At some point, Gauleiter Greiser asked — and was given — Himmler’s permission to liquidate 100,000 Jews in his area.127 There is no direct indication that Greiser’s request went beyond Himmler. It would, of course, not have been necessary to take the request further, had it been known that Hitler had already accorded his general authorization for the mass killing of Jews in Poland. That Hitler’s approval, however broad, was essential can be read out of a further initiative coming from the head of government in the Warthegau. When, some months later, Wilhelm Koppe, Higher SS and Police Chief in the Warthegau, wrote to Himmler in support of Greiser’s request to extend the killing to 30,000 Poles suffering from incurable tuberculosis, the answer given by the Reichsführer’s personal adjutant, SS-Sturmbannführer Rudolf Brandt, was that ‘the last decision in this matter must be taken by the Führer’.128 Greiser’s own revealing comment on the need to consult Hitler was: ‘I myself do not believe that the Führer needs to be asked again in this matter, especially since at our last discussion with regard to the Jews he told me that I could proceed with these according to my own judgement.’129 Such a response would indeed have been typical of Hitler’s approach. But the episode does suggest that, if it were necessary to have Hitler’s approval for the extermination of 30,000 Poles with incurable tuberculosis, it would have been essential to have had at least his blanket authorization for the killing of 100,000 Jews. When exactly Greiser spoke to Hitler directly about the Jews in his area cannot be precisely determined. The most likely date was before the decision was taken to exterminate the 100,000 Jews referred to in the initial correspondence with Himmler. Whether Hitler was consulted on the precise developments or not, his overall approval was evidently necessary. By the first week of December 1941, Chelmno, a gas-van station in the south of the Warthegau, had become the first extermination unit to commence operations.130
The Warthegau was not the only area scheduled to receive the deportees. Shortly before the killing in Chelmno commenced, the first transports of German Jews had arrived in the Baltic. The initial intention was to send them to Riga, to be placed in a concentration camp outside the city prior to further deportation eastwards. Hitler had approved proposals from the local commander of the Security Police, SS-Sturmbannführer Dr Otto Lange, to set up the concentration camp. Lange had, however, proposed erecting a camp for Latvian Jews. This was turned, in accordance with a ‘wish’ of the Führer, into the construction of a ‘big concentration camp’ for Jews from Germany and the Protectorate. Some 25,000 were expected to be interned there,
By the time the first Jews were due to arrive in Riga from the Reich, the building of the camp had scarcely begun. An improvised solution had to be found. Instead of heading for Riga, the trains were diverted to Kowno in Lithuania. Between 25 and 29 November, terrified and exhausted Jews were taken from five trains arriving in Kowno from Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, Vienna, and Breslau and, without any selection on grounds of ability to work, promptly taken out and shot by members of the locally based Einsatzkommando. The same fate awaited 1,000 German Jews who then did arrive in Riga on 30 November. They were simply taken straight out into the forest and shot, along with some 14,000 Latvian Jews from the Riga ghetto. Himmler had earlier in the month told the police chief in the area, Friedrich Jeckeln, ‘that all the Jews in the
