The Historiography of the Holocaust

Ghettoization 75
Interpreting ghettos in such terms, Friedman saw ghettos as transitional
measures, rather than as ends in and of themselves. Rejecting what he saw to be
the explanations for ghettoization put forward by Nazi propaganda – as a means
of limiting epidemics or stopping ‘Jewish’ economic contact – Friedman
suggested that ‘the true reasons for the setting up of the ghettos emerge from
allusions made by high officials in private conversations or in conferences held
by the Nazi party’. 50 These revealed that ghettos such as that established in
Lódz in early 1940, were created as ‘a necessary transitional solution of the
Jewish Question’ and nothing ‘more than a transitional measure.’ 51
However, while transitional in nature, Friedman did suggest that ghettos
should be interpreted as deadly spaces in themselves. Not only did he suggest
that ‘there is indirect evidence...that the “concentration” of the Jews was
intended as a preparation for gradual extermination, as originally conceived,
by hunger, cold, disease, epidemics, forced labor and, finally, by the murder
operations called “actions”’; 52 he went further to argue that ‘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’. 53 Such an interpretation
of ghettoization as a self-consciously implemented exterminatory measure
became a plank of later intentionalist writing, perhaps best illustrated in Lucy
Dawidowicz’s suggestion that ‘the only institution comparable to the Nazi
ghetto was the Nazi concentration camp.... Death bestrode the Nazi ghetto
and was its true master, exercising its dominion through hunger, forced labor
and disease.’ 54
In marked contrast, functionalist writers interpreted ghettoization as a
policy envisaged apart from extermination, suggesting that exterminatory
policies were adopted only when ghettoization policies were seen by local
actors to be failing. In contrast to Friedman’s assumption that Heydrich’s ‘ultimate
goal’ in implementing ghettoization was destruction, Hans Mommsen
argued that ‘the primary motive was revealed in the executory provisions of
Himmler’s decree for the Reichsgau Wartheland: “The purging and protection
of the new German areas” was designed to provide housing and employment
prospects for the ethnic German settlers.’ 55 However, once established, these
ghettos presented increasingly intolerable conditions. It is in this context that
Martin Broszat argued that a decision was made to implement exterminatory
policies as a solution to the starvation, disease and overcrowding of the ghettos.
He posited that ‘epidemics and a high mortality rate [in the ghettos]
suggested the possibility of “helping nature along” in a systematic fashion’. 56
Thus, ghettoization was viewed by Broszat not as prelude to destruction, but
rather as a crucial element in the radicalization of Nazi anti-‘Jewish’ policy. He
noted that ghettoization was a ‘form of self-confirmation and self-fulfilling
prophecy’, given that ‘epidemics in the ghettos made them a threat to the
health of the general population’. 57 Ghettoization as a self-fulfilling prophecy