16: "Large-Scale Measures"

"At the very moment [December 7, 1941] Hitler was rejoicing at Japan's entry into the war . . . the long planned gassings of the Final Solution began to be put into effect, when seven hundred Jews from the small Polish town of Kolo, situated two hundred miles south-west of Rastenburg, were taken in trucks to the nearby village of Chelmno. There, on the following morning, eighty of the Jews were transferred to a special van, which set off towards a small clearing inside the nearby woods. By the time the journey was over, the eighty Jews were dead, gassed by exhaust fumes which had been channeled back into the van. The bodies were then thrown out into a specially dug pit, and the van returned to the village. After eight or nine journeys, all seven hundred Jews had been killed.

"Henceforth, day after day, Jews from all the surrounding towns and villages were to be brought to Chelmno and killed. Told that they were being taken to 'the East' for agricultural labor, or to work in factories, up to a thousand Jews a day were taken to their deaths. When sick or old Jews were put into the van, the Germans in charge of the operations would advise the driver 'to drive carefully and slowly.' No one every survived that journey; in all, it was to consume 360,000 lives, and to eliminate Jewish life altogether from more than two hundred communities. The whole plan was carried out by deception; without the need for publicly visible mass killings, at a place which was located in a remote woodland in German-occupied Poland, far from prying eyes and protests. A new method of mass murder had been devised; Chelmno had become its first, but was not to be its last, location.

"In German occupied Poland, the sealed van at Chelmno had made its journeys to the woods each day since December 7. On December 10 more than a thousand Jews, from six small villages just to the west of the death camp, had been taken to Chelmno from a collection point in the village of Kowale Panskie, held overnight in the church at Chelmno, and then gassed. Four days later, it was the 975 Jews from the village of Dabie who were taken on that short but final journey.

"In Warsaw, on December 14, Emanuel Ringleblum recorded how, at a Jewish funeral, A German policeman 'suddenly, without warning, began shooting at the funeral procession." Two of the mourner fell dead on the spot. 'Jews have no peace," Ringleblum wrote, 'even when accompanying their dead to eternal rest.' On the following day, in Paris, forty Polish Jews were shot by the Gestapo for acts of resistance. Among those killed were four Jews who had been born in Warsaw.

"With the gassings at Chelmno having been proved effective, a swift and secret, Heydrich called a conference in Berlin to discuss the 'future' of Europe's Jews. The date set for the conference was early January. 'Do you imagine they're going to be housed in neat estates in the Baltic Provinces!,' Hans Frank, ruler of the General Government, asked his senior officials on December 16, and he added: 'We were told in Berlin: why all this bother? We've go no use for them either in the Ostland or in the Eastern Territories. Liquidate them yourselves!'

"Frank himself had no objection at all to this particular 'future' for Jews of Poland. 'I ask nothing of the Jews,' he told his officials, 'except that they should disappear.' What was needed, he said, were steps which, one way or another, will lead to extermination, in connection with the large-scale measures under discussion in the Reich.'

"What those 'large-scale measures' might be, the January conference would reveal.

"Behind the German lines in Russia, the Special Task Forces had continued their mass executions. Operational Situation Report USSR No. 148, sent from Berlin on December 19, recorded among several dozen separate mass executions 5,281 Jews shot in Bobruisk; 1,013 Jews and Jewesses in Parichi who had 'shown a hostile attitude to the Germans and had close connections with the partisans;' and 835 Jews 'of both sexes' in Rudnya 'because they lent extensive help to the partisans, spread disruptive propaganda, partly refused to work, and did not war their Jewish badges.'

"In Vitebsk, the Germans had decided upon the 'evacuation' of the ghetto which they had earlier set up there. 'During this process,' Report No. 148 noted, 'a total of 4,090 Jews of both sexes were shot.' This report also gave details of the shooting of sixteen 'mentally ill Jewish and Russian children' in Shumyachi. 'In fact,' the report explained, 'the children were lying for weeks in their own excrement. All had severe eczema. The German chief military physician from the hospital in Shumyachi, who was called in for consultation, declared that the children's home and its inmates were an epidemic center of the first degree, sufficient reason for their shooting.'"

-- Martin Gilbert, in his book The Second World War: A Complete History