Scholars have generally reckoned Eichmann to have been “successful,” at least to the extent that the first deportation wave of October 18 and 20 was followed by a second one on October 26 and 27, during which—according to Moser—4,760 Jews were deported from Mährisch Ostrau, Kattowitz, and Vienna.26 On the deportations from Vienna, the Austrian State Archive holds what would seem to be the most informative summary, one bearing the notation “Correct Nisko Lists,” which shows a first transport on October 20 and a second one on October 26, with 669 persons assigned to the latter, recorded with car and seat numbers.27
The Austrian archive’s list has not been mentioned in scholarship to date. But it is in fact also of questionable reliability, for it proves only that German ambitions to expel Vienna’s Jews had already ripened quite far. It does not, however, answer the question of whether this second transport actually departed, or whether it too was halted at the last moment. Neither H. G. Adler nor Herbert Rosenkranz provide evidence about this, and neither do Moser or Goshen.28 Goshen quotes a telegram sent from Berlin by Eichmann on October 24, in which the latter confirmed the cessation of deportations, but he nonetheless announced to his subordinates in Mährisch Ostrau that there would be one more, final, transport, “in order to maintain the prestige of the local [i.e., Mährisch Ostrau] Gestapo.”29 Meanwhile, Moser bases his claim on a telegram from the next day, in which Günther forewarned the camp superintendent in Nisko, Theodor Dannecker, of the arrival of a combined transport from Mährisch Ostrau and Kattowitz, which would depart from Kattowitz on October 27—but there is no mention of Vienna in the telegram.30 More important: In a report on the history of the Austrian Jews under Nazism, compiled after the war by two members of the organized Jewish Community of Vienna (Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien, or IKG), Nisko is indeed mentioned—but with only the one transport that departed Vienna on October 20.31 The same is true of the fifty-page report prepared by the former head of the IKG, Dr. Josef Löwenherz. He too describes Nisko as a traumatic wound and also lists one by one the deportations to Poland that started again in early 1941—but here too, there is no mention of a second transport to Nisko.32 In the scholarly literature, however, apart from Tuviah Friedmann and Götz Aly, the second transport is taken for granted; for example, by Christopher R. Browning, Sybille Steinbacher, and Wolf Gruner.33 No reliable evidence, in fact, exists for the second transport from Vienna apart from the aforementioned declarations of intent by the Nisko campaign’s protagonists, which means they can be more convincingly seen as simply reflecting their eagerness to actually complete the project as envisaged. But at a time when the deportations had already come under heavy fire from Berlin, eagerness probably no longer sufficed to set more trains in motion.
Moreover, my doubts about the departure of this second transport from Vienna are further compounded by a message to Himmler on March 1, 1940, written by the state secretary at the Reich Transport Ministry, Dr. Wilhelm Kleinmann, listing all transports conducted since October 18, 1939, and still scheduled to happen by March 15, 1940.34 Only three of them might have been part of the Nisko campaign: a transport carrying three thousand persons from Mährisch Ostrau on October 18 and two trains carrying a total of a thousand persons from Vienna on October 20. This would roughly match Moser’s figure of 4,760 Jews deported to Poland, with the difference based on the lower number of Jews deported from Vienna, namely, a thousand persons instead of more than fifteen hundred.35 Although Kleinmann’s summary also raises some questions, in that it does not mention a train from Kattowitz, and the number of persons transported from Mährisch Ostrau appears somewhat high at first, both these discrepancies could be explained by the transport from Mährisch Ostrau having gone through Kattowitz, where it gained additional cars.36 Furthermore, the entry for this transport differs from all others on the list in two regards: first, the train is not labeled a “Sonderzug” (“special train”) but instead as a Wehrmacht train; second, it includes the notation “fifty freight cars.”37 Since the Wehrmacht also moved its troops in freight cars, each carrying around forty soldiers with all their gear, it is entirely conceivable that fifty freight cars were used in this case to deport three thousand persons.38
Kleinmann had compiled this summary after a meeting hosted by Göring, whose participants included the Gauleiters of the annexed eastern provinces, the head of the General Government Hans Frank, and Himmler. Discussions focused on the deportation of the Polish populace, and not least the question of available transport capacities. Here, it was Himmler who argued most strongly for a continuation of the deportations, and Kleinmann’s summary was now intended to prove just how much the Reich Railroad had already done. This is why it can be safely assumed that Kleinmann really made an effort to list all transports known to Berlin—and, nonetheless, there is no mention here of a second set of deportations departing Vienna in late October 1939.
Unlike with the origins and early days of the Nisko campaign, the scholarly literature is in agreement about what forced its suspension: the resettlement of “Volksdeutsche” from Eastern Europe.39 As early as October 15, 1939, the Reich had already signed an agreement with Estonia that provided for the emigration of its ethnically German populace. Similar agreements followed, with Latvia on October 30 and with the Soviet Union on November 16.40
As a consequence, the train with three thousand Jews from Mährisch Ostrau and Kattowitz was not the only deportation transport on October 18 that had been assembled by the Germans. That same day also saw the first “Volksdeutsche” from Estonia landing in Gdynia, which the occupiers had renamed Gotenhafen, and to make room for them, Forster’s agencies had ordered the filling of a deportation train, which left the city—also on October 18—with 925 Poles bound for Kielce in central Poland, later to be followed by more.41 The Reich Security Main Office, which had previously contravened Eichmann’s original plan by shifting the Nisko campaign’s focus to the deportation of Jews from Kattowitz along with Polish Jews in general, found itself forced to quickly change gears, for it had now become clear that tens of thousands of “Volksdeutsche” would be arriving in occupied western Poland in the coming weeks. With the strained transport situation, Himmler had to decide whether Eichmann’s deportation of Jews or the accommodation of the “Volksdeutsche” should take priority. It is hardly surprising that Himmler decided to prioritize the deportation of the Polish populace in and around Gotenhafen, in order to free up the necessary housing and jobs for the “Volksdeutsche” who were now rolling in.
In the scholarly literature, there is now general agreement that the debarking of the Baltic Germans in Gotenhafen and Danzig was what stopped the deportations to Nisko. But the stoppage has often been mistakenly interpreted as a situation in which Nazi aspirations to expel Jews from the Reich had been subordinated, if only temporarily, to the needs of the ethnic Germans, when in fact the Nisko campaign should itself be seen as an early attempt to Germanize the annexed western Polish territories. Accepting this hypothesis also has implications for the position assigned to the Nisko campaign in the history of the annihilation of the Jews. David Cesarini, for example, suggests that Müller was already thinking ahead at this early date and had ordered the Nisko campaign in order to “broach an entirely new policy”: the deportation of all Jews from the Reich, which included the annexed territories.42 Michael Alberti likewise sees Nisko as “part of a much larger plan.”43 In this view, the Nisko campaign appears to be a first step toward a more comprehensive, but primarily anti-Jewish, policy. As far as could be found in the scholarly literature, it is only Ludmila Nesládková who contradicts this interpretation, viewing the stopping of the Nisko campaign as an effort to press ahead with