Giving the victims a voice, identifying them as human beings, is the primary task of the source edition “The Persecution and Murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933-1945” (VEJ).
It is laid out on 16 volumes and divided geographically. Volume 10 has now been published by the one dealing with the parts of Poland incorporated into the territory of the German Reich, not the heartland administered as the “Generalgouvernement”.
The orientation of the edition to the administrative and military borders that were then decreed by the Nazi regime made sense especially in this volume, when it was officially an imperial territory. On the other hand, a cursory reading of the – as always – around 300 documents on a good 800 pages makes it clear that the cruelty of the Nazi henchmen and, accordingly, the unspeakable suffering of the Jews did not differ in any other area.
It is the principle of the edition of the project, which is laid out on 16 volumes, of various sources, from the official letter of an SS officer to the desperately scribbled message of a persecuted person, to be presented in chronological order and explained as far as necessary, especially with regard to biographical information.
This principle has received a lot of specialist criticism. With the now 14 volumes and their overwhelming abundance of materials, however, a picture of the Holocaust that was previously unimaginable has become visible in its course.
Polish Jews had to give way
The incorporated areas, mainly the Reichsgaue Danzig-West Prussia and Wartheland, were to serve as a new home for the approximately 500,000 “Volksdeutsche” resettled from Eastern Europe. The Polish Jews had to give way; they should be deported to the neighboring General Government.
However, this was not quite successful; instead, “the situation of the Jews in the integrated areas was characterized by intensive exploitation as forced laborers” – it says in the introduction to the volume – “as it was organized by the SS in the larger ghettos and in eastern Upper Silesia”.
The Auschwitz concentration camp with its numerous satellite camps was located in eastern Upper Silesia; it is documented in volume 16.
Maintain normality
In Warthegau, on the other hand, the Polish city of Lodz, Germanized in 1940 to “Litzmannstadt”, was the center of the persecution. Of the approximately 400,000 Jews who originally lived in Wartheland, the 250,000 remaining after the evictions to the General Government were crammed in the Lodz ghetto.
The specialty of the ghetto was its function as a supplier of labor. Here too, the Nazi regime used the authority of a “Jewish elder” who had to carry out the German orders and who was burdened with the terrible task of selecting workable ghetto inmates.
The elder Elde Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski tried to maintain something like normality and to protect the ghetto from deportations through labor. That didn’t work; Rather, the nearby extermination camp Kulmhof / Chelmno was created to carry out the murder campaigns that had been approved by SS chief Himmler.
In August 1944, the Litzmannstadt ghetto was dissolved and the remaining 68,000 residents, including the “Jewish elder” Rumkowski, were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and murdered.
Cruelty to Nazi henchmen
“The everyday occurrence of crimes was characteristic of the unlimited arbitrariness and terror against Jews in Reichsgau Wartheland as in the other occupied Polish territories,” writes volume editor Ingo Loose in the introduction.
Attached documents testify to the cruelty of the Nazi henchmen; and be it, as the report by a concentration camp inmate from Kulmhof states, to have the penned-up victims repeated, “We Jews thank Adolf Hitler for the food”.
At the same time, the Nazi regime functions as an authority. The Gestapo Reichsbahn, for example, sent an invoice for seven deportation trains for 20 484.80 Reichsmarks: “Please pay the amount to the ticket office at Litzmannstadt Hbf.”
No escape
The sisters Roza and Lusia Gips managed to send a postcard to their parents in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942: “Dear ones! Nothing helps, we know, there is no way out. “
No, there was no way out. The fact that the Polish government-in-exile in London attached “little importance” to the news it received about the killings is a fact that the introduction does not hide. This does not reduce an iota of the crimes of the Nazi regime. Of the 400,000 Jews in the Warthegau alone, fewer than 10,000 survived, and in the incorporated areas “more than half a million Jews were murdered by the Germans”.
The persecution and murder of European Jews by Nazi Germany 1933-1945. Volume 10: Poland. Integrated areas, August 1941-1945. Edited by Ingo Loose. De Gruyter Oldenbourg, Berlin / Boston 2020. 862 pages, € 59.95.
