CHAPTER V

September 1941–December 1941

On November 12, 1941, Himmler ordered Friedrich Jeckeln, the HSSPF Ostland, to murder the approximately 30,000 Jews of the Riga ghetto.

On the eve of the operation, on November 29, the able-bodied Jews were separated from the bulk of the ghetto population.¹ On November 30, in the early-morning hours, the trek from the ghetto to the nearby Rumbula forest began. Some 1,700 guards were ready, including around 1,000 Latvian auxiliaries. In the meantime several hundred Soviet prisoners had dug six huge pits in the sandy terrain of Rumbula.²

Jews trying to escape the evacuation were killed on the spot—inside houses, on stairways, in the streets. As, group after group, the ghetto inhabitants reached the forest, a tightening gauntlet of guards drove them toward the pits. Shortly before approaching the execution site, the Jews were forced to dispose of their suitcases and bags, take off their coats, and finally remove their clothes. Then the naked victims descended into the pit by means of an earthen ramp, lay facedown on the ground, or over the bodies of the dying and the dead, and were shot in the back of the head with a single bullet from a distance of about two meters.

Jeckeln stood on the edge of the pits surrounded by a throng of SD, police, and civilian guests. Reichskomissar Lohse paid a short visit, and some police commanders were brought from as far away as the Leningrad front.³ Twelve marksmen working in shifts shot the Jews throughout the entire day. The killing stopped sometime between five p.m. and seven p.m.; by then about fifteen thousand Jews had been murdered.⁴

A week later, on December 7 and 8, the Germans murdered almost the entire remaining half of the ghetto population. The RSHA’s report no. 155 of January 14, 1942, summed up the overall outcome: “The number of Jews who remained in Riga—29,500—was reduced to 2,500 as a result of the Aktion carried out by the Higher SS and Police leader Ostland.”⁵

The historian Simon Dubnow, who lay ill, had been overlooked during the first massacre. The second time he was caught in the dragnet. The sick and feeble ghetto inhabitants were brought to the execution area in buses; as Dubnow could not board the bus fast enough, one of the Latvian guards shot him in the back of the head. The next day he was buried in a mass grave in the ghetto. According to rumor—fast turning into legend—on his way to the bus, Dubnow repeated: “People, do not forget; speak of this, people; record it all.”⁶ A few months later, on June 26, 1942, SS Obersturmführer Heinz Ballensiefen, head of the Jewish Section of Amt VII (research) in the RSHA, informed his colleagues that in Riga his men had “secured” (sichergestellt) “about 45 boxes containing the archive and library of the Jewish historian Dubnow.”⁷

Himmler continued to worry about the heavy stress that these mass killings imposed upon his men. On December 12, 1941, he once again issued secret instructions in this regard: “It is the sacred obligation of the higher SS leaders and commanders to see to it personally that none of our men who have to fulfill this heavy duty, become brutalized…. This will be achieved by keeping the strictest discipline in the performance of the official duties and by comradely evening gatherings after days filled with these difficult obligations. However, these comradely gatherings should never end with abuse of alcohol. During such evenings, as far as conditions allow, one should sit together around the table and eat in the best German domestic tradition; moreover, these evenings should be devoted to music, to lectures and to introducing our men into the beautiful domains of German spiritual and emotional life.”⁸

On the day of the first massacre of the Riga Jews, in the early-morning hours, a transport of 1,000 Jews from Berlin had arrived at a suburban railway station. Jeckeln did not deem it appropriate to send these new arrivals into a ghetto in full upheaval, from where the trek to Rumbula would be starting at any moment. The solution was at hand: The Berlin Jews were transported straight from the station to the forest and killed on the spot.

The deportees transported from the Reich to Riga were but one group among others who, since October 15, following a sudden decision taken by Hitler, were being sent off from cities in Germany and the Protectorate to ghettos in former Poland or the Ostland. Just a month earlier, Hitler had told Goebbels that the deportation of the Jews of Germany (and, implicitly, of all European Jews) would take place after the victory in Russia and would be directed to the Russian Far North. What could have triggered the Nazi leader’s sudden initiative?

I

The precise date of Hitler’s decision about the deportation of the Jews from Germany remains undetermined. Some historians have argued that Hitler reached his decision on September 17. The following day, in a letter to Greiser, with copies to Heydrich and to Wilhelm Koppe, the HSSPF in the Warthegau, Himmler summed up the “Führer’s wish”: “The Führer wishes the Altreich and the Protectorate to be cleared of and freed from Jews from west to east as soon as possible. Consequently, I shall endeavor, this year if possible and initially as a first stage, to transport the Jews from the Altreich and the Protectorate to those eastern territories that became part of the Reich two years ago and then deport them even farther eastward next spring. My intention is to take approximately 60,000 Jews of the Altreich and the Protectorate to spend the winter in the Litzmannstadt ghetto, which, I have heard, still has available capacity. I ask you not only to understand this step, which will certainly impose difficulties and burdens on your Gau, but to do everything in your power to support it in the interest of the Reich. SS Gruppenführer Heydrich, whose task is to carry out the transfer of the Jews, will contact you in good time, directly or through SS Gruppenführer Koppe.”⁹

Himmler’s letter to Greiser demonstrates that Hitler’s decision was sudden and that nothing was ready for its implementation. To deport 60,000 to 80,000 Jews to the overcrowded Lodz ghetto was manifestly impossible. The promise that these Jews would be sent farther eastward in the spring was clearly an improvised commitment, devoid of practical significance, meant only to preempt any protests from Greiser or from the Lodz authorities. Thus the immediate context of the Nazi leader’s decision becomes even more puzzling.

Starting the evacuation in the West of the Reich points to one of Hitler’s possible motives: persistent demands from the Gauleiter of western and northwestern Germany for housing, as a result of the damages inflicted by British bombings. A particularly pressing request was addressed directly to Hitler by Hamburg Gauleiter Karl Kaufmann on September 16 after a heavy British raid on the city, on the previous day.¹⁰ Such demands were reinforced by Goebbels’s constant insistence upon “cleansing Berlin of its Jews.”

Hitler’s sudden decision has mainly been attributed to information about Stalin’s order to deport the entire population of Volga Germans to Siberia.¹¹ Rosenberg’s adjutant, Otto Bräutigam, who brought the news to Hitler’s headquarters on September 14, was told that the Führer attached the greatest importance to this information.¹² After consulting with Ribbentrop on September 16, Hitler—according to this interpretation—made up his mind on the seventeenth. Yet we know that six days beforehand Goebbels had already mentioned Stalin’s order in his diary, and, on the following day, the propaganda chief recorded the worldwide echo stirred by the deportation.¹³ Thus Hitler could hardly have been impressed on September 14 by information he undoubtedly received nearly a week earlier and to which, until then, he had not reacted. Moreover, he certainly knew that deporting the Jews of Germany to avenge the Volga Germans would hardly impress somebody of Stalin’s ilk. The Volga Germans could, of course, have been a convenient pretext for a decision taken earlier for an entirely different reason: Roosevelt’s steady efforts to involve the United States in the war.

The Nazi leader had more than enough information concerning the direct assistance Roosevelt was providing Great Britain; the Churchill-Roosevelt meeting in August 1941 underscored the foundations of what had virtually become an alliance. And Berlin was following with no less concern Roosevelt’s determination to keep Stalin willing and capable to fight on. The Germans knew of Roosevelt’s unofficial envoy Harry Hopkins’s mission to Moscow and of Roosevelt’s decision to send planes and tanks directly from American assembly lines to the Soviet forces, even before filling the U.S. Army’s immediate needs.¹⁴ All this unquestionably tallied with Hitler’s belief that the Jews were the threatening force behind Roosevelt. How else could one explain the readiness of the leader of world capitalism to rush aid and assistance to the threatened fortress of Bolshevism?

In January 1939 Hitler had threatened the Jewish “warmongers” in Paris, London, and mainly Washington with his notorious “prophecy” in order to dissuade the democracies from intervening in the incipient Polish crisis. In January 1941 the Nazi leader took up his prophecy again (albeit in slightly different terms), possibly as a reaction to Roosevelt’s reelection and mainly to his fireside chat about the United States becoming “the great arsenal of democracy.” As speeches and threats did not seem to deflect the American president from his course, the Nazi leader may have thought that direct and highly menacing steps against a closely scrutinized Jewish community, the Jews of Germany (with any number of American correspondents posted in Berlin), would have some effect on Roosevelt’s “Jewish entourage.” The German Jews became, concretely and visibly, hostages on the brink of a dire fate if the United States moved further toward war.

In July 1940 Fritz Rademacher of the Foreign Ministry had expressed the same idea regarding the Madagascar plan: “The Jews [in Madagascar] will remain in German hands as a pledge of the future good conduct of the members of their race in America.”¹⁵ In March 1941, the Foreign Ministry once again linked measures against Jews in Germany to American policy; it demanded that a new decree (then in preparation) about the loss of citizenship and expropriation of Jews leaving the Reich be announced on March 26, the day the Lend-Lease Bill was to take effect.¹⁶

The need to put pressure on Roosevelt may have seemed increasingly urgent to Hitler during the first days of September 1941. On September 4, a German submarine, U-652, dangerously trailed by the U.S. destroyer Greer—and attacked by British aircraft guided by the Greer—attempted to torpedo the American vessel. Both the Greer and U-652 escaped unharmed, but a week later, on September 11, Roosevelt gave a distorted account of the incident and announced the “shoot-on-sight” policy, a major American step on the path to war with Germany.¹⁷ “The time for active defense has come,” the president declared in a radio speech, and two days later American naval forces received the order to shoot on sight at all Axis ships encountered within the American “neutrality zone” (unilaterally defined by the United States and extending to the mid-Atlantic).¹⁸

One may assume that, in Hitler’s mind, the counterthreat could work both ways: Either the fate menacing the Jews of Germany would eventually stop Roosevelt in his tracks (due to Jewish pressure) or, if Roosevelt and the Jews were bent on war with the Reich—that is, if total war was in the offing—the most dangerous internal enemy would already have been expelled from German territory.

Hitler’s decision may, in fact, have been taken in the early days of September. On September 2, Himmler was the Nazi leader’s guest for lunch. Other issues were on the agenda, but later that same day, the Reichsführer met his delegate in the General Government, Krüger, and discussed with him the deportation of Jews from the Reich (“Judenfrage-Aussiedlung aus dem Reich”). Two days later, as the Greer incident was unfolding, the Reichsführer again met with Hitler and, later in the evening, had a discussion with Koppe, his man in the Warthegau.¹⁹ The main practical obstacles were Frank’s uncompromising opposition to further transports of Poles and Jews into the General Government, and the overcrowding of the Lodz ghetto.²⁰

Hitler hesitated for some three additional weeks, as the attack against Moscow unfolded, probably in order to assess the difficulties that the deportation trains could be adding to the already overburdened supply routes from the Reich to the East. In early October, after the German victories in Vyasma and Briansk, the decision was finalized: The deportations could begin.²¹ When the president of the Lodz district, Friedrich Uebelhoer, prodded by the city mayor, Werner Ventzki, dared to protest to Himmler against the forthcoming influx of Jews and even accused Eichmann of providing false information about the situation in the ghetto, Himmler sent him a sharp rebuff.²²

On October 15, the first transport left Vienna for Lodz; it was followed by transports from Prague and Luxembourg on the sixteenth, and from Berlin, on the eighteenth. By November 5 twenty transports carrying 19,593 Jews completed the first phase.²³ In the meantime, on October 23, Eichmann and his men reviewed the reports about the first deportations and added some administrative steps and practical measures to the existing procedures.²⁴ Then, on November 8, the second phase started and lasted until mid-January 1942. This time twenty-two transports with some 22,000 Jews in all were headed further east, to the Ostland, to Riga, Kovno, and Minsk (upon Heydrich’s suggestion, as we shall see further on).²⁵ Of the transports destined for Riga, five were rerouted to Kovno; none of these 5,000 deportees ever set foot in the ghetto: Upon their arrival, they were immediately transferred to fort IX and shot in two batches on November 25 and 29.²⁶ A month beforehand, on October 28, approximately 10,000 inhabitants of the Kovno ghetto had been murdered. In Minsk 13,000 local Jews were exterminated on November 7, and a further group of 7,000 on November 20. Clearly the mass slaughters of October and November 1941 were intended to make space for the new arrivals from the Reich. And, as we saw, at times some of the new arrivals were killed on reaching their destination.

Soon the Reichsführer was receiving a growing number of complaints about the inclusion of Mischlinge and decorated war veterans in the transports. And, as information about the Kovno massacres spread, Himmler precipitously ordered, on Sunday, November 30, that “no liquidation” of the Jews deported from Berlin to Riga “should take place.”²⁷ The order reached Riga too late, and an irate SS chief threatened Jeckeln with “punishment” for acting on his own.²⁸ During the following months mass executions of Jews deported from Germany stopped. It was but a brief respite.

II

Typhoon, the Wehrmacht’s offensive against Moscow, was launched on October 2; it was Germany’s last chance to win the war in the East before the onset of the winter. For a few days victory again seemed within reach. As in July, Hitler’s euphoric state of mind was shared by the OKW and also by Fedor von Bock, the commander of Army Group Center, the main force advancing on the Soviet capital. On October 4, when the Nazi chief returned to Berlin for a major speech at the Sportpalast, Goebbels noted: “He looks at his best and is in an exuberantly optimistic frame of mind. He literally exudes optimism…. The Führer is convinced that if the weather remains halfway favorable, the Soviet army will be essentially demolished in fourteen days.” And, on October 7: “It goes well on the front. The Führer continues to be extraordinarily optimistic.”²⁹

Hitler’s mood during those days was indeed so exuberant, his declarations about the collapse of the Red Army and of the Soviet Union so peremptory, that on October 13 press chief Dietrich could announce the momentous news: “Militarily, this war has been decided. What still remains to be done is essentially of a political nature, both internally and externally. At some stage, the German armies in the East will stop their advance and a border determined by us will be drawn; it will protect the greater Europe and the European bloc community of interests led by Germany, against the East.”³⁰ Dietrich was in fact merely repeating his Führer’s assessment and, so it seems, that of the army itself.

All over Europe, Jews were following the military news like an anxious choir, in despair at first, with hope somewhat later, then with exaltation at the end of the year. “Hitler is reported to have given a speech in which he said that he has begun a gigantic offensive in the east,” Sierakowiak noted on October 3. “I wonder how it will develop. It looks like this one will be as victorious as all the previous ones.”³¹ And on October 10: “The Germans have supposedly broken the Russian front with their 3 million-man army and are marching on Moscow. Hitler has personally taken command on the front. So it’s to be another successful offensive. The Germans are really invincible. We’ll rot in this ghetto for sure.”³² A few days later Kaplan became the voice of despair: “The Nazis continue to advance on the Eastern front,” he recorded on October 18, “and have reached the gates of Moscow. The city is still fighting desperately but its fate has been decided—it will surely be captured by the Nazis…. And when Moscow falls, all the capitals of Europe will be under the Nazi rule…. A Nazi victory means complete annihilation, morally and materially, for all the Jews of Europe. The latest news has left even the most hopeful among us dejected. It seems this war will go on for years.”³³ On October 25, Klemperer just mentioned laconically: “German advance continues in Russia, even though the winter has begun.”³⁴

Other diarists were somewhat less pessimistic. Thus, Willy Cohn, the former high school teacher from Breslau, noted, on October 11, that all the special victory announcements of the previous day looked like “advance laurels” (Vorschusslorbeeren) and added: “After all, the whole world belongs to the others!”³⁵ On October 20, Cohn mentioned the repeal of the “Neutrality Law” by Congress, and concluded, “This means, in the short as the long run, the entry of the United States in the war.”³⁶ As for Sebastian, he noticed slight nuances in the German communiqués; after recording the news of victory in the East, as trumpeted by German and Romanian newspapers on October 10, he noted on the next day: “A slight, almost imperceptible lowering of the tone in today’s papers. ‘The Hour of Collapse Is Near,’ said one headline in Universal. Yesterday the collapse was already an established fact. But the fact is that fighting is still taking place.”³⁷ Among Jews farther west, opinions may have been more starkly divided: “The events in Russia divide the Jews into two groups,” Biélinky noted on October 14. “There are those who consider Russia as already defeated and who hope for some generous gesture on the part of the victor. The others keep a robust faith in Russian resistance.”³⁸

Strangely enough the misperception of the military situation on the German side went on, particularly at army headquarters, until early November. Halder, the cool planner, envisioned an advance of 200 kilometers east of Moscow, the conquest of Stalingrad, and the capture of the Maykop oil fields, no less. It was actually Hitler who brought his generals’ fantasies down to earth and back to the more modest goal of taking Moscow.³⁹ On November 1, the Nazi leader ordered the resumption of the offensive against the Soviet capital.⁴⁰ By then, however, stiffening Soviet resistance, lack of winter equipment, subzero temperatures, and sheer exhaustion of the troops brought the Wehrmacht to a halt. By the end of November the Red Army had recaptured Rostov-on-Don, which the Germans had occupied a few days earlier; it was the first major Soviet military success since the beginning of the campaign. On December 1, the German offensive was definitively halted. On December 4, fresh Soviet divisions transferred from the Far East counterattacked before Moscow: The first German retreat of the war started.

Goebbels’s diary reflected growing pessimism: “A detailed OKW report about the communications and food supply situation in the East reveals considerable difficulties,” he wrote on November 16. “The weather conditions compel us to take constantly new and unplanned measures. And, as the weather situation is so exceptionally unstable, the measures sometimes have to be changed from one day to the next. Our troops are confronted with unprecedented difficulties.”⁴¹

While the Wehrmacht faced a perilous situation on the Eastern Front, the United States further inched toward war. On October 17 a German submarine attacked the US destroyer Kearney, killing eleven sailors; an American merchant ship, the Lehigh, was torpedoed off the African coast a few days later; and on October 31, the destroyer Reuben James was sunk, and more than one hundred American sailors perished. In the midst of this undeclared naval war (in which, apparently, German submarines did not identify the nationality of the vessels in time),⁴² the American president announced, on October 27, that he was in possession of documents showing Hitler’s intention to abolish all religions, and of maps indicating German plans to divide Latin America into five Nazi-controlled states.⁴³ Roosevelt’s allegations were false, but his intentions were clear enough. Congress—and public opinion—did not remain indifferent: On November 13, the Neutrality Act, which considerably hampered the delivery of American aid to Britain and the Soviet Union, was repealed. On November 16 Goebbels commented: “The political situation is essentially determined by the course of events in the United States. The American press makes no secret anymore of what Roosevelt’s aims are. He wants to join the war at the end of next year at the latest.”⁴⁴

For Berlin, Roosevelt’s moves were of course the result of a Jewish plot. “Roosevelt’s speech [of October 27] made a big impression,” Italian foreign minister Galeazzo Ciano noted in his diary on the twenty-ninth. “The Germans have firmly decided to do nothing that will accelerate or cause America’s entry into the war. Ribbentrop, during a long lunch, attacked Roosevelt. ‘I have given orders to the press to always write: “Roosevelt, the Jew”; I wish to make a prophecy: that man will be stoned in the Capitol by his own people.’ I personally believe that Roosevelt will die of old age, because experience teaches me not to give much credit to Ribbentrop’s prophecies.”⁴⁵

Besides the pressure Hitler may have hoped to put on “the Jewish clique” around Roosevelt by deporting the Jews of Germany, the best chance of avoiding the American entry into the war rested on the success of the isolationist campaign. The antiwar agitation was led, at this stage, by the America First Committee and its star speaker, Charles A. Lindbergh, the world-famous pilot and tragic father of a kidnapped and murdered son.

On September 11, following Roosevelt’s “active defense” speech, Lindbergh delivered his most aggressive address yet, entitled “Who Are the War Agitators?” before some eight thousand Iowans packed into the Des Moines Coliseum. Lindbergh indicted the administration, the British, and the Jews.⁴⁶ Regarding the Jews, he began by expressing compassion for and understanding of their plight and for their reasons to wish the overthrow of the regime in Germany. “But no person of honesty and vision,” he added, “can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy, both for us and for them.”

Lindbergh’s second point in no way mitigated the impact of the first: “Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way, for they will be among the first to feel its consequences. Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength.” After mentioning that a few Jews understood the threat that war could mean for them, Lindbergh continued: “But the majority still do not. Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our Government.” Probably without sensing it, Lindbergh had sunk at that stage to the level of a notorious American anti-Semitic rabble-rouser, the radio preacher Father Charles Coughlin, or, for that matter, to the level of Goebbels’s arguments.

The third and final part regarding the Jews was, implicitly, the most provocative of all: “I am not attacking either the Jewish or British people,” he declared. “Both races, I admire. But I am saying that the leaders of both the British and Jewish races, for reasons which are understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war. We cannot blame them for looking out for what they believe to be their own interests, but we must also look out for ours. We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction.”⁴⁷

“Lindbergh,” one of his biographers commented, “had bent over backward to be kind about the Jews; but in suggesting the American Jews were ‘other’ people and that their interests were ‘not American,’ he implied exclusion, thus undermining the very foundation of the United States.”⁴⁸The widespread outrage raised by his speech not only put an end to Lindbergh’s political activity but also demonstrated that, despite strong anti-Semitic feelings among segments of American society, the great majority would not admit any exclusionary talk, even if presented in “reasonable terms.” Goebbels missed neither the speech nor the reactions to it.

“During the day,” the minister recorded on September 14, “the original text of Colonel Lindbergh’s speech arrives. He has launched a sharp attack against the Jews but of course was caught as a result in a wasps’ nest. The New York press howls as if stung by a tarantula. One cannot but admire Lindbergh: relying just on himself he has dared to face this association of business manipulators, Jews, plutocrats and capitalists.”⁴⁹

On December 7, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. On December 11, preempting the inevitable, the Nazi leader declared war on the United States.

III

Hitler’s prolonged low-key rhetorical stance regarding the Jews came to an abrupt end in the fall of 1941: The restraint of the previous months gave way to an explosion of the vilest anti-Jewish invectives and threats. This sharp reversal closely followed the decision to deport the Jews of Germany; it was inaugurated by what must have been the most bizarre “order of the day” in modern times.

On the eve of Typhoon, on October 2, addressing the millions of soldiers poised for what was to be “the last of the great decisive battles of the year…the last powerful blow that will shatter this enemy before the onset of the winter,” Hitler left no doubt about the true identity of the “horrendous, beast-like” foe that had been about to “annihilate not only Germany, but the whole of Europe.” Those who upheld the system in which Bolshevism was but the other face of the vilest capitalism, he proclaimed, were in both cases the same: “Jews and only Jews!” ( Juden und nur Juden!).⁵⁰ The next day, in his Sportpalast speech to mark the opening of the annual Winter-Relief campaign, Hitler designated the Jews as “the world enemy.”⁵¹ From then on his anti-Jewish diatribes became torrential.

On October 13, the Nazi leader attributed the catastrophic state of U.S. economic policies to “Jewish thinking.”⁵² The next day he again attacked Jewish business thinking and practices.⁵³ On the seventeenth the Jews came up twice in conversation, at noon and in the evening. During lunch Hitler discussed the situation of Romania and its notoriously corrupt officials: “The precondition [for change] is the elimination of the Jews; otherwise a state cannot be freed [of corruption].”⁵⁴ After dinner, in the presence of Fritz Sauckel and Fritz Todt, the discussion turned to the future German settlement of Belorussia and the Ukraine: The “destructive Jews” would be gone, the Nazi leader promised.⁵⁵ On the eighteenth Hitler’s anti-Jewish obsession turned to the Jews’ role in England’s path to war.⁵⁶ On the nineteenth he brought up the Christian “pre-Bolshevik” mobilization of the slaves in the Roman Empire, manipulated by the Jews to destroy the structure of the state.⁵⁷ Two days later, on October 21, Hitler unleashed a more extensive attack: Jesus was not a Jew; the Jew Paul falsified Jesus’ teaching in order to undermine the Roman Empire. The Jews’ aim was to destroy the nations by undermining their racial core. In Russia, the Nazi leader declared, the Jews deported hundreds of thousands of men in order to leave the abandoned women to males imported from other regions. They organized miscegenation on a grand scale. The Jews continued to torture people in the name of Bolshevism, just as Christianity, the offshoot of Judaism, had tortured its opponents in the Middle Ages. “Saul became Saint Paul; Mordechai became Karl Marx.” Then came the notorious finale: “By exterminating this pest, we shall do humanity a service of which our soldiers can have no idea.” 58 The most rabid themes of the early speeches, of the dialogue with Dietrich Eckart, and especially of Mein Kampf, were back, sometimes in almost identical words.

In the meantime the Nazi leader did not miss the opportunity to vent his fury on an individual Jew. On October 20, the Berliner Illustrierte Nachtausgabe reported that a seventy-four-year-old Hamburg Jew, Markus Luftgas, had been condemned to two years in jail for black-marketeering in eggs. When Hitler read about it, he demanded that Luftgas be condemned to death. On October 23, the Justice Ministry informed the Reich Chancellery that Luftgas had been delivered to the Gestapo for execution.⁵⁹

On October 25, Hitler reminded his guests, Himmler and Heydrich—as if they needed to be reminded—of his notorious “prophecy”: “I prophesied to Jewry: The Jew would disappear from Europe if the war could not be avoided. This race of criminals carries the guilt of the two millions of dead of the World War and now already that of hundreds of thousands. Nobody should come and tell me that one cannot drive them into the marshes in the East! Who thinks of our men? It is not bad, moreover, that public rumor attributes to us the intention of exterminating the Jews. Terror is a salutary thing.”⁶⁰ And, he added, in an unrelated statement: “The attempt to establish a Jewish State will fail.”⁶¹ The remark about “public rumor” could apply to the German population; more likely, it referred to rumors circulating abroad, particularly in the United States…. That same day the Nazi leader lectured Ciano about the influence of Jewish propaganda in Latin America. During the same conversation, the ironic foreign minister informed his host that “Jewish propaganda” was depicting the internal situation of Italy in the bleakest colors; of course, Ciano added, none of this was true.⁶²

At the beginning of November, Hitler served another long historical-political tirade against the Jews to his dentist, SS Standartenführer Prof. Dr. Hugo Blaschke, and Blaschke’s assistant, one Dr. Richter. Once the Europeans discovered the nature of the Jew, Hitler told his guests, they would also understand the solidarity that tied them together. The Jew was the obstacle to this solidarity; he only survived because European solidarity did not exist: “Now he lives to destroy it.” At the outset of his disquisition Hitler had prophesized that the end of the war would witness the fall (Himmelssturz) of the Jews. They had no spiritual or artistic understanding, he went on; they were essentially inveterate liars and cheaters.⁶³

The first of Hitler’s two major public anti-Jewish speeches of those weeks was the annual address to the party “Old Fighters” on November 8, 1941. The previous year, on the same occasion, the Jews had not been mentioned at all. This time the Nazi leader launched into a vicious and massive anti-Jewish tirade. Many of his themes were merely a repetition of his former rants, those of 1936 and 1937 in particular, but also of the outpourings of the previous three or four weeks. He knew, Hitler told his audience, that behind this war “one ultimately had to look for the ‘arsonist’ who had always lived off the trading of nations: the international Jew. I wouldn’t be a National Socialist anymore,” he yelled, “if I distanced myself from this finding.” The Nazi leader then recalled the saying of “a great Jew” [Disraeli] that “race was the key to world history.” Indeed the Jewish race was behind the present events, using straw men for its bloody deals. At this point, once again, Hitler exclaimed: “I have come to know these Jews as world arsonists” [Ich habe diese Juden als die Weltbrandstifter kennengelernt].⁶⁴ This was only the prologue.

The Nazi leader went on to describe all the methods used by the Jews to poison the nations (press, radio, film, theater), and to push them into a war in which capitalists and democratic politicians would make money from their stocks in the armaments industries. This kind of coalition headed by the Jews had been eradicated from Germany; now the same enemy was standing on the outside, against the German Volk and the German Reich. After pushing a series of nations to the forefront of the battle, the Jew turned to his most trusted instrument: “What was more understandable,” Hitler exclaimed, “than the fact that one day the Power where the Jewish spirit is the most clearly in control, would move against us: the Soviet Union, now the greatest servant of Jewry [Die Sowjetunion, die nun einmal der grösste Diener des Judentums ist]. After describing the horrors of a regime in which the “organization of Jewish commissars”—in fact “slave-drivers”—ruled over subhuman masses, Hitler rejected the idea that a Russian nationalism could have taken over: “The carriers of such a [nationalist] trend do not exist anymore and the man who is for the time being the ruler of this state is nothing else but an instrument in the hands of this all powerful Jewry…. When Stalin is on scene, in front of the curtain, Kaganowitsch [Lazar Kaganowitsch was Stalin’s Jewish acolyte] stands behind him with all these Jews who…lead this huge empire.” Between these anti-Jewish insults and threats, the Nazi leader gave clear expression to the apocalyptic dimension of the ongoing struggle: “This struggle, my old party comrades, has really become not only a struggle for Germany, but for the whole of Europe, a struggle [that will decide] between existence and annihilation!”⁶⁵ In this same speech Hitler again reminded his audience that he had often been a prophet in his life. This time, however, the prophecy did not refer to the extermination of the Jews (implicit in his entire speech), but rather to a closely related theme: November 1918, when Germany was stabbed in the back, would never occur again. “Everything is imaginable,” he exclaimed, “except one thing, that Germany will ever capitulate!”⁶⁶

On November 10, the Jews were mentioned, albeit briefly, in a letter Hitler addressed to Pétain. The Jewish theme had never before come up in an exchange between the Nazi leader and the head of the Vichy state. “If I had not decided at the last minute, on June 22, to move against the Bolshevist menace,” Hitler wrote, “then it could have happened only too easily that with the collapse of Germany the French Jews would have triumphed, but the French people would likewise have been plunged into a horrible catastrophe.”⁶⁷

On November 12, Hitler again took up his anti-Jewish tirades at headquarters: By excluding the Jews from Prussia, King Friedrich II had opted for an “exemplary” policy.⁶⁸ On the nineteenth the Nazi leader warned against compassion for the Jews “who had to emigrate”; according to him, these Jews had enough relatives throughout the world, whereas the Germans who had been forced to leave their country had nobody and were compelled to rely entirely on themselves.⁶⁹ Hardly anybody in Hitler’s circle (or, for that matter, throughout Germany) did not know that the Jews were no longer emigrating but being deported to places where no relatives would help them to start a new life.

In Das Reich of November 16, under the title “The Jews Are Guilty!” Goebbels echoed his master’s voice. He reminded his readers of Hitler’s prophecy that the Jews would be exterminated in case of war: “We are now witnessing the fulfillment of this prophecy; the fate befalling the Jews is harsh, but more than deserved. Pity or regret is completely out of place in this case. In triggering this war,” the minister went on, “world Jewry completely miscalculated the forces it could muster. It is now gradually being engulfed by the same extermination process that it had intended for us and that it would have allowed to happen without any scruples, had it had the power to do so. But now it undergoes destruction according to its own law: ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth!’”⁷⁰ On December 1, the minister brandished the same threats in a lecture at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, in front of a highly select audience. Thoughout his speech, the propaganda chief openly alluded to what could be understood only as a murderous solution of the “Jewish question.” Whether the ominous diatribe referred to an ongoing and systematic extermination of all the Jews of Europe is not clear, however.⁷¹

On November 21, Hitler was back in Berlin for the funeral of Luftwaffe hero Gen. Ernst Udet (who had committed suicide after being held responsible by Göring—and by Hitler—for the failure of the Battle of Britain). In a discussion with Goebbels, the Nazi leader expressed his intention to pursue an “energetic policy” in regard to the Jews but not one “that could create difficulties.” The Jews would be evacuated from the Reich city after city, but Hitler could not tell when Berlin’s turn would come. He demanded that his minister show restraint regarding mixed marriages, mainly in artists’ circles. In his opinion “these marriages would die out and one should not get any gray hair about it.”⁷²

On November 27 the Nazi leader harangued the Finnish foreign minister, Rolf Witting: “One should be clear about the fact that the entire world Jewry stood on the side of Bolshevism. An objective political point of view was not possible in any country in which public opinion was controlled and molded by those forces which in the last analysis had brought about Bolshevism…. The entire national intelligentsia of England should be against the war, as even victory could not achieve anything for England. It was the Bolshevist and Jewish forces which kept the English from pursuing a reasonable policy.”⁷³

Hitler received the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem on the following day. The Palestinian Arab leader, Haj Amin al-Husseini, had fled to the German capital after the collapse of Rashid ’Ali al-Gaylani’s anti-British government in Iraq. Hitler made clear to his Arab visitor that Germany’s struggle against the Jews was “uncompromising” and that it included the Jewish settlement in Palestine. “Germany was determined to demand, systematically, from one European nation after another, to solve the Jewish problem; in due time, it would also address the same call to nations outside of Europe.”⁷⁴ That same day, the Nazi leader could not abstain from a further anti-Jewish tirade in his conversation with the Romanian vice–prime minister, Mihai Antonescu; this time, however, a new theme appeared: “Speaking at length,” the official record stated, “the Führer gave a survey of the current situation. World Jewry in combination with the Slavs and unfortunately also the Anglo-Saxons was carrying on the fight with embitterment. Germany and her allies confronted real colossi in terms of space, which possessed all raw materials and fertile land in copious measure. In addition, Jews had a certain destructive tendency, which found expression in the fight of Bolshevism and Pan-Slavism.”⁷⁵

Pan-Slavism was unexpected. It surfaced briefly following the “discovery” first by the Belgian and then the German press, of the “will of Czar Peter the Great,” urging the Russia’s expansion to the West. Hitler, soon informed that the testament was a forgery, ordered its use nonetheless, as if it were authentic. “[The Führer] ordered the widest possible discussion in the German press with the theme: the imperialist policy of Czar Peter the Great had been the guideline of Russian prewar policy and of the policy of Stalin. Bolshevist world hegemony and Slav imperialism have joined hands in the policy of Stalin…. It didn’t matter what some professor or other had discovered with regard to this Testament of Peter the Great. What mattered rather was that history had demonstrated that Russian policy was conducted according to these principles as they were laid down in the testament of Peter the Great.” The press thereupon “took up the subject in a big way and treated it to the satisfaction of the Führer.”⁷⁶

In his circle of intimates, Hitler briefly returned to his favorite topic on the evening of November 30, as he reminisced about a fight with Jews at the Nuremberg railway station during the early days of the party.⁷⁷ More was said on the night of December 1. Prodded about the issue of racial instinct, Hitler declared that some Jews did not necessarily intend to harm Germany, but even so they would never distance themselves from the long-term interests of their own race. Why were Jews destroying other nations? The Nazi leader admitted that he did not know the fundamental natural-historical laws of this phenomenon. But, as a result of their destructive activity, the Jews created the necessary defense mechanisms among the nations. Hitler added that Dietrich Eckart had once mentioned that he knew of one single upright Jew, Otto Weininger, who took his own life after he discovered the destructive nature of his race. Strangely, Hitler concluded, second- or third-generation Jewish mixed breeds would often come together again with Jews. But, he added, ultimately nature eliminated the destructive elements: In the seventh, eighth, or ninth generation the Jewish part would be “out-Mendeled” (ausgemendelt—a pun on the name of the Czech monk, Gregor Mendel, who discovered the laws of heredity) and “racial purity, reestablished.”⁷⁸

On December 11, four days after Pearl Harbor, Hitler announced to the Reichstag that Germany was declaring war on the United States. From the outset the messianic theme was present: “If Providence wanted that the German people not be spared this struggle, then I am grateful to it [Providence] for having entrusted me with the leadership of this historical confrontation, a confrontation that will decisively mold not only the history of our Germany but that of Europe, actually that of the entire world for the next 500 or 1,000 years.”⁷⁹ A first overview of the coming confrontation followed, which, after mention of the attack that the Soviet Union had been preparing against “Europe,” led to historical comparisons: The Romans and the Germans had saved Western civilization from the Huns; now as then Germany was not fighting just for its own sake but for the defense of the whole continent.⁸⁰

Another lengthy sequence followed about responsibility for the war; it brought Hitler somewhat closer to the object of the Reichstag meeting. Two American presidents had caused untold misery during the past decades: Wilson and Roosevelt. Wilson, the “paralytic professor,” was merely the forerunner of Roosevelt’s policies; but to understand fully Roosevelt and his hatred of Germany, one crucial element had to be kept in mind: The American politician acceded to the presidency at precisely the time Hitler took over the leadership of Germany. A comparison between both personalities and the achievements of both regimes would inevitably demonstrate the Nazi leader’s manifest superiority. Moreover, Hitler continued: “The forces that supported Mr. Roosevelt were the forces against which I struggled, given the fate of my people and from my own innermost and holiest conviction. The ‘brain trust’ the American president relied upon included the members of the same people that we fought in Germany as a parasitical manifestation and that we started excluding from public life.” Then, after once more demonstrating how catastrophic Roosevelt’s leadership had been, Hitler reached the core of his argument: “The evolution of the United States should not be surprising once one remembered that the spirits on whom this man had called to help him or, better said, the spirits that called him, belonged to those elements who, as Jews[underlined in the original printed text] could only be interested in destruction and never in order.” What followed was unavoidable: To deflect attention from his failures, Roosevelt—and the Jews behind him—needed a foreign diversion.⁸¹

At this point Hitler was ready for a full-scale anti-Jewish tirade of hate: “He [Roosevelt] was strengthened in this [political diversion] by the circle of Jews surrounding him, who, with Old Testament–like fanaticism, believe that the United States can be the instrument for preparing another Purim for the European nations that are becoming increasingly anti-Semitic. It was the Jew, in his full satanic vileness, who rallied around this man [Roosevelt], but to whom this man also reached out.”⁸² By formally declaring war on the United States, in accordance with the Tripartite Pact, Hitler had closed the circle of his enemies in a world war of yet-unknown fury.

On the following day, December 12, Hitler addressed the Reichsleiter and Gauleiter in a secret speech summed up by Goebbels: “In regard to the Jewish question the Führer is determined to wipe the slate clean [reinen Tisch zu machen]. He prophesied to the Jews that if they once more brought about a world war, they would be annihilated. These were not mere words. The world war is here, the extermination of the Jews must be its necessary consequence. This matter has to be envisaged without any sentimentality. We are not here to have compassion for the Jews, but to have compassion for our German people. As the German people has once again sacrificed some 160,000 dead in the eastern campaign, those responsible for this bloody conflict will have to pay for it with their lives.”⁸³

Then, according to an entry in Himmler’s appointment calendar dated December 18, in a meeting that same day, the Nazi leader instructed him: “Jewish question | exterminate as partisans.”⁸⁴ The vertical line remains unexplained. The identification of the Jews as “partisans” obviously did not refer to the Jews on Soviet territory who were being exterminated for six months already. It referred to the deadly internal enemy, the enemy fighting within the borders of one’s own territory, who, by plotting and treachery could, as in 1917–1918, stab the Reich in the back, now that a new “world war,” on all fronts, rekindled all the dangers of the previous one. Moreover, “partisans” associated maybe with the most general connotation used by Hitler in his declaration at the conference of July 16, 1941: All potential enemies within Germany’s reach; it was understood, as we saw, to include any civilians and entire communities at will. Thus the order was clear: Extermination without any limitation here applied to the Jews.

On December 17, on the eve of the meeting with the SS Reichsführer, Hitler once more raised the Jewish issue with Goebbels. “The Führer is determined to proceed consistently in this matter [the ‘Jewish question’],” the propaganda minister recorded, “and not be stopped by bourgeois sentimentality.” Hitler and his minister discussed the evacuation of the Jews from the Reich, but it seems that subsequently the Jewish issue in general was addressed: “All the Jews have to be transferred to the East. What happens to them there cannot be of great interest to us. They have asked for this fate; they brought about the war, now they must also foot the bill.” Then Goebbels added: “It is comforting that despite the burden of military responsibility the Führer still finds the time…for these matters and mainly has a clear view about them. He alone is in the position to solve this problem definitively, with the necessary toughness.”⁸⁵

In the course of two months the Nazi leader had explicitly mentioned the extermination of the Jews on October 19, October 25, December 12, December 17, and December 18, and was indirectly quoted to that effect by Goebbels, Rosenberg, and Frank between December 12 and 16. Nothing of the kind had ever happened before in Hitler’s declarations. Indeed, the fact that five out of seven of these exterminatory statements were made within a few days of December 11, could be seen as a thinly veiled message conveying that a final decision had been made as a result of American entry into the war. On the night of December 28–29, Hitler came to speak of the arch-anti-Semite, Julius Streicher: “What Streicher did in Der Stürmer: He drew an idealized portrait of the Jews. The Jew is much meaner, much more bloodthirsty than Streicher described him.”⁸⁶

For good measure the Nazi leader added a strong dose of anti-Jewish threats and insults in his last public message of the year. According to Goebbels, he dictated it on December 31 to have it read by his minister on the radio that same evening.⁸⁷ The general tone of the address was unusually defensive and insecure—understandably so. Those who forced the war on the Reich, the German chief declared, carried the responsibility for having deflected Hitler from forging ahead with the grand internal changes he had launched. But victory would be achieved with the help of Providence (invoked any number of times in this short message). The archvillains, the Jews, were mentioned no fewer than four times. At first they were merely designated as an element, though prime one, in the foes’ “Jewish-capitalist-Bolshevik world conspiracy”; they reappeared shortly thereafter, when the Nazi leader told his people—and all of Europe—what a horrendous fate would have befallen them if “Jewish Bolshevism in alliance with Roosevelt and Churchill had achieved victory”; then part of the notorious prophecy surfaced: “The Jew will not eradicate the European nations, but will be the victim of his own attack” [Der Jude aber wird nicht die europäischen Völker ausrotten, sondern er wird das Opfer seines eigenen Anschlages sein]; finally, in the closing part of the exhortation, after the savior of Germany and of Europe had once more invoked “the Almighty,” he brought in the Jews for the fourth time as the very root of evil: “If all of us together faithfully accomplish our duty, our fate will fulfill itself as Providence willed it. Those who fight for the life of their people, for its daily bread and for its future will win! But those who, in their Jewish hatred, attempt to exterminate the peoples in this war will be hurled down!” A further appeal to God ended the message.⁸⁸ Thus the year 1941 closed: It should have been, in Hitler’s own words, the year of “the greatest victory in world history.”

IV

As the deadly threats spewed by “the highest authority” became one continuous rant, the ever more murderous campaign developed apace. From midsummer 1941 on, the massacres of Jews throughout the German- and Romanian-occupied Soviet territories had reached colossal proportions. In Kamenets-Podolsky, Kiev, Kovno, Minsk, Riga, the towns of eastern Galicia—now part of the General Government—and in Odessa, among other killing fields, the Jews were murdered by the thousands, sometimes by the tens of thousands, in each Aktion. Some of the local commanders excelled at their task.

In Stanislawów, for example, in southern Galicia, the local Security Police commander, Hans Krüger, resolutely took things in hand after Friedrich Katzmann, the SSPF in Galicia, and Karl Eberhard Schöngarth, head of the Security Police in the General Government, had given him free rein.⁸⁹ On the morning of October 12, 1941, the Jews of the town were driven in groups to the local cemetery. The first batch of 1,000 Jews was then led through the gates, ordered to undress, and the shooting into the open pits started. Next to the mass graves, Krüger had had tables set with food and vodka for the killing commandos (German police units, Ukrainian auxiliaries, and groups of ethnic German volunteers). Krüger himself oversaw the increasingly chaotic murder scene as the line of Jews moved from the town to the cemetery; at times the SD chief made the rounds of his men with a salami sandwich in one hand and a bottle of schnapps in the other. Panic drove entire families to jump together into the pits, where they were either shot or buried alive; others tried to climb the walls of the cemetery until they were mowed down. With the onset of darkness, Krüger announced to the remaining Jews that the Führer had granted them a reprieve; the stampede toward the gates left further victims on the grounds: 10,000 to 12,000 of the Jews of Stanisławów had been murdered that day.⁹⁰ The remnant was driven into a ghetto.

Three months later a young female diarist, Elisheva, to whom we shall return, commented on the death of two women friends, Tamarczyk and Esterka, during the killings in the cemetery on October 12. “I hope,” Elisheva wrote, “that death was kind to [Tamarczyk] and took her right away. And that she didn’t have to suffer like her companion, Esterka, who was seen being strangled.”⁹¹

Even before the departure of the first transport from the Reich, Heydrich convened a meeting in Prague on October 10, attended by the highest local SS commanders and by Eichmann. Fifty thousand deportees, the RSHA chief told his acolytes, would be sent to the Ostland (Riga, Minsk); Kovno was added somewhat later.⁹² Regarding the Jews of the Protectorate, Heydrich planned the establishment of two transit camps (he spoke of “assembly camps”), one in Moravia and one in Bohemia, from which the Jews would leave eastward after being already “heavily decimated.” The “decimation” was not further explained; it may have been an improvised statement (like the identically worded forecast Heydrich would make at the Wannsee conference in January 1942 regarding the fate of Jewish slave labor building roads on Soviet territory).

Heydrich’s final sentence, according to the protocol of the meeting, echoed Himmler’s opening statement in his September 18 letter to Greiser: “The Führer wishes,” the Reichsführer had written, “the Altreich and the Protectorate to be cleared and freed of Jews.” Heydrich closed the October 10 meeting by reminding those present of the Führer’s wish: “As the Führer wishes that possibly even by the end of this year the Jews should be evacuated from German space, all outstanding issues have to be solved immediately. The transportation problem should not create any difficulty either.”⁹³

On October 13 the Reichsführer met Globocnik and Krüger. It was probably at this meeting that the SS chief ordered Globocnik to start building the Belzec extermination camp.⁹⁴ We do not know with any certainty whether the camp was being set up “only” to exterminate Jews of the Lublin district in order to make space for Jewish deportees from the Reich or whether the killing of all Jews in the district was also linked to colonization plans in the area (particularly in the Zamóść region), as a first step of the constantly reworked “General Plan East.”⁹⁵ It may have been intended for both objectives.⁹⁶

On the other hand we may surmise that it was essentially in order to deal with the influx of deportees from the Reich to Lodz that preparations for mass murder were initiated in the Warthegau. A euthanasia specialist, Herbert Lange, began searching for an appropriate killing site sometime in mid-October 1941. The extermination sites planned for the Ostland (Riga, Mogilev) were most probably also part of the same immediate murder projects regarding the local ghetto populations.

With Himmler’s agreement a few euthanasia experts had already been sent to Lublin in early September. If Hitler’s order about the deportation from the Reich had been conveyed to the Reichsführer at the beginning of September, the arrival of euthanasia experts at that time meant that the elimination of part of the ghetto populations was considered from the outset as the best solution to the overcrowding issue. A visit by Brack, and then by Bouhler himself, followed, and on November 1 the construction of Belzec started.⁹⁷ The killing installation Lange set up in Chelmno near Lodz was much simpler: Three gas vans were delivered by the RSHA sometime in November, and by early December everything was ready for the first batch of victims.

In regard to this sequence of events, Eichmann’s testimony at his Jerusalem trial was confusing. According to Eichmann, Heydrich sent him on an inspection visit to Lublin after telling him that Hitler had decided to exterminate all the Jews of Europe. When he arrived in Lublin the trees still had their autumn foliage, and at Belzec (Eichmann did not remember the name) he saw only two small huts being prepared for the gassing. This does not fit, of course, with the fact that the construction of Belzec started only in early November (when the trees would already have lost their autumn colors) and that the first barracks were ready in December. It seems that Eichmann did not remember precisely when Heydrich told him about the “final order” and which inspection tour took place in early autumn in the Lublin area.⁹⁸

Additional indications pointing to the initially “local” function of Belzec and Chelmno include the technically “limited capacity” of the Belzec gassing installations (before their “upgrading” in the late spring of 1942), and the letter Greiser sent Himmler in May 1942, indicating that Chelmno was meant to exterminate part of the Jewish population of the Warthegau, including Lodz (about 100,000 Jews, according to Greiser).⁹⁹

A few days after his meeting with Krüger and Globocnik, Himmler ordered the cessation of all Jewish emigration from the Reich (and thus, from the entire Continent). The Reichsführer’s order, issued on October 18, was conveyed by Müller to all Gestapo stations on the twenty-third, “in view of the forthcoming ‘Final Solution’ of the Jewish question.”

Furthermore, on the eve of Himmler’s order, a step, puzzling at first glance, had been taken by Heydrich. The chief of the RSHA asked Luther to reject an offer from the Spanish government to evacuate to Morocco two thousand Jews of Spanish nationality arrested over the previous months in Paris. Heydrich argued that the Spaniards would be unwilling and unable to guard the Jews in Morocco and that, moreover, “these Jews would also be too far out of the direct reach of measures for a basic solution to the Jewish question to be enacted after the war.”¹⁰⁰ Heydrich demanded that this explanation be conveyed to the Spaniards.

In fact, to allow any exception would have considerably reduced the ominous significance of the deportations from the Reich that had just started and of Himmler’s end-of-all-emigration decree. Moreover, had the transfer of Spanish Jews been agreed to, wouldn’t the Hungarian, Romanian, or Turkish governments, for example, ask for custody of their own Jews living in France or elsewhere in Western Europe?

A teletype sent to the Wilhelmstrasse on October 30, 1941 (barely a few days after Heydrich’s decision), by Rudolf Schleier, the councillor in charge of Jewish affairs at the German embassy in Paris, confirmed that fear of setting a precedent may have been on Heydrich’s mind when he turned down the Spanish request: “Military Commander France has arrested a considerable number of Jews including foreign nationals, in the course of the big roundup on August 20, 1941, of French and foreign Jews involved in communist and de Gaullist activities and in attempts against members of the Wehrmacht in the occupied zone of France. Foreign consuls in Paris have requested assistance of the embassy for the release of Jewish nationals of their respective countries. Military commander and Security Service take the view that the fact that arrested Jews are foreign nationals can in no way influence the measures taken. Release of individual Jews would create precedents.”¹⁰¹ As for the last part of Heydrich’s comment—“these Jews would be too much out of reach of measures for a basic solution to the Jewish question to be enacted after the war”—the reference to the forthcoming “Final Solution” in forbidding emigration had become a standard Nazi formula; as may be remembered, it was also used by Göring on May 20, 1941, when he forbade further emigration of Jews from France and Belgium.

While Heydrich was dealing with the Spaniards, one of Rosenberg’s acolytes in the ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, Eberhard Wetzel, ventured to issue instructions of his own: He had no objections that those Jews from the Ostland ghettos who were unable to work and Reich Jews of the same category should be “removed by Brack’s device” [gas vans].¹⁰² Wetzel’s nihil obstat of October 25 would have been a first direct allusion to a general extermination plan, except for the fact that neither Wetzel nor Rosenberg had any say in the matter. Moreover, it should be kept in mind that Rosenberg may have been informed of a general extermination plan in mid-November at the earliest (if such a plan existed at the time), and otherwise only in December.

A number of other documents, mostly of less intrinsic significance, have been adduced to argue that Hitler’s final decision to exterminate the Jews of Europe was made sometime in late September or early October 1941; others, obversely, have been introduced to demonstrate that it was made after the American entry into the war.¹⁰³ Either way the decision was taken sometime during the last three months of 1941.

If the decision for total extermination had already been made in October, the apparently local killings deriving from the deportations from Germany would turn out to be part and parcel of that overall plan; if the final decision was taken later, the “local measures” seamlessly became part of the generalized “Final Solution” from December 1941 on. Moreover, one could plausibly argue that from October to December, Hitler mulled over the decision, as shown by his obsessive daily attacks on the Jews: The Nazi leader had to convince himself that systematically murdering millions of people was indeed the right decision. In that case the decision may first have been considered in October or even before, to become final once the United States joined the war, the Soviet forces counterattacked, and the dreaded “World War,” in the East and in the West, became a reality.

Hitler’s acolytes and their underlings may have interpreted his anti-Jewish harangues from October 1941 on as implicit encouragement to forge ahead with local murderous initiatives to solve the problems caused by the deportations from the Reich; they could not, however, have interpreted them as an order to start the complete extermination of all European Jews. Crossing the line from local murder operations to overall extermination required a go-ahead signal from the supreme authority.

We do not know, of course, at what point Hitler started harboring the project of immediate extermination; this much, however, is certain: The timing of Hitler’s decisions was a matter of circumstances; the decisions as such were not. And the timing regarding the “Final Solution” was in part determined by the “prophecy” of January 1939. This prophecy, although politically motivated (as a deterrent), was nonetheless solemnly uttered again in January 1941 (despite its more open-ended wording). A prophet could not afford to hesitate when the circumstances heralding the fulfillment of the prophecy occurred; a savior could not, at that crucial moment, shy away from implementing an open and repeated threat. Thus, beyond his belief in the Jewish danger in case of world war, Hitler had to make good on what he had prophesied, once the circumstances that would lead to extermination of the Jews were becoming reality. The Jews could have been deported to northern Russia and decimated there; this, however, was no longer an option in the late fall of 1941. They would have to be murdered in areas closer to the heart of the Nazi empire and that of the “new Europe.”

And, what was generally true in regard to the whole Volk was particularly valid about Hitler’s bond with his old guard. As we saw, the Nazi leader delivered the most threatening indication regarding the pending annihilation of the Jews to the assembled Gauleiter and Reichsleiter on December 12. He was addressing the innermost circle, the most fanatical party faithful, men who in their immense majority were as radical as he was in regard to “the Jewish question,” and possibly as ready as he was to move from massacre to total extermination. Withholding the go-ahead at this stage would have meant that the supreme and providential leader did not believe in the most basic tenet of the common faith. Procrastination could have undermined the Führer’s grip on the hearts and minds of his most devoted followers, those who would be ready to stand by him in this struggle to the very last. A process that had started months earlier had reached the point of no return.

Furthermore, now that a rapid and victorious campaign in the East was receding out of sight, now that the dangers of a prolonged and difficult war had become concrete—the mobilization of all national energies was essential. For Nazism the Jews, the Jewish peril, and the uncompromising struggle against “the Jew” were, as we have seen, the mobilizing myth of the regime. The time had come not only to brandish Goebbels’s slogan “The Jews Are Guilty!” but to take the steps that would galvanize the Volksgenosseninto fighting this mortal threat with all available strength and would offer the hard-core party members an increasingly necessary taste of retribution.

Finally Hitler’s unusual declaration to Goebbels on the eve of the attack on the Soviet Union had become more real than ever before. If, before the attack, the Reich had no choice but to win in order to escape eradication, how vastly more compelling the argument must have appeared after six months of mass murder on an unprecedented scale. The increasing number of Germans from all segments of society involved in all aspects of the extermination campaign knew perfectly well, as did the party elite, that they were now accomplices in crimes of previously unimagined scope; victory or fighting to the end were the only options left to their leader, their party, their country—and themselves.

V

Throughout the weeks and months of the fall of 1941, as the deportations from the Reich started and the signal for the extermination of all the Jews of Europe was given, “ordinary” persecution of Jews in the Reich did not abate. Moreover, legislation dealing with the practical sequels of the deportations was finalized mainly to allow a smooth takeover of all assets and property left behind.

On September 18, 1941, the Reich Transportation Ministry issued a decree barring Jews from using sleeping and dining cars of the Reichsbahn; they were also forbidden to use excursion buses or excursion ships (outside their usual domicile area). Jews were allowed to use all other means of public transportation only when available seats remained, never at times of heavy traffic when seats were unavailable to non-Jews. Jews were allowed to travel only in the lowest class (at the time third class was the lowest passenger class on railways), and they could be seated “only when no other passengers were standing.”¹⁰⁴ On September 24 the Reich Ministry of the Economy forbade Jews to use checks.¹⁰⁵ On that same day, the Ministry of Justice excluded them from any benefit (property or asset) received from a full German. “Such benefits,” the decree stated, “are in sharp contradiction with healthy German popular feelings.”¹⁰⁶

A month later an RSHA circular ordered the arrest of any German publicly showing friendly relations with a Jew; in serious cases the Aryan offender would be sent to a concentration camp for at least three months; in each case the Jew was to be sent to a concentration camp.¹⁰⁷ On November 13 Jews had to register their electric appliances; that same day they had to turn in typewriters, bicycles, cameras, and binoculars; on November 14 Jews were forbidden to sell their books.¹⁰⁸

The main laws and decrees were of course aimed at canceling any remaining legal rights of Jews still living in the Reich and also of those who had emigrated or were being deported. The RSHA got involved in the deliberations, and so did the Führer’s Chancellery. At times Hitler himself would intervene.

Three issues were at the top of the agenda: The judicial status of Poles and Jews, the legal situation of Jewish laborers, and finally the status of Jews who were still German nationals but were no longer living in the Reich…. By mid-October 1941 the first law was ready: Almost any offense committed by a Pole or a Jew was punishable by death; the law was signed on December 4.¹⁰⁹

The new “Labor Law” for Jews was published on November 4. Like the one covering judicial status, it had been discussed for more than a year. The result was no less clear-cut: A Jewish laborer had no rights whatsoever and could be dismissed from one day to the next. Apart from a minimal daily salary, a Jew could not claim any social benefit or compensation.¹¹⁰ Nonetheless Jewish laborers had to forgo nearly half of their meager salary in income tax and social benefits payments.¹¹¹

The citizenship decree brought Hitler’s intervention. The Ministries of Justice and the Interior, the Finance Ministry, and the RSHA were working out complex formulas that would have enabled the state to impound any remaining assets and possessions of Jews who left the Reich.¹¹² Hitler decided on a simpler solution. German Jews residing outside the Reich would lose their citizenship and all their assets would become the property of the state. On November 25, 1941, the new regulation was promulgated as the Eleventh Ordinance to the Reich Citizenship Law.¹¹³ This ordinance brought into the open an ongoing tug-of-war between the Reich Finance Ministry and the RSHA regarding the ultimate fate of the assets and property of the Jewish deportees from Germany.

As we saw, the property of the Jews deported from the Reich in 1940 was confiscated by an order issued by Himmler on April 4, 1941, and turned into law by Hitler, on May 29, 1941. While the SS impounded this property for its own operations, the Finance Ministry claimed its own right of receivership. During the summer of 1941 the Finance Ministry had demanded that all banks prepare a list of Jewish accounts, while the Reichsvereinigung—under instructions from the RSHA—informed all the country’s Jews of the obligation to establish a precise inventory of their homes, apartments, and property; thereafter any nonauthorized transfer would be punishable by arrest. Thus both the Finance Ministry and the RSHA (via the Reichsvereinigung) were poised for the beginning of the deportations (to the Russian Far North or elsewhere).

On November 4, the finance minister established the mandatory administrative channels for the takeover of the deportees’ property by the ministry’s local, regional, and central authorities. “It is especially necessary,” the minister stressed, “to make sure that there are no appropriation orders for these properties by other offices.”¹¹⁴ A few days later, however, the Reichsvereinigung conveyed an order from the RSHA demanding that all Jews about to be deported to settle any outstanding amounts owed to the association (which would transfer them to the RSHA). They were told not to include these amounts on the forms they had to present at the assembly points (to avoid their transfer to the Reich Finance Ministry) in fact, they were prodded to settle these financial matters before reaching the assembly points.¹¹⁵

The Eleventh Ordinance to the Reich Citizenship Law seemed to settle the competition in favor of the state authorities. Jews whose “usual place of residence was abroad” lost their German citizenship. The law applied with immediate effect to Jews who resided abroad on the date of its publication and to those who were to reside abroad thereafter. The loss of citizenship entailed the forfeiture of all property and assets to the benefit of the Reich.¹¹⁶ To avoid any misunderstanding about the significance of “abroad,” the finance minister issued a circular on December 3 indicating that this notion also included “the territories occupied by German troops…especially the General Government and the Reichskom-missariate Ostland and the Ukraine.¹¹⁷

Ultimately, however, the RSHA had its way in regard to the funds owed to the Reichsvereinigung by arguing among other things that these funds were the financial basis for implementing all measures regarding the Jews. And to increase these amounts, Heydrich’s men figured out various schemes to further delude and despoil the unsuspecting victims. Thus elderly Jews could buy homes in the “old people’s ghetto” by signing off to the Reichsvereinigung the necessary funds, which would then be transferred to the RSHA. Some of these homes, the deportees were told, had a lake view and others faced a park. In one way or another, the victims were financing their own deportation and, ultimately, their extermination.¹¹⁸

The homes abandoned by the deportees generated a measure of local cooperation between Gestapo and party officials, as had already been the case in Vienna and in Munich. In the Frankfurt area, for example, in order to avoid tension and competition, the Gauleiter of Hesse-Nassau, Jakob Sprenger, appointed the Frankfurt Kreisleiter as the sole representative of the Gau entitled to negotiate with the Gestapo about the fate of Jewish homes and apartments.¹¹⁹

Sometimes, however, unexpected difficulties arose. The Jews who over the first two years of the war (or even beforehand) had been compelled to leave their apartments or homes to congregate in a “Jews’ house” were mostly renting apartments in buildings where they alone were allowed to live but which nonetheless belonged to “Aryan” landlords. When the deportations started, some of the apartments were vacated by the deportees, while others remained temporarily inhabited by their Jewish tenants. According to a letter of complaint sent to the Düsseldorf Gestapo on August 25, 1942, by one August Stiewe to (the landlord of such a house), the deportation of some of his Jewish tenants entailed a significant loss of income from unpaid rents, since Aryan tenants could not be asked to move into a house still partly occupied by Jews. The Gestapo did not deny the existence of the financial loss but told Stiewe to address his grievance to the local branch of the Finance Ministry, as it was pocketing the Jewish assets.¹²⁰

By the fall of 1941 the status and fate of mixed-breeds remained as confused as ever. On the eve of the deportations from the Reich, in a conversation with Lammers, Walter Gross, head of the racial policy office of the party, pointed to two major desiderata, from “a purely biological viewpoint”: “1. No reappearance of persons of mixed blood of the second degree—that is, the necessity of sterilizing persons of mixed blood of the first degree where exceptions [having to do with marriage] are necessary for political reasons. 2. The maintenance of some kind of clear distinction between persons of mixed blood of the second degree and Germans, so that a certain stigma could still be attached to the term ‘Mischling.’ Only by clearly keeping persons of mixed blood beyond the pale can racial consciousness be kept alive and the birth of children of mixed blood…be prevented in the future. We must reckon with such births in view of the extensive contacts between peoples and races in the future. Reichsminister Lammers listened attentively to both ideas and declared himself in favor of the sterilization of persons of mixed blood of the first degree, if they were allowed to remain on the territory of the Reich (emphasis added). Furthermore, he himself suggested that a marriage permit be compulsary for persons of mixed blood of the second degree, in order to keep control in every case over their choice of partners. The aim of such a measure would be to prevent, under all circumstances, the marriage of mixed-breeds of the second degree among themselves, because of the danger of transmitting Jewish characteristics in accordance with Mendel’s [heredity] laws. I answered,” Gross added, “that…one should thoroughly examine whether it was more advantageous to spread Jewish traits throughout the entire Volk rather than isolating them among a limited section of the community from which, now and than, persons possessing an accumulation of Jewish characteristics would appear, who in turn could be eradicated in some way.”¹²¹ The issue was left pending.

Finding a solution was becoming urgent, however, first and foremost in view of the deportations, but also in regard to the continuing service of at least some categories of Mischlinge in the Wehrmacht or in regard to their admission to universities. In principle Hitler’s decisions of 1940 regarding Mischlinge serving in the Wehrmacht remained valid, and were actually imposed more rigorously after the end of the French campaign and maintained despite the growing difficulties on the Eastern Front: Half Jews had to be discharged; quarter Jews could stay in the army but were not to be promoted, even to NCO ranks.

In reality, though, confusion persisted. It seems that in Rommel’s Afrika Korps these rules were entirely disregarded; in the navy their implementation was postponed, whereas in the army and the Luftwaffe, they were applied only if and when the racial identity of the soldier or officer was declared or discovered.¹²² Hitler usually kept for himself the right to promote quarter Jews to NCO or officer ranks. And, in addition to the existing confusion, the Nazi leader decreed that if a Mischling (even a half Jew) fell on the battlefield, the family should be protected from anti-Jewish measures.¹²³ It seems, in other words, that in 1941 the Wehrmacht was still drafting half Jewish Mischlinge for active service.¹²⁴

As could be expected, some Mischlinge were mistreated by commanding officers or fellow soldiers when their identity was uncovered. Many later testified, however, that they encountered humane, even friendly, attitudes from members of their units. Some Mischlinge felt deeply deprived at having to leave the army; others were relieved not to have to serve Hitler any longer. Most of the mixed-breeds found civilian work, at times in highly sensitive positions, such as scientific research in missile construction plants at Peenemünde, among other places.¹²⁵

Access to universities remained extremely difficult for Mischlinge of the first degree, although, as we saw, the Reich Ministry of Education accepted candidates with distinguished military credentials. As beforehand, however, the Party Chancellery and the rectors represented the hard line and used every possible argument (including the observation by some of the rectors of negative racial traits of the candidates) to close the doors of the universities to part Jews.¹²⁶

Generally, part Jews were spared from deportation, as were the Jewish spouses in mixed marriages with children, although as time went by and defeat appeared more certain, the radicalization and extension of the persecution increased.

VI

In the Reich information about massacres perpetrated in the East was first and foremost spread by soldiers who often wrote home quite openly about what they witnessed—and quite approvingly as well. “In Kiev,” Cpl. LB wrote on September 28, “mines explode one after the other. For eight days now the city is on fire and all of it is the Jews’ doing. Therefore all Jews aged 14 to 60 have been shot and the Jewish women will also be shot, otherwise there will be no end to it.”¹²⁷ On November 2 Pvt. XM described a former synagogue, built in 1664, that was in use up to the war. Now, only the walls remained. “It won’t ever be used in the previous function,” XM added. “I believe that in this country [the Soviet Union] the Jews will soon not be in need of any prayer house. I already described to you why it is so. For these dreadful creatures it remains after all the only right redemption.”¹²⁸

An SD report of October 2 from Münster conveyed a conversation between two officials of the mayor’s office about soldiers’ letters recently received from the Russian front. The extraordinary brutality of the fighting stemmed, for example, from “the intentional destruction of all religious and moral feelings by the Jews. The Russians were solely driven by their blind fear of the Jewish commissars. The Russian defends himself and bites like an animal. This is what Jewry has done to the Aryan peoples of Russia…. Already in peacetime, a substantial part of the Russian soldier hordes were purely Mongols. The Jews have mobilized Asia against Europe.”¹²⁹ The letters these officials received in Münster must have represented a random opinion sample of the Ostheer.

The information about the gigantic exterminations of Jews in the East was of course not conveyed only by soldiers’ letters. As early as in July 1941, Swiss diplomatic and consular representatives in the Reich and in satellite countries were filling detailed reports about the mass atrocities; all their information stemmed from German or related sources.¹³⁰ Senior and even midlevel officials in various German ministries had access to the communications of the Einsatzgruppen and to their computations of the staggering number of Jews they had murdered. Such information was mentioned in internal Foreign Ministry correspondence in October 1941 and not even ranked top secret.¹³¹

In a letter addressed to his wife, Freya, Helmuth von Moltke displayed a clear understanding of what was going on: “The news from the East is terrible again. Our losses are obviously very, very heavy. But that could be borne if we were not burdened with a hecatombe of corpses. Again and again one hears reports that in transports of prisoners or Jews only 20 percent arrive…What will happen when the nation as a whole realizes that this war is lost, and lost differently from the last one? With a blood guilt that cannot be atoned for in our lifetime and can never be forgotten.”¹³² These lines were written at the end of August 1941.

Later that year, in October and November, Moltke commented on the deportations: “Since Saturday,” he wrote to Freya on October 21, “the Berlin Jews are being rounded up. They are picked up at 9:15 in the evening and locked into a synagogue overnight. Then they are sent off, with what they can carry to Litzmannstadt and Smolensk. We are to be spared the sight of them being simply left to perish in hunger and cold, and that is why it is done in Litzmannstadt and Smolensk.”¹³³ And, on November 13: “I find it hard to remember these two days. Russian prisoners, evacuated Jews, evacuated Jews, Russian prisoners…. That was the world of these two days. Yesterday, I said goodbye to a once famous Jewish lawyer who has the Iron Cross First and Second Class, the Order of the House of Hohenzollern, the Golden Badge for the Wounded, and who will kill himself with his wife today because he is to be picked up tonight.”¹³⁴

Regarding the killings in occupied Soviet territories, Hassell received much of his information from Gen. Georg Thomas, chief of the Economic and Armaments Division of the Wehrmacht (who played a strange role as enforcer of looting in the occupied Soviet territories on the one hand, and source of information for the opposition to the regime on the other). “Conversations with Frida [Dohnanyi], among others and particularly a report from Auerley [Thomas], who again arrived from the front,” Hassell recorded on October 4, “confirm the continuation of the most disgusting atrocities mainly against the Jews who are executed row after row without the least shame…. A headquarters commanding medical officer…reported that he tested Russian dum-dum bullets in the execution of Jews and achieved such and such results; he was ready to go on and write a report that could be used in [anti-Soviet] propaganda about this ammunition!”¹³⁵

German populations were also quite well informed about the goings-on in the concentration camps, even the most deadly ones. Thus, people living in the vicinity of Mauthausen, for example, could watch what was happening in the camp. On September 27, 1941, Eleanore Gusenbauer sent a letter of complaint to the Mauthausen police station: “In the concentration camp Mauthausen at the work site in Vienna Ditch inmates are being shot repeatedly; those badly struck live for yet some time, and so remain lying next to the dead for hours or even half a day long. My property lies upon an elevation next to the Vienna Ditch, and one is often an unwilling witness to such outrages. I am anyway sickly and such a sight makes a demand on my nerves that in the long run I cannot bear. I request that it be arranged that such inhuman deeds be discontinued, or else done where one does not see it.”¹³⁶

As for the fate of Jewish deportees from the Reich, some information seeped back from the very outset. Thus, on December 12, 1941, the SD reported comments from the inhabitants of Minden, near Bielefeld in Westphalia, on the fate of the Jews from their own town, deported to the East a few days beforehand. “Until Warsaw,” people were saying, “the deportation takes place in passenger trains. From there on, in cattle cars…. In Russia, the Jews were to be put to work in former Soviet factories, while older Jews, or those who were ill, were to be shot.”¹³⁷

The killers themselves were not shy about describing their deeds, even regarding mass executions in the supposedly secret operation 14f13. During the last months of 1941, Dr. Friedrich Mennecke, one of the SS physicians directly involved in the operation, left a few notorious letters to his wife—and to posterity. On November 19, 1941, he reported to his “dearest Mummy” from the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp that on that day he had filled out ninety-five forms [of inmates to be murdered], that after completing the task he had supper (“3 sorts of sausages, butter, bread, beer”), that he slept “marvelously” in his bed and felt “perfect.”¹³⁸ Seven days later he wrote from Buchenwald: The first “portion” of victims was Aryan. “A second portion of some 1200 Jews followed, who need not be ‘examined,’ but for whom it suffices to take the incarceration reasons (often considerable!) from the file and transfer them to the form. Thus it is a purely theoretical task.”¹³⁹ A few days later the Jews were transported to Bernburg and gassed.

The German population’s reactions to the deportations and the fate of the Jews sent from the Reich to the East, remained diverse as already mentioned. While some of the inhabitants of Minden, for example, welcomed the deportations,¹⁴⁰ others expressed their compassion (“the Jews are also God’s creatures”).¹⁴¹ Yet others simply remained hostile to the Jews, whatever may have been happening to them. Thus, in the same area, many housewives were infuriated by a change in the hours allocated to Jews for their food purchase. The change either compelled German housewives to shop at an inconvenient time or to do so together with Jews.¹⁴²

Knowledge about the exterminations also spread to German academics in the East and created panic among some “field researchers.” Take the dire straits in which the Viennese Dr. Elfriede Fliethmann from the Race and Folklore (Volkstumskunde) section of the Krakow Institute for Research on the East found herself in October 1941: “We do not know what measures are being planned for the evacuation of the Jewish population in the next few months,” Fliethmann wrote on October 22 to her close friend and colleague in the Anthropology Department of the University of Vienna, Dr. Dora Maria Kahlich. “It could possibly happen that if we wait too long, valuable material could escape us; mainly our material could be torn out of its family background and of its habitual environment, whereby the shots would have to be taken under difficult conditions and the very possibilities for photographing would have considerably changed.”¹⁴³

Fliethmann and Kahlich were soon on their way to Tarnów in Galicia to take pictures and measurements of various Jewish family members, “so that we could save at least something of the material, in case measures were to be taken.”¹⁴⁴ As the “objects” resisted, the snapshots and measurements had to be taken with the “kind” help of the Security Police. Tarnów Orthodox families with many children were the main material; they were considered as “typical representatives of the original Galician Jewry.”¹⁴⁵ Both researchers forged energetically ahead as their correspondence of the following weeks showed: They did not hide their enthusiasm about the racial-anthropological “wonders” which they were discovering. Thus Kahlich, who, back in Vienna, was interpreting the material informed Fliethmann of the first results but with all the scientific caution necessary: “I must immediately set something right. I only established that the Jews of Tarnów can be included in the Near eastern-oriental racial mixture, which does not mean that they will not also show some other racial trace.”¹⁴⁶

The importance of Fliethmann’s and Kahlich’s research led to further inquiries at the SD in Lemberg: Couldn’t the Tarnów Jewish community be left in place somewhat longer?¹⁴⁷ We can only surmise what the answer from Lemberg may have been. Nonetheless the preliminary results of Fliethmann’s endeavor were not lost. They can still be found in the “Preliminary Report about the Anthropological Photographs of Jewish Families in Tarnów” published in volume 2 of Deutsche Forschung im Osten in 1942.¹⁴⁸

And, at the very time when the Kahlichs and the Fliethmanns of German academe were increasingly worried about the disappearance of their “material,” at the end of 1941 and in January 1942, historian Schieder—whose advice on the handling of Poland’s Jews we already encountered in October 1939—was writing a “confidential” survey about ethnic relations in the newly annexed Bial^/ystok region. Contrary to the two female anthropologists, the eager historian from Königsberg prided himself on an “extraordinarily good” collaboration with the authorities. Schieder strongly encouraged the same authorities to pursue their policies in regard to the Jewish inhabitants of Bial^/ystok; the ghettoization had put an end to the economic primacy acquired by the Jews under the czars and reestablished by other means during the 1939–41 Soviet occupation period when “the Bolshevik organization of the Jewish-Russian bureaucracy soon controlled the entire economic life of the Bialystok district.” Schieder uncovered the roots of this Jewish ability to dominate its economic environment in pre-1917 Russian history: Jewish assimilation to Russian society was sheer “whitewash” (Tünche) that, in his eyes, “did not deter these Jews from tenaciously keeping the racial characteristics which had allowed them in the past to occupy all key economic positions.” Now, however, “Anti-Semitism was becoming understandable to the Belorussians from their everyday experience.”¹⁴⁹

VII

The two most extreme measures taken against the Jews of the Reich from mid-September 1941 on, the introduction of the star and the beginning of the deportations, confronted the German churches with challenges they could no longer disregard. Even more immediately than other segments of German society, the Christian churches had to take a stand, as at least some of the victims were converted Jews.

On September 17, two days before the enforcement of the star decree, Cardinal Theodor Innitzer of Vienna sent out a pastoral letter commending respect and love toward the Catholic Jews; on September 18, the cardinal’s message was withdrawn and replaced by a short text from which any mention of love and respect had disappeared; it merely allowed non-Aryan Christians to continue to participate in church life as previously.¹⁵⁰

Also on September 17, Breslau’s Cardinal Bertram set the guidelines for the Church in the Reich. He reminded the Bishops of the equal standing of all Catholics, Aryans or non-Aryans, and demanded that discriminatory measures in church services be avoided “as long as possible.” But, if asked by (non-Aryan) Catholics, priests should recommend “attendance of early morning services.” If disturbances were to occur, then—and only then—a statement reminding the faithful that the church did not recognize any differences among its members, whatever their background, should be read, but separate church attendance should also be considered.¹⁵¹ A month later, however, Bertram wrote to Munich’s Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber that the church had more urgent issues to deal with than the problem of the converted Jews.¹⁵² As for the Jews as such, they were not even mentioned.

For some Catholic institutions, keeping converts was too much of a burden. In her memoirs Cordelia Edvardson, at the time a young Jewish convert to whose story we shall return, describes a telling episode. Shortly after the introduction of the star, the headmistress of the Berlin branch of the Catholic Girls Association to which Cordelia belonged informed her that “if it became known that one kept members who wore the Jewish star, the authorities would disband the association; it would be better therefore if the girl did not come to their meetings anymore.” And, unaware of the irony, the director added: “You know our slogan: one for all and all for one.”¹⁵³

Among Protestants stark differences of course appeared between the Confessing congregations and the “German Christians.” Some members of the Confessing Church demonstrated outright courage. Thus, in September 1941, Katerine Staritz, a church official in Breslau, published a circular letter in support of the star bearers, calling on her congregation to show an especially welcoming attitude toward them.¹⁵⁴ The SD reported on the circular;¹⁵⁵ the Schwarze Korps commented on it, and officials of the church dismissed Staritz from her position as “city curate.” A few months later she was shipped to Ravensbrück for a year. Upon her return she was not allowed to perform any significant duties in the church and had to report twice a week to the Gestapo.¹⁵⁶

As could be expected, the German Christians reacted to the new measure with glee. A few weeks beforehand, they had published a manifesto praising the anti-Bolshevik campaign in the East: “We are opposed,” they declared in their message, “to a form of Christianity which allies itself with Bolshevism, which regards the Jews as the Chosen People, and which denies that our Volk and our Race are God-given.”¹⁵⁷ For them the introduction of the star allowed barring “Jewish Christians from attending services, entering church buildings, or being buried in Christian cemeteries.”¹⁵⁸

When the deportations from the Reich started, the controversies within both the Protestant and the Catholic churches sharpened. In November 1941 the most prominent personality of the Confessing Church, Bishop Theophil Wurm, tried to convince Goebbels that the measures taken against the non-Aryans could only be grist to the mill of Germany’s worst enemies, particularly “Roosevelt and his accomplices.”¹⁵⁹ The propaganda minister noted that Wurm probably aspired to play among the Protestants the role held by Galen for the Catholics: “His letter goes to the wastebasket.”¹⁶⁰ On December 10 Wurm, in the name of the assembly of church leaders [of the Confessing Church], handed a memorandum addressed to Hitler to State Secretary Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger; a short paragraph also alluded to the fate of the Jews: “Much has happened that can help enemy propaganda: we include in this the measures taken to eliminate the mentally ill and the growing hardness in dealing with the non-Aryans, also those who adhere to the Christian faith.”¹⁶¹ There is no known answer.

Thereupon, on December 17, the German Christian church leaders of Saxony, Nassau-Hesse, Mecklenburg, Schleswig-Holstein, Anhalt, Thuringia, and Lübeck announced their position regarding Jews in general and converted Jews more specifically: “The severest measures were to be taken against the Jews,” who were “to be expelled from German territories…. Racially Jewish Christians have no place and no right in the church.” The undersigned church leaders had “discontinued every kind of communion with Jewish Christians.”¹⁶²

The German Christian manifesto demanded a response; it came from the highest authority of the Evangelical Church—the Church Chancellery, the mouthpiece of mainstream German Protestantism. An open letter addressed to all provincial churches, published two days before Christmas 1941 and signed by the deputy director, Dr. Günther Fürle, in the name of the chancellery and its spiritual advisory board of three bishops, took an uncompromisingly anti-Semitic stand: “The breakthrough of racial consciousness in our people, intensified by the experience of the war and the corresponding measures taken by the political leadership, has brought about the elimination of Jews from the community of us Germans. This is an incontestable fact, which the German Evangelical Churches, which serve the one eternal Gospel within the German people and live within the legal domain of this people as corporations under public law, cannot heedlessly ignore. Therefore, in agreement with the Spiritual Council of the German Evangelical Church, we request the highest authorities to take suitable measures so that baptized non-Aryans remain separate from the ecclesiastical life of the German congregations. The baptized non-Aryans will have to find the ways and means to create their own facilities to serve their particular worship and pastoral needs. We will make every effort to help obtain permission for such facilities from the responsible authorities.”¹⁶³

Bishop Wurm responded in the name of the Confessing Church. He remained very prudent in his criticism of the chancellery’s stand, adding a fair amount of anti-Semitism to his reservations about the discrimination between Aryan and non-Aryan Christians.¹⁶⁴The Provisional Church (the Confessing Church) Administration was more forthright: “Together with all the Christians in Germany who stand on the ground of the Scripture and the Confession, we are compelled to declare that this request from the Church Chancellery is incompatible with the confession of the church…. By what right do we desire to exclude, for racial reasons, Christian non-Aryans from our worship services? Do we want to be like the Pharisees, who renounced communion with the “tax collectors and sinners” in the worship service and, because of this, reaped Christ’s judgment?”

To be consistent, the Provisional Church Administration noted, the chancellery would have to “expel…all the Apostles and, not least of all, Jesus Christ himself, the Lord of the church, because of their racial membership in the Jewish people.” The Provisional Church Administration did not contest, however, that the state could take measures against the Jews and, as in Wurm’s case, its statement was not devoid of anti-Jewish comments.¹⁶⁵ The controversy persisted for several months, while an increasing number of regional churches adopted the chancellery’s attitude.¹⁶⁶

Klepper, who in the meantime had been dismissed from the Wehrmacht on account of his Jewish wife, had resumed his diary recordings. On Christmas Day 1941, he noted: “No solution has yet been found [in K.’s church] for the carriers of the star [his wife and daughter, although both Protestants by then, had to display the star, of course]…. Today no Jew with the star was present at the Christmas service” [Heute war kein Jude mit dem Stern in der Weihnachtskirche].¹⁶⁷

The lack of public response of the German Catholic church to the deportations and to the growing awareness of the mass exterminations in the East was calculated. A small group of bishops (Gröber, Berning, and Preysing) had drafted a pastoral letter that bore the date November 15, 1941; it listed and denounced in clear and courageous terms the hostile measures taken by the state and party authorities against the church and its institutions, as well as against the basic rights of Germans to life, freedom, and property; the Jewish issue was not included in the text.¹⁶⁸ The reason adduced for this omission is to be found in an unsigned memorandum dated November 25 found in Cardinal Faulhaber’s archives; in setting the guidelines for the publication of the pastoral message, it indicates the reason for this omission: “(2) Simultaneously with the reading [of the message], the Reich government will be informed of its content; it will be told that this public way had to be chosen, as none of the petitions or memoranda [addressed to the authorities] were adequately answered. Moreover, some further issues are to be presented to the government that could not be dealt with in the pastoral letter without hurting the reputation of the people and the government (Jewish question, treatment of Russian prisoners, atrocities of the SS in Russia, etc.).”¹⁶⁹

There may have been several reasons for avoiding the “Jewish question”: a tactical show of moderation despite what could have appeared as a public confrontation with the regime, or the avoidance of issues that may have found little echo among the churchgoing part of the population. Whatever the reasons may have been, Cardinal Bertram opposed the publication of the letter “in principle and for practical reasons.”¹⁷⁰

The exclusion of the “Jewish question” from the draft letter was of particular significance given that it was decided by two out of the three bishops who usually showed the greatest concern for the fate of converts and even of Jews as such (Preysing and Berning). It was even more significant in light of the declaration of these same bishops that the success or failure of the letter was not the essential issue, and that all that mattered was: “What is our duty in the present moment? What does conscience require? What does God, what do German believers expect of their bishops?”¹⁷¹ Finally, as the letter was still being debated in early 1942, the exclusion takes on an even more ominous significance in light of what was becoming known about the fate of the deportees.

Margarete Sommer, in charge of relief work at the Berlin archdiocese, was informed in early 1942 by Lithuanian Catholics and also, it seems, by Hans Globke, a high official of the Ministry of the Interior, of the mass killings in the Baltic countries of Jews deported from the Reich.¹⁷² After meeting with Sommer, Bishop Berning of Osnabrück noted on February 5, 1942: “For months no news arrived from Litzmannstadt. All postcards are returned…. Transports from Berlin arrive in Kovno, but it is doubtful whether anybody is still alive. No exact news from Minsk and Riga. Many have been shot. The intention is to exterminate the Jews entirely” [Es besteht wohl der Plan die Juden ganz auszurotten].¹⁷³

At the Paderborn conference of November 24 and 25, 1941, the German episcopate dealt with one further “Jewish” issue: separation from the spouses of mixed marriages on the demand of the Aryan partner. The bishops decided to deal with each case individually, according to “pastoral wisdom.”¹⁷⁴

Two months before the debates about the pastoral letter, an anonymous German Jew addressed a letter to Bishop Galen. He expressed his admiration for the bishop’s stand on euthanasia and reminded him of what was happening to the Jews in Germany, even to deeply patriotic Jews like himself who were no longer allowed to be Germans. “Only the senseless wish, the mad hope,” the letter ended, “that somewhere a helper will stand up for us incited me to address this letter to you. May God bless you!”¹⁷⁵ Galen went on preaching throughout the war and his patriotic and anti-Bolshevik exhortations carried no less fervor than his defense of the mentally ill.¹⁷⁶ About the persecution of the Jews, however, even in private letters he never uttered one single word.

Bernhard Lichtenberg, prior of Saint Hedwig’s Cathedral in Berlin, was a lone exception. Like Pastor Grüber on the Protestant side, Lichtenberg was helping non-Aryan Catholics. And from November 1938 on, during every evening service he prayed aloud for the Jews. On August 29, 1941, two women parishioners denounced him to the Gestapo. He was arrested on October 23, 1941, interrogated, and sentenced to prison on May 29, 1942. He died on his way to Dachau on November 3, 1943.¹⁷⁷

VIII

In late 1941, as details about the fate of the Jews in the East were seeping back into the Reich, British high officials were also becoming aware of the mass murders on Soviet territory, from decoded German messages. However, any such information remained strictly secret to protect the most precious trump card of the war: the possession of a German “Enigma” encoding machine that gave access to a large number of enemy radio communications.¹⁷⁸

In the meantime the leadership of American Jewry and that of the Jewish community in Palestine seemed rather unconcerned about the European situation, both because of inadequate information and more pressing and immediate challenges. For American Jews their veneration of Roosevelt and their fear of anti-Semitism added to the reticence regarding any interventions that might have displeased “the Chief” and the higher levels of the administration. At times, however, these Jewish leaders may have overstepped the limits of subservience by taking measures that, unwittingly no doubt, added to the hardship of ghetto inhabitants.

In the spring of 1941 Rabbi Wise had decided to impose a complete embargo on all aid sent to Jews in occupied countries, in compliance with the U.S. government’s economic boycott of the Axis powers (whereby every food package was seen as direct or indirect assistance to the enemy). The “patriotic” surrender to the boycott also stemmed from political considerations regarding postwar relations of the American Jewish leadership with Britain, mainly on the question of Palestine.¹⁷⁹ Strict orders were given to World Jewish Congress representatives in Europe to halt forthwith any shipment of packages to the ghettos, despite the fact that these packages did usually reach their destination, the Jewish Self-Help Association in Warsaw. “All these operations with and through Poland must cease at once,” Wise cabled to Congress delegates in London and in Geneva, “and at once in English means AT ONCE, not in the future.”¹⁸⁰

The display of unconditional Americanism became particularly loud after Lindbergh’s anti-Jewish attack in Des Moines, in September 1941. “We will not put even what he [Lindbergh] considers our ‘interests’ before those of our country,” the American Jewish Committee responded, “since our interests and those of our country are one and indivisible.” The American Jewish Congress was no less decisive in tone and content: “Surely it is needless to state that we [Jews] are of and for America as truly as any other group within the nation…. We have no view or attitude in relation to foreign affairs that is not determined solely by American interests, the needs and interests of our own free country.”¹⁸¹ Official American Jewry was paralyzed.

More perplexing in many ways was the attitude of the Jewish leadership in Palestine. At the beginning of the war, the Jewish Agency Executive had established a four-member committee to monitor the situation of European Jewry. The head of the committee, Itzhak Gruenbaum, himself a former member of the Polish parliament, did not instill much energy or sense of purpose into the activities of his group. Nobody, it must be added, seems to have prodded him on or questioned his ability to fulfill the (undefined) task. In the first months of 1941 for example, the Committee of Four published an overview of the situation in Europe that defined the German policy in Poland as aiming at the destruction of Jewish economic life in that country; “the Jews,” it added, “were fighting for their dignity with all their strength, refusing to give up.”¹⁸²

At the time the strongest political party of the Yishuv was Mapai (“Party of the Workers of Eretz Israel,” in other words the “Labor Party”); it was the major political force in all the central institutions of the Jewish community in the country and particularly in the most important of them—its highest executive body, The Jewish Agency. The one political leader who, in turn, held a dominant position in Mapai in general and on the Jewish Agency Executive in particular (although he had formally resigned as its chairman at that time), was David Ben-Gurion.

In February 1941 Ben-Gurion returned to Palestine after a lengthy stay in Great Britain and in the United States. His comments at a meeting with his Mapai colleagues offer an indication of what had been and would be his approach to the events in Europe: a uniquely Zionist perspective. After mentioning that the Yishuv was not fully aware of the scope of the war, he ‘turned to the situation of the Jews: “No one can estimate the enormity of the destruction of the Jewish people [“destruction” was not meant as physical extermination.]…Of course there is information available on all this, but people here are not living out these matters…. What we must do now, more than anything, above all and before anything, for ourselves and for the Diaspora, that same small Diaspora still left to us…is [create] Zionist commitment.”¹⁸³ In other words, for Ben-Gurion there was but one way of helping European Jewry: achieving the goals of Zionism. And simultaneously such help would eventually allow a Jewish state in Palestine to survive.

Notwithstanding Ben-Gurion’s exhortations, no concrete plans emerged from the Yishuv throughout most of 1941. The Jewish Agency hardly dealt with the situation in Europe, and the common opinion was that nothing much could be done to alleviate whatever suffering there was.¹⁸⁴Between August and December 1941, the Mapai Central Committee did not address the plight of European Jewry even once.¹⁸⁵

Richard Lichtheim, the delegate of the Jewish Agency in Geneva, whose reports had been a steady series of warnings about the looming catastrophe, himself seemed to hesitate about possible developments in view of the first German setbacks on the Eastern Front. In the final lines of a report sent to Jerusalem on December 22, 1941, about the fate of German Jews, he considered two contrary yet possible developments: “The turn of the tide on the Eastern Front may have the effect that the expulsions of the Jews from the Reich will cease, at least temporarily, owing to transport difficulties and to the necessity of employing all available labor in the German factories; it may also lead—and that is a tragic probability—to further persecutions and pogroms in Germany and in the occupied territories if the wounded beast of prey feels that the end is near.”¹⁸⁶

IX

Throughout the Reich and the Protectorate, the local Jewish community offices were informed well in advance of the date of deportations from their area. The local Gestapo station received the lists of names from the district office of the Reichsvereinigung and decided whom to include in the upcoming transport. Those designated for departure were given a serial number and informed by the Reichsvereinigung or by the Gestapo about the procedures regarding assets, homes, outstanding bills, the amount of cash allowed, the authorized weight of the luggage (usually fifty kilograms), the amount of food for the journey (three to five days, and so on), as well as the date by which they had to be ready. From then on they were forbidden to leave their homes—even briefly—without permission from the authorities.¹⁸⁷ For some Jews, the summons seems to have come more suddenly; thus, in Breslau, Willy Cohn interrupted his diary in midsentence. On November 17, he started to describe his visit to the community offices and his conversation with the chairman, Dr. Kohn: “First, he told me, that at the Secret State Police [Gestapo] there was no possibility….”¹⁸⁸

On the departure day these Jews were assembled by the Schutzpolizei and marched or driven in trucks to a waiting area where they would be kept, sometimes for several days, before being marched again or driven to the railway station, often in broad daylight and in full view of the population. According to Herta Rosenthal, then sixteen years old, deported from Leipzig to Riga in January 1942, when the Jews were taken by truck from the school where they had been assembled to the railway station, “Everybody saw it, and they were screaming bloody murder. All the Jews were leaving Leipzig and they [the Germans] were happy, a lot of them. They were standing there laughing…. They brought us up during the day, not at night. There were both SA and ordinary citizens there.”¹⁸⁹ Rosenthal’s testimony is confirmed by various contemporary reports. As the twelve Jews of Forchheim were taken from the Paradeplatz (“parade square”) to the railway station on their way to Bamberg, Nuremberg, and Riga, on November 27, 1941, “a great number of inhabitants gathered [in the square] and followed the evacuation [Abtransport] with interest and great satisfaction.”¹⁹⁰ A minority reacted differently, and in Bremen, for example, ten members of the Confessing Church were briefly arrested in early December of that year as they were taking up a collection for the Jews about to be evacuated.¹⁹¹

In exceptional cases some Jews were taken off the deportation list, even at the very last moment: Marianne Ellenbogen (at that time, Strauss) and her parents were among them. It all took place in their hometown, Essen, on October 26, 1941. The house was sealed and, luggage in hand, the family set off for the assembly point. There many of the city’s Jews were already waiting. Boarding of the streetcar that was to take them to the railway station had started when two Gestapo officials arrived and told the Strausses to go back home. “We were sent back home,” Marianne reminisced, “and that was the most dreadful experience anybody had, to hear this animal howl go up [from the crowd of fellow Jews].”

The wealthy Strausses had apparently promised the director of the Deutsche Bank in Essen, Friedrich Wilhelm Hammacher, an old business acquaintance of Strauss senior, to sell him their house at a very advantageous price. Hammacher, it seems, got in touch with high-ranking Abwehr (military intelligence) officers who used some Jews, allowed to emigrate, as agents, mainly in North and South America. The Abwehr was interested in the Strausses; its Bremen headquarters informed the Düsseldorf Gestapo, which in turn instructed the Essen Gestapo to set the family free. Nothing came of the project in the end.¹⁹² In 1943 the Strausses were deported to the East and perished with their fellow Jews. Marianne escaped and went into hiding in Germany.¹⁹³

Other Jews also avoided deportation, but differently. “Nineteen Jews who should have gone with the first transport from Vienna to Lodz on October 15 took their own lives, either by jumping from windows or by gassing themselves, by hanging, with sleeping tablets, by drowning, or by means unknown. Within the space of three weeks, the Gestapo reported 84 suicides and 87 suicide attempts in Vienna.”¹⁹⁴ According to statistics of the Berlin police, 243 Jews took their lives during the last three months of 1941 (from the beginning of the deportations to the end of the year).¹⁹⁵ The quota was filled with other Jews, of course.

“In the evening,” Goebbels recorded in his diary, on November 7, 1941, “the unpleasant news that the [non-Jewish] actor [Joachim] Gottschalk, who was married to a Jewish wife, committed suicide with wife and child…I take all measures so that this humanly regrettable but concretely almost unavoidable case should not lead to the spreading of alarming rumors.”¹⁹⁶

The first transport of Jews from Munich left the Bavarian capital on November 20; its original destination had been Riga but since the Riga ghetto was overfilled, the train was redirected to Kovno. All the deportees were inmates of the barracks camp in Milbertshofen. The young Erwin Weil was ordered to help those unable to board the train on their own: “At the merchandise station stood a long train with the locomotive already under steam. The people were pushed into the wagons under a hail of the wildest curses. At daybreak we were yelled at to throw out the luggage, so that the people would be pushed in faster. Then a bus arrived with armed SS and the (small) children from the Antonienstrasse. We had to put them on the train. We tried to calm their panic; it was horrible.”¹⁹⁷ On November 23 the transport arrived in Kovno. There too the ghetto was overfilled; the deportees never even came close to it, as we know. They were directly transported to fort IX. For two days they remained in the ditches surrounding the fort. On November 25 they were murdered.¹⁹⁸

During the journey to the East, the transports were guarded by members of the Schutzpolizei (SCHUPO). “On the way from the Schlachthof [slaughterhouse] to the loading ramp a Jewish male tried to commit suicide by jumping under a tramway,” SCHUPO captain Salitter wrote in his reported about the December 11 transport of 1,007 Jews from Düsseldorf to Riga, for which he was responsible. “Also,” he went on, “an elderly Jewess moved stealthily away from the loading ramp, taking advantage of the fact that it was very dark and rainy. She dashed into a nearby house, where she quickly undressed and went to a public bath. But a cleaning woman spotted her and she was brought back to the transport.”

Salitter then described the journey, via Berlin and eastward. In Konitz he got into a squabble with the stationmaster. For better surveillance Salitter demanded that one of the carriages transporting the Jews be switched with that of the Schutzpolizei; the stationmaster refused and offered to move the passengers: “It seems necessary for the train authorities to explain to this employee that members of the German police must be treated differently from Jews. I was under the impression that he was one of those Germans who still thought of them as ‘poor Jews’ and for whom the concept ‘Jew’ was totally unknown.”

Finally, on December 13, around midnight, the train arrived in the vicinity of Riga. The outside temperature had dropped to minus 10 degrees Celsius. The Germans were brought to the city and replaced by Latvian guards; the Jews were left in the unheated train until the following morning. In Riga, Salitter met with Latvians who told him about the attitude of the population: “They especially hate the Jews, this being the reason they took such an intensive part in the annihilation of these parasites since the liberation [from Soviet rule]. Through my contacts…I heard that some of the people wonder why Germany bothers to transport the Jews to Latvia instead of annihilating them right there.”¹⁹⁹

A deportee from Berlin, Haim Baram (Heinz Bernhardt at the time), described the arrival of his transport in Minsk. The train had left Berlin on December 14, 1941; it arrived in Minsk on the eighteenth at 10 a.m. Latvian SS auxiliaries chased everybody out of the cars; the elderly and the children were driven away in trucks, while the bulk of the deportees were marched to a neighborhood of wooden huts (without water or electricity) whose inhabitants had disappeared. “The wrecked houses looked as if a pogrom had taken place there. Pillow feathers everywhere. Hanukah lamps and candlesticks laying around in every corner…. Later we were informed that this was the Russian ghetto whose Jewish residents were shot in early November 1941.” An SD officer confirmed what had happened. Most of the inhabitants of the ghetto had been massacred to make space for the transports from Germany. [The officer] “pointed and said: ‘There, in front of you, a heap of bodies.’ And in fact we saw a hillock with parts of human bodies sticking out.”²⁰⁰

Oskar Rosenfeld was deported from Prague to Lodz on November 4, 1941, in the last of the transports that had carried some 5,000 Jews from the Protectorate to Lodz before the end of the year. From then on most Jews from Bohemia and Moravia would be deported to Theresienstadt, a “transit camp” on the way to the killing sites for part of the inmates (but a camp whose function in the general extermination system was a peculiar one, as we shall see).

Born in Moravia, Rosenfeld grew up in Vienna, where he became a journalist and a writer, somewhat in the expressionist vein of his time. His major interest, however, seems to have been theater. In 1909 he established the first Jewish theater in the Austrian capital; later on he encouraged visits to Vienna by Yiddish and Hebrew theater companies. In many ways an intellectual like Klemperer, Rosenfeld was his opposite in terms of Jewish outlook and politics—he was a staunch “anti-assimilationist” and a right-wing (revisionist) Zionist to boot. After the Anschluss, Oskar and his wife, Henriette, fled to Prague. Henriette managed to leave for England in the summer of 1939; he was to follow. The war put an end to his emigration plans.²⁰¹ In early November 1941, after the usual summons, Rosenfeld had to report to the assembly point at the Messepalast (The Fair Palace).

“The Messepalast was a warehouse,” Rosenfeld recorded in his Notebook A, “where, instead of goods and wares, people were exhibited, closely pressed together in bunks, resting on backpacks and mattresses, with bundles, suitcases, packages, stuffed to bursting, and cots that served as sleeping places. Three days and three nights they lingered here, in this filthy warehouse, slowly consuming their stores of food since the provisions from the Jewish community were inadequate.”²⁰²

Rosenfeld went on, describing the days and nights at the Messepalast and the last expropriation measures before departure. The trek to the railway station took place without any secrecy: “Along the way, behind the windows of the houses, the faces of the Czechs were visible, here and there Czech passersby, without exception serious faces, some sad, pensive, disturbed. A train was waiting. Doors were pulled open, they entered the cars by numbers, which each one had to display clearly visible on clothing and luggage.”²⁰³

The deportees were not informed of their destination, and it was only in the course of the journey, once they saw “the desolate Polish landscape,” that they guessed it would be Lodz. In a strange improvisation, the officers in charge of the transport ordered, in the middle of the night, that the men shave their faces and polish their shoes: “Hungover, hungry, sleepy, hundreds of men began to polish their shoes in the dark coupé and to shave with a shaver, [using] water from the toilet. From time to time a Gestapo man with a flashlight appeared and had some of them line up, cursing when an evacuee didn’t seem elegant enough for him.”²⁰⁴ The transport stopped on the outskirts of the ghetto, and one thousand Jews were marched to a school building, their temporary quarters. Within days hunger set in, weakness increased, and some died of “enfeeblement” in their temporary abode.

At the beginning of December the deportees from the Reich and the Protectorate to Lodz were still living in separate encampments, although they could move around in the ghetto in search of some work, of possible deals to enhance the weekly ration of bread (a single loaf) or of the daily cabbage soup (whose very odor usually brought nausea): “At the beginning of winter, the price of a loaf of bread on the bread exchange, on the black market, is already 20 marks. From autumn to the beginning of winter it rose from 8 to 20. But the selling prices for textiles, clothing, shoes, leather bags, did not keep up with the bread prices, so the owners of the wares they had brought along sank daily into greater poverty.”²⁰⁵

On September 23, Rumkowski had been informed by the Germans of coming deportations into the ghetto. Statistics gathered by the “Elder” regarding overcrowding obviously had no effect whatsoever. For the 143,000 inhabitants of the ghetto in the fall of 1941, first the arrivals of Jews from the surrounding small towns and then of the 20,000 Jews from the Reich and the Protectorate and of 5,000 Gypsies meant a sudden 20 percent increase in the population. Seen from the perspective of the new arrivals it meant sleeping in evacuated school buildings and halls of all types, often on the floor and without heating or running water; for most, toilets were located a few buildings away. For the ghetto inhabitants it meant greater overcrowding, less food, and other unpleasant consequences, as we shall see. Tension between the newcomers and the ghetto population became unavoidable.²⁰⁶

During the first two weeks of October 1941, everyday life in the ghetto had followed its “normal” course, notwithstanding the arrival of the approximately 2,000 Jews from Wloclawek and the surrounding small towns. The chroniclers reported “beautiful” autumn weather, 277 deaths, and eighteen births (“October 9 marked the lowest daily death rate since the inception of the ghetto: scarcely 11 people died that day”). They also counted five suicide attempts and one murder.²⁰⁷ Then came the dumping of the 20,000 new deportees.

The “Chronicle” entries for the second half of October are lost and with them the first semi-official reactions to the new situation. Sierakowiak, however, kept his own recordings of the events. “October 16: The first transport of deportees from Vienna arrived…in the afternoon. There are thousands of them, pastors and doctors among them, and some have sons on the front. They have brought a carload of bread with them and excellent luggage, and are dressed splendidly. Every day the same number is supposed to arrive, up to 20,000. They will probably overwhelm us completely.”²⁰⁸

The next day Sierakowiak witnessed the arrival of a transport from Prague; again he noticed the cartloads of bread, the luggage, the clothes: “I have heard,” he added, “that they have been inquiring whether it’s possible to get a two-room apartment with running water. Interesting types.”²⁰⁹On October 18 the young diarist brought up the same theme again. On October 19, however, the first practical consequences of the influx of the new deportees were recorded: “More Luxembourg Jews arrived today. They are beginning to crowd the ghetto. They have only one patch on the left breast with the inscription Jude. They are dressed splendidly (you can tell they haven’t lived in Poland). They are buying up all they can in the ghetto, and all the prices have doubled. Bread is 12 to 13RM; socks which cost 70pf. before, are now 2RM. Although they have been here only a few days, they already complain about hunger. So what can we say, we who haven’t had our stomach full for more than a year? You can apparently get used to everything.”²¹⁰

The economic disruption soon worsened: “Since the transports arrived from Germany,” the “Chronicle” reported in November 1941, “all the restaurants and pastry shops in the ghetto, half-empty until then, have truly been besieged by newcomers…. From the moment they arrived the newcomers began selling their personal property and, with the cash they received, began to buy up literally everything available on the private food market. In the course of time, this caused a shortage in the food supply, and prices rose horrendously with indescribable speed. On the other hand, the availability of all sorts of items which had been lacking in the ghetto for quite a while has caused trade to become brisk, and a few of the ghetto’s stores have shelves filled with goods that have not been seen in the ghetto for a long time. Because of the newcomers who are popularly known as Yekes, stores never really closed their doors in the month of November. They sold their clothing, shoes, linen, cosmetics, traveling accessories, and so forth. For a short while this caused a decline in prices for the most varied items; however, to match the price increase on the food market, the newcomers began to raise the prices of the items they were selling. From the point of view of the ghetto’s previous inhabitants, this relatively large increase in private commerce has caused undesired disturbances and difficulties and, what is worse, the newcomers have, in a short span of time, caused a devaluation of the [ghetto] currency. That phenomenon is particularly painful for the mass of working people, the most important segment of ghetto society, who only possess the money they draw from the coffers of the Elder of the Jews.”²¹¹

Immediately after the war some of the surviving deportees to Lodz confirmed the unexpected effects of their arrival upon business transactions within the ghetto—and with the Germans: “I had a new suit of clothes,” Jacob M. recalled, “for which I had paid 350 marks in Hamburg…I got 1 kilo [2.2 pounds] of flour for it. You could purchase a pair of shoes for 100 grams of margarine…. Germans who would at times come into the ghetto with 1 pound of bread or margarine would leave with a trunkful of new things.”²¹²

X

As transports of deportees were arriving in Lodz from the Reich and Protectorate, the Germans started murdering part of the ghetto’s inhabitants. On December 6 the Chelmno gas vans had become operational and that same day Rumkowski was ordered to have 20,000 of “his” Jews [the local Jews] ready for “labor deployment outside the ghetto.” The number was finally reduced to 10,000. Shortly afterward the Chronicle recorded a sudden interruption of all mail services between the ghetto and the outside world. On the face of it the chroniclers could not make any sense of the order: “There have been various stories concerning the suspension of mail service, and a question of fundamental interest has been whether this was a purely local event or whether there have been nationwide restrictions. There are, in addition, conjectures about the reasons behind this latest restriction.”²¹³ Obviously the chroniclers could not write that these conjectures pointed to the forthcoming deportation.²¹⁴

As rumors continued to spread, Rumkowski decided to address the issue in a speech at the House of Culture on January 3, 1942: “I don’t like to waste words,” the Elder began that part of the speech, according to the “Chronicle” record: “The stories circulating today are one hundred percent false. I have recently agreed to accept twenty thousand Jews from the smaller centers, setting as a condition that the territory of the ghetto must be enlarged. At the present time, only those who are in my opinion deserving of such fate will be resettled elsewhere. The authorities are full of admiration for the work which has been performed in the ghetto and it is due to that work that they have confidence in me. Their approval of my motion to reduce the number of deportees from 20,000 to 10,000 is a sign of that confidence. I have complete confidence in the Resettlement Commission. Obviously it too is capable of making mistakes from time to time…. Bear in mind that at the center of all my projects is the aspiration that honest people may sleep in peace. Nothing bad will happen to people of goodwill.” (Thunderous applause.)²¹⁵

We do not have Sierakowiak’s notes for the period of the January deportations, but Rosenfeld described some of the ghetto scenes of these same days, albeit not in precisely dated entries: “The [Jewish] police stormed the lodgings of the Jews marked for evacuation. Not infrequently they found the corpses of children who had starved to death or of old people who had frozen to death…. Only 12¹/₂ kg of luggage and 10 marks of money were allowed to be taken away…. The bundles of the evacuees contained slices of bread, potatoes, margarine…. They had better not be sick. No doctor accompanied them, no medications.”²¹⁶

From Rosenfeld’s notes it appears that he did not yet know where the transports were headed. Between January 12 and 29, 10,103 Jews were deported from Lodz to Chelmno and gassed.

The deportations continued in February and March: By April 2, a further 34,073 ghetto Jews had been deported and murdered. “Nobody was safe anymore from being deported,” Rosenfeld noted; “at least eight hundred people had to be delivered every day. Some thought they would be able to save themselves: chronically ill old people and those with frozen limbs—not even that helped. The surgeons in the hospital were very busy. They amputated hands and feet of the poor ‘patients’ and discharged them as cripples. The cripples too were taken away. On March 7 nine people froze to death at the railway station where they had to wait nine hours for the departure of the train.”²¹⁷

Rosenfeld’s comments about the deporation of cripples find a poignant echo in a diary fragment written by an anonymous young girl from the ghetto, covering merely three weeks, from the end of February to mid-March 1942. The diarist tells about her friend, Hania Huberman [mostly HH in the diary], “extremely intelligent and wise. She knows life. A third-year gymnasium student, a very good girl.” The diarist and HH herself were both convinced that HH would not be deported because she had a crippled father who could not walk. Then, on March 3 the news arrived: “Hania H. was leaving.” The diarist could not imagine how her friend and her father would face the future: “Where will she go with her sick, helpless father, without a shirt for him and with nothing for herself? Hungry, exhausted, without money and food. My mom immediately found some shirts for her and her father. My sister and I ran upstairs. When I came back, I couldn’t stop crying. I couldn’t stay there longer because I had to finish the laundry…. I promised to visit her.”²¹⁸

Rumors spread among some of the Germans working in the Chelmno area—and probably among the local Poles. Heinz May was forest inspector (Forstmeister) in Kolo County, near Lodz. In the fall of 1941 May was informed by Forest Constable Stagemeir that some commandos had arrived in the vicinity. In reporting this “Stagemeier was strangely serious,” a detail to which May did not pay attention at the moment. Somewhat later, as May was traveling through the forest with Kreisleiter Becht, the district chief pointed to Precinct 77 and declared: “The trees will be growing better soon”; by way of explanation, Becht added: “Jews make good fertilizer.” Nothing else.

Strange events occurred in May’s precinct over the following weeks: A closed truck about four meters in length and two meters high, with iron bolt and padlock in the rear, was being pulled out of a ditch by another truck among a group of policemen: “A definitely unpleasant smell came from the truck and from the men standing around it.” May and his son, who arrived on the scene, were quickly chased away. A succession of further incidents and some rumors induced May to drive to Stagemeier’s home for more information.

“Stagemeier explained to me,” May reported in 1945 testimony, “that a large detachment of military police was stationed in Chelmno. The palace [castle] on the western side of Chelmno had been enclosed by a high wooden fence. Military police sentries armed with rifles were standing by the entrance…. I passed by there on the way back to my forest district and confirmed that what Stagemeier had said concerning the wooden fence and the sentries was true. There were row upon row of trucks with improvised canvas tops in Chelmno. Women, men, and even children had been crammed into those trucks…. During the short time I was there I saw the first truck drive up to the wooden fence. The sentries opened the gates. The truck vanished into the palace courtyard and immediately afterwards another closed truck came out of the courtyard and headed for the forest. And then both sentries closed the gates. There was no longer the slightest doubt that terrible things, things never before known in human history, were being played out there.”²¹⁹

The killing capacity of Chelmno was approximately 1,000 people a day (around fifty people could be crammed into each of the three vans). The first victims were the Jews from villages and small towns in the Lodz area. Then, before the deportation of the Jews from the Lodz ghetto started, came the turn of the Gypsies herded into a special area of the ghetto (the Gypsy camp). “For the last ten days the Gypsies have been taken away in trucks, according to people who live in the immediate vicinity of the [Gypsy] camp,”²²⁰ the entry for the first week of January 1942 in the ghetto “Chronicle” indicates. Approximately 4,400 Gypsies were killed in Chelmno but there were few witnesses. After the war some Poles who lived in the area mentioned the Gypsies, as did both the driver of one of the gas vans and another SS member of Lange’s unit. None of the Gypsies survived.²²¹

As mentioned, the vast majority of the Lodz ghetto inhabitants remained unaware of Chelmno, although over the weeks and months information reached them in diverse ways. Strangely enough some information was even sent by mail. Thus on December 31, 1941, three weeks after the beginning of the exterminations, an unknown Jew sent a card later forwarded to Lodz to an acquaintance in Posbebice: “Dear cousin Mote Altszul, as you know from Kolo, Dabie, and other places Jews have been sent to Chelmno to a castle. Two weeks have already passed and it is not known how several thousands have perished. They are gone and you should know, there will be no addresses for them. They were sent to the forest and they were buried…. Do not look upon this as a small matter, they have decided to wipe out, to kill, to destroy. Pass this letter on to learned people to read.”²²²

Two weeks later a letter based on an eyewitness account was sent by the rabbi of Grabów to his brother-in-law in Lodz: “Until now I have not replied to your letters because I did not know exactly about all the things people have been talking about. Unfortunately, for our great tragedy, now we know it all. I have been visited by an eyewitness who survived only by accident, he managed to escape from hell…. I found out about everything from him. The place where all perish is called Chelmno, not far from Dabie, and all are hidden in the neighboring forest of Lochów. People are killed in two different ways: By firing squad or by poison gas. This is what happened to the cities Dabie, Isbicza, Kujawska, Klodawa, and others. Lately thousands of Gypsies have been brought there from the so-called Gypsy camps of Lodz, and for the past several days, Jews have been brought there from Lodz and the same is done to them. Do not think that I am mad. Alas, this is the tragic cruel truth…. O Creator of the world, help us! Jakob Schulman.”²²³

The eyewitness was probably the man called the “gravedigger from Chelmno,” Yakov Groyanowski from Izbica, a member of the Jewish commando that dug the pits into which the corpses were thrown in the forest. The gravedigger’s story reached both Ringelblum and Yitzhak Zuckerman, a Zionist youth leader in Warsaw.²²⁴ He told of people undressing in the castle for showering and disinfection, then being pushed into the vans and suffocated by the exhaust gas pumped in during the ride to the forest, some sixteen kilometers away. “Many of the people they [the gravediggers] dealt with had suffocated to death in the truck. But there were a few exceptions, including babies who were still alive; this was because mothers held the children in blankets and covered them with their hands so the gas would not get to them. In these cases, the Germans would split the heads of the babies on trees, killing them on the spot.” Groyanowski managed to flee, and hid in small communities (probably also in Grabów) until he reached Warsaw, in early January 1942.

XI

In Western Europe, in the meantime, life—a kind of life—was going on. In Paris the bombing of the synagogues didn’t cause any panic among the Jewish population. Although the round-ups of hostages, the executions, and the sending of thousands of Jews to Compiègne and Drancy signaled a worsening situation, Biélinky’s diary entries did not indicate a sense of upheaval.²²⁵ On October 9 it was registration time again, and Biélinky noted the long line of “‘B’s…. It is interesting to notice,” he added, “that in this crowd of Jews, thoroughly Jewish types are rare; all look physically like ordinary Parisians…no trace of a ghetto.”²²⁶ Most of his entries in these days dealt with the ongoing difficulties in getting enough food.

For Lambert, in October, the new German victories in the East did not mean the end of the war. “But, what will become of France and what will become of us, the Jews, in the meantime?”²²⁷ Lambert’s question was somewhat rhetorical as he immediately added in the same October 12 entry: “Of course, in this immense blaze, Jewish worry is but one element of the universal anxiety and expectation. This quietens me, at least in regard to the future of my sons, as a Pole, a Belgian or a Dutch are not more assured of the next day than I am myself.”²²⁸ A few weeks later, at the end of December, one thing at least had become clear: The outcome of the war was no longer in question. “Victory is certain; it could even take place in 1942.”²²⁹

In Bucharest in these same days, Sebastian certainly did not feel that his fate as a Jew was like that of other Romanians. He wanted to flee: “Never have I thought so intensely about leaving,” he wrote on October 16. “I know it’s absurd, I know it’s impossible, I know it’s pointless, I know it’s too late—but I can’t help it…. In the last few days I have read a number of American magazines…and I suddenly saw in detail another world, another milieu, other cities, another time.”²³⁰ He wished to sail on the Struma that was taking some seven hundred “illegal” emigrants to Palestine.²³¹ Maybe he could join.

Sebastian, like most Jews in Romania, knew what was happening to the Jews in Bessarabia, Bukovina, and—Transnistria. “It is an anti-Jewish delirium that nothing can stop,” he wrote on October 20. “There are no brakes, no rhyme or reason. It would be something if there were an anti-Semitic program; you’d know the limits to which it might go. But this is sheer uncontrolled bestiality, without shame or conscience, without goal or purpose. Anything, absolutely anything, is possible. I see the pallor of fear on Jewish faces.”²³²

In the diary entries that followed from mid-October to mid-December, Sebastian reacted to the daily indignities and threats that targeted Romanian Jewry (before and after Antonescu’s public letter to Filderman) which, in Sebastian’s eyes, was an intentional call for violence.²³³ Well-intentioned Romanian friends tried to convince the Jewish writer to convert to Catholicism: “The Pope will defend you!” they argued.²³⁴ “I don’t need arguments to answer them, nor do I search for any,” he noted on December 17…. Even if it were not so stupid and pointless, I would still need no arguments. Somewhere on an island with sun and shade, in the midst of peace, security, and happiness, I would in the end be indifferent to whether I was or was not Jewish. But here and now, I cannot be anything else. Nor do I think I want to be.”²³⁵

In the Reich the Jews not included in the first wave of deportations desperately attempted to understand the new measures and their personal fate. “Even more shocking reports about deportations of Jews to Poland,” Klemperer noted on October 25. “They have to leave almost literally naked and penniless. Thousands from Berlin to Lodz…. Will Dresden be affected and when? It hangs over us all the time.”²³⁶ November 1: “Today urgent warning card from Sussman, he must have read something alarming about the deportations, I should immediately renew my USA application…. I wrote back immediately, every route was now blocked. In fact, we heard from several sources that a complete ban on all emigration has just been decreed on the German side.”²³⁷ November 28: “The alarm abroad about the deportations must be very great: Without having asked for them, Lissy Meyerhof and Caroli Stern received, by telegram, from relatives in the USA visa and passage to Cuba. But it doesn’t help them; the German side is not issuing any passports…cf. also Sussman’s card to me. We weighed matters up again. Result as always: stay. If we go, then we save our lives and are dependents and beggars for the rest of our lives. If we remain, then our lives are in danger, but we retain the possibility of afterward leading a life worth living. Consolation in spite of it all: going hardly depends on us anymore. Everything is fate, one could be rushing to one’s doom. If, e.g., we had moved to Berlin in the spring, then by now I would probably be in Poland.”²³⁸

Klemperer’s rationalizations (ultimately borne out in his case, albeit by pure chance), were common among those who did not immediately board the trains. Hertha Feiner assumed that her status as former wife of an Aryan would save her: “We have serious worries and are living through a very grave time,” she wrote to her daughters on October 16. “I can’t and won’t burden you with details; I am fortunate in being better off than many others. You don’t have to worry about me. Because of my special status, I hope to be able to go on living here as before. Should there be any change, I would notify you immediately, but I don’t think there will be.”²³⁹

The only aspects of everyday life shared in various degrees by most Jews living throughout the German-dominated continent at the end of 1941 were the daily struggles for material survival, the sense of complete lack of any control over their own fate, and the passionate hope that, somehow, liberation was on its way. Even in Rubinowicz’s remote hamlet, in the Kielce district, the total uncertainty about the fate of Jews, day in, day out, was inescapable in those winter days. “Yesterday afternoon I went to Bodzentyn to get my tooth filled,” young Dawid noted on December 12. “Early this morning the militia came. As they were driving along the highway, they met a Jew who was going out of town, and they immediately shot him for no reason, then they drove on and shot a Jewess, again for no reason. So two victims have perished for absolutely no reason. All the way home I was frightened I might run across them but didn’t run across anybody.”²⁴⁰ The next day, another Jew was killed, again for no reason.²⁴¹

A few days later the order came, as in most occupied countries and in the Reich, that the Jews had to deliver all furs to the authorities: “Father said,” Dawid noted on December 26, “an order had come that Jews were to hand over all furs, down to the smallest scrap. And 5 Jews were to be made responsible for those who didn’t hand them over. And whoever they found with any furs would receive the death-penalty—that’s how harsh the regulation was. The militia men gave till 4 p.m. for all furs to be handed over. After a short while the Jews began bringing in small remnants and whole furs. Mother unpicked three furs right away and took the fur collars off all the coats. At 4 o’clock the militia man himself came to our house for the furs and ordered the Polish policeman to make out a list of the furs that the Jews had handed over. Then we put them into 2 sacks, and 2 Jews took them to a peasant who was to take them to the local police at Bieliny.”²⁴²

Dawid knew little about the course of the war and about the immediate reasons for the fur collection. But elsewhere, East and West, the portents were not missed. In Stanislawów, the town in eastern Galicia where, on October 12, 1941, Hans Krüger had presided over the massacre in the local cemetery, a young woman in her early twenties, Elisheva (Elsa Binder), whom we already briefly met, had started recording her observations in the newly set-up ghetto.²⁴³ “Yesterday’s newspaper,” Elisheva noted on December 24, “said that the Great Leader [Hitler] assumed command of the army. Jews are therefore drawing the most optimistic and far-reaching conclusions…. The Reds are marching ahead, slowly but steadily. It is rumored that they took Kharkov (where they didn’t see a single Jew), Kiev and Zhitomir. Some people claim to have ‘heard’ our radio broadcast from Kiev. I wish I could believe it, although I am trying to look into the future with hope and optimism.”²⁴⁴

The lines that follow in the same entry are indicative of the intense doubts that nonetheless assailed some Jews when it came to portents of liberation: “I have to admit,” Elisheva went on, “that I personally don’t believe in early liberation. I want it and I fear it. From today’s perspective a free tomorrow seems to be extremely bright. In my dreams I expect so much from it. But in reality? I am young, I have a right to fight and to demand everything from life. But desiring it so much, I fear it. I realize that under the circumstances such thoughts are irrational, but…. Never mind. What really matters is liberation.”²⁴⁵

“When death strikes,” Kaplan noted in Warsaw on October 9, “the mourner turns the ‘merchandise’ over to the burial office, which then attends to everything. So the black wagon proceeds—sometimes drawn by a horse and sometimes pulled rickshe fashion by the employees of the burial office—from corpse to corpse, loading as many bodies as it can hold and transporting them wholesale to the cemetery. Usually the expedition to ‘the other world’ begins at noon. A long line of horse-drawn and rickshe-drawn wagons then stretches along the length of Gesia Street. This death traffic makes no impression on anyone. Death has become a tangible matter, like the Joint’s Soup Kitchen, the bread card, or the raising of one’s hat to the Germans. At times it is difficult to distinguish who is pushing whom, the living the dead or vice versa. The dead have lost their traditional importance and sanctity. The sanctity of the cemetery is also being profaned; it has been turned into a marketplace. It now resembles a ‘fair’ of the dead.”²⁴⁶

Yet the shift in the war situation sufficed to dispel the gloom, at least for a while. “A firm conviction burns within us,” Kaplan recorded on December 19, “that the beginning of the end has begun for the Nazis. What basis have I for such optimism? A ‘communiqué’ from the battlefield was published yesterday, December 18, which reads as follows: ‘Because of the approach of the Russian winter…the front line must be shortened….’ This is disaster veiled in rhetoric.” News secretly heard on the BBC confirmed the conclusion reached from the German announcement. The ghetto was abuzz with rumors eagerly peddled and amplified: “A wit comes along and reports bona fide information to the effect that Churchill sent a cable to the ghetto saying, ‘let the Jews not run after the Nazis so fast because he has not the strength to follow them.’” And in part melancholy, part hopeful tone, as was his wont, Kaplan added: “This is the way our people are—the bitter reality does not constrain their glowing imaginations: ‘On the very day the Temple was destroyed, Messiah was born.’”²⁴⁷

In Lublin, during these same weeks, the ghetto in the General Government targeted by the worst German brutality and one that, a few months later, would be the first destined for total extermination, the council debated mundane issues, including the sloppy and downright dishonest management of the hospital and various plans for its reorganization.²⁴⁸ Farther north, in Bialystok, the council under Barash’s leadership could even claim some “achievements” at its meeting of November 2, 1941: “As much as possible, mitigation of the [German] demands was achieved; instead of 25 kg of gold—6 kg, instead of 5 million [rubles]—2.5 million. Instead of a ghetto in the quarter of Chanajkes—today’s ghetto. The order for 10 million was annulled. No more than 4,500 persons were evacuated to Pružana. The order to submit lists of the intelligentsia was revoked. All this succeeded after much effort, thanks to our good relations with the authorities.” However, the Germans were demanding ransom money once again: “The Judenrat must pay 700,000–800,000 rubles every three days, starting Thursday the 6th of this month. If a deadline is missed, we will be liable to the ‘ruthless means of the Gestapo…’ If we comply with the demands for work and taxes,” Barash concluded, “we will be sure of our life—otherwise, we are not responsible for the life of the ghetto. God grant that we will meet again and that none of us will be missing.”²⁴⁹

In the Ostland, as we saw, mass killings had followed one another throughout October and November 1941, to make space for the deportees from the Reich. In Kovno in early October, some sporadic Aktions targeted the hospital and the orphanage, which the Germans burned with their inmates.²⁵⁰ Then, on October 25, the council was informed by SS Master Sgt. Helmut Rauca, the man in charge of the Jewish desk at the Kovno Gestapo, that all the inhabitants—that is all 27,000 of them, had to assemble on October 28 at six a.m. at Demokratu Square—“to allow a reallocation of food rations to those who did labor for the Germans as one category and to the nonworkers on the other; the nonworkers would be transferred to the “small ghetto.” The council was ordered to announce the general roll call to the inhabitants.²⁵¹

Unable to get any information about the Germans’ real intentions, the members of the council asked for another meeting with Rauca; he agreed. Dr. Elkes attempted, in vain, to persuade him to offer some explanation, even implying that if the war turned badly for the Reich, the council would vouch for the Gestapo man’s readiness to help.²⁵² At a loss about whether they should publish the decree or not, the ghetto leaders turned for advice to the old chief rabbi, Abraham Shapiro. After several postponements the rabbi finally told them to publish the decree in the hope that it would eventually save at least part of the population. Thus, on October 27, the decree was posted, in both Yiddish and in German.²⁵³

On the morning of the twenty-eighth, the whole population assembled at the square; each and every adult Jew who did not possess a working permit carried some document—a “school certificate,” a “commendation from the Lithuanian army,” and the like: Maybe these would help. At the square Rauca was in charge of the selection: The good side was the left. Those sent to the right were counted and pushed to an assembly point in the small ghetto. From time to time Rauca was informed of the number of Jews that had been moved to the right. After nightfall the quota of 10,000 people had been reached: The selection was over; 17,000 Jews were returning home.²⁵⁴

Throughout the entire day Elkes had been at the square; in some rare cases he could appeal to Rauca and achieve a change of decision. When he reached home that evening of the twenty-eighth, a crowd besieged him, and each Jew implored him to save somebody. The next day, as the first column of Jews started the trek from the small ghetto to Fort IX, Elkes, with a list of names in hand, tried once more to intervene. Rauca granted him 100 people. But when Elkes tried to remove these 100 from the columns, he was hit by the Lithuanian guards and collapsed. According to Tory, who was among those who carried the chairman away, days went by before Elkes’s wounds healed and he could stand on his feet again. In the meantime, from dawn to noon on the twenty-ninth, the 10,000 Jews from the small ghetto marched to Fort IX where, batch after batch, they were shot.²⁵⁵ Days beforehand, pits had been dug behind the fort: They were not for the Lithuanian Jews, however, but as we saw, for the Jews from the Reich and the Protectorate who arrived in November and disappeared without ever reaching the ghetto.

In a longer-than-usual description of several weeks in the life of the Vilna ghetto, probably written sometime in December 1941 (as it mentions, at the end, the Soviet counterattack before Moscow), Rudashevski noted at some point: “I feel we are like sheep. We are being slaughtered in the thousands and we are helpless. The enemy is strong, crafty, he is exterminating us according to a plan and we are discouraged.”²⁵⁶ For the fourteen-year-old diarist there was little that the ghetto inhabitants could do other than hope for quick liberation from the outside: “The only consolation has now become the latest news at the front. We suffer here, but there, far in the East, the Red Army has started an offensive. The Soviets have occupied Rostov, have dealt a blow from Moscow and are marching forward. And it always seems that any moment freedom will follow it.”²⁵⁷

Other Vilna Jews also drew conclusions from the events, yet without any such hopefulness. In the eyes of some members of the Zionist youth movements, the systematic manner in which the Germans carried out the killings indicated the existence of a plan, of an extermination project that would ultimately extend to all the Jews of the Continent. It was a chance intuition and could not be anything else; it was the right intuition.

One of the first to grasp the significance of the Vilna massacres was the twenty-three-year-old poet and member of Hashomer Hatzair, Abba Kovner, who was hiding in a monastery close to the city. He found the words and the arguments that convinced an increasing number of his fellow youth movement members.²⁵⁸ And, if his interpretation was correct, if sooner or later death was unavoidable, only one conclusion remained possible: The Jews had to “die with dignity”; the only path was armed resistance.

Kovner was asked to write a proclamation that would be read at a gathering of members from all youth movements in the ghetto.²⁵⁹ The meeting, which took place under the guise of a New Year’s celebration, brought together some 150 young men and women at the “Pioneers’ Public Kitchen,” 2 Straszun Street, on December 31, 1941. There Kovner read the manifesto that was to become the first call for a Jewish armed resistance.²⁶⁰ “Jewish Youth,” Kovner proclaimed, “do not believe those that are trying to deceive you…. Of those taken through the gates of the ghetto not a single one has returned. All the Gestapo roads lead to Ponar, and Ponar means death.

“Ponar is not a concentration camp. They have all been shot there. Hitler plans to destroy all the Jews of Europe, and the Jews of Lithuania have been chosen as the first in line.

“We will not be led like sheep to the slaughter. True, we are weak and helpless, but the only response to the murderer is revolt! Brothers! It is better to die fighting like free men than to live at the mercy of the murderers. Arise! Arise with your last breath!”²⁶¹

Within a short time Kovner’s appeal led to the creation of the first Jewish resistance organization in occupied Europe, the FPO (Fereynegte Partizaner Organizatsye [United Partisans Organization]). It brought together young Jews from the most diverse political frameworks, from the communists to the right-wing zionists of Betar.²⁶² Yet, precisely in Vilna, the situation seemed to change again: A relative stability that was to last for more than two years settled on the remaining 24,000 Jews of the ghetto—most of whom worked for the Germans—and on the members of their immediate families.

When the Vilna massacres of the summer and fall of 1941 became known in Warsaw, they were generally interpreted as German retribution for the support given by the Jews of Lithuania to the Soviet occupation. It was only among a minority within the youth movements that, there too, a different assessment was taking shape. Zuckerman explained the change of perception that was emerging in his group: “My comrades [from Dror] and the members of Hashomer Hatzair had already heard the story of Vilna [the massacres of Jews in Ponar]. We took the information to the Movement leadership, to the political activists in Warsaw. The responses were different. The youth absorbed not only the information but also accepted the interpretation that this was the beginning of the end. A total death sentence for the Jews. We didn’t accept the interpretation…that this was all because of Communism…. Why did I reject it? Because if it had been German revenge against Jewish Communists, it would have been done right after the occupation. But these were planned and organized acts, not immediately after the occupation, but premeditated actions…. That was even before the news about Chelmno, which came in December-January.”²⁶³

A few weeks later, in early 1942, “Antek” would grasp from the comments of a Dror female emissary, Lonka, that his own family in Vilna had perished: “Among other things, she said, but not explicitly, that she [Lonka] and Frumka [another female Dror courier] had decided to save my sister’s only son, but hadn’t managed to do it. Then it was clear to me that my family was no longer alive. My family—my father and mother, my sister, her husband, and the child Ben-Zion whom the girls had decided to rescue, only him, because they couldn’t save any more and, ultimately, they couldn’t save him either…. Uncles, aunts, a big tribe of the Kleinstein and Zuckerman families, a big widespread clan, in Vilna.”²⁶⁴

As the fateful year 1941 reached its last day and the course of the war seemed to be turning, the mood of a vast majority of European Jews differed starkly for a short while from that of a tiny minority. In Bucharest, Sebastian had overcome his worst fears: “The Russians have landed in eastern Crimea,” he noted on December 31, “recapturing Kerch and Fedosiya. The last day of the year…. I carry inside myself the 364 terrible days of the dreadful year we are closing tonight. But we are alive. We can still wait for something. There is still time; we still have some time left.”²⁶⁵Klemperer, for once, was even more ebuliant than Sebastian. At a small New Year’s Eve gathering at his downstairs neighbors, the Kreidls, he made a speech for the occasion: “It was our most dreadful year, dreadful because of our own real experience, more dreadful because of the constant state of threat, most dreadful of all because of what we saw others suffering (deportations, murder), but…at the end it brought optimism…. My adhortatio was: Head held high for the difficult last five minutes!”²⁶⁶

Of course Klemperer’s optimism had been fueled by the news from the Eastern Front. Herman Kruk, less emphatically so, also sought solace in the “latest information.” The gathering of friends at his home was suffused with sadness: “In sad silence we assembled, and in sad silence we wished each other to hold out, survive, and be able to tell about all this! Meanwhile we consoled ourselves with the latest information: Kerch has fallen. Kaluga has fallen. An Italian regiment surrendered and promised to fight against the Germans. On the front 2,000 [Germans] are found frozen.”²⁶⁷ As for Elisheva, in her Stanisl^/awów ghetto, she expressed both the hope and the dread ultimately shared by all: “I welcome you, 1942, may you bring salvation and defeat. I welcome you, my longed-for year. Maybe you will be more propitious for our ancient, miserable race whose fate lies in the hands of the unjust one. And one more thing. Whatever you are bringing for me, life or death, bring it fast.”²⁶⁸

On that last day of the year, incidentally, the freezing weather was celebrated by many an inhabitant of occupied Europe, and not only by the small community of Jews: “We watch as military ambulances and trains go west,” Klukowski noted on December 31, “loaded with wounded and frostbitten soldiers. Most frostbite occurs on hands, feet, ears, noses, and genitals. You can judge the desperation of the German military situation by the fact that Hitler has taken direct responsibility for all military action in Russia.”²⁶⁹Klukowski’s entry for the last day of 1941 ended with words that, again, must have become increasingly common throughout Europe: “Many people are dying, but everyone still alive feels sure that our time of revenge and victory will come.”²⁷⁰

In the same entry Klukowski also mentioned that all Jews had been ordered to deliver any furs or parts of furs in their possession within three days, under threat of the death penalty. “Some people,” he wrote, “are boiling mad, but some are happy because this fur business shows that the Germans are suffering. The temperature is very low. We lack fuel and people are freezing, but everyone hopes for an even colder winter, because it will help defeat the Germans.”²⁷¹

For some young Jews like Kovner in Vilna or Zuckerman in Warsaw, the closing days of 1941 also meant a profound change, but a different one. “Antek” defined this psychological turning point: “A new chapter began in our lives…. One of its first signs was a sense of the end.”²⁷²