184. Yoav Gelber, “Zionist Policy and the Fate of European Jewry (1939–1942),” Yad Vashem Studies 13 (1979), pp. 191–92.
185. Porat, The Blue and the Yellow Stars of David, p. 22.
186. Friedlander and Milton, eds., Archives of the Holocaust, vol. 4, Central Zionist Archives, p. 40. It was in this context of utter misperception regarding the fate of European Jewry under German rule that a splinter of the Revisionist clandestine group Irgun, the “Stern group” (or Lehi), offered the Reich, in late 1940 (via a German diplomat in Beirut), to fight on the Axis side of against the British, in exchange for German help in the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. The Lehi offer never received an answer.
187. Adler, Der verwaltete Mensch, pp. 380ff.
188. Cohn, Als Jude in Breslau 1941, p. 122.
189. Eric A. Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany: An Oral History (Cambridge, MA, 2005), p. 306.
190. Kulka and Jäckel, Die Juden in den geheimen NS-Stimmungsberichten 1933–1945, p. 474.
191. Ibid., p. 472.
192. It seems that in most such cases the Jews were not utilized as agents; the Abwehr used the pretext to help some selected (and wealthy) individuals to leave the Reich. See for example Winfried Meyer, Unternehmen Sieben: eine Rettungsaktion für vom Holocaust Bedrohte aus dem Amt Ausland/Abwehr im Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (Frankfurt am Main, 1993). However, notwithstanding the opposition of some senior Abwehr officers to the regime, other members and particularly the secret military police (Geheime Feldpolizei) units and their commanders were deeply involved in the mass murder of Jews and other groups, in the eastern territories. Even later participants in the military conspiracy against Hitler were implicated. See Christian Gerlach, “Männer des 20 Juli und der Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion,” in Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941–1944, ed. Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann (Hamburg, 1995), pp. 434ff.
193. Mark Roseman, A Past in Hiding: Memory and Survival in Nazi Germany (New York, 2001), pp. 125ff, 130ff, and 133ff.
194. Konrad Kwiet, “The Ultimate Refuge: Suicide in the Jewish Community under the Nazis,” in Year Book of the Leo Baeck Institute (London), p. 151.
195. Ursula Baumann, “Suizid im ‘Dritten Reich’—Facetten eines Themas,” in Geschichte und Emanzipation, ed. Reinhard Rürup et al. (Frankfurt am Main, 1999), p. 500.
196. Goebbels, Tagebücher, part 2, vol. 2, p. 247.
197. Stadtarchiv Müchen, ed., “…verzogen, unbekannt wohin”: Die erste Deportation von Müchner Juden im November 1941. (Zürich: Pendo, 2000), doc. 14 [the document section is unpaginated].
198. Ibid., p. 20; Porat, “The Legend of the Struggle of the Jews from the Third Reich in the Ninth Fort near Kovno, 1941–1942,” pp. 363 and 370.
199. Yaacov Lozowick, “Documentation: “Judenspediteur,” Deportation Train,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 6, no. 3 (1991), pp. 286ff.
200. Shalom Cholavsky, “The German Jews in the Minsk Ghetto,” Yad Vashem Studies 17 (1986), pp. 223–25.
201. For the details about Rosenfeld’s life see the editor’s introduction to Oskar Rosenfeld, In the Beginning Was the Ghetto: Notebooks from Lódz, ed. Hanno Loewy (Evanston, IL, 2002), pp. xiii–xviii.
202. Ibid., pp. 8–9.
203. Ibid., p. 11.
204. Ibid.
205. Ibid., p. 21.
206. For an excellent survey and analysis see Avraham Barkai, “Between East and West: Jews from Germany in the Lodz Ghetto,” in The Nazi Holocaust: Historical Articles on the Destruction of European Jews, ed. Michael R. Marrus (Westport, 1989), vol. 6, pt. 1, pp. 378ff, and, specifically, pp. 394–395.
207. Lucjan Dobroszycki, ed., The Chronicle of the Lódz Ghetto, 1941–1944 (New Haven, 1984), p. 79.
208. Sierakowiak, Diary, p. 141.
209. Ibid., p. 144.
210. Ibid., p. 142.
211. Dobroszycki, The Chronicle, pp. 80–81.
212. Donald L. Niewyk, ed., Fresh Wounds: Early Narratives of Holocaust Survival (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998), p. 303.
213. Dobroszycki, The Chronicle, p. 109.
214. Ibid., pp. 109 and 109n3.
215. Ibid., p. 113.
216. Rosenfeld, In the Beginning Was the Ghetto, pp. 31–32.
217. Ibid., p. 32.
218. Zapruder, Salvaged Pages, p. 233.
219. May’s postwar memoir is quoted in Dobroszycki’s “Introduction” to Dobroszycki, ed., The Chronicle, pp. lv–lvi.
220. Ibid., p. 108.
221. Guenter Lewy, The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies (New York, 2000), p. 115.
222. Translated from the original and quoted in Laqueur, The Terrible Secret, p. 130.
223. Ibid., p. 131.
224. David Graber, “Some Impressions and Memories,” in Joseph Kermish, ed., To Live with Honor and Die with Honor!…: Selected Documents from the Warsaw Ghetto Underground Archives “O.S.” (“Oneg Shabbath”). (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1986), p. 61.; Yitzhak Zuckerman, A Surplus of Memory: Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (Berkeley, 1993), p. 156ff.
225. Biélinky, Journal, pp. 153ff.
226. Ibid., p. 155.
227. Raymond-Raoul Lambert, Carnet d’un témoin: 1940–1943, ed. Richard I. Cohen (Paris, 1985), p. 132.
228. Ibid.
229. Ibid., p. 163.
230. Sebastian, Journal, p. 427.
231. Ibid.
232. Ibid., pp. 428–29.
233. Ibid., p. 434.
234. Ibid., p. 452.
235. Ibid.
236. Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933–41, p. 440.
237. Ibid., p. 442.
238. Ibid., p. 446.
239. Hertha Feiner, Before Deportation: Letters from a Mother to Her Daughters, January 1939–December 1942, ed. Karl Heinz Jahnke (Evanston, IL, 1999), p. 53.
240. Dawid Rubinowicz, The Diary of Dawid Rubinowicz (Edmonds, WA, 1982), p. 26.
241. Ibid.
242. Ibid., p. 27.
243. For details about Elsa Binder, see Alexandra Zapruder’s “Introduction” to the diary in Zapruder, Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust, pp. 301ff.
244. Ibid., pp. 306–7.
245. Ibid.
246. Kaplan, Scroll of Agony, p. 267.
247. Chaim Aron Kaplan, Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan, ed. Abraham Isaac Katsh (New York, 1973) p. 285.
248. Lucy S. Dawidowicz, ed., A Holocaust Reader (New York, 1976), p. 264ff.
249. Ibid., pp. 273–74.
250. Martin Gilbert, introduction to Avraham Tory, Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary, ed. Martin Gilbert and Dina Porat (Cambridge, OK, 1990), p. xiv.
251. Tory, Surviving, p. 44.
252. Ibid., p. 46.
253. Ibid., p. 47.
254. Ibid., pp. 49–55.
255. Ibid., pp. 55–59.
256. Isaac Rudashevski, The Diary of the Vilna Ghetto, June 1941–April 1943, ed. Percy Matenko (Tel Aviv, 1973), p. 46.
257. Ibid., p. 48.
258. Dina Porat, “The Vilna Proclamation of January 1, 1942 in Historical Perspective,” Yad Vashem Studies 24 (1996), pp. 106ff.
259. Ibid., pp. 108ff.
260. Ibid., pp. 111ff.
261. Yisrael Gutman, Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (Boston, 1994), p. 103.
262. Ibid., pp. 104–5.
263. Zuckerman, A Surplus of Memory, pp. 153–54.
264. Ibid., p. 156.
265. Sebastian, Journal, p. 458.
266. Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933–41, p. 456.
267. Herman Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939–1944, ed. Benjamin Harshav (New Haven, 2002), p. 149.
268. Zapruder, Salvaged Pages, p. 311.
269. Zygmunt Klukowski, Diary from the Years of Occupation, 1939–44, ed. Andrew Klukowski and Hel
en Klukowski May (Urbana, IL), 1993), p. 179.
270. Ibid., p. 180.
271. Ibid., p. 179.
272. Zuckerman, A Surplus of Memory, p. 153.
Chapter Six: December 1941–July 1942
1. For a detailed narration of the Struma tragedy, see Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins, Death on the Black Sea: The Untold Story of the Struma and World War II’s Holocaust at Sea (New York, 2004).
2. Quoted in Dalia Ofer, Escaping the Holocaust: Illegal Immigration to the Land of Israel, 1939–1944 (New York, 1990), p. 158.
3. Quoted in Bernard Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe, 1939–1945 (London, 1979), pp. 145–46.
4. Ofer, Escaping the Holocaust, pp. 162ff. According to documents uncovered in Soviet archives, Stalin had apparently given a secret order to sink neutral ships sailing from the Bosporus into the Black Sea to disrupt the delivery of chromium from Turkey to Germany. See Frantz and Collins, Death on the Black Sea, pp. 159 and 341.
5. Mihail Sebastian, Journal, 1935–1944 (Chicago, 2000), pp. 476–47.
6. Hitler’s New Year’s speech to the German people was in fact dated December 31, 1941, but was published by the VB on January 1, 1942. See Adolf Hitler, Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen, 1932–1945: Kommentiert von einem deutschen Zeitgenossen, ed. Max Domarus, 4 vols. (Leonberg, 1987–88), part 2, vol. 4, pp. 1820, 1820n.
7. Adolf Hitler, Monologe im Führer-Hauptquartier 1941–1944, ed. Werner Jochmann and Heinrich Heim (Munich, 2000), pp. 228–29.
8. Hitler, Reden, pp. 1828–29. (Emphasis in the original.)
9. Kulka/Jäckel, Die Juden, p. 485.
10. Ibid., p. 486.
11. Chaim Aron Kaplan, Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan, ed. Abraham I. Katsh (Bloomington, 1999), p. 297.
12. Hitler, Reden, p. 1844.
13. Karl Dürkefälden, Schreiben, wie es wirklich war: Aufzeichnungen Karl Dürkefäldens aus den Jahren 1933–1945, Herbert Obenaus and Sibylle Obenaus, eds. (Hannover, 1985), p. 108.
14. Ibid., pp. 107–8.
15. Joseph Goebbels, Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels: Sämtliche Fragmente, ed. Elke Fröhlich (Munich, 1996), part 2, vol. 3, p. 104.
16. Ibid., pp. 320–21.
17. Ibid., part 2, vol. 3, p. 561.
18. Ibid., part 2, vol. 4, p. 184.
19. See Hitler, Reden, part 2, p. 1865.
20. Ibid., pp. 1865–69.
21. Goebbels, Tagebücher, part 2, vol. 4, p. 188.
22. Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933–41 (New York, 1998), vol. 2, p. 45 (emphasis in original).
23. David Bankier, “The Use of Antisemitism in Nazi Wartime Propaganda,” in The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed and the Reexamined, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck (Bloomington, 1998), p. 45.
24. Ibid., pp. 45–46.
25. Ibid., p. 46.
26. Kulka/Jäckel, Die Juden, p. 489.
27. Ibid., p. 491.
28. Ibid., p. 494.
29. Martin Doerry, My Wounded Heart: The Life of Lilli Jahn, 1900–1944 (London, 2004), pp. 95–96.
30. For the main details about the conference see Kurt Pätzold and Erika Schwarz, eds., Tagesordnung Judenmord: Die Wannsee-Konferenz am 20. Januar 1942: Eine Dokumentation zur Organisation der “Endlösung.” (Berlin, 1992) See also Mark Roseman, The Villa, the Lake, the Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution (London and New York, 2002).
31. See Yehoshua Büchler, “A Preparatory Document for the Wannsee Conference,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 9, no. 1 (1995), pp. 121ff.
32. There is no indication, however, of Heydrich’s wish to convey to the participants (and to their chiefs) that he, the newly appointed SS Obergruppenführer and acting Reichsprotektor was in fact the man whom the Führer had personally put in charge of the “Final Solution,” independently of the SS Reichsführer. Had that been Heydrich’s intention (and had Hitler indeed appointed him) the RSHA chief would probably have avoided indicating immediately at the outset that the ultimate executive authority in the matter was that of the SS Reichsführer. For this hypothesis see Eberhard Jäckel, “On the Purpose of the Wannsee Conference,” in Perspectives on the Holocaust, ed. James S. Pacy and Alan P. Wertheimer (Boulder, CO, 1995), pp. 39ff.
33. In Heydrich’s view, mixed breeds of the first degree were to be considered identical to Jews, when not married to full-blooded Germans with whom they had children; in the latter case they would be exempted from deportation. In order to solve once and for all the problem of the Mischlinge, mixed breeds of the first degree exempted from evacuation would be sterilized. Mixed breeds of the second degree were put on equal footing with Germans, except if they were “bastards” (that is, the offspring of parents both of whom were themselves Mischlinge), if their physical appearance pointed to their Jewishness, or if an incriminating police record indicated that they felt and behaved as Jews.
The issue of mixed marriages followed. Heydrich emphasized the impact that decisions in this domain could have on German partners. In marriages between full Jews and Germans, the decision about the Jewish spouse’s deportation depended on the existence of children. In childless marriages the Jewish spouse would be deported. In marriages between a Mischling of the first degree and a German, the mixed-breed partner would also be deported if the marriage was childless. If the couple had children (Mischlinge of the second degree), and if these children were put on an equal footing with Jews (in the three cases previously mentioned), the Mischling parent and the children would be deported. If the children were not identified with Jews (the rule), they would not be deported, nor would their parent, the mixed breed of the first degree.
In regard to marriages of Mischlinge of the first degree among themselves or with Jews, everybody, including the children, would be “evacuated.” Finally, in the case of marriages of mixed breeds of the first degree and mixed breeds of the second degree, everybody would be “evacuated,” as children in these unions tended to present a racially stronger influence of the Jewish blood than mixed breeds of the second degree (“da etwaige Kinder rassenmässig in der Regel einen stärkeren Jüdischen Bluteinschlag aufweisen, als die Jüdischen Mischlinge 2. Grades”).
34. For the full text of the conference see Pätzold and Schwarz, Tagesordnung, pp. 102–12.
35. Himmler, Der Dienstkalender, p. 355n.
36. For this Hitler order, see Richard Breitman, Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew (New York, 1998), p. 111.
37. Miroslav Kárný, Jaroslava Milotová, and Margarita Kárná, eds., Deutsche Politik im “Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren” unter Reinhard Heydrick 1941–1942: Eine Dokumentation (Berlin, 1997), p. 229. See also Himmler, Der Dienstkalender, p. 353n.
38. Himmler, Der Dienstkalender, p. 321.
39. Himmler to Glücks, 25.1.1942, U.S. v. Flick: The Flick Case. Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law no. 10, Nuremberg, October 1946–April 1949, 15 vols., vol. 6 (Washington, DC: US. GPO, 1952), Nuremberg doc. NO-500, p. 365.
40. Quoted in Peter Longerich and Dieter Pohl, eds., Die Ermordung der europäischen Juden (Munich, 1989), p. 165ff. See also Peter Longerich, Politik der Vernichtung: Eine Gesamtdarstellung der nationalsozialistischen Judenverfolgung (Munich, 1998), p. 483.
41. Pätzold and Schwarz, Tagesordnung, pp. 118 and 118n.
42. Schlegelberger to Stuckart et al., 8 April 1942, Nuremberg doc. NG-2586-I; Hilberg, The Destruction, vol. 2, p. 440.
43. For a good summary see Beate Meyer, “Jüdische Mischlinge”: Rassenpolitik und Verfolgungserfahrung 1933–1945 (Hamburg, 1999), p. 99ff. The protocols of both meetings are reproduced in Nuremberg doc. NG-2586, U.S. v. von Weizsaecker: The Ministries Case. Trials of war criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals, 15 vols., vol. 13 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. G.P.O., 1952), pp. 221–25. One of the exemptions granted by Hitler led to a strange conflation between a mixed marri
age and the measures deriving from the Eleventh Ordinance regarding the loss of citizenship and of all assets by German Jews “residing outside of the Reich.” On September 16, 1942, the Propaganda Ministry intervened with the Ministry of the Interior in favor of the Jewish wife of one of Germany’s most famous actors, Hans Moser. Moser had been authorized by “a decision at the highest level” (allehöchster Entscheidung) to pursue his activities without any hindrance. In the meantime, however, his wife had moved to Budapest and, as a consequence of the Eleventh Ordinance, had automatically lost her German citizenship (and passport); she had become “stateless.” Moser was understandably distressed by this sudden blow. The Ministry of the Interior was asked to restore Mrs. Moser’s citizenship (and passport). To support its demand, the Propaganda Ministry added the names of other actors who had also been allowed by “a decision at the highest level” to live and work in the Reich with their full-Jewish wives: Paul Henckels, Max Lorenz and Georg Alexander. See Archives of the Holocaust, vol. 20, pp. 118ff.
44. The protocol of the March 6 conference is quoted in Peter Longerich and Dieter Pohl, eds., Die Ermordung der europäischen Juden: Eine umfassende Dokumentation des Holocaust 1941–1945 (Munich: Piper, 1989), pp. 167ff. For a discussion of the conference see Yaacov Lozowick, Hitlers Bürokraten: Eichmann, seine willigen Vollstrecker und die Banalität des Bösen (Zurich, 2000), pp. 130–31. At about the same time, Eichmann divided IVB4 into sections a and b: IVB4a, in charge of the logistics of deportations, was headed by the transportation specialist Franz Novak, while section IVB4b, in charge of legal and technical matters, was under Friedrich Suhr (followed by Otto Hunsche). Rolf Günther faithfully served as Eichmann’s deputy and an intense “esprit de corps” characterized the entire group of Eichmann’s men. For this tightly knit group see Hans Safrian, Die Eichmann-Männer (Vienna, 1992); Lozowick, Hitlers Bürokraten: Eichmann, seine willigen Vollstrecker und die Banalität des Bösen; David Cesarani, Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes, and Trial of a “Desk Murderer” (New York, 2006), particularly pp. 126ff.
45. Wolf Grüner, “Zwangsarbeit,” in Wolfgang Benz et al., Enzyklopädie des Nationalsozialismus, p. 814.
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