Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews Read Online Free Page A

to an end after the ‘Final Solution’ had been determined upon in
    principle but that after 1942 decisions were continually being reached that affected
    the lives of millions of people—in this case it is clear that the implementation of
    Judenpolitik was not only the result of priorities set by the leadership but was
    increasingly influenced by the behaviour of German allies, by the way that the
    local administration in occupied territories acted, and not least by the attitude of
    the local populations and the behaviour of Germany’s enemies.
    There is a further key factor to be considered, too. The Jewish population that in
    1941 faced the plans being made for the ‘Final Solution’ was defenceless and wholly
    unprepared, but in the second half of the war it too became an element that
    influenced the way the perpetrators proceeded. By fleeing, by seeking to escape
    persecution by living in a hide-away or underground, but also by negotiating with
    individuals or bribing them, they were attempting to slow down the inexorable
    process of annihilation and thereby—if only to a limited extent—influencing the
    behaviour of the perpetrators.
    Here research into the perpetrators reaches its limits, or in other words the
    further into the war is the stage that research concentrates on, the more difficult it
    becomes to reconstruct the development of the persecution and annihilation of
    the European Jews by concentrating exclusively on persecutors and their activities.
    This is not to say that concentrating on the persecutors in the period after 1942 is
    historiographically impossible or pointless, but that it is important to make
    precisely clear what the parameters are within which the perpetrators were able
    to act autonomously.
    Fourthly, if the history of the final solution is seen as a chain of ongoing
    decisions that together come to make up the full context of Judenpolitik, then
    the fate of the other groups persecuted by the Nazis must also be considered, or

    8
    Introduction
    considered at least in so far as they reveal direct comparisons with or information
    about the National Socialists’ Judenpolitik.
    These, then, are the fundamental ideas around which this book’s depiction of
    Judenpolitik in the years between 1933 and 1945 will be oriented. There is one
    further significant angle that needs to be considered in more detail, and it
    concerns the tricky nature of the available sources.
    As far as possible this study is based on primary sources. Alongside the
    documentary holdings of the German administrative departments that are housed
    in well-known archives in Germany and outside, this study will also consider the
    holdings of archives in the former Warsaw Pact states that since the 1990s have
    become accessible to scholars. In practical terms this primarily means Moscow’s
    ‘Special Archive’ where two collections have been used in some detail: the papers
    of the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith—the Central-
    verein Deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (hereafter referred to simply as
    the Centralverein)—which permits a far more detailed picture of the Nazis’
    persecution of the Jews in the period from 1933 to 1938 than has hitherto been
    available; and the papers of the Security Service of the SS (the Sicherheitsdienst, or
    SD), which cover the period from 1935 to 1940. In addition, papers from various
    other former Soviet, Polish, and Czech archives are considered, some of which
    were consulted from copies in Yad Vashem or the US Holocaust Museum in
    Washington.
    For my investigation of the radicalization of Jewish persecution in the occupied
    Soviet zones in the second half of 1941 I have made extensive use of papers from
    the Central Office for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Ludwigsburg (properly
    known as the Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen zur Aufklärung nation-
    alsozialistischer Verbrechen) via the branch office there of the