The Nisko Plan

On 18 October 1939 a train in which the Gestapo had placed some 900 Jewish men left Moravská Ostrava in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The next day it reached the station at Nisko on the San, in occupied Poland. On 20 October further transports set off, from Vienna and from Katowice. The whole operation was conceived and directed by Adolf Eichmann, until then head of the offices that forced the Jews of Austria and the Protectorate to emigrate. A “reservation” was to be created on the San, to which Jews from the whole Reich would be sent.

The plan failed. By the end of October, according to various estimates, between 4,700 and more than 5,000 people had been deported to Nisko; then the transports were halted. Most of the deportees were driven by the SS towards the new border with the USSR. Only a few hundred remained in a makeshift camp in the village of Zarzecze on the other side of the San. Even so, the operation on the San marked an important stage: it was the first wartime deportation of Jews from the Reich to the east, prepared by the men who two years later would organise their mass murder.

The operation is often described as the deportation of Jews “from Austria and Czechoslovakia”. Austria, however, had been part of the Reich since March 1938, Czechoslovakia had ceased to exist in March 1939, and Ostrava lay in the Protectorate. The third place of deportation was Katowice – that is, Polish Upper Silesia, occupied in September and just then being incorporated into the Reich.

From forced emigration to deportation

Until September 1939 Nazi policy towards the Jews had consisted above all in driving them out of the country. Its most effective executor was Eichmann. After the Anschluss of Austria he set up the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna in August 1938, which within little more than a year forced more than a hundred thousand people, stripped of their property, to leave. In the summer of 1939 a similar office was set up in Prague. The war, however, closed most escape routes, and the conquest of Poland put some two million more Jews into German hands.

The SS leadership quickly found a new solution. On 21 September 1939 Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Security Police and the SD, sent the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen what is known as the Schnellbrief (express letter). In it he ordered that the Jews of the occupied Polish territories be concentrated in larger towns on railway lines, that a council of elders (Judenrat) be set up in every community to be responsible for carrying out German orders, and that Jews be removed from the areas earmarked for incorporation into the Reich. He referred to a “final aim”, which was to remain strictly secret and which he did not name. On 27 September the Security Police and the SD were merged into the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), to which Eichmann too was subordinate.

On 29 September Adolf Hitler described to Alfred Rosenberg the division of conquered Poland into three strips: a German one in the west, a Polish one in the middle, and an eastern one, between the Vistula and the Bug, for “all Jewry”, including that of the Reich, and for all “unreliable elements”. The day before, the German–Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty had given the Lublin region to Germany, so such an area was now in German hands. In his Reichstag speech of 6 October Hitler publicly announced a new “ethnographic ordering” of Eastern Europe, and among its tasks he named “an attempt to order and regulate the Jewish problem”.

The choice of Nisko

On 6 October the head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Müller, instructed Eichmann to prepare the expulsion of 70,000–80,000 Jews from the Katowice district, as well as the Jews of Moravská Ostrava. Eichmann at once widened the task. With the consent of the Gauleiter of Vienna, Josef Bürckel, he added the Jews of Vienna, promising the Jewish community that the city would be “free of Jews” within three quarters of a year. He also held talks with the Gauleiter of Silesia, Josef Wagner. On 9 October he was in Ostrava, where together with the commander of the Security Police in the Protectorate, Franz Stahlecker, he organised the first transport.

Between 12 and 15 October Eichmann and Stahlecker toured the area between Kraków and Warsaw to choose a site for a transit camp. They chose Nisko on the San, a small town on the western edge of the future Lublin District, with a railway station on the line from Rozwadów to Lublin. On the other side of the river, on marshy meadows near the village of Zarzecze, the first deportees were to build huts. From there people were to be sent on further east. According to the plan, young men fit for work would come first, including craftsmen and engineers, with food supplies for several weeks, followed by women, children and the elderly. The cost of transport and building materials had to be borne by the Jewish communities.

The first transports

In Ostrava the men were rounded up on 17 October, and the next day the train set off. According to studies by Seev Goshen and Jonny Moser, it carried 901 people, together with timber and tools for building huts. It reached Nisko on 19 October. On 20 October transports left Vienna, with 912 men, and Katowice, with 875. The deportees were guarded by policemen under orders to shoot anyone who tried to escape. The people did not know where they were going. The Viennese, whom the Jewish community had been forced to select according to a list of trades, had been told they were going to a “retraining camp”.

Eichmann was waiting at the station. Survivors remembered a speech that was later repeated in many accounts: the Führer had promised the Jews a new homeland, a few kilometres from here, beyond the San; there were no flats or houses there, and whoever built himself a house would have a roof over his head. The Viennese rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein, sent to Nisko together with other officials of the Jewish communities of Vienna, Prague and Ostrava, told Claude Lanzmann years later that Eichmann, speaking of how the deportees were to manage on the spot, added with a smile: “otherwise you will simply have to die”.

From each train the SS picked out several hundred men to build the camp. The rest were driven east in columns and abandoned in villages with orders never to return. Anyone who tried to come back risked being shot. Many crossed the demarcation line to the Soviet side or were chased across it. The camp at Zarzecze, which German documents called a transit camp, was in reality a few huts on a waterlogged meadow, without water, without sanitation and with almost no supplies. Peter Longerich considers that the building of the camp was merely a cover and that the whole operation was from the outset a “wild expulsion”: the people were to be pushed across the border or left without means of subsistence in the borderland.

The operation halted

By the time the first train reached Nisko, the decision to halt the scheme had already been taken in Berlin. On 19 October Müller, acting on behalf of Heinrich Himmler, informed the offices in Vienna and Ostrava that further transports required his approval – in practice, that only those already prepared could still be sent. According to Christopher Browning, the order came from Himmler himself. On 7 October Hitler had appointed him Commissioner for the Strengthening of German Nationhood, that is, the man responsible for resettlement. Priority now went to bringing in the Germans from the Baltic states, whose departure from Estonia was just beginning, and settling them in the Polish lands being incorporated into the Reich. Trains and space in the General Government were needed above all for the expulsion of Poles and Jews from those lands, not for deporting Jews from Vienna or Ostrava.

Eichmann, however, did not cancel the trains he had ordered. A second wave set off on 26–27 October: some 400 people from Ostrava, some 1,000 from Katowice and several hundred from Vienna. These deportees were not let into the camp at all but were driven straight on to the east. The total number of deportees is estimated by David Cesarani, Eichmann’s biographer, at about 4,700, and by Czech researchers from Ostrava at more than 5,000; some studies give a lower figure of about 3,800.

The fate of the deportees

Some five hundred men remained in the camp at Zarzecze. In the winter of 1939–1940 they suffered from sickness and hunger; some were moved to labour camps in the area, and a few delegates were allowed to go to the Jewish community in Lublin to seek help. In April 1940 the camp was liquidated, officially because the army needed the land. In what was unique in the history of SS camps, the prisoners were sent home. On 14 April, according to German and Austrian studies, a train took away 501 people, 198 of them to Vienna; according to other data only about 300 returned. Most of them were deported again in the following years and murdered.

Those who had been driven across the demarcation line fell into Soviet hands. Many of them, refusing to accept Soviet citizenship, were arrested by the NKVD in the summer of 1940 during the “cleansing” of the border zone and sent to the Gulag. According to Czech researchers, some 20 per cent of the Czechoslovak citizens among them died in the camps. After the amnesty of 1942 about 350 joined the Czechoslovak unit being formed in the USSR by Ludvík Svoboda. Of those deported from Ostrava, little more than a hundred returned home after the war. Of the Viennese Jews, only a minority survived.

“The first ghetto in Lublin”

Some chronologies state, under the date of 19 October, that “the first Jewish ghetto” was established in Lublin. This is not true. The Germans set up the ghetto in Lublin only on 24 March 1941, and they murdered most of its inhabitants in the spring of 1942 at the Bełżec extermination camp. The first ghetto in occupied Poland was the ghetto in Piotrków Trybunalski, created by an order of the German acting mayor of 8 October 1939. Within a few weeks the Jews had to move into a designated quarter around the old town. It was an open ghetto, marked with signs but not fenced in. The Germans ordered the ghetto in Łódź in February 1940 and sealed it on 30 April; the Warsaw ghetto was created in the autumn of 1940.

The error probably stems from confusing a ghetto with the planned “Lublin reservation”. In October 1939 Lublin was indeed at the centre of Nazi plans for the Jews – not as the site of a ghetto, but as the capital of the area to which the Jews of the whole Reich were to be banished.

The Lublin reservation

The idea of a “Jewish reservation” (Judenreservat) survived the halting of the transports to Nisko. In November the Deputy Governor-General, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, toured the Lublin District and noted the opinion of local Germans that the marshy terrain would be well suited to a reservation and that such a measure “would cause a considerable decimation of the Jews”. From November the SS and Police Leader Odilo Globocnik was responsible for Jewish affairs in the district. According to Browning, at the end of October Hitler approved Himmler’s plans to expel to the General Government all the Jews of the annexed territories, some 550,000 people, together with hundreds of thousands of Poles.

The plans exceeded what was possible. On 28 November Heydrich approved a more modest “first short-term plan”: in December 1939 more than 87,000 Poles and Jews were deported from the Warthegau to the General Government. In February 1940 some 1,000 Jews from Stettin, most of them elderly, were deported to the Lublin region, and many of them froze to death or died in the first weeks. Hans Frank, however, protested against the flooding of “his” General Government with deportees. At the end of March 1940 Hermann Göring banned transports without his or Frank’s consent, and in the spring the SS abandoned the idea of a reservation. In the summer of 1940 Madagascar took Lublin’s place in the plans.

Place in the war

The operation on the San lasted less than two weeks and ended in failure, but in the light of later events its significance was great. For the first time during the war the authorities of the Reich deported Jews from Austria, the Protectorate and the annexed territories by train to the occupied east, from ready-made lists, under police escort, with the costs passed on to the victims. A process began in which “territorial solutions” – Lublin, Madagascar and the boundless expanses of the USSR in turn – gave way to ever more murderous ideas. Historians disagree as to whether the Nisko Plan was still a search for a “place” for the Jews, as Browning believes, or already a disguised plan for their annihilation, as Longerich holds. Both interpretations agree that a large proportion of the people banished to the marshes on the San were meant to perish there.

For Eichmann the operation did not mean the end of his career. In December 1939 Heydrich put him in charge of the RSHA section for resettlement and Jewish affairs, and from 1941 his office, known as IV B 4, organised the deportation of Jews from all over Europe to the extermination camps. Lublin, which in October 1939 was to have been a “reservation”, became in 1942 the headquarters of Operation Reinhard, in which Globocnik directed the murder of the Jews of the General Government at Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka. The Viennese, the people of Ostrava and the Silesians who survived Nisko often perished in those same camps.