Ideology and the Rationality of Domination. Gerhard Wolf

emphasized that these deportations represented a radicalization of anti-Jewish policy, they also assume that this was simply the radicalization of an already existing policy—in other words, these were intensified efforts toward the same assumed goal, namely, to make the Reich “Jew-free” (“judenrein”). It is therefore no wonder that the deportation of Vienna’s Jews, that is, Jews from the Reich, is assigned special significance here, although the Vienna group was certainly not the largest one. But what if the deportations to the vicinity of Nisko on the San River, or more precisely, to the village of Zarzecze across the San, were conducted not primarily to expel German Jews from the Reich, but instead to remove Polish Jews from the annexed territories; that is, that it was about Germanizing the annexed western Polish regions, and not Germany proper?

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      The historiography of the Nisko campaign is divided even in the determination of its beginnings. It starts with the question of who first advanced this idea, Eichmann or Stahlecker. But what is perhaps more important here is that both men responded to the assigned task with mass deportations to Poland, and at a time when this was not yet on the agenda even for the Reich Security Main Office.⁸ The “official” beginning of the Nisko campaign is also not entirely clear. Scholars often cite Eichmann’s memo of October 6, 1939, on an order from SS Senior Leader Heinrich Müller, chief of the Gestapo, in which Eichmann was asked to “make contact with the office of Gauleiter [Josef] Wagner in Kattowitz [Katowice].” The main goal of such discussions was to be the “deportation of seventy to eighty thousand Jews from the Kattowitz region . . . across the Vistula,” while “at the same time” Jews might “also be deported from the vicinity of Mährisch Ostrau” (today Ostrava).⁹ It should be noted: there was no mention of Vienna’s Jews here. And although Seev Goshen rightly points out that only the memo survives, and not the original order itself, Michael Wildt’s observation seems equally correct, that it is very likely an overestimation of Eichmann’s capabilities when Goshen writes of Müller’s “purported order” (emphasis added), thereby casting doubt on the existence of such an order and conjecturing instead that Eichmann was attempting to attach Müller’s blessing to the expulsion of Czech and Viennese Jews, thus providing it with the necessary authority.¹⁰ It is much more likely that Eichmann simply saw an opportunity to take Müller’s order and expand it to cover all territories he was tasked to rid of its Jewish populace. But no matter how exactly the operation started, this did not fundamentally change the course of events, which, in line with Müller’s order, placed the focus clearly on the region around Kattowitz and—as it would turn out—on Polish Jews.¹¹

      This emphasis on Poland was mirrored by a shift in focus among the leadership of the Reich Security Main Office, who at this point were already concentrating their efforts on the Germanization of the annexed western Polish territories. After the expulsions and killing campaigns conducted by the Einsatzgruppen and “self-defense” units, it was now time to embark on the first systematic steps toward expelling the remaining undesired population segments. And it was probably no accident that this reorientation in the policy of violence took place on October 6, the same day that Hitler announced to the Reichstag an ethnic reorganization of eastern Europe.

      As both Moser and Goshen correctly assert, it was not by the most direct route that Eichmann now traveled from Berlin to Kattowitz. He probably did not, however, stop off in Vienna on October 7—as both scholars have stated without citing sources, a claim subsequently repeated by Longerich, among others—in order to then travel onward via Mährisch Ostrau to Kattowitz; that would have been indeed a “marathon tour.”¹² Instead, skipping Vienna, he made his way directly to Mährisch Ostrau, in order to inform his subordinates about Müller’s order, before traveling on to Kattowitz on October 9. Here he met first with the administration head dispatched by Wagner, Otto Pfitzner, along with the head of Border Commando III, Major General Otto von Knobelsdorff; then on the following day, he also finally met with the Gauleiter and Oberpräsident of Silesia, Josef Wagner, and spoke of starting with two trains each from the areas around Kattowitz and Mährisch Ostrau.¹³ After that, Heydrich would write a progress report to Himmler that “would probably be passed on to the Führer,” before a decision would finally be made about the “general removal” of all Jews. In any case, the first ones earmarked for expulsion here were Jews from the annexed territories, and not those from Austria or Germany itself.¹⁴

      It can be assumed that when Eichmann spoke to his meeting partners about his intention to deport four thousand Jews to or across the demarcation line, he was “preaching to the choir”; after all, Wagner himself had already been planning to initiate the expulsion of the Jewish populace.¹⁵ Somewhat unclear, however, was the figure of three hundred thousand Jews that Eichmann introduced here for the first time—and, specifically, Jews from Germany and Austria. In Kárný’s view, this probably did not mean a program for deporting all Jews from Germany and Austria, since the number was too low for this. And ultimately, the meeting minutes state that Hitler had ordered a “reallocation” (“Umschichtung”) of these persons but not their expulsion across the national border.¹⁶

      With this train of events, it remains unclear how the deportations of Vienna’s Jews came to pass at all, since mention of Vienna was absent—according to Eichmann’s own records—from Müller’s order, as was mention of what were now three hundred thousand Jews to be deported. Steur traces the increasing radicalization to Heydrich’s visit with Hitler on October 7, when the topics under discussion included the “handling of Jews” (“Judenbehandlung”).¹⁷ And although it seems entirely possible that Heydrich thereby sought authorization to expand the deportations and passed the larger numbers on to Eichmann, who on that day was still in Berlin and not already on his way to Vienna, Steur’s evidence nonetheless remains questionable because her conjecture is based on an extremely short entry in Halder’s war diary. But the entry reveals little and seems to refer more to a conflict between the Wehrmacht and the SS over the killings conducted by a police unit in Mława.¹⁸ In the entry, Halder simply wrote, “Complaint about Mława. Handling of Jews.”¹⁹

      Even if Halder’s war diary is not enough to show that Hitler himself had approved large-scale deportations of Jews from the Reich itself, the likelihood that Eichmann received the number three hundred thousand from Müller or Heydrich before leaving Berlin is nonetheless much greater than the possibility that he simply invented it, thereby mentioning it to Wagner without any backing from above. Such a rapid escalation would not have been otherwise unusual for the overall Nisko campaign, nor for the subsequent deportation actions. In Mährisch Ostrau and Kattowitz, Eichmann did name Poland as the destination for the deportation trains, but what the exact locality would be, he did not know. It was only after the discussion with Wagner that Eichmann, along with Stahlecker, set out for Poland to settle this question as well. The initial ruminations focusing on the area around Kraków were made obsolete by the German-Soviet Frontier Treaty of September 28, which is why the area around Lublin now came into consideration. It was from there that Eichmann’s wireless message of October 15, 1939, then reached the Gestapo in Mährisch Ostrau: “Railroad station for transports is Nisko on the San”—just in time to keep the entire operation from grinding to a halt.²⁰ It was only two days later that the Gestapo assembled the first transport, which left Mährisch Ostrau on October 18 as the first train in the Nisko campaign. On board were some nine hundred male Jews, who were considered by the Gestapo to be in good physical condition, and who were predominately Polish nationals—a crucial aspect, for it underlines the focus of the Nisko campaign.²¹

      Just like its origins, the sudden termination of the Nisko campaign by an order from Berlin also raises some fundamental questions. The day after a train had left Mährisch Ostrau (which was to be followed by another from Vienna on October 20), a telex arrived in Kattowitz from Müller at the Reich Security Main Office. Sent only an hour after the transport had departed Mährisch Ostrau, Müller’s message made clear that for every further transport, there needed to be, “in general, an authorization from this office.”²²

      Since Eichmann, the addressee of this message, had already left the city, it was passed on to his deputy, SS Head Assault Leader Rolf Günther, who was at that moment supervising the dispatch of a deportation train carrying Jews who had fled from Kattowitz across the