More than fifty years on Samuel Willenberg can still only scarcely comprehend what he saw. ‘They alighted on to the platform in the usual manner, as if they had arrived in a health resort. And here, on this small plot of land, was taking place the greatest murder that ever took place in Europe, in the entire world. Before he died, Professor Mering [Samuel’s history teacher, who worked alongside him at Treblinka] said, and I will never forget it: “You know, I look at it from the point of view of history.” “Excuse me?” I looked at him as if he had gone mad.’
At night Samuel and the other Jews made to work in the camp would try to make sense of what was happening to them: ‘There were discussions, quietly, people asked each other, “Why?” That question, all the time – why? Why? And, “For what crime? Why small children? What have they done? What have I done? What has each of us done?” There was no answer.’ These same questions still resonate today. How was it possible that Germans ordered and organized this mechanized extermination? Not just in Treblinka, but in Auschwitz, Bełżec, Sobibór and the other death camps. In all history there is no crime to equal it. No one before has ever sought to kill men, women and children on this scale and to justify such killing by the simple expedient ‘They were Jews’ or ‘They were Gypsies’ or ‘They were homosexuals’ – to kill people just because they did not fit, were not wanted. How could it happen? How could a place like Treblinka come to exist on the face of the Earth?
No single cause is itself sufficient to explain it. Rather, there were a number of preconditions without which the final decision to order this mass extermination could not have been made. Chapter One described how anti-Semitism grew in Germany after World War I and how some extreme right-wing parties used rhetoric calling for the Jews to be killed. But before he became Chancellor of Germany, Hitler himself, at least in his public speeches and writing, never openly called for the Jews to be murdered. His public stance in the 1930s was consistent with calls for the Jews to be excluded from German citizenship and to be forced out of Germany altogether. Many Jews were subsequently pressed into leaving Germany, and this method of dealing with the Nazi-created problem of the Jews was to exist almost until the moment when the killings were ordered.
Yet behind the idea of ‘purifying’ Germany by ridding it of Jews there had always lain a far more sinister philosophy. As early as 21 March 1933 a Leipzig newspaper had announced: ‘If a bullet strikes our beloved leader, all the Jews in Germany will immediately be put up against the wall and the result will be a greater blood bath than anything the world has ever seen.’ As Arnon Tamir told us, Nazi anti-Semitism can be summed up in the simple words, ‘The Jew is guilty, for everything, always.’2
The idea of blame is a crucial one. Even the mentally ill, whom the Nazis despised, were never held personally to blame for their own illness. The Jews, however, were always blameworthy: they were held responsible for the loss of World War I and were behind the hideous creed of Bolshevism. It did not matter that this analysis was simply wrong; it was still possible for the Nazis to believe it – after all, Germany had clearly lost the war and suffered as a result. Furthermore, the Nazis said every Jew was to blame because, as Nazi propaganda made clear, the Jews were all part of one homogeneous mass, loyal to each other rather than to their Fatherland. If one Jew had committed a crime, then all Jews had committed it.
None of this meant that the extermination of the Jews was inevitable from the moment the Nazis came to power. For most of the 1930s many Jews managed to live relatively peacefully in Hitler’s Reich. After the chaotic violence of the early months of the regime and the abortive boycott of 1 April 1933 there was less violent oppression. Segregation and discrimination remained widespread, but many Jews managed to tolerate these everyday abuses. Then, on 9 November 1938, came Kristallnacht. The horror of that night is encapsulated in the experience of 18-year-old Rudi Bamber, who rang the police to report that Storm Troopers were smashing up his family’s house, only to realize that they would not help; the police approved of the crime.
Kristallnacht is important in the development of Nazi anti-Semitism because it illustrates once again how the Jews were held collectively to blame for any crime. The Jew who shot the German diplomat in Paris was not treated as an individual criminal, but as one cell in an organism that consisted of all Jews. Rudi Bamber tried to work out why the Storm Troopers had picked on his family. What had they done wrong? But the Nazis did not think that way. All Jews were held responsible for any crime committed by any other Jew. It did not matter that they had never met or that they might condemn his crime; one Jew was all Jews.
This all meant that the Jews were in a uniquely vulnerable position in Nazi Germany. On 30 January 1939 Hitler gave a speech that included these words: ‘. . . if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevizing of the Earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.’ At first reading these words seem unequivocal. Hitler talks of the ‘annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe’ – what could be a clearer promise of the Holocaust than that? But it is not necessarily that obvious. We have already seen how the ghetto managers of Łódź in 1940 knew nothing of any planned extermination; instead, they had initiated a scheme whereby the ghetto was functioning as a slave factory. And another significant clue about Nazi thinking in 1940 exists in Himmler’s memo, ‘Some thoughts on the treatment of the alien population in the east’. When writing about his plans to educate Polish children only at the lowest level and to kidnap any Polish children who seem to be ‘racially first class’, Himmler adds the paragraph: ‘However cruel and tragic each individual case may be, if one rejects the Bolshevik method of physically exterminating a people as fundamentally un-German and impossible, then this method is the mildest and best one.’ Thus to Himmler, writing in the spring of 1940, ‘physically exterminating a people’ is ‘un-German’. Of course, he could have been lying. He could already have known of a secret plan Hitler had hatched to exterminate another group – the Jews. But why would he bother to dissemble in a memo destined for Hitler? Himmler had no difficulty in making inhuman statements once the Holocaust had been decided upon. (In a speech at Posen in October 1943, talking of the ‘extermination of the Jewish people’, he said, ‘We had the moral right, we had the duty to our people, to destroy this people which wanted to destroy us,’ and, ‘We have exterminated a bacterium because we did not want in the end to be infected by the bacterium and die of it.’)3
It therefore seems highly unlikely that, despite Hitler’s speech in 1939, there was any systematic plan to exterminate the Jews until 1941. But we can never know for sure because we cannot know the content of Hitler’s mind – his secret intention. Maybe he longed to implement extermination but was restrained enough to wait until he thought he could do so with impunity. Alternatively, and perhaps more probably, Hitler always loathed and despised the Jews and simply wanted to get rid of them. What form that ‘getting rid of’ would take was something the Nazis were capable of revising given the circumstances. Initially, the overt policy was clearly one of expulsion. Before the war Adolf Eichmann ran the SS ‘Office for Jewish emigration’ in Vienna after the Anschluss, which served effectively to steal the Austrian Jews’ money before they were allowed to leave. In one sense this was working towards ‘annihilating’ the Jewish race in Austria.
A grander plan to expel the Jews from Europe took shape in 1940 at the time of the fall of France. At first sight it is an incredible, almost unbelievable plan – to send the Jews to Madagascar. Franz Rademacher, who worked in the German Foreign Ministry, wrote the following memo dated 3 July 1940: ‘The imminent victory gives the Germans the possibility, and in my opinion also the duty, of solving the Jewish question in Europe. The desirable solution is: All Jews out of Europe . . . In the peace treaty France must make the island Madagascar available for the solution of the Jewish question, and must resettle th
e approximately 25,000 French people living there and compensate them. The island will be transferred to Germany as a mandate . . . The Jews will be jointly liable for the value of the island. Their former European assets will be transferred for liquidation to a European bank to be set up for the purpose. In so far as these assets are insufficient to pay for the land which they get and for the necessary purchase of commodities in Europe needed for developing the island, bank credits will be made available to the Jews by the same bank.’4 Outlandish as it appears, this plan was the logical conclusion of the expulsion policy which the Nazis had been following up to this point. The Madagascar version was simply more ambitious: to send the Jews to an island off the coast of Africa and to steal all their money by making them pay for the privilege of going there. And Madagascar was not going to be a tropical paradise for the Jews, it was proposed that the Chancellery of the Führer organize transportation to the island under its head, Philipp Bouhler, the man behind the murderous Nazi euthanasia policy.
In the event, the Madagascar plan came to nothing. A precondition of its success was that the sea route to Africa needed to be safe for German shipping. With Britain still in the war, this could not be guaranteed. Of course, when Rademacher wrote his memo in July 1940, the Nazis thought it likely that Britain would shortly be out of the war. Hitler had never wanted to fight the British and was prepared to discuss peace terms – a peace that would have probably turned Britain into a satellite of the Nazi empire, like Vichy France.
As 1941 dawned, no practical progress had been made on the ambitious Madagascar plan. Deportations of Poles and Jews to the General Government had begun again, but not in sufficient numbers to solve Greiser’s problems. Hans Frank still complained that the General Government did not have the resources to take the deportees and the transports temporarily stopped again in March 1941. The squabbling between the competing Nazi barons of Poland over the destination of Polish ‘undesirables’ seemed never-ending.
By now preparations were in hand for the invasion of the Soviet Union, an event that was to be the catalyst for a radical change in Nazi policy towards the Jews. This time a much more extensive role for the Einsatzgruppen was openly acknowledged.
Instructions dated 2 July 1941 tell of the proposed scope of the work of the Einsatzgruppen: ‘4. Executions. The following will be executed: all officials of the Comintern (most of these will certainly be career politicians); officials of senior and middle rank and ‘extremists’ in the party, the central committee, and the provincial and district committees; the people’s commissars; Jews in the service of the Party or the State . . . No steps will be taken to interfere with any purges that may be initiated by anti-Communist or anti-Jewish elements in the newly occupied territories. On the contrary, these are to be secretly encouraged.’5 Reinhard Heydrich, Head of the Reich Main Security Office and close colleague of Himmler, who issued these instructions, is thus openly calling for the execution only of ‘Jews in the service of the Party or State’, but the fact that purges are to be ‘secretly encouraged’ and that implicitly such purges may include the killing of women and children shows that there is an inherent contradiction in the instructions, unless the reference to ‘Jews in the service of the Party or State’ constitutes the bare minimum of Jews to be murdered.
Let us look at how one of the Einsatzgruppen went about its hideous tasks. Einsatzgruppe A was under the command of Police General and SS Brigadeführer Dr Walther Stahlecker. They moved into Lithuania behind the German Army on 23 June 1941 and swiftly reached the town of Kaunas, Lithuania’s second city. Given that Lithuania had been incorporated into the Soviet Union against her will in 1940 (as a result of the Molotov/Ribbentrop secret protocol), Stahlecker hoped that the Lithuanians themselves could be persuaded to turn on their former enemies. The Nazi lie that Communism and Judaism were virtually synonymous had also spread in Lithuania during the brief period of Communist rule. According to a report by Stahlecker, ‘The task of the security police was to set these purges in motion and put them on the right track so as to ensure that the liquidation goals that had been set might be achieved in the shortest possible time.’6
Just after the Germans arrived in Kaunas, a sixteen-year-old Lithuanian girl called Viera Silkinaite walked past a row of garages just outside the city centre. She saw a group of people gathered around what looked like some drunks having a fight. As she drew closer, she saw that one man was lying on the ground, hardly breathing. Another man was standing above him holding a wooden club. This was not a drunken brawl, but the brutal clubbing to death of unarmed Jews by Lithuanians who had just been released from prison by the Germans. ‘I was very frightened,’ she says. ‘I was lost, worried. I cannot describe my state of mind. Even now I can see that picture in my eyes.’ Some of the crowd watching the killing shouted encouragement to the murderers, screaming, ‘Beat those Jews!’ and one man even held his small child up so that he could see. Viera Silkinaite could scarcely believe that a child was watching: ‘What kind of person would he be when he grew up? If, of course, he could understand what he had seen. And what could you expect of such a person who was shouting? It was as if he was going to step into that garage and join the beating.’
Reports survive from some Germans who happened to witness these killings. One, written by an army officer, reads: ‘There was a large number of women in the crowd and they had lifted up their children or stood them on chairs or boxes so that they could see better. At first I thought this must be a victory celebration or some type of sporting event because of the cheering, clapping and laughter that kept breaking out. However, when I enquired what was happening, I was told that the “Death-dealer of Kovno [Kaunas]” was at work . . . In response to a cursory wave, the next man stepped forward silently and was then beaten to death with the wooden club in the most bestial manner . . .’7 A German photographer witnessed that, ‘After the entire group had been beaten to death, the young man put the crowbar to one side, fetched an accordion and went and stood on the mountain of corpses and played the Lithuanian national anthem.’8
After witnessing just a few minutes of the killing, Viera Silkinaite ran off to seek sanctuary in a nearby cemetery. ‘I was ashamed,’ she says. ‘When I went to the cemetery, I sat down and I thought: “God Almighty, I heard before that there were windows broken or something like that done, that was still conceivable, but such an atrocity, to beat a helpless man . . . it was too much.”’
From the first, Einsatzgruppe A was more murderous than the other three groups. We know this because of extensive documentation generated by the groups themselves. Different Einsatzgruppen appear to have interpreted their initial orders in different ways, but even Einsatzgruppe A stopped short of murdering women and children in the initial weeks of the occupation.
Riva Losanskaya, who lived in the village of Butrimonys, roughly halfway between Kaunas and the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, was twenty-one years old when the Germans invaded. Until the war she had spent a happy life in Butrimonys with her father, mother and two sisters. They were Jewish, but that was of little consequence before the war as everyone rubbed along together without a problem. ‘When the war began,’ says Riva, ‘although we knew that the Jews were suffering in Poland, we still could not believe that the same thing could happen to us. How could innocent people be detained and killed? My father used to say that without a trial no harm could be done to anyone.’ But as the German troops advanced, Riva saw people rushing around shouting ‘We must flee!’ There were rumours of Jews being killed in reprisals by Germans in the local town and that ‘the streets were scattered with corpses’. Riva and her family gathered a few possessions together and travelled 10 kilometres to a nearby village where they tried to hide. They still thought that the Russians had been pushed back only temporarily and that the Germans would be swiftly thrown out of Lithuania. Soon, however it became clear that the Russians were not returning and that there was little point, as a family, in trying to hide in another village. ‘The people in the vi
llage wouldn’t give you a crust of bread,’ says Riva. ‘We had nowhere to go.’ So the family returned to Butrimonys, where they lived uneasily in their own house.
Within days of the German occupation, all the Jewish young men of the village were rounded up and taken away. The remaining Jewish villagers were told that the young men had been taken to the nearby town of Alytus, where they had been put to work for the Germans. Riva’s father was among those taken after the initial arrests. Days later some locals called on her and her mother and said they had good news. ‘These “nice” people with whom we had been on such friendly terms all our life came to us,’ says Riva, ‘and told us, “We’ve seen your father, don’t cry!” It was Vaitkevicius [a local who has since died], who came to tell us, “Here is a letter we got from him. We’ll read it to you and then I’ll take a parcel back for him.” He had been very friendly with my father. I went to see my neighbours to tell them that everyone was still alive. “Why the tears? My father is still alive and I’m sending him clothes and food via Vaitkevicius.” My neighbours said, “Riva, you have such nice friends. Can we pay him to take parcels to our husbands and fathers too?” So we got our parcels ready and gave them to Vaitkevicius who took them all. Other people were collecting up parcels in all the other streets too.’ But it was a trick, breathtaking in its callousness. Just before they were killed by the Lithuanian police acting on German orders, the Jewish men had been made to write letters to their families asking for money, clothes and food to be sent to them. Then locals had been given these letters by the police so that they could steal from the victims’ families. By the time Riva was told by her neighbours, ‘We’ve seen your father,’ he was already dead.
The Nazis- a Warning From History Page 29