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

Bundesarchiv, or
    Federal Archive of Germany.
    Despite what is an almost unmanageably large quantity of documents available
    for the reconstruction of Nazi Judenpolitik, from the point of view of the central
    decision-making processes for the ‘Final Solution’ the state of source material can
    only be described as ‘patchy’. This is because the most important decisions that led
    to the murder of the European Jews were not usually written down; the perpet-
    rators also systematically attempted to destroy documents that reflected these
    decisions, and were largely successful in doing so. Documents that have nonetheless
    survived are scattered between archives in several different countries. In addition,
    documents relating to the murder of the Jews are written in a language designed to
    veil their true purpose. And finally, bringing these fragments together is a process
    that leaves plenty of room for interpretation: in my view the decisive question that
    such an interpretation has to address is that of the role of Judenpolitik within the
    overall political activity of the regime.
    Given these difficulties with source material, a precise reconstruction of the
    individual complexes of events and actions—including executions, deportations,

    Introduction
    9
    murders in the concentration camps, and so on—that together constitute the
    genocide perpetrated against the European Jews is indispensable for any analysis
    of the decision-making process. The disparate nature of the sources leaves us no
    alternative but to draw conclusions about decisions from a reconstruction of the
    individual acts that they gave rise to. Since this study is primarily a reconstruction
    of the decision-making process the account will necessarily appear somewhat
    imbalanced or one-sided: whenever the Nazis’ Judenpolitik enters a new phase the
    narrative will broaden out, but a policy once implemented will be described
    relatively briefly. In other words, this book is designed to be an analysis of
    Judenpolitik that goes back to the events themselves in the form of a schematic
    narrative and where possible only summarizes them when it is necessary to do so
    in order to reconstruct an aspect of Judenpolitik. The account of the gradual
    radicalization of the persecution of the Jews in the occupied territories of the
    Soviet Union will, for example, need considerably more space than the depiction
    of the rapidly executed deportations of the Hungarian Jews in 1944. However, this
    study is only one-sided in so far as it is chiefly concerned with the perpetrators
    and only takes account of the reactions of the victims or of third parties when their
    behaviour permits conclusions to be drawn about the perpetrators.
    This book first appeared in Germany in 1998 under the title Politik der
    Vernichtung. For this English edition, the whole of the original text was revised
    to take account of the latest scholarship in the field of Holocaust studies: the book
    has been significantly reworked, shortened in some places and extended in others.
    The cuts that were made chiefly affect Part I on the persecution of the Jews in
    Germany and Part III on the war against the Soviet Union. The sections that are
    new to this English version are on anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic (Intro-
    duction), the removal of the Jews (Entjudung) from German society (Chapter 1),
    life in the Polish ghettos (Chapter 7), the Holocaust in Eastern Europe between
    1942 and 1944, and the end of the Holocaust (Part V).

    HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: ANTI-SEMITISM
    IN THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC
    This study begins with the first anti-Semitic measures taken by the National
    Socialists immediately after taking over government in 1933. These measures
    represent the end of the equality of citizenship that the Jews had enjoyed
    throughout Germany since 1871.
    By gradually removing the citizenship rights of German Jews the Nazis were
    fulfilling one of the principal demands that radical anti-Semites had been