Nisko Plan - Lublin Reservation

Lublin Reservation

The Lublin reservation comprised an area of 300 to 400 square miles (780 to 1,000 km2) located between the Vistula and San rivers southeast of Lublin. Adolf Eichmann, then head of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration for the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, was the first to realize the Nisko Plan by deporting Jews to the Lublin reservation. While initially the Jews of East Upper Silesia were to be deported, Eichmann expanded the program to include Jews from Mährisch-Ostrau in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and from Vienna. Eichmann also set up a transit camp in nearby Nisko, a town on the western border of the Lublin district, from which the deportees were to be expelled eastward.

The first Jews were shipped to Lublin on October 18, 1939. The first train loads consisted of Jews deported from Austria and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. On October 19, when the second and third transports were prepared, Heinrich Müller, on behalf of SS head Heinrich Himmler, ordered a suspension of further deportations.,Historian Christopher Browning says Himmler's decision must be seen in correlation with his new position as chief coordinator of the resettlement of ethnic Germans to the former Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany, a position he held since 15 October. He suggests that Himmler did not consider the deportation of Jews from all the Third Reich as urgent as providing space for the resettlement of ethnic Germans in Nazi Germany's new eastern provinces.

This priority shift resulted in focusing on the expulsion of Jews from these provinces to the Lublin reservation, the contemporary resettlement of about 30,000 ethnic Germans from the Lublin district in the opposite direction, and the resettlement of Jews living within the Generalgouvernement to the eastern bank of the Vistula. Hitler approved of this priority shift: While in early October he had envisioned the short-term expulsion of all Jews from Vienna and 300,000 Jews from the Altreich to the Lublin reservation, he in late October approved Himler's plans for deportation of 550,000 Jews from the new eastern provinces and all "Congress Poles", meaning Poles from the Soviet partition residing in the Third Reich, to the Lublin reservation. While this would have resulted in short-term expulsions of one million people, this number was cut down for capacity reasons to 80,000 after intervention on 28 November 1939 by Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Main Security Office.

The reservation was not kept secret; the local population was aware and the international press was reporting. Reports in the Luxembourgian paper Luxemburger Wort of 12 November and the British paper The Times of 16 December 1939 both gave a total of 45,000 Jews deported to the reservation so far. Also in December, the American paper The Spectator reported the reservation was enclosed by barbed wire on an area of fifty by sixty miles near Nisko and Lublin, and prepared for an intake of 1,945,000 Jews.

An excerpt from a Luxemburger Wort report of November 1939 reads:

"Sometimes trains drive on for forty kilometres beyond Lublin and halt in the open country, where the Jews alight with their luggage and have to find themselves primitive accommodation in the surrounding villages."

Historians estimate that by January 30, 1940, a total of 78,000 Jews had been deported to Lublin from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. This figure was given by Heydrich when he reported in Berlin in January. He stated the number would increase to 400,000 by the end of the year. Among the Jews deported to the reservation in February 1940 were the Pomeranian Jews, resulting in Gauleiter Franz Schwede-Coburg declaring his Pomeranian Gau the first Gau of the Altreich to be judenrein ("cleansed of Jews"). The deportees were put under the authority of the Judenrat in neighboring Lublin. By April, when the reservation was dissolved, the total number of Jews who had been transported to Nisko had reached 95,000.

Many deportees had died due to starvation, either during the transport or during their stay in the reservation. Additional deaths in the reservation were caused by typhus and typhoid fever epidemics, the lack of housing and any "sources of livelihood", a situation the local Jews were not able to ease, despite great efforts.