Holocaust Heroes

by Felton, Mark;

  Instead of viewing Judaism as a religion, the followers of the Völkisch movement and other anti-Semitic ideologies classified the Jews as a race, and therefore as ‘outsiders’ to the mainstream population. A German Jew, in their eyes, was not really a ‘German’, but a kind of national imposter. As early as 1895, prominent public figures in Germany were calling for the Jews to be ‘exterminated’ for the common good.

  ‘The signer hereby swears to the best of his knowledge and belief that no Jewish or coloured blood flows in either his or in his wife’s veins, and that among their ancestors are no members of the coloured races.’1 This oath was taken by members of another German ultranationalist group, the Order of the Teutons, founded in 1912, and indicates how entrenched racism and religious intolerance was.

  The Germans already had a dark heritage of ethnic cleansing, stemming from their ill-fated attempts at creating an African empire. In German South-West Africa, now Namibia, the Imperial German Army committed genocide against the Herero and Namaqua peoples, including the creation of early concentration camps. By the outbreak of the First World War, German anti-Semitism and its handmaiden pseudoscientific racism were widely accepted throughout the nation, and what had started as fringe beliefs had moved into the mainstream political world.

  The Nazi Party, founded in 1920, was a natural if extreme offshoot of the new German worldview, having its roots firmly in the Völkisch and Teutonic movements, as well as being avid supporters of Social Darwinism and eugenics. Charles Darwin’s idea of the survival of the fittest was particularly popular in defeated Germany, where the Great Depression had followed hard on the heels of the humiliating Treaty of Versailles, events that caused widespread poverty and economic hardship among all classes of Germans and led many to seek outlets for their frustrations in extremist politics of both the Left and the Right. Many Germans, among them the fledgling Nazi Party, at this time even advocated state-sponsored euthanasia to remove the mentally retarded and physically disabled in order to save the nation money.

  Even some sections of German society that were against euthanasia on moral grounds, for example the Catholic Church, contained many anti-Semites. Hatred and distrust of the Jews was much wider than those who were supporters of the Nazi Party, but once Hitler swept to power in January 1933, anti-Semitism was given free rein, alongside the propagation of the ideas of Aryan supremacy that were central to National Socialist thought.

  The Nazis divided German society, known as ‘Völksgemeinschaft’ (People’s Community), into two distinct halves. Citizens were categorized as either ‘Völksgenossen’ (National Comrades) or ‘Gemeinschaftsfremde’ (Community Aliens). The second category included the Jews, gypsies, communists, liberals and even some Christians. Some groups due for persecution fell into the first category and were labelled as ‘wayward’ National Comrades. These included homosexuals, the permanently unemployed and habitual criminals. These groups could be ‘re-educated’ with a stint inside one of Germany’s new concentration camps, such as that established in 1933 at Dachau outside Munich.

  The Jews and the Bolsheviks could not be ‘re-educated’ or rehabilitated – to the Nazis, they were simply race enemies. It was the intention early on in Hitler’s dictatorship to completely remove Jews from German society. Hitler had made no secret of his desire to rid Germany of its Jews, as any perusal of his political manifesto, Mein Kampf, starkly demonstrates.

  From the moment Hitler became Chancellor on 30 January 1933, life for Germany’s Jews began to deteriorate rapidly. On 1 April, the Nazis organized a boycott of Jewish-owned businesses, following this with new racial laws that barred Jews from various professions. Jews were thrown out of the civil service, banned from practising medicine and even banned from farming. Jews were also barred from being lawyers and judges, and this was often violently enforced, with Jewish judges being beaten and thrown out of their own courts in one dreadful incident. Later, the Jews were excluded from schools and universities, from the media and from owning or editing newspapers. The idea was to make life so economically and socially difficult for Jews that they would rather leave Germany than remain voluntarily and ride out the storm. But before they did, the Nazis enforced a sterilization programme to prevent the Jews from procreating. Compulsory sterilization of Jews judged by Nazi doctors to be ‘hereditarily diseased’ began in 1935, resulting in over 400,000 people losing their human right to a family.

  At the same time, the institution of marriage came under attack from the Nazis. From 1935, Aryans were prohibited from marrying or having sexual relations with Jews, blacks, gypsies or ‘their bastard offspring’. Those Germans who were already in mixed-religion or mixed-race marriages faced the prospect of their family unit coming under direct assault from their own government.

  Unsurprisingly, a great many Jews chose to leave Germany for good, including some of its greatest minds. Albert Einstein fled in 1933, and Dr Sigmund Freud moved to Britain after Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938. Writers, artists, musicians, composers, actors and many other creative and talented Jews moved to other European countries or the United States.

  The one event that hastened the pace of Jewish emigration was a carefully orchestrated orgy of violence against them in 1938 that came to be called Kristallnacht, due to the amount of broken glass left in Germany’s streets afterwards. The pretext for the ‘Night of Broken Glass’ pogrom was the assassination in Paris of a senior German diplomat, Ernst von Rath, by an idealistic Jewish teenager named Herschel Grimspan, who was appalled and angered by the Nazis’ treatment of his fellow Jews. The Nazis exploited this event to the maximum and used it to whip up racist violence against German, Austrian and Sudeten (an area of Czechoslovakia ceded to Germany by that year’s Munich Agreement) Jews. The Nazis’ private army, the Sturmabteilung or ‘Brownshirts’, caused most of the damage as they rampaged through German cities and towns, hunting for Jews and smashing up their businesses. Jews were badly beaten, and their businesses and places of worship vandalized. The official Jewish death toll, as admitted to by the Nazis, was ninety-one, although many more than this undoubtedly perished. In addition, over 7,000 Jewish shops and 1,200 synagogues were damaged or destroyed. Some 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald or Oranienburg concentration camps, and only released weeks later if they agreed to sign over their assets to the Nazis and leave the Third Reich. In addition, the Jews were forced to pay the Nazis a so-called ‘atonement tax’ for the damage caused to Jewish property, in the region of a billion Reichsmarks. Kristallnacht convinced many Jews that emigration was really their only remaining option if they wished to have any meaningful existence as human beings.

  The man who was charged by the Nazis with removing the Jews from the Third Reich was a tall, blond, horse-faced former naval officer. Reinhard Heydrich had been appointed head of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the Nazi security service, in 1932 at the age of 28. In June 1936, Heydrich had also been appointed to command the Sicherheitspolizei or SiPo, the Nazi security police, while another senior Nazi, Heinrich Müller, retained control of the dreaded Gestapo. Heydrich, as Heinrich Himmler’s deputy in the SS, rapidly became one of the most powerful leaders in the Nazi state, and one of its most feared. He was able to exercise his awesome power to deadly effect in late 1940 following the so-called Nacht und Nebel (‘Night and Fog’) Decree, where his security forces effected the ‘disappearance’ of over 7,000 enemies of the state, a figure that included a high proportion of Jews.

  Regarding the so-called ‘Jewish Question’, the Nazis initially viewed emigration as the solution to the problem of removing them from the Third Reich. The problem was: where should the Jews be sent? With Nazi encouragement, some 60,000 emigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine (now Israel) between 1933 and 1939, along with 100 million Reichsmarks in capital. Germany tried to persuade Britain and France to take more Jews into their overseas colonies, but without success. Heydrich eventually formulated a detailed plan to dump Europe’s Jews on t
he French island of Madagascar. Between 1938 and 1941, this plan slowly took shape, with Hitler’s personal blessing, but was ultimately superseded by events elsewhere. Other European countries and even the United States, with its own large Jewish population, declined to accept any more Jewish refugees from the Nazis. The only place that would receive Jews fleeing the Nazis was Shanghai, China’s largest city and at the time a ‘treaty port’, meaning that no one nation ruled it as a colony; rather, it was a self-governing enclave administered by a British and American-dominated municipal council. Prewar Shanghai owed much of its economic success to Iraqi Jews, who had moved there from other parts of the British Empire and had grown fabulously wealthy – families like the Sassoons, Hardoons and Kadoories. They tried to help European Jews arriving in Shanghai. After the Japanese takeover of European Shanghai in December 1941, the Jewish refugees were moved into a ghetto, but the Japanese did not pursue an anti-Semitic policy towards them, resisting Nazi plans to take the entire population out to sea in ships and sink them. But the Japanese ignored all German attempts to try and persuade Tokyo to adopt such a racist and murderous policy. The Japanese believed that the Jews could prove to be economically useful to them, so they let them be, providing an unlikely and distant sanctuary from the horrors being committed in Europe.

  Reinhard Heydrich’s Madagascar option was soon dropped once Germany embarked on her conquest of the Soviet Union. Instead of mass emigration, the Nazis developed the idea of the ‘relocation’ of Europe’s Jews. The Germans demanded ‘Lebensraum’, ‘living space’, which led to population displacement, murder and colonial settlement in the east. Linked to taking land from the Slavic and Russian peoples was the idea of dealing once and for all with ‘Jewish Bolshevism’, what became known as the ‘final solution’ of the ‘Jewish problem’. The Nazis had long linked Judaism with Bolshevism, and later Communism, pointing out the number of Soviet leaders who happened to be Jewish, which spelled disaster for those Soviet Jews who would fall under German control after 22 June 1941.

  The September 1939 invasion and conquest of Poland accelerated Germany’s desire to deal with the ‘Jewish Question’. Almost three million Jews had fallen into German hands following the five-week campaign. Heydrich, who had all but abandoned the Madagascar option, decided instead on a policy of creating ghettos to concentrate all of Poland’s Jews into easily managed and carefully segregated areas of the major cities, where they could be productively used for labour. Armaments firms and other enterprises were encouraged to relocate to the ghettos and establish factories, where Jewish manual labour could be utilised free of charge for the German war effort. This labour was to prove absolutely vital to the German war effort, and many of the Jews involved, particularly ghetto leaders, came to believe that they, as the labour force, would be preserved by the Germans for as long as possible. What they failed to realize until it was too late was that Nazi policy towards the Jews was not determined by economic factors, and though the Jews might fulfill some short-term usefulness slaving in armaments and clothing factories, this was not the ‘final solution’ envisioned for them.

  The Nazis did not invent ghettos – they had been a part of the Jewish experience in Europe since the Dark Ages. Many European cities maintained Jewish ghettos – some enforced by law, others created by the Jews themselves in much the same manner as Chinatowns had spontaneously sprouted across Europe and North America so that Chinese immigrants could live, trade and worship amongst their own people. The ghetto had become part of the social history of European Jews, with both positive and negative connotations. But under the Nazis, the ghetto was to become something quite different.

  One of the oldest Jewish ghettos was in the Czech capital, Prague. Founded in the tenth century, it had been surrounded by a wall since an anti-Jewish pogrom in 1096. The ghetto was self-governing and had suffered occasional assaults by its Christian neighbours, the worst violence occurring in 1389 when mobs killed 1,500 Jews. In 1781, Joseph II, the Holy Roman Emperor, emancipated the Czech Jews and in his honour the ghetto was renamed Josefstadt (Joseph’s City) in 1850. Due to efforts to remodel Prague in the style of Paris, Josefstadt (Josefov in Czech) was progressively pulled down between 1893 and 1913, leaving only its synagogues and the Old Jewish Town Hall. But the area retained a high Jewish population that fell into German hands in 1938.

  Vienna, capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, had created a special Jewish ghetto in the centre of the city in 1625 after local Jews had petitioned the government. By the mid-seventeenth century it was thriving. But Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I, a noted anti-Semite, had the entire Jewish community forcibly expelled. The Viennese renamed the former ghetto in the emperor’s honour, the district becoming Leopoldstadt. However, large numbers of Jews began to settle the district again during the height of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, building many important synagogues that were all destroyed in 1938 by the Nazis.

  Further to the west, Paris had a sizeable Jewish ghetto centred in the Marais district, established by Ashkenazi Jews fleeing the pogroms in the Russian Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the Marais, they established themselves as leaders in the clothing trade. Many other European cities had sizeable Jewish settlements, which were often what we would today term ‘ghettos’. They included Warsaw, Budapest, Turin, Rome, Venice, Mantua, Krakow, Barcelona, Amsterdam and European Istanbul. Part of the East End of London, though never actually labelled as such, was by the late nineteenth century essentially a Jewish ghetto, with over 150 synagogues, which engendered outbreaks of anti-Semitic protest in the capital and the Aliens Act in 1905 to regulate Eastern European immigration.

  In September 1939, Himmler had appointed Reinhard Heydrich head of the Reichssicherheitsdienst (RSHA), the ‘Reich Security Main Office’, giving his deputy complete control over the SS police and security organs. This meant that the ‘Jewish Question’ was now firmly under Heydrich’s personal control. Heydrich moved quickly to resolve the Jewish issue, once and for all. On 21 September, Heydrich sent out a teleprinter message to all his Einsatzgruppen leaders, ordering them to begin rounding up Jews preparatory to placing them in ghettos. However, the Einsatzgruppen, consisting of 3,000 men in Special Action Squads, supported by twenty-one battalions of Ordnungspolizei (Order Police) totalling a further 11,000 troops, initiated a programme to not only move the Jews into ghettos, but to exterminate a large proportion of the Polish elite in order to remove resistance to German rule and destroy Polish national identity. Under Operation Tannenberg, Poland’s intelligentsia, scholars, actors, senior police and many other significant groups were either shot or sent to ghettos. At least 20,000 died. Heydrich also created a special unit called the Selbstschütz from ethnic Germans living in Poland. The Selbstschützen committed many horrific atrocities before it was hastily disbanded following widespread condemnation. However, the Einsatzgruppen and its related units under Heydrich’s direct control had established a new level of violence towards the enemies of the Third Reich, including the killing of defenceless women and children. Once Germany invaded the Soviet Union, this violence would increase markedly.

  Poland as a nation state simply ceased to exist. Large sections were hived off from the rest of the country and renamed the ‘General Government’ under Nazi Governor Dr Hans Frank. The General Government comprised much of central and southern Poland and modern western Ukraine, and included the cities of Warsaw, Krakow and Lvov. Into this new political entity were dumped millions of Jews from across Poland, into what would eventually consist of 275 ghettos of varying sizes and population densities.

  Following the German Army into the Soviet Union in June 1941 came the various Einsatzgruppen death squads and Ordnungspolizei reserve battalions, with orders to liquidate entire Jewish communities. The Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD received a series of detailed orders from Heydrich informing them exactly whom they should kill. It was a chilling list. All senior and middle-ranking members of the Comintern and Soviet Co
mmunist Party were to be shot, along with all commissars and Jews in political office. Heydrich then issued ‘open-ended instructions’ to execute ‘other radical elements’, defined as saboteurs, snipers, agitators, propagandists and so on. Further, the Einsatzgruppen were to turn a blind eye to and secretly encourage and support spontaneous pogroms launched against the Jews by often extremely hostile and anti-Semitic local populations.2 Over sixty such pogroms occurred in Latvia, Lithuania and Ukraine, resulting in the deaths of over 24,000 Jews.

  On 8 July 1941 Heydrich issued an order that all Jews were to be classified as ‘partisans’, meaning that the Einsatzgruppen could shoot however many Jews as their commanders decided upon.3 This was a firm step towards the issuance of orders for general mass murder. Heydrich’s order specified that all male Jews aged between 15 and 45 were to be executed, but in reality the Einsatzgruppen units simply rounded up every man, woman and child that they could lay their hands upon and shot them. Perhaps the worst atrocity occurred at a ravine at Babi Yar outside Kiev, Ukraine, where the Germans shot 33,771 Jews in just two days of unrelenting slaughter. At Rumbala outside Riga in Latvia, the Einsatzgruppen shot a further 25,000 Jews in two days. SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln commanded the Rumbala Massacre, and later proudly reported to Himmler that his men had shot over 100,000 Jews since the launch of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941. Jeckeln was awarded the War Merit Cross with Swords for his efforts. Other reports demonstrate that the activities of the Einsatzgruppen were very extensive. SS-Standartenführer Karl Jager reported to his headquarters that in the period July to November 1941, Einsatzkommando III from Einsatzgruppen A had liquidated precisely 137,346 people, only 1,851 of whom were not Jews.