The Second World War (57 page)
Planning and timetables were of critical importance. The Reichsbahn, with 1.4 million employees, was the largest organization in Germany after the Wehrmacht, and it made a considerable profit. Jews were transported in freight cars and cattle wagons at the same price as fare-paying passengers, in coaches on a one-way ticket. Journeys for the guards from the Ordnungspolizei were charged on the basis of return fares. The Gestapo took the money to pay for this from Jewish funds. But the ideological obsession of Hitler, Himmler and Heydrich often proved totally at odds with the conduct of the war they were trying to win. The Wehrmacht began to complain about the elimination of skilled Jewish labour in the armaments industry and the huge diversion of rail transport, when it was so badly needed to resupply the eastern front.
Jewish community leaders were told to organize their own policing of the ‘relocation’, with the threat that if they did not do it, then the SA or the SS would do it instead. They knew what that signified in terms of broken heads. They also had to draw up lists for the ‘transports’. Those sent to the Ostland were executed by shooting on arrival mainly in Minsk, Kaunas and Riga. The majority, depending on their point of departure, were soon despatched to the extermination camps. The elderly and ‘privileged’ Jews sent to Theresienstadt did not know that their death sentence was merely in abeyance.
Ordnungspolizei and Gestapo men employed in clearing the ghettos were allocated a ration of brandy. Ukrainian auxiliaries were not. Those Jews who tried to hide or escape were shot on the spot. So too were the old who could not move to the transports unaided. The vast majority departed in the railways wagons, apparently accepting their fate. But a number managed to escape from the trains into the woods. Some were helped by Poles and others managed to join partisan groups.
As already mentioned, Nazi concentration camps had been set up soon after Hitler’s assumption of power in 1933 in order to hold political opponents. They also acted as a threat to potential critics of the regime, whether gentile or Jewish. Himmler organized one of the first for political prisoners at Dachau just north of Munich, and soon he took over the administration of all such camps. The guards came from the
Totenkopfverbände
or Death’s Head Units and received their name from the skull cap-badge they wore. In 1940, when the scale of the camp network expanded dramatically following the conquest of Poland, Obergruppenführer Oswald Pohl created his own sub-empire within the SS, turning labour camps into a means of raising revenue. He also became a key figure in the development of the camp system.
Although tests had been carried out with Zyklon B at Auschwitz in September 1941, the first extermination camp with proper gas chambers constructed under Pohl’s direction was Be
ec. Work began in November 1941, two months before the Wannsee conference. The preparation of others rapidly followed. The work of the extermination camps was greatly assisted by the expertise of those who had been involved in the euthanasia programme under the direction of the Reichschancellery.
Some have argued that the production-line method of the extermination camps was strongly influenced by
Henry Ford
, who in turn had obtained his ideas from the Chicago slaughterhouses. Ford, who had been a ferocious anti-semite since 1920, was revered by Hitler and other leading Nazis. He may even have helped fund the Nazi Party, but nobody has managed to obtain documentary evidence of this. In any case, his book
The International Jew
had been translated and published in Germany, where it had a great influence in Nazi circles. Hitler kept a portrait of Ford hanging on the wall in his office in Munich, and in 1938 awarded him the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle. But there is no real evidence that the Ford production-line techniques were copied in the extermination camps.
By the end of 1942, close to four million Jews from western and central Europe as well as the Soviet Union would be killed in the extermination camps, along with 40,000 Roma. The active participation of the Wehrmacht, officials in almost every ministry, a large part of industry and the transport system spread the guilt to a degree which German society took a long time to acknowledge in the post-war years.
The Nazi regime did everything that it could to keep the extermin ation process secret, but many tens of thousands were involved. Himmler, speaking to senior SS officers in October 1943, described it as ‘
an unwritten, and never to be written
, page of glory in our history’. Rumours spread rapidly, especially after the photographs taken by soldiers of mass executions of
Jews in the Soviet Union. At first, most civilians could not believe that Jews were being killed by production-line gassing. But so many Germans were involved in various aspects of the Final Solution, and so many were profiting from the confiscation of Jewish property, both businesses and apartments, that a large minority of Germans soon had a fairly good idea of what was happening.
Although a certain amount of sympathy had been shown to Jews when they were forced to wear the yellow star, once the deportations began Jews became non-persons in the eyes of their fellow citizens. Germans preferred not to dwell on their fate. This, they later persuaded themselves, was due to ignorance when it was in truth much closer to denial. As Ian Kershaw wrote: ‘
the road to Auschwitz
was built by hatred, but paved with indifference’.
German civilians, on the other hand, had little idea of the infamous medical experiments at Auschwitz carried out by Dr Josef Mengele and his colleagues. Even today, those carried out on Russian, Polish, Roma, Czech, Yugoslav, Dutch and German political prisoners at Dachau by SS doctors are comparatively unknown. More than 12,000 died, usually in agony, as a result of tests and practice operations and amputations. The victims included those injected with diseases, but also at the request of the Luftwaffe, those subjected to extremes of high and low pressure, immersed in freezing water as research for aircrew shot down over the sea, force-fed salt water and subjected to liver-puncture experiments. In addition, prisoners in the autopsy room were forced by SS personnel to remove and treat the good-quality skin of corpses (but not those of Germans) ‘
for use as saddles
, riding breeches, gloves, house slippers and ladies’ handbags’.
In Danzig at the Anatomical Medical Institute, Professor Rudolf Spanner had ‘Poles, Russians and Uzbeks’ killed at the nearby concentration camp of Stutthof so that he could carry out experiments on recycling their corpses to make soap and leather. Such a mentality in a doctor may be beyond our comprehension, but as a traumatized Vasily Grossman observed after describing the horrors of Treblinka: ‘
It is the writer’s duty
to tell this terrible truth, and it is the civilian duty of the reader to learn it.’
Despite the progressive industrialization of the Final Solution, the ‘Shoah by bullets’ still continued in both the Reichskommissariat Ostland and the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. Even Jews who had been retained as specialist workers were rounded up and shot. Throughout the early spring and summer of 1942, the SS
Einsatzgruppen
and the nine regiments of Ordnungspolizei competed to eliminate all Jews in their respective areas through ‘Grossaktionen’. In July, a German paymaster wrote home: ‘
In Bereza-Kartuska
where I took my midday break, 1,300 Jews had been
shot the day before. They were taken to a hollow outside the town. Men, women and children were forced to undress completely and were dealt with by a shot through the back of the head. Their clothes were disinfected for reuse. I am convinced that if the war lasts much longer Jews will be processed into sausage and be served up to Russian prisoners of war or to qualified Jewish workers.’
Ghetto after ghetto was surrounded. Some Jewish businessmen tried to buy their survival with bribes. ‘
Jewish girls who wanted
to save their lives offered themselves to policemen. As a rule, the women were used during the night and killed in the morning.’ The police and their auxiliaries moved in during the early hours or just before dawn, under the glare of searchlights or flares. Many Jews tried to conceal themselves under floors, but the killers rolled hand-grenades under the shacks. In some cases, the buildings were set on fire.
Those rounded up were taken off to the execution pits, where they too were made to strip before being shot on the edge, or forced to lie down in the ‘sardine’ method. Once again, the killers were amazed by the submission of the Jews. Many executioners were drunk and failed to finish their victims off. Quite a number of them were buried alive. Some even managed to dig themselves out afterwards.
Not all were submissive. The ‘forest Jews’ who had escaped the roundups either joined Soviet partisan groups or formed their own, especially in Belorussia. Anti-partisan sweeps under the command of Bach-Zelewski continued into the spring of 1944. In Lwów and the rest of Galicia, German security police and Ukrainian Hilfspolizei, known as Hipos, continued the killings. Attempts to form resistance groups in ghettos were seldom successful until the desperate rising of the Warsaw ghetto in January 1943. There were attempts at resistance in the ghettos of Lwów and, Biaystok, but nothing on the scale or determination of Warsaw.
Jews who had initially argued against resistance now knew the truth. The Germans wanted them all dead. After the deportation of more than 300,000 Jews during 1942, only 70,000 were left in the Warsaw ghetto. Most of those remaining were young and comparatively strong. The sick and old had been taken away already. The different Jewish political groups, Bundists, Communists and Zionists, agreed to fight back. They began by killing collaborators, and then prepared defensive positions linked to the sewers. Weapons and explosives were obtained from the Home Army, or Armia Krajowa, which was loyal to the government-in-exile, and also from the Polish Communist resistance, the People’s Guard. A few hundred pistols and revolvers were bought from citizens in Warsaw who had kept them hidden despite the risk of execution. In January 1943, the first armed clash occurred when the Germans rounded up 6,500 Jews for deportation.
An enraged Himmler ordered that the whole
Warsaw ghetto
should be destroyed. But it was not until 19 April that the main attempt to storm the area took place. Waffen-SS troops entered from the north end, where prisoners were loaded on to cattle trucks in the sidings. The attackers soon withdrew with their wounded after coming under heavy fire and losing their only armoured vehicle to a Molotov cocktail. Himmler was appalled when he heard of their repulse and he sacked the commander. From then on, the SS attacked with small raiding groups at different points.
After a doomed defence of the factories which the Germans set on fire with flamethrowers, the Jewish defenders pulled back into the sewers, from where they would emerge to shoot at German troops from behind. The SS pumped in water in attempts to drown them, but the Jewish fighters managed to avoid or divert the flood. Others had seized a large building used by an armaments firm and defended it. Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop ordered his men to set the building on fire. When Jews threw themselves from the top floors, the SS troopers called them ‘parachutists’ and tried to shoot them before they hit the ground.
