The Second World War

by Antony Beevor

  Successful mass killing depended on the uninterrupted flow of a conveyor belt, delivering the victims naked and without fuss to the gas chamber. But on the slave-labour side of the system, Pohl would never be able to resolve the fundamental problem of the concentration camp. If you are trying to kill your labour force through ill-treatment, you cannot extract effective work from them, as was shown time and time again.

  Vasily Grossman’s study of Treblinka, carried out in the summer of 1944, underlined the importance of flow. Grossman was allowed to sit in with Red Army interrogators when they interviewed captured guards, Polish locals and forty survivors of the work camp Treblinka I. (Treblinka II was the adjacent extermination camp.) He immediately perceived this to be the key aspect of the Nazis’ system. Never before in human history had so many people been killed by so few executioners. At Treblinka a staff of about twenty-five SS men and around a hundred Ukrainian auxiliary Wachmänner managed to kill some 800,000 Jews and ‘Gypsies’–equivalent, as Grossman put it, to the population of ‘a small European capital city’–between July 1942 and August 1943.

  The most important contributions to the smooth running of the operation were secrecy and deception. ‘People were told that they were being taken to Ukraine to work in agriculture.’ The victims should not know their real fate until the very last moment. To ensure this, not even the guards who accompanied the trains were allowed to know the truth or enter the central area of the camp.

  At Treblinka, ‘the railroad dead-end siding was made to look like a passenger station… with a ticket office, baggage room and restaurant hall. There were arrows everywhere, indicating “To Bialystok”, “To Baranovichi”. By the time the train arrived, there would be a band playing in the station building, and all the musicians were dressed well.’ Once rumours began to circulate about Treblinka, the name of the station was changed to Ober-Maidan.

  Not everyone was taken in. The sharp-eyed and the inquisitive soon spotted that something was wrong, whether personal objects abandoned on the square beyond the station, which had not been cleared properly by the work detail after the previous transport, or the high wall, or the railway track which led nowhere. The SS had learned to exploit the instinctive optimism of most people, desperate to hope that things must be better here than in the ghetto or the transit camp from which they had come. On a very few occasions, however, the intended victims guessed their fate and knocked down the guards when they opened the doors of the cattle trucks. Machine guns cut them down as they stampeded towards the forest.

  Ordered to leave their luggage in the square, the crowd of three or four thousand in the new transport worried whether they would ever find it again in the confusion. In a loud voice, the SS Unteroffizier would order them to bring just their valuables, their documents and their wash things for the showers. Anxiety increased as the families were shepherded by armed guards, some grinning wolfishly, through a gate in a six-metre-high barbed-wire fence covered by machine-gun posts. Behind them in the station square, ‘work Jews’ from Treblinka I were already sorting through their belongings, selecting what to keep for despatch back to Germany and what to burn. They had to be careful if they surreptitiously crammed some food from a suitcase into their mouths. A Ukrainian guard would drag them off for a savage beating or shoot them.

  In a second square, close to the centre of the camp, the old and sick were led off to an exit marked ‘Sanatorium’, where a doctor in white with a Red Cross armband awaited them. The SS Scharführer in charge then told the remainder of the crowd to separate, with women and children going to undress in the barracks to the left. This was when much wailing began, as families naturally feared a permanent separation. But, knowing this, the SS stepped up the pressure, with short, sharp commands: ‘Achtung!’ and ‘Schneller!’ Then, ‘Men stay here! Women and children undress in the barracks on the left!’

  Any outpouring of grief was cut off by more shouted commands, but also by an insinuation of hope that everything was normal after all. ‘Women and children must take off their shoes when entering the barracks. Stockings must be put into shoes. Children’s stockings into their sandals, boots and shoes. Be tidy!… Going to the bath-house, you must have your documents, money, a towel and soap. I repeat…’

  The women in the barracks had to remove their clothes and then submit their heads to be sheared, supposedly as a precaution against lice. Naked, they had to hand in their documents, money, jewellery and watches at a booth where another SS Unteroffizier presided. As Grossman observed, ‘a naked person immediately loses the strength to resist, to struggle against his fate’. There were nevertheless a few exceptions. A young Jew from the Warsaw ghetto, connected to the resistance, managed to conceal a hand-grenade which he threw at one group of SS and Ukrainians. Another hid a knife, with which he stabbed a Wachmann. And a tall young woman surprised another by seizing his carbine to fight back. But she was overpowered and killed later after the most terrible tortures.

  Now that the victims could have little further doubt that their death was imminent, the SS in grey uniforms and the Wachmänner in black began to shout more loudly and insistently to confuse them and hurry them. ‘Schneller! Schneller!’ They were herded into a sand-covered alley between fir trees to conceal the barbed wire behind. Ordered to raise their hands above their heads, they were forced forward with truncheons, whips and blows from sub-machine guns. The Germans called this ‘The Road of No Return’.

  Gratuitous sadism increased the shock effect, reducing the chance of a last-minute attempt to rebel. But the guards in question also acted from a monstrously perverted pleasure. One immensely strong SS man known as ‘Zepf’ would seize a child by the legs ‘like a cudgel’ and smash his or her head against the ground. Forced into a third square, the victims saw the temple-like façade in stone and wood which concealed the gas chambers behind. Apparently a group of naive Roma women, who still had no idea of their fate, clasped their hands in wonder as they admired the building, which prompted the SS and the Ukrainian guards to collapse in laughter.

  To force their prisoners into the gas chambers, the guards unleashed their dogs. The screams as they sank their teeth into the prisoners were apparently heard for miles around. One of the captured guards told Grossman: ‘They could see their death coming, and besides, it was very crowded there. They were beaten terribly, and dogs were tearing their bodies.’ Silence fell only once the heavy doors of the ten gas chambers were closed. Twenty-five minutes after the gas was introduced, the doors at the back would be opened and working parties of prisoners from Treblinka I began to remove the yellow-faced bodies. Another group of Jewish prisoners would then be made to extract gold-capped teeth with pliers. They may have survived longer than the corpses they had to deal with, but they were not to be envied. ‘It was a luxury to get a bullet,’ one of the few survivors said to Grossman.

  Packed into the gas chambers, the victims took up to twenty or even twenty-five minutes to die. The chief guard, watching through a glass peep-hole, waited until there was no more movement. The large doors at the far end from the entrance were opened and the bodies dragged out. If any showed signs of life, the SS Unteroffizier administered a rapid coup de grâce with his pistol. Then he would signal to the tooth party to get to work with their pliers, extracting gold teeth. Finally, another work party of temporarily reprieved Jews from Treblinka I would load the corpses on to carts or trolleys to take them to where steam-powered excavators had been digging another line of mass graves.

  The old and the sick, meanwhile, who had been diverted into the ‘Sanatorium’, were finished off with a Kopfschuss or pistol shot in the back of the head. ‘Work Jews’ from Treblinka I dragged their bodies to pits. But, as at Auschwitz, these temporary survivors were hardly to be envied. They too were subject to an unbelievable sadism, from the shooting of prisoners to the rape of young Jewish women, who were killed afterwards. German SS guards forced the prisoners to sing a special ‘Treblinka’ hymn which one of them had composed. Grossman also
noted details in Treblinka I of ‘the one-eyed German from Odessa, Svidersky, whose nickname was “Master Hammer”. He was considered the unsurpassed specialist in “cold” death, and it was he who had killed, in the course of several minutes, fifteen children aged from eight to thirteen who had been declared unfit for work.’

  Early in 1943, Himmler visited Treblinka and ordered the commandant to have all the bodies dug up and burned. The ashes were to be spread far and wide. It seems that after the Stalingrad campaign the SS hierarchy were suddenly forced to contemplate the consequences if the Red Army discovered the sites of their mass murders. The putrefied corpses, up to 4,000 at a time, were spread across lengths of rail track laid over huge firepits, known as ‘roasts’. There was such a backlog of corpses to deal with that the work continued for eight months.

  The 800 ‘work Jews’ forced to carry out this grisly task had their revenge. They knew that they would never be allowed to live once all the bodies were burned. On 2 August 1943, during a long heatwave, they staged an uprising led by Zelo Bloch, a Jewish lieutenant from the Czech army. Armed with little more than spades and axes, they attacked the watchtowers and guard room, killing sixteen SS and Wachmänner. They set fire to part of the camp and stormed the fences. In the mass breakout of about 750 men which followed, the SS brought in reinforcements and men with tracker dogs to comb the woods and marshes. Spotter aircraft flew constantly overhead. Some 550 were brought back and murdered in the camp, while others were shot on the spot when discovered. Only seventy survived until the arrival of the Red Army the following year.

  But the revolt marked the end of Treblinka. The rest of the buildings, including the gas chambers and the fake railway station, were destroyed. The last ashes from the firepits were spread, and then, in a grotesque attempt to pretend that the camp had never existed, lupins were sown all over the site. But as Grossman observed, walking there, ‘the earth is throwing out crushed bones, teeth, clothes, papers. It does not want to keep its secrets.’

  Treblinka established a far more intense killing cycle than Auschwitz-Birkenau. Its death toll of 800,000, achieved over thirteen months, was not very far short of the million killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau over thirty-three months. While Treblinka received mainly Polish Jews, with just some from the Reich and others from Bulgaria, Auschwitz-Birkenau received its victims from all over Europe. As well as Polish Jews, they came from the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Greece, Italy, Norway, Croatia and later Hungary. Beec accounted for some 550,000 people, mainly Polish Jews. The camp at Sobibór, where some 200,000 died, dealt with the Jews from the region of Lublin, but also some from the Netherlands, France and Belorussia. Another 150,000 mainly Polish Jews died in Chemno, and 50,000 Polish and French Jews in Majdanek.

  On 6 October 1943, Himmler addressed Reichsleiters and Gauleiters at a conference in Posen. Grossadmiral Dönitz, Generalfeldmarschall Milch and Albert Speer (although he tried to deny it for the rest of his life) also heard his speech. For once dropping the standard euphemisms of the Final Solution–such as ‘evacuated east’ and ‘special treatment’–Himmler was at last frank with outsiders about what they were doing. ‘We faced the question: what should we do with the women and children? I decided here too to find a completely clear solution. I did not regard myself as justified in exterminating the men–that is to say to kill them or have them killed–and to allow the avengers in the shape of the children to grow up for our sons and grandsons. The difficult decision had to be taken, to have this people disappear from this earth.’

  On 25 January 1944, Himmler addressed nearly 200 generals and admirals, once again in Posen. They too needed to be aware of the sacrifices which the SS had been making. The ‘race struggle’ carried out by his ‘ideological troops’, Himmler again explained, would not ‘allow avengers to arise for our children’. In this total elimination of the Jews there would be no exceptions.

  Himmler could have boasted to his audience how so few of his men had managed to murder so many. Through a mixture of outright deception, uncertainty and then unspeakable cruelty, the minute force of persecutors had succeeded in killing nearly three million victims, unable to believe that extermination camps could exist in Europe, supposedly the cradle of civilization.

  35

  Italy–The Hard Underbelly

  OCTOBER 1943–MARCH 1944

  The Allied invasion of mainland Italy in September 1943 had seemed a good idea at the time, with the collapse of Fascism and the prom ise of airfields. Yet there had been a distinct lack of clear thinking about the objectives of the campaign and how these would be achieved. Alexander, the commander of the Allied 15th Army Group in Italy, failed to coordinate the operations of General Mark Clark’s Fifth Army and General Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army. Clark was still far from happy with the slowness of Montgomery’s advance to relieve him at Salerno, despite all the cheerful messages saying ‘Hang on we’re coming!’ To make matters worse, Montgomery somehow seemed to believe that he had saved the Fifth Army at Salerno.

  Allied relations were not helped by the fact that both the short, wiry Monty and the tall, gangling Clark should be so obsessed with their image. Clark, who soon increased his public relations team to fifty men, insisted that photographers should capture his most flattering profile with its truly imperial nose. Some of his officers dubbed him Marcus Aurelius Clarkus. And Monty had started to hand out signed photographs of himself as if he were a movie star.

  Over them, the charming but diffident ‘Alex’ seemed to think that planning could be made up as they went along, an attitude which certainly suited Churchill, who wanted to keep the Italian campaign going far beyond what the Americans envisaged. Montgomery, on the other hand, did not like to do anything unless it had been carefully worked out in advance. ‘There was as yet’, he wrote acerbically in his diary, ‘no plan known to me for developing the war in Italy, but I was quite used to that!’ But, as Alexander knew from experience, Montgomery would in any case do only what he wanted to do. As his biographer remarked, Alexander played the part of ‘an understanding husband in a difficult marriage’. Eisenhower also failed to get a grip on his subordinates and failed to establish any clarity in thinking about what they were trying to do in Italy.

  The real problem, of course, came from the very top, and the central disagreement which had dogged Allied strategy since 1942. Roosevelt and Marshall were determined that nothing should delay Overlord. Churchill and Brooke, on the other hand, still saw the Mediterranean as the vital theatre for the time being, where the surrender of Italian troops should be exploited. In fact both men, who remained nervous of a cross-Channel invasion without air supremacy, half hoped that a run of successes in the Mediterranean might provide a good excuse to delay Overlord. The only senior American officer who agreed with them was General Spaatz, the US air force commander in the Mediterranean. Like Harris, Spaatz believed that bombing alone could win the war in three months and ‘didn’t think Overlord was necessary or desirable’. He wanted to continue the advance in Italy, across the River Po and even into Austria so as to get his bombers closer to Germany.

  Churchill had undoubtedly been right to push for Torch and Husky against all of Marshall’s opposition. Even if motivated by the wrong reasons, he had at least prevented a disastrous attempt to invade France in 1943. But he was now starting to lose all credibility with the Americans, thanks to his new obsession with retaking Rhodes and other islands in the Aegean which had been occupied by the Italians. General Marshall naturally suspected that this island-hopping in the eastern Mediterranean was part of a secret plan to invade the Balkans. Not surprisingly, he vigorously refused any American help or involvement whatsoever.

  Even Brooke, who supported the Italian campaign and other operations in the region, feared that the prime minister had become completely unbalanced by what he called his ‘Rhodes madness’. ‘He has worked himself into a frenzy of excitement about the Rhodes attack, has magnified its importance so that he can no longer see anything else and
has set his heart on capturing this one island even at the expense of endangering his relations with the President and with the Americans, and also the whole future of the Italian campaign… The Americans are already desperately suspicious of him, and this will make matters far worse.’

  Wishful thinking that the Allies would soon be in Rome had infected American commanders as well as Churchill. Mark Clark was absolutely determined to be crowned as its conqueror, and even Eisenhower believed that the Italian capital would fall by the end of October. Alexander declared unwisely that they would be in Florence by Christmas. But there were already clear indications that the Germans would fight ruthlessly in retreat and take their revenge on Italian troops and partisans, who were actively helping the Allies.

  East of Naples, in a village near Acerra, B Squadron of the 11th Hussars found the local inhabitants in the cemetery burying ten men that the Germans had put against a wall and shot. ‘Just after [our] armoured cars had gone,’ the regiment recorded, ‘more Germans suddenly jumped over the cemetery wall and shot down the crowd with Tommy guns as they stood beside the graves.’ Hitler’s fury against the Italians for having changed sides had filtered right down to the ordinary German soldier.

  Clark’s Fifth Army, advancing north-west from Naples, faced its first major obstacle at the River Volturno, thirty kilometres further on. In the early hours of 13 October, both divisional and corps artillery opened a massive barrage across the valley. The British 56th Division had a tough time near the coast, but the main stretch of the river, although broad, was fordable, and by the following day a large bridgehead had been secured. The Volturno was only a holding position for the Germans, for Kesselring had already identified their main line of defence south of Rome. Like Hitler, he wanted to hold the Allies as far down the peninsula as possible. Rommel, who commanded the German divisions in the north and argued for a withdrawal, had been sidelined.