The Implementation of the Final Solution after the Wannsee Conference
89. We shall now review the implementation of the Final
Solution in various countries and begin with those countries
in which Jews were rounded-up, brought to assembly points,
and expelled to places of mass extermination in the East.
We shall go from country to country and note briefly the
background of events, emphasizing certain facts, the
description of which is necessary to lay the ground for the
evaluation of the Accused’s responsibility, which will be
made later on. We wish to emphasize at this point again
that we are neither require or able to take upon ourselves
the task of the historian, and those matters of which we
will mention will be made, out of the whole complicated web
of events of the years of the Holocaust, will necessarily be
fragmentary, and they are not cited here for the purpose of
exhaustive historical description.
90. Again, we begin with Germany itself, because the actions
there served as the prototype for what happened in the other
countries from which Jews were expelled to the East, both in
regard to the anti-Jewish legislation which preceded the
expulsion, and also in regard to the carrying out of the
expulsions themselves, naturally with changes necessitated
by special conditions in each country.
Of the later anti-Jewish legislation in Germany, mention
should be made of:
(a) The order for the marking of Jewish apartments,
issued in March [1942] (T/640), in order to complete
the isolation of the Jews from the rest of the
population. As with other anti-Jewish decrees of this
kind, this order was not published in the usual way,
but handed to the Jewish organizations, which had to
publish it in a bulletin intended for Jews only.
(b)A Jew was no longer considered fit to keep domestic
animals (dogs, cats and birds), according to special
instructions published on 15 May 1942 (T/642).
(c) Regulation No. 11 “legalized” the robbery of Jewish
property only if the expulsion was to a place beyond
the Reich borders. When the expulsion was to a place
within the Reich – for instance Terezin, or in the case
of a Jew who had died before crossing the borders of
the Reich – other ways were found, so that everything
should proceed in a proper and orderly manner. One of
the ways is described in detail in a circular issued by
the Accused’s Section, signed by Suhr, the Section’s
expert in such matters (T/729). The law dated 14 July
1933 (T/65) was invoked, enabling the confiscation of
property devoted to aspirations “hostile to the nation
and to the state,” as defined by the Minister of the
Interior. The Minister of the Interior published an
overall definition on 2 March 1942, which stated that
the aspirations of all deported Jews were hostile to
the nation and to the state.
(d) On 18 September 1942, a conversation took place
between Himmler and Thierack, the then Minister of
Justice, drastically limiting legal proceedings and the
ordinary processes of punishment. It was agreed
between them, inter alia, that “unsocial elements would
be excluded from the operation of penal procedure and
handed over to the Reichsfuehrer-SS for extermination
through labour.” Those mentioned included all those
under protective custody – Jews, Gypsies, Russians and
Ukrainians (T/197). In other words, a Jew, a Gypsy, a
Russian or a Ukrainian who was sentenced to
imprisonment for any offence, would be handed over to
the SS for “extermination through labour.” The open
use of this term should be noted, in contrast to the
method customary in the Nazi regime, of euphemistically
distorting the usual meaning of words. Thierack again
returns to this matter in his letter to Bormann, dated
13 October 1942 (T/198). These discussions culminated
in Regulation No. 13 under the Law of Nationality,
published on 1 July 1943, according to which only the
police was competent to deal with crimes committed by
Jews (T/643). This completed, also according to the
letter of the “law,” the process of putting the Jew
outside the pale of the law, which had been a matter of
practice long before this.
How expulsions from Reich territory were carried out during
the period after the Wannsee Conference, we shall illustrate
by a Duesseldorf Gestapo file submitted to us (exhibits
T/1395-1398). The first document in this file (T/1395) is a
circular dated 31 January 1942, issued by the Accused’s
office and bearing his signature. The reference number is
IVB4-2093/42g (391), which henceforth is the special marking
for all transports of Jews from the Reich. The circular
includes instructions defining certain categories of Jews,
such as foreign nationals, which are not to be included in
the deportations. For the time being, the purpose of the
circular is to fix the number of people to be expelled.
According to the circular, the Duesseldorf office collects
the necessary data and transfers them to the Accused’s
office on 9 February 1942. Then, file T/1395 includes
“instructions for the technical implementation of the
evacuation of Jews to the Generalgouvernement (Trawniki near
Lublin).” The part played by the local Gestapo authorities
was defined thus:
“The rounding-up and arrest of individuals to be
evacuated, the transport of these Jews in special
trains of the Reich Railways according to a timetable
laid down by the Head Office for Reich Security, in co-
ordination with the Ministry of Transport, and also the
transfer of property.”
Each train will carry one thousand Jews. Each person is
permitted to take with him fifty Reichsmark, one suitcase, a
complete outfit (good shoes), bedding, food for two weeks,
eating utensils (a plate or a pot) and a spoon. The
document continues:
“The Commander of the Security Police and the SD in
Cracow is responsible for the reception of the evacuees
in the Generalgouvernement, and for this purpose he
will avail himself of the units of the Commander of
the SS and the Police in the Lublin district…the
departure of a deportation train is to be communicated
immediately by means of the attached form…to the Head
Office for Reich Security, Section IVB4, (b) to the
Commander of the Security Police and the SD, SS
Oberfuehrer Dr. Schoengarth, in Cracow, (c) to the
Commander of the SS and the Police in the Lublin
district, SS Brigadefuehrer Globocnik. The arrival and
orderly reception of transports at the place of
destination, will be reported by the receiving
authority (Commander of the SS and the Police in the
Lublin district) to the Head Office for Reich Security,
Section IVB4, by means of the attached form… On the
completion of the operation, a general report
containing numerical data (division according to sex,
age and profession) is to be supplied to the Head
Office for Reich Security by both the forwarding
authority and the receiving authority.” (These
instructions were submitted as exhibit T/737.)
File T/1395 also included a copy of the above circular,
T/729, in connection with the handling of the property
of evacuated Jews, and also document T/724, which deals
with the setting up of the Special Account “W.”
91. Special Account “W” was the name of a cunning device
invented by the Accused’s Section for the transfer of money
from evacuated Jews to its own direct disposal (T/734).
Perhaps this device was rather aimed against other Reich
authorities which might benefit from Jewish property than
against the Jews themselves, for they lost their property in
any case. The procedure used was an instruction to the
Reich Association of Jews in Germany, to ensure that each
evacuated Jew “contribute” not less than twenty-five per
cent of his cash to the Special Account “W.” The Accused in
his testimony explained (Session 77, Vol. IV, p.xxxx71) that
the account was used to finance the expulsion of the Jewish
“contributors” themselves. Even if this explanation is
correct, the balance left over after the expulsion was
completed in any case finally passed into the hands of the
RSHA, all the accounts of the Association of Jews having
been blocked in favour of the RSHA from the outset (T/665,
p. 9).
This is the directive transmitted by the Accused’s office to
the District Gestapo at Duesseldorf, which in turn writes on
17 March 1942 to its local branches, conveying to them
instructions requiring action by them. On 10 April 1942, a
telephone message is received from the Accused’s office
stating that a transport is likely to leave Duesseldorf on
22 April 1942. Accordingly, the action is planned in
Dusseldorf: The timetable, the men to handle the matter and
their duties are fixed along the lines of the instructions
issued at Nuremberg (T/620), as mentioned above. The Gestapo
man at Duesseldorf is charged with additional tasks before
the transport leaves:
He must see to it that two execution officers are present to
hand the confiscation orders to the Jews; he has to meet
with the local railway authorities to co-ordinate
sub_transports from various points; he also has to overcome
difficulties made by the local labour authority which is
reluctant to release Jews employed in enterprises important
to the war effort. In this connection, a telephone
conversation takes place with Novak, one of the Accused’s
assistants.
Three Jews escaped and another three committed suicide. And
thus the transport rolled eastwards.
Last-Modified: 1999/05/27
