The Sonderkommando diarists knew of course that they could not be allowed to survive as witnesses nor could they hope to survive the uprising they were preparing. On the eve of the rebellion, in early October 1944, Gradowski, one of its organizers, buried his notebooks. Throughout it seems that he remained a religious Jew: After each of the gassings, he would say Kaddish for the dead.134
The last part of the process began once the pulley was sent on its way to the upper floor: “On the upper level, by the pulley, stand four men,” the chronicle continued. “The two on one side of the pulley drag corpses to the ‘storeroom’; the other two pull them directly to the ovens, where they are laid in pairs at each opening [“mouth” is used in the translation]. The slaughtered children are heaped in a big stack, they are added, thrown onto the pairs of adults. Each corpse is laid out on an iron “burial board”; then the door to the inferno is opened and the board shoved in…. The hair is the first to catch fire. The skin, immersed in flames, catches in a few seconds. Now the arms and legs begin to rise—expanding blood vessels cause this movement of the limbs. The entire body is now burning fiercely; the skin has been consumed and fat drips and hisses in the flames…. The belly goes. Bowels and entrails are quickly consumed, and within minutes there is no trace of them. The head takes the longest to burn; two little blue flames flicker from the eyeholes—these are burning with the brain…. The entire process lasts twenty minutes—and a human being, a world, has been turned to ashes.”135
Why the Red Cross delegate, Maurice Rossel, did not demand to proceed to Birkenau after the visit to Theresienstadt is not clear. He was told by his SS hosts that the Czech ghetto was the “final camp”; yet Rossel could hardly have believed, in June 1944, that Theresienstadt was all there was to see regarding the deportation of the Jews of Europe. Be that as it may, on July 1, the ICRC representative sent an effusive thank-you note to Thadden, the senior official at the Wilhelmstrasse he dealt with. He even enclosed photos taken by the delegation during the visit of the camp as mementos of the pleasant excursion, and asked Thadden to forward a set to his colleagues in Prague. After expressing his gratitude, also in the name of the ICRC, for all the help extended to the delegation during its visit, Rossel added: “The trip to Prague will remain an excellent memory for us and it pleases us to assure you, once again, that the report about our visit in Theresienstadt will be reassuring for many, as the living conditions [in the camp] are satisfactory.”136
The German concentration and extermination camp system was geared to send its Jewish victims either to immediate extermination or to slave labor that would end in extermination after a short time. Yet some of the smaller labor camps attached to enterprises working for the armaments industry, whether under control of the SS or not, sometimes kept their Jewish slaves alive for longer stretches of time, either due to essential production imperatives or (and) for the personal benefit of local commanders.137 There was also Theresienstadt, of course, antechamber to extermination and holding pen for international propaganda. Then, in the course of 1943, another (very limited) series of camps was added to the overall landscape of destruction—and deception: camps for Jews who could be used as trading objects.
The very notion of keeping some Jews either as hostages or as exchange material for Germans in enemy hands, or else as sources of large sums of foreign currency, was nothing new from a Nazi perspective. Both the hostage idea and that of selling Jews predated the war and reappeared, as we saw, from late 1941 onward: it grew in importance as the war became increasingly difficult for the Reich. Some Palestinian Jews who had remained in Poland were exchanged for German nationals living in Palestine in the late fall of 1942, and at the same time a few Dutch Jews managed to bankroll their way to freedom. In December 1942 Hitler allowed Himmler to release individual Jews for hefty sums in foreign currency.
In early 1943 on the initiative of the Wilhelmstrasse, the same ideas became a larger-scale project. On March 2 a memorandum addressed to the RSHA suggested keeping some 30,000 Jews, first and foremost of British and American nationality, but also Belgian, Dutch, French, Norwegian, and Soviet nationals and to barter them for appropriate groups of Germans.138 Himmler agreed, and in April 1943 a partly empty POW camp, Bergen-Belsen, was transferred by the Wehrmacht to the WVHA. As historian Eberhard Kolb has noted, Himmler’s decision not to establish a civilian internees’ camp but to include the new setup within the framework of the concentration camps section of the WVHA was in line with his notion that “the ‘exchange Jews’ could at any time still be transported to extermination camps.”139
And indeed the earliest groups of “exchange Jews,” mainly Polish Jews with Latin American “promesas” (promises to receive passports), who were assembled in Warsaw at the Hotel Polski, arrived in Bergen-Belsen in July 1943; by October of that same year, however, they had been transported to Auschwitz under the pretext that the Latin American papers were not valid.140 Further categories of Jews arrived in Bergen-Belsen throughout 1944, and although very few of these were exchanged for Germans, their fate has to be considered within wider exchange schemes tossed around by German and Jewish operatives during the last two years of the war. These projects, as we shall see, would take on their momentary significance in late 1944 and early 1945.
VII
At the end of October 1943, the Kovno ghetto became a concentration camp. A few days beforehand, batches of young Jews had been deported to the Estonian labor camps, while the children and the elderly were sent to Auschwitz.141 In late December the pits at the ninth fort were opened and tens of thousands of corpses, undug: These remnants of most of the Kovno community and of the transports of Jews from the Reich and the Protectorate were then burned on a number of huge pyres, restacked day after day.142
Abraham Tory, the Kovno diarist, escaped from the city at the end of March 1944 and survived the war. Three months later, as the Soviet army was approaching, the remaining 8,000 inhabitants of the ghetto-camp were deported (including the members of the council and its chairman, Elchanan Elkes). The men were sent to Dachau, the women to Stutthof, near Danzig. By the end of the war three-quarters of these last Kovno Jews had perished. Elkes himself died in Dachau shortly after his arrival.143
On October 19, 1943, Elkes had written a “last testament.” It was a letter to his son and daughter who lived in London; it was given to Tory and retrieved with the diary, after the liberation of Kovno. The very last words of the letter were filled with fatherly love, but they could not erase the sense of utter despair carried by the lines that just preceded: “I am writing this in an hour when many desperate souls—widows and orphans, threadbare and hungry—are camping on my doorstep, imploring us [the council] for help. My strength is ebbing. There is a desert inside me. My soul is scorched. I am naked and empty. There are no words in my mouth.”144
In the fall of 1943 Lodz remained the last large-scale ghetto in German-dominated Europe (except for Theresienstadt). Throughout the preceding months Himmler had reached the decision to turn the Warthegau ghetto into a concentration camp, not on its location, however, but in the Lublin district, within the still existing framework of OSTI, the SS East Industries Company. The advance of the Red Army toward the former Polish borders put an end to the Lublin project, but Himmler continued to cling to his plans, albeit in some other location.145 Neither Greiser nor Biebow, nor anybody else in the Warthegau administration, had been consulted. When Himmler’s project became known, it triggered fierce opposition at all levels of the Gau, and from the Wehrmacht’s armaments inspectorate. In February 1944 the Reichsführer visited Posen and, atypically, gave in to Greiser’s objections. The Gauleiter did not waste any time in informing Pohl of the new agreement. On February 14, 1944, Greiser wrote a rather abrupt letter to the chief of the WVHA:
“The ghetto in Litzmannstadt is not to be transformed into a concentration camp…. The decree issued by the Reichsführer on June 11, 1943, will therefore not be carried out. I have arranged the following with the Reichsführer
.” Greiser went on to inform Pohl that (a) the ghetto’s manpower would be reduced to a minimum; (b) the ghetto would not be moved out of the Wartheland; (c) its population would be gradually reduced by Bothmann’s Kommando [Hans Bothmann was Lange’s successor in Chelmno]; (d) the administration of the ghetto would remain in the hands of the officials of the Wartheland; and (e) “After all Jews are removed from the ghetto and it is liquidated, the entire grounds of the ghetto are to go to the town of Litzmannstadt.”146
As their fate was being sealed, the unsuspecting inhabitants of the ghetto went on with the misery of their daily life plagued by hunger, cold, endless hours spent in workshops, exhaustion, and ongoing despair. And yet the mood also changed on occasion, as on December 25, 1943, for example, the first day of Hanukkah: “There are gatherings in larger apartments. Everyone brings a small appropriate gift: a toy, a piece of babka (cake), a hair ribbon, a couple of brightly coloured empty cigarette packages, a plate with a flower pattern, a pair of stockings, a warm cap. Then comes the drawing of lots; and chance decides. After the candles are lighted, the presents are handed out. Ghetto presents are not valuable, but they are received with deep gratitude. Finally, songs are sung in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Polish, as long as they are suitable for enhancing the holiday mood. A few hours of merrymaking, a few hours of forgetting, a few hours of reverie.”147
A few weeks before Hanukkah the chroniclers noted the same urge for some spiritual or cultural sustenance in its wider expression: “Though life weighs heavily upon people in the ghetto,” they recorded on November 24, “they refuse to do without cultural life altogether. The closing of the House of Culture has deprived the ghetto of the last vestiges of public cultural life. But with his tenacity and vitality, the ghetto dweller, hardened by countless misfortunes, always seeks new ways to sate his hunger for something of cultural value. The need for music is especially intense, and small centers for the cultivation of music have sprung up over time; to be sure, only for a certain upper stratum. Sometimes it is professional musicians, sometimes amateurs who perform for an intimate group of invited guests. Chamber music is played, and there is singing. Likewise, small, family-like circles form in order to provide spiritual nourishment on a modest level.148 Poets and prose writers read from their own works. The classics and more recent works of world literature are recited. Thus does the ghetto salvage something of its former spiritual life.”149
On March 8, 1944, “by order of the authorities,” all musical instruments were confiscated; they would be distributed to the Litzmannstadt municipal orchestra, to the mayor, and to the music school of the Hitler Youth.150
VIII
To the very end, research about “the Jew” went on. Notwithstanding the course of the war and the rapid disappearance of their “objects,” German “specialists” did not give up; moreover, some local Nazi officials, apparently acting on their own, launched projects meant to document what had been the world of an extinct race. And throughout all these years, Heinrich Himmler himself, whose thirst for knowledge on the Jewish issue was hard to match, often personally encouraged the most promising avenues of investigation.
Thus on May 15, 1942, Himmler’s personal assistant, Obersturmbannführer Dr. Rudolf Brandt informed Standartenführer Max Stollmann, head of Lebensborn [the SS institution taking care of racially valuable single mothers and children born out of wedlock, among others], that the Reichsführer demanded the setting up of “a special card index for all mothers and parents [alle die Mütter und Kindeseltern] who had a Greek nose, or at least the indication of one.”151 But Greek noses weighed less on Himmler’s mind than the indentification of Jewish traits or hidden ancestry, although these matters were indirectly related. A year after his foray into the domain of nasal shapes, on May 22, 1943, the SS chief wrote to Bormann about the need for researching the racial evolution of mixed breeds, not only those of the second degree but even of a higher degree [one-eighth or one-twelfth Jewish, for example]. “In this matter—strictly between us [das aber nur unter uns gesprochen]—we have to proceed like in the breeding of higher races [Hochzucht] of animals or the cultivation of better plants. At least during several generations (3 or 4 generations), the descendants of such mixed-breed families will have to be racially tested by independent institutions; in case of racial inferiority, they have to be sterilized and thus excluded from hereditary transmission.”152
At times the Reichsführer gave vent to justified anger against some incompetent scientist. Thus in the matter of three SS men of part-Jewish ancestry, Himmler agreed to keep them temporarily in the SS, but their children were excluded from joining the order or marrying into it. This unpleasant confusion was the result of a scientific evaluation by Prof. Dr. B. K. Schultz, who had pointed out that in the third generation, it could happen that not even one Jewish chromosome would any longer be present. “Thus,” Himmler wrote to SS Obergruppenführer Richard Hildebrandt, on December 17, 1943, “one could argue that the chromosomes of all other ancestors also disappear. Then one should ask: from where does a person get its heredity if after the third generation the ancestors’ chromosomes have all disappeared? For me, one thing is certain: Herr Professor Dr. Schultz is not suitable to head the Race office.”153
Sometimes the Reichsführer ventured into somewhat dangerous territory. In April 1942 Winifred Wagner, the widow of Richard and Cosima Wagner’s son Siegfried and herself a much-loving and beloved friend of the Führer, had complained about a lecture allegedly held in Würzburg in an SS institution about “the Jewish ancestry [Versippung] of the Wagner family.” On December 30, 1942, Himmler assured the “lady of Bayreuth” that no such lecture had taken place, but that the rumor stemmed from a conversation between SS officers. To put all such insinuations to rest the Reichsführer asked Winifred Wagner to send him her family’s genealogical chart.154 It is unknown if this was ever done.
Throughout, collective racial identification remained of the essence, and in this domain some issues stayed unsolved for years, that of the Karaites, for example. On June 13, 1943, Dr. Georg Leibbrandt, head of the political division of Rosenberg’s Ministry of the Eastern Occupied Territories, issued the following statement: “The Karaites are religiously and nationally different from the Jews. They are not of Jewish origin, rather they are viewed as being people of Turkic-Tatar origin closely related to the Crimean Tatars. They are essentially a Near Asian–Oriental race possessing Mongolian features, thus they are aliens. The mixing of Karaites and Germans is prohibited. The Karaites should not be treated as Jews, but should be treated in the same fashion as the Turkic-Tatar peoples. Harsh treatment should be avoided in accordance with the goals of our Oriental policies.”155
At first glance it may seem unusual that, as late as June 1943 (and later), the Germans had to restate a decision that the head of the Reich-stelle für Sippenforschung (the “Reich Agency for Ancestry Research”) had already officially conveyed, in a letter of January 5, 1939, to the representative of the eighteen-member Karaite community in Germany, Serge von Douvan. “The Karaite sect should not be considered a Jewish religious community within the meaning of paragraph 2 point 2 of the First Regulation to the Reich’s Citizenship Law,” the letter stated. “However, it cannot be established that Karaites in their entirety are of blood-related stock, for the racial categorization of an individual cannot be determined without further ado by his belonging to a particular people, but by his personal ancestry and racial biological characteristics.”156
The Reichsstelle’s decision was dictated by political considerations such as the thoroughly anti-Soviet attitude of the Karaites, many of whom had fought in the White armies during the Russian civil war, and by the racial-cultural research of a well-known German Orientalist, Paul E. Kahle, in the Leningrad archives during the 1930s; it confirmed the position taken by the former czarist regime defining the Karaites as a religious group unrelated to Judaism.157 Yet, as the war began, and mainly after the attack on the Soviet Union, some hesitation remained.
&nb
sp; In Lithuania, Gebietskommissar Adrian von Renteln sent researchers to the heads of the local Karaite community, and in the course of 1942 several Jewish specialists were ordered to participate in the investigation: Kalmanovitch in Vilna, Meir Balaban and Yitzhak Schipper in Warsaw; Philip Friedman in Lwov.158 In a diary entry of November 15, 1942, Kalmanovitch noted: “I continue to translate the book of the Karaite hakham [“sage,” in Hebrew]. (How limited is his horizon! He is proud of his Turkish-Tatar descent. He has a better understanding of horses and arms than of religion, although he is religious in the Christian sense.)”159
Friedman was loath to participate in the Nazi-directed project: “At the beginning of 1942,” he recollected after the war, “when I was in Lwov, I was asked by Dr. Leib Landau, a well-known lawyer and director of the Jewish Social Self-Help in the Galicia district, to prepare a study of the origins of the Karaites in Poland. The study had been ordered by Colonel Bisanz, a high official of the German administration in Lwov. Both Landau and I saw clearly that a completely objective and scholarly study, indicating the probablility of the Karaites’ Jewish origin, might endanger their lives. Besides, everything in me revolted against writing a memorandum for the use of the Nazis and I asked Landau to give the assignment to another historian of Polish Jewry, Jacob Schall. He agreed, and Dr. Schall prepared a memorandum which I went over carefully, together with Landau. The memorandum was so drafted as to indicate that the origin of the Karaites was the object of heated controversy, and great emphasis was laid on those scholars who adhered to the theory of the Karaites’ Turko-Mongol extraction.”160
Additional German research in the Ukraine and elsewhere in the East, objections to the non-Jewish identification of the Karaites that came from the Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives in France, as well as some opposition within Germany itself delayed Leibrandt’s decision until June 1943. The decision, however, was final. The Karaites escaped the fate of the Jews, and also that of 8,000 Krymchaks murdered by Ohlendorf ’s Einsatzgruppe D in the Crimea, although in many ways Karaites and Krymchaks were linguistically related and both groups displayed identical Turkic-Mongolian features.161
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