHY OF GHETTOIZATION With the advantage of hindsight, however, historians have constructed two major arguments about such a relationship. The traditional interpretation, expressed by an earlier generation of historians such as Andreas Hillgruber, Philip Friedman, and Isaiah Trunk, portrayed ghettoization as a calculated, preparatory step for the Final Solution. For example, Friedman wrote that Nazi Jewish policies in Poland from 1939 to 1941 “were not of a spontaneous or accidental nature, but were rather part and parcel of an unfolding plan, which began with the concentration and isolation of the Jews.” Furthermore, the “ghettos were designed to serve the Nazis as laboratories for testing the methods of slow and ‘peaceful’ destruction of whole groups of human beings.”9 A younger generation of historians, emphasizing local initiative rather than central planning, has portrayed the ghettos as a means by which local authorities first prevented any stabilization of Jewish living conditions and then exploited untenable circumstances to provide them with leverage to press the central government for ever more radical measures. For instance, Ulrich Herbert has recently written: The administration of the General Government therefore endeavored to portray as ostentatiously as possible that the living conditions of the Jews were “untenable.” . To the reports coming from everywhere over the “untenable circumstances” and the urgent inquiries as to what now must be done with the Jews, the Berlin authorities reacted with continual instructions 4 • BEFORE THE “FINAL SOLUTION” or subsequent sanctioning for ever more radical measures, which once again accelerated the anticipatory actions taken regionally.10 Neither interpretation is convincing. Certainly with hindsight, we can see how the ghettos served to concentrate the Jews, weaken them physically through hunger and disease, divide and demoralize them through the control mechanism of the Jewish Council (Judenrat), and finally provide the ideal staging area for deportation to the death camps. If the Germans had known where they were going from the beginning, they could scarcely have devised a more effective mechanism than the ghetto to achieve their goal, but it is unclear that such a motive and premeditated calculation lay behind ghettoization. Nor was the ghetto exploited by local authorities to create untenable circumstances in order to press the central government to approve or sanction ever more radical measures, including ultimately mass murder. From the beginning there was a struggle over ghettoization policy on the local level between two groups, the “productionists” and “attritionists.” Initially the former prevailed―in no small part because the latter could find no allies among either central or regional authorities for a policy of mass murder―but the victory of the productionists was both temporary and partial. The untenable circumstances within the ghettos and the problems that they posed to frustrated German administrators caused many to long for the day when the Jews would finally disappear. Nevertheless, most ghetto administrators continued to seek solutions within a productionist framework. When Berlin finally opted for mass murder, it found on the local level both eager attritionists who felt that their day had finally come, as well as exhausted productionists who either made no objection to being relieved of an intractable problem or quickly adapted to the new situation. Let us look more closely at German ghettoization policy as it moved through these stages. STAGES OF GHETTOIZATION The first stage―the process of creating ghettos in the first place―stretched over many months for one reason: there was no centrally ordered, uniform policy for ghettoization. The ghettos of Poland were created at different times in different places in different forms for different reasons. In his “express letter” (Schnellbrief) of September 21, 1939, Reinhard Heydrich had stipulated the immediate concentration of Jews “in ghettos” in order to facilitate “a better possibility of control and later deportation.” But aside from ordering the setting up of Jewish Councils, Heydrich left other arrangements Christopher R.
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