SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR 249
that, “as a further possible solution and with the appropriate prior authorization
by the Führer, emigration has now been replaced by
evacuation to the East.”
Heydrich was therefore in actual fact “the chief planner of the final
solution in Europe,” but this term, in actual fact, designated the evacuation
of the Jews from Europe, i.e. from the area of the General Government.
The following order given by Himmler to the higher SS and police
leader in the General Government Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger must be
seen in this light: 729
“I decree that the resettlement of the total Jewish population of
the General Government must be implemented and terminated by 31
December 1942. On 31 December 1942 no persons of Jewish descent
must any longer be present in the General Government unless
they are held in the collection camps at Warsaw, Cracow, Chenstohova,
Radom, Lublin. All other work projects employing Jewish labor
must be terminated by that date, or, if their termination is impossible,
must be assigned to one of the collection camps. These
measures are required to assure the ethnic separation of races and
peoples in Europe as well as in the interest of the securitty and purity
of the German Reich and its region of interest.”
The well-known letter written by the engineer Albert Ganzenmüller
to SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff, Himmler’s assistant, is part of
this framework: 730
“Since 22 July there has been a daily train with 5,000 Jews from
Warsaw via Malkinia to Treblinka, plus twice a week a train with
5,000 Jews from Przemysl to Be��ec. Gedob [731] is in permanent contact
with the Cracow security service. The latter has agreed to stop
the trains from Warsaw via Lublin to Sobibór (near Lublin) as long
as the revamping of this line renders these transports impossible
(until about October of 1942).”
This was actually a “population movement” (Bevölkerungsbewegung),
as Wolff wrote in his reply dated 13 August 1942. 730 The choice
of Heydrich’s first name “Reinhardt” in this context thus indicates the
continuity of the task entrusted to him by Göring in 1939 and extended
in 1941, viz. to resolve “the Jewish question by means of emigration or
729 NO-5574.
730 NO-2207. Facsimile in J. Schelvis, op. cit. (note 70), p. 58.
731 Gesellschaft der Ostbahn, the German railway agency.