CHAPTER 17

The Final Solution

THE HORROR REVEALED. US SOLDIERS ATTEND TO THE REMOVAL OF CORPSES, BUCHENWALD DEATH CAMP, 1945. TRAGICALLY, THEY REPRESENT ONLY ONE SMALL HANDFUL OF THE MILLIONS WHO HAD BEEN CRUELLY AND SYSTEMATICALLY EXTERMINATED AS PART OF THE ENDLOSUNG – THE FINAL SOLUTION. IT HAD ITS ROOTS IN T4, A PROGRAMME OF EUTHANASIA AIMED PRIMARILY AT THE MENTALLY AND PHYSICALLY HANDICAPPED – A GROTESQUE REHEARSAL FOR ITS LATER AND PRINCIPAL PURPOSE: THE GENOCIDE OF THE JEWS.

On 20 January 1942, a group of high-ranking Nazi officials gathered in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee. They had been given a task of the utmost secrecy, handed down by Hitler and passed on to them by Hitler’s deputy, Hermann Göring. The task the Führer had placed in their hands was to arrange for the extermination of the entire Jewish population of Europe, a policy the Nazis termed Endlosung, the ‘Final Solution’ of the Jewish question.

Chairing the meeting was Reinhard Heydrich, second-in-command of the SS and head of the Reich Main Security Office. A fairly young man – he was 38 – Heydrich was so ruthless that even Hitler was said to be wary of him. Although the official minutes of the meeting contained thinly veiled euphemisms to describe the rounding up and transportation of Europe’s Jewish population to death camps, Heydrich himself was in no doubt of their fate. As he said, the Final Solution would see Europe ‘combed through from west to east’, and no Jews would be left alive.

Although it was treated as a state secret, carrying out the Final Solution would require thousands of SS guards, scientists, doctors and administrators to see it through to completion. Many of them relished the task, including the man at the heart of the practical administration, Adolf Eichmann, head of the SS Race and Resettlement Office. Anti-Semitism had been present in Germany for centuries and German Jews had been cruelly persecuted, dispossessed and murdered in the early, pre-war years of Nazi power. Now, though, anti-semitism was to take its most evil and most diabolical form.

Even before Heydrich and his colleagues sat down to their meeting in Wannsee, SS units, with the co-operation of the German Army, had been systematically murdering Jews in the occupied territories of Poland since 1939 and the Soviet Union since 1941.

Reinhard Heydrich, whose looks were those of the perfect Aryan, but who was rumoured to have Jewish blood, was Himmler’s deputy and second-in-command of the SS. In 1933 he oversaw the setting up of Dachau, the original concentration camp, and the first to bear the supremely cynical slogan Arbeit Macht Frei – work makes you free. It was Heydrich who rounded up 25,000 wealthy Jews after Kristallnacht and sent them to the concentration camps. He was soon rewarded for his work by receiving control of the Reich Main Security Office, RSHA, and began setting up the first Einsatz groups – or action groups – for operations in Poland as well as organising the construction of the Jewish ghettos. It was these Einsatzgruppen SS troops who first began the systematic murder of European Jews. Heydrich was then given the task of organising the Final Solution, to which end he chaired the Wannsee conference at the beginning of 1942. He was also appointed Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia (Czechoslovakia) in September 1941. He was critically injured by Czech resistance fighters in Prague on 29 May the following year. It took him six days to die of his injuries, on 4 June.

Indeed, the Nazi desire to ‘solve’ the Jewish question had reached such a sophisticated level by this time that bullets were no longer considered a humane way of killing the millions of Jews who had come under German control as Hitler’s war machine rolled further east. Humane that is, for the executioners. Many of them were buckling under the sheer strain of slaughtering thousands upon thousands of men, women and children by first stripping them naked, then shooting them in the back of the head, and afterwards tossing their corpses into mass graves. So, to preserve the sanity of his men, Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, was keen for other methods of annihilation to be developed. In December 1941, the first use of gas on Jews took place at the Polish village of Chelmno. Jews from the surrounding area were placed in vans, ostensibly for transportation to work camps. The vans were specially designed so that the vehicles’ exhaust fumes were fed back inside the hermetically sealed interiors, killing the Jews by carbon monoxide poisoning. After this, slaughtering Jews by gas was considered so successful that it was soon employed at death camps in German-occupied Poland. With this, the killing of Jews began to proceed on an industrial scale.

ADOLF EICHMANN, THE SUPREME BUREAUCRAT AND DRAUGHTSMAN OF THE FINAL SOLUTION. AFTER THE WAR HE EVADED CAPTURE BUT WAS HUNTED DOWN AND CAPTURED BY THE ISRAELI GOVERNMENT, WHICH TRIED AND EXECUTED HIM IN 1960.

GERMAN OFFICERS POSE PROUDLY FOR THE CAMERA AS THEY MURDER RUSSIAN VILLAGERS.

But how had it come about that Germany, apparently one of Europe’s most cultured and civilised nations – albeit one with a strong militaristic tradition – had adopted as an official policy of state the genocide of Europe’s Jews? And not only them, but also the mentally defective, homosexuals, freemasons and gypsies as well? Since he took over the Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ Party, originally formed in 1918 to encourage nationalism among the working classes, and which after 1920 he turned into the militaristic, vengeful Nazi Party, Adolf Hitler had made no secret of his paranoid hatred of the Jewish people. They were, he believed, a race, not a religion, and one that ‘degraded’ German life. In the twisted, racist, Nazi philosophy that saw life as a never-ending struggle between competing races, the Jews were dangerous enemies of the pure ‘Aryan’ or German people. As such, they had to be eradicated. Precisely how Hitler was to achieve this remained obscure until long after he came to power in 1933. Even then, the plans for mass extermination of the Jews were largely kept secret from the majority of Germans, and from the world.

In his political testament, Mein Kampf, Hitler described the moment when he first became fully aware of the Jewish ‘peril’. He was living in Vienna before the First World War, and it was there that the revelation took place. He wrote:

The Nazi decision to rid Germany of what they called ‘life unworthy of life’, that is the mentally ill, homosexuals, those stricken with hereditary diseases, gypsies and the senile, was intimately bound up with the Final Solution. It was born of the same callous and evil disrespect for life that did not conform to the criteria laid down by Nazi ideology. Many of the methods of killing that were later used against the Jews were also used to exterminate people who fell into these ‘categories’.

The euthanasia programme was known as T-4, short for the operations address Tiergartenstrasse 4, but despite Hitler’s attempts to get it under way earlier, it did not come into force until late in 1939. The Nazis were more sensitive to, or wary of, public opinion than is often realised, and were careful to keep the ‘mercy killings’ secret. Relatives of the victims were given false reports of their deaths. By the time T-4 had run its course, over 70,000 people had been gassed by medical staff or killed by lethal injection. Despite Nazi attempts to keep the project under wraps, the Catholic bishop of Münster, Clemens August, Count von Galen, a courageous and outspoken opponent of the Nazis’ racist policies, learned of the project and, on 3 August 1941, delivered a sermon in Münster Cathedral attacking euthanasia as ‘plain murder’. The Nazi leadership was stunned at this condemnation. Together with a subsequent incident in which a crowd, apparently incensed by T-4, booed Hitler for the first time, this led to the shelving of the operation. By then, however, it had essentially run its course. Many of the staff who carried out T-4 were transferred to the operation of the Final Solution, where their expertise in murder by gassing was put to use in the extermination camps.

I suddenly encountered a phenomenon in a long kaftan and wearing black side-locks. My first thought was: is this a Jew? They certainly did not have this appearance in Linz [Hitler’s home town]. I watched the man stealthily and cautiously, but the longer I gazed at this strange countenance and examined it section by section, the more the question shaped itself in my brain: is this man a German? I turned to books for help in removing my doubts. For the first time in my life, I bought myself some anti-semitic pamphlets for a few pence.

From then on, anti-Semitism and his belief in a worldwide Jewish ‘conspiracy’ became an obsession with Hitler. Once in power, he began slowly, but later with increasing speed, to put his racist creed into practice. First of all, Nazi storm troopers began to enforce a boycott of Jewish shops. Many Germans complied, but some ignored or resisted the boycott. They included the formidable grandmother of Dietrich Bonhoeffeur, the Protestant theologian who was to hang in 1945 for his opposition to the Nazis. This valiant old lady pushed her way past storm troopers trying to turn customers away from a Jewish-owned establishment on the grounds that she had always shopped there and meant to go on doing so. Not everyone, however, was so courageous. Some were bullied into compliance by Nazi threats. Some, of course, approved of the persecution of Jews.

HERSCHELL GRYNSZPAN, WHO SHOT DEAD THE GERMAN AMBASSADOR IN PARIS IN PROTEST AT THE TREATMENT METED OUT BY GERMANY TO THE JEWS.

NAZI STORMTROOPERS AND PARTY MEMBERS ORGANISING THE BOYCOTT OF JEWISH SHOPS, 1933.

A NAZI WARTIME PROPAGANADA POSTER FROM 1942 PROCLAIMS: ‘BEHIND THE ENEMY POWERS, THE JEW!’ THE NAZIS CONSISTENTLY PORTRAYED THE WAR AS THE OUTCOME OF A SINISTER WORLDWIDE JEWISH CONSPIRACY RATHER THAN AS THE DIRECT RESULT OF HITLER’S DESIRE TO ESTABLISH A ‘NEW ORDER’ IN EUROPE.

Hitler’s desire to drive the Jews from German national life was placed on the statute book when, in 1935, the Nuremberg Laws were passed banning all Jews from holding German citizenship. From then on, no Jew could be considered a German. Under these Laws, a Jew was classified as someone who had just one Jewish grandparent; in order to qualify for membership of the elite SS, however, it was necessary to prove a ‘pure’, non-Jewish lineage going back six generations, or 150 years. Further measures designed to preserve the ‘honour’ of Germany forbad Jews and Aryans to marry. Those already married would be forced to separate.

JEWISH WOMEN PEER OUT OF THE CATTLE TRUCKS TAKING THEM TO THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS AND TO ALMOST CERTAIN DEATH. CONDITIONS INSIDE THESE RAILWAY CARRIAGES WERE FOUL. THERE WAS STANDING ROOM ONLY, NO FOOD OR WATER, NO HEATING AND NO SANITATION. AS A RESULT MANY INNOCENT PEOPLE WERE TO DIE BEFORE THEY EVEN REACHED THE CAMPS.

RECENT ARRIVALS AT THE BIRKENAU CONCENTRATION CAMP, AUSTRIA 1944. THEY WOULD SOON BE SPLIT UP FROM THEIR FAMILIES AND FRIENDS, STRIPPED AND TATOOED WITH A CAMP IDENTITY NUMBER. DEATH THROUGH STARVATION, OVERWORK OR THE GAS CHAMBERS AWAITED ALMOST ALL WHO ENTERED HERE.

At this stage, the Nazis aimed to solve the ‘Jewish Question’ by making life in Germany so unpleasant that Jews would emigrate rather than remain as an underclass in their own country. The cynicism with which the emigration of German Jews was handled was breathtaking. Jews were unable to take their property out of the country, and were given little or no compensation for their businesses or homes, which they had to ‘sell’ before leaving. In practice, this meant confiscation for re-sale to ‘Aryans’ at a vast profit for the state. This ‘Aryanisation’ of the German economy proceeded at breakneck speed after Ernst von Rath, a member of the German embassy staff in Paris, was gunned down by a 17-year-old Polish Jew named Herschel Grynszpan. The killing gave the Nazis the excuse they wanted to launch their first nationwide, state-sponsored pogrom. As a result, 9 November 1938, the same day von Rath died, became known as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass.

In a ‘spontaneous’ demonstration of German feeling organised by the Nazi Party, 7500 Jewish businesses were destroyed, 267 synagogues were set on fire and 91 Jews killed by gangs of thugs who looted shops, destroyed their goods, beat their owners and torched religious shrines. In fact, the Nazis took special care to ensure that as many sacred Jewish artefacts as possible were consumed by the flames. Piles of books and the Torah scrolls, which contained the sacred Jewish scriptures, together with much other precious material, were flung down in the road and burned.

In addition to the destruction of their homes, possessions and livelihoods, German Jews were hit by the further humiliation of having to pay a one-billion Deutschmark fine to the government as compensation for von Rath’s death. Jewish shopkeepers were also expected to pay for the damage done to their shops. The decree for the fine was issued by Hermann Göring himself. Measures were also taken by the Nazis to ensure that insurance companies paid out compensation – not to the Jews whose property had been destroyed, but to the state, which had organised the orgy of violence.

The Nazis took special care to ensure that as many sacred Jewish artefacts as possible were consumed by the flames. Piles of books and the Torah scrolls, which contained the sacred Jewish scriptures, together with much other precious material, were flung down in the road and burned

LOCATIONS OF NAZI DEATH CAMPS

THE ENTRANCE TO AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU. THESE TWIN CAMPS FORMED ONE OF THE NERVE CENTRES OF THE FINAL SOLUTION, WHERE MASSIVE GAS CHAMBERS AND CREMATORIA (CAPABLE OF BURNING AS MANY AS 2000 BODIES AT A TIME) REDUCED LIVING AND BREATHING HUMAN BEINGS TO ASHES WITH INSANE SPEED.

Kristallnacht stunned many people, both in Germany and abroad, who had formerly persuaded themselves that stories of Nazi persecution of the Jews were exaggerated or overblown. For some Germans, it was the first time they questioned the decency of the regime under which they were living. Britain was particularly incensed by Kristallnacht, principally because a German newspaper, Angriff, bizarrely accused British politicians, Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden and Clement Attlee amomg them, of inciting Grynszpan to kill von Rath. The Times was blunt in its assessment, describing the mindless violence of Kristallnacht as ‘scenes of systematic plunder and destruction that have seldom had their equal in a civilised country since the Middle Ages.’

ABOVE: CONCENTRATION CAMP PRISONERS PUT TO WORK FOR THE REICH. THOSE ‘LUCKY’ ENOUGH NOT TO BE SENT STRAIGHT TO THE DEATH CAMPS WERE OFTEN PUT TO WORK FOR THE GERMAN WAR EFFORT.

CENTRE: THESE INMATES OF BUCHENWALD FREED THEMSELVES FROM THEIR NAZI GUARDS IN THE FINAL DAYS OF THE WAR BEFORE THE ALLIES ARRIVED.

BELOW: MURDERED FOR ‘SCIENCE’. THE UNFORTUNATE VICTIM OF A SADISTIC NAZI EXPERIMENT DESIGNED TO TEST THE LIMITS OF HUMAN ENDURANCE BEYOND BREAKING POINT.

The Nazis, of course, were not deterrred. In the days after Kristallnacht, the systematic persecution continued. Some 25,000 wealthy Jews were flung into the concentration camps, the first of which, Dachau, had been opened in 1933. Jews were banned from the professions. They were no longer able to practise as doctors, lawyers or accountants. They were forbidden to hold driving licences, and in Berlin they were confined to certain areas and forced into a ghetto. Jews were banned from entering public spaces such as parks and cinemas, and were not permitted to possess firearms. Naturally enough, Jews took the chance to leave Germany while they still could, and moved to the USA, or elsewhere in Europe. However, less than 200,000 of Germany’s 500,000 Jews managed to get out before Kristallnacht. Some who remained believed they would survive, as Jews had always survived. Some, of course, were simply unable to leave.

With the events of Kristallnacht still on his mind, Hitler made what some at the time considered a rather odd prediction. In a speech on New Year’s Day, 1939, he spoke of the coming war. ‘Today, I am going to make another prophecy,’ he announced. ‘If the Jewish international financiers succeed in involving the nations in another war, the result will not be world Bolshevism and therefore a victory for Judaism, it will be the destruction of the Jews in Europe.’

As the tempo of Nazi persecution continued to increase, the war saw it move from its earlier stages of exclusion and forced emigration, and proceed to the ghettoisation of Jews. The first appreciable steps came after the German advances in Poland brought millions of Polish Jews within Hitler’s grasp.

There are many examples, undertaken both by individuals or by groups, of Jewish resistance to the Nazis, but the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 is the most famous. In Warsaw, over 400,000 Jews were crowded into a 3.5 square mile area of the Polish capital. The lack of sanitation and insufficient food resulted in hundreds of deaths a day from starvation. In July 1942, the SS began carrying out deportations from the Ghetto to the extermination camp at Treblinka. The Jewish leaders were forced to hand over 6000 people a day for onward transmission to the gas chambers. In two months, over 300,000 men, women and children had been sent to their deaths.

When what was happening became all too apparent, and there were only a few thousand Jews left in the Ghetto, the decision was taken to resist the Nazis. Battle commenced on 18 January 1943. The Jews knew they were facing certain death and fought the Nazis with suicidal desperation. The Germans, at first amazed by their resistance, fought with tanks and machine-guns some 1500 opponents who were armed only with rifles, a few machine guns, pistols and Molotov cocktails. The inhabitants of the Ghetto were able to hold off several thousand Germans for over a month. The Germans tried to burn the Jews out, but as the Nazi commander, SS GrigadeFührer Jurgen Stroop observed: ‘Despite the danger of being burned alive, the Jews and bandits often preferred to return into the flames rather than risk being caught by us.’

But, inevitably, defeat came on 16 May when Stroop was able to declare: ‘The former Jewish quarter of Warsaw is no longer in existence. The large-scale action was terminated at 10.15 p.m. by blowing up the Warsaw synagogue. Total number of Jews dealt with, 56,065, including both Jews caught and Jews whose extermination can be proved.’

Within weeks of the Nazi conquest during September 1939, a ghetto had been set up at Piotrkow, followed by more throughout the country. Inside the ghettos, the Jews received so little food that they were soon starving to death. Hundreds died each week, but still the ‘progress’ was not fast enough for the Nazis. To move the project forward, extermination camps were established in Poland at Chelmno, Treblinka, Birkenau and Sobibor. The sites were no accident. Polish anti-semitism had long been virulent and the Nazis expected no problems or protests even though the Poles themselves were being wickedly abused.

ABOVE: TOOL OF GENOCIDE – A CANISTER OF THE POISON GAS ZYKLON B.

BELOW: THE CREMATORIUM AT DACHAU, 1941.

The purpose of the death camps was different from that of the concentration camps, where Jews and others were worked to death. The death camps had only one purpose: to kill victims outright. Here, no work took place. Healthy men, women and children were stripped, their hair shaved off, their clothes sorted into piles for the German war effort. They were then gassed and their bodies burned in specially constructed ovens. The evil smell of burning flesh gave the inhabitants of the areas surrounding these camps no doubt as to their purpose. What was happening in the camps was no secret to the Allies, who let it be known that retribution for these unspeakable crimes would be exacted once the War was over. However, the Allies failed to respond to repeated pleas from Jewish organisations and others that the camps and the railway lines that led there from occupied Europe should be bombed.

The Polish Jewess Sophia Litwinska was taken to the gas chambers in the Auschwitz concentration camp on 25 December 1941. She arrived in the camp from the Polish city of Lublin. Her head had already been shaved and she had been tattooed with a camp identity number before being picked out for the gas chambers while she was in the camp hospital where she was recovering from a broken leg. It was on Christmas Day that Litwinska and dozens of her fellow patients were taken by their SS guards to the gas chambers, where they were to be murdered.

Sophia Litwinska takes up the story in her own words:

We were led into a room which gave me the impression of a shower-bath. There were towels hanging round, and sprays, and even mirrors. I cannot say how many were in the room altogether, because I was so terrified, nor do I know if the doors were closed. People were in tears; people were shouting at each other; people were hitting each other. There were healthy people, strong people, weak people and sick people, and suddenly I saw fumes coming in through a very small window at the top. I had to cough very violently, tears were streaming from my eyes, and I had a sort of feeling in my throat as if I would be asphyxiated. I could not even look at the others because each of us concentrated on what happened to herself.

At that moment I heard my name called. I had not the strength to answer it, but raised my arm. Then I felt someone take me and throw me out from that room.

Litwinska, bemused at her reprieve, put her survival down to the fact that her husband, who was not a Jew, was a Polish officer. Litwinska had been saved at the point of death and had the unique and ghastly experience of knowing what it was like to die in a concentration camp gas chamber and yet survive.

After being taken from the chamber Litwinska spent six weeks in hospital. ‘As the result of the gas I had still, quite frequently, headaches and heart trouble, and whenever I went into the fresh air my eyes were filled with tears.’ Litwinska’s testimony was used in the trial of the camp commandant, Joseph Kramer, after the war.

On 4 April 1945 British troops liberated the Nazi concentration camp at Belsen. The SS camp guards were well aware that the approach of Allied troops meant they would be forced to pay for the appalling crimes they had committed during the years of war. So, during the last days before liberation, they began attempts to cover up their crimes. Those camp inmates who were still able to work were forced to begin clearing up the mounds of corpses that littered the camp before the British troops arrived. They were allowed no food or water while they worked and some, forced by unbelievable levels of hunger, ate parts of the corpses they were ordered to bury. When the British finally arrived, one inmate, a French school teacher, was eating his first meal in six days; it was grass.

Despite the best attempts of the SS when the British soldiers entered the camp they were greeted by stacks of corpses left in open mass graves. The dead, more than 35,000 in total, outnumbered the living by several thousand.

A British officer, Patrick Gordon-Walker, told listeners in a radio broadcast of the scenes that had been described to him by the officers and men of the Oxfordshire Yeomanry and the horrors he himself had found when he arrived in Belsen shortly after its liberation:

The first night of liberty, many hundreds of people died of joy. Next day some men of the Yeomanry arrived. The people crowded around them kissing their hands and feet – and dying from weakness. Corpses in every state of decay were lying around, piled on top of each other in heaps. There were corpses in the compound in flocks. People were falling dead all around, people who were walking skeletons. One woman came up to a soldier who was guarding the milk store and doling out milk to the children, and begged for milk for her baby. The man took the baby and saw that it had been dead for days, black in the face and shrivelled up. The woman went on begging for milk. So he poured some on the dead lips. The mother then started to croon for joy and carried the baby off in triumph. She stumbled and fell dead in a few yards.

Despite the best effort of British medical teams and the Red Cross, 20,000 of the 30,000 survivors of Belsen died soon after their liberation.

In the concentration camps Jews toiled, making munitions, and when their usefulness was at an end, they were taken to the extermination camps and gassed. Jews were also brutally murdered in sadistic ‘medical experiments’. In Dachau, inmates were deliberately infected with malaria. Others were exposed to extremes of air pressure until they died. Some were submerged in ice-cold water until they became unconscious to test for ways of reviving those suffering from extreme exposure. Those who managed to survive these tests were also killed.

CORPSES AWAITING CREMATION IN DACHAU. CREMATORIA CAME INTO USE AFTER EXPERIMENTS WITH MASS BURIALS OFTEN HAD GHASTLY RESULTS. THE DECOMPOSITION OF SO MANY CORPSES IN A SMALL AREA OFTEN LED TO THE BODIES RISING THROUGH THE SOIL TO THE SURFACE ONCE MORE.

The first extermination camp to be liberated, on 25 July 1944 by the Russians, was Maidanek. It was situated near Lublin in Poland and by the time the Red Army arrived, over 1.5 million people had died there. Despite the attempts of the SS to hide what they had done from the advancing Allies, the shocking truth of the Final Solution was subsequently revealed to a horrified world, which after nearly six years of savage warfare had believed itself unshockable. People were truly appalled by the obscene acts committed in the name of racial supremacy and Nazi ideology.

During the war, the Final Solution claimed the lives of approximately six million Jews. Only around one-twentieth of Europe’s pre-War Jewish population survived. Approximately two million gypsies had also been killed in the name of Aryan purity.

TWO INMATES GAZE OUT AS THEIR LIBERATORS FINALLY ARRIVE.

FREEDOM. THE STARS AND STRIPES RISES OVER DACHAU, GERMANY’S FIRST AND OLDEST CONCENTRATION CAMP, WHICH WAS LIBERATED BY US SOLDIERS IN 1945. IT WAS AT DACHAU THAT SOME OF THE WORST ‘MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS’ TOOK PLACE.