From the mid-1300's, Jews had begun to concentrate in a large
strip of eastern European territory known as the "Pale
of the Settlement." By 1900, there were, perhaps, as many as
7 million Jews living in this area bounded by Germany on the east, the
Baltic sea on the north, the Black Sea on the south and the Dnieper
River in Russia on the east. The Jewish population of Poland in 1939 was about
3.3 million with an additional 2.1 million in the occupied Russian provinces.
There were also heavy concentrations of Jews in Lithuania,
Latvia and Estonia to the north
and Hungary and the Slavic
states to the south.
Anti-Semitism had long
been evident in Poland. Jews were not considered Poles and, as in Nazi
Germany, were defined as a race. It appears that, until 1939, Poland
saw its destiny as tied to Germany's and its policies toward Jews mirrored
those of Germany — forced emigration. This was all to change with
the Nazi invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. The consequences of
this invasion were disastrous for Poland as a nation and, especially
for Poland's Jewish population.
Immediately following the invasion, Heinrich Himmler was appointed to take
measures to strengthen German ethnicity in the occupied territories
and to create lebensraum, or living space for German citizens. To this
end, Himmler created special task forces within the SS,
the Einsatzgruppen,
and placed them under the command of Reinhard
Heydrich. On September, 21, 1939,
Heydrich instructed those under his command to observe a distinction
between the "final aim," which would take some time and "the
steps necessary for reaching it which can be applied more or less at
once." The Einsatzgruppen became "mobile killing units"
charged with liquidating all political enemies of the Reich. According
to historian, Raul Hilberg, the mobile killing units murdered 1.4 million
Jews between 1941 and the end of the war in 1945.
A new study by historians
Klaus-Michael Mallman and Martin Cueppers
says that an Einsatzgruppe was created in 1942 to kill Jews in Palestine. “Einsatzgruppe
Egypt” was
standing by in Athens, and was prepared to
go with General Erwin
Rommel’s Afrika
Corps to Palestine to kill the roughly half
a million Jews that had fled Europe. The
mobile killing unit was to be led by SS Obersturmbannfuehrer
Walther Rauff.
The plan was for the 24
members of the death squad to enlist Palestinian
collaborators so that the “mass murder
would continue under German leadership without
interruption.”
The group never left Greece,
however, because Rommel’s force was
routed at El Alamein by the British force
of General Bernard Montgomery; otherwise
the history of the Middle East might have
been different.