Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler

by Robert Gellately

  Majdanek and Auschwitz were under the jurisdiction of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office (WVHA); that is, they were part of the regular concentration camp system, initially intended as a money-making operation, with profits financing the SS empire.

  At some point, likely in mid-1942, Majdanek got another task, namely to kill Jews, and soon it had gas chambers that went into high gear in the autumn. Some 500,000 people, from fifty-four different countries, passed through this camp. An estimated 50,000 Jews died there, and as many as 250,000 non-Jews. The last mass execution is usually dated to November 3, 1943.51

  In the beginning the victims in the camps, as well as those of Einsatzgruppen, were buried in mass graves. In early 1942, Himmler decided it would be prudent to cover the traces, and in March he instructed that the bodies be exhumed and cremated. The task was delayed when Heydrich was killed, and eventually Special Action 1005, led by Paul Blobel, was formed for this job.

  Himmler also informed Globocnik in August 1942 that in his district bodies would henceforth have to be cremated and that, in addition, all those buried would have to be exhumed and cremated. According to one witness, Globocnik did not want to do this, because he thought the German people should be proud of what they had done. One witness quoted Globocnik as boasting among a group of SS men at Belzec, particularly when someone suggested it might be wise to cover up the crime: “Gentlemen, if there were ever, after us, a generation so cowardly and soft that they could not understand our work which is so good, so necessary, then, gentlemen, all of National Socialism will have been in vain. We ought, on the contrary, to bury bronze tablets stating that it was we who had the courage to carry out this gigantic task.”52

  AUSCHWITZ

  Auschwitz was separate from the Operation Reinhard camps, located in an area overrun by German troops in 1939 and incorporated into the Reich as the Reichsgau Wartheland, a new district created out of pieces of Poland in January 1940 and put under Gauleiter Arthur Greiser. Auschwitz was thus part of Germany; it was not some distant camp in the vast stretches of the east.

  In October 1939, Hitler had appointed Himmler the Reichskommissar for the strengthening of Germandom. His task was to “cleanse” areas in the east of undesired racial groups, bring in “racially valuable Germans,” and make the lands productive. There were so many Jews and Poles in eastern Upper Silesia, and so few Germans, that plans had to be delayed, and the province, including the small town of Auschwitz, became a kind of holding ground where Jews were sent. Himmler decided to create a concentration camp at Auschwitz on or around April 27, 1940, after several inspection trips. On May 4, Rudolf Höss was appointed the first commandant.53

  Auschwitz opened on June 14 and was initially intended to terrorize the region. The first prisoners were mostly Polish. The camp’s large capacity, at ten thousand, set it apart from others, but it was not originally conceived for the mass murder of Jews. Another feature was that the cheap labor of prisoners and location of the camp made it attractive to private industry.

  In early 1941 the I. G. Farben chemical concern began the construction of a factory at the camp, the so-called Buna works, designed to create synthetic rubber. The company eventually invested around 600 million marks there, and I. G. Auschwitz became the largest investment project by private industry in the Third Reich. Himmler paid a visit to accelerate matters on March 1 and ordered ten thousand prisoners put at the firm’s disposal. Their wages were as good as nothing.54 This arrangement, whereby factories would be created inside concentration camps, was exactly the kind of relationship Himmler wanted with industry. Virtually every leading German firm and many minor ones came to such arrangements with the SS.55

  Himmler gave orders on September 26 for the construction of a new and larger camp a short distance down the road at Birkenau. Modeled along the same lines as Majdanek, which was created at the same time, the camp was massive. The SS kept expanding the planned capacity of Birkenau, which by August 1942 could hold 200,000. The entire complex would occupy an area of 432 acres, with three hundred barracks buildings, factories, and other structures.56

  From autumn 1941 onward more than a thousand deaths at Auschwitz were reported every month. These statistics come from the standard chronicle of the camp, which is incomplete.57

  The first major gassing in Auschwitz with Zyklon B was most likely in early September 1941, after a commission of the Gestapo sorted through Soviet prisoners of war in search of “fanatical Communists” and selected six hundred, along with several hundred sick prisoners. By December a crematorium had been converted into a gas chamber and began operating.58

  Although there were some Jews in Auschwitz almost from the beginning, the first transport of them arrived on February 15, 1942, sent by the Gestapo from Beuthen. They were gassed at once. Inside the camp the SS barred off the area and made noises to conceal what was happening. Perhaps for that reason the prisoners, like Józef Garlifiski, member of the Polish underground, may have been misled. He swore that “the first time a transport reached the camp and was sent straight from the railway station to the gas chamber in Bunker No 1”was on May 12. He said that was the turning point in the minds of the prisoners. Until then Auschwitz was pure hell, but after that “the name Vernichtungslager (death camp) hung like an ominous cloud over the fenced-in marshes where a colony of human ants sought vainly for help.”59

  According to the Auschwitz Chronicle, on March 20 the gas chamber in a farmhouse located in Birkenau was put into operation, and a transport of Polish Jews from Upper Silesia went “without undergoing a selection” straight to their deaths. From mid-1942 onward, more transports from all over Europe began arriving. For example, 1,000 Jews arrived from Compiègne in France on June 7, and though they were not killed immediately, within ten weeks only 217 were still alive. A shipment of 1,004 Jewish men and 34 Jewish women arrived (the fifth transport) from Beaune-la-Rolande camp in France on June 30, with more to follow.60

  Trains from France originated in Pithiviers, Angers St.-Laud, or Le Bourget-Drancy. On July 8, 1,170 non-Jewish and Jewish prisoners from Paris arrived, many of them French Communists, so that Auschwitz was also a camp for “serious” political prisoners. The seventy-fifth train from France arrived on June 2, 1944, only days before the Allied landings in Normandy.61

  On July 17, 1942, 2,000 Jews came from Westerbork and Amersfoort camps in Holland. The transport of October 18 had 1,710 Jewish men, women, and children. Only 116 women were admitted to the camp, and the remaining people were gassed. There were “horrible scenes” when some women beseeched the SS to let them live.62

  More than twenty trains came from the Malines camp in Belgium, beginning in August 1942. The same month Jews from Yugoslavia started to arrive. The first Jews from Czechoslovakia reached the camp in October 1942, and a train from Norway arrived in December. On March 20, 1943, a group of 2,800 Jewish men, women, and children came from the ghetto in Salonika, Greece; 2,191 were gassed immediately and the rest sent to work.63

  The first “selection” among the Jews in the camp took place on July 4, 1942, in which those who arrived from Slovakia were combed through for able-bodied men. The less fit were killed, but 264 men were allowed to live. However, just over a month later only 69 of them were still alive. By this time, life expectancy for Jews in this camp, even for those not murdered immediately, could be measured in days and weeks.

  Himmler paid a second visit to the camp on July 18, 1942, and witnessed a mass execution at Birkenau. He also inspected the Buna works. He had big plans for other industries at Auschwitz. Satisfied with what he saw, he gave Commandant Höss a promotion and ordered him to accelerate construction of Birkenau and to do away with any Jewish prisoners unfit for work.64

  Mussolini’s Fascist regime fell on July 25, 1943, when he was deposed and arrested. The new head of government, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, initially said he would stay in the war on Germany’s side but secretly negotiated and signed an armistice with the Allies on September 8. The Germans r
escued Mussolini, and when Hitler heard this, he was pleased. However, he held it against the Fascist leader for not taking energetic steps against the Jews, perhaps also for wishing to make peace with the Soviet Union. According to Goebbels, Hitler now saw that Mussolini “was no revolutionary in the sense of the führer or Stalin.”65

  Field Marshal Albert Kesselring declared Italy to be under military control on September 11. The Germans interned around 700,000 Italian troops, many of whom were sent to Germany, where they were treated as slave laborers. They suffered dreadfully, a story of heartbreak that has rarely been told.66 The end of Fascism, initially welcomed by the Italian Jewish community of 44, 500, soon brought them darker days. On September 12 orders were issued from Berlin to Herbert Kappler, commander of the security police and SD in Rome, to deport all of the Jews.

  Kappler decided to extort money from the Jewish community by demanding a large quantity of gold—which the Jews raised with the help of the Vatican. Pressure from Berlin persisted, however, because it was not just the money but deaths of the Jews that Hitler and Himmler wanted. Word leaked out about the impending roundup, and the Vatican saved the lives of nearly five thousand, even as the pope kept his silence. On October 16, German forces apprehended 1,030 Jewish men, women, and children and sent them to Auschwitz; only 17 ever returned. Romans either offered passive resistance or were revolted by what they saw.67This raid was followed in other cities, including Florence, Venice, Milan, and Genoa. Four-fifths of the Jews in Italy survived, and did so because they got help from people of all classes. It was also the case that the SS was assisted in their work by Italian collaborators, so the record is a mixed one.68

  Auschwitz-Birkenau became not only the largest concentration camp but the biggest death camp. Even excluding Birkenau, Auschwitz established a network of fifty sub-camps, and prisoners worked far afield for industry, agriculture, and at clearing up after bombing attacks. The I. G. Farben camp at Monowitz failed in every sense of the word. In trying to construct a plant, prisoners were badly mistreated and even murdered. Life expectancy in some of Farben’s mines was four to six weeks.69

  In a meeting with Hitler in April 1943, Admiral Horthy of Hungary said he had broken the economic power of the Jews, but Hitler wanted more. In answer to his question about what he should now do with the Jews, Horthy was told (by Ribbentrop, who was also at the meeting) either to put them in concentration camps or to exterminate them. Hitler said the problem had been faced and solved in Poland: “If the Jews did not want to work, they were shot. If they could not work, they had to be taken care of.” He said it was not cruel to kill them, because they are “all parasites” and should be treated as though they were “tubercular bacilli.” He asked Horthy point-blank: “Why should we spare these beasts any longer, those who wanted to bring us Bolshevism? Races who cannot defend themselves against the Jews go to ruin.”70

  The great tragedy for the Jews in Hungary began in March 1944, when, in response to Horthy’s attempts to negotiate with the Allies, Hitler invaded the country. Just before the invasion there were around 700,000 Jews in Hungary, which was the largest remaining intact such community in Europe.

  The Daily Mail reported on May 9 that Hungarian Jews had been concentrated into fifty-six camps in preparation for their deportation. “The elimination of Hungarian Jewry is proceeding faster than was ever dreamed of even in Germany,” it said. Their destination was given as the death camps. Between May 15 and July 9, around 440,000 Jews, in 147 trains, were deported.71

  This deportation of the Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz was compressed within seven weeks and became the single greatest massacre of the Second World War. Auschwitz was revamped to receive and kill the large contingents, and beginning in May the schedule was for three or four trains a day, each carrying 3,000 to 3, 500. In total 438,000 were sent to Auschwitz between May 15 and July 9, 1944.72

  Raul Hilberg estimates that in Auschwitz, around 1million Jews and 250,000 non-Jews were murdered.73 The non-Jews confined and killed in Auschwitz included 140,000 to 150,000 Poles; 23,000 Sinti and Roma, or Gypsies; 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war; and 25,000 drawn from every nationality in Europe.74

  PART NINE

  HITLER’S DEFEAT AND STALIN’S AGENDA

  31

  GREATEST CRISIS IN STALIN’S CAREER

  In the early morning hours of June 22, the German invasion broke through Soviet defenses all along the western border. When Moscow got word of these collapses, no one dared to phone Stalin at his dacha. Zhukov finally drew the unhappy chore. Stalin was caught unawares and raced to the Kremlin, where Commissar of Defense Timoshenko gave him irrefutable evidence. Despite all the warnings, Stalin was shocked at Hitler’s treacherous violation of their nonaggression treaty.

  FIRST RESPONSES

  Stalin held on desperately to the bizarre idea that perhaps renegade German generals were trying to provoke war. He had Molotov call the German ambassador to find out what was going on. The tight-lipped Friedrich Werner Graf von der Schulenburg arrived with a note saying that in dealing with the Soviet Union, Germany had put aside the “grave objections arising out of the contradiction between National Socialism and Bolshevism.” The Soviets were accused of breaking the nonaggression treaty and “about to fall on Germany’s back while Germany is in a struggle for her life.” In response Hitler had ordered the Wehrmacht “to oppose this threat with all the means at its disposal.”1

  There was no declaration of war, and Stalin persisted in the illusion that all this was some sort of elaborate ploy. The Soviets had fulfilled their treaty obligations to the letter and, in the eighteen months prior to the attack, had shipped two million tons of petroleum products and key war materials to Germany. The last deliveries crossed the border only hours before the invasion.

  Stalin had made a disastrous mistake, and he now rattled off a stream of commands. The Politburo was called to his Kremlin office at 5: 45 a.m. Even the directive they now issued to the border military districts, signed by Commissar of Defense Timoshenko, was timid, ordering troops not to cross the border without special authorization.2 None of the Soviet leaders guessed how bad the situation was at the front.

  Georgi Dimitrov, head of the Communist International, was summoned to the Kremlin at 7: 00 a.m. Stalin blurted out when he arrived: “They attacked us without declaring any grievances, without demanding negotiations; they attacked us viciously, like gangsters.” He still sounded convinced of one thing: “Only the Communists can defeat the Fascists.”3

  He set the new Party line at once. In August 1939, at the time of the nonaggression treaty with Germany, he told Communists around the world to drop their anti-Nazi stance. In countries like the United States their followers were told to come out against all involvement in Europe’s conflict. The Moscow-oriented movements in countries like France were instructed to put their guns away.

  Once the Nazis attacked the Soviet Union, however, all bets were off, and Communists were now instructed that “the issue of socialist revolution” was being put on hold. The primary focus was to mount a defense of the Soviet people, who were “waging a patriotic war against fascist Germany. It is a matter of routing fascism, which has enslaved a number of peoples and is bent on enslaving still more.” This Stalinist portrayal of the war as a battle of rival ideologies was precisely how Hitler saw it as well. Stalin drove himself from the time he arrived back in the Kremlin, staying at his desk almost nonstop. He kept complaining that he had destroyed Lenin’s heritage, the worst sin he could think of.4

  He gave the chore of breaking the news to the country to Molotov, whose speech he “edited” with other Politburo members. It was delivered on nationwide radio. Molotov spoke of the treacherous invasion that was totally unjustified.5 Stalin then vanished from public view, with stories and pictures of him practically disappearing from newspapers.6

  The military was put on a wartime footing early on June 23, when the Politburo established Stavka, the Headquarters of the High Command of the Armed Forces. S
talin was reluctant to take charge himself, so the job was given to Timoshenko. Stavka was a stopgap measure that went through several changes, but initially included Stalin, Molotov, the marshals of the Soviet Union Voroshilov and Semyon Budenny, and Admiral Nikolai Kuznetsov. Stalin also issued orders for the evacuation of millions of people and even factories to keep them out of the hands of the enemy.

  Casualties reported from the front were staggering. Stalin was even more infuriated that hundreds of thousands of Red Army troops were being encircled and entire divisions were giving up without a fight. By June 28, Minsk had been enveloped and cut off, with the Germans taking nearly a half million prisoners. The way was opened to Smolensk and Moscow.

  The first week brought the greatest crisis Stalin faced in his political career. The Soviet Union, notwithstanding five-year plans and great sacrifices, seemed to be falling apart. The thought crossed Stalin’s mind that he might be deposed or arrested. After all, it was on his watch that the country was left vulnerable to attack, and it was he who had brushed off the warnings. By July 4 he had the commander of the western front, General Dmitri G. Pavlov, and three of his top generals arrested. Charged with “anti-Soviet military conspiracy,” they were subjected to a perfunctory trial and shot on July 22. Stalin told his trusted secretary Aleksandr Poskrebyshev to inform the fronts that “defeatists will be punished without mercy.”7 If there was no such thing as an unexpected development or surprise, should the same rule not apply to Stalin? Surely such a thought crossed his mind.

  Stalin had chosen to ignore or downplay ominous signs. For example, in a war game held after the Winter War with Finland of 1940, General Zhukov, who favored the offensive approach, was able to defeat the Soviet forces led by General Pavlov—the latter misnamed the “Soviet Guderian” after the famous Wehrmacht tank commander. The lesson to be drawn should have been to put more emphasis on defense. Stalin was furious but nonetheless put Pavlov in charge of the western front, dismissed the chief of the General Staff, General Kirill A. Meretskov, and replaced him with Zhukov.8