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.

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.