The German War (44 page)

Gerstein returned to Berlin by night train, where he found himself sharing a compartment with the Swedish attaché at the embassy in Berlin, Göran von Otter. Profoundly disturbed by his experience, Gerstein took the risk of disclosing what he knew to Otter, and urged him to tell the outside world. He even revealed his own identity and, as a devout Protestant, named the liberal Protestant Bishop of Berlin, Otto Dibelius, as a character reference. Back in the Reich capital, Gerstein immediately informed both Dibelius and his Catholic counterpart, Bishop Konrad Count von Preysing. He also tried to brief the Papal Nuncio and the Swiss legation; all in vain. The Swedish attaché’s report to his government was promptly buried, and the bishops failed to act on the information.
³⁶

Gerstein’s father, a retired judge, also did not want to know. Their conversation was not a success and Gerstein tried to resume it by letter. On 5 March 1944, the son wrote to his father,

I do not know what goes on inside you, and would not presume to claim the smallest right to know. But when a man has spent his professional life in the service of the law something must have happened inside him during these last few years. I was deeply perturbed by one thing you said to me, or rather wrote to me . . . You said: Hard times demand tough methods! – No! No maxim of that kind is adequate to justify what has happened.

In a generational role reversal, the son pleaded with the father to take a moral stance, warning him that he too

will have to stand up and be called to account for the age in which you live and what is happening in it. There would be no understanding left between us . . . if it were not possible or permissible for me to ask you not to underestimate this responsibility, this obligation on your part to answer for yourself.

The father remained unmoved, and, in a desperate attempt to reach him, the son wrote again, ‘If you look around you, you will find that this is a rift that is cutting through many families and friendships that were once close.’ Like Karl Dürkefälden, Kurt Gerstein’s attempt to articulate a moral position was blocked by his own family: no doubt there were others like him.
³⁷

Only a privileged few actually witnessed how the killing was done. As news spread rapidly in the vicinity of the death camps and beyond, errors crept in about crucial details of the operations. Ten days after Pfannenstiel and Gerstein visited Beł
ec, a non-commissioned officer, Wilhelm Cornides, was waiting on the platform at the nearby station of Rawa Ruska in Galicia when a train of some thirty-five cattle trucks, packed with Jews, arrived. A policeman explained to him that they were probably the last Jews from Lwów: ‘That has been going on for five weeks uninterruptedly.’ When he got on his own train, Cornides found himself sharing a compartment with a railway policeman and his wife, who promised to point out the camp where the Jews were being killed. After travelling for some time through a tall pine forest, he noticed a sweetish smell. ‘Here it comes!’ the policeman’s wife called out. ‘They are stinking already.’ Her husband laughingly corrected her that it was ‘only the gas’. ‘We had gone on about 200 yards,’ Cornides noted in his diary, and ‘the sweetish odour was transformed into a strong smell of something burning. “That is from the crematory,” says the policeman.’
³⁸

Rawa Ruska was only 18 kilometres from Beł
ec and most trains crossing Poland had to stop at the station. When some French and Belgian prisoners of war were sent to work there that summer, they asked the middle-aged German reservists guarding them where the trains packed with Jews were going. The blunt reply was simply, ‘To heaven’. Two of the Belgian prisoners managed to escape to Sweden in the spring of 1943, where they also spoke to a British agent, who filed the following report:

What made the most impression on them was the extermination of the Jews. They had both witnessed atrocities. One of the Belgians saw truck loads of Jews carried off into a wood and the trucks returning a few hours later – empty. Bodies of Jewish children and women were left lying in ditches and along the railways. The Germans themselves, they added, boasted that they had constructed gas chambers where Jews were systematically killed and buried.

French prisoners dismantling Jewish graves in eastern Galicia near Tarnopol, so as to use the stones in road-building, returned to Germany bringing their stories with them. One told a German trade unionist he trusted about the packed trains which returned empty; two others, who escaped to Sweden, informed a British agent. They did not know the details of how the killing occurred and reported that ‘some said they [the Jews] had been electrocuted
en masse
’. This was not unusual. Whilst the arrival, undressing and burial or burning of corpses occurred in the open and were observed by witnesses from outside the camp, the killing itself was not. Zygmunt Klukowski, a well-informed hospital director in the nearby town of Szczebrzeszyn, heard that ‘electricity’ as well as ‘poison gases’ was being used at Beł
ec as early as 8 April 1942.
⁴⁰

Tales of mass electrocution scattered far and wide, reaching the Warsaw ghetto. On the ‘Aryan’ side of the city, the German captain in the garrison, Wilm Hosenfeld, wrote home on 23 July, the second day of the deportations from Warsaw, telling his wife that the ‘ghetto with its half-million Jews is to be emptied’ on Himmler’s orders: ‘History has no real parallel. Perhaps, cavemen ate each other, but to simply butcher a nation, men, women, children, in the twentieth century, and that it should be us, who are waging a crusade against Bolshevism, that is such a dreadful blood-guilt to make you want to sink into the ground with shame.’ Each detail he learned only made him feel worse. On 25 July, he heard that the Jews were being sent to a camp near Lublin where the victims were burned alive in electrically heated chambers, saving the work of mass shootings and burials.
⁴¹

Such knowledge did not mean that everyone knew, but it was spreading from the vicinity of the camps, reaching far beyond the local German telephonists and railwaymen, the drinkers at taverns who fell into conversation with sozzled SS men wanting to let off steam or the German engineers working in the IG Farben plant alongside Jewish prisoners from Auschwitz. There were other rumours too – of gassing tunnels and deportation trains in which the Jews were gassed through the heating system. They cropped up in a diary from Hesse as early as November 1941, in Frankfurt in June 1942, and in the notebooks of a Viennese diarist in late 1942. In Berlin, Ruth Andreas-Friedrich noted it three times in her diary.
⁴²

Just as with the news of the murder of psychiatric patients in 1940 and 1941, so the information passed most rapidly amongst those with privileged bureaucratic access. The ex-ambassador to Rome and anti-Nazi conservative Ulrich von Hassell heard first of the
Einsatzgruppen
in the Soviet Union and then about the gas chambers from his high-level contacts in the military and in military counter-intelligence – Hans von Dohnanyi, Georg Thomas and Johannes Popitz. Even the head of the SD in occupied France, Werner Best, had learned of the
Einsatzgruppen
‘sweeps’ informally from colleagues posted back from the east. Among less influential Germans information circulated more quickly among those who still maintained anti-Nazi networks of friends and acquaintances. On 31 August 1943, the 15-year-old daughter of Berlin Social Democrats confided to the pages of her diary, ‘Mummy told me recently most of the Jews have been killed in camps, but I can’t believe it.’
⁴³

In January 1942, one of the gravediggers at Chełmno, Yakov Grojanowski, escaped and managed to make his way to the Warsaw ghetto, where his tale reached Emanuel Ringelblum, head of the secret Jewish archives, and Yitzhak Zuckerman, a Zionist youth leader. At least two letters with similar information reached Łód
. But the warnings did not pass into mass circulation. Amongst inhabitants of the Łód
ghetto, hunger was the most important issue in early 1942, masking the true nature of the deportation of 55,000 people from the ghetto.
⁴⁴

It was not necessary for Germans to hear about death camps in order to know about the murder of the Jews. By the time the Viennese lawyer Ludwig Haydn was told, on 19 December 1942, that gas was being pumped through the heating vents of the trains in which Jews were being deported, he had already heard first- and second-hand accounts of mass shootings. At the end of June, he had tuned in to the BBC to hear one of its first reports on the extermination of the Jews. But already Haydn knew that ‘With regard to the mass murder of the Jews, the broadcast merely confirms what we know here anyhow.’
⁴⁵

At the same time, even those in charge did not know for certain how much progress they had made. Dissatisfied with the internal counts compiled within the Reich Security Main Office, SS leader Heinrich Himmler commissioned his chief statistician, Richard Korherr, to provide reliable figures; an abridged – and slightly more euphemestically phrased – version of his report was sent to Hitler in early April 1943. Korherr estimated that by the end of 1942, 1.2 million Jews had been killed in the death camps and a further 633,300 Jews in the occupied Soviet Union – in the light of other evidence a considerable underestimate even at this juncture. This was a secret report for the eyes of the highest Nazi leaders, yet its estimates were broadly in line with what the Allies were saying. ‘If the Jews say we have shot 2.5 million Jews in Poland or pushed them off to the east, then we obviously cannot reply that it was only 2.3 million,’ Goebbels had said in his confidential press briefing on 14 December 1942. Others could only guess at the scale: Ulrich von Hassell thought that 100,000 Jews had been gassed in May 1943. Hearing an SS man boast that 2,000 were being killed every week in Auschwitz, Ruth Andreas-Friedrich estimated that 100,000 Jews were being killed in just this one camp each year. By the time the ninety-six Jews who lived on the tiny Greek island of Kos were ferried to the mainland and shipped off to Auschwitz in July 1944, it had long been clear that this was an operation to winkle out and destroy all the Jews in Europe.
⁴⁶