The Holocaust

by Martin Gilbert

  In the course of the final solution, the Jews should be brought under appropriate direction in a suitable manner to the East for labour utilization. Separated by sex, the Jews capable of work will be led into these areas in large labour columns to build roads, whereby doubtless a large part will fall away through natural reduction.

  The inevitable final remainder which doubtless constitutes the toughest element will have to be dealt with appropriately, since it represents a natural selection which upon liberation is to be regarded as a germ cell of a new Jewish development.

  Heydrich then explained the European aspect of the plan:

  In the course of the practical implementation of the final solution, Europe will be combed from West to East. If only because of the apartment shortage and other socio-political necessities, the Reich area—including the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia—will have to be placed ahead of the line.

  For the moment, the evacuated Jews will be brought bit by bit to so-called transit ghettos from where they will be transported farther to the east.

  It was intended, according to the statistics presented to the Wannsee Conference, that a total of eleven million European Jews should ‘fall away’, including those in the neutral and unconquered countries. The Conference discussed the various problems involved. ‘In Slovakia and Croatia’, they were told, ‘the situation is no longer all that difficult, since the essential key questions there have already been resolved.’ As for Hungary, ‘it will be necessary before long’, Heydrich told the Conference, ‘to impose upon the Hungarian government an adviser on Jewish questions’. Rumania posed a problem, as ‘even today a Jew in Rumania can buy for cash appropriate documents officially certifying him in a foreign nationality’. Speaking of the occupied and unoccupied zones of France, however, Heydrich commented that there ‘the seizure of the Jews for evacuation should in all probability proceed without major difficulty’.

  The representative of the General Government, Dr Joseph Buhler, stated that his administration ‘would welcome the start of the final solution in its territory, since the transport problem was no overriding factor there and the course of the action would not be hindered by considerations of work utilization’. Buhler added:

  Jews should be removed from the domain of the General Government as fast as possible, because it is precisely here that the Jew constitutes a substantial danger as carrier of epidemics and also because his continued black market activities create constant disorder in the economic structure of the country. Moreover, the majority of the two and a half million Jews involved were not capable of work.

  Buhler had, he said, ‘only one favour to ask’, and that was ‘that the Jewish question in this territory be solved as rapidly as possible’.

  The meeting was drawing to its end. ‘Finally,’ the official notes recorded, ‘there was a discussion of the various types of solution possibilities.’

  What these ‘possibilities’ were, the notes of the Conference do not record.1

  ‘I remember’, Adolf Eichmann later recalled, ‘that at the end of this Wannsee Conference, Heydrich, Muller and myself sat very cosily near the stove and then I saw Heydrich smoke for the first time, and I thought to myself, “Heydrich smoking today”: I’d never seen him do that. “He is drinking brandy”: I hadn’t seen him do that for years.’ After the Conference, Eichmann recalled, ‘we all sat together like comrades. Not to talk shop, but to rest after long hours of effort.’2

  The ‘long hours of effort’ were over. As Heydrich knew, the time was right for the deportation and destruction of millions of people. From many parts of Europe, there was evidence that only one more step had to be taken, and could be taken: the step already tried in the villages around Chelmno: the uprooting of whole communities, and their total disappearance. Few, if any, would care to enquire what had become of them. In hidden camps, a small band of sadists could then destroy them.

  What had hitherto been tentative, fragmentary and spasmodic was to become formal, comprehensive and efficient. The technical services such as the railways, the bureaucracy and the diplomats would work in harmony, towards a single goal. Local populations would be cajoled or coerced into passivity. Some would even cooperate: that had been made clear already. On January 9 the Polish underground in Warsaw had warned the Polish Government in Exile of ‘a blind and cruel anti-Semitism’ among the Polish population, itself the victim of Nazi terror.3

  By the end of January 1942, the Germans needed only to establish the apparatus of total destruction: death camps in remote areas, rolling stock, timetables, confiscation patterns, deportation schedules, and camps; and then to rely upon the tacit, unspoken, unrecorded connivance of thousands of people: administrators and bureaucrats who would do their duty, organize round-ups, supervise detention centres, coordinate schedules, and send local Jews on their way to a distant ‘unknown destination’, to ‘work camps’ in ‘Poland’, to ‘resettlement’ in ‘the East’.

  The officials present at the Wannsee Conference had agreed with Heydrich’s suggestion that the ‘final solution’ should be carried out in coordination with Heydrich’s own ‘department head’, Adolf Eichmann. The result of this decision was that Eichmann’s representatives now travelled to all the friendly European capitals. Although they were attached to the German Embassies, they received their instructions direct from Eichmann’s section in Berlin and reported back to Eichmann, by telegram, as each deportation was planned and carried out.

  In addition to the technical arrangements involving thousands of trains and tens of thousands of miles, a complex system of subterfuge had to be created, whereby the idea of ‘resettlement’ could be made to appear a tolerable one.

  All this was done by Eichmann’s section, whose representatives were soon active in France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Norway, Rumania, Greece, Bulgaria, Hungary and Slovakia. Regular meetings were held in Berlin to coordinate the complex yet essential aspect of the impending deportations: the despatch of full trains and the return of empty trains. In a document dated 13 January 1943, and signed by Dr Jacobi of the General Management, Railway Directorate East, in Berlin, one sees the amount of work, and the number of people, involved in these deportation plans. The document took the form of a ‘telegraphic letter’ addressed to the General Directorate of East Railways in Cracow; the Prague Group of Railways; the General Traffic Directorate, Warsaw; the Traffic Directorate, Minsk; and the Railway Directorates in fourteen cities, including Breslau, Dresden, Königsberg, Linz, Mainz and Vienna. Copies were also sent to the General Management, Directorate South, in Munich, and to the General Management, Directorate West, in Essen: a total distribution of twenty copies. The subject was: ‘Special trains for resettlers’ during the thirty-nine days from 20 January to 28 February 1943.4

  By the time of this railway telegram, sent a year after Wannsee, the transport aspects of the ‘final solution’ were well tested, and well arranged. For anyone whose cooperation was needed, but who might be reluctant to cooperate, the full rigours of Nazi terror were readily available: perfected even at the time of Wannsee by nine years of Nazi rule and practice.

  On January 30, nine years after coming to power in Germany, and only ten days after the Conference on the shore of Wannsee, Hitler spoke at the Sports Palace in Berlin of his confidence in victory. He also spoke of the Jews, telling his listeners, as reported by the Allied monitoring service on the following day: ‘They are our old enemy as it is, they have experienced at our hands an upsetting of their ideas, and they rightfully hate us, just as much as we hate them.’ The Germans, Hitler added, were ‘well aware’ that the war could only end when the Jews had been ‘uprooted from Europe’, or when ‘they disappear’. Hitler then declared, as recorded by the Allied monitoring service:

  …the war will not end as the Jews imagine it will, namely with the uprooting of the Aryans, but the result of this war will be the complete annihilation of the Jews.

  Now for the first time they will not bleed other people to deat
h, but for the first time the old Jewish law of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, will be applied.

  And—world Jewry may as well know this—the further these battles [of the war] spread, the more anti-Semitism will spread. It will find nourishment in every prison camp and in every family when it discovers the ultimate reason for the sacrifices it has to make. And the hour will come when the most evil universal enemy of all time will be finished, at least for a thousand years.

  Such was Hitler’s message, as received in London and Washington: the war would end with ‘the complete annihilation of the Jews’.5

  Even as Hitler spoke, new death camps were being prepared. Three of the sites chosen were remote villages on the former German—Polish border, just to the west of the River Bug. Although remote, each site was on a railway line linking it with hundreds of towns and villages whose Jewish communities were now trapped and starving. The first site, at Belzec, had been a labour camp in 1940: the railway there linked it with the whole of Galicia, from Cracow in the west to Lvov in the east, and beyond; and with the whole of the Lublin district. The second site, at Treblinka, also the site of an existing labour camp, was linked by rail, through both Malkinia junction and Siedlce, with Warsaw and the Warsaw region. The third site, at Sobibor, a woodland halt where Jewish prisoners-of-war had been murdered in 1940, linked by rail to many large Jewish communities, among them Wlodawa and Chelm.

  Although a tiny handful of Jews, like Michael Podklebnik and Yakov Grojanowski, might be chosen in these camps as a small labour force to dispose of the corpses, or to sort out the clothes of the victims, most of the deportees were gassed within hours of their arrival, husbands with their wives, mothers with their children, the old, the sick, the infirm, pregnant women, babies; no exceptions were made and no mercy was shown.

  Later, camps were to be set up at which as many as half of the deportees were ‘selected’ for forced labour, but at Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka no such ‘selections’ were made. In these four camps, between the early months of 1942 and the first months of 1943, many hundreds of Jewish communities were to be wiped out in their entirety: more than fifty communities at Chelmno alone. Yet within a few months Chelmno was to prove the second smallest of the four death camps; a camp at which, nevertheless, at least 360,000 Jews were killed within a year.

  A fifth camp was also set up in the spring of 1942, an extension of an existing camp, Auschwitz. Situated across the railway line from Auschwitz Main Camp, where Polish prisoners suffered cruel torments, the new camp was in a birch wood, known in German as Birkenau.

  At the railway yard near Auschwitz station, a selection was to be made of each incoming train, and as many as half those brought to the camp were to be ‘selected’, not for gassing, but for forced labour. The labour was, first, in the camp itself, and subsequently in the surrounding factories of East Upper Silesia: coal mines, synthetic coal and rubber factories, and other military and industrial enterprises. From each train, however, of a thousand deportees, at least five hundred were to be gassed within a few hours of their arrival: all old people, all those who were sick, all cripples and all small children. The gassings took place, at first, in a gas-chamber in Auschwitz Main Camp, or in a specially constructed gas-chamber in the birch wood.

  Auschwitz was not a remote village in eastern Poland, but a large town at a main railway junction, in a region annexed to the German Reich. The railway was part of a main line, with direct links to every capital of Europe: to the Old Reich, to Holland, France and Belgium, to Italy, and to the Polish railway network.

  Fewer Jews were to be killed at Auschwitz—Birkenau than at the four death camps combined, but far more Jews were to survive Auschwitz—Birkenau, having been ‘selected’ for slave labour, than were to survive the four death camps.6 Indeed, from Belzec there were to be no more than two survivors, from Chelmno only three, from Treblinka less than forty, and from Sobibor a total of sixty-four; while from Auschwitz—Birkenau, several thousand Jews were to survive. But in February 1942 all this was in the future: the special gas-chambers in these camps were still under construction, except at Chelmno, whose gas-vans had been working without interruption since 8 December 1941. By the time of the Wannsee Conference, three special gas-vans were in operation at Chelmno. ‘At the beginning, Jews were brought to Chelmno daily,’ recalled Andrzej Miszczak, a resident of Chelmno village. ‘The gendarmes used to say, “Ein Tag—ein tausend,” “One day—one thousand.”’7

  ***

  In the Eastern Territories, despite the frozen ground, the Einsatzkommando killings continued. On January 9, at Khmelnik in the Ukraine, all the Jews were assembled under the guns, not only of the Einsatzkommando, but also of all the regular German army officers in Khmelnik, of the local volunteer Ukrainian militia, and of volunteers from others towns. ‘On that day,’ the eighteen-year-old Maria Rubinstein recalled, ‘my mother was killed, one of my brothers, and three of my sisters.’8

  In Yugoslavia, in the last week of January, Hungarian soldiers ran amok, killing several thousand Jews and Serbs. On January 23, at Novi Sad, 550 Jews and 292 Serbs were driven on to the ice of the Danube, which was then shelled. The ice broke, and the victims drowned. At Stari Becej, on January 26 and the two following days, a hundred Jews and a hundred Serbs were slaughtered. At Titel, thirty-five of the thirty-six Jews living in the village were killed.9 These killings, seen and publicized, led the Hungarian government to charge the senior Hungarian officer responsible for the murder of six thousand Serbs and four thousand Jews: before he could be brought to trial, however, he fled to Germany.10

  Six weeks after the Wannsee Conference, a second death camp was opened, at Belzec. In those six weeks, in addition to the continuing gassings at Chelmno, tens of thousands of Jews were to die elsewhere: the largest number, 5,123, died of starvation in Warsaw in January.11 Thousands also died in each of the ghettos in the General Government, and, further east, in White Russia, the Ukraine and Volhynia, of starvation, typhus and shooting. On January 24, in the Volhynian town of Luck, the dead from typhus included the distinguished neurosurgeon, Dr Pawel Goldstein, born in Tsarist Poland in 1884, a graduate of Freiburg University, who between the wars had worked in the surgical department of the Jewish hospital in Warsaw. In 1939 Goldstein had been the Chief Surgeon of the Polish army hospital in Chelm.12 In 1940 he had managed to cross the Soviet border and reached the safety of Luck.

  On January 26, in the Volhynian village of Teofipol, three hundred Jews were assembled from the village itself and the neighbouring hamlets, stripped naked, ‘and led down a stretch of three miles in zero weather and then were shot down’: among them eight members of the Spivack family.13

  January 1942 saw the final destruction of the Jewish community of Odessa. Following the mass murder and deportation of the Jews of Odessa in October 1941, the thirty thousand survivors had been driven into an enclosed area in the Slobodka suburb of the city. Because most of the houses in that area had been destroyed during the battle for the city, several thousand of the Jews had to lie in the open, in the rain and snow, and many perished. Some Jews committed suicide rather than go to Slobodka. A few were able to hand over their children to Christian families for conversion and adoption, the conversion ceremonies being performed by Russian Orthodox priests.

  On January 12 the deportations from the Slobodka ‘ghetto’ began. Within six weeks, a total of 19,582 Odessa Jews, the majority women, children and old people, had been taken by rail in sealed cattle trucks to Berezovka, and then on to two concentration camps in the Golta district. If someone died while the trucks were being loaded, the body would be put in the truck ‘just the same’, as Dora Litani, the historian of the fate of Odessa Jewry, has recorded, ‘because the exact number that appeared on the list had to be handed over in Berezovka.’ These bodies and those of persons who died on the way, she added, fifty to sixty in each shipment, were taken off the train and piled up near the Berezovka railway station platform, gasoline was poured on them, and they
were burned before the eyes of their families and all those present. There were instances where those burned included dying persons, who still had breath in their bodies.

  Once the deportees had reached the Golta district, Dora Litani has written, they were sent to two camps, one at Bogdanovka, the other at Domanovka. There they were packed into partly destroyed houses, without doors or windows, and into warehouses, stables and pigpens. ‘Disease cut short the lives of hundreds of people, for they lay without food or medical care.’ Those capable of working were sent to farms in the region, some nearby, others some distance away. ‘They lived like work-animals, but unlike animals they received neither food nor care of any kind.’

  Within a year and a half, almost none of these 19,582 deportees were alive. Most had died of starvation, severe cold, untreated disease, or in repeated mass executions in which several hundreds would be shot at a time.

  In Odessa, many of the apartments in which the Jews had lived before the war were assigned, together with their furniture, to the 7,500 Ethnic Germans living in the city. Even the tombstones in the Jewish cemetery were made use of, being shipped to Rumania and sold to stonemasons. A year later, in Bucharest, 831 cubic metres of marble, all from the Odessa Jewish cemetery, were found in a stone-cutting plant. Among the marble slabs was the gravestone of the poet Simon Frug.14

  ***

  Evidence survives of some non-Jewish attempts to help Jews during these Eastern slaughters. On January 16 the Einsatzkommando unit at Kremenchug reported that they had shot a Red Army officer, Major Senitsa Vershovsky, because he had ‘tried to protect the Jews’.15

  Throughout January the deportations of elderly Jews to Theresienstadt, and of whole communities from the Old Reich to Riga had continued. On January 28 Eichmann personally rejected a request from the Swedish explorer, Sven Hedin, to prevent the deportation of Alfred Phillipson, a Jew living in Bonn. ‘It cannot be agreed that he stays in Bonn until he dies,’ Eichmann noted, ‘because when we deal with a final solution of the Jewish problem, the plan is that Jews above the age of sixty-five will be put in a special Ghetto for the aged.’16 Three days later Eichmann’s office, IV-D-4, sent a note to all its officials in the Reich, urging them to miss no ‘opportunity’ to forward more deportations from the Old Reich. ‘For additional deportations’, the note explained, ‘it is necessary to draw up a list of the Jews still in the Reich….’17