Holocaust Heroes

by Felton, Mark;

  As word spread like wildfire of what the Germans were doing, entire Jewish communities fled before the dreaded Einsatzgruppen arrived, going deeper into the Soviet Union, where they mostly managed to survive the war. Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg has calculated that the Einsatzgruppen killed approximately 1.7 million Jews on the Eastern Front between 1941 and 1945. But this murderous organization did not work alone. Apart from the support of the Orpo units and locally raised anti-Semitic militias, the regular German Army aided and abetted this process, and in some instances even shot Jews itself. This is a fact that has often been ignored, demonstrating that the regular army’s Prussian Junker officer corps was often as ridden with anti-Semites as the SS.

  On 27 September 1941, Heydrich was appointed Deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, the Nazi designations for the rump of Czechoslovakia left over after the German-speaking Sudetenland had been incorporated into the Reich proper. In reality, Heydrich was in complete control of the territory, as Reich Protector Konstantin von Neurath was leader in name only. Heydrich terrorized the Czech population, stating ominously that ‘we will Germanize the Czech vermin’.4 On 10 October, Heydrich chaired a meeting in Prague where it was decided to deport 50,000 Czech Jews to ghettos in Minsk and Riga. Heydrich was also responsible during 1941 for deporting 60,000 Jews from Germany and Czechoslovakia to the Lodz Ghetto in Poland.

  Dr Hans Frank, Governor of the General Government, made no secret of his intention of permanently eradicating the Jews in his care from Poland. ‘But what will happen to the Jews?’ he asked a meeting of senior SS and police leaders on 16 December 1941. ‘Do you believe they will be lodged in settlements in Ostland? In Berlin, we were told, “why all this trouble; we cannot use them in the Ostland or the Reichskommissariat either; liquidate them yourselves!”.’5

  A German-appointed Judenrat, or Jewish Council, ran each ghetto. The Judenrat was responsible for the day-to-day operations of the ghetto and its members were naturally responsible with their lives to the higher SS authorities. Administration conducted by the Judenrat would include distributing food and providing access to clean water, providing heating, medical care and allocating shelter. The Germans also required that the Judenrat confiscated Jewish property, staffed a Jewish police, organised forced labour and, later, drew up lists of those to be deported to concentration camps or extermination camps. The ghetto was, in the words of one historian, an instrument of ‘slow, passive murder’.6 It was not lost on many Jews that the Germans were forcing fellow Jews to inflict a lot of misery upon them, and were using the Jews to extinguish themselves from Europe.

  The ghetto Jews were put to work under the auspices of Fritz Sauckel’s Reich Labour Office, working in factories supplying important German war industries, particularly armaments production. Conditions inside the ghettos were deliberately harsh, with many thousands dying of disease, starvation and exhaustion. For instance, one-in-ten Jews died inside the Warsaw Ghetto during its operation. Heydrich had used the term ‘natural wastage’ in reference to the poor conditions hastening Jewish deaths, and there appears to have been a deliberate policy of utilizing Jewish labour but also encouraging large numbers of Jewish forced labourers to die off precisely because of the conditions under which that labour was provided.

  In 1940 and 1941, most of the ghettos were sealed off from the outside world with high brick walls or stout barbed-wire fences. Any Jew who was caught outside of the ghetto without special permission risked immediate execution. The largest Jewish ghetto was located in Poland’s pre-war capital, Warsaw. It measured just 1.3 square miles but was home to over 400,000 people. The second largest was in Lodz, with 160,000 Jews. The ghetto was never intended as a ‘final solution’ to the Jewish problem, rather as a temporary one. It was eventually Nazi policy to clear the ghettos and send the surviving Jews further east for what they euphemistically labelled as ‘resettlement’. In many cases this ‘resettlement’ ended with mass murder. When word reached various ghettos that their inhabitants were to be deported, resistance often flared up, particularly among young men who were not connected with the Judenrat or ghetto police.

  The Nazis had an ambitious plan for solving the ‘Jewish Problem’, and the ghettos represented one stage of that plan. On 20 January 1942, Heydrich convened a secret meeting at a large house in Wannsee, a plush suburb of Berlin, attended by fifteen top party functionaries representing all those departments with an interest in the fate of the Jews. Heydrich had decided on a process of clearing the ghettos and sending the Jews on transport trains to the east, to a series of special camps to be constructed under conditions of extreme secrecy.

  ‘In the course of the final solution, the Jews should be brought under appropriate direction in a suitable manner to the east for labour utilization,’ stated Heydrich, according to secret minutes kept by SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, who acted as secretary of the meeting. ‘Separated by sex, the Jews capable of work will be led into these areas in large labour columns to build roads, whereby doubtless a large part will fall away through natural reduction. The inevitable final remainder, which doubtless constitutes the toughest element, will have to be dealt with appropriately, since it represents a natural selection which upon liberation is to be regarded as a germ cell of a new Jewish development.’7 The language of the Wannsee Conference transcript is deliberately euphemistic and Heydrich never explicitly states how the remaining estimated 6.5 million Jews under German control are ‘to be dealt with’. All that is known for certain is that the policies of emigration and ghettos were superseded on Heydrich’s express order by ‘evacuation’ to the east. We now know precisely what ‘evacuation’ would ultimately mean for Europe’s Jews.

  When word reached the Judenratten that they would be required to furnish the Germans with lists of Jews for deportation to the east, trouble flared in several ghettos. Himmler began the process of depopulating the ghettos with an order issued on 19 July 1942. Heydrich, Himmler’s loyal deputy, was by now dead after he had been mortally wounded during an assassination attempt by British-trained Czech SOE agents in Prague in late May 1942. But although Heydrich was gone, nothing would stop the deportation programme. In fact, Himmler made sure that the operation would carry his fallen subordinate’s name – Aktion Reinhard.

  Underground resistance organizations had already been established in many of the ghettos, particularly the very large ones, and guns and explosives secretly gathered. But any form of Jewish resistance, and in particular armed rebellion, was met by the Nazi state with overwhelming military and police might. Resistance meant a literal battle to the death for those Jews who decided to attempt it. The only hopeful outcome for those who took part in the uprisings was that they might survive long enough to escape the clutches of the SS and join up with Jewish and non-Jewish partisans outside of the ghettos.

  For the Germans, crushing the ghetto insurrections was generally straightforward. Because not all of the ghettos were liquidated at the same time, Jewish armed resistance was uncoordinated, sporadic and unpredictable, so there was no united front or timed rebellion against the Germans. Other better-armed and organized resistance groups, such as the Armia Krajova or Polish Home Army, often expressed ambivalent feelings towards Polish Jews, anti-Semitism being as well entrenched in many of the occupied countries as that expressed inside Germany, and they did little to physically aid the uprisings. Some non-Jewish resistance groups were waiting for the strategic situation to turn against the Germans and time their own attacks accordingly. Even amongst the Jews themselves, there was considerable disunity in the face of imminent oblivion.

  The resistance groups that flowered in the ghettos were often ideologically opposed to each other, with Zionists against communists and so on, meaning that even within one large ghetto there might be different resistance groups operating, gathering weapons from different sources and maintaining different lines of communication with non-Jewish groups outside of the ghetto. But despite their lack of supplies or ideological
differences, the resisters were all bound together by one horrific fact – the Germans intended to rid Europe of the Jews and destroy Jewish society once and for all time. The resisters were prepared to stand in the way of that plan, to fight for their existence and not meekly submit to their cultural extinguishment. They would make the Nazis fight for every inch of the ghettos and kill as many Germans as they could before falling valiantly in defence of their families and their religion. It was literally a choice of that or to be led like lambs to the slaughter.

  Chapter 2

  Ghettograd

  ‘I have therefore decided to embark on the total destruction of the Jewish quarter by burning down every residential block, including the housing blocks belonging to the armament enterprises.’

  SS-Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop

  ‘Stroop,’ hissed Heinrich Himmler like a snake down the telephone line from Berlin, ‘you must at all costs bring down those two flags.’

  SS-Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop straightened himself, his gloved hand tightening around the receiver in anger.

  ‘Zu befehl, Herr Reichsführer,’ he snapped back stiffly, before replacing the telephone in its cradle. Walking a few hundred yards from his command post to the ‘front line’, Stroop narrowed his blue eyes and stared up at a tall building in Warsaw’s Muranowski Square. Black smoke was drifting across the sky from the many burning buildings, but in the breaks between each gust Stroop could make out the two flags that had Germany’s second most powerful man in a rage. Two young Jewish boys who had fearlessly braved the German gunfire had erected the flags the day before. One was the red and white Polish national flag, the other the banner of the Jewish resistance organization known as ZZW (Jewish Military Union). It consisted of a blue Star of David on a white background, today’s Israeli flag. Stroop, personally appointed by Himmler to crush the Warsaw Ghetto Revolt, pulsed with fury. He knew the power of flags. ‘It reminded hundreds of thousands of the Polish cause, it excited them and unified the population of the General Government, but especially Jews and Poles,’ he wrote afterwards. A flag was worth a hundred machine guns in a situation like this. Stroop would topple those flags, just like he would crush the Jews who had had the temerity to make a stand against the Third Reich. The ragtag army of Jewish ‘terrorists’ who had already managed to throw the Germans out of the ghetto would be utterly destroyed. This was Stroop’s almost pathological determination. That he was also fighting women and children made no impression on him in the slightest. With such cold-hearted warriors, Himmler prosecuted his destruction of the Jews.

  The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest of the many ghettos created for the Jews by the Germans. A tiny part of the Polish capital that measured only 1.3 square miles had been fenced and walled off and housed between 300,000 and 400,000 people in squalid, overcrowded conditions. Disease and malnutrition had already killed thousands before the Nazis decided to reduce the population dramatically by shipping tens of thousands of inmates east under Aktion Reinhard. SS-und-Polizeiführer Odilo Globocnik, Nazi police leader in the Lublin district of the General Government, had been ordered to progressively clear the ghetto, assisted by the head of the SiPo and SD in Warsaw, SS-Standartenführer Ludwig Hahn.

  Globocnik’s surname gave away his non-German origins. Born in Trieste in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1904 to parents of Slav origin, Globocnik served in the Austrian and Yugoslav armies before becoming a member of the banned Austrian Nazi Party. To say that Globocnik was a fanatical Nazi would have been an understatement, and he served time in prison for his political beliefs and activities, which endeared him to Himmler. A key player in the German takeover of Austria in 1938, Globocnik was rewarded by promotion to Gauleiter of Vienna, a position he utilized to both persecute Jews and enrich himself. Caught by SS investigators with his hand in the till in 1939, Globocnik was convicted of foreign currency speculation, dismissed from his position and reduced to a corporal in the Waffen-SS. Sent to the front in Poland, Himmler ensured that his old friend was rapidly reinstated as a top Nazi leader less than a year later, when he appointed Globocnik SS-Brigadeführer and assigned him to Lublin province as Higher SS and Police Leader. Himmler placed him in charge of the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto and a series of other major Jewish population centres, and Globocnik excelled at these tasks.

  The aristocratic SS-Oberführer Ferdinand von Sammern-Frankenegg, who had been in command of the Warsaw area since 1941, commanded Grossaktion Warschau on the ground, as the Germans termed the ghetto clearances. Globocnik maintained overall charge from a safe distance.

  The turning point for the ghetto inhabitants occurred on 18 April 1942, when the SS began a process of executing inmates it deemed ‘undesirables’ before commencing with its clearance of the ghetto. On 22 July, the head of the Judenrat, or Nazi-appointed Jewish Council, Adam Czerniakow, was called to a meeting headed by the German ‘Resettlement Commissioner’ SS-Sturmbannführer Hermann Höfle, where he was informed that mass deportations to camps in the east would commence shortly. Czerniakow, feeling that he was helpless to protect his people from what looked to be an increasingly homicidal Nazi programme, committed suicide rather than cooperate and was replaced by Marc Lichtenbaum. It made no difference to Höfle’s timetable. Over eight weeks during the summer of 1942, cattle trains left the ghetto railway collection point twice daily, carrying between 5,000 and 7,000 people on each occasion east to camps, primarily the extermination centre known as Treblinka II. The SS recorded that a total of 310,322 Jews were ‘evacuated’ from the ghetto when this action ended on 3 October 1942.1 Although the population of the ghetto was greatly reduced, the Germans planned a second round of deportations for later in the year, and it was at this point that some of the more militant Jews decided to act.

  The Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB) was formed in October 1942 with the intention of resisting further deportations. Led by an idealistic 24-year-old named Mordechai Anielewicz, its members were under no illusions as to their fate should they rise up against the SS police state. But they felt that they had nothing to lose, as the news filtering back from the eastern camps suggested that the Germans were murdering the evacuees. The ZOB received some weapons, ammunition and supplies from the well-organised Polish Home Army, a non-Jewish national resistance movement that was heavily supported by Britain. But the weapons were nowhere near plentiful enough for the ZOB to be considered a serious threat to the Germans. The ZOB only had 220 committed fighters in Warsaw, who were armed with a miscellany of handguns, grenades, rifles and home-made Molotov cocktails.

  Anielewicz divided the ghetto into sectors, sending his small number of fighters to garrison each one. So short were they of arms that each sector only had three rifles, and within the entire Warsaw Ghetto the ZOB possessed just two land mines and one sub-machine gun with limited ammunition. More weapons would be smuggled into the ghetto once the revolt started, some were captured from the Germans and a few were even manufactured in secret arsenals, but the ZOB would remain vastly outnumbered and outgunned by the Germans throughout the revolt.

  A second ghetto resistance organization, the right-wing ZZW, received large quantities of arms, ammunition and supplies from the Polish Home Army’s affiliated National Security Corps (PKB), and on several occasions the Home Army would launch attacks on German forces that were assaulting the ghetto, trying to take some of the pressure off the ZOB and ZZW forces inside the walls that were resisting bravely. One PKB unit led by Henryk ‘Bysty’ Iwanski even fought inside the ghetto. Many of the resisters would be young women, who, the Germans noted grimly, fought as fiercely as their menfolk.

  Himmler, who visited Warsaw in January 1943, ordered that the numerous armaments factories that had been established inside the ghetto, along with their Jewish labourers and machines, should be transferred to Lublin.2 The process began early on the morning of 18 January, when the temperature was minus 20°C. Grey army trucks loaded with 200 SS and 800 Ukrainian and Latvian SS auxiliaries roared into the centr
e of the ghetto. The round-up was timed to catch the 35,000 Jewish slave labourers on their way to work in the factories. The SS fired indiscriminately into the crowds before beginning to corral large numbers of people preparatory to marching them to the railhead.3 The sudden Nazi Aktion caught the Jewish resistance organizations completely off-guard. Trying to recover, they broke out their meagre supply of weapons or armed themselves with pipes, sticks and bottles. The Germans soon had long columns of Jews being herded towards the train depot when Anielewicz’s fighters suddenly opened fire. Whilst the stunned SS reacted to completely unexpected Jewish resistance, another group of SS stormed a building where a ZOB commander, Yitzhak Zuckerman, and forty of his fighters were holed up.4 Zuckerman had placed two armed lookouts in the large building’s foyer and they carefully took no notice as the SS swaggered through the main door and started for the staircase. Suddenly, one of the lookouts pulled out a revolver and shot two of the Germans in the back. The rest of the SS men, shocked and suddenly wrong-footed by this act of resistance, retreated from the building in some disarray, with the rest of Zuckerman’s fighters in pursuit. One more SS man was wounded in the intense gunfight that followed.5

  At Gestapo headquarters, there was considerable consternation. The Aktion was a complete failure, the Germans only managing to snatch 5,000 Jews instead of the 50,000 they had planned. Von Sammern-Frankenegg was humiliated. The Germans were aware that Poland’s resistance organization, the Home Army, numbered over 380,000 wellarmed personnel, and throughout the occupation they feared what would happen if it rose against Nazi rule. The fear was that this sudden resistance by Jewish ‘terrorists’, as the SS labelled them, could spread to the non-Jewish Polish population. The Home Army was indeed watching events in Warsaw with interest, and was impressed by the bloody nose that a handful of poorly armed Jewish fighters had managed to inflict on Hitler’s ‘master race’. But the Home Army would refuse all entreaties to join in with the ghetto rising, preferring to wait until events favoured them – that is, until the Red Army arrived close to the Polish capital, an event that in January 1943 was judged to be a long time off. The Jewish leadership demanded weapons and ammunition to supplement what they had bought or manufactured, and in February the Home Army gave the ZOB fifty pistols and some hand grenades.