Genocide: - DIIS

Torben Jørgensen
ferences between Gypsies and Jews: The Gypsies were characterised by inborn
anti-social traits and therefore belonged under the jurisdiction of the
police while the Jews were seen as an anti-race, posing a security problem
for both the state and the “German Race”. The negative and positive population
policies were expressed in Himmler’s activites in connection with
the Umsiedlung/Aussiedlung in late-January 1943. Thousands of Poles were
moved by force from Zamosc to Berlin where they replaced one thousand
so-called “Rüstungsjuden” and their families who were then transported
back to Poland, to Auschwitz, on the very same train. Thereafter Volksdeutsche
from Rumania were brought to Zamosc, where there was now
room for them. In this connection the garden metaphor was put to use:
“To the fostering and preferring of the ones of higher value corresponds
the marginalisation of the ones of lesser value “. 26 This, Aly writes, is documentation
for the connection between “Umsiedlung” and “Aussiedlung”;
the planning and organisational unity between the positive and negative
population policies, “Only in this tension did the total biologism gain the
dynamic which at fi rst led to the murder of the European Jews and the
Gypsies”. 27 In his study of Adolf Eichmann and the Gestapo department
IVb4 – the logistical centre for the extermination of the Jews – the Austrian,
Hans Safrian, also insists on investigating the decision-making process
from below, i.e. focusing on the infl uence of the lower cadres on the decision
to go on with a general genocide. 28 Safrian accentuates the step-wise
radicalisation of the Judenpolitik, but sees the origin of a great part of the
driving force in an incipient Central European anti-Semitism was characteristic
of the individual state offi cials and the circle around Eichmann. The
ideology gave these practitioners of genocide enthusiasm for their job and
strengthened their personal initiative in connection with putting the German
Judenpolitik into practice.
Eichmann’s unit was in this phase [autumn 1941 – spring 1942, TJ] a switch-
25 Zygmunt Bauman (1994), Modernity and Holocaust. London, p. 122, 147.
26 “Der Förderung und Bevorzugung der “Höherwertigen“ entsprach die Marginalisierung
der “Minderwertigen““. Aly (1995), p. 381.
27 “Erst in dieser Spannung gewann der totale Biologismus jene Dynamik, die zunächst zum
Mord an den deutschen Geisteskranken und dann zum Mord an den europäischen Juden
und Zigeunern führte.“ Ibid., p. 383.
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