by Jay Winik
Where there had once been only enveloping woodlands, or existing work camps, the sites would constitute one of the most ambitious construction projects ever conceived. But this was no ancient Versailles, with its finely clipped hedges and bubbling fountains. Nor was it like the great imperial forums of Rome, where crowds once thronged to festivals, or, for that matter, the dazzling temple complex at Karnak, Egypt. Nor, for that matter, was it like the sumptuous Russian Winter Palace, or Sa’adabad, the Ottoman Sultan’s summer estate outside Constantinople. Devoted exclusively to death rather than life, in history it was unique to Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich.
Each of the first four sites, though remote, was a spur on a railway line, which linked it to many towns where half-starved Jews were now confined. The first, Belzec, was tied to Lvov and Kraków, and encompassed the whole of Polish Galicia. It had six gas chambers designed to look like a bathhouse; this was prettified with geraniums, and as a “thoughtful little witticism,” a Star of David was painted on the roof. Belzec was capable of killing fifteen thousand people a day. By rail, all of Warsaw could be brought to Treblinka, which had no fewer than thirty gas chambers capable of dealing with twenty-five thousand people a day. Sobibór was deep in the woods but was accessible by rail for large Jewish populations dispersed across Chelm. The fourth, in existence since December 1941, was Chelmno itself.
By comparison, a fifth site was not tucked away in a remote village at the edge of eastern Poland, where houses were clean and small and flowers bloomed in almost every yard. Rather, it was a sizable town with a significant railway line, with ties to each major country in Europe—to France as well as Belgium in the west, to Yugoslavia as well as Italy in the south, to the Reich itself, as well as to the annexed railway network in Poland. Prior to the spring of 1942 it had been a work camp, but then construction began for a new camp located in a forest of towering birch trees (Birken), which the Germans called Birkenau. Auschwitz-Birkenau, as it then came to be called, would soon provide slave labor for the Nazi war effort spread across eastern Upper Silesia—in synthetic coal factories, rubber factories, military and industrial enterprises, and coal mines.
In June 1942, the Germans put in place their program for the deportation of Jews from western Europe to the camps. That July, the first transports were under way, and Jews from the Polish and German ghettos began arriving at the camps by the trainload. That summer, new gas chambers were built and the system of industrialized mass murder was put into operation. By now, what had once been fitful and episodic, haphazard and frequently improvised, had become methodical and consistent. The Final Solution had commenced with stunning speed.
By the year’s end, the SS was able to report initial successes in the Final Solution. At the close of 1941, only about 500,000 Jews living in the conquered Soviet territories had been executed. But by the end of 1942, some 4 million Jews were dead.
IT WAS LIKE AN earthquake splintering a continent—a turning point after which human history would never be the same. And yet it went largely unrecorded. In the United States, there were factories to gear up and soldiers to train. And the Allied world had focused its attention and its war machine on the Pacific in the east and on North Africa in the west. In North Africa, the British were already squaring off against Rommel.
And waiting for the Americans.
THE LARGER TRUTH WAS that in 1942 the United States had already been at war with Germany for months, but had yet to fire a single shot. That, however, was about to change. While British forces were slugging it out with Rommel in North Africa, beginning in the spring officials both in Washington and in London had spent innumerable sleepless nights debating the logistics of opening up a second front against Hitler. “We’ve got to go to Europe and fight,” Dwight Eisenhower bellowed, “and we’ve got to quit wasting resources all over the world.” Eisenhower, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, and Army Chief of Staff George Marshall were adamant in their belief that only one vast, direct assault would be sufficient to roll up and cripple Nazi forces in Europe. They wanted to spend the next six months building up an assault force in Britain, and then in the spring of 1943 launch a cross-Channel invasion. Their thinking was straightforward: Marshall and Eisenhower dreamed of one decisive battle, a land attack with the largest force they could muster “as soon as possible,” and with America’s greatest tank commanders smashing Germany’s famed panzers on the open ground of northern Europe.
Churchill thought otherwise. He did not feel that the Allies were ready to fight the Wehrmacht in France. Moreover, he remained haunted by the Somme, a ghastly battle of World War I in which the British saw sixty thousand of their finest young men wiped out in a single day. Thus he favored a peripheral attack, perhaps in the Mediterranean, in North Africa, or in southern Italy. It would test the waters and, in his words, it was better “to go round the end rather than through the center.”
Undaunted, Eisenhower and Marshall drew up preliminary plans for the great cross-Channel assault. It had two code names: Operation Bolero for the buildup of Allied forces, and Operation Roundup for the actual invasion of France, scheduled for 1943. With considerable fanfare, it was presented to the president at the close of March 1942. As a fallback should the Soviet army collapse—a fear that plagued Roosevelt—they had also designed a limited emergency operation for later in 1942, intended to divert German resources. Would Roosevelt sign off on these plans? A skeptical Stimson thought not; he was worried that the president lacked “the hardness of heart” to undertake such a large-scale operation at this point. However, Roosevelt surprised them, not only approving the plan but immediately sending George Marshall and his own personal aide Harry Hopkins to London to meet with Churchill and discuss it.
Speaking with the Americans at 10 Downing Street, Churchill and his staff were reluctant. Still, they also knew how important the proposed plan was to the president; actually, Roosevelt had already wired to the prime minister: “What Harry and George Marshall will tell you all about has my heart and mind in it.” To Marshall’s surprise, by the end of the weekend Churchill was unusually cooperative. With a nod, a wink, and a smile, Churchill insisted that he was “open to” the Americans’ alternatives. Moreover, he seemed to have approved Bolero. “All well,” Hopkins cabled to Roosevelt. In truth, the weekend had been a masterly exercise in stage management by a prime minister who had rallied his people on the brink of catastrophe. Now, with the American delegation, he was seeking to buy time.
Jubilant over Churchill’s seeming change of heart, Roosevelt cabled to Joseph Stalin and invited the Soviet foreign minister to Washington to discuss plans for a second front. Vyacheslav Molotov arrived at the White House on the afternoon of May 29. It was a Friday. With two interpreters present, Roosevelt went out of his way to make Molotov happy; he had confessed in a memo to the Joint Chiefs, “At the present time, our principal objective is to help Russia. It must be constantly reiterated that Russian armies are killing more Germans and destroying more Axis material than all the 25 united nations put together.” Roosevelt was charming; Molotov, peering owlishly through his round glasses, was persistent and pugnacious. Roosevelt wanted to make Molotov happy; Molotov wanted to make Stalin happy. In the end, Roosevelt complied. Without stipulating when and where a second front would be opened, he directly told the Soviet foreign minister to inform Stalin that “we expect the formation of a second front this year.”
Machination now followed machination. From London, Churchill, his eyes wide, watched all this with mounting interest—and concern. In truth, he had sensed what was coming and on hearing about the outcome of Roosevelt’s meeting with Molotov, he was aghast. Now he moved quickly. On June 10, Churchill promptly informed Molotov, who was then visiting London, that he opposed a cross-Channel invasion anytime during 1942. The next day, the British cabinet voted to postpone an invasion of Europe until 1943 or later. And Churchill decided to fly to Washington immediately to discuss military strategy with the president himself. The prime minister arrived
in Washington on June 18 and flew to Hyde Park to see the president the next morning. He did not know that Roosevelt was already feeling political pressure, trapped between a desire to satisfy Marshall and Eisenhower and a hope of somehow reassuring his closest ally, Churchill. In a sudden turnabout, the president blurted to Marshall that the time had come to “reopen” the question of invading northwest Africa.
As Roosevelt and Churchill settled down to business at Hyde Park, the prime minister began to pepper the president with questions about the strategy for the proposed invasion. Were there enough craft to transport the men? Where would they land? How many men would be needed? What was the actual plan? Wagging a finger at Roosevelt, his eyes twinkling, Churchill raised question after question. Nor did Roosevelt have the answers. At that point, Churchill began to wonder aloud whether there might be other options for relieving the pressure on the Soviet Union. He mused, “Ought we not to be preparing within the general structure of Bolero some other operation by which we may gain positions of advantage, and also directly and indirectly to take some of the weight off Russia?” It was then that Churchill suggested what was already on Roosevelt’s mind: a military operation in French northwest Africa.
The two men returned to Washington by train on June 20 and met again the following morning in the president’s study. In the middle of the meeting, an aide quietly slipped into the room and slid a piece of paper into the president’s hand. A shaken Roosevelt read the message and silently gave it to the prime minister. Staring at it, Churchill looked careworn. Tobruk, the seemingly impregnable British garrison in Libya, had fallen to General Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Corps. The information was sketchy, and only over the next eighteen hours would the full magnitude of the defeat become clear. For a valiant thirty-three weeks the British at Tobruk had managed to hold off the German siege; now thirty thousand British officers and men were being rounded up as prisoners of war and Rommel was poised to push on to the strategic prize of Egypt. With this victory, Rommel also took possession of vast dumps of ammunition, food, and, most important, gasoline. With Hitler’s blessing, Rommel boasted “I am going to Suez!”
Churchill was despondent. “Defeat is one thing,” he later wrote; “disgrace is another.” In later years he went so far as to acknowledge that the fall of Tobruk was “one of the heaviest blows” he experienced during the war.
The president sensed this. After a long silence, Roosevelt finally said, “What can we do to help?”
Churchill composed himself and said to Roosevelt, “Give us as many Sherman tanks as you can spare, and ship them to the Middle East as quickly as possible.” The president immediately agreed, and within days the United States was shipping three hundred tanks and one hundred self-propelled guns to the British Eighth Army in Alexandria.
The disaster of Tobruk had an immediate effect on Churchill, fixing his opposition to a cross-Channel invasion in 1942. Roosevelt, also stricken by the news, intuitively understood this, and now in earnest turned the discussion to the idea that he had hinted at in previous days to Marshall: a smaller-scale invasion of French North Africa. It would at once, he reasoned, bolster the British in the Middle East and force the Germans to shift troops from the eastern front where they were fighting the Russians.
A jubilant Churchill embraced the idea, booming to the president, “HERE is the true second front in 1942! HERE is the safest and most fruitful stroke that can be delivered!”
All that remained was to inform Marshall and Eisenhower, and begin putting the operation into place. It would be code-named Torch.
THIS WAS CLASSIC ROOSEVELT, making ad hoc decisions based not on extensive studies but on intuition and a gut feeling. His top advisers, who would have to carry the plan out, were vehemently opposed. They could point out, with good reason, that months earlier when Roosevelt had written out a list of alternatives for military action, this plan wasn’t even included. After he learned of the final decision, Eisenhower wrote in his diary that July 28, when the order was signed, would go down as “the blackest day in history.” Secretary of War Stimson was convinced that Torch would be a disaster, another bloody Gallipoli. Marshall concurred. They had other considerations as well. Roosevelt had promised Molotov that the second front would be opened in 1942. But Torch was no second front. Moreover, the invading forces wouldn’t even be fighting Germans. Their enemy would essentially be French colonial troops defending France’s North African empire—troops the Americans were hoping to lure over to the Allied side.
Politically, Torch was problematic. It intensified Stalin’s paranoia regarding his capitalist partners, and his feeling that they were shaky. Militarily, it was every bit as vexing. Eisenhower and Marshall worried about the risks. The target was, as Eisenhower put it, the rim of a continent where “no major military campaign” had been conducted for centuries. It was a forbidding thousand-mile stretch of sand, rock, and mountain that extended from Casablanca on the Atlantic to the narrow spit of land at the Mediterranean pointing toward Sicily and southern Italy, with the Tunisian coast somewhere between. There, the Vichy French ruled like Ottoman sultans in Casablanca, Oran, Algiers, and Tunis. The Italians and Germans ruled like Julius Caesar in Tripoli and Cyrenaica. And Rommel’s armies, at El Alamein, some 160 miles northwest of Cairo, reigned like Roman legions in the provinces.
There was also a question of preparation. Rather than a systematic buildup over many months, “we had only weeks,” Eisenhower complained. For him, this was an uncharacteristic understatement, but time was short. Then there was the question of where to land. For Africa, unlike Europe, they had only meager information about the terrain; in truth, it was riddled with unknowns. And none of the options were very attractive; the beaches of Algeria were protected from the elements but otherwise were a risky landing site: there was a strong possibility that the Nazis would thrust through Spain to cut off the Allied invaders via Spanish Morocco. To land on the ledge of Africa from the Atlantic entailed possibly encountering ferocious weather, particularly the towering eighteen-foot whitecaps that crashed ashore on the beaches of Casablanca. And to land from anywhere in the North Atlantic, hundreds of boats and thousands of troops would have to thread their way through blackened waters infested by predatory U-boats. And however determined the Americans were to create a second front, it would divert U.S. naval power away from the Pacific. To Eisenhower’s way of thinking, striking at the periphery of German power, rather than at its core, would prolong the war—a fatal mistake. Finally, critics of Torch worried once again that a desperate Stalin would make a separate peace with Hitler. This time for good.
Roosevelt was willing to let his generals fret. On August 6, the definite decision had been made, and it included appointing Eisenhower as commander in chief of the Allied expeditionary force. Roosevelt’s “secret baby”—Henry Stimson’s words—would move forward. Whether it prolonged the war or not—most historians think not—and whether it was preferable to a full cross-Channel invasion or not, Torch had the undeniable benefit of finally bringing U.S. ground troops into the fight against the Axis powers in 1942. Churchill and Roosevelt understood this, even if Eisenhower and Marshall did not. Only later did Marshall concede, “We failed to see that the leader of democracy has to keep the people entertained.”
Actually, entertainment was an inelegant euphemism. More accurately, Roosevelt had conceived of the operation as a way of uplifting the American people. Thus, he wrote to Churchill on August 30, “I feel very strongly that the initial attacks must be made by an exclusively American ground force.” Those assaults would be supported by British air and transport units, and there was concern about how the Americans would be distinguished from the British; as Churchill quipped to Roosevelt, “in the night, all cats are gray.” Roosevelt was reassuring. “We’re getting very close together,” he told Churchill. Churchill shot back that if convenient, British troops could “wear your uniform. They will be proud to do so.”
Roosevelt said, “Hurrah!”
Churchi
ll agreed the next day: “OK, full blast.”
When would the attack take place? At the outset, Roosevelt had planned for late October; clasping his hands as if in prayer, he had pleaded with Marshall, “Please make it before Election Day.” But Eisenhower and his colleagues were still working out details to the very end—for weeks, the Americans and the British wrangled over the specifics of the operation—so the assault was postponed until five days after the election: November 8. It was to be Roosevelt’s first major military operation of the war—ordered against the counsel of his military advisers.
For the president, it needed to be a triumph.
9
Giant Cemeteries
HE WAS A MAN who had probably never imagined that anyone’s life might depend on him. He had neither epic ambitions nor epic flaws; indeed, on almost every level he was a puzzle. Proud of his lineage—Eduard Schulte was German through and through—meticulous, iron-willed, driven, and secretive, he was possessed by an inner vision that he dared not share with anyone. He was a titan of industry, but he had a hidden side that would astonish his colleagues and the elegant social set—the men in white tie and tails and the women in furs—with whom he mingled. No doubt he himself was surprised when, in a time of Nazi barbarism, his unlikely hands would potentially come to hold the fate of hundreds of thousands of innocent Jews and the future of the Final Solution.
Physically he was impressive—six feet tall with broad shoulders. His skin was pale; his nose was like a beak; his eyes were dark, sad, and brooding. And he had a confident gait even though he walked with a pronounced limp, the souvenir of an accident that had almost killed him—he had accidentally slipped under a railway car—necessitating the amputation of his left foot, and then eventually of his entire leg.
Little in his background suggested that he would play a central role in the drama of the Final Solution. The Schultes had lived in Germany since the seventeenth century, and his grandparents grew up among the spired churches and lush green parks of Westphalia. Schulte’s own childhood home in Düsseldorf was luxurious and decidedly aristocratic. The family dined out at exclusive clubs and entertained extravagantly. Like others in their social set—their friends were eminent lawyers, bankers, physicians, and artists—they enjoyed the first flush of prewar prosperity. Their surroundings were always stylish and the children, including Eduard, were taught the finest of social graces; later in Eduard’s life, his motto became “Anstand und Würde” (“decency and dignity”). The Schultes’ passion was hunting—they owned a weekend getaway outside the city, and Schulte would eventually buy land for a hunting lodge the size of a small resort. And they collected gold watches.
