THE
DESTRUCTION
OF THE
EUROPEAN
JEWS
Ll'lJVlIQ
V
O
L
THE
DESTRUCTION m
OF THE e
EUROPEAN
n
JEWS °
REVISED AND DEFINITIVE EDITION E'1
RAUL HILBERG E
HOLMES & MEIER
NEW YORK LONDON
Published in the United States of America 1985 by
Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc.
30 Irving Place
New York, N.Y. 10003
Great Britain:
Holmes & Meier Publishers, Ltd.
Unit 5 Greenwich Industrial Estate
345 Woolwich Road Charlton, London SE7
Copyright © 1985 by Raul Hilberg
All rights reserved
Book design by Stephanie Barton
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Hilberg, Raul, 1926—
The destruction of the European lews.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) 2. Germany—
Politics and government—1933-1945. I. Title.
D810.J4H5 1985
940.53'15'03924
83-18369
ISBN 0-8419-0832-X (set)
Manufactured in the United States of America
V O L U M E O N E
c
P R E F A C E i x
o
C H A P T E R O N E 3
PRECEDENTS
C H A P T E R T W O 2 9
N
ANTECEDENTS
C H A P T E R T H R E E 5 1
T
T H E STRUCTURE OF DESTRUCTION
C H A P T E R F O U R 63
DEFINITION BY DECREE
E
C H A P T E R F I V E 81
EXPROPRIATION
Dismissals 83
N
Aryanizations 94
Property Taxes 134
Blocked Money 139
T
Forced Labor and Wage Regulations 144
Special Income Taxes 148
s
Starvation Measures 149
C H A P T E R S I X 1 5 5
CONCENTRATION
The Reich-Protektorat Area 157
Poland 188
The Expulsions 205
Ghetto Formation 215
Ghetto Maintenance 234
Confiscations 239
Labor Exploitation 249
Food Controls 259
Sickness and Death in the Ghettos 266
C H A P T E R S E V E N 2 7 1
MOBILE KILLING OPERATIONS
Preparations 274
The First Sweep 291
Strategy 292
Cooperation with the Mobile Killing Units 2 99
The Killing Operations and Their Repercussions 317
The Killing of the Prisoners of War 334
The Intermediary Stage 341
The Second Sweep 368
V O L U M E T W O
C H A P T E R E I G H T 3 9 1
DEPORTATIONS
Central Agencies of Deportation 407
The Reich-Protektorat Area 416
The Uprooting Process 416
Special Problem 1: Mischlinge and Jews in Mixed Marriages 417
Special Problem 2: The Theresienstadt Jews 430
Special Problem 3: The Deferred Jews 439
Special Problem 4: The Incarcerated Jews 449
Seizure and Transport 454
Confiscations 471
Poland 482
Preparations 483
The Conduct of the Deportations 489
Economic Consequences 523
The Semicircular Arc 543
The North 554
Norway 555
Denmark 558
The West 568
The Netherlands 570
Luxembourg 597
Belgium 599
France 609
Italy 660
The Balkans 679
Military Area “Southeast" 681
Serbia
682
Greece
692
Satellites par Excellence
Croatia
708
Slovakia
718
The Opportunistic Satellites
Bulgaria
743
Romania
758
Hungary
796
V O L U M E T H R E E
C H A P T E R N I N E 8 6 1
KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS
Origins of the Killing Centers 863
Organization, Personnel, and Maintenance 894
Labor Utilization 917
Medical Experiments 936
Confiscations 947
Killing Operations 961
Concealment 962
The "Conveyer Belt" 967
Erasure 976
Liquidation of the Killing Centers and the End of the
Destruction Process 979
C H A P T E R T E N 9 9 1
REFLECTIONS
The Perpetrators 993
The Destructive Expansion 994
The Obstacles 1002
Administrative Problems 1003
Psychological Problems 1007
The Victims 1030
C H A P T E R E L E V E N
1045
CONSEQUENCES
The Trials 1060
Rescue 1109
Salvage 1154
C H A P T E R T W E L V E 1185
IMPLICATIONS
A P P E N D I X A 1195
GERMAN RANKS
A P P E N D I X B 1199
STATISTICS OF JEWISH DEAD
A P P E N D I X C 1221
NOTATION ON SOURCES
The work culminating in the contents of these volumes was begun P
in 1948. Thirty-six years have passed since then, but the project
has remained with me, from early youth to late middle age, sometimes
interrupted but never abandoned, because of a question I asked. From
R
the start I have wanted to know how the Jews of Europe were destroyed. I wanted to explore the sheer mechanism of destruction, and as I delved into the problem, 1 saw that I was studying an administra
E
tive process carried out by bureaucrats in a network of offices spanning
a continent. Understanding the components of this apparatus, with all
the facets of its activities, became the principal task of my life.
F
The “how” of the event is a way of gaining insights into perpetrators, victims, and bystanders. The roles of all three will be described in this work. The German officeholders will be shown passing memo
A
randa
from
desk
to
desk,
conferring
about
definitions
and
classifications, and drafting public laws or secret instructions in their
relentless drive against the Jews. The Jewish community, caught in the
C
thicket of these measures, will be viewed in terms of what it did and did
not do in response to the German assault. The outside world is a part of
this history by virtue of its posture as spectator.
Still, the act of destruction was German, and the primary
focus in
E
PREFACE
this portrayal is therefore placed on the German conceptualizes, initiators, and implementers of the deed. They constructed the framework within which collaborators in Axis and occupied countries made their
contributions to the operation, and they created the conditions that
confronted Jewry in a closed ghetto, the roulette wheel of a roundup,
or at the entrance of a gas chamber. To inquire into the structure of the
phenomenon is to ask the question about the Germans first.
I have looked for answers in a large number of documents. These
materials are not merely a record of events, but artifacts of the administrative machinery itself. What we call a documentary source was once an order, letter, or report. Its date, signature, and dispatch invested it with immediate consequences. The sheet of paper in the hands of the participants was a form of action. Today most surviving
collections are German, but there are also some relics of Jewish councils and other non-German agencies. I have drawn upon them all, not only for the facts that they contain but to recapture the spirit in which
they were written.
Mine is not a short account. The book is large and complex because it depicts an undertaking that was massive and intricate. It is detailed because it deals with nearly all of the important occurrences in
the arena of destruction, inside and outside Germany, from 1933 to
1945. It is unabridged so that it may record, in full, measures that were
taken in full.
The first edition of this work appeared in Chicago twenty-three
years ago. It filled eight hundred double-columned pages and was reprinted several times. I knew even as the original version went to press that inevitably I would become aware of errors, that there were gaps in
the story, and that analytical statements or conclusions would some
day strike me as incomplete or imprecise. I also knew that to achieve
greater accuracy, balance, and clarity, I would have to make use of
more documents.
My early probing had been concentrated principally on Nuremberg
evidence and on stores of captured German records located in the
United States at the time. Now my research was going to be extended
to cover diverse materials surfacing in the archives of several countries. Prolonged as this labor had to be, it yielded information about organizations and events that had hitherto been shrouded or undiscovered altogether. Among the documents I found were telegrams of the German railroads setting up schedules of death trains, wartime
protocols of Jewish community officials in Berlin on their periodic
meetings with Gestapo officers, and newly declassified files of the U.S.
Office of Strategic Services about the death camp of Auschwitz. Each
PREFACE
set of communications was written in an internal language, each enclosed a separate world, and each was a missing link.
The atmosphere in which I have worked has changed considerably.
In the 1940s and 1950s, I was copying documents by hand, writing the
manuscript on a bridge table, typing it on a manual machine. During
those days, the academic world was oblivious to the subject, and publishers found it unwelcome. In fact, I was advised much more often not to pursue this topic than to persist in it. Much later, in the dimly lit
court archives of Dusseldorf or Vienna, I still copied out testimony on
a pad, but the feeling of isolation was gone. The subject, no longer
unmentionable, has engaged the public.
Fortunately, I received decisive help when I began with few resources. I remember Hans Rosenberg, whose lectures on bureaucracy welded my thoughts while I was still a college student; the late Franz
Neumann, whose sponsorship was essential to me in the early stages of
my research when I was a doctoral candidate at Columbia University;
William T. R. Fox of the same university, who stepped in with acts of
exceptional kindness when I was stranded; the late Filip Friedman,
who, believing in my work, encouraged me; and my late father,
Michael Hilberg, whose sense of style and literary structure became
my own. My old friend, Eric Marder, listened as I read to him my
handwritten drafts of long passages. With his extraordinarily penetrating mind, he helped me overcome difficulty after difficulty. The late Frank Petschek interested himself in the project while it was still
unfinished. He read it line by line and, with a singular gesture, made
possible its first publication.
A
researcher
is
utterly
dependent
on
archivists
and
librarians.
Some of those who assisted me I do not know by name, others could
not possibly recall who I am. A recapitulation of all those whose specialized knowledge was vital is hardly possible, and therefore I will mention
only
Dina
Abramowicz
of
the
YIVO
Institute,
Bronia
Klibanski of Yad Vashem, Robert Wolfe of the National Archives, and
Sybil Milton of the Leo Baeck Institute. Serge Klarsfeld of the Beate
Klarsfeld Foundation and Liliana Picciotto Fargion of the Centro di
Documentazione Ebraica Contemporánea sent me their valuable publications and talked to me about their data. Many more historians and other specialists facilitated my search for sources at the Columbia
University Law Library, the Library of Congress, archives of German
courts, the German railroad archives at Frankfurt and Nuremberg, the
Instituí für Zeitgeschichte in Munich, the German Federal Archives at
Koblenz,
the
Zentrale
Stelle
der
Landesjustizverwaltungen
in
Lud-
wigsburg, the U.S. Berlin Document Center, the Centre de Documenta-
PREFACE
tion Juive Contemporaine in Paris, the archives of the American Jewish
Committee, and the Office of Special Investigations in the U.S. Department of Justice.
I have lived in Vermont since 1956, and during these decades 1
worked at the University of Vermont, which has given me the sort of
support that only an academic institution providing tenure, sabbatical
leaves, and occasional small sums of money for research, can furnish
over time. At the university I have also had colleagues who stood by
me. The first of them was the late L. Jay Gould, who was always
patient with me, and more recently, Stanislaw Staron, with whom I
worked on the diary of Warsaw ghetto chairman Adam Czemiakow;
and Samuel Bogorad, with whom I taught a course on the Holocaust.
To H. R. Trevor-Roper, who wrote several essays about the book
when it first appeared, I owe most of the recognition that it received.
Herman Wouk, novelist, and Claude Lanzmann, film maker, both of
whom portray the Jewish fate in large-scale artistic endeavors, reinforced me in my own quest on many occasions.
My literary agent, Theron Raines, who is a man of letters with an
understanding of the subject, has made unceasing efforts on my behalf.
Max Holmes, publisher of Holmes & Meier, took on the task of publishing the second edition with a deep knowledge of what I was trying to do.
For my family I have a special word. My son David and my daughter Deborah have given me purpose and peace. My wife Gwendolyn has aided me with her caring presence and her fa
ith in me.
Burlington, Vermont
September 1984
xii
THE
DESTRUCTION
OF THE
EUROPEAN
JEWS
c
H
A
P
T
E
R
O
N
PRECEDENTS E
The German destruction of the European Jews was a tour de force;
the Jewish collapse under the German assault was a manifestation
of failure. Both of these phenomena were the final product of an earlier
age.
Anti-Jewish policies and actions did not have their beginning in
1933. For many centuries, and in many countries, the Jews had been
victims of destructive action. What was the object of these activities?
What were the aims of those who persisted in anti-Jewish deeds?
Throughout Western history, three consecutive policies have been applied against Jewry in its dispersion.
The first anti-Jewish policy started in the fourth century after
Christ in Rome.' Early in the fourth century, during the reign of Constantine, the Christian Church gained power in Rome, and Christianity became the state religion. From this period, the state carried out
Church policy. For the next twelve centuries, the Catholic Church
prescribed the measures that were to be taken with respect to the Jews.
Unlike the pre-Christian Romans, who claimed no monopoly on religion and faith, the Christian Church insisted on acceptance of Christian doctrine.
For an understanding of Christian policy toward Jewry, it is essential to realize that the Church pursued conversion not so much for the sake of aggrandizing its power (the Jews have always been few in
number), but because of the conviction that it was the duty of true
believers
to
save
unbelievers
from
the
doom
of
eternal
hellfire.
Zealousness in the pursuit of conversion was an indication of the depth
of faith. The Christian religion was not one of many religions, but the
1.
Pre-Christian Rome had no anti-Jewish policy. Rome had crushed the independent Jewish state of Judea, but the Jews in Rome enjoyed equality under the law. They could execute wills, enter into valid marriages with Romans, exercise the rights of
guardianship, and hold office. Otto Stobbe, Die Juden in Deutschland während des
Mittelalters (Leipzig. 1902), p. 2.
PRECEDENTS
true religion, the only one. Those who were not in its fold were either
ignorant or in error. The Jews could not accept Christianity.