Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (26 page)

The battle for Kaluga was part of the astonishing counterattack of the Red Army. In early December 1941, Soviet soldiers turned the tide at Moscow. Operation Typhoon had failed. On December 7, a German general, Hellmuth Stieff, wrote to his wife that he and his men were “fighting here for our own naked lives, daily and hourly, against an enemy who in all respects is far superior.”

That very day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into the war. The global strategic catastrophe allowed Hitler to slip from one conception of his war to another. His very errors allowed him to radicalize his rhetoric. His misunderstanding of Poland had brought him a war with Britain. His underestimation of the Soviet Union meant that Germany now had to fight the British, the Soviets, and the Americans—all at once. Yet following the logic of his worldview, he could claim that the “common front” of capitalism and communism against Germany was the work of the Jews. A victory in the USSR might have allowed their deportation. A stalemate in the East and a long global conflict required something else. “The world war is here,” said Hitler on December 12, 1941, recalling his “prophecy” of January 1939. “The annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence.”

In the occupied zones of the Soviet Union in the preceding six months, Germans had learned how this might be achieved: by mass shooting. By the time Hitler promised to annihilate the Jews in December 1941, a million Jews in the occupied Soviet Union had already been murdered. Even so, Governor-General Hans Frank had no idea how the Polish Jews packed into the ghettos of his General Government could be eliminated. After listening to Hitler in Berlin in December 1941, he returned to Cracow and spoke to his subordinates. “Gentlemen,” he began, “I must ask you to rid yourselves of all feeling of pity. We must annihilate the Jews wherever it is possible, in order to maintain the structure of the Reich.” He had understood what Hitler could not say: that the struggle was now defensive. The killing of the Jews was to substitute for a normal acknowledgment of defeat.

The lessons of the USSR could not be applied in Poland, at least not in the General Government and the lands annexed to the Reich, where Germany had been exercising power since 1939. Germany had invaded Poland more than two years earlier without beginning a Final Solution.
Einsatzgruppen
had ravaged western and central Poland in 1939, but mostly in the hunt for educated Poles. There had been no promises of political liberation then, only the project of destroying the Polish state forever. No Poles had been used as political collaborators: not because none had offered (a few had), but because Berlin had no use for them. Though the Polish police had been preserved, no thought was given to arming enough Poles to carry out a Final Solution by shooting. Polish Jews had been placed in ghettos in 1940 and 1941, not to kill them but to prepare for some deportation. To be sure, tens of thousands of Jews had died of disease or malnutrition in the ghettos. Still, two million Jews were still alive in the western and central lands of Poland taken by Germany in 1939. How would these people be killed?

On January 30, 1942, Hitler spoke at the
Berliner Sportpalast
before masses of Germans. He recalled again, now publicly, his “prophecy” of January 30, 1939, issued right after his foreign minister had returned with the news that Poland would not join Germany in the war against the Soviet Union. He now misdated his “prophecy” to September 1, 1939, the date of the German invasion of Poland. Hitler had seen back then, it would seem, the logic of his own actions. If he won his war, he could defeat the Jews. And if he lost his war, he could characterize it as a planetary conflict and also defeat the Jews. In January 1942, he told Germans that Jews were to be held responsible for a world war. His “prophecy” would be fulfilled.

That same month, Hitler asked rhetorically why he should regard Jews any differently than he regarded Soviet prisoners of war. The comparison was a telling one. As of that point, the Germans had starved more non-Jewish Soviet citizens than they had shot Jews. That fall and winter something like two million Soviet citizens would die in the starvation camps, and another half a million in besieged Leningrad. Now this trend would reverse, and indeed some of the Soviet survivors of the starvation camps would be used to kill Jews. The threat of death by starvation turned the prisoner-of-war camps into factories of collaborators. About a million young men of the Soviet armed forces—Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and others raised in communism and in anti-racism, most of them men of peasant or working-class origin aged between twenty and thirty—were chosen for new duties, directed against their homeland or against the Jews. Rather than killing the Slavs and then deporting the Jews, which had been the general idea, the Germans were finding ever new ways to exploit the Slavs against the Jews. They adapted the traditional African method of colonialism, exploiting a despised group against a still more despised one; they would even call these new collaborators
Askaren
. The
Askaren
had been local soldiers in German East Africa, first deployed in the 1888–1889 Abushiri rebellion, who had fought loyally in Africa under German command during the First World War. German East Africa was the only colony that had been defended until the end of the First World War, and so the legend of the
Askaren
was that of fidelity in a doomed but righteous struggle.

No one had to say that the war as originally conceived had been lost. No one had to explain that colonization of a particular territory inhabited by subhumans, as the Nazis saw matters, was yielding pride of place to the liberation of the planet from the domination of nonhuman Jews. When in October 1941 Himmler spoke with one of his enterprising lieutenants, Odilo Globocnik, the SS and Police Leader for the Lublin district of the General Government, there would have been no need for such explicit talk. The Lublin district lay at the eastern edge of the General Government, on what had been the border with Soviet Ukraine until June 1941; and it had been Globocnik’s job in the six months after the invasion to prepare for the eastern empire. His Lublin district, thick with prisons and camps, perhaps the ghastliest part of the General Government, was originally meant as a kind of testing ground for the
Lebensraum
to the east. As the Soviets held the line and Hitler’s priorities shifted, Himmler and Globocnik found the way to realize their
Führer
’s desires by murdering the Jews of Poland.

In the occupied Soviet Union in the second half of 1941, Globocnik’s SS colleagues, men such as Stahlecker and Jeckeln, had improvised techniques of mass killing from the chaos created by the first weeks of a war of elimination against a state defined as Jewish. In the Lublin District of the General Government in late 1941 and early 1942, Globocnik was starting from very different initial conditions. Globocnik’s innovation was to assemble the political fragments left by German policies of state destruction over the previous several years. From the east, he took the starved and demoralized Soviet prisoners of war. There are no known cases of anyone refusing to leave the starvation camps when offered a chance to do so, nor are any likely to be found. Trained at a camp known as Trawniki, Soviet citizens released from the starvation facilities (among them Belarusians, Chuvash, Estonians, Komi, Latvians, Lithuanians, Romanians, Russians, Tatars, Ukrainians, and at least one half Jew) would help build and guard the death factories at Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. Later they would be deployed to empty some of the larger ghettos, such as Warsaw. From the realities of occupied Poland, Globocnik would exploit the ghettos, their Jewish councils, the Jewish police, and Jewish and Polish informers.

From the west, from Germany itself, Globocnik would borrow the technique of mass murder through carbon monoxide. In Germany and in the annexed territories of Poland, German doctors had murdered with canisters of carbon monoxide; in occupied Soviet Belarus and Soviet Ukraine exhaust was pumped from vans into their own holds. Christian Wirth of Hitler’s personal chancery, the man who had run the “euthanasia” program in Germany, found the technical solution that would be applied in these new facilities. He brought five young colleagues from the “euthanasia” program, most of them specialists in burning corpses, to Bełżec, where they experimented with methods of generating carbon monoxide in a closed space. They finally settled on a variation of the eastern technique: exhaust from internal combustion engines, pumped into sealed chambers. Some hundred more participants of the gassing program in Germany arrived in Globocnik’s Lublin District in late 1941.

The program of mass killing developed by Himmler, Globocnik, and Wirth involved bringing these fragments together into a new whole, and that whole into murderous motion. Beginning in early 1942 in the Lublin District of the General Government, Globocnik’s SS men would go from ghetto to ghetto, explaining the mission to the German stationary police. Under German supervision, the Jewish councils would order and the Jewish police would organize selections from the ghetto population to be taken to the trains. When the trains arrived at the new death facilities, the Jews would be murdered in gas chambers built and manned by Soviet citizens.

The practice of extermination was contingent in several ways upon the economics of scarcity. At the highest level, the failure of the German colonial campaign meant that the German leadership had to choose among victims. No tremendous bounty was produced by the starvation of Slavs, but Jews could be blamed for this failure. In the politics of relative deprivation, Poles who inherited Jewish property were all the more attached to what they had gained, and Soviet citizens were desperate to find a way to leave the starvation camps. In Nazi decisions about the fate of Polish Jews, one relevant calculation became Jewish productivity versus Jewish consumption of calories. At moments when food seemed more pressing, Jews were killed; at moments when labor seemed more urgent, Jews were spared. In such a dark market, in which Jews were nothing but economic units, the general tendency was toward extermination. In July 1942, when it became known that the General Government was to become a net food exporter, Himmler decided that all of its Jews should be killed by the end of the year.

Many Jews yielded to dreams of food when the Germans deliberately associated nourishment with deportations. In Cracow, where Governor-General Frank lived in his castle, the claim in 1942 was that Jews were being deported to the East to bring in the harvest in Ukraine. In Warsaw, in the largest ghetto in Frank’s General Government, Jews were promised bread and jam if they reported to the
Umschlagplatz
for deportation. With time, as Jews came to understand what deportation meant, the politics of relative deprivation became the politics of the delay of death. Precisely because the Germans themselves were always uncertain as to whether they were more desperate for food or for labor, Jews could always persuade themselves that some of their number would be spared. The very fact of selection, as Warsaw Jews reported, meant “a division between the productive and the nonproductive” that “broke down the morale of the people of the ghetto.” The hope of the individual for survival worked against the solidarity of the community. The Jewish policemen were assigned quotas of Jews to deliver to the trains, the fulfillment of which became their source of hope for themselves and their families and their alienation from others. As one of their number in Warsaw responded to the pleas of a fellow Jew: “That’s your problem. My problem is to bring ten people.”

Most likely there was never a definitive decision to murder all the Jews of Poland in death facilities. Once the process began in March 1942, however, the alternatives became infeasible, and for this reason unmentionable. As late as that February, Himmler and Heydrich were still discussing sending Jews to the Gulag. But absent a victory over the USSR in 1942, which was not forthcoming, this was impossible. Thus the deportations that began in the Lublin District spread throughout the General Government. At first Jews were sent from ghettos to Bełżec, then to Bełżec and Sobibór, and finally to Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. Over the course of 1942, some 1.3 million Polish Jews were murdered in these three death facilities. In Warsaw alone, in what was called the
Grosse Aktion
, some 265,040 Jews were deported to Treblinka and murdered and another 10,380 shot in the ghetto between July 23, 1942, and September 21, 1942. Tens of thousands remained, mostly young men, as the ghetto became a labor camp.

In Warsaw in late December 1942, some of those survivors, working together in a loose confederation known as the Jewish Combat Organization, began to assassinate the Jewish authorities of the ghetto. In January 1943, Himmler ordered that the ghetto be dissolved entirely. Jewish resistance prevented this deportation from being carried out. In February, Himmler renewed his order. When the Germans came again to the ghetto in larger numbers in April 1943, a significant number of Jews resisted. Some were from the Jewish Combat Organization, which included representatives of major Jewish parties such as the Bund as well as left-wing Zionists and communists; others fought within a Jewish Military Union that was dominated by the Revisionist Zionists of Betar. It was the Revisionists who, following old habit, raised both the Polish and the Zionist flags. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was the first major urban resistance to German rule in Europe. The Jews understood that they were not risking very much: In most cases, their families were already dead, and they believed, correctly, that the same fate awaited them. The rebellion led to the physical destruction of the Warsaw ghetto, as the Germans used flamethrowers to extract Jews from bunkers and then burned the entire district to the ground. The survivors were sent to other labor camps, as originally planned, where almost all of them were shot in 1944. This was the end of the most significant Jewish community in the world.

The man who suppressed the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Jürgen Stroop, believed that he was doing his part to win a war that would make Ukraine a German land of milk and honey. In fact, his superiors saw the extermination of Warsaw Jews as a necessity in July 1942 because of pressing food shortages. The logic was similar in the ghettos of the
Warthegau
, such as Łódż. German Jews were dispatched to the overcrowded ghetto there, then local German authorities were left to solve the problem of overpopulation by their own means.

In July 1941, the local head of the SD had proposed direct killing rather than slow starvation for the Jews of Łódż: “There is the danger this winter that the Jews can no longer all be fed. It is to be seriously considered whether the most humane solution might not be to finish off those Jews not capable of working by some sort of fast-working preparation. This would be in any event more pleasant than letting them starve.” In a mental world where starvation was taken to be the norm, other forms of killing could be presented as a kindness.

That winter, Jews were indeed murdered by such a “preparation”: the exhaust fumes that had already been tested in Belarus and in the east. The killing machines at Chełmno, where Jews from Łódż and elsewhere in the
Warthegau
were taken beginning in December 1941, were parked gas vans guarded by German Order Policemen. This was a modification of a technique earlier used to kill people designated as “unworthy of life.” Immediately after the German invasion of Poland, the Germans had emptied Polish mental hospitals by gassing their patients. The SS commando responsible for these killings, led by Herbert Lange, was entrusted with the killing at Chełmno. There was also a certain amount of influence from the east. Otto Bradfisch had been the commander of
Einsatzkommando
8 in Belarus, which painted Stars of David on its vehicles to proclaim its annihilatory task. In April 1942, he was assigned to Łódż, where he oversaw the continuing deportation of Jews to Chełmno.