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.