Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 2: The Years of Extermination

by Saul Friedlander

  Although members of the Warsaw ghetto underground had understood that the mass murder of the Jews in Lithuania, in the Warthegau, and in Lublin were indications of an overall German extermination plan, it remains unclear whether they fully grasped what the rapid construction of a second camp in Treblinka, next to the labor camp, meant before the onset of the deportations. Messages did reach them from outside the ghetto during June 1942, as the construction of Treblinka II was entering its final stage. Thus, in early June, an unknown survivor of the extermination in Włodawa sent an easily decipherable code letter into the ghetto: “Uncle has the intention to celebrate the wedding of his children also at your place; he has rented a house close to you, very close to you. You probably don’t know a thing about it. We write to you, so that you may be informed and do find a house outside of the city, for yourself and also for all our brethren and children, as the uncle has already prepared a new house for all, the same as in our case.” The Jews of Włodawa had been exterminated in Sobibor.249

  On July 8 Czerniaków noted in his diary: “Many people hold a grudge against us for organizing play activities for the children, for arranging festive openings of playgrounds, for the music, etc. I am reminded of a film: a ship is sinking and the captain, to raise the spirits of the passengers, orders the orchestra to play a jazz piece. I have made up my mind to emulate the captain.”250

  PART III

  Shoah

  Summer 1942–Spring 1945

  “It is like being in a great hall where many people are joyful and dancing and also where there are a few people who are not happy and who are not dancing. And from time to time a few people of this latter kind are taken away, led to another room and strangled. The happy dancing people in the hall do not feel this at all. Rather, it seems as if this adds to their joy and doubles their happiness….”

  —Moshe Flinker (sixteen years old), Brussels, January 21, 1943

  CHAPTER VII

  July 1942–March 1943

  Wilhelm Cornides, a Wehrmacht noncommissioned officer, was stationed in Galicia in the summer of 1942. According to his diary entry of August 31, while he was waiting for a train at the railway station in Rava Ruska, another train entered the station: It carried Jews in some thirty-eight cattle cars. Cornides asked a policeman where the Jews came from. “‘Those are probably the last ones from Lvov,’ the policeman answered. ‘That has been going on now for five weeks uninterruptedly. In Jaroslav, they let only eight remain, no one knows why.’ I asked: ‘How far are they going?’ Then he replied, ‘To Belzec.’ ‘And then?’ ‘Poison.’ I asked: ‘Gas?’ He shrugged his shoulders. Then he said only: ‘At the beginning, they always shot them, I believe.’”

  Later, in his compartment, Cornides struck up a conversation with a woman passenger, a railway policeman’s wife, who told him that such transports “were passing through daily, sometimes also with German Jews. I asked: ‘Do the Jews know then what is happening with them?’ The woman answered: ‘Those who come from far won’t know anything, but here in the vicinity they know already.’…Camp Belzec is supposed to be located right on the railway line and the woman promised to show it to me when we pass it.”

  “At 6:20 p.m.,” Cornides recorded, “the train passed Belzec: Before then, we had traveled for some time through a tall pine forest. When the woman called, ‘Now it comes,’ one could see a high hedge of fir trees. A strong sweetish odor could be made out distinctly. ‘But they are stinking already,’ says the woman. ‘Oh nonsense, that is only the gas,’ the railway policeman [who had joined them] said, laughing. Meanwhile we had gone on about 200 yards—the sweetish odor was transformed into a strong smell of something burning. ‘That is from the crematory,’ says the policeman. A short distance further the fence stopped. In front of it, one could see a guard-house with an SS post.”1

  I

  By late August 1942 the German armies on the Eastern Front had reached the oil fields and the (destroyed) refineries of Maikop and, farther south, the slopes of the Caucasus; soon the German army flag would be hoisted on Mount El’brus, Europe’s highest peak. At the same time, Paulus’s Sixth Army was approaching Stalingrad’s outer defenses; it reached the Volga, north of the city, on August 23. In the north a new attack to break through the defenses of Leningrad was planned for early September.

  Yet, in the late summer of 1942, despite such impressive advances, the German military situation on the Eastern Front was becoming increasingly precarious. In the center and the south, the armies were spread over considerable distances and their supply lines were dangerously overstretched. But, instead of heeding the warnings of his generals, Hitler obstinately insisted on forging ahead.

  The confrontations at headquarters led to a series of dismissals, that of Army chief of staff Halder, among others (Halder was replaced by Kurt Zeitzler) and to the breakdown of all personal relations between Hitler and his top commanders. On Hitler’s orders the daily military conferences were thereafter stenographically recorded so that his words could no longer be twisted.2 According to Hassell’s diary entry of September 26, Ferdinand Sauerbruch, the director of the Charité hospital in Berlin, a world-renowned surgeon and probably the most eminent medical authority in Germany at the time, told him—after meeting Hitler during those same days—that “he was now unquestionably mad” (Er sei jetzt unzweifelhaft verrückt).3

  The fateful turn about came suddenly, in the course of a few weeks. On October 23, 1942, Montgomery’s Eighth Army attacked at El Alamein; within days Rommel was in full retreat. The Germans were ousted from Egypt, then from Libya. The debacle of the “Afrika Korps” would halt, albeit for a short time, only at the Tunisian border. On November 7, American and British forces landed in Morocco and Algeria. On November 11, in response to the Allied landings, the Germans occupied the Vichy zone and sent forces to Tunisia, while the Italians slightly enlarged their own occupation area in the Southeast of France. The major drama, however, unfolded on the Eastern Front.

  The battle for Stalingrad had started in the last days of August, after a devastating German bombing of the city that left some 40,000 civilians dead. To face the mediocre Paulus, Stalin had sent his most brilliant strategist, Marshal Georgy Zhukov, to command the Stalingrad front and the unflappable Vasily Chuikov to organize the defense of the city itself. By October the battle had turned into house-to-house combat among the hulks of buildings, the ruins of factories, the remnants of grain silos, carrying names that resonated as so many symbols, “Stalingrad” itself, “Red October,” and the like. And as, under Hitler’s relentless pressure, Paulus was desperately attempting to take the city center and reach the Volga, Soviet divisions were gathering undetected on both flanks of the Sixth Army.

  On November 19 the Red Army counterattacked, and soon the Soviet pincer movement shattered the German rearguard at its weakest point, the area held by Romanian forces. Paulus’s army was cut off. A second Soviet offensive destroyed a mixture of Italian and Hungarian units: The encirclement was complete.

  While ordering a hasty retreat from the Caucasus, Hitler adamantly refused to abandon Stalingrad. The battle for the city soon became, in the eyes of millions the world over, a portent of ultimate victory or defeat. Hoth’s attempt to break through the Soviet ring failed, as did the airlift of supplies to the beleaguered German forces. By the end of the year the Sixth Army was doomed. Nonetheless the Nazi leader rejected Paulus’s entreaty to allow him to surrender: Soldiers and commanders, the newly promoted field marshal was told, had to resist to the last and die a heroic death. On February 2, 1943, the Sixth Army stopped fighting. It had lost 200,000 men; 90,000 soldiers, including Paulus and his generals, were led into captivity.

  The German defeats in North Africa and on the Eastern Front were compounded by the rapid expansion of the Anglo-American bombing campaign: German industrial production did not slow down, but the toll in lives, homes, and entire city areas began to undermine the population’s faith in victory.

  Simultaneously partisan warfare
turned into a growing threat in the occupied territories of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, while resistance networks multiplied and grew bolder in the West. And, in order to demonstrate their common resolve (mainly for the benefit of their suspicious Soviet ally), Roosevelt and Churchill announced, at their meeting in Casablanca, on January 24, 1943, that the sole option left to Germany and its allies was “unconditional surrender.”

  In the meantime, Hitler’s diatribes against the Jews went on with the same fanatical obsessiveness. The themes, either in his public speeches or in his private disquisitions, were the same as before. The “prophecy” resurfaced again and again as a mantra announcing to all and sundry that the fate of the Jews was sealed and soon none would remain alive. Yet minute nuances surfaced here and there. Thus, in his Sportpalast speech of September 30 for the launching of the “winter relief” campaign, Hitler bandied his extermination threat with a particularly sadistic twist. Once more he reminded his audience that in his September 1, 1939, Reichstag speech he had stated: “If Jewry instigated an international world war for the elimination of the Aryan peoples of Europe, then not the Aryan peoples would be exterminated but Jewry would be. The wire-pullers of the madman in the White House (des Geisteskranken im Weissen Haus) succeeded in dragging one nation after another into the world war. But, in the same measure, a wave of anti-Semitism engulfed one people after the other and it will further expand and include one state after the next, that joins this war, and each one will turn into an anti-Semitic state over time. The Jews have once laughed at my prophecies, also in Germany. I don’t know whether they are still laughing today, or if they have stopped laughing. But I can assure now as well: Everywhere they will stop laughing (Es wird Ihnen das Lachen überall vergehen). And I shall also be vindicated in this prophecy.”4

  Some Jews understood what the crazed German messiah was proclaiming. “‘The Jews will be exterminated,’ Hitler said in his speech yesterday [at the Sportpalast]. He hardly said anything else,” Sebastian commented on October 1.5 The next day, Klemperer recorded: “Hitler’s speech at the beginning of the Winter Aid campaign. The same old song mercilessly exaggerated…. Merciless threats against England, against the Jews in all the world, who wanted to exterminate the Aryan nations of Europe and whom he is exterminating…. The shocking thing is not that a crazy man raves in ever greater frenzy, but that Germany accepts it, for the tenth year now and in the fourth year of the war, and that it [Germany] continues to allow itself to be bled…”6

  Of course the party grandees were now following the extermination stage by stage. After mentioning protest meetings that had taken place in London, Goebbels noted on December 14: “All this won’t help the Jews. The Jewish race has prepared this war, it is the spiritual instigator of all this misfortune which came upon the world. Jewry must pay for its crimes, as the Führer prophesied at the time in his Reichstag speech; it means the wiping out [Auslöschung] of the Jewish race in Europe and possibly in the entire world.”7

  Goebbels was well informed: “The higher SS and police leader who is in charge [probably Krüger] informs me about the situation in the [Warsaw] ghetto,” the minister had recorded on August 21, 1942. At this time the Jews are being evacuated in vast numbers and pushed to the East. All this is happening on quite a significant scale. Here the Jewish question is handled in the right way, without sentimentality and without much consideration. That is the only way to solve the Jewish problem.8

  No dissenting voices arose among the party faithful or anywhere else. At most, some suggestions from the regime’s elite pointed to possible adaptations of the killing program to the needs of the hour. Thus, on June 23, 1942, Viktor Brack, in a letter to Himmler, had suggested that some two to three million of the “ten million” Jews designated for extermination should be sterilized instead by using X-rays. These Jewish men and women were, according to Brack, “in very good condition to perform work.”9 In response Himmler encouraged Brack to start the sterilization experiments in one camp, not more.10

  A few months later, on October 10, 1942, “a long conversation regarding the Jewish question” took place between Göring and Bormann. According to the head of the Party Chancellery, Göring declared that he considered Himmler’s measures “entirely correct” but emphasized that exceptions were necessary in special cases and that he [Göring] would discuss the matter with Hitler.11 What these exceptions were and whether this discussion with Hitler ever took place remains unclear. In the meantime, at various administrative levels, a flurry of activity surrounded the exclusion of Jews from any recourse to the Reich’s judiciary system. In fact, by then the problem was losing its relevance, except for the implications of the “Thirteenth Ordinance” of July 1, 1943, to which we shall return.12

  It also seems that, in the fall of 1942, keeping the extermination at least formally hidden from the population was still considered important, although the information was widely available, also from the bloodthirsty speeches of the “highest authority.” In any case the constant flood of propaganda depicting the Jews as the enemies of humanity, as the leaders of the hordes of Untermenschen, beastly creatures who had only the semblance of human beings (according to the SS propaganda pamphlet Der Untermensch, distributed in a score of languages throughout the Continent), led logically to only one possible solution. Thus not too many soldiers could have misunderstood Bormann when, in October 1942, in answering the questions most frequently asked by the troops, he addressed question number 9—“How will the Jewish question be solved?”—in the tersest yet clearest way: “Very simply!”13

  II

  During his visit to Auschwitz, on July 17, 1942, after touring some of his pet agricultural projects, Himmler watched the extermination of a transport of Jews from Holland. According to Höss, the SS chief remained silent throughout. While the gassing took place, “he unobtrusively observed the officers and junior officers engaged in the proceedings, including myself.”14 A few days later, an order came from the Reichsführer: “All mass graves were to be opened and the corpses burned. In addition the ashes were to be disposed of in such a way that it would be impossible at some future time to calculate the number of corpses burned.”15

  In the evening Himmler attended a dinner party organized in his honor by Gauleiter Fritz Bracht. Höss, invited with his wife, found the guest a changed man, “in the best of spirits”…he talked on every possible subject which came up in the conversation. He discussed the education of children and new buildings and books and pictures…. It was fairly late before the guests departed. Very little was drunk during the evening. Himmler, who scarcely ever touched alcohol, drank a few glasses of red wine and smoked, which was also something he did not usually do. Everyone was under the spell of his good humor and lively conversation. I had never known him like that before.”16

  During these same days of July 1942, the German onslaught against the Jews of Europe reached its full scale. Throughout the spring and early summer, the extermination process—after decimating part of the Jewish population of the Warthegau, of Lodz, and of the occupied territories of the Soviet Union—had expanded to Jews from the Reich, from Slovakia, and, district after district, from the General Government, except for Warsaw. In the second half of July the deportations from Holland and France began, followed by Warsaw, all within days of one another. In August the Jews of Belgium were included. In the General Government, while the Warsaw Jews were being killed, a large part of the Jewish population of Lwóv was carted away. In the first days of September major roundups struck again at the Jews of Lodz, and throughout, deportations from the West continued.

  The steady expansion of deportations and killings from the early summer of 1942 on was enabled by the activation of further extermination facilities: “Bunker 2” at Auschwitz-Birkenau; and Belzec, Sobibor as previously, and also at Treblinka. Thus while most of the Jewish populations from the General Government were deported to Belzec and Sobibor, the first victims of Treblinka would be the Warsaw Jews. Simultaneously the deportees
from the Reich, Slovakia and the West would increasingly be directed to Auschwitz-Birkenau (and, for a time, from Holland to Sobibor, due to a typhus epidemic in Auschwitz).

  Although Himmler’s supervision of the entire system remained necessary and his interventions regarding transportation and slave labor allocation (or extermination) guided the rhythm and implementation of the killings, Hitler himself kept regularly abreast. As we shall see, within a few months he would be given the most updated progress report and would intervene personally to push for or decide on the deportations, which had not yet started (Hungary, Denmark, Italy, and again Hungary). Otherwise the “Final Solution,” despite all unforeseen political, technical, and logistic problems, had turned into a smoothly running mass-murder organization on an extraordinary scale. In regard to control over various aspects of the extermination whatever the feuds between various agencies and individuals within the SS or between the SS and party officials may have been, nothing indicates that these tensions had any impact on the overall progress of the campaign, on its unfolding, or on the ultimate distribution of the spoils.

  As for the attitude of the surrounding populations and their social, political, or spiritual elites, throughout the Continent, although some small groups were ready to help Jews once the deportations started, in general only very rare gestures of solidarity with the victims occurred on a collective scale. And, in their vast majority, the Jews did not understand the fate that awaited them.

  The Jews whose murder Himmler had watched were probably the deportees of the first transport that had left the Netherlands for Auschwitz, on July 14. The meticulous registration work accomplished by the Dutch census office, the German Central Emigration Office (Zentralstelle), and the Jewish Council allowed for summons to be sent on July 4 to 4,000 (mainly refugee) Jews chosen from the updated lists. To fill the quota the Germans organized a sudden police raid in Amsterdam on July 14; it netted 700 more Jews.17