The Holocaust

by Martin Gilbert

  One of those who witnessed the deportations from the Reich was Gertrude Schneider, who was deported on February 6 from Vienna. The transport commander was Alois Brunner, one of whose charges during the long journey was the Viennese financier, Siegmund Bosel. During the second night of the train journey, Brunner chained Bosel, still in his pyjamas, to the floor of the first wagon and berated him for having been a ‘profiteer’. The old man repeatedly asked for mercy; he was very ill, and it was bitterly cold. Finally, Brunner wearied of the game and shot him. Afterwards Brunner walked into the second wagon and asked whether anyone had heard anything. ‘After being assured that no one had,’ Gertrude Schneider later recalled, ‘he seemed satisfied and left.’

  This Viennese transport reached Riga on February 10. It was met at the station by Dr Rudolph Lange, one of the Nazi officials who had been present at the Wannsee Conference. Gertrude Schneider later recalled how Lange told these latest arrivals that those who were ‘unwilling or unable’ to walk the seven kilometres to the ghetto could make the journey on trucks which had been especially reserved for them. ‘In this way,’ he said, ‘those of you who ride can prepare a place for those who walk.’ Gertrude Schneider’s account continued:

  It was an extremely cold day—forty-two degrees below zero, to be exact—and so the majority of the hapless, unsuspecting Jews from Vienna took his advice and lined up to board the trucks. They did not know that those greyish-blue trucks had been manufactured by the Saurer Works in Austria especially for the implementation of the ‘final solution’. These trucks were the famous gas-vans, which were used from time to time despite the fact that the SS did not especially like them because they always had mechanical problems.

  At the time of the arrival of this train on February 10, more than five thousand of the twenty thousand Riga Jews who had come from the Reich had already been murdered. From Jungfernhof continual selections were made for ‘resettlement’. The Jews were told that they were to go as a workforce to the city of Duenamuende where they would be working in fish-canning factories. ‘To the Jews,’ Gertrude Schneider later wrote, ‘the plan sounded credible. The Baltic Sea was rich in fish, and everyone knew that workers were badly needed everywhere.’ To the hungry old people who were ordered to go to Duenamuende, she added, ‘the magic words “fish canneries” implied food as well as a certain security and reprieve from the cold. While most of those selected for this work were elderly or ailing or parents with small children, some of the ghetto functionaries were chosen as well. A number of physicians were also put on the lists, ostensibly to take care of workers who might get sick.’18

  At Auschwitz, a further experiment had been carried out using Cyclon B to murder several hundred Jews who had been brought to the camp from several cities in Upper Silesia. This gassing took place, not in Auschwitz Main Camp, but across the railway line, in a cottage at the village of Birkenau. This cottage had been specially adapted for the purpose. Once more, the experiment was judged a success. The corpses were then buried in a number of mass graves in the adjoining meadow.19

  ***

  On March 6, at a meeting of experts at the Head Office for Reich Security, Adolf Eichmann spoke of the forthcoming deportation of fifty thousand Jews from the Old Reich—Germany, Ostmark—Austria and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. ‘Among others,’ Eichmann explained, ‘we include herewith Prague with twenty thousand; Vienna with eighteen thousand Jews; all these have to be deported.’ A representative from the Reich Security Office in Dusseldorf, Mann, told the meeting: ‘One must never permit Jews to learn about preparations for deportation. Therefore strict secrecy is required.’20

  Strict secrecy was indeed meticulously maintained: bureaucrats in Berlin, and construction experts in the ‘East’, worked under the protection of wartime censorship and silence.

  ***

  Not only in Europe, but also in North Africa, Jews were murdered in remote, unknown camps. One such camp was at Hadjerat M’Guil, in the Sahara desert. There, on January 13, a Jew, Paul Levinstein, was murdered. Ten months earlier, on 22 March 1941, Marshal Petain had signed a law authorizing the construction of a railway across the Sahara. As a result of this law, several forced labour camps had been opened in the Sahara desert.

  Of the fifteen hundred prisoners sent to these camps, two hundred and fifty were Jews. The rest were Spaniards who had been interned in Vichy France at the time of the Franco—German armistice in June 1940, most of them refugees from the Spanish civil war who had fled to France for safety in March 1939, with the defeat of the Republican forces. The Jews were mostly German and Austrian Jews who, like Paul Levinstein, on release from concentration camps in Germany early in 1939, had fled to France, and had then enlisted in the French Foreign Legion. This had enabled them, although not French nationals, to fight alongside French forces in May 1940. First German or Austrian citizens, then prisoners, then refugees, then soldiers, they were prisoners once more, in circumstances of considerable hardship.21

  The camp at Hadjerat M’Guil was opened on 1 November 1941, as a punishment and isolation camp. It contained one hundred and seventy prisoners, nine of whom were tortured and murdered in conditions of the worst brutality. Two of those murdered were Jews.22

  Paul Levinstein, murdered on January 13, was the son of Dr Oswald Levinstein who, with his wife, had found refuge in Britain shortly before the outbreak of war. On learning of their son’s murder, they committed suicide.23

  18

  * * *

  ‘Journey into the unknown’

  Throughout February 1942 the deportations to the death camp at Chelmno continued, systematically destroying the Jewish communities of western Poland. Also throughout February, gas-chambers were under construction at Belzec and Sobibor. But even as these preparations were being made, the Jews of German-occupied Poland and western Russia continued to suffer from the earlier German policies of spasmodic massacre and deliberate starvation. In the Warsaw ghetto, deaths from starvation in 1941 had approached the horrific total of fifty thousand.1 As that figure was reached, during February 1942, thirty-three Jewish doctors living in the ghetto decided that, as they could not alleviate the hunger, they should at least study it scientifically, for whatever benefits could be accrued for post-war medicine.

  To coordinate their researches, these thirty-three doctors met once a month, knowing that their work was likely to come to an abrupt end, for they were starving as were their patients. They decided to focus on two age groups, children between the ages of six and twelve, and adults between twenty and forty, hoping by this means to exclude from their investigations the chemical and biological imbalances created in the normal course of infancy, puberty and old age. During more than a year of research, the doctors carried out tens of thousands of examinations, and 3,658 autopsies.

  Only eight of the thirty-three doctors were to survive the war, but their work, which did survive, was to serve as a basis for a fuller understanding of the process of starvation. In their book, which was published in Warsaw in 1946, the doctors made no mention either of Hitler’s name or of the word ‘Nazi’. Hugo Gryn, himself a survivor of the Holocaust, has written of how, through this book, the spirit of the doctors emerged ‘not so much triumphant, but civilized and with human dignity intact’.2

  As the doctors worked on their study of starvation, the Warsaw ghetto’s torment continued. ‘The Germans impose the death penalty on people who leave the ghetto,’ Mary Berg noted in her diary at the end of February, ‘and several people have recently been shot for this crime. But’, she added, ‘no one cares. It is better to die of a bullet than of hunger.’3

  In the Minsk ghetto, on February 13, the Germans shot the leaders of those Jews deported from Hamburg the previous November.4 That same month, somewhere behind the lines on the Russian front, a German soldier, Private Christian, noted in his diary: ‘Since we have been in this town we have already shot more than thirteen thousand Jews. We are south of Kiev.’5

  As the killing continued, th
ere were disagreements among the German authorities. On February 10 the Commissar in Baranowicze, Gentz, protested in writing to his superior in Minsk, Wilhelm Kube, that the German army authorities in Baranowicze wanted Jews to be spared as ‘skilled workers’. But these Jews, Gentz insisted, were in fact ‘no more than office cleaners, housekeepers etc.’. It was not merely a question of ‘categories’, for, as Gentz told Kube, ‘even officers in responsible positions lack the instinct for the Jewish problem’.6

  The Jewish Councils continued to face the dilemma of compliance or opposition. On February 12, when three thousand Jews were rounded up in the Ukrainian town of Brailov, to be marched away for execution, the Council Elder there, Josef Kulok, refused an offer to join the skilled workers who were to be spared, and chose to die with the community.7

  In the ghetto at Dvinsk, now formally designated a concentration camp, a forty-eight-year-old Jewess, Chaya Mayerova, was arrested and shot on February 19 for giving a non-Jewish worker in the camp a piece of cloth in return for a two-kilogramme bag of flour. The Jews of Dvinsk were assembled in order to witness the execution. In reporting the episode to his superiors, the German commander of the concentration camp enclosed the bag of flour.8

  Beyond the area of Nazi control, the precarious fate of those who had succeeded in escaping was cruelly demonstrated when a small cattle boat, the Struma, was torpedoed in the Black Sea. On board were 769 Jewish refugees, among them 70 children and 260 women. They had been on their way from the Rumanian port of Constanta to Palestine. But on reaching Istanbul their boat was halted for two months, while the British government tried to persuade the Turkish government not to let it proceed. Only a single person, Medea Salamovitz, who was in the last stages of pregnancy, was allowed to leave the ship. As the negotiations continued, the British prepared to allow the children to proceed to Palestine, but the Turks, impatient at the dragging on of the discussions, ordered the ship to turn back into the Black Sea. On the night of February 24 it was sunk.

  All but a single refugee were drowned.9 Thirty-six years later, a Soviet naval history disclosed that the ‘unguarded’ Struma had been sunk by a Soviet submarine. The history added: ‘Sergeant Major V. D. Chernov, Unit Commander Sergeant G. G. Nosov, and the Torpedo Operator Red Navy man I. M. Filatov, demonstrated exemplary courage in the action.’10

  ***

  There had been no halt during February to the deportations to Chelmno. As the deportations continued, so too did the deception. In a second deportation of ten thousand Jews from the Lodz ghetto between February 22 and February 28, all of whom were sent to Chelmno and gassed, it was rumoured in the ghetto ‘that the deportees were set free in Koluszki’—a railway junction less than twenty miles from Lodz, on the main Warsaw-Cracow line, and in the opposite direction to Chelmno. Another rumour ‘had it that the deportees were in Kolo county and also in the vicinity of Brzesc Kujawski’: Chelmno was indeed in Kolo county, although it was situated twenty-five miles from Brzesc Kujawski, again in the opposite direction. ‘We mention these stories’, the Ghetto Chronicle recorded at the end of February, ‘only for the sake of accuracy in chronicling events, for in reality the ghetto has not received any precise information on which to base an idea as to the fate or even the whereabouts of the deportees.’

  The Chronicle added that the ‘mystery’ of the destination of the deportees was depriving all the ghetto dwellers of sleep. One thing was certain: the ‘resettlement’ in February had been ‘significantly more severe’ than the one in January. Most of the German guards, the Chronicle recorded, had ordered the deportees ‘to throw away their knapsacks and often even the bundles they were carrying by hand, including the food supplies they had taken with them for their journey into the unknown’.11

  The first week of March 1942 saw the Jewish festival of Purim, a time of rejoicing at the defeat of Haman the Amalekite. It was Haman who had tried, in ancient days, to destroy all the Jews of the Persian Empire, intending not to leave ‘the least remains of them, nor preserve any of them, either for slaves or for captives’. Since the first days of the invasion of Poland in September 1939, the Germans had used the Jewish festivals for particular savagery: these days had become known to the Jews as the ‘Goebbels calendar’.

  In Minsk, on the eve of Purim, the Germans ordered the Jewish Council to hand over five thousand Jews for deportation ‘to the west’. The Council did not know what to do. Some members suggested that small children, and the elderly, might be sent away. But those Jews who wanted no collaboration whatsoever with the Germans in these demands insisted on ‘no trading in Jewish souls’. Hiding places had already been prepared in cellars and ruined buildings. Those who felt they were endangered hid.

  On the morning of March 2 the Jewish labour battalions were sent out of the ghetto as usual. Then the Gestapo approached the Jewish Council for the five thousand, urging haste, ‘because the trains were ready and waiting’. The Jewish Council refused. In fury, the Gestapo sent German and White Russian policemen to search the ghetto. Reaching a children’s nursery, they ordered the woman in charge, Dr Chernis, and the supervisor, Fleysher, to take their children to the Jewish Council building.

  The order was a trap. On reaching a specially dug pit on Ratomskaya Street, the children were seized by Germans and Ukrainians, and thrown alive into the deep sand. At that moment, several SS officers, among them Wilhelm Kube, arrived, whereupon Kube, immaculate in his uniform, threw handfuls of sweets to the shrieking children. All the children perished in the sand.12

  That night, when the Jewish forced labourers returned to Minsk from their tasks outside the ghetto, they were ordered to lie down in the snow outside the ghetto gates. Any who tried to get up and run into the ghetto were shot. Others were taken to the pit in Ratomskaya Street and killed. Some were marched away from the city, to the Koidanovo forest, and murdered there. At least five thousand Jews were killed in Minsk during that Purim day.13

  The Purim destructions were widespread; on March 1 the Jews of Krosniewice, in western Poland, after having been ordered to assemble, were told by the German mayor that, on the following day, they were to be resettled in the south, in distant Bessarabia. They should go home, he said, and have a good night’s sleep in preparation for such a long journey. On the next morning they were all deported thirty miles westward, to Chelmno, and gassed.14

  In the Baranowicze ghetto, in White Russia, the Chairman of the Jewish Council, Joshua Izykson, and his secretary, Mrs Genia Men, were ordered, that same Purim, to draw up a list of all old and sick Jews, and to deliver these Jews to the Gestapo. They refused to do so. Both were shot.15 But first, they had been forced to watch the torture and execution of some of the three thousand Jews rounded up that day.

  The system chosen by the Gestapo to ‘select’ Jews of Baranowicze for destruction was one which they were to repeat in different cities at different times. Cards were issued, in this instance marked with the letter ‘O’, as alleged evidence that the holder was employed by the German authorities as a labourer. But the holders of the cards feared a trap, and hid. Even while the cards were being distributed in the ghetto square, White Russian police, known as ‘Ravens’, would strike at random with their rifle butts at the stomachs of those being given their cards.

  On the following day, March 5, the holders of the cards were ordered to assemble. German, Lithuanian and Ukrainian police, brought specially to Baranowicze, dragged hundreds from their homes and hiding places. The local ‘Ravens’ were equally active. Then, as an eye-witness later recalled, ‘SS men made their selection, sending some people to the left and some to the right. Those on the left were beaten cruelly, while those on the right were compelled to look on at the spectacle. Those sentenced to death were carried away from the ghetto in lorries. Later it became known that these had been taken away to a grave near the railway line, some three kilometres from the town.’

  Pits had been dug at this site by Russian prisoners-of-war. Ten Jewish policemen, led by their commander, Weltman, w
ere then ordered to dig a further pit, for the Russians. Jews and Russians were then murdered. As for the Jewish policemen, ‘not one of them returned’. In all, 3,300 Jews were murdered that Purim in Baranowicze.16

  Also during the Purim festival, at Zdunska Wola, thirty miles west of Lodz, the Gestapo asked the Jewish Council for ten young, healthy Jews, ‘for work’. Dora Rosenboim, an eye-witness of what followed, later recalled:

  The Gestapo ordered the Jewish police to bring the ten Jews to a place where a gallows had already been prepared and the Jewish police had to hang the ten Jews with their own hands. To add to this horrible, unheard-of crime, the Gestapo drove all the Jews out of the houses to the hanging-place, so that all the Jews should witness the great catastrophe. Many women fainted seeing the terrible and horrible sight, how ten of our brothers were writhing on the gallows. Our faces were ashamed and our hearts ached, but we could not help ourselves.17

  According to another account, the Chairman of the Jewish Council at Zdunska Wola, Dr Jakub Lemberg, had been ordered by the Germans to deliver ten Jews to the Gestapo, as ‘substitutes’ for the ten hanged sons of Haman, the Jew-hater, in the biblical narrative. But Dr Lemberg replied that he would only deliver four Jews, himself, his wife and their two children. In revenge for this defiance, Dr Lemberg was taken out and shot by orders of Hans Biebow, the chief of the German Ghetto Administration in Lodz.18