The_Holokaust_-_origins,_implementation,_aftermath

CHRISTIAN GERLACH
until June 1941. In Galicia, mass executions of Jews by the Germans began in
October 1941. 12 Construction of the extermination camp at Belzec in the district
of Lublin was begun in November 1941. 13 It was intended exclusively for the
destruction of Jews. Its capacity was relatively limited, however, so that it could
not have been designed for a rapid extermination of all Jews living in the General
Government. 14
(d) In the annexed Reich province of the Wartheland, mass murders of Jews
began in some areas in late September or early October 1941. At about this same
time, construction was begun on an extermination camp in Chelmno, near Lodz.
There, beginning on December 8, 1941, an SS-Commando unit used gas vans to
exterminate Jews from neighboring districts. On January 16, 1942, the execution
of Polish Jews from Lodz itself started. 15
(e) Sometime between September 14 and September 18, 1941, Hitler approved
the inauguration of a program to deport German Jews to the eastern territories.
For some time, Himmler, Heydrich, and various regional party leaders (Gauleiter)
had been pressing him to do so. Starting on October 15, transports filled with
Jews departed from cities throughout the Reich (including Austria and the
Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia). They were bound for Lodz, Minsk,
Kaunas, and Riga. The German leadership, the SS, and the police viewed these
transports as an interim measure. Organizational and technical problems limited
the deportations to a small fraction of the Jews living in Germany. It was also in
September of 1941 that the deportation of French Jews, limited initially to those
being held in detention, was announced. 16
The point of transition to a policy of exterminating the Jewish people, or the
initial preparations for it, can thus be clearly seen in a number of occupied
territories and regions beginning in September and October of 1941. Total
liquidation began in the occupied Soviet lands. Selective mass executions of
those seen as “unfit for labor” began in western Ukraine, in western White
Russia, and in the Wartheland. In Serbia, executions of Jewish men served as a
prelude to the murders of women and children, groups that were “useless” in
the eyes of the occupation authorities. In the context of these developments,
most historians have hitherto equated the decision to deport German Jews with
the decision to liquidate them. At the most, it is assumed that there were two
separate decisions. One, involving the execution of Soviet Jews, would have
occurred in July or August of 1941. 17 The second, concerning the extermination
of Jews from the rest of Europe, is supposed to have been reached in September
or October of that year. 18 There are some historians, it must also be noted, who
would date these decisions as early as January 1941, or even earlier. 19
The Wannsee Conference was a meeting between representatives from the
RSHA and state secretaries and other officials from the ministerial bureaucracy.
Its purpose was to discuss the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” It took
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