SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR 245
This latter category comprised some 30% of the 280,000 Jews still
remaining in the Altreich and the Ostmark 712 on 31 October 1941, i.e.
84,000 persons.
The Protokoll states that “emigration has now been replaced by
evacuation to the East” as a possibility and as a provisional option in
the process towards a final solution of the Jewish question. Hence, if
“evacuation” were synonymous with extermination, the SS would have
decided not to exterminate the 84,000 German Jews who were over 65
years old but to move them into an “old people’s ghetto”!
The only passage of the Protokoll which Holocaust historiography
invariably brings up in its effort to demonstrate that the decisions announced
at Wannsee aimed at the extermination of the Jews, actually
demonstrates the contrary: 713
“In the course of the final solution and under appropriate direction,
the Jews are to be utilized for work in the East in a suitable
manner. In large labor columns and separated by sexes, Jews capable
of working will be dispatched to these regions to build roads,
and in the process a large number of them will undoubtedly drop out
by way of natural attrition.
Those who ultimately should possibly get by will have to be given
suitable treatment because they unquestionably represent the most
resistant segments and therefore constitute a natural elite that, if allowed
to go free, would turn into a germ cell of renewed Jewish revival.
(Witness the experience of history.)” (Emph. added)
This paragraph refers to “Jews capable of working”; the Protokoll
says nothing about the fate of those incapable of working, but one cannot
believe that they were going to be exterminated if 84,000 of them
were going to be moved into an “old people’s ghetto.”
In this context the term “suitable treatment” has nothing sinister
about it: If these people, “if allowed to go free,” constituted “the germ
cell of renewed Jewish revival,” they would simply not be allowed to
go free.
The employment of the able-bodied Jews “to build roads” in the East
was part of Generalplan Ost, as has been pointed out by J.E. Schulte: 714
“Rather, the Jews were to further the colonization of the East
planned by the SS and build an enormous system of roads, not so
much for military use but for the strategy of colonization. General-
713 Ibid., pp. 7f.
714 J.E. Schulte, op. cit. (note 675), p. 59.