The Water Works' Camps in the Lublin District, 1940-1942. Hubs of the Persecution of Jews in the General Government?

• Applicant: Dr. Frank Grelka
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2018 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 406251089

This research project explores the non-industrial deployment policy of the General Government (GG) as a leitmotif of the persecution of the Jewish population in occupied Poland between 1940 and 1942. At the core of the investigation is an empirical study on publicly-funded construction projects which ex-ploited Jewish labor to drain farmland on behalf of the branch for water management (within the Department for Nutrition and Agriculture). Using previously undiscovered archival sources from about 60 camps across the Lublin district (with altogether ca. 170 camps across the entire GG), this project expands our knowledge of the use of forced labor through a comparison of the SS and the Wehrmacht. It details the lethal mistreatment of Jews at camps associated with Lublin’s water works, and also makes a critical causal link between these areas and the mass extermination camps at Sobibór and Bełżec. Results will be published both in a monograph and (using digital tools) interactive maps intended for university and research purposes. They visualize the central significance of multiple displacements of Jewish forced laborers from the ghettoes in Poland, as well as from deportation trains from West and East Central Europe into Labor and Extermination Camps, for the Holocaust. From a methodological point of view, the project analyzes the experiences of Jewish workers in the camps from four perspectives: the German Government, Jewish Help Organizations, non-Jewish residents who lived close to the camps, and the Jewish workers. Making use of the most up-to-date geographical approaches to Holocaust Studies, the project recognizes melioration camps as precarious hubs of survival in the early stages of genocidal persecution, where the main preconditions for survival like wages and food barely existed. In contrast to existing research, I argue, firstly, that this type of forced labor was more decisive than ghettoization in regard to the process of murdering Jews. Secondly, I advocate for a stark analytical differentiation be-tween both persecution strategies through practice-oriented research. While the Nazis established ghettoes for sanitary reasons to concentrate Jewish populations in certain places, the installation of forced labor camps took another course. Starting in 1940, Jews were transferred to camps at water works under the pretext of them being deployed as forced labor, but authorities neglected elementary sanitation. This investigation of non-industrial labor deployment provides concrete evidence of Nazi at-tempts to systematically deteriorate the socioeconomic conditions of the Jewish population to consciously reduce the number of Jews that would have to be housed in cost-intensive ghettos. My project connects multiple venues of persecution: through Judenlager, transit camps, and ghettos, the workers at the water work camps were victims of a rudimentary but genocidal policy which ultimately led to the implementation of the Holocaust.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants