In practice, this meant that the Jews arriving from the old Reich were treated differently in the various reception areas. In Lodz and Minsk, German Jews were crammed into the ghettos, with the twist that, in the latter city, over eleven thousand Belorussian Jews were shot to make room for the new arrivals. The situation in Kaunas, in Lithuania, was different, however. There, the men of Karl Jäger’s murderously efficient Einsatzkommando 3 were waiting as the deportation trains arrived, shooting nearly five thousand German Jews within a few days in late November. In Riga, Latvia, all the deportees on a train from Berlin were murdered on 30 November, a situation that aroused quite a stir since many of the victims were Mischlinge (part Jews), war veterans, or married to Aryans. Shooting Ostjuden was one thing; executing German Jews, “from our cultural sphere… [and not] the native bestial hordes,” as Wilhelm Kube put it, clearly presented a problem. Himmler, in fact, had telephoned that afternoon in an attempt to halt the execution but was too late. After this incident, German Jews arriving in Riga were no longer executed immediately. Instead, they were confined in temporary camps outside the city, where the atrocious conditions meant that many died within a short time. By mid-December, after some twenty-five thousand local Jews were executed, deportees from Germany were allowed into the Riga ghetto, where large numbers died of “natural causes.” Others were shot in small groups in a nearby forest, while the deportees on several trains that arrived in late December, January, and February were liquidated on arrival.70
These gruesome activities confirmed a pattern of confused local reactions but also a sinister long-term trend. Local objections forced a reduction in the number of deportation trains leaving Germany in the late autumn, but the transports themselves could not be stopped entirely, despite the fact that they contributed to a severe shortage of railcars and bottlenecks in the transportation system crippling the German advance toward Moscow. Bock protested the continuing presence of “Jew trains,” fearing that the “arrival of these trains must result in the loss of an equal number of trains vital to supplying the attack,” but to little avail. Once the Jewish deportations had begun, Himmler and Heydrich refused to halt them. Clearly, no blueprint for systematic mass murder had been devised and no general order issued when the deportations began to execute German Jews on arrival in the east, but chaotic conditions in the ghettos in Poland, the public nature of mass shootings, the drain on German manpower, and the psychological burden on the perpetrators all demanded a more discrete, efficient, and orderly process of killing the Jews. Bolstered by his authorization of 31 July to prepare some sort of final solution for European Jewry for implementation after the Russian campaign, which now seemed to be in its concluding stages, Heydrich began to bring together elements from three existing programs: the concentration camp, the euthanasia program, and the resettlement program. Out of this fluid process of experimentation would come perhaps the most sinister invention of the twentieth century: the extermination camp (Vernichtungslager).71
In July and August, even before the euthanasia killings had spread to the concentration camps, Nazi authorities had been searching for a more humane way—more humane for the killers, not the victims—to dispose of large numbers of people. As Walter Rauff, an official of the Criminal Technical Institute of the RSHA, explained to an aide, a “more humane method of execution” was needed for the Einsatzgruppen since members of the firing squads suffered from frequent nervous breakdowns. Out of this necessity came a number of proposals, some disastrous, such as a test using explosives on mental patients that left body parts strewn about, and others more promising. By mid-September, a number of officials were exploring the possibilities of using poison gas. Hitler had suspended the adult euthanasia program on 24 August, which meant that trained killing experts were available to lend their expertise. Rauff himself charged his technicians with constructing a gas van that would channel engine exhaust into a sealed compartment, thus killing the victims by carbon monoxide poisoning. In September and October, experiments using Zyklon-B, a common agent used in the pest extermination business in Germany, were undertaken at the concentration and prisoner-of-war camp at Auschwitz. Although many of these trials were clearly associated with the expansion of the euthanasia program into the concentration camps, Nazi officials were quick to see the broader implications. That fall, for example, a gassing facility at Chelmno, originally conceived by local officials for the Wartheland, was accelerated to completion since it now fit well with broader goals at the center. By early October, plans had been made for the construction of a second large camp at Birkenau, adjacent to Auschwitz, complete with underground cellar rooms with large forced air ventilation systems attached to crematories. At roughly the same time, near Lublin, under the supervision of Christian Wirth, a leading functionary of the euthanasia program, construction began on a facility at Belzec that would use exhaust gas from engines channeled into sealed rooms to kill Jews. The Nazis also began preliminary work on another camp near Lublin, at Sobibor, that autumn.72
Significantly, Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi deportation expert who later claimed that Heydrich had told him in the fall of 1941, “The Führer has ordered the physical destruction of the Jews,” also met with Wirth at Belzec. Although Eichmann’s postwar testimony was admittedly somewhat contradictory, the fact that Hitler had authorized the deportation of German Jews and the dispatch of euthanasia personnel to the east adds credence to his recollections. So does the fact that, on 17 October, Heydrich intervened to prevent the evacuation of Spanish Jews interned in France to Morocco, on the grounds that “these Jews would be… out of direct reach of the measures for a basic solution to the Jewish question to be enacted after the war.” The next day Himmler noted to Heydrich, “No emigration by Jews to overseas,” while on the twenty-third the emigration gates were sealed. That day, Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller circulated a Himmler order to the various police and SD agencies announcing that all Jewish emigration was to be stopped. A fateful divide had been passed; what had formerly been official Nazi policy, a Judenfrei Europe through expulsion, had been definitively altered. The Jews of Europe would now be deported to the east.73
Nor would their eventual fate be in doubt. Talking with Fritz Sauckel and Fritz Todt on 17 October, Hitler, in an expansive mood, sketched his vision of the Germanization of the eastern territories. The Slavs, he mused, would be treated “as Indians,” with some elements “sifted.” For the rest, “We are getting rid of the destructive Jews entirely…. I proceed with these matters ice-cold. I feel myself to be only the executor of a will of history.” Four days later, meeting with Bormann, Hitler clearly sketched his sense of mission: “When we exterminate this plague, then we perform a deed for humanity, the significance of which our men out there can still not at all imagine.” On the night of the twenty-fifth, Hitler recalled to Himmler and Heydrich his Reichstag prophecy, then boasted, “We are writing history anew from the racial standpoint.” By that time, not only was the extermination camp at Chelmno, near Lodz, nearly completed, but plans were also set in motion to construct two other such facilities, at Mogilev (in Belorussia) and Riga. In mid-November the Topf company had been commissioned to construct a huge crematorium at Mogilev, with the first oven actually delivered in December. By then, however, military events had interceded, and the camp and gas chambers were never constructed; instead, the crematory units were sent to Auschwitz.74