Holocaust Controversies: Galicia

An interesting site that posts accounts that are pretty comprehensive on matters related to "A Trail of Paper" is Holocaust Controversies. Here's a link to a posting on Galizien: Holocaust Controversies: Galicia

Please feel free to comment on the differences between our approaches to the topic.
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Lemberg - Lwow - L'viv: Sites of persecution

The center of the city suffered little damage in July 1944 when Red Army forces invested, then occupied L'viv and captured what remained of its defenders. Today, most of the urban landscape that witnessed the ghettoization and eventual murder of at least 125,000 Jews between November 1941 and November 1943 is similar to its disposition sixty-five years ago. These images may be cross referenced to a contemporary German map of Lemberg (2.1944) that will appear in this blog in the near future.

The first photo, above, is the Sobieski School, located at 11 Zamarstynivka [Zamarstinowka] Street, just south of the railway embankment that separated the Jewish ghetto from the "Aryan" section of the city. Across from Sobieski is the Zamarstyniv underpass (from where I took this photo), which connected the northern and southern halves of the city. The underpass bisects the railway embankment about 250 meters east of the former main ghetto entrance, the underpass on Peltevna Street (second photo). Nazi authorities first used Sobieski as a transit site during the ghetto reduction action in March 1942. All seized Jews were destined for either the Janowska forced labor camp (Zwangsarbeitslager), or across Janowska Street [Weststrasse] from it, the Livandivka [Livandowka] embarkation platforms for trains to the killing centers in neighboring Lublin District. Those Jews were first deposited at the school where German authorities re-checked their identities and papers in its crowded class rooms. Ukrainian and German police then escorted the Jews to the city's northwest limit along Janowska Street.

The so-called bridge of death (as Jewish memoirists referred to it), in the second image, was where the German security and civil administrators established the only passageway into the Jewish residential district (later, ghetto, then Judenlager - Jewish camp). It is the underpass on Peltevna [Peltwena] Street. Today, it is the site of a memorial to the Jewish victims of the Nazi occupation; the memorials visible in the foreground are situated within the former ghetto area just north of the embankment. This perspective show clearly the railroad bridge and embankment that defined the southern edge of the Jewish quarter. When the German civil administrator (Stadthauptmann) ordered the residential district established in 15 November 1941, security personnel funneled all Jews passing into the area through this underpass. Elderly and ill Jews were separated from the rest and killed nearby; others were searched and their valuables seized if those were not sufficiently well concealed. When security authorities converted the Jewish quarter into a fenced ghetto after the murder of the Judenrat in early September 1943, a gate sealed off this official point of entry into the area.

The March 1942 Aktion: the first phase

German authorities assumed control of the 500 man Jewish Ordnungsdienst (police force) for the operation. The force was to assemble, screen, and transport a quota of 1,000 Jews a day, in close coordination with the unsuspecting Judenrat.(1) Beginning on 14 March, Jewish policemen gathered Jews on the basis of their documentation, the names on rolls kept of Jewish community welfare organization, or (in some instances) in settlement of personal scores. Each Jew's documents were first checked and the Ordnungsdienst delivered those lacking appropriate documentation to a school just beyond the Jewish residential district's boundary, the Sobieski School. The deportees filled the schoolrooms and police commissioner Dr. Ullrich rechecked the papers of the day's catch the same afternoon. Trains arrived each morning at a loading platform in the northwest part of the city (the Klepariv siding), directly opposite the Janowska forced labor camp. The selected Jews were moved to Klepariv, loaded aboard freight trains, and dispatched to their final destination.

Early in the operation, the Judenrat had an interest in securing the release of about 120 Jews, mainly specialists and other prominent members of the Jewish community. During the operation's first few days, Dr. Ullrich entertained requests for individual releases. By the third day of the deportation, about 17 March, the Sobieski School remained almost empty and the resettlement train departed Klepariv, not loaded with its quota of 1,000 Jews, but almost empty. Jewish witnesses reported after the war that Dr. Ullrich appeared unusually tense during that day's operation. On the fourth day, Dr. Ullrich did not appear at Sobieski to check papers and dispatch those selected.

SS-Untersturmführer Inquart arrived instead that afternoon (ca. 18 March) and immediately selected almost every Jew in the school for "resettlement," without concern for the status of their papers or appeals for exemptions. Inquart was the Jewish Referent on SSPF Katzmann's staff, and Katzmann's adjutant. The the civil administration police commissioner no longer oversaw the operation. Other SS men accompanying Inquart roamed Sobieski and beat the Jews awaiting transportation. SS men also oversaw the transfer of the Jews from the school to Klepariv (by truck, horse carts, or tram), and the loading of the Jews onto the trains that departed in the direction of District Lublin, to the northwest. The additional violence at Sobieski did not contribute to the attainment of the daily quota; Jews at risk rapidly disappeared into hiding, or acquired the documents necessary to avoid seizure by Jewish police.(2)

On about 20 March, SSPF Katzmann called a meeting with Inquart and a few leaders of the Judenrat. Dr. Landesberg (the Judenrat chairman) and the head of the Jewish police told Katzmann that their men were exhausted, and that there simply were no more undocumented or indigent Jews to be found. Dr. Ullrich, also in attendance, confirmed the difficulties reported. However, Katzmann was not sympathetic. He replied, Wenn ich mit meinem Kommando einsteige, dann werden nicht dreizig-, sondern hundert-tausand ausgesiedelt ["When I get involved with my detachment, not 30,000 but 100,000 will be resettled"].(3) For a couple more days after the meeting the round-ups continued haphazardly. Informers in the civil population reported the locations of Jews in hiding, information that made its way to the German security police.(4) Yet the results must have continued to disappoint Katzmann and Inquart, for no later than 24 March 1942, the SS and Police Leader unleashed his "detachment" against the city's Jews.
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(1) Statement of Dr. Ludwig Jaffe, 11.4.67, New York, Landesgericht Stuttgart Ks 5/65 [Röder et al.], 10060-10083, cited in Pohl, Judenverfolgung, 187. Jaffe is the principal source for the unfolding of the March Aktion in Lemberg that follows.

(2) DALO, R-12 / 1 / 41 / 10, Report (5th Comm.) on sweeps for Jews, 20.3.42. Jews were fleeing the residential district by way of Zamarstynivs'ka and Zhovkivs'ka streets to the Kryvchytsya and Zhovkva districts then leaving the area by car, according do the 5th Commissariat.

(3) Jaffe statement, op. cit. Jaffe participated in the meeting as a Judenrat member.

(4) DALO, R-12 / 1 / 41 / 10, Report (5th Comm.) on sweeps for Jews, 20.3.42. On 19 March, Ukrainian Police headquarters ordered (as Order No. 21) commissariats to report incidents of Jews in hiding that they had received since the start of the month. The 5th Commissariat responded the next day with four incidents involving more than six Jews within the precinct.
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The March 1942 Aktion: Prelude

The first deportation [Aussiedlung] of Jews from Lemberg occurred in March 1942. This operation also marked the initiation of a policy of systematic murder of Jews -- men, women and children -- in the city. German civil authorities had exclusive control of the resettlement, with security elements limited to coordination and provision of manpower. German occupation bureaucrats advised the Judenrat on 19 February that the operation would begin in March, and directed the council to be ready to provide some 33,000 Jews for "resettlement" to labor camps in the East.(1)

In early March, the German police commissioner [Polizeidirektor], Dr. Albert Ullrich, advised the head of the Judenrat, Dr. Henryk Landesberg, that the operation was imminent. Jews who could not present valid identification and work documentation would be relocated to labor camps outside the city. He also ordered the Judenrat to turn over the welfare rolls of Jews who were homeless and those receiving assistance from its welfare offices.(2) The Jewish residential quarter, though not yet containing all of the city's 125,000 or more Jews, was severely overcrowded. Some Poles and Ukrainians had not vacated their apartments, as directed, during the attempted separation of "Aryans" and non-Aryans (Jews) in November-December 1941, when German authorities forced many thousands of additional Jewish families into the new residential district.(3) The quarter was situated beyond the railroad embankment just to the north of the city center.

German occupation authorities began preparations in late February. The Labor Office [Arbeitsamt] within the civil administration, which had responsibility for regulating legal employment in Lemberg, ordered the registration and marking of Jews working in enterprises authorized by German authorities.(4) Those businesses were the only legal work sites aside from the Jewish community where Jews were allowed to work. At the same time, the commander of the German Municipal Police [Schutzpolizei, or Schupo], Major Weise, requested a significant increase in the end strength of his Ukrainian police force [ukrainische Hilfspolizei] to meet the current and anticipated responsibilities he expected to place on it.(5) Since the previous December, the Ukrainian Police had reported regular incidents of criminal assault on Jews, sometimes with participation of "unknown" individuals in Wehrmacht uniforms, and often in daylight or early evening.(6) A few days before the start of the operation, the SS and Police Leader, Brigadeführer Fritz Katzmann, issued directions to his Municipal Police subordinates. One participant reported after the war:

As the adjutant, I participated in a meeting with Major Weise [Schutzpolizei commander in Lemberg], conducted at the office of the SS and Police Leader shortly before the spring operation. The SS and Police Leader for District Galicia, Katzmann, explained in broad strokes how the upcoming resettlement operation would be conducted. He also set out the organization in broad strokes . . . Katzmann explained in turn that the Jews would initially be collected in a school and then sent to a camp for a short time, then transported out of Lemberg from there by rail for labor assignments in the East.(7)

The Jewish community's leaders opposed the operation on principle. The involuntary removal of Jews who lacked registered residences or authorized work were nevertheless members of their community. Dr. Ullrich had established good working relations with a few men in the Jewish community administration and his assurances placated the Judenrat's leaders. He strengthened the deceit by ordering Jews destined for deportation to inventory carefully their movable property, so that the Judenrat could later transmit the auction proceeds from its sale to each deportee. Yet even before the deportation operation began, Ullrich knew what "resettlement" meant to the intended victims.(8)

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Sources:
(1) AAN Warsaw, Starostwo Miejskie we Lwowie, sygn. 510/9-10, Jüdische Gemeinde der Stadt Lemberg to Stadthauptmann Lemberg, 26.3.42. Figure: Emanuel Ringelblum, Kronika getta warszawskiego, wrzesien 1939 - styczen 1943 [Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto, September 1939 to January 1943], ed. Artur Eisenbach (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1988), p. 360 (entry on 24.3.42).

(2) TsDIA L'viv, spr. 7696, Gouverneur Dist. Galizien, "Bekanntmachung: Bildung eines jüdischen Wohnbezirkes in der Stadt Lemberg," 8.11.41.

(3) AAN Warsaw, Starostwo Miejskie we Lwowie, sygn. 510/9-10, Jüdische Gemeinde der Stadt Lemberg to Stadthauptmann Lemberg, 26.3.42.

(4) DALO, R-12/1/37/10, "Arbeitseinsatz jüdischer Arbeitskrafte, hier: Erfassung und Kennzeichnung der 'A' Juden," 25.3.42.

(5) DALO, R-58/1/30/45+v., "Erhöhung der Sollstärke der ukrainischen Hilfspolizei," 26.2.42.

(6) DALO, R-12/1/41/1+v., "Stan bandits'kykh napadiv v rayoni 5. Komisaryatu U.P.," 28.2.42.

(7) Statement of Hermann Greifenberg, 15.12.67, in Landesgericht Stuttgart Ks 5/65 [Röder et al.], 5108-5123.

(8) Statement of Dr. Ludwig Jaffe, 11.4.67, in Landesgericht Stuttgart Ks 5/65 [Röder et al.], 10060-10083, cited in Pohl, Judenverfolgung, 187. Jaffe was head of the Judenrat's housing office.
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A memorandum of importance

The document is a carbon copy, created for file record purposes. It is entitled memorandum for the record (Vermerk) and its unidentified author (Der Unterzeichnete) worked in the office of the Governor of District Galicia, of the Government-General. On 6 August 1942, the Governor and the SS and Police Leader of Galicia met to discuss the deportation of Jews (Judenaussiedlung) and related civil-police coordination for the next six months. The governor's chief of internal district administration and chief of agriculture also attended.

SSPF Fritz Katzmann announced that within half a year, the Government-General would be free of all Jews not confined to labor camps, either through "deportation" or by being "killed by individual detachments" on the spot. Four days later the largest ghetto clearance action to occur in the East, aside from Warsaw, began in Lemberg (L'viv) and resulted in more than 40,000 Jews being removed to the Belzec gas chambers during a two week period.

This document is historically interesting for two reasons. First, it repeats (through Katzmann's declaration) the order issued by Heinrich Himmler on 16 July 1942, when the Reich SS and Police Leader ordered that the Government-General be rendered "free of Jew" by the end of the year. As Dieter Pohl argues, that order authorized the senior SS and police official in the five districts of the Government-General to launch large scale extermination operations using all civil and police resources available. This suggests in turn that expropriation and ghettoziation of Jews, and their individual murder or incremental killing through severe forced labor, had failed to meet Berlin's goals since the occupation of Poland in 1939. Instead, the new phase of unrestrained and widespread mass murder differed in character and consequence from what had gone before. Consequent to Himmler's order, large scale operations began against the ghetto-bound Jewish populations that had until then escaped annihilation, most famously in Warsaw, from which 200,000 Jews were dispatched to the recently opened gas chambers of Treblinka between July and early September 1942.

Second, the memorandum represents one of the very rare documentary examples of the Nazis' declared goal of, literally, to kill (umbrechen) the Jews. Killing in situ was already proceeding along side the euphemistic "deportation" that everyone – German, Jew, Ukrainian, Pole – knew meant involuntary transportation to a killing center. Governor Losacker's bureaucratic subordinate recorded with heady enthusiasm something that all knew but that no one openly recorded: that anti-Jewish policy was exterminatory. That fact alone was sufficient to account for the "Secret" classification atop this otherwise mundane memorandum. The policy coordination it documented also underpinned German policy towards Galicia's Jewish population until the final murder of all Jews within German reach on 19 November 1943.

How have we determined who wrote the document? It is stored in fond R-35 of the State Archive of L'viv Oblast, in L'viv, Ukraine. The finding aid to that collection identifies R-35 as the records of the Governor of District Galicia during the German occupation of the area. (Note that German records seized by Soviet forces at the end of the war did not pass into publicly accessible archives. Instead, the NKVD/KGB utilized them first for state security purposes – to identify and prosecute collaborators – and then transferred them to the restricted section of the relevant oblast archive for permanent preservation and storage. With the opening of these holdings during Glasnost' researchers could utilize the surviving record of German occupation in the East. The history of the Holocaust has not been the same since.) We can consider the document to be a record of the meeting, essentially a "business record," created for the file, because it is not addressed to a person or institution. Finally, we can assess that this document is a second (or carbon) copy because it was not signed by the author, it has no heading indicating the originator's office (it was produced on blank paper, presumably unlike the original), and various barely legible manuscript annotations show its filing status.

These characteristics tell the researcher that the original was destroyed before the German retreat in about July 1944, not surprising since German policy mandated destruction of all documents related to the Final Solution. For instance, the surviving records of the Lemberg Commander of the Security Service and Security Police (KdS, including all criminal police, Gestapo and SD personnel under the SSPF), fond R-36, contain virtually nothing documenting the organization's role in the ghettoization, expropriation, deportation, and murder of Galicia's Jews, even though KdS was the executive agency within SSPF with direct executive responsibility for those policies. The Governor's Office, however, apparently overlooked this memorandum as it attempted to obliterate evidence of its role in the mass crimes that occurred with its cooperation and assistance.

Modern states and their bureaucracies do not function without records. The best laid plans of executive agencies that break the law cannot always control the disposition of records, generated pursuant to their criminal activities, when they wish to obliterate the paper trail.

Business records

Common law practices recognize a characteristic of modern documentation that also governs archiving practices: Records in modern societies are most often created in the normal course of operation of every organization (governmental or non-governmental), and the evolved "best practices" of organizational record management prescribe certain features of how those records are arranged. Archival practices universally are built on the principle that original creation arrangement and order is the form in which documents should be retained in storage. Hence, archivists do not go around making "logical" connections from disparate materials as a matter of routine.
This practice seems to be understood infrequently by those outside of law, or library/archival science, or the historical profession. The language of the law is precise and accurate about the principle:

Records of regularly conducted activity [include]: A memorandum, report, record or data compilation in any form, of acts, events, conditions, opinions, or diagnoses, made at or near the time by, of from information transmitted by, a person with knowledge, if kept in the course of a regularly conducted business activity, and if it was the regular practice of that business activity to make the memorandum, report, record or data compilation... [Federal Rules of Evidence, Rule 803, Hearsay - Exceptions]

One legal gloss explains this further. If a document possess these characteristics, it is defined as, and may be admitted into evidence as a business record:

- Business activity: it is kept in the course of a regularly conducted business activity, which includes business, institution, association, profession, occupation, and calling of every kind, whether or not conducted for profit; can be activity of an individual as long as it is done and the records are kept regularly.

- Routine record: it has to be the regular practice of the business activity to make the document.

- Timely: it was made at or near the time of the event that it records.

- Business duty or Person with knowledge: it must be made by a person with knowledge of the recorded event or information and that person with knowledge must have acted in the regular course of business, or have had a business duty to report.

Another legal commentary argues that a business record is "credible because it is economically inefficient to keep false business records."

Historians rely on the stable characteristics of modern record keeping, whether they know it or not, in writing source-based history. When issues are contentious they may rely on additional measures to vouchsafe a conclusion, such as searching for corroboration in other documentation or in more general indicia, such as memoirs and diaries, correspondence, or any news sources that may be relevant. Most historians consider themselves informed and competent users of archival materials, because knowledge of the principles governing the organization of archival materials is indispensable to any successful survey of materials relevant to a topic. Ignorance of archival principles leads to ignorance of where even to find documentary historical materials.

How do we know?

If nothing else, a historian today is distinguished from others trawling the past by a specific relationship to sources, that is, to documents understood most broadly. Interest in the excitement or color of past events is admirable and, one might hope, central to the day to day business of historical research, but in itself that is chronicling, mere antiquarianism. All history writing has a certain measure of chronicling; if a historian cannot get even the basic chronology right, then the rest of the work might be properly considered suspect as well. But there's still more that the historian must get right. There is context and significance (and sometimes, even more stickily, 'cause and effect'), which are the most vigorously contested terrain. I will argue in future posts that these things can matter, sometimes a lot. (That old axiom, that academic squabble are so nasty because the stakes are so low, makes up for ignorance with an abundance of pithiness.) In almost all these instances, historians fight not about facts but about sources. Hence, the study of history is foremost the study of sources and necessitates consideration of epistemology, weight, and perspective. Sources are everything.
Wie es eigentlich gewesen, at Ranke's insistence, is rarely within reach for the historian. The most document-rich and familiar periods or subjects -- even those in which the participants and witnesses still draw their share of oxygen and can inform the researcher -- are (eigentlich) accessible only through some process of imagination. But that's quite a different topic. What matters here is that documents are the foundation of historical imagination. Pity the sub-Saharan African specialist, or the specialist in pre-Columbian civilization? Not necessarily, for every artifact created by a human is a document, and each speaks a fact of some sort -- if only it can be read.