CHAPTER VIII

March 1943–October 1943

“My dear little Daddy, bad news: After my aunt, it’s my turn to leave.” Thus began the hasty pencil-written card sent on February 12, 1943, from Drancy by seventeen-year-old Louise Jacobson to her father in Paris. Both Louise’s parents—divorced in 1939—were French Jews who had emigrated from Russia to Paris before World War I. Louise and her siblings were born in France and all were French citizens. Louise’s father was a master cabinetmaker; his small business had been “Aryanized,” and, like all French Jews (naturalized or not), he was waiting.

Louise and her mother had been arrested in the fall of 1942, following an anonymous denunciation: They were not wearing their stars and supposedly were active communists. On a demand from the SD, French police officers searched their home and indeed discovered communist pamphlets (belonging in fact to Louise’s brother and brother-in-law, both prisoners of war). A neighbor must have seen Louise’s sister hiding the subversive literature under a stack of coal, in the cellar. While her mother remained in a Paris jail, Louise was transferred to Drancy in late 1942 and in February 1943, slated for deportation.

“Never mind,” Louise went on. “I am in excellent spirits, like everybody else. You should not worry, Daddy. First, I am leaving in very good shape. This last week I have eaten very, very well. I got two packages by proxy, one from a friend who was just deported, the other from my aunt. Now your package arrived, exactly at the right moment.

“I can see your face, my dear Daddy, and, that’s precisely why I would like you to have as much courage as I do…. You should send the news to the Vichy zone [to her sister, among others] but carefully. As for Mother, it would probably be better if she knew nothing. It is entirely unnecessary that she be worried, mainly as I may well be back before she gets out of jail.

“We leave tomorrow morning. I am with my friends, as many are leaving. I entrusted my watch and all my other belongings to decent people from my room. My daddy, I kiss you a hundred thousand times with all my strength. Be courageous and see you soon [Courage et à bientôt], your daughter Louise.”¹

On February 13, 1943, Louise left for Auschwitz in transport number 48 with one thousand other French Jews. A surviving female friend, a chemical engineer, went through the selection with her. “Tell them that you are a chemist,” Irma had whispered. When her turn arrived and she was asked about her profession, Louise declared: “Student”; she was sent to the left, to the gas chamber.²

I

Five months after Stalingrad, the last German attempt to regain the military initiative failed at the decisive battles of Kursk and Orel. From July 1943, the Soviet offensives determined the evolution of the war on the Eastern Front.³ Kiev was liberated on November 6, and in mid-January 1944 the German siege of Leningrad was definitively broken.

In the meantime the remnants of the Afrika Korps had surrendered in Tunisia, and in July 1943, while the Germans were being battered on the Eastern Front, British and American forces landed in Sicily. Before the month was over the military disasters swept the Duce away. On July 24, 1943, a majority of the Fascist Grand Council voted a motion of no confidence in their own leader. On the twenty-fifth, the king briefly received Mussolini and informed him of his dismissal and his replacement by Marshal Pietro Badoglio as the new head of the Italian government. As he left the king’s residence the Italian dictator was arrested. Without a single shot being fired, the fascist regime had collapsed. The former Duce was moved from Rome to the island of Ponza and finally imprisoned at Gran Sasso, in the Appenines. Although German paratroopers succeeded in liberating Hitler’s ally on September 12, and the Führer appointed him the head of a fascist puppet state in northern Italy (the “Italian Social Republic”), a broken and sick Mussolini regained neither popular acceptance nor power.

English and American troops landed in southern Italy on September 3, and on the eighth the Allies announced the armistice secretly signed by Badoglio the day of the landing. The German reaction was immediate: On the ninth and the tenth the Wehrmacht, which had been moving troops to Italy for several weeks (also from the Eastern Front), occupied the northern and central parts of the country and seized all Italian-controlled areas in the Balkans and in France. The Allies remained entrenched in the south of the peninsula; over the coming months their northward advance would be slow.

The Allied successes on land were compounded by the steadily fiercer bombing campaign against both German military targets and cities. The July 1943 British bombing of Hamburg and the resulting “firestorm” caused the death of some thirty to forty thousand civilians. The nighttime raids were British, the daytime operations American.

Despite the uninterrupted series of military disasters and the increasing vacillation of “allies” such as Hungary and Finland, Hitler was far from considering the war lost in the fall of 1943. New fighter planes would put an end to the Anglo-American bombing campaign, long-range rockets would destroy London and play havoc with any Allied invasion plans, newly formed divisions equipped with the heaviest tanks ever built (just rolling out of the factories) would stem the Soviet advance. And if a military stalemate was achieved for some time, the Grand Alliance would crumble, due to its inherent political-military tensions.

However, such optimistic forecasts could not alter the unmistakable sense of crisis that had been spreading both in the German population and among the Reich leadership since the outset of 1943. Though Hitler’s authority was not in question, and no major step could be taken without his approval, the Nazi leader’s increasing obsession with every detail of the military situation (due in part to his endemic lack of confidence in his generals) interfered with the rational running of operations. His growing reluctance to speak in public created further uncertainty among the population and may have weakened the quasi-religious confidence that, until then, had set him beyond any criticism.

In early 1943 Hitler appointed a “Committee of Three”—Lammers, Bormann, Keitel—to achieve some coordination among the overlapping and competing state, party, and military agencies. Yet within a few months the committee’s authority dwindled, as ministers intent on defending their own power positions steadily undermined its initiatives. Only Bormann’s influence kept growing: Above and beyond his control of the party, he had become the “Führer’s secretary,” and Hitler increasingly relied on him. Independently Himmler’s power reached new heights when, in August 1943, he replaced Frick as minister of the interior. Goebbels, on the other hand, as clever an intriguer as he was, reaped no added power from preaching the “total war” effort, at least not in the immediate future; nor did he succeed, despite Speer’s support, in reviving Göring’s authority as head of the ministerial committee for the defense of the Reich (established at the beginning of the war) to counter the Committee of Three, due to Hitler’s fury at the repeated failures of the Luftwaffe.⁴

Whipping up anti-Jewish frenzy was, in Hitler’s imagination, one of the best ways to hasten the falling apart of the enemy alliance. If the Jews were the hidden link that held capitalism and Bolshevism together, a deluge of anti-Jewish attacks endlessly repeating that the war was a Jewish war launched only for the sake of Jewish interests, could influence foreign opinion and add momentum to the antagonism between the West and the Soviet Union. Moreover, at this time of peril for Fortress Europe, stamping out all remnants of the internal foe remained of the highest importance. Jews were—and Hitler kept harping on it—the subterranean communication line between all enemy groups; they spread defeatist rumors and hostile propaganda, and they were the ferment of treason in countries that Germany had not yet set under its heel. The renewed ferocity of the anti-Jewish campaign after Stalingrad had its inner logic.

A few days after the surrender of the Sixth Army, Goebbels opened the floodgates of German rage: The minister’s “total war” speech, delivered at the Sportpalast on February 18, was in many ways the epitome of the regime’s propaganda style: the unleashing of demented passion controlled by the most careful staging and orchestration. The huge crowd packing the hall had been carefully selected to represent all parts of the Volk, to be ideologically reliable, and thus ready to deliver the expected response. The event was broadcast on all German radio stations to the nation and the world. And, as Goebbels’s speech was meant to mobilize every last spark of energy, it had to brandish the mobilizing myth of the regime:

“Behind the onrushing Soviet divisions we can see the Jewish liquidation squads—behind which loom terror, the spectre of mass starvation and unbridled anarchy in Europe. Here once more international Jewry has been the diabolical ferment of decomposition, cynically gratified at the idea of throwing the world into the deepest disorder and thus engineering the ruin of cultures thousands of years old, cultures with which it never felt anything in common…. We have never been afraid of the Jews and today we are less afraid of them than ever. We have unmasked Jewry’s rapid and infamous maneuvers to deceive the world in fourteen years of struggle before the accession to power and in a ten years’ struggle afterwards. The aim of Bolshevism is the world revolution of the Jews…. Germany in any case has no intention of bowing to this threat, but means to counter it in time and if necessary with the most complete and radical extermi—[correcting himself]—elimination” [Ausrott—Ausschaltung] [Applause. Shouts of “Out with the Jews.” Laughter].

The lengthy speech reached its climactic finale in the paraphrase of a verse written by poet Theodor Körner at the time of the national uprising against Napoleon, in 1814: “Und jetzt Volk, steh auf! Und Sturm brich los!” (“And now people, stand up and storm, break loose!”).⁵ Wild cheering greeted the apocalyptic outburst, with its litany of Sieg Heils and the singing of the anthem. Tens of millions of Germans, glued to their radios, were engulfed in a rhetoric of rage and vengeance. Most of them probably caught the “Ausrott—Ausschaltung.” In the hall, as we saw, it was greeted with applause and laughter. Simply put, the extermination of the Jews was no secret unveiled amid shock and stony silence.

“A few hours ago,” Moshe Flinker recorded, “I heard a speech made by Propaganda Minister Goebbels. I shall try to describe the impression this speech made on me and the thoughts it aroused in me. First of all I heard what I could have heard any number of times—unlimited anti-Semitism. One whole section of his speech he addressed to the great hatred he and nearly all Germans have for our people, the reasons for which to this day I cannot understand. A thousand times I have heard from the German leaders angry words against the Jews, accompanied by the epithets ‘capitalist’ or ‘communist,’ but I doubt very much if they themselves believe their own words. On the other hand, however, they pronounce these words with so much excitement that I can almost believe they are sincere. Apart from their excitement and emotion, there is other evidence for their sincerity. It should be remembered that now, when Germany is receiving blow after blow from all sides and when she is compelled to abandon one Russian city after another, they never forget the people they have already so tortured and crushed, nor do they let the slightest opportunity pass to shame or humiliate them. In these very days, which are times of trouble for Germany, the Propaganda Minister considers it to be the right moment to abuse us and blaspheme our people even more violently. Maybe it is that the wild, primitive hatred which exists in almost all peoples appears in the Germans more clearly and openly and with more consequence for us…. But from their actions we see that this war must end in the solution of the Jewish problem (speaking from the Orthodox Jewish point of view, I would say in the redemption of the Jews) because, as far as I know, the hatred of the Jews has never been as widespread or poisonous as it is now.”⁶

In Bucharest, Sebastian had also heard the Goebbels speech: “Goebbels’ speech last night,” he noted, “sounded unexpectedly dramatic…. The Jews are once more threatened with extermination.”⁷ The next day Klemperer got the text of the speech at the Jewish cemetery where he was working: “The speech contains a threat to proceed against the Jews, who are guilty of everything, ‘with the most draconian and radical measures’ if the foreign powers do not stop threatening the Hitler government because of the Jews.”⁸

In his two-hour-long address to the Reichsleiter and Gauleiter assembled at Rastenburg on February 7, 1943, Hitler repeated once again that Jewry had to be eliminated from the Reich and all of Europe.⁹ On the Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers, March 21, the same threat reappeared with the extermination prophecy added for good measure. And, as constant repetition was of the essence, Hitler unleashed the traditional anti-Jewish torrent of invectives: “The driving force [behind capitalism and Bolshevism] is anyway the eternal hatred of that accursed race which for thousands of years punishes the nations like a true scourge of God, until the time comes when these nations will get back to their senses and arise against their tormentors.”¹⁰ The order of the day was anti-Jewish propaganda and ever more anti-Jewish propaganda. “The Führer issues instructions to set the Jewish question once more at the forefront of our propaganda, in the strongest possible way,” Goebbels noted on April 17.¹¹

The propaganda minister did not miss the benefits of linking “Katyn” (the discovery of a mass grave in the eastern Polish Katyn Forest with the bodies of more than four thousand Polish officers shot by the NKVD about a year before the German attack against the USSR) and the “Jewish question.”¹² In other words the Jews, always held responsible for all Soviet crimes, could now be denounced as the instigators and perpetrators of this major Bolshevik atrocity.

Back in Berlin on May 7, for the funeral of SA chief Viktor Lutze, Hitler exhorted the assembled Gauleiter to “set anti-Semitism again at the core of the ideological struggle, as we fostered and propagated it in the party in earlier days” [dass der Antisemitismus, wie wir ihn früher in der Partei gepflegt und propagiert haben, auch jetzt wieder das Kernstück unserer geistiger Auseinandersetzung sein muss].¹³

Goebbels recorded further Hitler promptings on May 9. “The Führer attaches great importance to hard-hitting anti-Semitic propaganda. Success will be achieved by constant repetition. He is extremely pleased with our sharper anti-Semitic campaign in the press and on the radio. I tell him how important the place of anti-Semitic propaganda is in our foreign broadcasts. It amounts at times to 70 or 80 percent of our entire foreign broadcasts. The anti-Semitic bacteria are naturally present in the entire European public; we need only to make them virulent” [Die anti-semitischen Bazillen sind natürlich in der ganzen europaischen Öffentlichkeit vorhanden; wir müssen sie nur virulent machen].¹⁴

To “make the bacteria virulent,” the minister turned to some basic recipes: “Once more I thoroughly study the Zionist Protocols” [sic; The Protocols of the Elders of Zion], he noted in his diary entry of May 13, 1943.¹⁵ “The Zionist Protocols are as modern today as when they were published for the first time. It is amazing to see the extraordinary consistency that characterizes the Jewish striving for world domination. If the Zionist Protocols are not authentic, then they have been invented by a genius interpreter of our epoch. At noon I broach the topic with the Führer. The Führer thinks that the Zionist Protocols can be considered as absolutely authentic. Nobody would have had such an extraordinary ability to describe the Jewish striving for world domination, as the Jews themselves perceive it. The Führer is of the opinion,” Goebbels went on, “that the Jews do not need at all to follow a pre-established plan; they work according to their race instinct; it will always drive them to act as one, as they have demonstrated in the course of their entire history.”¹⁶

The discussion of the Jewish race instinct allowed the German leader to roam far and wide. He pointed to the similarity of Jewish characteristics all over the world and to the natural causes that explained the very existence of the Jews: “The modern peoples have no option left but to eliminate the Jews,” the obsessed Führer went on. “They use all available means to defend themselves against this oncoming extermination process. One of these means is war. Thus we have to know that in this conflict between Aryan humanity and the Jewish race we still have to withstand hard battles, as Jewry has been able, consciously or unconsciously, to use large national groups of the Aryan race at its own command.”¹⁷ And so it continued, on and on.

In the course of his monologue Hitler repeated his belief that the Jews were not, as they thought, on the eve of a “world triumph” but on the eve of a “world catastrophe.” “The peoples who were the first to recognize the Jew and the first to fight him would raise to world domination in his [the Jew’s] stead.”¹⁸ The themes of these anti-Jewish tirades were not new, but this was no speech to the masses: Hitler was discussing the Jews with his propaganda minister, the minister who had just rediscovered the “Protocols.” The conversation had a ring of demented authenticity. And for the first time, it seems, Hitler revealed his ultimate goal: world domination.

In the meantime, of course, Goebbels was furiously mobilizing all German media outlets for the most systematic anti-Jewish campaign ever. On May 3, 1943, the minister issued a highly detailed circular (labeled confidential) to the press. After berating papers and journals for still lagging in this domain, the minister offered his own suggestions: “For example, countless sensational stories can be used, in which the Jew is the culprit. Above all, American domestic politics offers an inexhaustible reservoir. If those journals, in particular, which are geared to commenting on current affairs, apply their staff to this issue, they will be able to show the true face, the true attitude and the true aims of the Jews in a varied manner. Apart from that, of course, the Jews must now be used in the German press as a political target: the Jews are to blame; the Jews wanted the war; the Jews are making the war worse; and, again and again, the Jews are to blame.”¹⁹

Klemperer soon became aware of the systematic aspect of the new propaganda frenzy, and his diary entries show that Goebbels’s directives were being faithfully applied: “The last few days have been dominated by the river dam business,” he recorded on May 21, 1943. “First the English have ‘criminally’ bombed two dams (location not stated); very many civilian casualties. Then: It has been proven, proven by an English newspaper article, that the criminal plan was hatched by a Jew…. The river dam business—it has superseded the 10,000 officers’ corpses at Katyn—is reinforced by the American child murder in Italy: There the Americans dropped toys filled with explosives (also similarly prepared ladies’ gloves). A ‘Serbian newspaper’ writes, this murder of children is a Jewish invention. No news-hour without such reports.”²⁰ On May 29 Klemperer noted that one of his coworkers at the Zeiss factory brought a newspaper article from the Freiheitskampf, “The Jew is to blame” by Professor Dr. Johann von Leers:…‘If the Jews are victorious our whole nation will be slaughtered like the Polish officers in the forest of Katyn…. The Jewish question became the core and central question of our nation once it had let the Jews loose.’”²¹

A few days later Klemperer once again turned to the unceasing anti-Jewish blasts: “On the radio, on Friday evening, Goebbels’s editorial from Das Reich on the dissolution of the Comintern [the Communist International had been dissolved by Stalin]. The Jewish race always master of camouflage. They adopt every political position that can benefit them, according to country and circumstance. Bolshevism, plutocracy—behind Roosevelt, behind Stalin there are Jews, their goal, the goal of this war is Jewish world dominion. But our propaganda is gradually having an effect, even in the enemy camp. The victory of our ideas is certain.”²²

“Katyn” had some effect on anti-Bolshevik hatred and fear among the German population; yet comparison of these Soviet atrocities with German atrocities against the Poles and Jews came up quite frequently, according to SD reports. A typical reaction of this kind was overheard in mid-April: “If I did not know that in our people’s struggle for existence every method is right, the hypocrisy shown in the pity for the murdered Polish officers would be unbearable.”²³ The report drew the conclusion that even among “positively attuned Volksgenossen, superficial comparisons were made which allowed for easy exploitation by hostile circles.”²⁴

Yet almost a year later, in March 1944, Klemperer recorded that the relentless anti-Jewish propaganda had its effect. He mentioned a conversation with a good-natured foreman at the Zeiss factory. They came to speak of cities both of them knew, also about Hamburg; this led to a discussion of the bombing, and, for this mild fellow, the Americans, whom Europe had never threatened, were in the war because “a few billionaires” pushed them into it. “Behind the couple of billionaires,” Klemperer noted, “I heard ‘a couple of Jews’ and felt the belief in Nazi propaganda. This man, who is undoubtedly not a Nazi, most certainly believes that Germany is acting in self-defense, is completely in the right, and that the war was forced upon it; most certainly he believes, at least in large part, in the guilt of ‘world Jewry’ etc., etc. The National Socialists may have miscalculated in the conduct of the war, but certainly not in their propaganda. I always have to remind myself of Hitler’s words, that he is not making speeches for professors.”²⁵

From mid-1942 on the continent-wide murder campaign ran as an administrative bureaucratic system in all its basic operations. However, had these operations unfolded only according to bureaucratic norms of instrumental rationality, they would increasingly have adapted, mainly after Stalingrad and Kursk, to the worsening military situation. A whole array of activities of no use to the war effort, such as transporting the Jews to their death despite growing logistic problems or exterminating Jewish workers—although, of course, the argument of the Jewish threat could always be brandished—would have probably slowed down. Yet the contrary was happening: Anti-Jewish propaganda became more pervasive than ever and the danger represented by every single Jew turned into a generalized ideological obsession.

In order to be effective, however, the ideological impetus had to emanate not only from the top but also be fanatically adopted and enforced at intermediate levels of the system by the technocrats, organizers, and direct implementers of the extermination—by those, in short, who made the system work, several levels below the main political leadership. Key figures in the agencies involved—particularly some of the best organizers and technocrats among them—were motivated by anti-Jewish fanaticism.²⁶

In the face of such ruthless German determination, the absence of major opposition or protest from the surrounding world did not change significantly. As before, hundreds of thousands (possibly millions) of Germans and other Europeans continued tacitly to support the extermination campaign, both for profit and on ideological grounds (that, in occupied countries, did not exclude the simultaneous hatred of Germans, particularly among many Poles). The determining factors in the passivity of most remained fear, of course, the absence of any sense of identification with Jews, and the lack of decided and sustained encouragement to help the victims from the leaders of Christian churches or the political leadership of resistance movements.

Among the Jews—the majority of whom had already been murdered by mid-1943—the two contrary trends that have already been mentioned became ever more noticeable: increasing passivity and lack of solidarity with fellow sufferers among the mass of terrorized and physically weakened victims (mainly in the camps) on the one hand, and on the other the tightening bonds within small, usually politically homogeneous groups that, as we shall see, would rise in some places in desperate armed revolts.

II

On January 11, 1943, Hermann Höfle sent a radiogram from Lublin to SS Obersturmbannführer Franz Heim, the deputy commander of the Security Police and the SD in the General Government; a few minutes later he sent a second, most probably identical one to Eichmann. Whereas the radiogram from Höfle to Heim was partially decoded by the British and distributed on January 15 (to the small group of recipients of these decodes), the second message was either not fully intercepted or not decoded except for the indication of the source and of the addressee.²⁷

Höfle’s message to Heim was, in its main part, a computation of the number of Jews exterminated in the camps of “Aktion Reinhardt” up to December 31, 1942. After listing the number of Jews who had arrived in the four camps during the third and fourth weeks of December, Höfle gave the following overall results of the extermination for each camp:

L [Lublin-Majdanek]: 24,733.

B [Belzec]: 434,508.

S [Sobibor]: 101,370.

T [Treblinka]: 71,355 (read: 713,555).

TOTAL: 1,274,166.²⁸

Höfle’s report was probably related to a more encompassing set of results being put together at the same time. According to his postwar declarations, Eichmann had given Himmler a first progress report at the SS leader’s headquarters near Zhitomir, on August 11, 1942 (although Himmler’s calendar indicates that the meeting dealt essentially with the planned deportations from Romania).²⁹ A second report, this time a written one, was prepared by Eichmann’s IV B 4 department and sent to Himmler on December 15, 1942, under the title “Operations and Situation Report 1942 on the Final Solution of the European Jewish Question.”³⁰ Though the report is considered lost, it is known to have displeased the SS chief intensely.

In a letter of January 18, 1943, addressed to Müller, the irate Reichsführer did not mince words: “The Reich Main Security Office is hereby relieved of its statistical responsibilities in this area, since the statistical materials submitted to date have consistently fallen short of professional standards of precision.”³¹ On the same day the Reichsführer put the SS chief statistician, Richard Korherr, in charge of the report: “The Reich Security Main Office,” Himmler wrote Korherr, “is to put at your disposal whatever materials you request or need for this purpose.”³²

An initial Korherr report, sixteen pages long, establishing the total of Jews killed by December 31, 1942, was submitted to Himmler on March 23, 1943: The number of Jews “evacuated” was estimated at 1,873,539. On Himmler’s demand an abridged estimate, updated to March 31, 1943, was prepared for Hitler; it was six and a half pages long. In this second version, Korherr was ordered to replace the words “special treatment” (of the Jews) by “transport of Jews from the eastern provinces to the Russian East: passed through camps in the General Government…through camps in the Warthegau.³³ We do not know the total number that could have been alluded to or deduced from the second version, but it must have been close to 2.5 million. Korherr titled his report “The Final Solution of the European Jewish Question.”³⁴

According to some interpretations, Himmler needed the report to defend himself against criticism coming from Speer and from the commander of the Reserve Army, Gen. Friedrich Fromm, in regard to the extermination of potential workers or even soldiers.³⁵This seems unlikely, as, on Hitler’s orders, thousands of Jews working in German industries were seized and deported in February 1943 and further tens of thousands of Jewish slave laborers would be systematically murdered throughout the year. Moreover, on December 29, 1942, Himmler had reported to Hitler about the extermination of Jews in the Ukraine, in southern Russia, and in the Bialystok district during the summer of 1942; as we saw, in the Ukraine no distinctions were made between working and non-working Jews. According to the Reichsführer, 363,211 Jews had been exterminated in these operations.³⁶ Had Hitler criticized such indiscriminate annihilation, some hint of it would most probably have been mentioned.

The Korherr report was an overall progress report that, let us remember, Himmler had been trying to obtain since midsummer 1942. Was it pure chance that the Nazi leader received it on the eve of his fifty-fourth birthday, after Germany had suffered its worst military defeats yet? Here at least was a war that Hitler was winning. The document was eventually returned to Eichmann’s office with Himmler’s remark: “The Führer has taken note: destroy. H.H.”³⁷

During these same days Rosenberg forwarded his own general survey of Jewish spoils, explicitly for his leader’s birthday: “My Führer,” the minister wrote on April 16, 1943, “with the wish to make you happy for your birthday, I allow myself to submit to you a folder with photos of some of the most valuable paintings from Jewish ownerless property secured by my Commando in the occupied western countries…. This folder gives but a weak impression of the extraordinary value and quantity of the art objects seized by my agency in France and put in security in the Reich.” Rosenberg attached a written summary of all the treasures his commando had seized in the West. Until April 7, 1943, the “recovery locations” in the Reich had received 2,775 boxes of art objects in ninety-two freight cars; of these objects, 9,455 had already been inventoried, while “at least” 10,000 further objects had yet to be processed.³⁸

While Rosenberg’s fawning birthday offering definitively stamps National Socialism’s foremost thinker not only a criminal but also a grotesque figure, even by Nazi standards, the significance of the other gift, Korherr’s report, whether meant for Hitler’s birthday nor not, is quite different in several ways. First, Korherr’s wording of one sentence was corrected on Himmler’s order to avoid associating the Führer with an expression openly used as a reference to mass murder. Yet strangely enough the new phrasing—“Transport to the Russian East…passed through the camps”—was as easily identifiable with mass murder as the previous euphemism. Moreover, as historian Gerald Fleming quite cogently noted, no mistake could be made about the meaning of these words, as another part of the same document alluded to “the collapse of the Jewish masses…since the evacuation measures of 1942.”³⁹

Mainly, whatever the intent of Himmler’s linguistic exercises may have been, Korherr’s report is not merely a statistical survey to be tucked away in the history of the “Final Solution” in a section dealing with the number of victims. Of course, it is that, but also much more. Himmler sent the report to Hitler (or presented it to him) either because the Nazi leader had asked for it or the SS chief knew that his Führer would be pleased to see it. Be that as it may, we have to imagine Hitler reading the six pages of the report (typed on his special typewriter) outlining for him the interim results of the mass murder operation that he had ordered. Two and a half million Jews had already been killed, and the campaign was rapidly unfolding. We do not know whether the Nazi leader showed satisfaction as he read, or impatience about the slow pace of the killings. The killing in and of itself, but also the perusal of the report by its initiator, the leader of one of the most advanced nations in the world, remains of the essence. The scene thus imagined—which necessarily took place—tells more about the regime and its “messiah” than many an abstract treatise.

Another aspect of this ghoulish occurrence comes to mind. We do not know of any other equally elaborate and detailed statistical report about a specific group of people whom Hitler ordered to murder; we know merely of general estimates and aggregates. It is only in regard to the number of murdered Jews that Himmler gave full vent to his anger, in view of the unprofessional statistical work of Eichmann’s office. And Korherr offered the precision Himmler requested: 1,873,539 Jews by December 31, 1942. To Kaltenbrunner, Himmler wrote: “In the brief monthly reports of the Security Police, I only want figures on how many Jews have been shipped off and and how many are currently left.”⁴⁰ In other words, every Jew still alive remained a danger, and every Jew still alive had to be caught and murdered in the end.

III

To keep the extermination progressing at full pace, the Germans had to impose their will on increasingly reluctant allies. In the case of Romania, Hitler gave up. He did not want to confront Antonescu, whom he considered a trustworthy ally, although he continued to prod him. In Hungary the situation was different. The Nazi leader believed that Horthy and Kallay were under Jewish influence, and he (rightly) suspected them of aspiring to switch sides. Moreover, for Hitler the 800,000 Jews of Hungary were a huge prize, almost within his grasp. On April 17 and 18, 1943, the Nazi leader met with Horthy at Klessheim Castle, near Salzburg, Austria, and berated him about the mildness of Hungary’s anti-Jewish measures. German policies, the Nazi leader explained, were different. In Poland, for example, “if the Jews did not want to work, they were shot; if they could not work, they had to perish. They were to be dealt with like tuberculosis microbes that could infect a healthy body. This was not cruel if one considered that even innocent beings such as deer or hares had to be killed to avoid damages. Why should one spare the beasts that wanted to bring us bolshevism?” At this point in his exhortation, the Nazi leader felt the need to add a historical proof to his arguments: “People who did not defend themselves against the Jew,” he went on, “perished. One of the best-known examples was the downfall of the once so proud Persian people, who now lived a miserable life as Armenians.”⁴¹

Whether the regent was impressed by the German leader’s erudition is hard to tell, but he certainly understood that Hitler was set on the speedy extermination of all of European Jewry. Just in case German aims had not been sufficiently hammered home at Klessheim, a cable from Ambassador Sztójay to Kallay, sent on April 25, left no further doubt: “National Socialism,” the ambassador reported, “despises and deeply hates the Jews whom it considers as its greatest and most relentless enemy with which it is engaged in a life and death struggle…. The Reich Chancellor is determined to rid Europe of the Jews…. He has decreed that until the summer of 1943 all the Jews of Germany and of the countries occupied by Germany will be moved to the Eastern territories that is to the Russian territories…. The German Government has expressed the wish that its allies should participate in the action mentioned.”⁴²

Neither Hitler’s exhortations nor Sztójay’s report sufficed to change Horthy’s policies—increasingly aimed at an understanding with the Allies. In fact Kallay made a point of stating openly that, in regard to the Jews, Hungary would not budge. In a speech delivered at the end of May 1943, the Hungarian prime minister was explicit: “In Hungary,” he declared, “live more Jews than in all of Western Europe…. It is self-explanatory that we must attempt to solve this problem; hence the necessity for temporary measures and an appropriate regulation. The final solution, however, can be none other than the complete resettlement of Jewry. But I cannot bring myself to keep this problem on the agenda so long as the basic prerequisite of the solution, namely the answer to the question where the Jews are to be resettled, is not given. Hungary will never deviate from those precepts of humanity, which, in the course of history, it has always maintained in racial and religious questions.”⁴³ Given Hitler’s declarations to the regent a few weeks before, Kallay’s speech was nothing less than a slap in the Nazi leader’s face. Clearly the moment of confrontation with Germany was rapidly approaching; it did not bode well for Hungary—mainly, not for its large Jewish community.

In the meantime the Bulgarian attitude regarding the country’s further deportations of Jews still looked promising to Berlin. As we saw, in March and April 1943, Sofia had given all necessary assistance to Dannecker and his men in deporting the Jews of occupied Thracia and Macedonia to Treblinka. Simultaneously, in March 1943, thousands of Bulgarian Jews had already been concentrated at assembly points, and the transports from the “Old Kingdom” were about to start. King Boris had promised this to the Germans. When it came to the deportation of native Bulgarian Jews, however, public protest erupted. The opposition found its strongest expression in parliament and among the leaders of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. The monarch backed down: Any further such deportations were definitively canceled.⁴⁴

The king, slightly embarrassed, it seems, had some explaining to do to his German ally. On April 2, during a visit to Germany, the Bulgarian monarch informed Ribbentrop that “he had had given his agreement to the deportation to Eastern Europe only in regard to the Jews of Thracia and Macedonia. As for the Jews of Bulgaria as such, he was merely ready to allow for the deportation of a small number of Bolshevik-communist elements, while the other 25,000 Jews would be put into concentration camps, as he needed them for road construction.” The protocol of the conversation indicates that Ribbentrop did not address Boris’s remarks in detail but merely told him: “According to our view on the Jewish question, the most radical solution is the only right one.”⁴⁵

A few days after the meeting, a general overview of the events in Bulgaria, sent by the Foreign Ministry to the RSHA, indicated that, there as in other countries of southeastern Europe, “distancing from harsh anti-Jewish measures was noticeable.”⁴⁶

Even in Slovakia, hesitation about further deportations persisted. It may be remembered that merely 20,000 mostly baptized Jews remained in the country after the last three transports to Auschwitz had departed in September 1942 following a three-month lull. In the meantime rumors about the fate of the deportees had seeped back. Thus when Tuka mentioned the possibility of resuming the deportations in early April 1943, protests from Slovak clergy, and also from the population, put an end to his initiative.⁴⁷ On March 21, a pastoral letter condemning any further deportations had been read in most churches.

The growing turmoil led to a meeting between Ludin and Tuka, as reported by the German envoy to Berlin on April 13. After minimizing the significance of the pastoral letter, Tuka mentioned that information about atrocities perpetrated by the Germans against the Jews had reached the Slovak bishops. “Prime Minister Dr. Tuka let me know,” Ludin went on, “that the ‘naïve Slovak clergy’ was prone to believe such atrocity fairy tales and he [Tuka] would be grateful if they were countered from the German side by a description of conditions in the Jewish camps. He considers that from a propaganda viewpoint it might be especially valuable if a Slovak delegation, which should appropriately comprise a legislator, a journalist, and perhaps also a Catholic clergyman, could visit a German camp for Jews. If such an inspection might be organized,” Ludin concluded, “I would certainly welcome it.⁴⁸

On April 22, 1943, Hitler met Tiso at Klessheim. Essentially the Nazi leader held forth against the protection that Horthy granted to the Jews of Hungary; Ribbentrop, who attended the meeting, added a few comments of his own to his Führer’s declarations.⁴⁹Tiso, in other words, was being indirectly encouraged to complete the job on his own turf by delivering his remaining Jews. On this occasion, the Slovak president did not make any promise.

As by the early summer of 1943 the deportations from Slovakia had not yet been resumed, Eichmann added a heavy dose of what could only be defined as comic relief to the messages sent to Bratislava. In a memorandum dated June 7, 1943, that the Wilhelmstrasse passed on to Ludin, Tuka, and Tiso, the head of IVB4 demanded that the Slovaks be informed of the favorable reports published about the “conditions in Jewish camps” by a series of newspapers in Eastern Europe (and even one in Paris), with “numerous photographs.” “For the rest,” Eichmann added, “to counteract the fantastic rumors circulating in Slovakia about the fate of the evacuated Jews, attention should be drawn to the postal communications of these Jews with Slovakia, which are forwarded directly through the advisor on Jewish affairs with the German legation in Bratislava [Wisliceny] and which for instance amounted to more than 1,000 letters and postcards for February-March this year. Concerning the information apparently desired by Prime Minister Dr. Tuka about the conditions in Jewish camps, no objections would be raised by this office against any possible scrutinizing of the correspondence before it is forwarded to the addressees.”⁵⁰

The German pressure on the Slovaks was relatively mild, possibly due to a bottleneck at Auschwitz resulting from the ongoing deportations from the West, the final transports from the Reich and the General Government, and the transports from Salonika, followed by the typhus epidemic in the camp that diverted transports to Sobibor. The fate of the remnants of Slovak Jewry would be sealed on the very eve of Germany’s collapse.

There was a measure of coordination between the deportations from Slovakia and from Croatia (or, more precisely put, from “Greater Croatia”). As we saw, the 40,000 Jews in Pavelic’s state, together with the Serbs and the Gypsies, were hunted down by the Croats, despite Italian efforts to protect as many of them as they could, in their own zone. The Germans, probably unimpressed by the thoroughness of the Ustasha butchering operations and worried from early 1943 on about the psychological impact of Stalingrad, took direct control of the final phase of the liquidation. A first wave of deportations had already substantially decimated the Jewish population in August 1942. The second wave followed in the early summer of 1943, after a visit by Himmler to Zagreb, on May 5. The mopping-up operations that took place after the end of Italian control of the Dalmatian coastal regions were only partly successful, as groups of Jews succeeded in joining Tito’s partisans.⁵¹ Throughout the entire period the local Catholic church played a major role in accepting or stemming the Ustasha persecutions and massacres, as already mentioned; we shall return to this issue in the next chapter.

During the first days of 1943 (possibly even at the end of 1942), while Dannecker was about to start the deportations from neighboring Thracia and Macedonia, Rolf Günther arrived in Greece to coordinate the deportations from Salonika. In early February, Dieter Wisliceny and Alois Brunner followed.⁵² Within a month everything was ready. The first train, with some 2,800 Jews, left the northern Greek city for Auschwitz on March 15, 1943; the second train departed two days later. Within a few weeks 45,000 out of the 50,000 Jews of Salonika had been deported and mostly killed on arrival.⁵³ Simultaneously deportee trains were leaving Thracia and Macedonia for Treblinka.

A host of factors have been adduced to explain the flawless implementation of the German assault upon the Jews of Salonika while the same operation encountered serious obstacles, a year later, when the deportation of the Jews of Athens started. The arrival in Salonika of Eichmann’s top men certainly played an important role, as did the eager collaboration of Vassilis Simonides, the German-appointed governor-general of Macedonia, and the “determination” of the Wilhelmstrasse delegate to Greece, Günther Altenburg.⁵⁴ Other elements of course reinforced the efficiency of the German officials and the role of Simonides and like-minded Salonikans. Historian Mark Mazower mentions the periodic tension between the Greek inhabitants of the city and the still incompletely assimilated post–World War I Jewish refugees (and thus the lack of active solidarity of the population), the immediate compliance of Chief Rabbi Zwi Koretz, the spiritual head of the community, with all German orders, the absence of any information among the local Jews about the fate that awaited them once they boarded the trains and, also, the absence of a Greek resistance movement that would play a major role a year later, during the deportation of the remaining Jews of the country.⁵⁵

It has been argued that the total incomprehension of local Jews regarding German policies stemmed—as in Thracia and Macedonia—from the intrinsically different historical memory of these mainly Sephardi communities. They had direct experience or detailed knowledge of Turkish atrocities, of expulsions from Asia Minor, in short of the misery, discrimination, massacres, and resettlements of the World War I years and their immediate aftermath.⁵⁶ Many of these Jews probably imagined their fate at the hands of the Germans in somewhat similar terms. Whether this was a significant factor in their attitudes is less certain, however: No Jew in occupied Europe imagined what the German measures would be.

During the two years that had elapsed between the German occupation of Greece and the beginning of the deportations, the Jewish community of Salonika had undergone the usual persecutions: looting of libraries and synagogues by the Einsatzstab Rosenberg, conscription of thousands of men to forced labor for the Wehrmacht, involvement of Greek collaborators and sundry prewar fascist groups in anti-Jewish propaganda, and, of course, the usual expropriations.⁵⁷

By February 1943 the Jews of the city had been marked with the star, segregated in a run-down area, and robbed by Germans and Greeks of whatever remained of their possessions. The Jewish police participated in the razzias and the extortions in a particularly vicious way, while the head of the community, Rabbi Koretz, was spreading soothing comments.⁵⁸ A camp set up near the railway station, in a tightly enclosed part of the Jewish quarter, became the assembly and transit site from which batch after batch of the Salonikan Jews boarded the trains.⁵⁹

As the first Jews were on their way to Auschwitz, a strange diplomatic imbroglio caused some annoyance in Berlin, without influencing, however, the speedy implementation of the deportations. First, the acting Greek prime minister, Constantine Logothetopoulos, protested against the German measures and had to be reassured by the combined persuasive talents of Altenburg and Wisliceny. The ICRC delegate in Athens, René Burckhardt, was more troublesome, as he insisted that the Jews of Salonika be sent to Palestine instead of Auschwitz.⁶⁰ The exasperated Germans finally demanded his removal from Greece.⁶¹ The most concrete interference, as usual, came from the Italians.

There had been some dispute about the role of the Italian consul in Salonika as the deportations started. It seems proved now that, from the outset, Consul Guelfo Zamboni did not spare any effort to protect as many Jews as possible: “It should be recalled that protection was granted not only to Jews of Italian nationality, but also to those who claimed a right to such nationality, or raised some forgotten, real or fabricated, familial relationship to Italian Jews, or even in some cases to Jews who in fact did not have any such relationship but who, in the consul’s opinion, had clearly contributed to the cultural or economic interests of Italy in the city or the region.”⁶²

The Italian minister plenipotentiary in Athens, Pellegrino Ghigi strongly supported Zamboni’s interventions, as did the Foreign Ministry in Rome. It seems that the Italians even appealed to the Wilhelmstrasse to obtain the release of some of the protected Jews who had already been deported—to no avail, of course.⁶³ All in all the Germans tried to block the Italian initiative. “Inland IIg,” which succeeded the former “department Germany,” recommended the rejection of Rome’s demands for reasons that illustrate the changing context of the German operations. The Swedes were also demanding exemptions for their newly minted nationals. A positive response to the Italians, Inland II argued, could only strengthen such demands. Moreover, accepting the Italian request would bolster the increasingly hostile attitude of Balkan states regarding German anti-Jewish policies. Finally “the Reich’s reputation” in the whole of Greece would suffer if Italy succeeded in its intervention.⁶⁴ The Italians nonetheless managed to transfer some 320 protected Jews to Athens.⁶⁵ As for the pliant Rabbi Koretz and a few other privileged Jews, they were sent to Bergen-Belsen, where Koretz died of typhus on the eve of liberation.⁶⁶

The old Jewish cemetery of Salonika, with its hundreds of thousands of graves, some of which dated back to the fifteenth century, was destroyed: The Germans used the tombstones for paving roads and building a swimming pool for the troops; the city used the space for developing its vast new university campus.⁶⁷ What happened to the remnants of generations of Salonikan Jews is nowhere told.

IV

For the Germans carrying the Jews to their death remained a logistic headache to the very end; for some of the Jews the transports as such became death traps, there and then.

In Holland, Belgium, and France the Jews were mostly assembled in Westerbork, Malines, or Drancy (where a sufficient supply of inmates to fill the transports remained the main priority); in these national assembly centers, special trains arrived at regular weekly intervals. In the Reich itself, however, where no such central assembly camp existed, a Russenzug (“Russian train”) arriving from the East with laborers had to be readied at one of the main departure cities and scheduled so as to allow for the timely arrival of connecting trains from smaller towns with their own loads of Jews. This demanded complex scheduling in and of itself, also due to the irregular arrivals of the trains from the East.

As the Russenzug from Brest-Litovsk to Cologne, programmed to carry 1,000 Jews from Düsseldorf to Izbica, had not yet left Brest, a Düsseldorf police official reported in March 1942, it was to be replaced by Russenzug RU7340 from Russia to Hemer, in Westphalia. The train was to be ready to leave Düsseldorf on April 22, 1942, at 11:06 (it should have arrived in Düsseldorf on the twentieth or twenty-first, after thorough cleaning and delousing); it included twenty cars of unspecified type. Since most trains for the East comprised diverse types of cars, loading at the cattle station was not possible.

For the transport of seventy Jews from Wuppertal to Derendorf, one four-axle car or two two-axle cars would be added to passenger train Pz286 leaving Steinbeck at 14:39, arriving at Düsseldorf Main Station at 15:20. The one hundred Jews from Mönchen-Gladbach would be transported in two cars added to passenger train Pz2303 leaving Mönchen-Gladbach at 14:39 and arriving at Düsseldorf at 15:29. For the 145 Jews from Krefeld, the passenger train leaving Krefeld at 15:46, arriving at Düsseldorf at 17:19, would get two additional four-axle passenger cars and one freight car. The freight car had to be ordered from the merchandise station in Krefeld with the destination Izbica.

The railway administration in Essen allocated a special train, Da152, with passenger cars to which two merchandise cars would be attached for baggage. The cars had to be ordered in Essen with the destination Izbica. The merchandise cars would be directed to the slaughterhouse station, whereas special train Da152 and the cars from Wuppertal, Krefeld, and Mönchen-Gladbach would be directed to the Tussmannstadt platform.⁶⁸ Of course, in the Reich such problems rapidly dwindled in 1943.

Periodically the Reichsbahn had to be paid for its services. Although most of the transports were easily funded by the RSHA from the victims’ assets, at times the payments were not readily available or the moving of the trains through several currency zones created complex accounting problems for all involved.⁶⁹

The major challenge, however, was the availability of trains as such. Thus in early June 1942, Himmler’s adjutant, SS Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff, demanded the personal intervention of the secretary of state at the Transportation Ministry, Dr. Theodor Ganzenmüller, to ensure the daily deportations from Warsaw. On July 27 Ganzenmüller reported to Wolff: “Since 22.7. a train with 5,000 Jews travels daily from Warsaw over Malkinia to Treblinka. Moreover, twice a week a train with 5,000 Jews travels from Przemysl to Belzec. Gedob [the “General Directorate of the Ostbahn”] stays in ongoing contact with the Security Service in Cracow.”⁷⁰ Wolff ’s notorious answer of August 13 remains engraved in history: “Hearty thanks in the name of the Reichsführer SS for your letter of July 28, 1942. With great joy I learned from your announcement that, for the past fourteen days, a train has gone daily to Treblinka with 5,000 members of the chosen people.”⁷¹

Wolff ’s plea to Ganzenmüller—and Himmler’s own repeated demands for help—are perplexing in regard to deportations within the General Government, given the short distances between any of the ghettos and the “Aktion Reinhardt” camps. The matter looks even more perplexing if we take into account that in the overall daily traffic of 30,000 trains operated by the Reichsbahn in 1942, only two Sonderzüge (“special trains”) per day carried Jews to their death during that same period.⁷² Yet Wolff ’s and Himmler’s nervousness was partly justified. The Reichsbahn gave very low priority to the “special trains” in its planning: “[They] were put into unoccupied slots intended for through freight trains or were run as freight extras. The result was that they were allowed onto the main line only after all other traffic had passed. Wehrmacht trains, military supply trains carrying armaments and coal trains all moved before the Sonderzüge. This explains the long stops in sidings and yards recorded in the anecdotal evidence of survivors and guards. Moreover, the trains were assigned old, worn-out locomotives and old cars, explaining their slow speed and frequent stops for repairs.”⁷³

Yet, as the “special trains” represented such a minute fraction of the overall traffic, timely planning ultimately allowed almost any problem to be solved. From September 26 to 28, 1942, a conference of Transportation Ministry officials attended either by Eichmann or by Rolf Günther rose to the challenge in a highly positive spirit. After a listing of the number of trains required for the district-by-district deportation of the Jewish population of the General Government to the extermination camps, the protocol expressed the overall confidence of the participants: “With the reduction of the transport of potatoes, it is expected that it will be possible for the special train service to be able to place at the disposal of the Directorate of the German Railways in Cracow the necessary number of freight cars. Thus the train transportation required will be available in accordance with the above proposals and the plan completed this year.”⁷⁴

Notwithstanding such goodwill, the Reichsführer had to plead again with Ganzenmüller on January 20, 1943, and explain that in order to ensure internal security East and West, the accelerated deportation of the Jews was essential: “I must receive more transport trains, if I want to complete this rapidly,” Himmler wrote. “I know very well the overstretched situation of the railways and what constant demands are made upon you. Nonetheless, I must address my request to you: Help me and get me more trains.”⁷⁵

As for the “cargo” itself, it did not cause any major problems. Of course there were the usual suicides and some attempts to flee before boarding the trains and others during the transports. Thus, on April 23, 1942, the Krefeld Gestapo informed Düsseldorf that among the Jews scheduled for deportation on April 22, Julius Israel Meier, Augusta Sara Meier, Else Sara Frankenberg, and Elisabeth Sara Frank could not be evacuated as the first three had committed suicide, and the fourth had disappeared.⁷⁶

Throughout the deportation period there are no records of any fights breaking out on the trains between the deportees and the guards. Deaths during the transports were frequent, from exhaustion, thirst, suffocation, and the like. They were duly accounted for and reported. On April 13, 1943, for example, a police lieutenant Karl reported about a transport from Skopje (Macedonia) to Treblinka: “On March 29, at 6:00, the loading of 2,404 Jews into freight cars commenced at the former tobacco sheds. Loading was completed at 12:00 and at 12:30 the train departed. The train passed through Albanian territory. The final destination, Treblinka (the camp), was reached on April 5, 1943, at 7:00…. The train was unloaded that same day between the hours of 09:00 and 11:00. Incidents: Five Jews died en route. On the night of March 30—an elderly woman of seventy, on the night of March 31—an elderly man aged eighty-five; on April 3 an elderly woman aged ninety-four and a six-month-old child. On April 4 an elderly woman aged ninety-nine died. Transport roster: received 2,404—less 5—total delivered at Treblinka: 2,399.”⁷⁷

Oskar Rosenfeld’s journey from Prague to Lodz had been relatively easy at the end of 1941.⁷⁸ Generally the travel from Western Europe, Italy, or even from Germany, appears to have been less lethal than the transports within Eastern Europe or from the Balkans to Auschwitz or Treblinka. The Italian writer Primo Levi, to whom we will return, briefly described his journey from the assembly camp at Fossoli di Carpi, near Modena, to Auschwitz in early 1944:

“Our restless sleep was often interrupted by noisy and futile disputes, by curses, by kicks and blows blindly delivered to ward off some encroaching and inevitable contact. Then someone would light a candle, and its mournful flicker would reveal an obscure agitation, a human mass, extended across the floor, confused and continuous, sluggish and aching, rising here and there in sudden convulsions and immediately collapsing again in exhaustion.”⁷⁹ Levi evokes the changing landscape, the successive names of cities, Austrian first, then Czech, and finally Polish: “The convoy stopped for the last time, in the dead of night, in the middle of a dark silent plain.”⁸⁰ They had arrived.

Most deportees would have considered Levi’s journey a luxury trip. Usually freight cars had insufficient openings for fresh air and an entirely insufficient supply of water. Even the relatively privileged transport from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz in June 1944, described by Ruth Kluger, gives an intimation of the more common traveling conditions: “The doors were sealed, and air came through a small rectangle that served as window. Maybe there was a second rectangle at the back of the car, but that was the place for the luggage…. Only one person could stand in this privileged spot [the small rectangle for air], and he was not likely to give it up. Rather he was apt to be someone who knew how to use his elbows. There were simply too many of us…. Soon the wagon reeked with the various smells that humans produce if they have to stay where they are…. The train stood around, it was summer, the temperature rose. The still air smelled of sweat, urine, excrement. A whiff of panic trembled in the air.”⁸¹

All of this was still peaceful. With a few more deportees per car, everything changed. Barely some weeks later, in July 1944, the very short trip (140 miles) from the Starachowice labor camp to Auschwitz unfolded differently. According to surviving deportees, the train was brutally overloaded on orders of the Starachowice police chief, as the Red Army was approaching. Around 75 women were packed per freight car, and separately 100 to 150 men were crammed into each wagon.⁸² The journey lasted thirty-six hours. The struggle for water and mainly for air soon started in the men’s cars. “Nineteen-year-old Ruben Z. was ‘very lucky’ to find a place beside the small window for fresh air at the beginning of the trip. He got several beatings from people who were desperate to get near the window, and was finally pushed away and lost his place. He became so dizzy and weak that he could not remember what happened thereafter, other than that fifteen people had died in his car by the time they reached Birkenau.”⁸³ In one car 27 men died; in another, 30 out of 120 men.⁸⁴

Not all the men who died on the train suffocated. About twenty members of the Starachowice Jewish Council and the Jewish police, among them the head of the camp police, Wilczek, and a man called Rubenstein, were strangled by a group of inmates recently transferred from Majdanek.⁸⁵Henry G. and many others in the same car saw it all: The fighting for air turned into a life-and-death struggle between the “Lubliners,” mostly young and strong, and the Starachowice Prominenten. Henry G. arrived in Birkenau sitting on the pile of corpses.⁸⁶

If transportation of the deportees was the backbone of the “Final Solution” for the Germans and one further deadly trap for the Jews, the growing demands for slave labor represented a fundamental dilemma for the killers. The wholesale murder of the vast majority of Jews in the General Government was of course not in question, and the continent-wide annihilation progressed apace. The contentions chiefly arose from the use of Jewish skilled labor both for the needs of the Wehrmacht and in the ambitious industrial projects of the SS themselves, mainly in the Lublin district. Obversely, however, both for Hitler and Himmler, the security risks involved in the survival of Jewish workers would remain the overriding imperative, also in 1943.

The Wehrmacht forcefully expressed its views in a memorandum presented on September 18, 1942, by Gen. Kurt von Gienanth, the commander of the German forces in the General Government. Gienanth spelled out in great detail the essential function of Jewish specialized workers and the damage that would result from their elimination. His conclusion was clear: “Unless work of military importance is to suffer, Jews cannot be released until replacements have been trained, and then only step by step…. The general policy will be to eliminate the Jews from work as quickly as possible without harming work of military importance.”⁸⁷

Himmler replied on October 9. The Reichsführer’s letter was uncompromising, even threatening. To bolster its overall thrust, it did not offer any detailed answers to Gienanth’s point-by-point argumentation but invoked Hitler’s decision: “I have given orders,” Himmler wrote, “that all so-called armament workers who are actually employed solely in tailoring, furrier and shoe-making workshops be collected in concentration camps on the spot…. The Wehrmacht will send its orders to us, and we guarantee the continuous delivery of the items of clothing required. I have issued instructions, however, that ruthless steps be taken against all those who consider they should oppose this move in the alleged interest of armament needs, but who in reality only seek to support the Jews and their own businesses.

“Jews in real war industries, i.e., armament workshops, etc are to be withdrawn step by step. As a first stage they are to be concentrated in separate halls in the factories. In a second stage in this procedure the work teams in these separate halls will be combined…so that we will then have simply a few closed concentration camp industries in the Government-General.

“Our endeavor will be to replace this Jewish labor force with Poles and to consolidate most of these Jewish concentration camp enterprises—in the Eastern part of the Government-General, if possible. But there, too, in accordance with the Führer’s wish, the Jews are some day to disappear.”⁸⁸

In his answer Himmler did not hide his ambition to control the specialized Jewish work force that would be slaving in “concentration camps enterprises—in the Eastern part of the General Government, if possible.” There, in the existing overall framework of SS enterprises (Deutsche Wirtschaftsbetriebe, or DWB), a new company, Ostindustrie Gmbh (or OSTI) had been set up by Globocnik according to Pohl’s (and Himmler’s) directives. Jewish slave labor would toil in the previously existing and the newly established SS workshops, and the entire endeavor would be financed by the assets of the victims murdered in the “Aktion Reinhardt” camps.⁸⁹

Very soon, however, these plans would be put in abeyance, and OSTI would be scuttled in view of ominous portents in Himmler’s eyes: the Warsaw ghetto uprising of April 1943, followed a few months later by the uprisings in Treblinka and Sobibor, and the rapid progress of the Red Army toward former Poland. Thus immediately after the ghetto revolt the Reichsführer was back at his “full extermination” policy to preempt any further Jewish threat. In a meeting held on May 10, 1943, he restated his immediate goals: “I shall not stop the evacuation of the approximately 300,000 Jews remaining in the General Government but rather implement it in the greatest haste. Notwithstanding the unrest that the evacuation of the Jews creates at the time of its implementation [an obvious reference to the Warsaw uprising], once accomplished it will be the main condition for a total calming down of the territory.”⁹⁰ Two days later SS Obergruffenführer Ulrich Greifelt, chief of staff of the RKFdV, probably alluded to the same meeting when he noted: “A priority task in the General Government remains the evacuation of the still remaining 300,000 to 400,000 Jews.”⁹¹

Himmler’s fears about Jewish armed actions in the General Government, possibly in coordination with Soviet partisans or with the Polish underground, were apparently not taken as seriously by a local administration more immediately worried by the needs of the armaments industry. The divergence of views became blatant at a high-level meeting, held in Kraków on May 31. Krüger, the HSSPF elevated to the rank of secretary of state in Frank’s domain, took a rather unexpected stand: “The elimination of the Jews,” he declared, “did undoubtedly bring about a calming down of the overall situation. For the police, this had been one of the most difficult and unpleasant tasks, but it was in the European interest…. Recently he [Krüger] had again received the order to complete the elimination of the Jews in a very short time [Er habe neulich erst wieder den Befehl erhalten in ganz kurzer Zeit die Entjudung durchzuführen]. One has been compelled to pull out the Jews from the armaments industry and from enterprises working for the war economy…. The Reichsführer wished that the employment of these Jews should stop. He [Krüger] discussed the matter with Lieutnant General Schindler [head of the armaments inspectorate of the OKW, under the command of General Gienanth] and thought that in the end the Reichsführer’s wish could not be fulfilled. The Jewish workers included specialists, precision mechanics, and other qualified artisans, that could not be simply replaced by Poles at the present time.” After further mentioning the qualities and physical endurance of these Jewish workers, Krüger told the meeting that he would ask Kaltenbrunner to describe the situation to Himmler and persuade him to keep these workers.⁹² Yet none of these arguments would ultimately help, as we shall see.

V

Throughout the twelve years of the Third Reich, looting of Jewish property was of the essence. It was the most easily understood and most widely adhered-to aspect of the anti-Jewish campaign, rationalized, if necessary, by the simplest ideological tenets. But even looting encountered unexpected problems at every step, particularly during the extermination years. Thus notwithstanding dire threats, theft and corruption eluded all controls to the very end, although the Reich finance agencies and the SS bureaucracy attempted to keep a handle on all operations, large and small.⁹³

On the spot, at local murder sites, the procedure was simple. The victims, for example groups of Vilna Jews about to be killed in Ponar, would hand over any valuables to the SD man in command of the operation; after the killing their belongings would be searched again by members of the commando and any object of value had to be handed over to the officer in charge, under penalty of death.⁹⁴ Denunciation of Jews in hiding or of other related offenses was rewarded in kind. Such a stroke of good fortune befell a Frau Meyer in Riga: Having turned in a neighbor for keeping Jewish property, she was allowed to buy a gold chain bracelet at a dirt-cheap price.⁹⁵

Of course major operations were centralized in the Reich capital. In Berlin all gold (including gold dental crowns torn from corpses’ mouths) was usually smelted right away by Degussa and, often mixed with gold from other provenances, turned into ingots for the Reichsbank.⁹⁶ Other metals were mostly smelted as well, except if the value of the item as such was greater than its value as smelted metal. According to historian Michael MacQueen the most valuable items were turned over to a few jewelers trusted by the Finance Ministry or the SS, and were exchanged in occupied or neutral countries for industrial diamonds essential to the German war industry. The activities of one such longtime intermediary working mainly with Swiss dealers have been pieced together, and it seems that the authorities in Bern were well aware of the ongoing transactions and of the steady supply of industrial diamonds to the Reich, despite Allied economic warfare measures.⁹⁷

From mid-1942 on, most of the victims’ belongings piled up in the major killing centers of “Aktion Reinhardt” and in Auschwitz-Birkenau, as the exterminations reached a high point. In early August 1942 negotiations among WVHA and all central Reich finance and economic agencies led to an agreement according to which Pohl’s main office would centralize and itemize the booty. Himmler informed the HSSPFs of the decision and officially appointed Pohl to his new function. Within a few weeks, on September 26, Pohl’s deputy, SS Brigadeführer August Frank, issued a first set of guidelines, regulating all use and distribution of Jewish spoils from the camps, from precious stones to “blankets, umbrellas, baby carriages,” to “glasses with gold frames,” to “women’s underwear,” to “shaving utensils, pocket knives, scissors,” and the like. Prices were set by the WVHA: “a pair of used pants—3 marks; a woolen blanket—6 marks.” The final admonition was essential: “Check that all Jewish stars have been removed from all clothing before transfer. Carefully check whether all hidden and sewn-in valuables have been removed from all articles to be transferred.”⁹⁸

Regarding any items to be transfered to the Reichsbank, Pohl appointed SS Hauptsturmführer Bruno Melmer to be directly in charge of the operation. While the first deliveries of valuables from the camps were deposited in the “Melmer account” on August 26, all precious metals, foreign currency, jewelry, and so on, were further turned over to Albert Thoms’s precious metals section of the Reichsbank for further use.⁹⁹

Throughout the Continent Jewish furniture and household goods were, as we saw, the domain of Rosenberg’s agency. An undated note from Rosenberg’s office, probably written in the late fall of 1942 or in early 1943, gave a succinct overview of the distribution process. While part of the furniture was allocated to Rosenberg ministry’s offices in the eastern territories, most of the spoils were handed out or auctioned off to the Reich population. “On 31 October 1942, the Führer agreed with the proposal of Reich Minister Alfred Rosenberg to give primary consideration to persons suffering from bomb damage in the Reich and ordered that, in the execution of the project, all assistance be given to Office-West and that transports are to be dispatched as Wehrmacht goods.

“Up to now, by using free freight space, 144,809 cubic meters of household goods have been removed from occupied Western Territories…Parts of the material were delivered to the following German cities: Oberhausen, Bottrop, Recklinghausen, Münster, Düsseldorf, Cologne, Osnabrück, Hamburg, Lübeck, Rostock, and Karlsruhe.¹⁰⁰

Vast amounts of goods, coming mainly from the camps (Pohl’s, Globocnik’s and Greiser’s territories), had to be mended before being shipped on to German agencies or markets; clothing was processed with particular care: Stars had to be taken off, as we saw; blood and other bodily stains washed away; and the usual wear and tear dealt with as thoroughly as possible in SS clothing workshops. Who decided what items could or could not be repaired or who had the authority to assess degrees of damage remains unclear. One could not send tens of thousands of torn socks to the outlets in the Reich. The issue arose—but received no answer—in an incident described by Filip Müller, sometime in the late spring of 1942, in one of the Auschwitz crematoriums.

Müller, himself a Slovak Jew, arrived in Auschwitz in April 1942. He had just been transferred to the Sonderkommando (which will be discussed further on): This was his initiation, so to speak, under the supervision of SS Unterscharführer Stark. As was still common during these months, a group of Slovak Jews had been gassed with their clothes on. “Strip the stiffs!” Stark yelled and gave Müller a blow. “Before me,” Müller remembered, “lay the corpse of a woman. With trembling hands and shaking all over I began to remove her stockings. It was the first time in my life that I touched a dead body. She was not yet quite cold. As I pulled the stocking down her leg, it tore. Stark, who had been watching, struck me again, bellowing: ‘What the hell d’you think you’re doing? Mind out, and get a move on! These things are to be used again!’ To show us the correct way he began to remove the stockings from another female corpse. But he, too, did not manage to take them off without at least a small tear.”¹⁰¹

Hamburg has been thoroughly studied. In 1942, in Hamburg alone forty-five shiploads of goods looted from Dutch Jews arrived; they represented a net weight of 27,227 tons. Approximately 100,000 inhabitants acquired some of the stolen belongings at harbor auctions. According to a female witness, “Simple housewives…were suddenly wearing fur coats, dealt in coffee and jewelry, had antique furniture and carpets from the harbor, from Holland, from France.”¹⁰²

Throughout 1943 assessments and inventories of looted Jewish property became frequent at all levels of the system. The total value of “Jewish belongings” secured during “Aktion Reinhardt” up to December 15, 1943, was estimated at the operation’s headquarters in Lublin as amounting to 178,745,960.59 reichsmarks. This official estimate, signed by SS Sturmbannführer Georg Wippern, was forwarded to the WVHA on January 5, 1944, from Trieste, the headquarters of Globocnik’s new assignment.¹⁰³ It seems to have been the late sequel to a January 15, 1943, message from Himmler to both Krüger and Pohl: “On my visit to Warsaw,” the Reichsführer’s admonition ran, “I also inspected the warehouses containing the material and the goods taken over from the Jews, that is, at the emigration of the Jews.

“I again request SS Obergruppenführer Pohl to arrange a written agreement with the Minister of Economics,” Himmler went on, “regarding each individual category; whether it is a question of watch crystals, of which hundreds of thousands—perhaps even millions—are lying there, and which, for practical purposes could be distributed to the German watchmakers; or whether it is a question of turning lathes.” After adding some further examples, Himmler warned: “I believe, on the whole, we cannot be too precise.” And, following more instructions, he added: “I request SS Obergruppenführer Pohl to clear up and arrange these matters to the last detail, as the strictest accuracy now will spare us much vexation later.” Three weeks later Pohl sent in a detailed account of the textile items collected from Lublin and Auschwitz: They filled 825 railway freight cars.¹⁰⁴

There can be no precise overview of the plunder and expropriation of Europe’s Jewish victims. Orchestrated and implemented throughout the Continent first and foremost by the Germans, it spread to local officials, police, neighbors, or just any passerby in Amsterdam or Kovno, in Warsaw or Paris. It included “feeding” extortionists, distributing bribes, or paying “fines,” individually but mainly on a huge collective scale. It comprised the grabbing of homes, the looting of household objects, furniture, art collections, libraries, clothes, underclothes, bedding; it meant the impounding of bank accounts and of insurance policies, the stealing of stores, or of industrial or commercial enterprises, the plundering of corpses (women’s hair, gold teeth, earrings, wedding rings, watches, artificial limbs, fountain pens, glasses), in short pouncing on anything usable, exchangeable, or salable. It comprised slave labor, deadly medical experiments, enforced prostitution, loss of salaries, pensions, any imaginable income—and, for millions—loss of life. And of socks torn in stripping the corpses.

On July 1, 1943, the Thirteenth Ordinance to the Reich Citizenship Law was signed by the ministers of the interior, finance, and of justice. Article 2, paragraph 1 read: “The property of a Jew shall be confiscated by the Reich after his death.”¹⁰⁵

VI

From the early summer of 1942, Auschwitz II–Birkenau gradually changed from a slave labor camp where sporadic exterminations had taken place to an extermination center where the regular flow of deportees allowed for the selection of constantly expendable slave laborers. Throughout 1943 the Auschwitz complex of main and satellite camps grew vastly: The number of inmates rose from 30,000 to about 80,000 in early 1944, and simultaneously tens of satellite camps (about fifty in 1944) were established next to plants and mines, even on the site of agricultural stations. In Birkenau a women’s camp, a Gypsies’ “family camp” and a “family camp” for Jews from Theresienstadt were set up in 1943 (the inmates of both “family camps” were later exterminated). On September 15, 1942, Speer authorized the allocation of 13.7 million reichsmarks for the rapid development of buildings and killing facilities.¹⁰⁶

As we saw, the first gassing had taken place at Auschwitz Main Camp (Auschwitz I), in the reconverted morgue. Then provisional gas chambers were set up in Birkenau, first at the “red house” (Bunker I), then at the “white house” (Bunker II). After some delay a technically much improved Crematorium II, which had initially been ordered for the main camp, was set up in Birkenau. Crematoriums III, IV, and V followed. After the shutting down of the gas chamber in the main camp, the installations were renumbered I to IV, all in Birkenau.¹⁰⁷ These gas chambers became operational in the course of 1943.¹⁰⁸ Crematoriums VI and VII were apparently planned but never built. They would certainly have been of help in the late spring of 1944, as hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were gassed within a few weeks and the murdering capacity of the system was stretched to its utmost limits, even after Bunker II had been reactivated as an auxiliary killing installation.

The man who, more than anyone else, orchestrated the transformation of Auschwitz into the central extermination camp of the Nazi system by overseeing the building of the new gassing installations in Birkenau was Pohl’s construction chief, Hans Kammler. “In Kammler,” historian Michael Thad Allen wrote, “technological competence and extreme Nazi fanaticism coexisted…. For his intensity, his mastery of engineering, his organizational genius, and his passion for National Socialism, SS men esteemed Kammler as a paragon.”¹⁰⁹ In Speer’s words, “nobody would have dreamed that some day he would be one of Himmler’s most brutal and most ruthless henchmen.”¹¹⁰ The Kammlers of the Third Reich were the technological managers of the “Final Solution” during its mid-and late phases. As previously emphasized, their ideological fanaticism was essential to keep the system working in spite of increasing difficulties.

On January 29, 1943, Max Bischoff, the head of Auschwitz Zentrale Bauleitung (Central Building Management) reported to Kammler: “Crematorium II has been completed—save for some minor construction work—using all the forces available, in spite of unspeakable difficulties and severe cold, in twenty-four-hour shifts. The fires were started in the ovens in the presence of Oberingenieur Kurt Prüfer, representative of the contractors of the firm Topf and Sons, Erfurt, and they are working most satisfactorily. The planks from the concrete ceiling of the cellar used as a mortuary have not yet been removed, on account of the frost. This is not very important, however, as the gassing cellar can be used for that purpose. The firm Topf and Sons was not able to start deliveries of the aeration and ventilation equipment according to the timetable requested by Central Building Management because of restrictions in the use of railroad cars. As soon as the aeration and ventilation equipment arrives, the installing will start.”¹¹¹

Crematorium II was activated in March 1943. The gas chamber was built mainly underground and accessed by way of the underground disrobing hall. But its roof was slightly elevated above ground level to allow the pouring in of the Zyklon B pellets from the canisters, through four openings protected by small brick chimneys built around and over them. In the gas chambers of Crematoriums II and III, the Zyklon pellets were not thrown from the vents to the floor of the chamber but lowered in containers that descended into “wire mesh introduction devices [Drahtnetzeinschiebvorrichtungen],” or wire mesh columns. The columns allowed for the full release of the gas into the chamber—once the adequate temperature was reached—and the retrieval of the pellets at the end of the operation to avoid further release of gas while the corpses were being pulled from the chamber (which had no other openings but the single access door.)¹¹²

Apart from the hall for disrobing and the gas chamber (or gas chambers), the basements of crematoriums built on two levels included a hall for the handling of the corpses (for the pulling out of gold teeth, cutting women’s hair, detaching prosthetic limbs, collecting any valuables such as wedding rings, glasses, and the like) by the Jewish Sonderkommando members after they had dragged the bodies out of the gas chamber. Then elevators carried the corpses to the ground floor, where several ovens reduced them to ashes. After the grinding of bones in special mills, the ashes were used as fertilizer in the nearby fields, dumped in local forests, or tossed into the river, nearby. As for the members of the Sonderkommandos, they were periodically killed and replaced by a new batch.

Prüfer was so proud of his installation that he had it patented.¹¹³ Besides Topf, a dozen other firms were involved in the construction of the four crematoriums.¹¹⁴ Despite the slow process of setting up the new units, their frequent malfunctioning, and the insufficient burning capacity of the ovens during peak activity (which compelled the camp authorities to revert to open-pit burning), the Auschwitz murder machinery did fulfill its task.

Primo Levi, whose journey to Auschwitz we described, was a twenty-four-year-old chemist from Turin who had joined a small group of Jews hiding in the mountains above the city, within the loose framework of the Resistance organization Giustizia e Libertà (Justice and Liberty). On December 13, 1943, Levi and his companions were arrested by the Fascist militia and, a few weeks later, transported to the Fossoli assembly camp. By the end of February 1944 the Germans took over. On February 22 the 650 Jews of the camp were deported northward.

“The climax [of the four-day journey] came suddenly,” Levi later wrote: “The door opened with a crash, and the dark echoed with outlandish orders in that curt, barbaric barking of Germans in command which seems to give vent to millennial anger…. In less than ten minutes all the fit men had been collected together in a group. What happened to the others, to the women, to the children, to the old men, we could establish neither then nor later: The night swallowed them up, purely and simply. Today, however, we know…that of our convoy no more than ninety-six men and twenty-nine women entered the respective camps of Monowitz-Buna and Birkenau, and that of all the others, more than five hundred in number, not one was living two days later.”¹¹⁵

About her arrival in Birkenau at the age of twelve, Ruth Kluger remembered that when the doors of the freight car were unsealed, unaware that one had to jump, she fell on the ramp: “I got up and wanted to cry,” she reminisced, “or at least sniffle, but the tears didn’t come. They dried up in the palpable creepiness of the place. We should have been relieved…to be breathing fresh air at last. But the air wasn’t fresh. It smelled like nothing on earth, and I knew instinctively and immediately that this was no place for crying, that the last thing I needed was to attract attention.” Kluger then noted the same welcoming party as Levi: “We were surrounded by the odious, bullying noise of the men who had hauled us out of the train with the monosyllables ‘raus, raus’ (get out), and who simply didn’t stop shouting as they were driving us along, like mad, barking dogs. I was glad to be walking safely in the middle of our heap of humanity.”¹¹⁶

In the din of human barking, some inmates later remembered the Raus, others the Schneller: The effect was the same. Greta Salus, who also arrived from Theresienstadt, described her first impression: “Schneller, schneller, schneller (faster, faster, faster)—it still rings in my ears, this word that from now on hounded us day and night, whipped us on, and never gave us any rest. On the double—that was the watch word; eat, sleep, work, die on the double…. I often asked people with the same experiences what their impressions were on their arrival in Auschwitz. Most of them weren’t able to tell me much about it, and almost all of them said they were utterly addled and half-dazed, as though they had been hit on the head. They all perceived the floodlights as torturous and the noise as unbearable.”¹¹⁷

The first selection took place on arrival, on the spot. As SS physician Friedrich Entress explained in his postwar statement, “The young people under sixteen, all the mothers in charge of children, and all the sick or frail people were loaded into trucks and taken to the gas chambers. The others were handed over to the head of the labor allocation and taken to the camp.”¹¹⁸

In fact Entress should have remembered one more category of Jews selected on arrival: interesting specimens for some of the medical or anthropological experiments. Thus Entress’s notorious colleague, Joseph Mengele, who very often took part in the initial selections, was also present at arrivals to search for his special material. “Scouting incoming transports for twins with the order Zwillinge heraus! (Twins forward!), he also looked for individuals with physical abnormalities who might be used for interesting postmortems. Their measurements were taken, they were shot by an SS noncom, and their bodies dissected. Sometimes their cleaned bones were sent to Verschuer’s research institute in Berlin-Dahlem.”¹¹⁹ (Prof. Dr. Otmar von Verschuer was Mengele’s mentor and the Director of the Institute for Biological-Racial Research at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin-Dahlem.)

The deportees selected for slave labor were usually identified with a serial number, tattooed on their lower left arm; the category to which they belonged was indicated on their striped inmate “uniform” by a colored triangle (with different colors for politicals, criminals, homosexuals, Gypsies) which, for all Jews was turned into a six-pointed star by the addition of a reversed yellow triangle.¹²⁰ The results of the initial selections aimed at filling the ranks of the labor pool were at times truly disappointing. For example, in a transport from Theresienstadt at the end of January 1943, fewer than 1,000 out of some 5,000 deportees could be of some use at the I. G. Farben works. The others were immediately gassed.¹²¹ It was even worse in March, although the transports from Berlin were filled with deportees seized during the Fabrikaktion. As family members had been taken along with the deported men, in the transport of March 3, out of a total 1,750 Jews, 1,118 were women and children. Only two hundred of these women and children were not immediately subjected to “special treatment.” And so it went with the four transports that followed.¹²²

The march, or transportation to the crematoriums, of those selected for immediate gassing usually took place without incidents, as, according to a well-honed routine, the victims were told they would undergo disinfection. At the entrance of the crematorium, the new arrivals were taken in charge by a few SS men and by Jewish Sonderkommando members. These Sonderkomanndo men mixed with the unsuspecting victims in the undressing hall and, if need be, like the SS guards, they offered a few soothing comments. Once the undressing was completed and the belongings carefully hung on numbered hooks (shoes tied together), to prove that there was no ground for fear, the party of SS men and Sonderkommando inmates accompanied the throng of candidates for “disinfection” into the gas chamber, fitted with the shower contraptions. A member of the Sonderkommando usually stayed until the very last moment; often an SS man also remained standing at the doorsill until the last victim had crossed it. Then, the door was hermetically sealed and the gas pellets poured in.¹²³

A physician was on duty to ensure that gassing had been completed and no sign of life remained. Dr. Johann Paul Kremer, professor of medicine at the University of Münster and an SS Hauptsturmführer, kept a diary about his daily activities at Auschwitz between August 30 and November 20, 1942: “2 September 1942. For the first time, at three this morning, present at a special operation (Sonderaktion)…5 September 1942…. In the evening around 8 o’clock again attended a Sonderaktion from Holland. The men [the Sonderkommando inmates] push themselves to participate in these operations, because special provisions are passed out, including a fifth of liquor, 5 cigarettes, 100 grams of baloney [bologna], and bread…. 6 September: Today, Sunday, excellent lunch: tomato soup, one-half chicken with potatoes and red cabbage (20 grams fat). Sweets and fantastic vanilla ice cream…. Evening at 8 o’clock outside again for a Sonderaktion.”¹²⁴

Incidentally, there could be a weird association between Kremer’s obsessive attention to his daily food intake, which reappears throughout the diary, and his research in Auschwitz on the medical aspects of starvation. His specimens would be put on a dissection table, interrogated about their weight loss, then killed and dissected. The effects of starvation could then be studied at leisure. According to Robert Jay Lifton, Kremer was expecting to pursue his research after the war.¹²⁵

On September 5 Kremer attended a selection of Muselmannen [Muslims], in this case of women slave laborers no longer fit for work; it did not proceed as easily as the selection of new arrivals; the victims knew what awaited them. “The gassing of exhausted women in the concentration camp, cachectics generally known by the term ‘Muslims’ was especially unpleasant,” Kremer declared in his deposition in a postwar trial. “I remember that I once took part in the gassing of a group of women. I couldn’t say now how many there were. When I arrived near the bunker, they were sitting on the ground, still dressed. Because their camp clothes were in rags, they were not admitted into the undressing barracks; they had to undress in the open air. From their behavior I deduced that they knew what was in store for them, for they were crying and pleading with the SS men for their lives. But all were chased into the gas chambers and gassed…. It was under the impressions that I felt at the time that I wrote in my diary on 5 September 1942: ‘The most horrible of horrors. Hauptscharführer Thilo was quite right when he said to me today that we had reached the anus of the world.’ I used that expression because I couldn’t imagine anything more frightful or more monstrous.”¹²⁶

Much has been written about the members of the Sonderkommando, those few hundreds of inmates, almost all Jews, who lived at the very bottom of hell, so to speak, before being killed and replaced by others. As we just saw, at times they helped the SS in soothing the fears of the prisoners entering the gas chambers, they pulled out the bodies, plundered the corpses, burned the remains, and disposed of the ashes; sorted and dispatched the belongings of the victims to “Kanada” (the derisive appellation of the hall where the belongings were stored and processed). An inmate of the women’s camp that adjoined the crematoriums, Krystina Zywulska, asked one of the Sonderkommando members how he could bear to do this work, day in and day out. His explanations—the will to live, witnessing, revenge—ended with what probably was the gist of it all: “You think that those working in Sonderkommandos are monsters? I’m telling you, they’re like the rest, just much more unhappy.”¹²⁷

In many ways Auschwitz illustrated the difference between the Nazi concentration camp system in general and the extermination system in its specific anti-Jewish dimension. In this multipurpose camp with a mixed population of inmates, the non-Jewish inmates soon became aware of the fundamental difference between their own fate and that of the Jews. The non-Jewish inmate could survive, given some luck and some support from his national or political group. The Jew, on the other hand, had ultimately no recourse against death and, as a norm, remained utterly defenseless. For many a Polish or Ukrainian inmate, or for many a German “criminal” inmate, this was but one more opportunity to exercise their own anti-Jewish terror within the generalized system of terror or just to assert their own power against this entirely powerless group.¹²⁸

Alluding to the status of Jews in the camp system in general and in Auschwitz particularly, where he himself had been an inmate, Yisrael Gutman put it this way: “The Jews were pariahs in the concentration camps and were regarded as such by the other internees. Anti-Semitism was perceptible in the camps and assumed the most violent forms. Attacks against Jews were encouraged by the Nazis. Even those who were not anti-Jewish and were in a position to oppose the tide of hatred which flooded the camp acceded to the accepted norms and regarded the Jews as abandoned, miserable creatures who were best avoided.” There were also many examples of help extended to Jews, but for Gutman, “These were of sporadic, individual nature, while anti-Semitic attitudes and attacks on Jews were the rule in the majority of camps.”¹²⁹

Among Jews themselves the constant threat of death at any sign of weakness exacerbated tensions, including the prejudices of each national group against some others: “Instead of displaying solidarity [the Jews in Auschwitz] felt enmity toward one another,” Benedikt Kautsky wrote, with somewhat exaggerated harshness…. “The ‘Poles’ now stood opposed to the ‘Germans,’ the ‘Dutch’ to the ‘French,’ and the ‘Greeks’ to the ‘Hungarians.’ It was by no means unusual for one Jew to use arguments against another Jew that were not very different from those of the anti-Semites.”¹³⁰ As for those Jews who had been granted some power over their brethren, as “kapos,” for example, they often clung to the illusion of saving their own skin by brutalizing other Jews. Not all of them followed this path, but many did.¹³¹

As Auschwitz was turning into the main murdering center of the regime, the Jewish inmates soon considerably outnumbered all the other groups added together. According to historian Peter Hayes, “From the opening of the camp in May 1940 to its evacuation in January 1945, some 1.3 million people were transported to the site, of whom only about 200,000 ever left alive, only 125,000 of these surviving the Third Reich. Of these captives, 1.1 million were Jews, about eighty percent of whom succumbed upon arrival or shortly thereafter.”¹³²

“The Jews arrive here, that is, to Auschwitz, at a weekly rate of 7 to 8,000,” Pvt. SM wrote home on December 7, 1942, on his way to the front. “Shortly thereafter they die a ‘hero’s death.’” And he added: “It is really good to see the world.”¹³³

SM was not alone in enjoying Auschwitz. For the approximately 7,000 members of the SS who at one time or another were assigned to the camp and served there first under Höss until November 1943, then under Arthur Liebehenschel and Richard Baer, life was definitely not unpleasant.¹³⁴ All the usual amenities were available: decent housing, good food (as we saw from Kremer’s diary), medical care, long stays for spouses or companions, and regular furloughs to the Heimat or to special vacation spots.¹³⁵ In the camp itself, to relieve the stress generated by their work, the SS could enjoy music played specially for them by the female inmates’ orchestra, which performed from April 1943 to October 1944.¹³⁶ And outside the camp, cultural life comprised an array of performances, once every two or three weeks at least, with a preference for comedies, A Bride in Flight, Interrupted Wedding Night, or Merry Varieties, and soirées under the motto “Attack of the Comics.” There was no shortage of classics either: In February 1943 the Dresden State Theater presented Goethe Then and Now.¹³⁷

VII

Details about the extermination spread through any number of channels in the Reich and beyond. Thus, for example, every summer hundreds of women visited their husbands who were guards in Auschwitz and other camps, as just mentioned; they often stayed for long periods of time. As for the German population of the town of Auschwitz, it complained about the odor produced by the overloaded crematories.¹³⁸ This particular problem was confirmed by Höss: “It became apparent during the first cremations in the open air that in the long run it would not be possible to continue in that manner. During bad weather or when a strong wind was blowing, the stench of burning flesh was carried for many miles and caused the whole neighborhood to talk about the burning of Jews, despite official counter-propaganda. It is true that all members of the SS detailed for the extermination were bound to strict secrecy over the whole operation, but as later SS legal proceedings showed, this was not always observed. Even the most severe punishment was not able to stop their love of gossip.”¹³⁹

What German civilians living in eastern Upper Silesia gathered about Auschwitz, what railwaymen, policemen, soldiers, and anybody traveling through the eastern reaches of the Reich could easily hear or witness, Reich Germans visiting the Warthegau or settled there learned simply by comparing what they had seen on their earlier visits, in 1940 or 1941, and what could not be missed one or two years later. “I saw nothing more of the Jewish population of what had been Poland,” Annelies Regenstein reminisced in an interview. “In 1940, I traveled on one occasion through the ghetto in Litzmannstadt, a dark area of the city fenced off with barbed wire in which thousands of Jews were herded together and left to vegetate. Something of the terrible fate of these people probably seeped into the population (emphasis in original). But anti-Semitic propaganda and a hostile attitude on the part of the resettled Germans towards the Jews made them indifferent.” As historian Elisabeth Harvey put it: “She [Regenstein] did not spell out her own reactions at the time to the knowledge that was ‘probably seeping’ into German consciousness.”¹⁴⁰

Another former woman settler, Elisabeth Grabe, spoke more explicitly of her own experience, also in the Warthegau: “The Jews who had lived in the ghetto in Zychlin and Kutno disappeared one day (I can’t remember when that was, perhaps 1942). People whispered to each other that they had been loaded into lorries and gassed [Sie wären in Autos geladen und vergast, wurde genuschelt]. These rumors affected me even more painfully than the notion that I was using confiscated [Polish] furniture.”¹⁴¹ Of course the information thus whispered around described quite precisely the killings in Chelmno.

By early 1943 the information about mass extermination of the Jews was so widespread in the Reich (even if the “technical details” were mostly not precise) as to have probably reached a majority of the population. A recurring rumor mentioned the gassing of Jews in tunnels somewhere on the way to the East.¹⁴² This kind of information didn’t seem to soften anti-Jewish hatred and brutality. Thus the Spanish Consul in Berlin reported that, in April 1943, trucks with deportees were stopped on their way to the railway station by bombed-out people, who attempted to seize the luggage of the victims.¹⁴³ Generally speaking, recent historical research increasingly turns German ignorance of the fate of the Jews into a mythical postwar construct.

The Party Chancellery deemed it necessary to issue appropriate guidelines in response to the spreading knowledge. The opening sentences of the confidential document sent out on October 9, 1942, were telling: “In the context of work on the final solution of the Jewish question there has recently been some discussion by people in various parts of the Reich about ‘very harsh measures’ against the Jews, particularly in the eastern territories. It has been established that such statements—usually distorted and exaggerated—are passed on by people on leave from the various units engaged in the East, who have themselves had the opportunities to observe such measures.”¹⁴⁴

Opposition leaders were particularly well informed. Historian Hans Mommsen has shown that in 1942 the gassing of Jews was known to the Jesuit priest Alfred Delp, to the Prussian finance minister Johannes Popitz, and to Helmuth von Moltke, among others.¹⁴⁵ On October 10, 1942, Moltke wrote to his wife: “Yesterday’s lunch was interesting in that the man I ate with had just come from the [General] Government and gave an authentic report on the ‘SS blast-furnace.’ So far I had not believed it, but he assured me that it was true: 6,000 people a day are ‘processed’ in that furnace. He was in a prison camp 6 km away, and the officers there reported it to him as absolute fact.”¹⁴⁶

At about the same time members of the clandestine “Freiburg Circle” were putting the final touch to the “Great Memorandum,” the outcome of the group’s discussions about the social, political, and moral bases of a post–National Socialist Germany. The Freiburg economics professor Konstantin von Dietze authored the fifth and last appendix to the memorandum, “Proposals for the Solution of the Jewish Question in Germany.” The document was discussed in November 1942 at Dietze’s home by several leaders of the political opposition (among them Karl Goerdeler), key members of the Confessing Church, and others. Although the “Final Solution” as such was not mentioned in the fifth appendix, the mass extermination of Jews was recognized: “These persecutions [of the Jews] have unmistakably been at the will of the central authorities. They led not only to innumerable forced evacuations, during which many Jews died; hundreds of thousands of human beings have been killed systematically merely because of their Jewish ancestry…. The full extent of such infamous deeds is hardly imaginable; in any case it cannot be portrayed fully in objective facts or figures, since no agency has openly assumed responsibility for them.”¹⁴⁷

Recognition of the mass extermination did not, however, induce the Freiburg group to consider the Jews in post-Nazi Germany as individuals and citizens like all others. “The existence of a numerically significant body of Jews within a people,” the memorandum emphasized, “constitutes a problem that must lead to recurrent difficulties, if it is not subjected to a fundamental and large-scale arrangement.”¹⁴⁸ A series of contemplated measures for dealing with this “Jewish problem,” both in Germany and on the international level, followed: The traditional anti-Semitism of German conservatives and of the German churches found full expression, with an additional touch of notions garnered from Nazism: “All who belong to the Jewish confession, as well as those who belonged to this confession earlier but have not joined another religious affiliation, are considered Jews. If Jews convert to Christianity then they remain members of the body of Jews, as long as they have not been naturalized by the state in their homeland.” And, beforehand, the authors declared: “The state, after revoking the Nuremberg Laws, renounces all special regulations for the Jews, since the number of surviving Jews and those returning to Germany will not be so large that they still could be considered a danger for the German Volkstum.”¹⁴⁹

Another illustration of the mixture of knowledge regarding the exterminations and the permanence of anti-Semitism among German opposition groups and in much of the population appeared in the second clandestine leaflet distributed in early July 1942 by the essentially Catholic “White Rose” resistance group based at the University of Munich. In this leaflet the murder of Jews in Poland was mentioned. Yet the Munich students presented the issue in a strangely convoluted way and added an immediate disclaimer:

“We do not intend to say anything about the Jewish question in the broadsheet; nor do we want to enter a plea in their defense. No, we simply want to cite as an example the fact that since the conquest of Poland 300,000 Jews have been murdered in that country in the most bestial fashion. In this we see the most fearful crime against human dignity, a crime with which no other in the whole history of mankind can be compared. For whatever one thinks of the Jewish question, the Jews too are human beings and this has been done to human beings. Perhaps someone may say the Jews deserved such a fate; this statement would be an incredible presumption. But assuming somebody did say this, how would he deal with the fact that the whole of the younger generation of Polish nobility has been annihilated?”¹⁵⁰

In other words these militant enemies of the regime were well aware that the mass killing of Jews would not impress most readers of the leaflet and that crimes committed against Polish Catholics had to be added. Whether this addition also expressed the attitude of the “White Rose” group is hard to tell, but it certainly indicates their own assessment of Catholic middle-class public opinion in Germany sometime in mid-1942.

Notwithstanding such spreading knowledge, the regime’s propaganda was, as we saw, penetrating the minds of the Volksgenossen, activating preexisting layers of anti-Jewish hostility. A report of July 7, 1942, from the SD in Detmold to the SD main office in Bielefeld emphasized again a point already previously made. “The population has no understanding for the fact that Jews married to an Aryan are not obligated by law to display the star of David [This probably applied to the Jewish partners in mixed marriages with children]…. It is being asked with increasing frequency on what ground full-blooded Jews still run around without the star. Precisely this exception—so people say—is especially dangerous as the non-tagged Jew may nowadays be much more easily mistaken for an Aryan than before and may thus, without being suspected, eavesdrop and spy, as one encounters only marked Jews on the streets.” The report went on to describe a scandalous incident that had taken place on a local train, when a former SS man (now political leader) made space for an untagged Jew on his bank. Another passenger drew the attention of the former SS man to what he had just done, which led to embarrassment and anger all around.¹⁵¹

There were exceptions, of course. The same SD office sent a different report to Bielefeld on July 31 about the deportation of the last Jews from neighboring Lemgo. According to the agent, many of the older inhabitants (even party members) criticized the deportations “for all kinds of reasons.” People related to the Catholic Church often expressed the fear that the Germans would be punished by God for these acts. In discussions with supporters of the deportations, some people went so far as to argue that Jews would not harm a fly and that many had done much good. In neighboring Sabbenhausen, the wife of the teacher Heumann tried to bring sausage and other sorts of food to the Jews being deported: She was arrested.¹⁵²

Whether as God’s punishment or as retaliation by the Jews, for many Germans the original sin that would cause the retribution was the pogrom of November 9 and 10, 1938, when all synagogues in the Reich were set on fire;¹⁵³ and of course the deportations added to the burden of guilt. Thus an SD report of August 3, 1943, from Ochsenfurt, near Würzburg, alluded to the widespread rumor “that Würzburg would not be attacked by enemy planes because in Würzburg no synagogue had been set on fire. However, others say that now the planes would come to Würzburg, as a short while ago the last Jew had left Würzburg. Before his deportation he predicted that now Würzburg would be bombed.”¹⁵⁴

At times, however, the reactions were mixed with political comments that squarely put the blame upon the regime. In mid-August a local party official in Wiegolshausen (in Gau Mainfranken) reported on an hour-long conversation with a “very religious” peasant whose views “clearly expressed various trends that are dominant in this part [the religious one] of the population”: “Without Hitler—no war—our fight against the Jews has brought about the present developments of the war; Bolshevism, not as dangerous as is described—Doubts about victory—and if something changes regarding religious matters, there will be an uprising in the country.”¹⁵⁵

In many ways the SD reports show the resilience of religious feelings and beliefs and thus point to the important role that guidance from religious authorities could have played. As we saw, both Protestant and Catholic prelates and many ordinary priests knew that the trains transporting the Jews from the Reich and from all over Europe to “Poland” were not carrying them to labor camps but to their death. Clergymen who after the war claimed lack of knowledge, the likes of Cardinal Bertram or Bishop Gröber, for example, simply lied. They did not know, in historian Michael Phayer’s words, because they did not want to know.¹⁵⁶ Typically Bertram refused to receive briefings about the situation of the Jews from Margarete Sommer, the extremely well informed assistant to Bishop Preysing (whom we already encountered). Bertram demanded that any report from Sommer be put in writing and undersigned by Preysing to guarantee its authenticity; otherwise, he threatened, “I will not schedule anymore appointments for her.”¹⁵⁷Bertram could not have ignored that writing down the reports was tantamount to severe punishment.

As beforehand Catholic dignitaries remained divided about the appropriate way to react: The leading advocates of a public protest were Preysing and a group of Munich Jesuits, while the majority wished to avoid any confrontation with the authorities and favored various degrees of accommodation. Not unexpectedly the most “accommodating” prelate of all was Bertram. Matters came to a head when, in August 1943, upon Preysing’s request, Sommer prepared the “Draft for a Petition Favoring the Jews,” that would be signed by all the country’s bishops and sent to Hitler and to other members of the party elite.

The opening paragraph represented a courageous statement regarding all Jews: “With deepest sorrow—yes, even with holy indignation—have we German bishops learned of the deportation of non-Aryans in a manner that is scornful of all human rights. It is our holy duty to defend the unalienable rights of all men guaranteed by natural law…. The world would not understand if we failed to raise our voice loudly against the deprivation of rights of these innocent people. We would stand guilty before God and man because of our silence. The burden of our responsibility grows correspondingly more pressing as…shocking reports reach us regarding the awful, gruesome fate of the deported who have already been subjected in frightfully high numbers to really inhumane conditions of existence.” A series of demands that would have alleviated the fate of the deportees followed, but throughout the petition avoided any direct reference to extermination.¹⁵⁸ The bishops’ conference rejected the idea of submitting the petition and merely issued a pastoral letter admonishing German Catholics to respect the right of others to life, also that of “human beings of alien races and origin.”¹⁵⁹

Preysing still hoped to sway his fellow bishops by trying to muster encouragement and guidance from the Vatican. No encouragement was provided by Orsenigo: “Charity is well and good,” the nuncio told the bishop, “but the greatest charity is not to make problems for the Church.”¹⁶⁰Preysing’s repeated pleas to Pius XII himself elicited no guidance from the pontiff except, as we shall see in the next chapter, for the statement that bishops throughout the Continent were free to respond to the situation according to their own best judgment, an implicit support for Bertram’s passivity. The pope knew of the attitude prevalent among the German bishops and almost certainly understood that Preysing hoped for clear support from Rome, precisely in order to overcome their faintheartedness.¹⁶¹ In fact Pius XII further bolstered the abstentionist course of the majority by praising the choice made in 1942—and restated in the pastoral letter of 1943—the choice of private help instead of public protest.¹⁶²

The only private letter of protest addressed to Hitler by a church dignitary was sent on July 16, 1943, once again by Bishop Theophil Wurm, the leading figure of the Confessing Church. The bishop first mentioned the absence of any response to letters already addressed to various state and party dignitaries about matters of concern to all Christians. After affirming his own love of the fatherland and alluding to the heavy sacrifices that had become his own lot (he had lost his son and his son-in-law on the Eastern Front) and that of countless Evangelical Christians, Wurm, writing as “the most senior Evangelical bishop,” declared himself to be “assured of the understanding and support of wide circles within the Evangelical Church.” At this point he turned to the core issue of the letter:

“In the name of God and for the sake of the German people we give expression to the urgent request that the responsible leadership of the Reich will check the persecution and annihilation to which many men and women under German domination are being subjected, and without judicial trial. Now that the non-Aryans who have been the victims of the German onslaught have been largely eliminated, it is to be feared…that the so-called ‘privileged’ non-Aryans who have so far been spared are in renewed danger of being subjected to the same treatment.” Wurm then protested against the threat that mixed marriages would be dissolved. Indirectly he returned to the measures that had been taken against the Jews as such: “Such intentions like the measures taken against the other non-Aryans are in the sharpest contrast to Divine Law and an outrage against the very foundation of Western thought and life and against the very God-given right of human existence and human dignity.”¹⁶³

Wurm’s letter received no response, and although it was not a declaration ex cathedra, as Galen’s sermon against euthanasia had been, it was widely circulated. A few months later, on December 20, 1943, Wurm sent a letter to Lammers, pleading again for the safety of Mischlinge. This time he received a handwritten warning from the head of Hitler’s chancellery: “I hereby warn you emphatically,” Lammers wrote, “and request that in the future you scrupulously stay within the boundaries established by your profession and abstain from statements on general political matters. I urgently advise you further to show the greatest restraint in your personal and professional conduct. I ask you to refrain from replying to this letter.”¹⁶⁴ This warning of dire retribution silenced Wurm and the Confessing Church.

VII

In October 1942 Dr. Ernst Jahn, the general practitioner from Immenhausen, divorced his Jewish wife, Lilli, notwithstanding the fact that four of their five children were adolescents and one even younger. As we saw, Ernst had been involved with one Rita Schmidt, a colleague who had borne him a child. He may have believed (as he declared after the war) that the very existence of the five mixed-breed children would protect Lilli from any serious danger, even if she was separated from her Aryan husband. He could not ignore, however, that Lilli’s situation would in any case become more precarious than beforehand. The slightest infringement of any of the regulations and decrees impinging on every move of the last Jews living in the Reich could be fatal.

Lilli herself did not seem aware of what her new status implied. Hadn’t her eldest child, her son Gerhardt, become an enthusiastic auxiliary in an antiaircraft unit based near Kassel? Of course she could not know what had happened to other Jewish women in her situation—to a Hertha Feiner for example. Was Lilli trying to taunt fate? The business card she put on the door of the Kassel apartment merely indicated: “Dr. Med. Lilli Jahn.” She had forgotten—or maybe not?—that Jewish physicians were forbidden to use their professional title, that she had to add “Sara” to her name, and, in any case, was not allowed to cater to Aryan patients. Somebody denounced her; she was summoned to the Gestapo and, on August 30, 1943, she was arrested.¹⁶⁵

By mid-1943 the remnants of German Jewry, bereft of any institutional framework, had become a scattering of individuals, defined on Gestapo lists as so many specific “cases”; in the logic of the system, they would have to disappear. The Klemperers, although they were a childless mixed marriage, had not yet received a summons. But how long could they hope to remain in limbo? Their daily existence was becoming harder. At the end of 1943 they were ordered to move again, to yet another “Jews’ house,” even more overcrowded than the previous one. “The worst thing here,” Victor Klemperer noted on December 14, “is the promiscuity. The doors of three households open into a single hallway [on the third floor]: the Cohns, the Stühlers, and ourselves. Shared bathroom and lavatory. Kitchen shared with the Stühlers, only partly separated—one source of water for all three—a small adjoining kitchen space for the Cohns.”¹⁶⁶ The fear of informers had grown with time, even in conversations with Jews whom one did not know well; Klemperer heard rumors about one of the inhabitants in his own house, and he noted a telling joke: “A star-wearing Jew is abused on the street, a small crowd gathers, some people take the Jew’s side. After a while, the Jew shows the Gestapo badge on the reverse of his jacket lapel, and the names of his supporters are noted.”¹⁶⁷ In one form or another, this was part of everyday reality in the Reich, in the remaining ghettos, in every occupied country.

To Klemperer the attitudes of the population appeared as contradictory as ever, even in this last phase of the war. Frequently he encountered expressions of sympathy and encouragement (“it can’t last much longer”) or just unremarked acts of kindness; nonetheless anti-Semitism was never far away. “On my way to Katz,” he noted on February 7, 1944, “an elderly man in passing: ‘Judas!’ In the corridor of the health insurance office. The only wearer of the star, I walk back and forth in front of an occupied bench. I hear a worker talking: ‘They should give them an injection. Then that would be the end of them!’ Does he mean me? Wearers of the star? The man is called a few minutes later. I sit down in his place. An elderly woman beside me, whispering: “That was nasty! Perhaps one day what he wished upon you will happen to him. One can never know. God judges!”¹⁶⁸

The reader may remember young Cordelia, the Jewish girl who grew up as a Catholic and, in September 1941, was expelled from the Berlin Catholic Girls Association by her headmistress who didn’t want to keep “girls carrying a Jewish star.” Cordelia’s mother, Elisabeth Langgässer, a convert herself and already a well-known writer, was half Jewish, but the girl’s father, who did not live with Langgässer anymore, was a full Jew. Thus, Cordelia, who turned fourteen in 1943, was a “three-quarter Jewess.”

Sometime in late 1942 or early 1943, Langgässer succeeded in getting a Spanish passport for her daughter and even an entry visa to Spain. Cordelia Langgässer became Cordelia Garcia-Scouvart and stopped wearing the star. Before long both daughter and mother were summoned to Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. In the presence of her mother, who remained silent throughout, Cordelia was given the choice of signing a declaration that she agreed to keep her German citizenship and was ready to submit to all laws and decrees applying to her status as a Jew, or to have her mother prosecuted for getting the Spanish passport under false pretenses and thus committing a treasonable act. Cordelia signed. “And now,” the Gestapo official volunteered, “you may go to the office across the hall and purchase a new Jewish star; it costs 50 Pfennig.”¹⁶⁹

In Berlin in 1943 the Gestapo used Mischlinge to arrest any remaining Jews slated for deportation. Two such half-Jewish auxiliaries took Cordelia to the Jewish hospital that had become an assembly and administrative center for all Jews, after the disbanding of the Reichsvereinigung. The hospital (first using its buildings on Iranischestrasse, then on Schulstrasse), was of course under complete Gestapo control; Eichmann had dispatched SS Hauptsturmführer Fritz Woehrn to supervise it, while an obscure Jewish physician, albeit a very able and energetic one, Dr. Walter Lustig, a “one-man Reichsvereinigung,” was in charge of everyday matters. A number of Jewish patients continued to stay on the premises, mostly protected by some special status; Jews rounded up in other German cities temporarily landed there, as did Jews caught in hiding. At the end of the war some 370 patients and around one thousand inmates in all still lived at the hospital; this number included ninety-three children and seventy-six Gestapo prisoners.¹⁷⁰

At the hospital any male with some power could share any woman’s bed; Lustig had an array of eager nurses at his disposal, as he promised to one or another an exemption from deportation. Cordelia, the young newcomer, was shared by two Mischling twins from Cologne, Hans and Heinz, although, at fourteen, she had not even menstruated.¹⁷¹ But Hans and Heinz could not protect her in any way: Toward the end of 1943, she was transferred from the children’s section to that of the mentally ill, all gathered for deportation. Before the end of the year she boarded the train for Theresienstadt.¹⁷²

Cordelia’s mother had come to visit once, just before her daughter’s departure. She conveyed her impressions in a letter to a friend: “We [Elisabeth Langgässer and her Aryan husband] found her entirely calm, even cheerful and confident, as first, it was really only Theresienstadt and not Poland and, second, because she traveled as accompanying nursing personnel. She had to take care of two children and of an infant and wore a nurse’s uniform; she even had a small bonnet and that, I think, filled her with pride.”¹⁷³

After a brief stay in Theresienstadt, Cordelia Maria Sara was shipped to Auschwitz.

VIII

Following the failed attempts to establish a unified resistance group in the spring of 1942, the Jewish Fighting Organization (Zydowska Organizacia Bojowa, or ZOB) was created in Warsaw on July 28, 1942, a few days after the beginning of the Aktion. The initial group of some two hundred members mostly succeeded in dodging the deportations, but beyond that there was little the ZOB could do. In August some pistols and hand grenades were purchased from the Polish communist underground. A first and minor operation—an attempt to kill the chief of the Jewish police, Józef Szerynski—failed. Much worse occurred a few days later: The Germans arrested a group of ZOB members on their way from Warsaw to Hrubieszow and tortured and killed them; soon afterward, on September 3, the Gestapo caught some leading members of the organization in Warsaw and murdered them as well: The weapons were discovered and seized. This catastrophic series of events seemed, at first, to put an end to a courageous venture that had hardly begun.¹⁷⁴

An eerie period of apparent respite and complete uncertainty descended on the surviving inhabitants of the ghetto after mid-September. The approximately 40,000 Jews left in an area of drastically reduced size either worked in the remaining workshops or in sorting the mounds of belongings abandoned by the victims. The German administrators had been replaced by Gestapo officials, mainly of low rank.¹⁷⁵

None of the remaining Jews knew when the next German move would take place. By then much had transpired about Treblinka: “The women go naked into the bath house to their death,” Abraham Lewin quoted the report of an escapee on September 27: “The condition of the dead bodies. What are they killing them with? With simple vapour (steam). Death comes after seven or eight minutes. On their arrival they take away the shoes of the unfortunates. The proclamation in the square: ‘Emigrants from Warsaw.’”¹⁷⁶On October 5 he noted: “No one knows what tomorrow will bring and we live in perpetual fear and terror.”¹⁷⁷ News seeped in from the outside world. On November 10 the diarist recorded news of the Anglo-American landings in North Africa and the British offensive in Egypt; he also reported about Hitler’s speech to the “Old Fighters” on the previous day: “As yet we have not received a copy of this speech in print, but the Jews already know that it is steeped in venomous hatred and full of terrible threats against the Jews, that he talked of the total annihilation of the Jews of Europe, from the youngest to the very old.”¹⁷⁸ On November 17 Lewin mentioned the final liquidation of all the Jews of Lublin.¹⁷⁹ News reports about mass exterminations in the Polish provinces soon replaced a spate of reports about protests in England and in the United States regarding the murder of the Jews: “Departing this life is a matter of 10 or 15 minutes in Treblinka or in Oswiecim (Auschwitz).”¹⁸⁰ On January 15, 1943, Lewin wrote of renewed anxiety as the ghetto expected a forthcoming Aktion.¹⁸¹ The following day he recorded his last entry.¹⁸²

In the meantime the ZOB had overcome the crisis triggered by the events of September 1942. Yet, even under the dire new circumstances, unification of all political forces in support of armed resistance occurred only stagewise and not in full. The lengthy negotiations proved once more how deeply divisive ideological issues remained even among the younger generation of ghetto Jews. A Jewish National Committee was first established in October 1942, uniting all left-wing and centrist Zionist youth movements with the communists. The Bund, however, again refused to join, and only after further—and lengthy—discussions did it agree to “coordinate” its activities with the national committee. A Jewish Coordinating Committee was set up.¹⁸³ As for the right-wing Zionists (the Revisionists and their youth movement, Betar), they had already established an independent armed organization, the Jewish Military Union (Zydowski Zwiazek Wojskowski, or ZZW), prior to (and without any link with) the Jewish Coordinating Committee.¹⁸⁴ Whether the Revisionists did not want to cooperate with the “leftists” of the ZOB or whether the ZOB kept them at arm’s length remains unclear. Ideological divisiveness persisted to the end.

On January 18, 1943, following a brief visit by Himmler, the Germans launched a new Aktion (albeit a limited one at this stage); their plan was partly foiled. Resistance members—Mordechai Anielewicz, the commander of the ZOB, among them—attacked the German escort of the front column and the Jews dispersed. Some 5,000 to 6,000 Jews were ultimately caught during the January operation. Lewin and his daughter were among them; they were deported to Treblinka and murdered.¹⁸⁵ This first sign of armed resistance probably led Himmler to issue an order to Krüger on February 16 to liquidate the ghetto entirely, “for security reasons.”¹⁸⁶

The January events considerably bolstered the authority of the fighting organization among the ghetto population and garnered praise from various Polish circles. During the weeks that followed, the ZOB executed a few Jewish traitors (Jacob Lejkin, the second-in-command of the Jewish police; Alfred Nossig, a shady eccentric who apparently worked for the Gestapo; and some others); it collected—at times “extorted”—money from some wealthy ghetto inhabitants, acquired a few weapons from the communist Gwardia Ludowa and also from private dealers, and mainly organized its “combat groups” in expectation of the forthcoming German operation. In the meantime the inhabitants, increasingly ready to face an armed struggle in the ghetto, were hoarding whatever food they could get and preparing underground shelters for a lengthy standoff. The council, now chaired by a nonentity, Marc Lichtenbaum, and reduced to utter passivity, nonetheless contacted Polish resistance groups, mainly the Home Army (Armeia Krajowa, or AK), to denounce the ZOB as a group of reckless adventurers without any backing in the ghetto.¹⁸⁷

The council’s denunciations were not the source of the AK’s reticence to provide help for the ZOB, although after the January events it accepted to sell some weapons. Gen. Stefan Rowecki, the commander in chief of the Home Army remained evasive when asked for stronger support. The traditional anti-Semitism of nationalist conservative Poles may have played a role but there was more to this basically negative stand. The Armeia Krajowa was suspicious of the leftist and pro-Soviet leanings of part of the ZOB (while it was ready to supply some weapons to the Revisionists); furthermore, and mainly so it seems, the Polish command was worried that fighting could spread from the ghetto to the city while its own plans for an uprising and its own forces were not yet ready. As a result AK even offered its help to transfer the Jewish fighters from the ghetto to partisan groups in the forests. The offer was turned down.¹⁸⁸

The Germans did not expect major difficulties in the final “evacuation” of the ghetto, notwithstanding the January events and other signs indicating that some ghetto Jews throughout the General Government were opting for armed action (such as the attack, on December 22, 1942, by a Jewish group in Kraków on a coffeehouse popular with Wehrmacht personnel, the Cyganeria).¹⁸⁹ Nor were the Germans attaching any significance to the failure of the campaign organized by their largest entrepreneurs in the ghetto, Toebbens and Schultz, to transfer Jewish workers to workshops in the Lublin area.

As for the leaders and members of the ZOB, they had no illusions about the outcome of the approaching struggle. “I remember a conversation I had with Mordechai Anielewicz,” Ringelblum wrote. “He gave an accurate appraisal of the uneven struggle, he foresaw the destruction of the ghetto and he was sure that neither he nor his combatants would survive the liquidation of the ghetto. He was sure that they would die like stray dogs and no one would even know their last resting place.”¹⁹⁰

When the final liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto started on April 19, 1943, the eve of Passover, the Jews were not caught by surprise: The streets were empty, and as soon as German units entered the area, firing started. The early street battles took place mainly in three distinct and unconnected areas: parts of what had been the Central Ghetto, the Brushmakers Workshop surroundings, and the Toebbers-Schultz Workshop surroundings.¹⁹¹ The ideological opposition that precluded some arrangement between the Revisionists and ZOB before the uprising apparently persisted during the fighting and in the later historiography. According to Moshe Arens’s painstaking reconstruction of the combat, the role of the ZZW in the bitter street battle around Muranowski Square and their hoisting of a Polish and a Zionist flag on the tallest building in the area are generally left unmentioned in later renditions of the uprising. And the names of the ZZW commanders, Pawel Frenkel, Leon Rodal, and David Apfelbaum, are rarely mentioned; all three fell in battle.¹⁹²

Fighting in the open lasted for several days (mainly from April 19 to April 28) until the Jewish combattants were compelled to retreat into the underground bunkers. Each bunker became a small fortress, and only the systematic burning down of the buildings and the massive use of flame throwers, tear gas, and hand grenades finally drove the remaining fighters and inhabitants into the streets. On May 8 Anielewicz was killed in the command bunker at Mila Street 18. Combat continued sporadically while some groups of fighters succeeded in reaching the Aryan side of the city by way of the sewers. Days later some of the fighters, “Kazik” for example, took again to the sewers and returned to the ghetto ruins to try and save some remnants: They found nobody alive.

On May 16 SS general Jürgen Stroop proclaimed the end of the Grossaktion: “The Jewish quarter in Warsaw exists no more.” Symbolically the Germans concluded the operations by blowing up the Warsaw [Great] Synagogue at 20:15 hours.¹⁹³ According to Stroop, fifteen Germans and auxiliaries had been killed and some ninety wounded during the fighting. “Of the total of 56,065 Jews caught,” the SS general reported further, “about 7,000 were exterminated within the former Ghetto in the course of the action, and 6,929 by transporting them to T.II [Treblinka], which means 14,000 Jews were exterminated altogether. Beyond the number of 56,065 Jews, an estimated number of 5,000 to 6,000 were killed by explosions or in fires.”¹⁹⁴

Posters informed the Polish population that anybody hiding a Jew would be executed. Moreover, according to Stroop, “permission was granted to the Polish police to pay one-third of the cash seized, to any of its men who arrested a Jew in the Aryan part of Warsaw. This measure already produced results,” he wrote. Finally the SS general reported, “for the most part the Polish population approved the measures taken against the Jews. Shortly before the end of the large-scale operation, the governor issued a special proclamation…to the Polish population; in it he informed them of the reasons for destroying the former Jewish Ghetto by mentioning the assassinations carried out lately in the Warsaw area and the mass graves found in Catyn [Katyn]; at the same time they were asked to assist us in our fight against Communist agents and Jews.”¹⁹⁵

On May 1 the uprising found its first echo in Goebbels’s diary: “Reports from the occupied territories do not bring anything sensationally new. Noteworthy though is the exceptionally sharp fighting in Warsaw between our police and even Wehrmacht units and the rebelling Jews. The Jews have managed to organize the defense of the ghetto. The fighting there is very hard; it goes so far that the Jewish command issues daily military reports. This whole fun will probably not last long. One sees though what one may expect from the Jews when they manage to set their hands on weapons. Unfortunately they have in part also good German weapons, mainly machine guns. God knows how they got them.”¹⁹⁶

During the following days and weeks the minister regularly mentioned the ghetto uprising. According to him the Jews had bought their weapons from Germany’s allies returning home via Warsaw; the Jews fought with such desperation because they knew what was awaiting them and so on. On May 22 he noted: “The fighting for the Warsaw ghetto continues. The Jews are still resisting. But, all in all, it can be considered as not dangerous and overcome.”¹⁹⁷

The desperate Jewish resistance further came up on May 31, 1943, at a high-level meeting in the General Government convened to discuss the worsening security situation, in the presence of RSHA chief Kaltenbrunner, a representative of the Führer Chancellery and senior Wehrmacht officers. Frank’s second-in-command, President Ludwig Losacker, reported on the ghetto uprising: “[The liquidation of the ghetto] was, by the way, very difficult. The police forces lost 15 dead and suffered 88 wounded. One noticed that…armed Jewish women fought to the last against the Waffen-SS and policemen.”¹⁹⁸

German opposition circles were also informed, although details were at times strangely off the mark. In a letter to his wife dated May 4, 1943, Helmuth von Moltke described a brief stay in Warsaw during these same days. “A big cloud of smoke stood above the city and could still be seen a good half hour after my departure by the express train, that means about 30 km. It was caused by a fight which had been raging for some days in the ghetto. The remaining Jews—30,000—reinforced by airborne Russians, German deserters, and Polish communists, had turned part of it into an underground fortress. It is said that they have made passages between the cellars of houses while the Germans were patrolling the streets, and reinforced the ceilings of the cellars; exits are said to lead by underground passages from the ghetto to other houses. I was told that cows and pigs had been kept in those catacombs and large food depots and wells had been installed. In any case it was said that something like partisan fighting in the town had been directed from these headquarters, so that it was decided to clear out the ghetto: but the resistance was so strong that a real assault with guns and flamethrowers was needed. And that is why the ghetto is still burning. It had already been going on for several days when I got there and was still burning on my return journey yesterday.”¹⁹⁹

German or Polish sources must have supplied Moltke with some of the fantastic stories about “airborne Russians, German deserters, and Polish communists”; such tales may have stemmed from the generally shared belief that Jews would not be able to put up a fight on their own. In Hassell’s diary the ghetto uprising appeared a few days later, preceded by a few lines about the gassing of hundreds of thousands of Jews “in specially built halls.” Then: “In the meantime the hopeless Jewish remnant in the ghetto defended itself; there has been heavy fighting which will end in total extermination by the SS.”²⁰⁰

Some sixteen months later, on September 1, 1944, during a military conference dealing, among other issues, with the Polish uprising in Warsaw, Hitler was told by Gen. Walter Wenck that the center of the city had been the area of the ghetto. “Has that been eliminated now?” Hitler asked. The (incompletely transmitted) answer came of course from Himmler’s representative at the military conferences, SS general Hermann Fegelein (the hero of the drowning attempt of Jewish women and children in the Pripet Marshes at the end of July 1941): “As such already everything.”²⁰¹In fact, on June 11, 1943, Himmler had to order again “that the city area of the former ghetto be totally flattened, every cellar and every sewer be filled up. After completion of this work, topsoil will be placed over the area and a large park will be laid out.”²⁰² In one year, between July 1943 and July 1944 (when the Red Army approached the city), the full destruction of the ghetto ruins was the only completed part of Himmler’s project.²⁰³

The news of the ghetto uprising rapidly spread among Jews in Germany and in most occupied countries: “On Sunday [May 30],” Klemperer recorded on June 1, “Lewinsky related as an entirely vouched for and widespread rumor (originating with soldiers): there had been a bloodbath in Warsaw, revolt by Poles and Jews, German tanks had been destroyed by mines at the entrance of the Jewish town, whereupon the Germans had shot the whole ghetto to pieces—fires burning for days and many thousands of dead. Yesterday I asked several people about it. Whispered reply: yes, they too had heard the same or similar, but not dared to pass it on. Eva, coming from the dentist, reported that Simon stated with certainty, 3,000 German deserters had also taken part in this revolt, and that battles lasting weeks (!) had taken place before the Germans had mastered the situation. Simon’s credibility is limited. Nevertheless: that such rumors are in circulation is symptomatic.” Simon had added that there was also unrest in other occupied countries.²⁰⁴

In Lodz, Kovno, Vilna, and most probably all throughout occupied Eastern Europe, people knew. Rosenfeld wrote of it in his diary;²⁰⁵ so did Tory, who reported that the news had spread among the Lithuanian population, throughout Kovno.²⁰⁶

By April 22 the news had reached Herman Kruk in Vilna and, so it seems, the entire population of the ghetto.²⁰⁷ On April 30, under the title “Warszawskie Getto Kona!” [The Warsaw Ghetto Is Dying], Kruk returned to the uprising: “Yesterday Swit [British broadcasts camouflaged as originating in Poland] once again sounded the alarm to the world, and once again the radio announcer repeated, as if he wanted the world to remember, the Warsaw Ghetto is bleeding to death. The Warsaw Ghetto is dying! Warsaw Jews are defending themselves like heroes. For thirteen days now, the Germans have had to fight with the ghetto for every threshold. Jews do not let themselves be taken and are fighting like lions…. The Warsaw Ghetto is dying!…My brother-in-law has a wife and two children there—he is silent. My neighbor has a mother and a sister—she is silent. And my own sister and children?…I am ashamed of my silence.”²⁰⁸

In October 1942 the well-known Yiddish novelist Yehoshua Perle completed his chronicle of the deportation of the Warsaw Jews for the “Oneg Shabbat” archive; he called it Khurbm Varshe (the destruction of Warsaw.) Three sentences in this record “shocked the surviving Yiddish world,” in the words of historian David Roskies: “Three times 100,000 people,” wrote Perle, “lacked the courage to say: No. Each one of them was out to save his own skin. Each one was ready to sacrifice even his own father, his own mother, his own wife and children.”²⁰⁹ These harsh words were written several months before the uprising.

The events of April 1943 introduced a new perspective. Of course the Warsaw fighters did not seek even a minimal success in military terms. Whether they wanted to redeem the image of Jews facing death, and to erase, so to speak, Perle’s terrible verdict, is not certain, either. They knew that most of a leaderless, hungry, and utterly desperate mass could not but submit passively to unbridled violence, before the uprising and no less so in its wake. Not all of them meant to send a message to their own political movements in Eretz Israel or to the socialist community: For a long time already, many had given up on the active solidarity of their comrades outside Europe. They just wanted, as they had proclaimed, to die with dignity.

In June 1943, one Herbert Habermalz, a sergeant in the Luftwaffe who belonged to a flight crew, wrote to his former colleagues at the Rudolf Sack machine engineering firm, where he had been employed as a clerk in the sales department. He described a flight from Kraków to Warsaw: “We flew several circles about the city [Warsaw]. And with great satisfaction we could recognize the complete extermination of the Jewish ghetto. There our folks did really a fantastic job. There is no house that has not been totally destroyed. This we saw the day before yesterday. And yesterday we took off for Odessa. We received special food, extra cookies, additional milk and butter, and, above all, a very big bar of bittersweet chocolate.”²¹⁰

IX

The life of Jews in former Poland was coming to an end. On March 31, 1943, the Kraków ghetto was liquidated and those of its inhabitants who were selected for work were sent to the Plaszow slave labor camp, commanded by the notoriously sadistic Austrian Amon Goeth; their liquidation was to follow later on. And so it went, from ghetto to ghetto, then from work camp to work camp.

Yet in some ghettos, the situation appeared different at times, for a short while of course. Thus, the 40,000 Jews who, in the fall of 1942, were still alive in Bialystok, had good reasons for hope. Like in Lodz, the ghetto was particularly active in manufacturing goods and performing services for the Wehrmacht. Barash’s relations with the military and even with some of the civilian authorities seemed good. A local resistance movement was getting organized under the leadership of Tenenbaum-Tamaroff, although the German threat did not appear immediate.²¹¹

The first warning signals came in late 1942–early 1943 with the deportation of all Jews from the Bialystok district to Treblinka. During the first days of February 1943, the Germans struck again, but as had previously happened in Lodz, only part of the population (10,000 Jews) was deported and approximately 30,000 inhabitants remained. Moreover, in a meeting on February 19, a representative of the Bialystok security police commander promised Barash that no further resettlement of Jews was expected for the time being. The continued presence of 30,000 Jews in the ghetto was likely to last until “the end of the war.”²¹²

Life returned to “normal” for the remaining population of the ghetto: Barash was confident that the new stability would last; Tenenbaum, however, was convinced that the liquidation of the ghetto was approaching.²¹³ As we saw, in May Himmler had restated his full extermination policy, with the exception of essential workers who for the time being would be transferred to the slave labor camps in the Lublin area; the remaining Jews of Bialystok would be sent to Treblinka.²¹⁴

Under Globocnik’s personal command, the Germans prepared the liquidation in utter secrecy to avoid a repeat performance of the Warsaw events. On August 16, 1943, when the operation started, Barash and Tenenbaum (who had broken off all relations by that time) were both taken completely by surprise. While the mass of the population followed the orders and moved helplessly to the assembly sites, sporadic fighting flared up in various parts of the ghetto, with only minimal impact on the “evacuation” operation. Within days the ghetto was emptied and the fighters had either been killed or had committed suicide. Barash was deported to Treblinka; Tenenbaum probably took his life.²¹⁵

In July 1943 the Germans massacred 26,000 inhabitants of the Minsk ghetto; some 9,000 Jewish laborers remained alive for a few months but, at the end of 1943, no Jews were mentioned any longer in the Reichskommissar’s report about the capital of Belorussia.²¹⁶ One after the other, the ghettos of “Weissruthenien” were liquidated, like those of the General Government. Small groups of Jews fled to nearby forests to join partisan units. A number of armed rebellions took place but were easily quelled as the Germans now expected some sporadic resistance. In some ghettos, on the other hand, where determined resistance could have been expected, as in Vilna, events took an unexpected turn.

“Here in the ghetto, the mood is cheerful,” Kruk recorded on June 16, 1943. “All rumors about liquidation have disappeared for the time being. A rapid building and expansion of the ghetto industry has been going on in recent weeks…. Yesterday, District Commissar Hingst and [Hingst’s deputy] Murer visited the ghetto. Both left very satisfied and “amused” themselves with the ghetto representatives. The ghetto breathed in relief. We ask—for how long?”²¹⁷

At the beginning of 1943 the situation in Vilna had indeed been relatively peaceful. On January 15 Gens gave an indirect expression to this state of things in an address celebrating the first anniversary of the ghetto theater: “How did the idea come up?” Gens said, “Simply to give people the opportunity to escape from the reality of the ghetto for a few hours. This we achieved. These are dark and hard days. Our body is in the ghetto but our spirit has not been enslaved…. Before the first concert they said that a concert must not be held in a graveyard. That is true, but the whole of life is now a graveyard. Heaven forbid that we should let our spirit collapse. We must be strong in spirit and in body…. I am convinced that the Jewish [life] that is developing here and the Jewish [faith] that burns in our hearts will be our reward. I am certain that the day of the phrase. ‘Why hast Thou deserted us?’ will pass and that we shall still live to see better days. I would like to hope that those days will come soon and in our lifetime.”²¹⁸

In April, though, Gens’s optimism and that of the ghetto population were sharply challenged. During the first days of the month, the Germans assembled several thousands of Jews from the smaller ghettos of the Vilna district under the pretext of sending them to Kovno. Instead of Kovno they were dispatched to Ponar and massacred. The killings instilled terror in the ghetto. “Today,” Rudashevski recorded on April 5, “the terrible news reached us: 85 railroad cars of Jews, around 5,000 persons, were not taken to Kovno as promised but transported by train to Ponar where they were shot to death. 5,000 new bloody victims. The ghetto was deeply shaken, as though struck by thunder. The atmosphere of slaughter has gripped the people. It has begun again…. People sit caged as in a box. On the other side lurks the enemy, which is preparing to destroy us in a sophisticated manner according to a plan, as today’s slaughter has proved.”²¹⁹ Yet, like so often beforehand, the fear was soon dispelled as nothing seemed to happen in Vilna as such; the cheerfulness that Kruk had noted returned.

On June 21, 1943, Himmler ordered the liquidation of all ghettos in the Ostland. Working Jews were to be kept in concentration camps and “the unnecessary inhabitants of the Jewish ghettos were to be evacuated to the East.”²²⁰

Of course the members of the FPO were not aware of the liquidation decision but, nonetheless, perceived the April killings as an omen. For them the question now arose: Should armed resistance be organized in the ghetto, or should the FPO leave for the forests and eventually join Soviet partisan units before the Germans struck? Gens himself, aware of the debate, was determined to have the FPO stay in the ghetto, together with the population that it would help to defend and, eventually, allow to flee.²²¹ Yet by the end of June, as the Germans were systematically liquidating the remaining small communities in the Vilna region, an increasing number of FPO members moved to the forests against Gens’s will: A confrontation within the ghetto was barely avoided.²²²

It seems that at this point (June–July 1943), the communist members of the FPO were hiding from Kovner and his left-wing Zionist comrades (Hashomer Hatzair) that they were actually under the orders of a far larger communist organization and that their “delegate,” Itzik Wittenberg, had been elected head of the FPO without Kovner and his people being aware of the dimension and secretive nature of the communist penetration.²²³

Gens had apparently decided that Wittenberg represented a danger to his own plans, and on July 15, late at night, as the communist leader was conferring with the ghetto chief (at Gens’s invitation), police forces (probably Lithuanians) arrested him. Freed by FPO members, Wittenberg went into hiding. The German reaction was foreseeable: If Wittenberg was not delivered, the ghetto population would be exterminated. Whether under pressure from his underground comrades (his communist fellow militants were the first to suggest that the step be taken) or because he sensed the fear of the ghetto populace and its increasingly threatening attitude toward the FPO, Wittenberg agreed to give himself up; once in German hands, instead of submitting to torture and certain death, he committed suicide.²²⁴

Kruk’s Vilna diary was interrupted on the eve of “Wittenberg Day.” It is not unlikely that the pages dealing with it were hidden or destroyed when Soviet forces reentered the city: “Wittenberg’s betrayal” by his comrades could have been of interest to the NKVD. That part of the chronicle never resurfaced.²²⁵ Kalmanovitch described the events in some detail in his own diary, apparently on the basis of rumors rather than precise knowledge. Throughout, the YIVO scholar was hostile to the FPO and to attempts at armed resistance that endangered the population. In this particular case he (wrongly) attributed all responsibility to the Revisionists, whereas he praised the communist Wittenberg for giving himself up and committing suicide.²²⁶

On September 14 the Germans ordered Gens to report to the headquarters of the Security Police. Although he had been warned of danger and told to flee, the ghetto chief went nonetheless, to avoid reprisals against the population. At six o’clock that same afternoon the Germans shot him.²²⁷ Part of the remaining 20,000 inhabitants were murdered in Ponar, part were deported to Sobibor, while able-bodied men (including Kruk and Kalmanovitch) were shipped to labor camps in Estonia. The Jews left in the ghetto were murdered just before the arrival of the Red Army.²²⁸

The FPO was unable to organize any significant resistance inside the ghetto, possibly due to Gens’s hostility, mainly because the majority of the population was opposed to an armed uprising and believed that the labor camps in Estonia offered a safer option, and possibly also as a result of Kovner’s hesitant leadership. Thus, after some minor skirmishes with the Germans, some eighty members of the FPO slipped out of the city in several groups and joined the partisans.²²⁹

On April 6, 1943, on the day he had recorded the massacre in Ponar, Rudashevski’s diary ended. The last line read: “We may be fated for the worst.”²³⁰ Itzhok and his family were murdered in Ponar a few months later.²³¹ In Lodz, Sierakowiak broke off his own diary entries a week or so after Rudashevski; the last line was recorded on April 15: “There is really no way out of this for us.”²³² In the summer he died of tuberculosis and starvation.²³³

X

Just before the uprising of the Warsaw ghetto, a merry-go-round was set up on Krasínski Square, on the Aryan side, close to the ghetto walls. As the desperate struggle unfolded, the merry-go-round did not stop, and joyful crowds besieged it day in, day out, while the Jews were dying on the other side of the wall:

Sometimes the wind from burning houses

Would bring the kites along

And people on the merry-go-round

Caught the flying charred bits.

This wind from the burning houses

Blew open the girls’ skirts

And the happy throngs laughed

On a beautiful Warsaw Sunday.

It was during the uprising that Czeslaw Milosz wrote “Campo di Fiori,” his best-known poem, “as an ordinary human gesture.”²³⁴ The poet compares the burning at the stake of the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno on the Campo di Fiori, while busy and indifferent Roman crowds are milling around, to the indifference of the Polish masses during the agony of the ghetto Jews. And so it was. There is nothing unlikely, therefore, about the assessment sent in August 1943, a few months after the uprising, by a representative of the Polish underground to the government-in-exile regarding the “Jewish question” in postwar Poland:

“In the Homeland as a whole—independently of the general psychological situation at any given moment—the position is such that the return of the Jews to their jobs and workshops is completely out of the question, even if the number of Jews were greatly reduced. The non-Jewish population has filled the places of the Jews in the towns and cities; in a large part of Poland this is a fundamental change, final in character. The return of masses of Jews would be experienced by the population not as a restitution but as an invasion against which they would defend themselves, even with physical means.”²³⁵

In the meantime, in Poland as in much of occupied Europe, money did help. Marcel Reich-Ranicki, whom we encountered in the Warsaw ghetto as music critic, then as typist during the fateful meeting of the council at which Höfle announced the beginning of the deportations, had escaped the main Aktion and that of January 1943, as employee of the Council. Tosia, Marcel’s wife, was left alive; his parents were shipped to Treblinka. In February 1943, Marcel and Tosia fled the ghetto. The underground had given him some money for his assistance in getting hold of a large sum from the council’s safe.

Marcel bribed a Jewish guard, then two Polish policemen, and the couple reached the Aryan side of the city. But as they were moving from one hiding place to another, like most fleeing Jews they were confronted with the same constantly recurring pattern: “Extortion and escape…. Thousands of Poles, often unemployed adolescents…spent their days suspiciously watching all passers-by. They were everywhere, especially near the ghetto boundary, looking for Jews, hunting down Jews. This pastime was their profession and probably also their passion. It was said that, even if there were no other signs, they were able to identify Jews by the sadness in their eyes.”²³⁶ These “Schmaltsovniks,” as they were commonly called, did not aim at delivering Jews to the Germans; they wanted money or anything of value, “at least a jacket or a winter coat.”²³⁷

And yet some Poles offered help, at great danger to themselves and their families. Thus Marcel and Tosia were hidden and saved by a Polish couple living in the Warsaw suburbs, “by Bolek, the typesetter, and by Genia, his wife.”²³⁸ It happened in the capital, and it happened in the provinces. In the words of a survivor: “These people helped us and risked their lives because they had to fear every neighbor, every passerby, every child, who might inform on them.”²³⁹ This, however, is precisely the point made by historian Jan Gross: “Because the Poles were not ready to assist the Jews and by and large refrained from doing so, the death punishment for harboring Jews was meted out by the Germans systematically and without reprieve and the task of helping was so difficult.”²⁴⁰

The diary kept by a Polish teacher, Franciszka Reizer, living in a village in the Rszezow province, starkly illustrates these various outcomes: “20 November 1942. The Germans drove many peasants and firemen from the villages and, with their help, arranged a hunt for Jews…. In the course of this action seven Jews were captured, old, young and children. These Jews were taken to the firemen’s station and shot the next day.” November 21: “On the fields belonging to Augustyn Bator Jews arranged themselves an earth bunker…. They were caught by the gendarmes who were hunting after Jews. All of them were shot on the spot.” On November 30, Reizer mentioned the death of a Jewish woman who tried to find shelter in the village. A year later, on October 2, 1943: “These days the last Jews in the vicinity were tracked down and murdered. They were shot near the tannery which belonged to the Jew Blank. Here, 48 Jews were buried.”²⁴¹ A year later again, the diary mentions that the Germans murdered a Polish family who had hidden Jews.

In the vast rural areas of eastern Poland (or western Ukraine) there was no difference of attitude between Polish and Ukrainian peasants: traditional hatred, isolated instances of courage, and mostly, almost everywhere, the insatiable greed for money or other spoils.

Aryeh Klonicki (Klonymus) had, as may be remembered, described in his diary the fate of Jews in Tarnopol, eastern Galicia, during the first days of the German invasion. Together with his wife, Malwina (Hertzmann), Aryeh returned to Buczacz, where he had lived and been a high school teacher for many years. In July 1942 their son Adam was born. In July 1943 Aryeh and Malwina fled to the neighboring villages desperately trying to save their son and themselves. The Klonickis’ bitterness emerges in the very first entry (July 7) of Aryeh’s short diary: “A new period has begun here since the end of 1943: it is the era of liquidation. A Jew is no longer allowed to remain alive…. If it weren’t for the hatred of local inhabitants one could still find a way of hiding. But, as things are, it is difficult. Every shepherd or Christian child who sees a Jew immediately reports him to the authorities, who lose no time following up these reports. There are some Christians who are ostensibly prepared to hide Jews for full payment. But actually no sooner have they robbed their victims of all their belongings than they hand them over to the authorities. There are some local Christians who have gained distinction in the discovery of Jewish hideouts. There is an eight-year-old boy (a Christian one, of course) who loiters all day long in Jewish houses and has uncovered many a hideout.”²⁴²

The Klonickis tried one hideout after another and each time were cheated out of their money or possessions. Their former maid, Franka was ready to help save the child, while they hid in nearby fields. “Franka is really displaying considerable devotion towards us and very much wants to help us. But she is afraid. Posters throughout town announce the death penalty for anyone hiding Jews. This is the reason for our being out in the field rather than at her home. We gave Franka all our money amounting to 2,000 zloty and 15 ‘lokschen’ (i.e., dollars). Should we succeed in finding a place for our child we could stay here for some time—as long as our presence is not discovered in the village.”²⁴³

The child, Adam, was finally taken in by nuns. Aryeh and Malwina had to leave him at night in the entrance of the convent: “On a dark night as the rain was coming down in torrents my wife and I took our boy with a sackful of belongings…. We left him together with the sack in the corridor of the convent and hurriedly ran off. We are overjoyed at having succeeded in arranging for our child’s keep under such favorable conditions. I was not bothered by the fact that they would baptize the child.”²⁴⁴

As the days went by, the Klonickis survived precariously, fleeing from one place to another. On July 27 Aryeh started his last diary entry; it was never completed: “The situation is very bad. All through the night it was raining and in the morning too…. At midday Samen once again looked us up in the company of someone called Vaitek and they took from us another three hundred zloty. What can we do! It is impossible to stay here any longer.”²⁴⁵ According to Franka’s brother, Aryeh and Malvina were killed by the Germans in a forest near Buczacz, in January 1944. As for their son, Adam, baptized Taras, all traces of him disappeared.

Farther east the Ukrainian populations of Volhynia and of “Dnieper Ukraine” displayed generally the same mix of anti-Jewish attitudes as their western brethren. Jewish dominance in the local Soviet institutions replaced the argument of Jewish collaboration. Here too greed, envy, religious hatred, and some form of Ukrainian nationalism and anti-Bolshevism contributed in various degrees to the same brew. Yet, as the careful assessment by historian Karel C. Berkhoff ’s has shown, a clear picture is hard to establish.²⁴⁶

Hostility toward Jews was widespread, but for many ordinary Ukrainians there clearly existed a distinction between anti-Jewish hostility, even hatred, and outright mass murder. Many Kiev inhabitants had expressed disbelief and then horror when faced with the Babi Yar massacres. According to Einsatzgruppen reports of the summer and fall of 1941, in the Ukraine as such, local anti-Jewish violence was not easily triggered: “To persecute Jews using the Ukrainian population is not feasible because the leaders and the spiritual drive are lacking; all still remember the harsh penalties which Bolshevism imposed on everyone who proceeded against the Jews,” one report stated. Another report repeated the same complaint: “The careful efforts once undertaken to bring about Jewish pogroms unfortunately have not produced the hoped-for success.”²⁴⁷

Yet paradoxically, once the Red Army reconquered the Ukraine, local anti-Semitism became more virulent. In the eastern Ukraine pogroms erupted in the summer of 1944, followed by fierce anti-Jewish riots in Kiev in September 1945. The reaction of the local authorities was hesitant; some of the key leaders of the restored Ukrainian Communist Party were themselves outspoken anti-Semites.²⁴⁸

It is in this overall Eastern European context that an outstanding initiative was taken in 1942 by a group of Polish Catholics, under the impulse of a well-known female writer, Zofia Kossak-Szezucka. A declaration (“Protest”), written by Kossak in August 1942, during the deportation of the ghetto inhabitants to Treblinka, stated that, despite the fact that the Jews were and remained the enemies of Poland, the general silence in the face of the murder of millions of innocent people was unacceptable and Polish Catholics had the obligation to raise their voices: “We are unable to do anything against the murderous German action, we are unable to take action to save one person, but we protest from the depth of our hearts, full of compassion, anger and dread. This protest is demanded by the Almighty God who forbade killing. It is demanded by Christian conscience.”²⁴⁹At the end of September, a Provisional Committee for Aid to Jews was established. Its first meetings took place in October, and in December it was reorganized and became the Council to Aid Jews, or Zegota, recognized and supported by the Delegatura.²⁵⁰

Over the ensuing months and until the occupation of Poland by the Soviet army, Zegota saved and assisted thousands of hidden Jews mainly on the Aryan side of Warsaw. The political-ideological composition of the leadership changed, however, over time. The right-wing Catholic movement, which had initiated the establishment of the council, left it in July 1943; its anti-Semitic ideology could not, at length, countenance the assistance given to the Jews.²⁵¹ The withdrawal of these conservative Catholics from the rescue operations tallied with the positions taken by much of the Polish Catholic Church, and of course with those of the majority of the population and of the underground movements.

On March 2, 1943, following a lengthy conversation with Göring, Goebbels noted in his diary: “Goering is completely aware of what would threaten us all, if we were to weaken in this war. He has no illusions in this regard. In the Jewish question in particular, we are so fully committed that for us there is no escape anymore. And it is good that way. Experience shows us that a movement and a people which have burnt their bridges fight by far more unconditionally than those who still have a way back.²⁵²