SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

204 J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR
East of the Jews from the Altreich and the Protectorate. For this purpose
Himmler strived, if possible even before the end of 1941, to move these
Jews “initially, as a first step, into the eastern territories that were made
part of the Reich two years ago, and to move them further east next
spring,” and thus he envisaged “to move some 600,000 Jews from the
Altreich and the Protectorate to the Litzmannstadt ghetto […] for the
winter.” 595
In a memo dated 7 October 1941, Werner Koeppen, a liaison official
for Rosenberg, recorded that Hitler had made the following declaration
the day before on the subject of the Protectorate: 595
“All Jews must be removed from the Protectorate, and not just
into the General Government as a first step, but right away further
on to the East. We just cannot do this right now because of a shortage
of transport capacity. Together with the Jews from the Protectorate,
all Jews from Berlin and Vienna are to disappear.”
On 10 October 1941, during a meeting at Prague on the subject of
“Solution to Jewish problems,” Heydrich declared that he planned to
deport some 50,000 Jews from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia
to Minsk and Riga between 15 October and 15 November. They
were to be housed in the “camps for communist prisoners in the operational
area.” 596
On 13 October 1941, Frank and Rosenberg met for a discussion
which also touched on the deportation of the Jews from the General
Government: 597
“The Governor General then raised the subject of the possibility
of deporting the Jewish population of the General Government into
the occupied eastern territories. Reichsminister Rosenberg remarked
that similar suggestions had already come to him from the military
authorities in Paris. [598] At the moment, however, he did not think
that such resettlement plans could be implemented. Still, for the future
he was ready to promote Jewish emigration toward the East, al-
595 Letter from Himmler to Greiser dated 18 September 1941. BAK, NS 19/2655, p. 3. Facsimile
of the document in: Peter Witte, “Zwei Entscheidungen in der ‘Endlösung der Judenfrage’:
Deportationen nach �od� und Vernichtung in Che�mno,” in: Theresienstädter
Studien und Dokumente, Academia, Prague 1995, p. 50.
596 T/37(299), p. 2.
597 Jüdisches Historisches Institut Warschau (ed.), op. cit. (note 116), p. 252. The quotation
is from the diary of H. Frank, 1941/IV, p. 930f.
598 A clear allusion to the proposal made by SS-Sturmbannführer Carltheo Zeitschel.