Nisko Plan
The idea for the expulsion and resettlement of the Jews of Europe[1] into a remote corner of the Generalgouvernement territory, bordering the cities of Lublin and Nisko, was devised by Adolf Hitler and formulated by his SS henchmen.
The first forced labor camps were established for the Burggraben project intended to fortify the Nazi–Soviet demarcation line and to supply the local SS units at Lublin from Lipowa.
The Nisko Plan was abandoned for pragmatic reasons; nevertheless, the Zwangsarbeitslagers (German for "forced labor camps") already established for DAW became the industrial base of other SS projects such as Ostindustrie.
The town of Lublin in Poland had been the focus of Nazi planners since the early 1930s, after Herrmann Seiffert described it as the center of Jewish worldwide power and source of their genetic potential.
[10] After Nazi Germany had defeated Poland in September 1939 and partitioned the country with the Soviet Union, the Lublin area became part of the Generalgouvernement headed by Hans Frank.
[10] 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.
He suggested also that Himmler did not consider the deportation of Jews from all the Third Reich to be as urgent as providing space for the Generalplan Ost resettlement of ethnic Germans into Nazi Germany's new eastern provinces.
[13] 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 Security Main Office.
[15] Also in December, the American paper The Spectator reported the camps were enclosed by barbed wire on an area of 80 by 100 kilometres (50 by 60 miles) near Nisko and Lublin 105 km (65 mi) apart from each other, and prepared for an intake of 1,945,000 Jews.
[15] 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.
[21] 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 their great efforts.
This resulted in desperate conditions: the inmates were crowded in dark and dirty rooms with no glass in the windows, had to sleep on the floor, the sick were not separated from the healthy, and the supply of food, water and soap was insufficient.
[10] In the functionalism versus intentionalism debate, which began in the 1960s, the Nisko Plan was brought up by Holocaust historians as an example of escalation of the Nazi anti-Jewish measures in World War II.
[26] Nevertheless, already at the beginning of war, on 24 October 1939 The Times noted that the German plan to create a Jewish state was cynical, and would surely doom the Jews to a deadly famine.
[27] Most historians of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust have concluded that the Nisko Plan was integrally related to Hitler's other programs and his intent to destroy the Jews in Europe.
Mainstream historians contend that Hitler and his government formulated an issue out of the "Jewish question", raised broad anti-semitism in Germany, and created the need for a type of "territorial solution" which could only result in a genocide.
