After the selection, those doomed to die were directed along a path to one of the bunkers. In soothing tones SS officers told the victims that they were to take a shower and undergo delousing. A French doctor assigned to the Jewish “special commando” responsible for removing the bodies from the gas chambers described the procedure. The victims “were addressed in a very polite and friendly way: ‘You have been on a journey. You are dirty. You will take a bath. Get undressed quickly.’ Towels and soap were handed out, and then suddenly the brutes woke up and showed their true faces: this horde of people, these men and women were driven outside with hard blows and forced both summer and winter to go the few hundred meters to the ‘Shower Room.’ Above the entry door was the word ‘Shower.’ One could even see shower heads which were cemented in the ceiling but never had water flowing through them. These poor innocents were crammed together, pressed against each other. Then panic broke out, for at last they realized the fate in store for them. But blows with rifle butts and revolver shots soon restored order and finally they all entered the death chamber. The doors were shut and, ten minutes later, the temperature was high enough to facilitate the condensation of the hydrogen cyanide. . . . This was the ‘Zyklon B’ gravel pellets saturated with twenty percent hydrogen cyanide which was used by the German barbarians.” Then the pellets were thrown in through a small vent. One could hear fearful screams, but a few moments later there was complete silence. Twenty to twenty-five minutes later, the door and windows were opened to ventilate the rooms and the corpses were thrown at once into pits to be burnt. But beforehand, the dentists had searched every mouth to pull out the gold teeth. The women were also searched to see if they had hidden jewelry in the intimate parts of their bodies, and their hair was cut off and methodically placed in sacks for industrial purposes.” The men who carried out these macabre tasks were Jewish prisoners selected by the Nazis to serve as Sonderkommandos, or special aides. After serving in this grim capacity for a time, they were executed, and a new batch of prisoners took their place. No one would survive. There would be no witnesses. The corpses were burned in the nearby incinerators, and the ashes were buried, thrown in the river, or used for fertilizer. In some cases the dead were thrown into an open pit. The stench was unbearable.
Despite the fact that rumors about the death camps were in wide circulation, Himmler continued to insist on complete secrecy. It was imperative for three reasons. First, in order to stifle any disruption or resistance, the victims should be ignorant of their fate awaiting them at the end of the train journey. Second, Hitler was always very impressed by the success of British propaganda during World War I. Those efforts had created the image of barbaric “Germans bayoneting babies in Belgium,” and he wanted to give the Allies no ammunition for new propaganda campaigns. And finally, neither he nor Himmler was convinced that the German people were ready for a confrontation with this gruesome reality. All of this was reflected in a speech delivered by Himmler to a gathering of SS men in Poznan in June 1943. “I want to talk to you quite frankly about a very grave matter,” he began.
We can talk about it quite frankly among ourselves and yet we will never speak of it publicly. . . . I am referring to the Jewish evacuation program, the extermination of the Jewish people. ‘The Jewish people will be exterminated,’ says every party comrade. ‘It’s clear, it’s in our program. Elimination of the Jews, extermination and we’ll do it.’ . . . Not one of those who talk like that has watched it happening, not one of them has been through it. Most of you will know what it means when a hundred corpses are lying side by side, or five hundred or a thousand are lying there. To have stuck it out and—apart from a few exceptions due to human weakness—to have remained decent, that is what has made us tough. This is a glorious page in our history and one that has never been written and can never be written.
Eventually more crematoria and gas chambers were constructed to deal with hundreds of thousands of victims, and the killing continued with increasing speed and efficiency into November 1944. At the peak of its operations in the summer of 1944, Auschwitz could murder 9,000 people per day, and by the close of the year, when the giant killing factory was closed down due to the approach of the Red Army, 1.1 million people, the vast majority Jews, had been murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Together with the massacres of the Einsatzgruppen, the ongoing mass murders at Treblinka, and other death camps with their dozens of brutal satellite labor camps, the Nazi crusade against Judeo-Bolshevism claimed the lives of roughly six million Jews—and millions of other undesirables—Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, Communists, as well as millions of Polish and Russian civilians, Untermenschen (subhumans) all.
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While the Nazi campaign against the Jews was reaching its bloody climax, the war in 1943–44 turned decisively against the Third Reich. In the East, the Russians for the first time assumed—and sustained—the offensive, initiating a series of ever-larger and -deadlier operations that drove the Wehr-macht out of the Soviet Union. It would not conclude until 1945 when Red Army troops were standing in the ruins of Berlin. In the high summer of 1943 the Red Army smashed the last German offensive at Kursk, about 320 miles south of Moscow. The Germans threw twelve panzer divisions and five panzer grenadier divisions, each employing heavy Tiger tanks and the new Panthers (Panzers). In a battle that raged into August, the Soviets mauled the Wehrmacht’s best armored forces in the largest tank battle in history. The greatly outnumbered Germans suffered crushing losses in both infantry and armor in the fighting. After receiving word of the Allied invasion of Sicily on July 10, 1943, Hitler, over General Manstein’s objections, abruptly broke off the operation, and Germany’s last offensive on the Eastern Front was over. It was, Guderian ruminated, “a decisive defeat. Needless to say, the Russians exploited their victory to the full. There were to be no more periods of quiet on the Eastern Front. From now on the enemy was in undisputed possession of the initiative.” With the Wehrmacht reeling, the Russians retook Orel and Kharkov, and in November they drove the Germans from Kiev. In January 1944 the long agony of Leningrad came to an end when an 872-day siege was at last lifted. By the end of the month, the Red Army had reached the prewar Soviet border of Poland.
In the course of 1943 the Germans suffered one setback after another. The Allies invaded mainland Italy in September. Mussolini was deposed by King Victor Emmanuel and his own Fascist Council, and although Hitler would install him as head of a puppet Fascist state in northern Italy, the Duce was a spent political and military force. German troops overran the country, rushing south to meet the Allied invaders, but they found themselves fighting a costly defensive war as British and American troops struggled slowly but steadily up the peninsula toward Rome. At sea, the Battle of the Atlantic was basically over, as the Allies’ use of convoys and aircraft threatened to sink Germany’s entire submarine force. Everywhere, Germany was in retreat. And yet, while German forces fell back on every front, the Nazi war against the Jews gathered momentum, reaching its crescendo in the lengthening shadow of the Reich’s mounting defeats. Here there would be no retreat.
17
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APOCALYPSE
As the spring of 1944 approached, German attention was focused on the anticipated Allied invasion of Northern Europe, and it was a time of mounting anxiety in the Reich. In March, the Gestapo reported that “the new developments in the East, the air war, and waiting for the invasion are making it hard to see a realistic way out of this bungled situation and to believe in a good outcome of the war.” The public followed with growing dismay the Russian advance on the Reich’s borderlands, and worries about the anticipated Allied invasion also weighed heavily on the home front. The outcome of that battle, Hitler believed, would be the critical turning point of the war, and in November 1943 he issued Führer Order No. 51. It read:
For the last two and a half years the bitter and costly struggle against Bolshevism has made the utmost demands upon the bulk of our military resources and energies. . .
. The situation has since changed. The threat from the East remains, but an even greater danger looms in the West: the Anglo-American landing! In the East, the vastness of the space will, as a last resort, permit a loss of territory even on a major scale, without suffering a mortal blow to Germany’s chance for survival. Not so in the West! If the enemy here succeeds in penetrating our defense on a wide front, consequences of staggering proportions will follow within a short time. For that reason I can no longer justify the further weakening of the West in favor of other theaters of war. I have therefore decided to strengthen the defenses in the West.
His calculation was largely political, for if the invasion failed, the Western Allies would not try again for at least a year, and the Russians might seek a separate peace, especially since even if they reached the border of 1941, they would still be a thousand miles from Berlin. He named Field Marshal von Rundstedt, whom he had dismissed in 1942, to command all German forces in the West but placed Rommel, the most popular military figure in Germany, in command of all ground units in the key coastal areas of northern France and the Low Countries. It was an unorthodox arrangement, though perfectly consistent with Hitler’s leadership, and would guarantee that the essential unity of command would be in question from the very beginning. Both Rommel and Rundstedt agreed that the Pas-de-Calais in the north of France was the most likely site for the Allied landing—only twenty miles across the Strait of Dover, the narrowest part of the Channel. Initially Hitler agreed but then suddenly decided that the invasion would come in Normandy, a most unlikely spot due to its distance from Paris. It was exactly the sort of surprise that always delighted Hitler, something that he would do. The generals agreed to beef up defenses along the Normandy coast, but continued to believe that a landing in the Pas-de-Calais area offered the shortest route into France, and then a quick drive through the Low Countries into Germany and the Ruhr. That had to be prevented at all costs.
While Rundstedt and Rommel were confident that the invasion would come in Pas-de-Calais, their agreement ended there. Rommel was convinced that the Allies had to be stopped immediately on the beaches; if they were to get ashore and establish a beachhead, the battle would be lost. The first twenty-four hours of the invasion would, therefore, be what he called “the longest day,” the day on which the fate of Germany would hinge. Rundstedt, on the other hand, certainly wanted a vigorous defense on the beaches, but believed that attempting to defend a coastline of several hundred miles, building up defenses on all possible landing areas, was simply impossible. Rundstedt was keenly aware of Frederick the Great’s dictum that he who defends everything defends nothing. Instead, he favored mounting a mobile defense with a powerful strike force to counterattack after the main thrust of the invasion had been identified. Complicating matters further, Hitler insisted on his sole control of the so-called OKW reserves, consisting of four key panzer divisions that would be essential for a successful defense. Whether Rommel’s “halt them at the beaches” or Rundstedt’s mobile defense strategy was adopted, these four armor divisions would be essential to thwart the main Allied assault, and only Hitler could release them.
When at last the invasion came on the blustery dawn of June 6, it was in Normandy, and it caught the Germans by surprise. Due to a prevailing bad weather front estimated to last a week, German commanders in the West assumed that the attack would not come at that time and thought it safe to attend war games in Rouen. Rommel took the opportunity to travel home to Germany for his wife’s birthday. But the Allies, who could track weather fronts across the Atlantic while the Germans could not, had detected a break in the storm and gambled that it would hold for thirty-six crucial hours on June 5–6. Although Rundstedt was at first convinced that the reported landings in Normandy were a diversion, he tried to contact Hitler in Berchtesgaden to request that the Führer release the reserve panzer divisions. But Hitler was asleep—he had taken sleeping pills—and Jodl refused to wake him. Precious hours were lost until he was awakened and briefed on the situation. Much has been made of this failure, but it is unlikely that under the circumstances Hitler would have released the panzers on June 6. In fact, for a month after the invasion began both he and Rundstedt remained convinced that a second landing would be attempted and continued to assume that it would come to the north, somewhere between the Scheldt and the Seine.
In July, a full month after the landings, the Allied breakout from Normandy finally occurred, and German forces began falling back in a disorderly retreat. American troops raced to the south-southeast; Paris fell in August, Belgium in September. To the Allies’ great surprise, German forces managed to regroup, and in September repulsed a major offensive in Holland (Operation Market Garden) that would have allowed Allied forces to cross the Lower Rhine. The failure of that operation meant that the war would not be over by Christmas, as many in the West had come to believe, and it gave the Germans a chance to recover and prepare for the next Allied lunge forward. The Germans had averted disaster, but as summer turned to fall, the Wehrmacht was staggering, on the cusp of defeat.
As the vise closed on the Third Reich, grumbling on the home front mounted. Complaints were widespread, and criticism of local party officials was rampant, but given the repressive nature of the regime, such dissent, if it can be called that, did not rise to the level of systemic opposition, to say nothing of organized resistance. In the last year of the war, the Gestapo did, however, report that top leaders were increasingly coming under attack, especially Goebbels and Göring. Juvenile delinquency, which was surprisingly high in the prewar Third Reich, increased as the bombing and attendant blackouts offered ample opportunities for looting, robbery, and assault, but troubling as these developments were for the regime, they were not in the end political in nature. During the war, Gestapo, police, and judicial agencies stepped up their efforts to root out possible sources of dissent, making organized resistance virtually impossible. Any hint of dissent provoked a furious response; arrests and executions multiplied; paranoia flourished.
Despite the dangers involved, some individuals and groups did manage to engage in acts of resistance to the regime. Among the most active oppositional groups were the Communists. Although they had been hounded relentlessly since the Nazi Machtergreifung and their organizations were honeycombed with Gestapo spies, Communist cells remained, especially in the large cities. A network of more than twenty cells run by Robert Uhrig and Josef Römer was active in Berlin. The group printed a monthly “Information Service” pamphlet, which was distributed to Communist cells around the city as well as across Germany, calling for sabotage against industrial and military targets. Uhrig, Römer, and 150 other Communists were swept up in a Gestapo dragnet in 1942, and after two years’ imprisonment in a series of prisons and concentration camps, both men were guillotined in 1944. That same sweep led to the arrest of Anton Saefkow, who had taken up where Uhrig and Römer left off, distributing leaflets and aiding fugitives. Sixty members of his group were also arrested at that time, and all were executed in 1944.
The largest of the Communist groups active in Berlin was the “Red Orchestra,” led by Harro Schulze-Boysen, Arvid Harnack, and his American wife, Mildred Fish Harnack. Its primary activity was espionage, sending coded radio messages to Moscow. Because resistance radio operators were referred to as “pianists,” the Gestapo gave the group its musical name. The group was tracked down by the Gestapo in 1942, and Schulze-Boysen, the Harnacks, and the majority of its members were arrested. Most were tried before a military court and executed as spies. Isolated Communist cells continued their shadowy existence into the last months of the Third Reich, printing leaflets, painting anti-Nazi slogans on city walls, and trying to stay one step ahead of the Gestapo.
The Gestapo also expressed a growing concern about a significant uptick in church attendance, which it interpreted as a symptom of growing disaffection with National Socialism. The churches, both Protestant and Catholic, had been a source of trouble for the regime since the early days, and their protest
against the euthanasia program had forced the regime to suspend that operation, if only briefly. During the war, sermons in both Catholic and Protestant churches, always monitored by the Gestapo, often expressed veiled criticisms of the regime, and as the war dragged on and Germany’s military fortunes sagged, many saw the church as a haven, an institution with some claim to independence. It was not the major figures of the churches that concerned the Nazis during the war, but local priests and ministers, whose sermons drew larger and larger audiences. As Germany’s military situation deteriorated, Nazi authorities throughout Catholic Germany had grown increasingly concerned about “competition with the clergy.” People were crowding into the churches “far more than in past years,” one report to Munich party headquarters noted, especially the rural population, and the regime was groping for “an effective counterweight to the increasing influence of the church.” One response was repression: more than four hundred priests were arrested and sent to Dachau.
On the whole the universities, with their starkly reduced enrollments, were quiet. But in 1942 a small group of students in Munich took bold—and suicidal—action against the regime. Calling themselves the White Rose, siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl, together with their friends Alexander Schmorell, Christoph Probst, Willi Graf, and philosophy professor Hans Huber, wrote a series of anti-Nazi leaflets, printing, and distributing them around the city. They painted slogans on walls—“FREEDOM,” “HITLER MASS MURDERER,” and “DOWN WITH HITLER.” They mailed copies of the leaflets to students in Hamburg, Berlin, and Vienna, urging them to make copies and distribute them in their communities. Hans Scholl and Alexander Schmorell were medical students and, as required of all medical students, had spent three months serving in Russia, where they were appalled by the slaughter of young German soldiers as well as the murderous SS actions against the Jews—an experience that gave them a deepened sense of urgency and purpose.
The Third Reich Page 67
