Article:4.1

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The Holocaust in Galicia

     The Holocaust in Galicia

David Engel

       Topics
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       Period
       1939-1945

       Region
       Galicia

       NLI Code
       997013604470405171

Extensions

• Judenräte in Galicia
• Ghettos in Galicia
• Labor Camps in Galicia
• Killing Centers
• Jewish Self-Help in Galicia
• Galician Jewish Youth Movements in the Holocaust
• Jewish Armed Resistance in Galicia

Related Personalities

• Person:ParnasJ
• Person:BiebersteinM
• Person:KurzmannDA
• Person:BiebersteinA
• Person:WeichertM
• Person:LiebeskindA
• Person:DraengerS
• Person:MireG
• Person:KuperR
• Person:BaumingerZ
• Person:LeiboviczA
• Person:DawidsonDraenger
• Person:Rufeisen-SchuepperH
• Person:HalberstamBZ
• Person:KahaneD
• Person:RokeahM
• Person:RokeahA
• Person:RingelblumE

Related Entries

• Article:4.1
• Article:4.2
• Article:4.3
• Article:5.4

Map

• Soviet Annexation of Eastern Galicia, 1939
• Galicia under German Occupation, 1939–1945

New Geopolitical Realities

Before 1 September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, the former Austrian Crownland of Galicia had been divided administratively among four Polish województwa (districts): Kraków, Lwów, Stanisławów, and Tarnopol. Four weeks later, on 28 September, the German-Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty split the region between the Third Reich and the USSR, ending Polish sovereignty and creating a new geopolitical order. Germany erased the western boundary that before 1918 had separated Galicia from Austrian Silesia and the województwa of Kraków and Śląsk under Polish rule, moving the line some 25 km eastward and placing the onetime Galician towns of Oświęcim, Bielsko-Biała, Chrzanów, and Wadowice in German Ost-Oberschlesien. It also joined the remainder of the Kraków województwo with the portion of the Lwów województwo west of the San River to form Distrikt Krakau. The Soviets, who had invaded Poland beginning on 17 September, were left in control of the former Galician territories east of the San. On 1 November 1939 those territories were incorporated into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Jarosław and Lesko, once located near the geographic center of Galicia, were now German and Soviet border towns, respectively, while Przemyśl was divided into German and Soviet sectors. The total Jewish population of the new Distrikt Krakau in November 1939 has been estimated at upwards of 200,000. Jews in the Soviet zone likely numbered between 560,000 and 580,000, including several tens of thousands of refugees from the west who fled from German to Soviet-controlled areas.

These geopolitical changes generated markedly different experiences for Jews in different parts of the Galician region. For Jews in the western regions, Germany’s 1939 ground and air assaults brought destruction, chaos, and terror all along the battlefront. In addition to the broad panic sown by aerial bombardment, German infantry and paramilitary troops, including SS units known as Einsatzgruppen (Special Task Forces), added to the fear by attacking civilian populations, Polish and Jewish alike. These forces killed perhaps as many as 90,000 civilians throughout German-occupied Poland between September and December 1939. Many of the victims came from local leadership circles. It is not known how many were from the former Galician territories or what proportion were Jews, but Galician Jews, including 500 murdered in Przemyśl on 18 September 1939 during the brief German occupation of the city before the new border was fixed, figured notably among the victims. In many places, German troops confiscated the stocks of Jewish shops and placed Jewish-owned businesses into trusteeship. Impressment of Jews for forced labor projects, chiefly involving public maintenance, was common, as were vandalism against synagogues or their destruction, acts of gratuitous violence, and public humiliation of Jewish men, especially those wearing traditional garb. Such targeted action prompted an unknown number of Jews, mostly men, to flee eastward. The gender difference was due first to a Polish government order to men of military age to evacuate areas near the front in order to regroup in the rear, second to a widespread belief among Jews that Nazi prohibitions against racial defilement would protect Jewish women from rape by German soldiers. Some evidence suggests that Polish women were indeed initially more vulnerable than Jewish women were to sexual assault.

The conditions governing personal decisions about whether to flee or to stay in place changed radically with the Soviet invasion of 17 September. Germany now saw an opportunity to remove Polish Jews en masse from territories under its control; it thus began not only to encourage Jewish flight but to push Jews across the demarcation line aggressively. Until the Soviet zone was annexed to the Ukrainian SSR on 1 November the new frontier remained largely open to Jewish refugees. After that date the Soviets took measures to stop the refugee flow. Restrictions were not always stringently enforced, however, especially where Jewish Red Army officers commanded Soviet border stations. Lviv in particular continued to add to its Jewish refugee population for several months more, albeit at a reduced rate. Refugee movement trickled to a halt in January 1940, when Germany, concerned not to exacerbate tensions with the Soviets, stopped trying to force Jews to cross the border.

Jews in Eastern Galicia under Soviet Rule, 1939–1941

The Jews under Soviet rule were subject to policies aimed at integrating them into existing state structures of governance and social organization. On one hand, those policies mandated nationalization of larger industrial and commercial enterprises, many of which were Jewish-owned. They also entailed dismantling Jewish communal organizations, vociferous discouragement of Jewish religious observance, and suppression of Jewish political parties and movements. On the other hand, they offered Jews access to higher education, state service, and the elite ranks of Soviet society to a degree inconceivable for Jews under Polish or Austrian rule. They also guaranteed employment and proscribed job discrimination (along with all public expression of hostility toward Jews). Women joined the labor force in unprecedented numbers. By recognizing Jews as one of the USSR’s constituent “nationalities,” the Soviet regime also offered unparalleled state support for Yiddish-language educational and cultural institutions, although its ideological opposition to what it deemed expressions of religion or of bourgeois culture led it to close schools in which Hebrew had been the main language of instruction.

Among other effects, Soviet policies exacerbated already acute tensions between Jews and local Ukrainians and Poles. Most Jews in the Soviet zone had welcomed the Red Army as the force best able not only to keep them out of German hands but also to prevent ethnic violence. Many non-Jewish residents, especially Poles, considered that attitude no less treasonous than collaboration with the German occupiers to the west. Their perception that Jews had colluded invidiously with the Soviets was heightened when Jews, both local and from farther east in the USSR, began to appear among Soviet officials in positions of authority from which they had been largely excluded under earlier regimes. Jews were widely thought to have gained more and lost less from Soviet rule than had other groups. Based on that belief some concluded that Jewish gains must have been obtained by helping the regime break their non-Jewish neighbors’ resistance to occupation.

The initial widespread Jewish sense of relief over escape from German rule subsided within months, as the harsher features of Soviet reality came to light. Disillusionment became clear in February 1940, when the authorities gave refugees from the west a choice: accept Soviet citizenship or return to the German zone. At least half of the Jews affected registered for the latter option. The choice turned out to be a ruse to identify potentially disloyal elements; would-be returnees to German-held territory were instead deported to the Soviet interior. Ironically, deportation greatly increased their chances of survival after Germany invaded and conquered the region beginning in June 1941.

The Destruction of Galician Jewry

It is not clear to what degree those who asked to go back to the German zone were aware of the conditions that had developed there under German administration. After the fighting of September 1939 had ended, Germany had incorporated its portion of Galicia into a larger political unit called the Generalgouvernement (General Governorate). This new entity was a strange hybrid formation defined officially as a Nebenland (roughly, “subordinate territory”); it was neither part of Germany, nor a German protectorate, nor a sovereign entity in its own right. Nevertheless, a German civilian authority made all laws and controlled all movement across and within its borders. Distrikt Krakau was one of the Generalgouvernement’s four main administrative subdivisions.

Beginning in October 1939, local Generalgouvernement officials began to implement measures to control the Jews for whom they were responsible, initially following only the vaguest policy guidelines. At first, the most common measure was the appointment of Jewish councils (Judenräte) to convey orders to the Jewish population and to be held responsible for their implementation. Although the head of the Generalgouvernement, Hans Frank, whose seat was in Kraków, tried to standardize the councils’ size, composition, and method of selection, Judenräte were not established according to any clear pattern. Neither were the compulsory Jewish districts, commonly called ghettos, which became a common (though not universal) institution for containing Jews gradually during 1940 and 1941. [IMG:4.1-Holocaust-1|]] In District Krakau, Frank initially discouraged creating ghettos, preferring to isolate Jews by marking them with a distinctive armband, forbidding them to travel on public conveyances, and imposing an evening curfew. He also endeavored to disperse the 60,000-70,000 Jews of Kraków among smaller nearby towns and to resettle as many Jews as he could from the Distrikt to other parts of the Generalgouvernement. Still, many local officials, acting on their own initiative, imposed additional residential restrictions, often involving confinement of Jews to an area surrounded by a fence or a wall. In Kraków, Frank’s subordinate, Otto Wächter, enclosed the 15,000 Jews who remained in the city in March 1941 in a “Jewish residential quarter” (jüdischer Wohnbezirk) in the suburb of Podgórze. As throughout the Generalgouvernement, Jews in Distrikt Krakau faced severe encumbrances on their livelihoods. Small merchants and shopkeepers, the largest sector of the Jewish population, saw their stocks confiscated, their supply and distribution networks cut. Larger Jewish-owned enterprises were forcibly sold to German buyers. Jewish bank accounts were blocked, with weekly withdrawals capped at 250 zł. (~$50). For most Jews the only sources of livelihood were sale of personal possessions and labor for German businesses or government agencies, for which workers were conscripted for minimal payment. Many conscript workers were taken from their homes and placed in forced labor camps, leaving their families without support. The German authorities also rationed food, sometimes at less than subsistence levels. The result for Jews was widespread malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic disease.

German authorities debated whether food supplies and sanitary conditions in the ghettos should be maintained sufficiently to keep Jewish laborers healthy enough to work or whether they should be engineered to increase overall mortality. 4.1-Holocaust-3Each side in the debate believed that the problem would soon be obviated: they anticipated a German military strike against Soviet territory, which would result in the rapid collapse of the USSR and permit wholesale removal of Jews from all European countries to the far reaches of Siberia.

That strike began on 22 June 1941 when some three million German troops and an additional 650,000-850,000 soldiers from four other countries crossed the Soviet frontier in Operation Barbarossa. Conquest of the Soviet-held former Galician territories was effectively completed within three weeks (although some areas were occupied by Hungarian or Romanian forces until late July or August before being turned over to German control). Among the first effects of German rule was the return of the name “Galicia” to the contemporary political lexicon. On 16 July 1941 Germany’s leader Adolf Hitler had ordered that the former Polish województwa of Stanisławów and Tarnopol, along with the eastern portion of the województwo of Lwów, be incorporated into the Generalgouvernement. The order was evidently meant to obscure those areas’ association with Ukrainian national aspirations by severing them from Reichskommissariat Ukraine, the name the Germans gave to their civil administration in the pre-1939 Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The severed provinces were constituted as Distrikt Galizien, the fifth Generalgouvernement district, on 1 August 1941.

German officials who oversaw the incorporation understood that the region’s ethnic antagonisms had been exacerbated under Soviet rule. They initially anticipated that local Poles and Ukrainians would rise up to slaughter masses of Jews once Germans entered their area. As it turned out, lethal violence against Jews by local mobs was noted in more than a quarter of cities, towns, and villages in what would soon become Distrikt Galizien. In Lviv more than 3,000 Jews were killed by mobs during the five weeks following the German conquest. [[IMG:4.1-Holocaust-6|]

In Ternopil some 5,000 (nearly a third of the town’s Jews) were murdered in a single day (2 July); shortly thereafter mobs in Zlochiv slaughtered 4,000 out of 5,700 Jewish residents over a three-day span. In most places, however, aggressive crowds claimed relatively few victims or did not form at all, much to German dissatisfaction. At the end of summer 1941, some 540,000 Jews of Distrikt Galizien remained alive. The German Army’s inability to topple the Soviet regime obviated plans to deport these and Jews from other German-occupied territories to the Soviet interior. The result was the deployment of significant German forces and local auxiliary troops for the systematic mass annihilation of the Jewish population.

In Distrikt Galizien the mass murder campaign was conducted initially by shooting, with German and local auxiliary squads entering a location, rounding up large numbers of Jews, marching them to the outskirts of town, and mowing them down with small arms or machine guns. 4.1-Holocaust-9 As long as the German Army continued to advance eastward, through December 1941, relatively little manpower could be spared for this labor-intensive practice. During its first half-year in operation the shooting campaign claimed about 50,000 victims ― a staggering number, to be sure, but one that accounted for fewer than 10 percent of the Distrikt’s Jewish population. Many of the remaining Jews were placed in ghettos, to be held until they could be killed. Once the German advance stalled, more personnel were devoted to killing operations, and recruitment of local auxiliaries to assist increased notably. The result was the death of nearly 340,000 Jews from Distrikt Galizien in 1942 and 135,000 in 1943. Of the few thousand Jews still alive after that date, about 1,500 were incarcerated in labor camps around Drohobych; most were murdered before the Red Army reconquered the area in mid-1944. The total number of survivors in the district probably did not exceed 2,500. The large majority of them survived in hiding. 4.1-Holocaust-8

Systematic murder of the Jews of Distrikt Krakau and the once-Austrian parts of German Silesia began in spring 1942 and reached its greatest intensity during the summer of that year. By that time, the bulk of killing was performed in specially-designated centers, to which victims were transported from their ghettos or other places of residence by rail. These were not “concentration camps” but locations where victims were murdered by asphyxiation in gas chambers immediately upon disembarkation. Nearly all Jews from Distrikt Krakau were murdered in the Bełżec killing center, located in Distrikt Lublin of the Generalgouvernement, just beyond the border with Distrikt Galizien. (The killing center at Birkenau, part of the complex associated with the concentration camp at Auschwitz, was located in the Silesian portion of the former Austrian Galicia, but most of its victims came from elsewhere in Europe.) 4.1-Holocaust-10By the end of 1942, only about 37,000 Jews remained alive in Distrikt Krakau labor camps, of which Płaszów, on the outskirts of Kraków, was the largest. An unknown number, likely no more than 10,000, attempted to survive in hiding. These Jews were hunted down relentlessly over the following two years by German and Polish auxiliary police. No more than 6,000 Jews, probably many fewer, remained alive when German troops left Distrikt Krakau in January 1945 ― at most a mere three percent of the Distrikt’s original Jewish population. 4.1-Holocaust-11

From early 1942 Bełżec also became a primary site for killing Jews from Distrikt Galizien, supplementing and, in some larger towns, overtaking death by shooting. 15,000 Jews from Lviv were murdered in that killing center in March 1942, 42,000 in August, and 10,000 in January 1943. Thousands more Lviv Jews were transferred to labor camps in the city, where most perished.

Although in the end only a handful of Jews survived German occupation anywhere in Galicia, the experiences of Jews before their murder differed greatly depending upon whether they had been under German or Soviet control between 1939 and 1941. For the Jews of Distrikt Krakau some three years passed between German occupation and annihilation. During that time German practices were inconsistent and policy aims unclear. Consequently, efforts to assess the German threat and to withstand it became a prominent feature of Jewish life under German rule. Initially virtually all Jews expected that rule to be temporary; it would constitute an interval of acute suffering similar to episodes of persecution that earlier Jewish generations had experienced. In many communities both Judenräte and alternative communal organizations worked to augment supplies of food, clothing, and medicine; locate shelter for war refugees and deportees; provide care and schooling for children; boost morale; and redistribute wealth for mutual aid. 4.1-Holocaust-7

Between May 1940 and July 1942, a German-recognized agency, the Jewish Social Self-Assistance Society (Jüdische Soziale Selbsthilfe), based in Kraków, run by Jews, and financed largely by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, distributed resources through more than 2,000 local committees in all parts of German-occupied Poland. Youth movements also played a significant role in organizing vital social services not only for their own members but also for their communities as a whole. Their activities led to the formation of armed resistance groups in Kraków and in three other ghettos. These encompassed relatively few ghetto inhabitants, and they began to function only after mass killing had been nearly completed. Their operations were confined mostly to sabotage and acts of revenge.

Parallel self-help and resistance activities in Distrikt Galizien were far more limited. In Distrikt Krakau those activities had built upon the foundations of prewar Jewish social service organizations; in Distrikt Galizien those foundations had been dismantled under Soviet rule. German authorities in Distrikt Galizien knew nearly from the outset that the Jews under their authority were destined for imminent death; hence the considerations that had moved some of their counterparts to the west to permit Jews minimal adequate living conditions were not operative in the east (although Jüdische Soziale Selbsthilfe did manage to establish a few short-lived committees there). The nearly immediate onslaught of mass murder operations left most communities shocked, atomized, and largely leaderless. 4.1-Holocaust-13

In the end, however, the different trajectories of East and West Galician Jewry after 1939 led to nearly identical fates. Only the smallest remnants of each community remained to attempt to reconstruct their lives, one under Soviet, the other under Polish communist rule.

Select Bibliography

Dąbrowska, Danuta, Avraham Wein, and Avraham Weiss, eds. Pinkas ha-kehilot, Polin, Volume 2: Galitsiyah ha-mizraḥit. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1980.

Megargee, Geoffrey, ed. Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1939-1945, Volume II: Ghettos in German-Occupied Eastern Europe. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2012, 475-601, 743-854.

Pohl, Dieter. Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung in Ostgalien 1941-1944. Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1997.

Wein, Avraham, and Avraham Weiss, eds. Pinkas ha-kehilot, Polin, Volume 3: Galitsiyah ha-ma’aravit u-Shleziyah. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1984.