Holocaust Heroes

by Felton, Mark;

  Stroop’s new method for ending the revolt was to burn down all of the houses and buildings inside the ghetto using flamethrowers and to dynamite basements, cellars and sewers in an effort to eradicate what both sides termed ‘bunkers’. Massive fires swept through the ruined ghetto streets, with many Jews perishing in the flames or being shot down by German troops as they fled the conflagrations.

  The sewer system proved difficult to capture. SS, Police or Wehrmacht troops entering sewers were often met by heavy fire. The Germans resorted to hurling smoke grenades down open manholes in an attempt to force the Jews out. In a more coordinated effort, 193 sewer entrances were opened at the same time and smoke bombs thrown in. Many of the ghetto fighters suspected gas and fled to the centre of the ghetto, while explosives or gunfire killed numerous others.

  After a few days the ghetto was reduced to a pile of smoldering ruins. It looked as though it had been carpet-bombed by aircraft. On 27 April, Stroop ordered a large, well-coordinated mopping-up operation. A force of 320 German and Latvian SS, two tanks and some half-tracks managed to clear out most of the remaining pockets of resistance around Muranowski Square. But the Germans continued to be ambushed from behind, often by Jews dressed in captured SS uniforms, which made the Germans very nervous and hesitant. One tank was knocked out in an ambush and the Jews managed to hold out until nightfall before either being killed or retreating.

  Whilst the fighting continued, the German destruction policy had netted results. Thousands of Jews fled the fires and were rounded up by the SS for immediate transportation to the east. By 2 May, Stroop was able to report to Kruger that he had apprehended a total of 40,237 Jews.21

  On the same day, the Germans assaulted Mark Edelman’s position. Army engineers managed to blow a way into the large bunker. Taking charge, Edelman organized its defence. The fighting lasted for seventy-two hours, with seven German casualties reported. Half of the Jewish fighters were killed and the rest managed to escape. On 6 May, the Germans withdrew from the vicinity and Edelman and the survivors moved to another bunker on Pleasant Street, a vast underground complex that had been carefully constructed over the space of a year. Here, Mordechai Anielewicz and 300 ZOB and ZZW fighters were holed up. The bunker was soon completely surrounded by the SS. Many of the fighters, including Anielewicz, killed themselves with poison on 8 May to avoid capture, while Edelman and a handful of survivors somehow made it out and escaped apprehension and death.

  The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising officially ended on 16 May 1943. The occasion was marked when Stroop personally pushed the plunger to trigger explosives that the SS had rigged in Warsaw’s Great Synagogue. With the synagogue’s symbolic destruction, Stroop could report to Himmler that Jewish resistance in Warsaw had been brought to an end. The SS and Wehrmacht had destroyed a total of 631 ‘bunkers’ throughout the ghetto. With typical Teutonic efficiency, the SS collected and catalogued all the weapons that they had captured or recovered after the battle. It was not an impressive haul, considering the doggedness of the resistance that the Germans had encountered. Of course, many weapons were not recovered, being buried under collapsed buildings, destroyed by fire or taken out of the ghetto by the surviving fighters. The SS listed just seven Polish, one Russian and one German rifle captured, along with fifty-nine pistols of various makes, several hundred hand grenades, Molotov cocktails and home-made explosives. The SS also recovered 1,240 German uniforms that the resisters often used to travel around the ghetto during the fight or to launch ambushes against the SS.

  The destruction to the centre of Warsaw was staggering – just eight buildings were left intact after the uprising. Sporadic resistance continued and it was not until 5 June that the last shots were exchanged between the remnants of the ghetto fighters and German forces.

  For those Jews who were captured or remained in the ghetto at the conclusion of the uprising, their fate was transportation to camps in the east. Over 13,000 ghetto inmates had perished during the uprising and 50,000 were herded onto cattle trains and shipped out. Of 7,000 Jews who had been transported to Treblinka II on 19 April, shortly before the uprising started, many would be involved in fomenting a fresh revolt that occurred in the camp on 2 August 1943. According to SS records, the Germans lost seventeen men killed during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and 101 wounded, though these figures may be on the conservative side.

  The non-Jewish Polish population of Warsaw, with some notable exceptions in the Home Army, did not rise up in support of the ghetto fighters. ‘The Polish population by and large welcomed the measures taken against the Jews,’22 alleged Stroop in his official report to Himmler. How much truth there was in Stroop’s statement cannot be ascertained. It was certainly true that Poles had killed Jews en masse under German encouragement earlier in the occupation. At Radzilow, Polish peasants had murdered 800 Jewish inhabitants. And at nearby Jedwabne, the entire Jewish population had been herded into the only synagogue and burned alive.23 It had been fear of a Polish-led pogrom that had first fired the ghetto Jews into forming self-defence militias. But though most Poles passively watched the events of 1943, they would rise up in Warsaw in 1944, with tragic consequences.

  Stroop records that a total of 265,000 ghetto Jews were transported from Warsaw to Treblinka between 22 July and 12 September 1943,24 closing the ghetto. Himmler was pleased with Stroop’s leadership during the operation to liquidate the ghetto and he was awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class.

  For the major perpetrators, justice for the uprising came in many forms. The Polish underground instituted the British-sponsored Operation Bürkl in October 1943, deliberately targeting Franz Bürkl, a senior Nazi official in the General Government, who was cut down by assassins from the Polish Home Army in Warsaw. As mentioned, Ferdinand von Sammern-Frankenegg was killed in an ambush in Croatia by Yugoslav partisans in 1944. Odilo Globocnik committed suicide in May 1945 to avoid war crimes charges. Jürgen Stroop, the man who had orchestrated the crushing of the uprising with the utmost brutality, was arrested by the US Army in 1945 and subsequently handed over to the Poles. Stroop was hanged in Warsaw in March 1952, totally unrepentant to the end. Another Warsaw Ghetto administrator, SS-Hauptsturmführer Franz Conrad, whom the ghetto inmates had nicknamed ‘The King of the Ghetto’ as he had consistently enriched himself by stealing valuables off the Jews, was also hanged by the Poles in Warsaw in 1952. But by and large the SS and Trawnikis who did the actual killing either didn’t survive the war or managed to reintegrate into post-war society and never faced prosecution. The brave and determined stand of the Warsaw Jews showed the world that the Jews were not prepared to submit to destruction without a fight, and the fight had both alarmed and deeply unsettled the Germans. But the Germans also learned many valuable lessons from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, lessons that they would put to good use when it came to liquidating the other major Jewish ghettos.

  Chapter 3

  Blobel’s Revenge

  ‘I believe that there isn’t and cannot be more back-breaking and harder work than that of burning corpses, our life wasn’t worth a nickel, they would shoot anyone for any reason. The only thing that saved us was that they needed us for work.’

  Yakov Kaper

  Syrets Concentration Camp

  ‘Go, go, go!’ yelled the German Order Police soldiers that were controlling the flow of victims into the pits. Another score of Jews ran forward at the command, the soldier bringing up the rear kicking the last Jew savagely in the backside as he ran. ‘Schnell!’ was the chorus that greeted the hapless Jews as they arrived at the end of the pit. Many stopped in stunned horror at the scene before them. The long, deep sandy pit was already filled with several layers of corpses. The bodies lay twisted upon each other, blood pouring from head wounds. Above the pit waited a line of Order Police, Mauser rifles at the ready, their eyes strangely dead, faces blank. Standing off to one side were several SS and Order Police officers, calmly smoking cigarettes. They hardly turned to look at the new arrivals. ‘Lay down!’ yelled an Order Police
corporal, levelling a Walther P.38 pistol at the fresh arrivals. ‘Do it now!’ the corporal insisted. The Jews, confused and terrified, complied, laying down upon the still warm corpses of their brethren. Guttural commands were hastily issued to the firing party up top, and Mausers were levelled down into the pit at the crying and quaking Jews. ‘Fire!’ A fusillade of shots cracked out. The corporal stared into the pit, then turned to another NCO who was waiting nearby: ‘Bring the next batch.’ And so it went on and on until the sun began to set. And the next day it would begin again.

  The name Babi Yar epitomises the cruelty of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. In the ravine at Babi Yar, north of Kiev, the Einsatzgruppen shot 33,771 Jews during two days of pitiless slaughter in September 1941. The bodies were then covered over with lime and soil and forgotten. That was until six horrific weeks during August to September 1943, when the panicked Germans decided to try and hide the crimes of Babi Yar from the rapidly advancing Red Army.

  A concentration camp had been established close to Babi Yar in 1942 at Syrets, using the former summer camp of Kiev’s pre-war Red Army garrison. It was created on the express order of SS-Obersturmbannführer Erich Ehrlinger, commander of the Security Police and SD in Central Russia and Belarus. The camp held both male and female prisoners, normally around 3,000 at any given time, and the inmates were Jews, communists, Soviet prisoners-of-war and captured Red Army partisans from the Kiev area. The man appointed by Ehrlinger to run the camp was a monster. SS-Sturmbannführer Paul Otto Radomski terrorized his prisoners.

  Radomski was described by one fellow SS officer as a drunkard who was ‘primitive in all his thoughts’.1 He was an ‘Alter Kämpfer’ (Old Fighter), a man who had joined the Nazi Party before 1930, and he had served time in prison for a political killing.2 A long-time acquaintance of Reinhard Heydrich, such a thug was very useful to the Nazis under the right circumstances, and Syrets was to prove to be that circumstance.

  The prisoners at Syrets starved in primitive wooden barracks or dugouts, with doors and stairs leading down from ground level to prevent them from freezing up during the brutal winter. ‘The whole Syretsky concentration camp was surrounded by a high barbed wire fence, through which ran wires carrying high-voltage electrical current,’ recalled Latvian SS-Mann Zubchenko. ‘Inside this big, so-called labour zone there was a small living zone.’3 The guards at Syrets were drawn from the 23rd Latvian SS Police Battalion, a unit formed in February 1942 that had participated in genocidal actions in the Dnepropetrovsk and Kerch areas from May 1942. It had also conducted mass shootings on the border territories between Latvia, Russia and Belorussia, as well as the Pskov region. Along with regular German SS, the battalion and other Latvian and Ukrainian auxiliaries had participated in the Babi Yar Massacre. Command and control of the Syrets camp and its environs remained the responsibility of regular SS-Totenkopfverbände, the Latvians completing the usual guarding and patrolling duties and handling the prisoners. In this, they exercised great brutality.

  The daily mortality rate at Syrets was ten to fifteen people, and it has been estimated that a total of over 25,000 prisoners died during the camp’s operation. The chances of escaping were limited. ‘Guards were stationed around the camp. At night they patrolled around the camp zone, which was almost entirely illuminated by electric light. There were two guard posts near the living zone.’ This ‘living zone’ consisted of a carefully segregated area. ‘At the camp corners there were high watchtowers, manned by policemen with machine guns. Inside the camp there was a fenced-in women’s camp, then a road, then our dugouts in two rows, also fenced in,’ recalled inmate Yakov Kaper. ‘The first dugout on the right side, near the entrance to zone no. 2, was for the Jews. Gallows were specially installed near our dugout … On the very day that we arrived, one man who tried to escape was hanged on these gallows. There followed a long row of dugouts, which also had names – “Soviet”, “Partisan”, “Communist”. On the left – in dugouts with odd numbers starting with 1 – were the most significant authorities.’4

  The prisoners and their Latvian SS guards were terrified of Commandant Radomski. ‘Sturmbannführer Radomski would often come to the camp in his car with his enormous German Shepherd, Rex, by his side,’ recalled Kaper. ‘Behind him sat the interpreter, a Volksdeutscher named Rein. Word of his arrival would travel across the camp very quickly. Everyone trembled. The policemen stood at attention, hoping he would not find fault with anything.’5 But Radomski nearly always did find fault, whether real or imagined. He simply enjoyed torturing and killing people. ‘The first to report to him was the Rottenführer on duty, then Anton,’ recalled Kaper. ‘Anton’ appears to have been a Czech SS sergeant who ran the day-to-day operations of the camp. ‘They escorted him around the camp, Radomsky in the lead with his dog. Sometimes this tour lasted until dinner. But if he had not liked how we sang or how we marched to dinner, he would make us march and sing instead of feeding us. Usually, we sang “Oh, you, Galya” or “Nightingale, nightingale, you birdie” or some other song like that.’ Following this, the entire camp was ordered to parade in ranks ‘and they would start to investigate what had happened during the day or night before and who was to blame. Then they would hand out punishments according to the seriousness of the incident.’6

  Punishments were always painful and very often fatal. ‘A special table was placed in the centre of the grounds for whipping people. The prisoner who was to be punished was ordered to take off his trousers and to lie face down on the table,’ said Kaper. ‘His neck and feet were then fixed to boards so that he could not move. The strongest men were chosen from the ranks and ordered to administer as many blows as were proscribed.’ Radomsky’s sadistic streak meant that he actually forced the prisoners to flog each other. ‘They would beat the other prisoner so hard that his flesh flew around. Those who did not hit hard enough were then themselves tied to the table and beaten by others. Many times the victim could not get up after the beating and Radomsky would shoot him on the spot.’7

  Sturmbannführer Radomsky used his pistol a lot, including regularly clearing out the ‘hospital’ of its patients. The conditions at Syrets conspired to ensure that the hospital was always fully stocked with the sick and the dying. ‘Roused at 4 o’clock in the morning: 4:30 – breakfast, 5 o’clock – marching to work in formations. At 12 noon – dinner: one hour later – return to work until 9 o’clock in the evening,’ described SS-Mann Morozov of the daily routine at Syrets. ‘In the morning they were given a cup of so-called coffee (boiled water with a taste of some herb). For dinner a litre of some “soup” – just water without salt, with several grains of millet. Two-hundred grams of bread made from millet flour was provided for an entire day.’ There was no evening meal, which forced the inmates to take extreme measures to try and feed themselves. ‘Inmates ate rats, dogs, cats, different herbs. They were swelling from hunger. People in this condition were taken to the so-called “hospital” – a dugout, where there was no medical help, and people just died, or were shot by the German camp commandant.’8 Radomski shot sick inmates almost every day. ‘He entered the hospital dugout, ordered the sick to be taken out, and here, near the dugout, he was shooting them,’9 recalled Morozov.

  Female prisoners were also treated with much harshness and violence alongside the men. ‘They peeled potatoes, cooked, served meals, sewed, mended clothes, cleaned the area and made a type of shoe from cord,’ said prisoner David Budnik. ‘In theory these were for the prisoners, but none of us ever received a pair.’ Female hard labour was difficult for the male prisoners to witness. ‘Among them were juveniles, young Jewish girls whose parents had been shot. They were given the hardest labour. They loaded carts with stones and bricks and then they were harnessed to the carts in place of horses. They were urged on with sticks and lashes. It was unbearable to watch how both the criminals and the fascists taunted them simply because they were Jewish. To make them easily identifiable all of their hair was cut off.’10

  The Germans were very c
oncerned lest evidence of their extensive Einsatzgruppen and Aktion Reinhard atrocities become known to the world after the Soviets conquered their lost territories and moved on into Poland. Before he was assassinated, Reinhard Heydrich had placed SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel, one of the perpetrators of the Babi Yar Massacre, in charge of getting rid of all evidence of the Nazi slaughter – and by ‘evidence’, Heydrich meant the bodies that had been hastily buried after the shooting and gassing operations. This clean-up operation was designated Sonderaktion 1005.

  Paul Blobel had been born in Potsdam near Berlin in 1894. After service in the Great War, during which he won the Iron Cross 1st Class, Blobel became an architect until he lost his job during the height of the Great Depression in 1931. Like many disillusioned veterans, Blobel joined the Nazi Party and the SS. In 1933, he became a police officer in Düsseldorf before transferring to the SD in 1934. In June 1941, during the invasion of the Soviet Union, Blobel commanded Sonderkommando 4a, part of Einsatzgruppe C, in the Ukraine. His unit exterminated the entire Jewish population of the town of Zhytomyr in early August 1941 before butchering women and children in Bila Tserkava with the cooperation of the German Sixth Army later that same month. Most notorious was Blobel’s involvement with the huge Babi Yar Massacre outside Kiev. By now, Blobel was an alcoholic; a problem that would eventually lead to his transfer to other duties once the clean-up operation was completed.

  Reinhard Heydrich’s unexpected death in Prague at the hands of British-trained SOE agents delayed the commencement of Sonderaktion 1005 until the head of the Gestapo, SS-Gruppenführer Heinrich Muller, personally stepped in to take charge at the end of June 1942 and issued the necessary orders to Blobel.