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

by Saul Friedlander

46. Quoted in Arno J. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?: The “Final Solution” in History (New York, 1988), p. 333.

  47. Ibid, pp. 333–34.

  48. Dawid Sierakowiak, The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak, ed. Alan Adelson (New York, 1996), p. 148.

  49. Christopher R. Browning, Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 71ff.

  50. Ibid. p. 74.

  51. Ibid., p. 75.

  52. Ibid., p. 76.

  53. Goebbels, Tagebücher, part 2, vol. 4, p. 350.

  54. Ibid., p. 351.

  55. Ibid., p. 355.

  56. Ibid., p. 386.

  57. Himmler, Der Dienstkalender, p. 437n86.

  58. Goebbels, Tagebücher, part 2, vol. 4, p. 405.

  59. Ibid., p. 406.

  60. Ibid. A few days later, Goebbels noted that hundreds of Jewish hostages should be shot for each assassination attempt: “The more of this filth we eliminate, the better the security of the Reich will be.” Ibid., p. 433.

  61. Kurt Pätzold, “Lidice,” in Wolfgang Benz, Hermann Graml, and Hermann Weiss, eds., Enzyklopädie des Nationalsozialismus (Stuttgart, 1997), p. 569.

  62. For the interim period, see Michael Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten: Das Führungskorps des Reichssicherheitshauptamtes (Hamburg, 2002), pp. 681ff.

  63. Himmler, Der Dienstkalender, pp. 448, 450, 451.

  64. Heinrich Himmler, Heinrich Himmler: Geheimreden, 1933 bis 1945, und andere Ansprachen, ed. Bradley F. Smith and Agnes F. Peterson (Frankfurt am Main, 1974), p. 159. Himmler imitates Hitler’s expressions about the extermination of the Jews (“and soon none will laugh anymore” as well as “wiping the slate clean”).

  65. Nuremberg doc. No-5574, reproduced in Tatiana Berenstein, ed., Faschismus, Getto, Massenmord: Dokumentation über Ausrottung und Widerstand der Juden in Polen während des zweiten Weltkrieges (East Berlin, 1961), p. 303.

  66. The most detailed monograph on Theresienstadt remains H. G. Adler, Theresienstadt, 1941–1945: Das Antlitz einer Zwangsgemeinschaft. Geschichte, Soziologie, Psychologie (Tübingen, 1960). Although extremely detailed, Adler’s study is considered highly biased in terms of personal assessments; on this issue see any number of essays in Miroslav Kárný, Vojtech Blodig, and Margita Kárná, eds., Theresienstadt in der “Endlösung der Judenfrage” (Prague, 1992).

  67. All details on Edelstein are taken from Ruth Bondy, “Elder of the Jews”: Jakob Edelstein of Theresienstadt (New York, 1989).

  68. Ibid., pp. 159ff.

  69. Ibid., pp. 208ff.

  70. Ibid., p. 246.

  71. Egon Redlich, The Terezin Diary of Gonda Redlich, ed. Saul S. Friedman (Lexington, KY, 1992), pp. 3ff.

  72. Bondy, “Elder of the Jews,” p. 270.

  73. Redlich, The Terezin Diary of Gonda Redlich, p. 5. Actually the nine men who were hanged had smuggled letters out of Terezin. See Eva Roubièkova, We Are Alive and Life Goes On: A Theresienstadt Diary (New York, 1998), p. 20; also Bondy, “Elder of the Jews,” pp. 260ff.

  74. Redlich, The Terezin Diary of Gonda Redlich, p. 53.

  75. Ibid.

  76. Ibid., pp. 53 and 54 n. 26. See also Bondy, “Elder of the Jews,” pp. 300ff.

  77. Bondy, “Elder of the Jews,” p. 301.

  78. Ibid., p. 302.

  79. Ibid., p. 61.

  80. Ruth Kluger, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (New York, 2001), pp. 78–79.

  81. Ibid. The 1942 film was a failure from the Nazi propaganda viewpoint, as the “ghetto” looked too close to reality. For a thoroughly researched article on the history of this first film, see Karel Margry, “Der Nazi-Film über Theresienstadt” in Miroslav Karny et al., Theresienstadt in der “Endlosüng der Judenfrage” (Prague, 1992), pp. 285ff.

  82. This letter, among others, was brought to Marianne Ellenbogen by the owner of a truck dealership in Essen who knew both Ernst and Marianne. He had joined the SS and traveled frequently to Izbica. For the document and the context see Mark Roseman, A Past in Hiding: Memory and Survival in Nazi Germany (New York, 2001), pp. 179ff.

  83. Ibid., p. 186.

  84. Ibid., p. 188.

  85. Ibid.

  86. Ibid., p. 192.

  87. Ibid.

  88. Ibid., pp. 207ff.

  89. Memo by Rauter, March 17, 1942, in Berenstein, Faschismus, Getto, Massenmord. pp. 269–70. Test gassings in which hundreds of Jews were exterminated had taken place from the end of February to mid-March. See Eugen Kogon, Hermann Langbein, and Adalbert Rückerl, eds., Nazi Mass Murder: A Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas (New Haven, 1993), p. 109.

  90. For the details see Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington, 1987), pp. 72ff; Kogon, Langbein, and Rückerl, Nazi Mass Murder; Dieter Pohl, Von der “Judenpolitik” zum Judenmord: Der Distrikt Lublin des Generalgouvernements, 1939–1944 (Frankfurt am Main, 1993), pp. 113ff. It appears that Majdanek was included among the “Aktion Reinhardt” camps by the headquarters in Lublin. As for the spelling of Reinhard(t), both forms were used by Heydrich himself.

  91. There has been some debate about the number of Jews exterminated in Belzec, until the discovery in the Russian archives of a message sent on January 11, 1943, by Hermann Ho¯fle (Globocnik’s deportation specialist) to Franz Heim (at the RSHA in Kraków), which indicates the number mentioned above. See on this issue Peter Witte and Stephen Tyas, “A New Document on the Deportation and Murder of Jews during “Einsatz Reinhardt 1942,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 95 (2002), pp. 458ff. The document will be quoted in chapter 8.

  92. Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (London, 1974), p. 111.

  93. Ibid., p. 117.

  94. Arad, Belzec, p. 80.

  95. Zygmunt Klukowski, Diary from the Years of Occupation, 1939–44, ed. Andrew Klukowski and Helen Klukowski May (Urbana, IL, 1993). Klukowski’s diary raises some problems. One editor, Zygmunt’s son, mentions that the full text, deposited at the library of the Catholic University in Lublin, has been cut by some 8 percent; moreover, in the collaborative effort with Zygmunt’s grandson to translate the text into English, some changes in the wording were apparently made and short paragraphs “that were clearly related” were combined (Klukowski, Diary, p. xix). Some passages that were rephrased in the English translation offer, in the original, a very negative image of the behavior of the local Polish population; these passages will be quoted in part of the next note, and can be compared in the note with their translation by Jan T. Gross.

  96. Ibid. Jan T. Gross’s translation runs as follows: “All the scum are milling around, a lot of [peasants with] wagons came from the countryside and stood waiting the entire day for the moment when they could start looting. News keeps reaching us from all directions about the scandalous behavior of segments of the Polish population who rob emptied Jewish apartments. I am sure our little town will be no different.” Quoted in Jan T. Gross, “A Tangled Web: Confronting Stereotypes Concerning Relations between Poles, Germans, Jews and Communists,” in The Politics of Retribution, ed. István Deák, Jan T. Gross, and Tony Judt (Princeton, 2000). Klukowski was right. Many of the Jews of Sczebrzeszyn were murdered on the spot, on May 8, 1942. “The next morning,” Klukowski noted, “behavior of a certain part of the Polish population left a lot to be desired. People were laughing, joking, many strolled to the Jewish quarter looking around for an opportunity to grab something from the deserted houses.” Gross, “Tangled Web,” p. 90.

  97. In her day-by-day chronicle of the events in Auschwitz, Danuta Czech noted for February 15, 1942: “The first transport of Jews who have been arrested by the [Ge]stapo and destined for death in Auschwitz arrives from Beuthen. They are unloaded on the platform of the camp siding. They have to leave their bags on the platform. The standby squad takes charge of the deportees from the Stapo and leads them to the gas chamber in the camp crematorium. There they are killed with Zyklon B gas.” Danuta Czech, Auschwitz Chronicle, 1939–1945 (New York, 1990), p. 135.
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  98. Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Auschwitz (New York, 2002), p. 301.

  99. Ibid., pp. 302–3.

  100. For the stagewise beginning of the second sweep from the end of 1941 on, see Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3 vols. (New Haven, Conn., 2003), vol. 1, pp. 382ff.

  101. Nuremberg doc. PS-2174, pp. 72–75. Quoted in Dieter Pohl, “Schauplatz Ukraine,” in Darstellungen und Quellen zur Geschichte von Auschwitz Ausbeutung, Vernichtung, Öffentlichkeit: Neue Studien zur nationalsozialistischen Lagerpolitik, ed. Norbert Frei, Sybille Steinbacher, and Bernd C. Wagner, vol. 4 (Munich, 2000), p. 155.

  102. For a detailed overview see mainly Shmuel Spector, The Holocaust of Volhynian Jews 1941–1944 (Jerusalem, 1990). Regarding the results of the “first sweep” and the extermination in Rovno, see pp. 113–15.

  103. Pohl, “Schauplatz Ukraine,” pp. 156–57.

  104. For the function of these auxiliary forces see in particular Martin Dean, Collaboration in the Holocaust. Crimes of the Local Police in Belorussia and the Ukraine, 1941–44 (New York, 2000).

  105. Ibid., p. 96.

  106. Pohl, “Schauplatz Ukraine,” p. 158.

  107. Ibid., pp. 159–61.

  108. Jäger’s report of February 9, 1942, is reproduced in Friedlander and Milton, eds., Archives of the Holocaust, vol. 22, doc. 82, p. 177.

  109. Ibid., vol. 22, doc. 91, p. 196.

  110. See the basic documentation in Helmut Heiber, “Aus den Akten des Gauleiters Kube,” Viertelsjahrhefte für Zeitgeschichte 4 (1956), pp. 67ff.

  111. International Military Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminal Before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 14 November 1946–9 October 1946, PS-3428, vol. 12, p. 67, quoted in Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution (Berkeley, 1984), p. 118.

  112. Ibid., p. 148.

  113. For the response, see Longerich and Pohl, eds., Die Ermordung, pp. 355–56.

  114. Ibid.

  115. For the details of this operation, see the partly diverging interpretations in Christopher R. Browning, Fateful Months: Essays on the Emergence of the Final Solution (New York, 1985) and in Menachem Shelach, “Sajmiste—An Extermination Camp in Serbia,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 2, no. 2 (1987), pp. 243ff.

  116. Shelach, “Sajmište,” pp. 253–54. For the full text of Schäfer’s telegram, see Nuremberg doc. 501-PS, U.S. Office of Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality, and International Military Tribunal, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, 8 vols. (Washington, DC, 1946), vol. 3, p. 418–19.

  117. Shelach, “Sajmište,” p. 254.

  118. Berenstein, Faschismus, Getto, Massenmord, p. 278.

  119. For a detailed history of the Bielskis, see mainly Nechama Tec, Defiance: The Bielski Partisans (New York, 1993).

  120. Ibid.

  121. About the situation in Minsk, see mainly Shalom Cholavsky, “The Judenrat in Minsk,” in Patterns of Jewish Leadership in Nazi Europe, 1933–1945. Yisrael Gutman and Cynthia J. Haft, eds. (Jerusalem, 1979), pp. 120ff. See also Hersh Smolar, The Minsk Ghetto: Soviet-Jewish Partisans Against the Nazis (New York, 1989).

  122. Ingo Müller, Hitler’s Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich (Cambridge, MA, 1991), p. 114ff.

  123. Nuremberg doc. NG-1012, quoted in John Mendelsohn and Donald S. Detwiler, eds., The Holocaust: Selected Documents in Eighteen Volumes (New York, 1982), vol. 13; John Mendelsohn, The Judicial System and the Jews in Nazi Germany (New York, 1982), p. 233.

  124. Mendelsohn, The Judicial System and the Jews in Nazi Germany, pp. 240–41.

  125. Ibid., p. 243.

  126. See Jörg Wollenberg, ed., The German Public and the Persecution of the Jews, 1933–1945 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1996), p. 137.

  127. Müller, Hitler’s Justice, p. 114. See also Otto Dov Kulka and Eberhard Jäckel, Die Juden in den geheimen NS-Stimmungsberichten 1933–1945 (Düsseldorf, 2004), p. 498.

  128. Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1942–45, pp. 4–5.

  129. Helmut Heiber, ed., Akten der Partei-Kanzlei der NSDAP: Rekonstruktion eines verlorengegangenen Bestandes. Regesten, vol. 1, part 2 (Munich, 1983), abs. no. 26106.

  130. Joseph Walk, ed., Das Sonderrecht für die Juden im NS-Staat: Eine Sammlung der gesetzlichen Massnahmen und Richtlinien, Inhalt und Bedeutung (Heidelberg, 1981), p. 360.

  131. Heiber, Akten der Partei-Kanzlei der NSDAP, vol. 1, part 2, abs. no. 26106.

  132. Ibid.

  133. Ibid., p. 366.

  134. Peter Longerich, ed., Akten der Partei-Kanzlei der NSDAP: Rekonstruktion eines verlorengegangenen Bestandes. Regesten., vol. 2, part 4 (Munich, 1992) abs. no. 42409.

  135. Walk, ed., Das Sonderrecht, p. 368.

  136. Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1942–45, p. 58.

  137. Ibid., p. 52.

  138. Wolf Gruner, Judenverfolgung in Berlin 1933–1945: Eine Chronologie der Behördenmassnahmen in der Reichshauptstadt (Berlin, 1996), p. 84.

  139. Ibid.

  140. Akten der Parteikanzlei der NSDAP, part 2, vol. 4, abs. no. 42900.

  141. Gruner, Judenverfolgung in Berlin, p. 85.

  142. Bormann’s letter and Fiehler’s answer are quoted in Ernst Piper, “National Socialist Cultural Policy and Its Beneficiaries: The Example of Munich,” in The German Public and the Persecution of the Jews, 1933–1945, ed. Jörg Wollenberg (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1996), p. 110.

  143. Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1941–1945, vol. 2, p. 8.

  144. Ibid., p. 9.

  145. Ibid., p. 28.

  146. Hertha Feiner, Before Deportation: Letters from a Mother to Her Daughters, January 1939–December 1942, ed. Karl Heinz Jahnke (Evanston, IL, 1999), p. 102.

  147. On this issue see in particular Beate Meyer, “Das unausweichliche Dilemma: Die Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland, die Deportationen und die untergetauchten Juden,” in Überleben im Untergrund: Hilfe für Juden in Deutschland, ed. Beate Kosmala and Claudia Schopmann (Berlin, 2002), pp. 278ff.

  148. Ibid., pp. 280–81.

  149. Paul Sauer, ed., Dokumente über die Verfolgung der jüdischen Bürger in Baden-Württemberg durch das nationalsozialistische Regime 1933–1945, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: 1966), vol. 2, pp. 317–18.

  150. Ibid., pp. 322–23.

  151. Ibid.

  152. Ruth Andreas-Friedrich and June Barrows Mussey, Berlin Underground, 1938–1945 (New York, 1947), p. 77.

  153. Ibid., p. 78.

  154. For the events in Slovakia see mainly Livia Rothkirchen, “The Situation of the Jews in Slovakia between 1939 and 1945,” Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 7 (1998), pp. 46ff. and particularly 51ff.

  155. Michael Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930–1965 (Bloomington, 2000), p. 88.

  156. Ibid., p. 89.

  157. Ibid.

  158. Ibid., p. 90.

  159. Ingrid Krüger-Bulcke and Hans Georg Lehmann, eds., Akten zur deutschen auswärtigen Politik, 1918–1945, Series E, 1941–1945 (Göttingen, 1974), vol. 3, pp. 65–66.

  160. Ibid., p. 66 n. 1.

  161. Yehuda Bauer, Jews for Sale? Nazi-Jewish Negotiations, 1933–1945 (New Haven, 1994), pp. 62ff.

  162. For the text of Dannecker’s memorandum of June 15, see Serge Klarsfeld, Vichy-Auschwitz: Le rôle de Vichy dans la solution finale de la question juive en France (Paris, 1983), vol. 1, pp. 202–3.

  163. Ibid., p. 70ff.

  164. J. Presser, Ashes in the Wind: The Destruction of Dutch Jewry (Detroit, 1988), p. 92.

  165. Ibid., pp. 94ff.

  166. Ibid., pp. 98ff.

  167. Ibid., pp. 100ff.

  168. Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941–1943 (New York, 1983), p. 93.

  169. Ibid., p. 107.

  170. Ibid., p. 118.

  171. Ibid., p. 122.

  172. For the chronology of events in France and in the early summer of 1942 most of the relevant docume
nts see mainly Klarsfeld, Vichy-Auschwitz, vol. 1 (Paris, 1983).

  173. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 236.

  174. Ibid., p. 237.

  175. For the introduction of the star in Holland, see Bob Moore, Victims and Survivors: The Nazi Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands, 1940–1945 (London, 1997), p. 86ff. For France, see Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (New York, 1981), pp. 234ff.

  176. Moore, Victims and Survivors, pp. 85–89.

  177. Presser, Ashes in the Wind, pp. 124–26.

  178. Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy et les juifs (Paris, 1990), pp. 236–37.

  179. Renée Poznanski, Être juif en France pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale (Paris, 1994), p. 358.

  180. Ibid.

  181. Biélinky, Journal, p.191.

  182. Ibid., p. 209.

  183. Ibid., pp. 209–10.

  184. Ibid., pp. 214ff.

  185. Nuremberg doc. NG-183, The Ministries Case, p. 235.

  186. Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Journal, 1939–1945, ed. Julien Hervier (Paris, 1992), p. 302.

  187. Lucien Rebatet, Les Décombres (Paris, 1942), pp. 568–69 (translated in David Carroll, French Literary Fascism: Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and the Ideology of Culture [Princeton, 1995], p. 212).

  188. Ibid., p. 605 (Carroll, French Literary Fascism, p. 211).

  189. Quoted in Frédéric Vitoux, Céline: A Biography (New York, 1992), p. 378.

  190. Quoted in Carroll, French Literary Fascism, p. 121.

  191. Ibid., p. 275.

  192. See in particular Robert Belot, “Lucien Rebatet, ou L’Antisémitisme comme Événement Littéraire,” in L’Antisémitisme de plume, 1940–1944: Études et documents, ed. Pierre-André Taguieff (Paris, 1999), pp. 217ff. See also Robert Belot, Lucien Rebatet: Un itinéraire fasciste (Paris, 1994).

  193. Pierre Assouline, Gaston Gallimard: A Half-Century of French Publishing (San Diego, 1988), p. 279.

  194. Richard I. Cohen, The Burden of Conscience: French Jewish Leadership During the Holocaust (Bloomington, 1987), pp. 71ff, 116ff.

  195. Raymond-Raoul Lambert, Carnet d’un témoin: 1940–1943, ed. Richard I. Cohen (Paris, 1985), p. 163. Much of what Lambert writes about the overall attitude of the Consistoire is true; the donations to “l’Amitié Chrétienne,” however, were intended as financial support for Jewish children helped by the organization. See Simon Schwarzfuchs, Aux Prises avec Vichy: Histoire politique des Juifs de France, 1940–1944 (Paris, 1998), p. 263.