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190 • Andrej Angrick V Annihilation and Labor: Jews and Thoroughfare IV in Central Ukraine Andrej Angrick When Reinhard Heydrich announced on January 20, 1942, at what we now call the Wannsee Conference, that the further emigration of Jews from German-occupied Europe would be suspended due to the war, and that the Jews would instead be “evacuated” to the east, a large part of Soviet Jewry had already been killed. Most of the largest mass shootings of Jews in the Second World War had already taken place. Upon finishing the outline of his plan for the “Final Solution of the European Jewish question,” the chief of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) nonetheless turned to the occupied Soviet Union, where it was planned to put the Jews to work “in the east in an expedient manner in the course of the Final Solution” with those who were able to work “moved into those territories constructing roads.”1 It must have been clear to those at the conference that the word “evacuation” was a euphemism for state-sponsored mass murder. The representatives of the Foreign Office, the Plenipotentiary for the FourYear Plan, and the Ministry of Justice may have lacked detailed knowledge of what this entailed, but all those present were at least informed of the mass shootings in the Soviet Union. All of them had already played a part in the process, each according to his ministry’s responsibilities, Annihilation and Labor • 191 interests, and powers. But even within this circle of insiders, was the formulation that the Jews would be sent east for road construction—where “a large part will drop off by a natural process of attrition,” while those who remained “will have to be treated accordingly”2 —simply a generalization with no basis in reality, since all Jews were to be murdered anyway? Or was there something else, a specific project, that Heydrich had in mind? Historians Wolfgang Scheffler, Helge Grabitz, and Hermann Kaienburg were the first to suggest that Heydrich’s digression on road construction was in no way a euphemism for mass murder, but instead a reference to the Jewish forced labor camps along the supply line Thoroughfare IV (Durchgangsstrasse IV, or DG IV) in Ukraine. Those camps, in particular those in Galicia, were already putting into practice what Heydrich disclosed as his intent at Wannsee.3 Yet the chief of the RSHA, home office to the state Security Police (which included the Gestapo) and Nazi party’s Security Service, was uncharacteristically imprecise, which might have had something to do with his desire to remind his audience in his opening remarks that, on July 31, 1941, Hermann Göring, then Hitler’s closest colleague and designated successor, had appointed him “plenipotentiary for the preparation of the Final Solution of the European Jewish question.” The reason for this reminder lay in Heydrich’s realization that, in the first weeks of the war against the Soviet Union, he faced competition within the SS and police where the mass murder of the Jews was concerned. In the summer of 1941, Heinrich Himmler, both the national leader of the SS and the chief of the German Police, deployed three higher SSand police leaders (HSSPF) to the Soviet Union as his direct representatives . These three men were the driving force behind what appeared to British intelligence as a “competition with each other as to their scores” in shooting Soviet Jews.4 In addition to employing their own battalions of regular police and SS combat brigades, the HSSPFs used the four Einsatzgruppen, Heydrich’s infamous death squads, which were made up largely of Security Police (Sipo) and Security Service (SD) personnel . But it was the HSSPFs who forced the transition from the murder of select Jewish men to the mass murder of all Jews regardless of age or gender.5 For example, Friedrich Jeckeln, HSSPF Russia South until October 31, 1941, seized the initiative within the SS at Kamianets-Podilsky at the end of August 1941, overseeing the murder of 23,600 Jews over three days, by far the largest massacre in the war to that date.6 And it was Himmler who traveled the eastern front, personally ordering the HSSPF to accelerate the campaign of mass murder and to expand the scope of operations to include women and children.7 By contrast, Heydrich appears to have been unusually inactive during this period. The question therefore arises whether Heydrich was aware of his limited powers of authority—at least in internal...

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