“Since December 1, many trains have been reaching the
area of the Generalgouvernement every day, containing
Poles and Jews from the districts recently annexed to
the Reich. A final central plan was laid down from
Berlin, so that district heads would be able to act in
accordance therewith, and to operate over a long
period.”
And further on:
“According to Section `A’ of the `long-range plan,’ six
hundred thousand Jews must first be brought from the
Eastern regions of the Reich to the
Generalgouvernement; out of these six hundred thousand,
forty thousand must be received immediately. The
Commander of the Security Police, to whom the
technical implementation of this assignment was
entrusted, has already been in touch with the districts
involved in the plan. There is lack of clarity on the
question of the Jewish Councils, as to to whom these
Jewish Councils were subordinate. Complaints are
received repeatedly from the officials in charge of the
districts, about the fact that no information at all is
given to them about police operations which were about
to take place in the future. In principle, the
handling of the resources of the Jewish labour forces
belongs to the police.”
In the middle of 1940 Frank announces, at a meeting of his
government:
“…The Fuehrer has also ordered that no more Jews will
be sent to the Generalgouvernement. On the contrary,
the Jews residing in the Generalgouvernement will also
be treated like all others, in an identical manner, by
means of a special programme, so that the
Generalgouvernement, too, will be free of Jews in the
not-too-distant future… SS Obergruppenfuehrer Krueger
advises that the matter of deporting all the Jews
living in the Generalgouvernement is now being worked
out. Memoranda have already been prepared as to how
the overseas operation is to be carried out… The
Generalgouvernement is negotiating solely with the Head
Office for Reich Security on the problems of uprooting
the residents…”
And on the eve of the Wannsee Conference Frank states, at a
meeting of his government:
“…In connection with the methods of operation against
the Jews, we are acting within the overall framework of
the Reich…they must get out. I have begun
negotiating in order to remove them to the East. On
this question, a conference will take place in January,
in Berlin, and I am sending State Secretary Dr. Buehler
to attend… At any rate, a major migration of Jews is
about to begin…”
And, after Wannsee, what does he say?
“…As State Secretary Dr. Buehler, advises, according
to the latest information there is a plan to dismantle
the Jewish ghettos, to retain the Jews who are capable
of working, and to send the remainder off to the East.
The Jews who are fit for work will be accommodated in a
number of large concentration camps, which are situated
in the production center… An additional proposal
coming from the Reich is to organize, in the large
towns, round-ups of residents found in the streets.”
State Secretary Krueger points to the fact that the Jewish
campaign has been prepared in all its details by the police,
and its implementation is simply a question of
transportation.
And what was to happen to the Jews while the police were
still in charge of the area of the Generalgouvernement? We
have heard about this from other witnesses who described
only a minute part of the terrible suffering.
Presiding Judge: One further question, Mr. Hausner. Defence
Counsel maintains, or he certainly will maintain, that there
was no command link between the Accused and the police in
the area of the Generalgouvernement – that is to say, that
the chain of command went directly from Heydrich to Krueger,
and through Krueger to Globocnik and the other commanders.
What do you say to that?
Attorney General: We say: The formal aspect is not the
decisive one from the criminal point of view. I assume that
when Dannecker sat in Paris he was, in a formal sense,
responsible to Knochen or other authorities, and so it was
with Zoepf in Holland and Wisliceny in Greece, and with
Eichmann himself, to Winkelmann in Budapest; he was obliged
to report to him and to receive permission from him to leave
the place, and so on. But that was not the decisive point –
the decisive point is the overall and practical planning.
It is not important whether he was able to give orders, or
if he could pass on directives and instructions. It is true
that we have fewer traces of his operations in Poland, as
far as the evidence is concerned, than we have in the West –
that is true. But these traces are sufficient since, first
of all, he stood at the centre of the entire operation; for
it was decided at the Wannsee Conference, with the approval
of all those present, that the Head Office for Reich
Security – in other words, Eichmann – would be the one to
carry out the Final Solution everywhere. We see him dealing
with foreign nationals, we see him dealing with the affairs
of the Warsaw Ghetto, we see the letter concerning Jews in
the Beskids Company, and all those are tracks which lead to
him. And now, what does he say? “I did not deal with the
Generalgouvernement.”
Thus, if his words had been marked by the seal of truth
throughout his evidence, possibly the Court would have to
give him the benefit of the doubt. But since it is
impossible to accept his version generally, since we have
already ascertained that he has not told the truth – and I
shall still attempt to prove this to the Court in other
important particulars – there is no special reason to
believe that precisely the Generalgouvernement, of all
regions, was excluded from the totality of the Final
Solution, when Frank repeatedly says, time and again, that
all the instructions and references, at least until 1943,
came from the Berlin centre. And the Berlin centre for the
solution of the Jewish Question was Eichmann. That is the
first point. And from the viewpoint of his liability as a
conspirator – that certainly brings him into every single
place from the moment he agreed to be a partner in the
practical implementation of the Final Solution.
The mode of operation in the Generalgouvernement, with all
its particular cruelties and brutalities which were revealed
in all their starkness, without even a covering fig-leaf,
without the necessity of any restraint, also bears
resemblance, nonetheless, to the system in the West. About
this, we know that he supplied the guidance, he showed the
way and he gave direction. And now let us analyse some
portions of the evidence.
The witness Lichtman described the system of rounding-up:
“Suddenly, one day in the morning they closed off the
Jewish quarter. There were streets where mostly Jews
lived. And German soldiers and officers burst brutally
into every house. They were shouting at the men to get
out of the rooms, they threw everything out of the
cupboards, destroyed everything and beat people up…
Many people were shot… many killed.”
Further on she describes the establishment of the Jewish
Councils, the mass deportation to concentration centres, and
goes on to depict what happened at Mielec.
“They gathered Jewish men, mainly older men, from their
homes. They drove them all together into the great
synagogue of Mielec, and there almost all the Jews were
slaughtered and shot, and those who jumped out of the
windows were shot outside… Before dawn, military
units, black-clad and green-clad, surrounded us and
chased us out of our homes and made us stand in the
market-place. Those people unable to run outside at
once, those who were sick, were shot on the spot or in
bed. Then they lined us up, all those who remained in
the market-place. After that they selected young men –
they put them on one side, and women and children and
parents they put in a line, on both sides went soldiers
with ropes, and the Jews stood in the middle.”
These were members of the SS, the SD and the SA, she said.
The witness Pachter spoke about the carrying out of mass
expulsions:
“…When we reached the top we were surrounded by
guards so closely that I have seen the like of it only
at the war front. After they had us rounded up, they
told us to stand in a semi-circle… They told us that
we were going on a march and that we had to hand over
everything in our possession: coins, gold, silver,
watches, and they left us with twenty zloty… They
gave an order not to speak, not to look around and not
to be in contact with one another. Anyone violating
the order would be shot. They gave the order to march
forward. We began walking… A young girl managed to
run after the column and to shout all the time until we
reached that village: Daddy, Mummy! Near Holotoshins
the girl was removed. We didn’t know what happened to
her – we only heard a shot… From time to time anyone
who became tired and stopped, anyone who paused to
arrange his clothes, was told to leave the line, and
thereafter we heard, behind us, the sound of a shot…
And so we marched… Our legs sank because this was the
season of the heaviest rains. This was in the month of
December… When we had already sat or lain down on the
ground, they came to argue with us and to tell us that
we were responsible for the war… They took all our
religious officials…and a number of other bearded
men… From time to time we heard that they had also
taken men from other groups. We estimated that on that
evening about two hundred men were taken. We did not
see what happened to these people, but there still
remained a hope in our hearts that, perhaps, this was
not a death march.
“The next morning they again formed us into ranks, but
in each row there were only three men…”
Noah Zabludowicz told us about the order to wear the Jewish
badge, and the punishment for not wearing the badge was
death. The Court will recall that under cross-examination
the Accused admitted that the idea of the Jewish badge was
worked out and conveyed by his Section to all regions of the
German occupation (Session 97, Vol. IV, pp. xxxx). The
instructions were given in the form of an order, they were
issued from his Department, they were signed by Heydrich and
were intended for all the areas of occupation. We shall
submit, in writing, a list of these instructions concerning
the wearing of the Yellow Badge. From the witnesses giving
evidence on the Holocaust in Hungary, we heard that
literally heaps of cloth were brought to his office there,
from which the badge was cut out.
Zabludowicz also testified about the concentration of Jews
in Ciechanow. Whoever was found outside the restricted area
– was shot. It was made obligatory for the Jews to work.
Whoever avoided this obligation – was liable to the death
penalty. This was in the territory of the Reich – not in
the Generalgouvernement.
This was the method, this was the formula operating
according to one centralizing source. In this manner
Heydrich’s instructions of 21 December 1939, were carried
out. He gave orders at the time that the most stringent
measures were to be adopted, and that any sentence against
Jews which was not a capital sentence had to be brought
specifically to his attention.
The same picture which Zabludowicz presented was depicted by
Judge Beisky about Cracow. The same picture was depicted of
recurring horrors, the oppression, the degradation and, in
the end, the labour camp at Plaszow, one of the creations of
the SS. Here, merely for the sake of reference, is one
passage:
“A group that appeared with food in its possession…a
particular group of the Abladekommando, a unit which
was in charge of the offloading of goods from the
railway station – they found food in its possession.
Then the camp commander, Untersturmfuehrer Amon Goeth,
came up and asked whose food it was. When no one
answered, he took a young man whose name was
Nachmansohn… and shot him. On the same occasion he
shot another man, Disler. And then someone had a
brilliant idea and said that they had brought the
food…. Then everyone received one hundred lashes.
One of the men…named Mandel…remained lying there
until the group was taken to the parade ground, and
there everyone received his “deserts.” He himself had
to count the blows, and if he made an error in the
counting, he had to go back to the beginning… There
was an instance with that group where one of the older
men was beaten and cried out a great deal, and after
that had to go to the camp commander and to inform him
that he had received his punishment, and he thanked him
for it. When he turned around, he shot him, and he,
too, was killed.”
After that came the liquidation of the Cracow Ghetto in
March 1943. Of the 600,000 people who had been in it,
between eight and ten thousand who had remained alive were
brought to Plaszow.
The Court will remember that the Accused was questioned on
the subject of the liquidation of the ghettos. In his
Statement to the police, after he had spoken of the
liquidation of the Lodz Ghetto, Eichmann was asked what the
rule was concerning other ghettos when these were closed
down and their inmates transferred to concentration camps.
To this he replied in the same examination (on page 3116):
“This was something which was done on the basis of the
expulsion order issued by the Reichsfuehrer-SS. It had
to go through me; at that time it had to go through
IVB4.”
Hence he acknowledged in his examination the liquidation of
the ghettos, and evidently he had good grounds for doing so.
His argument in Court that he was confused at the police
interview when he made these remarks is thus refuted, and it
is without foundation.
Zivia Lubetkin told the Court of the restrictive laws which
rained down on the Jews of Warsaw, of the prohibitory
decrees issued day after day, of the special “actions”
against the Jewish intelligentsia and the leadership, of the
enormous round-ups by the Schutzpolizei and the SS, and of
the so-called transfer to the East (Aussiedlung nach dem
Osten).
Rachel Auerbuch described the spiritual destruction which
preceded the physical destruction, the deliberate
degradation and oppression which were designed to prove that
the Jews did not deserve to live. Dr. Berman gave evidence
of the violence to Jewish children, of the special
wickedness towards the Jewish child, against whom the
efforts at annihilation were directed especially. There
were, in Warsaw, whence they were transferred for
extermination – one hundred thousand Jewish children. We
heard the same accounts from Przemysl, about the baby whom
his Nazi murderer tore apart like a rag, and about the dying
mother crawling towards him, her blood intermingling with
its blood, and thus the two of them died. We heard about
the eighty lashes which a Jewish lad was given there, when
fifty were enough to kill. This lad is alive today – he is
an officer in the Israeli police; his name is Michael
Goldmann, and during the investigations by Bureau 06 he
prepared the files on Poland and Soviet Russia.
Last-Modified: 1999/06/14
