by Jay Winik
Over only four months, an astonishing half a million Jews would be massacred.
AS WINTER SETTLED IN, the situation was little better for those still alive. In Warsaw, seventy children, the cold air stabbing at their lungs, shivered and froze to death in the streets. Indeed, frozen human corpses were now a “frequent sight.” Half-insane with grief, mothers would cuddle their dead children, seeking to warm the “inanimate” little bodies. Perhaps even more heartbreaking was the sight of a child huddling against his mother, stroking her face and tugging at her sleeves, thinking she was asleep when in fact she had quietly perished.
In England, the fiery Winston Churchill gave a public voice to the Jews. “None has suffered more cruelly than the Jew,” he wrote in a famous tract in the Jewish Chronicle. “He has borne and continues to bear the burden that might have seemed to be beyond endurance. He has not allowed it to break his spirit: he has never lost the will to resist. . . . Assuredly in the day of victory the Jew’s suffering and his part in the struggle will not be forgotten. . . . It will be shown that, though the mills of the Gods grind slowly, yet they grind exceedingly small.”
FOR ALL THE CARNAGE, though, the Germans still were not planning the Final Solution. Rather, they continued to contemplate a form of territorial solution, removing the Jews somewhere deep in the east. “Emigration” and “evacuation” were the watchwords. “Where the Jews are sent to,” Hitler maintained, “whether to Siberia or Madagascar, is immaterial.” But when Hitler’s rhetoric became more fiery, the rest of the world stayed largely mute, writing his words off as bluster or bluff, or simply wary of the consequences of an actual confrontation. Once more, Hitler had been underrated by his neighbors and his foes.
Not only Hitler himself but also his high command was increasingly focused on the problem of the Jews. Murderous words increasingly poured from their lips and from their pens. Each instruction, each technical problem in dealing with the Jews was examined. Each bureaucratic obstacle to making Europe Judenfrei was analyzed. In Poland, Nazi authorities flirted with the idea of one large camp into which the Jews would be herded to labor in coal mines. But every solution raised a new problem or conundrum: in this case, what about those who couldn’t work? (Of course, there was always the option of deporting the Jews eastward.) But to what district were the Jews to be relocated? (By late fall, the lightning war that Hitler had anticipated in the Soviet Union was proving to be a delusion.) What about transportation? (Trains were already in short supply.) What about the possibility of eliminating the Jews by starving them to death? (But even this required territory for them to be rounded up in.) That the war against the Soviet Union was stalled—the Nazis tried to capture Moscow, but their broad assault would fail—led the Germans to examine other options for handling the Jews.
Meanwhile, though there was not yet a coordinated, comprehensive decision about genocide, Adolf Eichmann, a dauntless figure, began preparing an overall plan for the “complete solution of the Jewish question,” and Hermann Göring continued to clamor for a “final solution.” At the same time, Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich initiated the creation of an extermination camp in Riga, Latvia, a network of prison and labor camps that could accommodate up to 10 million, though they then abandoned it because of local partisan warfare. Nevertheless, revenge and reprisal were never far from Hitler’s thoughts.
In September, Hitler agreed to start deporting German, Austrian, and Czech Jews to the east. The solution to the Jewish question, he said, must be “energetic” but must not cause “unnecessary difficulties.” At the same time, in Kraków, Poland, Hans Frank insisted, “As far as Jews are concerned, I want to tell you quite frankly that they must be done away with one way or another.” And Himmler maintained that the Jews must be exterminated “down to the very last one.”
It was around this time, in the fall of 1941, that the Nazis began to contemplate the use of poison gas.
The bridge to industrialized mass murder was about to be built.
THE MASS SHOOTINGS AND other forms of slaughter increasingly took a toll on the killers themselves. Even the much touted SS discipline was unable to prevent the stress created by the butchery; drunkenness and disorderly behavior increased among the Germans; and there were rumbles of protest from the army itself. One Nazi official, a Dr. Becker, went as far as to complain about the “immense psychological injuries” and “damages” to the men’s health. Wilhelm Kube, the commissioner general of White Russia, agreed, singling out the policy, which he called beastly, of burying alive seriously wounded people, who then “worked their way out of the graves.” Moreover, the German authorities came to believe that there had to be a cleaner and less public way of killing than mass shooting. There was. In East Prussia in 1940, the Nazis had used gas vans for “euthanasia,” that is, to murder people who were physically and mentally handicapped. At institutions in Germany, Austria, and Poland that housed the deformed, the disfigured, or the chronically ill, the Nazis piped in carbon monoxide from trailers or put the victims directly into carbon monoxide chambers. In other cases, elderly people were asphyxiated by exhaust fumes administered through specially designed tubes. The Germans experimented with other methods as well, including stationary killing installations.
Then, in 1941, fifteen mobile gas vans were delivered to the Einsatzgruppen for use against the Jews in the occupied countries of the east. No technical detail was too small to escape the Nazis’ attention. The Germans fretted about the weather—the vans could be used only in “absolutely dry weather.” They fretted because the gas caused constant headaches—it was debilitating their executioners. And they fretted about appearances—they camouflaged the vans as house trailers, outfitting them with neatly painted window shutters. Some even fretted about the nature of their victims’ deaths; Dr. Becker noted in one memorandum that, with proper use of the gas, “death comes faster” and the recipients fall asleep “peacefully.”
In an experiment with another toxic substance, on the night of September 2, 1941, several hundred Soviet prisoners of war at Auschwitz were marched into the cellars of Block 11 in pitch darkness, packed in, and gassed with Zyklon B. Auschwitz was then being used primarily as a concentration camp for the Nazis’ political opponents, mostly Poles.
Word soon raced out to the leadership of the Third Reich: this trial was deemed a success.
ON JANUARY 2, 1942, less than a month after the United States had officially entered the war, the Germans prepared for a conference on the shore of the beautiful Wannsee, a lake on the western rim of Berlin. The purpose was a “joint conversation” about the remaining work connected with the “final solution.” It would be, in the words of one Nazi official, a “great discussion.” But before it was to take place, the Germans carried out yet another experiment in gassing. Under a darkened sky on the evening of December 7, 1941—as Japanese aircraft were laying waste to the United States fleet at Pearl Harbor—seven hundred Jews were being ferried in trucks along a rutted road near the Polish village of Chelmno. They were told the usual story: that their destination was a railway station some five miles away, from where they would be sent to agricultural or factory work in the “east.” They never arrived. Instead, fearful and confused, they were detained overnight in a small, shabby villa on the outskirts of the village.
The next morning, eighty of the prisoners were dragged into a special van, which sped off toward a clearing in the thick Chelmno woods. By the journey’s end, they were struggling in vain for air. While the van was parked with the engine running, carbon monoxide was piped into the rear, killing them. Inside, after the doors were opened, there was a sickening stench of waste and sweat. This bloody work continued for four days, a thousand dying each day, four thousands all told. The bodies were pitched into a mass grave in a clearing in the woods. As President Franklin Roosevelt was announcing to the world that December 7 was “a date which will live in infamy,” the Germans were inaugurating, under the greatest secrecy, the first days of the “final solution.”
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br /> The number of Jews slaughtered in the Chelmno woods was nearly twice the number of Americans killed by the Japanese in the attack on Pearl Harbor. From that day, the Nazi gas vans began working overtime, without pause, without interruption; more than fifty communities in Chelmno would be wiped out. One local resident drily observed, “Ein Tag—ein Tausend”: “One day—one thousand.”
In Kraków, Hans Frank, having recently returned from Berlin, enthusiastically informed his cabinet of the imminent decisions about the Jews. “Do you think they will be settled in the Ostland, and villages?” he asked rhetorically. “We were told in Berlin: why all this bother? We can do nothing with them either in the Ostland or in the Reichskommissariat.” So what was to be done?
Berlin had answered with bravado: “Liquidate them yourselves.”
AND BY NOW, NO Jews were exempt. Previously, exceptions had been made for German Jews who had Aryan partners, German Jews who were decorated war heroes, and people who were only part Jewish (Mischlinge). When a train bearing a thousand such German Jews had come into Riga, no less than Heinrich Himmler placed an urgent call, seeking to prevent their extermination. It was too late; they were all killed.
After the Wannsee conference, however, there would no longer be any such confusion.
ON JANUARY 20, 1942, a fleet of limousines sped into a lakeside suburb of west Berlin, past clean, sturdy houses, where the walks were swept and smoke rose from the chimneys, onto a quiet residential street, just across from the popular Wannsee beach, and entered into the tree-lined driveway of a spacious, elegant stone villa. Goebbels himself lived only a few hundred yards away. Built in 1914, the villa was now owned by the SS and used as a conference center. One by one, representatives of all the key Reich ministries emerged from the cars to discuss the Final Solution. Here were officials from the ministries of the Interior and Justice, from the eastern territories and the Foreign Office, from the office of the Four-Year Plan and from the general government, and of course from the Gestapo. Here too, were representatives of the Reich Chancellery of the Nazi Party and the Race and Resettlement Office, as well as of the Nazi Party Chancellery. There was the secretary for the conference proceedings, whose task was to produce a written record of all that took place. And here came the cold-blooded killers: the dour bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann, along with Dr. Rudolf Lange, the SS Sturmbannführer, who was invited because he had successfully executed so many German Jews in Latvia.
When the participants assembled at midday, theirs was a daunting task. The German offensive against the Soviet Union, begun under a cloud of euphoria, had stalled short of Moscow. Temperatures there had plummeted to twenty below zero, blackening the German attackers’ skin with frostbite; even the crankcases of their vehicles froze. While the Germans were forced to seek shelter, the Soviet army began a punishing counteroffensive. Hitler had proclaimed that the Soviet territories west of the Urals would become a German garden of Eden, but the reality was that this would be a long war, and it was unlikely that the Soviet Union would ever be completely conquered. Moreover, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had prompted the Führer to declare war on the United States, meaning the Germans were now confronted with a true two-front war. None of this, however, distracted the conference from its cherished goal: establishing the Final Solution for the European Jewish question.
Even to the Nazis, the idea of deporting all the Jews of Europe to the eastern territories and then killing them seemed like lunacy. German resources, in men and matériel, were already severely stretched. Moreover, some German officials were horrified at the prospect of killing valuable workers and irreplaceable craftsmen who could help with the war effort. Also, a mass deportation of the Jews—which would involve gathering, registering, documenting, and transporting millions of people—was a formidable logistical task. The technical obstacles alone were mind-boggling—at Chelmno, for example, the experimental gas chambers often malfunctioned: deaths that were supposed to take no more than fifteen minutes sometimes took hours; routinely, some victims were still alive when the doors were opened. As to coordination, the railways, the bureaucrats, the Gestapo, and the military would all have to work in unison, toward a single, almost fathomless objective. From scratch, the Germans would have to create something never before accomplished: an entire industrial apparatus of destruction.
Death camps would have to be built in distant places. Intricate timelines would have to be drawn up. Impounding policies would have to be developed. For the endless stream of deportations, interim transit ghettos would have to be erected. And the Germans would have to depend on the tacit “unrecorded cooperation” of many thousands of disparate people—from unquestioning administrators and diligent secretaries to watchful bureaucrats and SS officials—all of whom would have to carry out their jobs unhesitatingly and in town after town and city after city, send Jews on their way to “resettlement.” Local populations would either have to collude outright with the ongoing mass murder or somehow be cajoled into cooperation, or at least into connivance—turning a blind eye. Nor could the involvement of all the necessary Germans be guaranteed.
At the conference, amidst the ornate marble pillars and gorgeous mahogany paneling, not to mention the oversized fireplaces and light-filled French doors, Heydrich made it clear to the participants that the Final Solution would be far more encompassing than previously imagined. Emigration and evacuation were no longer sufficient. Nor were shootings. He calmly explained that the Final Solution would now extend to all of the 11 million Jews scattered throughout Europe and beyond. With an expressionless face, he then presented a meticulous list of the numbers of all the Jews involved, including the 330,000 Jews in Britain; including the 4,000 Jews of Ireland; including the Jews of the neutral countries—55,500 in Turkey, 18,000 in Switzerland, 10,000 in Spain, and 8,000 in Sweden—and including the remaining 34,000 in Lithuania, where 200,000 had already been murdered by the Einsatzgruppen.
No number was too large to be considered, or too small. No country was exempt. The greatest number of Jews listed was 2,994,684, in the Ukraine. The second-largest number was 2,284,000, in Germany. Third was Germany’s ally, Hungary, which had 742,800. Fourth was unoccupied France, which had 700,000, a figure that included France’s North African colonies: Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. The smallest number was 200, in Italian-occupied Albania. There was even an entry for the estimated number of Jews in the United States. The list also included Estonia, for which the laconic notation was “Without Jews.”
As they sat around the polished table, Heydrich, one of the cruelest and most brutal mass murderers in the Reich (he referred to Jews as “terminal subhumans”), outlined the mechanism for the Final Solution. Europe, he said, would be “combed from west to east.” Evacuated Jews would be brought “bit by bit” to what he called “transit ghettos” before being transported farther east. Jews would be separated by sex, by their ability to be slave laborers, by their locality. And in countries such as Hungary, which thus far was protecting its Jews, it would be necessary to “impose an adviser” on Jewish questions.
The participants made another key decision. Heydrich’s right-hand man, Adolf Eichmann, would be put in charge of coordinating all aspects of the Final Solution. His representatives—in effect, his emissaries of death—would fan out to capitals all across Europe, while he would dispatch instructions from Berlin. In turn, he would be apprised of each deportation being planned and carried out. On such details did the fate of millions hang. Almost overnight, tens of thousands of miles of rail lines would come under his aegis, and so would a vast bureaucracy of murder. There would be an elaborate system of confidentiality to obscure the true nature of the Final Solution. Within months, the railway telegraphs would be chattering, and Eichmann would have men positioned in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Norway, Romania, Greece, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Slovakia.
As the meeting drew to a close, shafts of bright light came through the windows, and Eichmann, Heydrich, and another colleague
warmed themselves in chairs by a nearby stove. Uncharacteristically, Heydrich began puffing on a cigarette. They sipped brandy, and as Eichmann would later recount, they sat together like comrades, winding down “after long hours of effort.” With such power and pedigree, and soon racial purity, they believed the Nazis’ Third Reich was invincible. The destruction of the Jews, they felt, would one day arouse awe, testify to the greatness of their heritage, and cover them with glory.
Ten days later, nine years after his rise to power, Adolf Hitler spoke before a huge, cheering audience at the Sports Palace in Berlin. His words, broadcast by radio in Berlin and all across the Third Reich, were also received in Washington and London. His message was as chilling as ever. “The hour will come when the most evil universal enemy of all time will be finished . . . for one thousand years.”
AS THE WANNSEE CONFERENCE came to an end, and as eastern Europe was mostly sealed off from the rest of the world, the SS were scouring remote villages west of the Bug River on the former border between Germany and Poland. In three of these sites, men were soon hammering and swearing, sawing and building, turning old labor camps into new death camps. With such work, and much plotting and intrigue, everything seemed to unfold in precise, formalized detail. The Germans consulted architects and builders, the Gestapo, leaders of industry, and experts in pest control. While sipping sherry and eating caviar, they marveled at architects’ miniature models. And while the slave workers struggled in the muck and cold and darkness to erect the camps, the SS strode around like Roman Caesars, urging the prisoners to work harder and faster. If workers died of exhaustion, or of typhus or other maladies, it was no matter; the work continued.
