by Jay Winik
Two dead bodies, side-by-side.
In the new camps, death stalked thousands more. In March 1945 alone, eighteen thousand perished from hunger, disease, and unspeakable filth.
And at Auschwitz, even with only the weakest left behind, the SS was taking no chances. Between January 20 and 23, the SS men shot hundreds in the sick bays. They set fire to the storage complex, “Canada”; the fire smoldered for six days. Only six of the thirty camp barracks were left standing. And then they completed the mission of blowing up the crematoriums and gas chambers, reducing their vaunted killing machines to rubble. They left Crematorium V standing long enough to burn the last corpses (of prisoners shot in the back of the neck), and then blew it up too. In the meantime, the Soviets were racing westward.
One and a half days later, at precisely 3 p.m. on a cloudy January 27, Soviet troops discovered Auschwitz.
THE WORLD HAD NEVER seen anything like it. There were just 7,000 survivors. Other numbers were far greater: 370,000 men’s suits; 837,000 women’s coats and dresses; 44,000 pairs of shoes; 14,000 carpets; and 7.7 tons of human hair, packed in neatly tied sacks and bundles, labeled, and ready for transport. And there were the uncounted suitcases that survived the destruction of “Canada”—piles of them, from all those who had arrived in transport after transport. In two and a half years, the Auschwitz system had killed nearly 1 million Jews from nearly every country in Europe that was occupied by the Germans or was Germany’s ally. In addition, some 200,000 Soviet prisoners of war, Polish political prisoners, Gypsies, and other non-Jews from across Europe were deported to Auschwitz, and some 125,000 also died in the gas chambers and the camp. But whereas the Soviets had opened Majdanek for inspection and scrutiny. Auschwitz largely remained closed. There were reports from such outlets as the BBC, as well as rumors, but they were mostly fragmentary. The Soviet press itself said little. Not until April 27, after prodding by the British, did the Soviets respond with a perfunctory telegram: “It has been found from investigations from the Oswiecim group of concentration camps that more than 4,000,000 citizens of various European countries were destroyed by the Germans,” adding, “No British were found among the survivors.” The British considered the telegram “odd,” and concluded, “The figure is certainly much exaggerated.” It ultimately was too high—Rudolph Hoess himself later gave the figure of 3 million—but the actual figures were bad enough: 1.3 million deported and 1.1 million murdered, with the overwhelming number dying in just one year: 1944.
The year the Allies knew, beyond any doubt, that their war would be won.
ON SATURDAY, JANUARY 20, 1945, one week before the Soviets reached Auschwitz, Franklin Roosevelt was again sworn in as president of the United States. There was now yet another race, between his frail body and the Allied forces still pushing east.
Inmates wave a homemade flag when the U.S. Seventh Army liberates Allach concentration camp.
Part Four
1945
15
Reckoning
“THIS NEW YEAR OF 1945 can be the greatest year of achievement in human history,” Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed to the American people in a January fireside chat. He held out the likelihood of the imminent fall of the Nazi “reign of terror” and the end of the “malignant power” of imperial Japan. But his fervent desire for 1945 was to see “the substantial beginnings of the organizations of world peace.” With single-minded purpose, Roosevelt fixed his eyes on that goal. It had been his dream since early in the war, indeed since his first government service in the days of Woodrow Wilson. Now, the reality might at last be within his grasp.
But his grasp was an increasingly feeble one.
The day before his inauguration, Roosevelt gathered his cabinet. A shocked Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, who had been with Roosevelt since the beginning of his administration, later noted not the discussion but the president leading it. While he could still muster ebullient cheer, his skin had turned unspeakably gray, his once lively eyes were dull, and his clothes hung upon him. By the meeting’s end, he was supporting his head with his hand, as if its weight were too much for his neck and spine to bear. His lips had turned blue and there were tremors in his hands. He was even forgoing the ceremonial trip to the Capitol for the inauguration, husbanding every last ounce of strength.
Although his inaugural committee had pledged $25,000 for the celebration, Roosevelt countered that he thought he could do it for less than $2,000, without a parade and with a simple outdoor ceremony on the White House’s South Portico. Thus, fewer than five thousand people—eight thousand had been invited—came to watch in the cold on a layer of dense, iced-over snow covering the South Lawn as a Marine band outfitted in gleaming red played. Roosevelt’s son James and a Secret Service man offered him a cape—the bareheaded president turned it down—then hoisted him up from his seat so that he could reach the lectern. There, despite being “thoroughly chilled,” and after having had “a stabbing pain” in his chest that morning, he took the oath of office and gave his speech.
“The great fact to remember,” he said, “is that the trend of civilization itself is forever upward.” As Roosevelt spoke, Japanese Americans were being released from internment camps across the west. Many were starting over with nothing; many would return home to find that strangers had moved into their homes or vanished with their property.
Balanced on his braces, gazing out from the South Portico, Roosevelt added, his voice quiet, “We have learned that we cannot live alone, at peace; that our own well-being is dependent on the well-being of other Nations, far away.”
As Roosevelt spoke, the Nazis were preparing for the final evacuation from Auschwitz, marching prisoners west for travel in unheated trains and open trucks, without blankets, with nothing for warmth but the feeble parade of emaciated bodies next to them. The last SS men were still shooting the sickest prisoners who had been left behind.
Roosevelt continued, “We have learned that we must live as men and not as ostriches, nor as dogs in the manger.”
Along the western front at the Bulge, the Allied forces staging a pincer movement had linked up four days earlier. But the Allied troops were still finding pockets of tenacious Germans, and the shooting and dying continued in the frigid cold. And as Roosevelt spoke, Hitler was frantically ordering his panzers out of the Ardennes forest.
Meanwhile, at Los Alamos, New Mexico, scientists were working feverishly to deliver by August 1, an atomic bomb with a force equivalent to ten thousand tons of TNT or, as one scientist put it, “brighter than a thousand suns”—one of Roosevelt’s most momentous decisions. And nightly, the skies over Tokyo lit up with the blaze of American firebombs.
“We have learned,” the president said to the crowd, “to be citizens of the world, members of the human community.
“We have learned the simple truth, as Emerson said”—and here Roosevelt, in his own paraphrase of Lincoln’s second inaugural, slowed his words to add emphasis—“ ‘The only way to have a friend is to be one.’ ”
Two weeks later, Roosevelt would test the limits of his own wartime friendships at Yalta, when he met with Churchill and Stalin for what would prove to be the last time.
IT WAS WINSTON CHURCHILL’S opinion that if the Allies had spent ten years on research, they could not have picked a worse place to meet than Yalta. In truth, Yalta itself was a casualty of war. Between the rugged mountains and the Black Sea, it was warmer than most of the surrounding region and had once been deliberately maintained as an unspoiled wilderness. There, Russian czars and the Russian gentry had come to relax, to enjoy its bright sun and warm sea breezes; its aura of health along the coastal waters and its emerald waters in the little harbor of the imperial estate; its groves of cypresses, orchards, and vineyards; and its flowering fruit trees, lilacs, and wisteria. There, Nicholas II had constructed an elaborate palace, Livadia, a gorgeous white limestone structure perched on the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea, with magnificent rose gardens in the front and views of sn
owcapped mountains in the back. But then came the Soviets, who converted the imperial estate into a tuberculosis sanatorium. When the vengeful Germans overran the Ukraine, they made a particular point of devastating Yalta and its environs. They had looted the palace, being as thorough there as at the death camps when they took the belongings of their victims. At Livadia, they meticulously removed not just furniture and art, but plumbing fixtures, doorknobs, and locks. It was surprising that they did not tear up the floorboards as well. In the large city of Sebastopol, nearby, the destruction was even more complete; every building appeared to have been shattered. The city’s sports club was nothing more than a square of broken trees and old shell holes; a church was nothing more than a scarred shell.
Once the Germans retreated, rats and other local animals had free rein in the palaces and dachas of Yalta itself, infesting them with fleas and lice. It was hardly the most promising site for the Allied summit. So Soviet work crews had tenaciously scooped up the rubble and commandeered furnishings and decorations from dachas around Moscow to replace what the Germans had taken or destroyed. Staff had been brought in by train from three Moscow hotels. So appalling were the conditions that Stalin took the unusual step of letting U.S. Navy medical crews come in advance of the presidential party in order to clean the palace.
Churchill, who was just getting over a fever of 102 degrees, met briefly with Roosevelt in Malta before taking off by air for the Crimea. Churchill’s daughter recalled having to hide her shock at the “terrible change” in the president since their last meeting in Tehran, only fourteen months before. Despite the president’s charm and spirit, “It was quite obvious that he was a very sick man.” Lord Moran, Churchill’s physician, thought the president was suffering from advanced arterial sclerosis and gave him only six months to live. There was also a feeling that at this meeting, unlike previous gatherings, Roosevelt was very much cut off, increasingly surrounded and shielded by State Department aides. But that may have been due as much to Roosevelt’s maneuverings with Stalin as to any additional protectiveness about the president’s fragile health. As with the previous meeting of the Big Three, Stalin had dictated the location; and this time, with his armies quickly pushing westward, he held even more sway.
Once again, much like he had done on the final day at Tehran, Roosevelt mischievously sought to reach out to Stalin by excluding Churchill. Before the sessions got under way, Roosevelt met privately with Stalin and Molotov. The president expressed his utter horror at the devastation in the Crimea, adding that he felt even more cutthroat toward the Germans than he had earlier and that he hoped Stalin would repeat the toast to the “execution of fifty thousand German army officers”—the toast that had drawn such an indignant reaction from Churchill in Tehran. Stalin responded noncommitally that everyone was more bloodthirsty now than a year ago.
FDR then maneuvered the conversation toward France, and tantalizingly announced that he would tell Stalin something “indiscreet,” because he would not wish to say it in front of Churchill. His tidbit was that for two years the British had artificially tried to build up France into a strong power, something anathema to the Russians who saw the French as collaborationists. The British, Roosevelt added insincerely, were a peculiar people, who wished to eat their cake and have it too. Stalin himself was happy to disparage the British as well, and Roosevelt left their little meeting believing that the old camaraderie of Tehran had been restored.
The Yalta conference ranged over eight days, and it was a sprawling affair. Ministers and military chiefs met in the morning, and the Big Three met at 4 p.m., but there were also discussions during lunch and dinner and private meetings between just two leaders. The Big Three would raise many issues, but rarely were any of them formally resolved. Instead, after some discussion, a question would be delegated to the participating foreign ministers or military chiefs or quietly dropped while another issue was taken up.
Roosevelt continued to believe in improvising solutions, but there were far more staff members at Yalta than had been present at Tehran, so there were fewer opportunities for freewheeling decision making. “As the conference progressed, it became obvious that Roosevelt had not studied [his briefing books] as much as he should have,” noted the State Department adviser and Charles Bohlen, who was the president’s interpreter.
Two items were not on the official agenda at Yalta. The first, understandably, was Roosevelt’s health. Aside from a final evening toast by Stalin to the president’s well-being, in which he saluted Roosevelt for Lend-Lease and the mobilization of the world against Hitler, that topic was out of bounds. In any case, Stalin could no doubt see that Roosevelt was clearly not well. Moreover, the Soviets’ concealed recording devices, which included directional microphones that could capture a conversation two hundred yards away, probably picked up Dr. Bruenn’s repeated blood pressure readings and electrocardiogram, and possibly detected that after the topic of postwar Poland was broached, the president’s heartbeat was erratic. He recovered, but there were other worrying moments, including a rambling, less than coherent speech that Roosevelt delivered at the start of the second meeting: he went on about the Germany he had known as a boy in 1886, a Germany of thriving semiautonomous states that bore no resemblance to Hitler’s creation. Centralization in Berlin was the cause of the world’s current ills, the president concluded. The Soviets and the British did not respond. And, perhaps most tellingly, when Roosevelt hosted Stalin and Churchill for dinner, the president, for the first time, did not mix the cocktails.
The second item that did not come up for serious discussion in any of the official sessions was the fate of Europe’s remaining Jews. True, Soviet troops had liberated Auschwitz a week before the start of the conference, yet there is no record that Stalin recounted, at any point, the horrors they had found. The only reference—a passing one—came at the final dinner meeting, when Stalin and Churchill began discussing the British parliamentary elections and an uneasy Stalin changed the subject by saying that the Jewish problem was complicated. The Russian leader noted that he had attempted to create a permanent home for the Jews within Birobidzhan, an agricultural zone in Russia, but after several years, the Jews had wandered away, scattering to the cities. “Only some small groups had been successful at farming,” he added. At this point, Roosevelt joined the conversation, stating that he was a Zionist (indeed, both the Democratic and the Republican party platforms had a pro-Zionist plank), to which Stalin replied that he was one in theory, but there were considerable challenges. Roosevelt pushed slightly further, revealing that he would be meeting with the Saudi king to discuss the admission of Jews to Palestine. Stalin wondered if Roosevelt would be offering King Ibn Saud anything. The president retorted facetiously, “The six million Jews in the United States,” using a number that in retrospect would turn out to be particularly ill-chosen. But Stalin in any case missed the awkward joke, instead pondering the literal implications of resettling American Jews, as he had tried to resettle Soviet Jews, and noting that Jews were “middlemen, profiteers, and parasites.” Then in a moment of levity, Stalin quipped, “No Jew could live in Yaroslav”—a city that Bohlen, the interpreter, would explain was known for the shrewdness of its peddlers. Roosevelt offered no rejoinder—instead he simply smiled—and Stalin ultimately offered no objections to sending Jews to Palestine.
But otherwise, aside from a statement that all displaced civilians would be returned to their country of origin, the fate of Europe’s Jews, both those who had been killed and those who clung to survival, was seemingly not a topic meriting consideration by the Big Three as they concluded their summit at Yalta.
Roosevelt was, despite his physical frailty, a towering figure still in command. He presided over each plenary session and made sure that the major topics were addressed. Now that the war against Hitler was all but won, a singular achievement in history, his primary concern was guaranteeing the entry of the Soviets into the Pacific war against the Japanese. He wanted to pocket that commitment and
he did so, in a secret codicil to the official communiqué. Anticipating an extended fight to capture Tokyo, Roosevelt obtained Stalin’s promise to enter the Pacific war no later than ninety days after the surrender of Germany, in exchange for control of parts of Manchuria after Japan surrendered. Second among the president’s principal goals was securing an agreement for the establishment of the United Nations, which would be an international framework for peace. And there were the nagging post-war questions: What was to be done with Germany? Would the French have an occupation zone there? How would war reparations work? Would Germany be dismembered? And what was to become of Poland, home of Auschwitz, home of the Warsaw ghetto, home of the Warsaw revolt, and a symbol of the war? Would it be free and democratic? Or would it become a satellite of the Soviet Union? This was an issue that would dog Roosevelt’s legacy for years to come.
The results were decidedly mixed, although most issues were seemingly resolved: the French would be included in the occupation of Germany, overseeing territory in the British and American zones, while Germany would pay reparations, with half the amount going to compensate the Soviet Union; and future governments of the buffer nations along the Soviet border would be “friendly” to Moscow. To the chagrin of many observers, the president gave too much on Poland. Poland’s postwar government would include members of the Communist Party, which all but guaranteed that the Poles would be switched from one master, the Germans, to another, the Soviets. But in Roosevelt’s defense, this was a fate virtually sealed by the axiom of geography, since Russian troops were already on the ground across Poland. Still, as a token, the official communiqué at least promised “free and unfettered elections,” with universal suffrage and a secret ballot. And there was an agreement on the American plan for the United Nations Security Council: it would have five permanent members, and each would have a veto over any decisions the Council made. Other decisions on the UN were to be made later, at an inaugural meeting in San Francisco set for the end of April. Churchill had arguably lost the most; he had wanted a clearly democratic path for the countries in eastern Europe, which would not happen. But to some degree, Stalin had also compromised on the question of admitting France to the control commission in Germany. And Roosevelt clearly capitulated regarding Poland.
