Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 2: The Years of Extermination
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Within days admonishments from Tokyo reached the wayward consul: “Recently we discovered Lithuanians who possess our transit visas which you issued,” a cable of August 16 read. “They were traveling to America and Canada. Among them there are several people who do not possess enough money and who have not finished their procedure to receive their entry visas to the terminal countries. We cannot give them permission to land. And in regard to these cases, there were several instances that left us confused and we do not know what to do…. You must make sure that they have finished their procedure for their entry visas and also they must posses the travel money or the money that they need during their stay in Japan. Otherwise, you should not give them the transit visa.”216
Sugihara remained undeterred: He continued signing visas even from the window of an already moving train as he and his family were leaving for Berlin. He issued more visas in Prague and possibly in Königsberg. The Germans were certainly not adverse to the illegal departure of Jews from the territory of the Reich.217 Sugihara may have issued up to ten thousand visas, and possibly half the number of Jews who received them managed to survive.218 There is no concrete clue about his thoughts and motives: “I did not pay any attention [to consequences],” he wrote in a postwar memoir, “and just acted according to my sense of human justice, out of love for mankind.”219
PART II
Mass Murder
Summer 1941–Summer 1942
The proportions of life and death have radically changed. Times were, when life occupied the primary place, when it was the main and central concern, while death was a side phenomenon, secondary to life, its termination. Nowadays, death rules in all its majesty; while life hardly glows under a thick layer of ashes. Even this faint glow of life is feeble, miserable and weak, poor, devoid of any free breath, deprived of any spark of spiritual content. The very soul, both in the individual and in the community, seems to have starved and perished, to have dulled and atrophied. There remain only the needs of the body; and it leads merely an organic-physiological existence.
—Abraham Lewin, eulogy in honor of Yitshak Meir Weissenberg, September 31, 1941
CHAPTER IV
June 1941–September 1941
On September 29, 1941, the Germans shot 33,700 Kiev Jews in the Babi Yar ravine near the city. As the rumors about the massacre spread, some Ukrainians initially expressed doubts. “I only know one thing,” Iryna Khoroshunova inscribed in her diary on that same day, “there is something terrible, horrible going on, something inconceivable, which cannot be understood, grasped or explained.” A few days later, her uncertainty had disappeared: “A Russian girl accompanied her girlfriend to the cemetery [at the entrance of the ravine], but crawled through the fence from the other side. She saw how naked people were taken toward Babi Yar and heard shots from a machine gun. There are more and more such rumors and accounts. They are too monstrous to believe. But we are forced to believe them, for the shooting of the Jews is a fact. A fact which is starting to drive us insane. It is impossible to live with this knowledge. The women around us are crying. And we? We also cried on September 29, when we thought they were taken to a concentration camp. But now? Can we really cry? I am writing, but my hair is standing on end.”1 In the meantime, the war in the East was entering its fourth month.
For Dawid Rubinowicz the unleashing of the German attack was merely a noisy event at first: “It was still dark,” he noted on June 22, “when father woke us all up and told us to listen to that terrible din coming from the north-east. It was such a din the earth quaked. The whole day thundering could be heard. Toward evening Jews dropped in from Kielce and said Soviet Russia was at war with the Germans, and only then did it dawn on me why there had been that din all day.”2
Of necessity the Lodz chronicles had to keep to the barest facts: “In connection with the war against the Soviets, in the last ten days of June there has been a sudden increase in the price of packaged goods, which the ghetto had received mostly from the USSR,” they recorded in their entry of June 20–30, 1941. The mention of the German attack in the East elicited no further comment.3 The restraint imposed on the official ghetto recorders was not shared by the individual diarists, however. Young Sierakowiak was elated: “Incredible, wonderful news!” he wrote on the twenty-second, though he was not yet entirely sure that the “free, beloved, great Soviets” were not being attacked by a German-British coalition.4 On the twenty-third he triumphantly confirmed: “It is all true!…The entire ghetto is buzzing like one big beehive. Everybody feels that a chance for liberation is finally possible.”5
Not all Jewish diarists shared Sierakowiak’s high spirits. In Romania—which had joined the anti-Bolshevik crusade—fear spread: “In the evening, we gather early at the house,” Sebastian noted on June 22. “With the shutters drawn and the telephone out of service, we have a growing sense of unease and anguish. What will happen to us? I hardly dare ask. You are afraid to imagine what you will be like in another day, another week, another month.”6 Two days later Sebastian described a poster put up in the streets with the text ‘Who are the masters of Bolshevism?’, showing “a Jew in a red gown, with side curls, skullcap, and beard, holding a hammer in one hand and a sickle in the other. Concealed beneath his coat are three Soviet soldiers. I have heard that the posters were put up by police sergeants.”7
In Vilna, Hermann Kruk did not partake of Sierakowiak’s enthusiasm either. Kruk had fled from Warsaw to Lithuania a few days after the beginning of the war. In the Polish capital he had been active in Yiddish cultural circles and was in charge of the cultural activities of the Bund’s youth movement, Zukunft, and of the central Yiddish library.8 On June 22, 1941, he thought of fleeing again but did not succeed. Fatalistically he resigned himself to staying and recording the oncoming events: “I make a firm decision,” he noted on June 23, 1941. “I leave myself to the mercy of God; I am staying. And, right away, I make another decision: if I am staying anyway and if I am going to be a victim of fascism, I shall take pen in hand and write a chronicle of a city. Clearly, Vilna may also be captured. The Germans will turn the city fascist. Jews will go into the ghetto—I shall record it all. My chronicle must see, must hear, and must become the mirror and the conscience of the great catastrophe and of the hard times.”9
In the Warsaw ghetto, as in Lodz, the immediate everyday consequences of the new war seemed to be the main concern. “A newspaper special on the war with the Soviets,” Czerniaków noted on June 22. “It will be necessary to work all day, and perhaps they will not let one sleep at night.”10 For days on end the Warsaw chairman hardly mentioned the war in Russia; he had other, more urgent worries. “In the streets the workers are being impressed for labor outside the ghetto, since there are few volunteers for a job which pays only 2.80 zlotys and provides no food,” he noted on July 8. I went to [Ferdinand von] Kamlah to obtain food for them. So far, no results. Considering their dire predicament, the Jewish masses are quiet and composed.”11
Among the Germans, as far as Klemperer could observe, the news of the campaign in the East was well received: “Cheerful faces everywhere,” he noted on June 22. “A new entertainment, a prospect of new sensations, the Russian war is a source of new pride for people, their grumbling of yesterday is forgotten.”12 In fact, most observers would not have agreed with Klemperer: the news of the attack, although not unexpected, caused surprise and, at times, consternation.13
I
During the first days and weeks of the campaign, the German onslaught seemed, once again, irresistible. Despite repeated warnings from the most diverse sources (including several Soviet-controlled spy rings), Stalin and the Red Army had been caught by surprise. “We will still have some heavy battles to fight,” Hitler told Goebbels on July 8, “but the Bolshevik armed forces will not be able to recover from the present series of defeats.”14 Unperceived and unimagined by any observer at the time, Germany’s descent to defeat had begun.
Optimism pervaded the high-level meeting convened at Hitler�
�s headquarters on July 16 and attended by Göring, Bormann, Lammers, Keitel, and Rosenberg. In a memorable formula, the “greatest military leader of all times” [Grösste Feldherr aller Zeiten, according to Keitel] set the guidelines for German policy in the occupied Soviet Union: “Basically we have to divide this enormous cake in the right way in order, first to rule it, second to administer it, third to exploit it.” In this context the Nazi chief considered Stalin’s July 3 appeal to Red Army soldiers to start partisan warfare behind the German lines as one more favorable development: “This partisan warfare gives us an advantage by enabling us to destroy everything in our path…in this vast area, peace must be imposed as quickly as possible, and to achieve this it is necessary to execute even anyone who doesn’t give us a straight look.”15
It was at the same meeting that Alfred Rosenberg was officially appointed Reich minister for the occupied eastern territories; yet Himmler’s responsibility for the internal security of the territories was reaffirmed. According to the formal arrangement confirmed by Hitler on the next day, Rosenberg’s appointees, the Reichskommissare, would have jurisdiction over Himmler’s delegates in their areas, but de facto the HSSPF got their operational orders from the Reichsführer. The arrangement, which was meant to safeguard both Himmler’s and Rosenberg’s authority, was of course a recipe for constant infighting. Although the tension between both systems of domination has often been highlighted—a tension that also pervaded the control over the General Government—in fact the “results” prove that cooperation in implementing the tasks on hand, particularly in regard to mass murder, usually overcame competition.16 After all, Rosenberg’s appointees, headed by Reichskommissar Hinrich Lohse, former Gauleiter of Schleswig-Holstein, in the Ostland, and Reichskommissar Erich Koch, Gauleiter of East Prussia, in the Ukraine, as well as their district chiefs, were drawn from the party’s inner core: These local governors and the Reichsführer’s delegates—HSSPF Hans-Adolf Prützmann (Russia North), Erich von dem Bach-Zalewski (Russia Center), Friedrich Jeckeln (Russia South), and Gert Korsemann (Extreme South and “Caucasia”)—shared the same beliefs and the same goals; together with the Wehrmacht they were intent, beyond anything else, on imposing German domination, exploitation, and terror in the newly conquered territories.
As weeks went by neither the Red Army nor Stalin’s regime collapsed; the progress of the Wehrmacht slowed down, and German casualties steadily mounted. In mid-August, following tense discussions with his top military commanders, Hitler—against his generals’ advice to concentrate all available forces for an attack on Moscow—decided that although Army Group Center had already made considerable progress in its own part of the front, it would now turn southward to conquer the Ukraine before turning northward again for the final assault on the Soviet capital. Kiev surrendered on September 19, and more than 600,000 Russian soldiers—and their equipment—fell into German hands. Hitler was again in an ebullient mood; yet time was running dangerously short for the attack on the center of Soviet power.
In the meantime the international situation was becoming more ominous for Germany, given the policy systematically pursued by President Roosevelt. After his reelection and his use of the “garden hose” metaphor at the press conference of December 17, 1940, the American president had declared during his December 29 “fireside chat” radio broadcast that the United States would become “the great arsenal of democracy.” On March 11, 1941, Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease Bill: It would take effect on March 26. Within days British ships were carrying “lent” American weapons and supplies across the Atlantic. In the early summer American assistance to the Soviet Union started. The major problem for Washington was not whether to supply the Communist victim of German aggression but to get the American supplies to their destination in the face of increasingly successful German submarine operations.
In April 1941, invoking the Monroe Doctrine and the need to defend the Western Hemisphere, Roosevelt sent American troops to Greenland; two months later U.S. forces established bases in Iceland. Then, in mid-August, Roosevelt and Churchill met off the coast of Newfoundland, and at the end of their talks proclaimed the rather hazy principles of what became known as the Atlantic Charter. In Berlin, as elsewhere, the meeting was interpreted as signaling a de facto alliance between the United States and Great Britain. Secretly Roosevelt had indeed promised Churchill that the U.S. Navy would escort British convoys at least halfway across the Atlantic. By September major incidents between American naval units and German submarines had become unavoidable.
By midsummer 1941 the German population showed some signs of unease. The war in the East was not progressing as rapidly as expected, casualties were growing, and regular food supply became a source of mounting concern.17 It was under these circumstances that a major incident rattled the Nazi leadership.
On Sunday, August 3, Bishop Clemens Count von Galen defied Hitler’s regime. In a sermon at the Münster cathedral, the prelate forcefully attacked the authorities for the systematic murder of the mentally ill and the handicapped. The sermon came four weeks after the German episcopate had issued a pastoral letter, read from every pulpit in the country, denouncing the taking of “innocent lives.” Protestant voices, including that of Bishop Theophil Wurm of Württemberg, among others, also rose. Hitler had to respond.18
The Nazi leader decided not to retaliate against Galen at this crucial stage of the war. Accounts with the church would be settled later, he declared. Officially operation T4 was discontinued, but in fact the extinction of “lives unworthy of living” continued nonetheless, in less visible ways. Thereafter the victims were mainly chosen from prisoners of concentration camps: Poles, Jews, “criminals against the race,” “asocials,” cripples. Under the code name 14f13, Himmler had already launched these killings in April 1941 in Sachsenhausen; after mid-August 1941 it became a modified euthanasia operation. Morever, in mental institutions “wild euthanasia” took the lives of thousands of resident inmates. Yet despite the roundabout pursuit of the killings, it was the only time in the history of the Third Reich that prominent representatives of the Christian churches in Germany voiced public condemnation of the crimes committed by the regime.19
II
It seems that during the early months of the new campaign Hitler had decided to leave the fate of the Jews of Europe in abeyance until final victory in the East. Between June and October 1941, the Nazi leader’s mention of the Jewish enemy remained almost as perfunctory in his public addresses as it had been since the beginning of the war.
Of course the Jewish menace had not been forgotten. During Hitler’s broadcast to the German people on June 22, the Jews headed the enumeration of the Reich’s enemies; they were mentioned along with democrats, Bolsheviks, and reactionaries.20 The Jews surfaced again close to the end of the address, as Hitler explained and justified the attack that had just begun: “Now the hour has struck for the necessary counteraction against this plot of Jewish-Anglo-Saxon instigators of the war and the Jewish leaders of Bolshevik headquarters in Moscow.”21 By Hitler’s standards this sounded almost trite.
To the Croatian marshal Slavko Kvaternik the Nazi leader declared during a July 21 meeting that after the completion of the eastern campaign, the Jews of Europe would be sent to Madagascar or possibly to Siberia.22 Manifestly Hitler was using “Madagascar” as a standard illustration of the end goal of his policy: the expulsion of the Jews from Europe. On August 12 the departing Spanish ambassador Eugenio Espinosa was treated to Hitler’s usual diatribe against “Roosevelt, his freemasons, his Jews and the whole Jewish bolshevism.”23 A few days later, on August 25, in a meeting with Mussolini, Hitler came back to the same topic: “The Führer gave a detailed analysis of the Jewish clique surrounding Roosevelt and exploiting the American people. He stated that for anything in the world he would not live in a country like the United States, which had a concept of life inspired by the most vulgar commercialism and had no feeling for any of the most sublime expressions of the human spirit.”24
The Nazi leader possibly wished to maintain the public posture of supreme statesman and strategist who at the time of his greatest historical achievement left the talking to his subordinates. Only once Soviet resistance became a formidable obstacle and when, simultaneously, Roosevelt’s initiatives brought the United States closer to a confrontation with Germany, did the Führer’s aloofness disappear. The underlings, however, were pushed into action. When Goebbels met Hitler at headquarters on July 8, he was instructed to intensify anti-Bolshevik propaganda to the utmost. “Our propaganda line is clear,” the minister recorded the next day. “We must continue to expose the cooperation between Bolshevism and plutocracy and now increasingly stress the Jewish aspect of this common front. In a few days, starting slowly, the anti-Semitic campaign will begin; I am convinced that also in this direction, we can increasingly bring world opinion to our side.”28