Black Earth(85)

No one had to say that the war as originally conceived had been lost. No one had to explain that colonization of a particular territory inhabited by subhumans, as the Nazis saw matters, was yielding pride of place to the liberation of the planet from the domination of nonhuman Jews. When in October 1941 Himmler spoke with one of his enterprising lieutenants, Odilo Globocnik, the SS and Police Leader for the Lublin district of the General Government, there would have been no need for such explicit talk. The Lublin district lay at the eastern edge of the General Government, on what had been the border with Soviet Ukraine until June 1941; and it had been Globocnik’s job in the six months after the invasion to prepare for the eastern empire. His Lublin district, thick with prisons and camps, perhaps the ghastliest part of the General Government, was originally meant as a kind of testing ground for the Lebensraum to the east. As the Soviets held the line and Hitler’s priorities shifted, Himmler and Globocnik found the way to realize their Führer’s desires by murdering the Jews of Poland.

In the occupied Soviet Union in the second half of 1941, Globocnik’s SS colleagues, men such as Stahlecker and Jeckeln, had improvised techniques of mass killing from the chaos created by the first weeks of a war of elimination against a state defined as Jewish. In the Lublin District of the General Government in late 1941 and early 1942, Globocnik was starting from very different initial conditions. Globocnik’s innovation was to assemble the political fragments left by German policies of state destruction over the previous several years. From the east, he took the starved and demoralized Soviet prisoners of war. There are no known cases of anyone refusing to leave the starvation camps when offered a chance to do so, nor are any likely to be found. Trained at a camp known as Trawniki, Soviet citizens released from the starvation facilities (among them Belarusians, Chuvash, Estonians, Komi, Latvians, Lithuanians, Romanians, Russians, Tatars, Ukrainians, and at least one half Jew) would help build and guard the death factories at Be??ec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. Later they would be deployed to empty some of the larger ghettos, such as Warsaw. From the realities of occupied Poland, Globocnik would exploit the ghettos, their Jewish councils, the Jewish police, and Jewish and Polish informers.

From the west, from Germany itself, Globocnik would borrow the technique of mass murder through carbon monoxide. In Germany and in the annexed territories of Poland, German doctors had murdered with canisters of carbon monoxide; in occupied Soviet Belarus and Soviet Ukraine exhaust was pumped from vans into their own holds. Christian Wirth of Hitler’s personal chancery, the man who had run the “euthanasia” program in Germany, found the technical solution that would be applied in these new facilities. He brought five young colleagues from the “euthanasia” program, most of them specialists in burning corpses, to Be??ec, where they experimented with methods of generating carbon monoxide in a closed space. They finally settled on a variation of the eastern technique: exhaust from internal combustion engines, pumped into sealed chambers. Some hundred more participants of the gassing program in Germany arrived in Globocnik’s Lublin District in late 1941.

The program of mass killing developed by Himmler, Globocnik, and Wirth involved bringing these fragments together into a new whole, and that whole into murderous motion. Beginning in early 1942 in the Lublin District of the General Government, Globocnik’s SS men would go from ghetto to ghetto, explaining the mission to the German stationary police. Under German supervision, the Jewish councils would order and the Jewish police would organize selections from the ghetto population to be taken to the trains. When the trains arrived at the new death facilities, the Jews would be murdered in gas chambers built and manned by Soviet citizens.

The practice of extermination was contingent in several ways upon the economics of scarcity. At the highest level, the failure of the German colonial campaign meant that the German leadership had to choose among victims. No tremendous bounty was produced by the starvation of Slavs, but Jews could be blamed for this failure. In the politics of relative deprivation, Poles who inherited Jewish property were all the more attached to what they had gained, and Soviet citizens were desperate to find a way to leave the starvation camps. In Nazi decisions about the fate of Polish Jews, one relevant calculation became Jewish productivity versus Jewish consumption of calories. At moments when food seemed more pressing, Jews were killed; at moments when labor seemed more urgent, Jews were spared. In such a dark market, in which Jews were nothing but economic units, the general tendency was toward extermination. In July 1942, when it became known that the General Government was to become a net food exporter, Himmler decided that all of its Jews should be killed by the end of the year.