The Hagen Letter: "...to deal with 1/3 of the Poles - old people and children under the age of 10 - as with the Jews, that is to kill them."

On 17 February 1943, the Higher SS and Police Leader East Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger forwarded to the Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler correspondence of German officials in the General Gouvernement (BArch NS 19/1210).

The cause was a letter written by Wilhelm Hagen, the medical officer of Warsaw, to Adolf Hitler. In his letter of 7 December 1942, Hagen explained that Lothar Weirauch, head of the Department of Population and Welfare, had revealed that "it is intended or considered, in the course of the resettlement of 200,000 Poles in the east of the General Government...to deal with a third of the Poles - with 70,000 old people and children under the age of 10 - as with the Jews, that is, to kill them" (see document below). He requested Hitler for his intervention and decision on the issue.

The Kinna Report - German Document on the Killing of Unfit Jews in Auschwitz

Introduction

In late 1942, several thousand Poles were deported from Zamosc to destinations according to their racial value attributed to them by Nazis since the area was declared "to the first German settlement area in the Generalgouvernement" (order of Himmler of 12 November 1942, Jaczynska, Sonderlaboratorium SS, p. 414). The racially most inferior defined people were sent to Auschwitz concentration camp. The transport left Zamosc with 644 Poles of this group on 10 December 1942. Several people escaped from the train, the rest was admitted to Auschwitz on 13 December 1942.

The SS officer Heinrich Kinna of the migration central office wrote a report about the transport on 16 December 1942, in which he also summarised his talk with the deputy commandant in Auschwitz, Hans Aumeier (who he spelled phonetically as "Haumeier"). Aumeier informed Kinna on the camp's lethal policy on unfit prisoners, an indiscretion only trumped by Kinna writing that down in plain words:

"Imbeciles, idiots, cripples and sick people have to be removed from the camp within a short time by liquidation to unburden the camp. But this measure has insofar complications as, according to the order from the RSHA, the Poles have to die of a natural death contrary to the measures applied to the Jews."

(extract from the report of Heinrich Kinna of 16 December 1942, reproduced in full below)

It is noteworthy that while Kinna's employer, the migration central office in Lodz, sounds rather innocent and unrelated to the murder of Jews, its men were dispatched to Chelmno/Kulmhof extermination camp in 1942 (see documents 16 and 17 in Sonderkommando Kulmhof in German Documents - Origin and Foundation), so that Kinna might have been already inside the circle of people knowing details on the extermination of Jews. In fact, in his job description Kinna himself included the task "carrying out measures [Zweckmaßnahmen] against Jews and anti-social people" (letter of Kinna to the SS Personnel Main Office of 13 July 1943, cited in Aly, "Endlösung". Völkerverschiebung und der Mord an den europäischen Juden, p. 20).

The significance of this contemporary German document lies in its reference to the killing of Jews unfit for work in Auschwitz without resorting to the usual camouflage language (see for instance Mattogno's special treatment of evidence and "Separate accommodation" in Auschwitz: a code word for extrajudicial executions).