by Yitzhak Arad
17
The Annihilation of the Jews
in the General Government
After the change in command and the reorganization of the manpower in the camps, the enlargement of the gas chambers and improvements in the killing process, the extermination pace was stepped up considerably. The death camps turned into murder factories that could meet all the demands of those in charge of Operation Reinhard.
The large-scale deportations of the General Government Jews proceeded without disruption. Planned and coordinated from Operation Reinhard headquarters in Lublin, the expulsion of the Jews was carried out by the district SS and Police Leaders. From their headquarters in Cracow, German railroad authorities in occupied Poland (Generaldirektion der Ostbahn) planned the train schedule and allocated cars and engines accordingly. As transports to the death camps were outside the framework of normal passenger or freight-train traffic, their movements along the track system and via the way stations en route to the camps were coordinated by “travel timetable orders” (Fahrplananordnung) issued by the railroad authorities in Cracow. These detailed each station stop, the number and type of freight cars in the transport, arrival and departure times to and from the camps, the train’s destination once empty, and the fact that the train would be cleaned by prisoners before leaving the camp.
The trip-plans used a code to indicate a transport’s region of origin. Deportations from the General Government were indicated by the code PKR; those from the Bialystok district were PJ; and from Germany—or other countries which necessitated crossing Germany—DA. Railroad personnel were ordered to report to railroad authorities the number of people in each transport before it reached the camps.1
The estimation of the number of Jews from the General Government killed in Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka is not based on reports submitted by the camps’ commanding authorities. No written reports about the annihilation activities carried out in these camps ever existed. The whole operation was a “Reich secret matter” (Geheime Reichssache), and written reports about what was going on in the death camps could endanger this secrecy. The deportation orders and reports about their conduct were sometimes in writing, but in many cases were only given verbally. Moreover, some of the existing documents were destroyed by Nazi authorities toward the end of the war. Counting or even discussing the number of Jews killed in the camps was taboo even for the SS men serving in the camps. SS Unterscharführer Robert Juhrs, who, at the Belzec trial, was asked about the number of Jews killed in the camp, answered: “. . . in connection with this I may emphasize that we strictly had to avoid the mention of numbers. . . .”2
The estimation of the number of Jews murdered in the Operation Reinhard camps is based partly on available Nazi documents concerning the deportations, on testimonies of survivors, on evidence submitted at the Nazi criminal trials, on investigations carried out by the government and public committees after the liberation, and on various other sources. But there were also many hundreds of townships and villages from where the Jews were sent to the death camps from which no Jews survived and no testimonies were passed on. Therefore, we must add to the number of Jews who were deported to Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka at definite times and places and murdered there an estimated number of Jews who lived in the areas from where deportations took place to these camps but about which no information is available.
Belzec
The deportations to Belzec were renewed in the second week of July 1942 and lasted until the middle of December 1942. Rudolf Reder wrote:
From August up to the end of November 1942, I was in the death camp. It was the period of the mass gassing of the Jews. The few of my friends of suffering who had succeeded in surviving there a longer time told me that in that period there was the largest number of transports of death. They came every day, without interruption, three times daily. Each train numbered fifty cars, with hundreds of people in each one of them. When the transports arrived at night, the victims of Belzec waited in closed cars until 6 o’clock in the morning. Sometimes the transports were larger and more frequent. Jews arrived from everywhere—and only Jews. Never were there any other transports. Belzec served only to kill Jews. . . .3
From the district of Cracow, over 140,000 Jews were deported to Belzec between July 7 and November 15, 1942. From the Lvov district, about 240,000 Jews were deported between the end of July and mid-December 1942 (see Appendix A). About 8,000 Jews were deported to Belzec from the towns of Sandomierz and Zawichost from the district of Radom, and an additional 25,600 from the southern parts of the Lublin district (Bilgoraj and Janow counties).
From the second half of December 1942, no further transports arrived in Belzec, and the mass murder there ceased. The fact that the plan to deport 200,000 Jews from Rumania had been abandoned (see chapter 6) meant that there were no more potential victims for this camp.
The number of Jews deported and murdered in Belzec from identified towns and townships in this stage of the operation was about 414,000. From hundreds of small towns and villages located in these districts, thousands of Jews were deported to Belzec, but no documents or survivors were left and therefore no exact numbers can be determined. Thousands of Jews from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and other countries who had been deported to the ghettos in the Lublin district were also sent to Belzec and murdered there. We may definitely assume that these Jews numbered more than 100,000, and if we include the 93,000 Jews annihilated in Belzec between March and June 1942, the number of 600,000 Jews, as estimated by the official Polish committee to investigate Nazi crimes in occupied Poland, seems to be the lowest possible number. At the Belzec trial, SS Scharführers Heinrich Gley and Robert Juhrs estimated that 500,000 to 540,000 corpses of murdered Jews had been burned in the months between November 1942 and March 1943. The estimated number of 600,000 was also accepted by the Landgericht München in the Federal Republic of Germany in the Belzec-Oberhauser Trial.4
Treblinka
The deportations to Treblinka, which were renewed on September 3, 1942, included transports from the Warsaw district, the Radom district, and the northern part of the Lublin district, all of which were in the vicinity of this camp. The deportations continued without pause until mid-November 1942. During this period 438,600 Jews from the ghettos of the General Government were murdered in Treblinka. Aron Gelberd, who was deported to Treblinka from Czestochowa in October 1942 and was there for nineteen days until his successful escape, wrote that during that time each day three or four transports arrived in the camp, and some of them even came at night.5
From mid-November 1942 until January 1943 there were almost no transports from the General Government to Treblinka. During that period transports from Bialystok were sent there. In January 1943 some small ghettos were finally liquidated, and the Jews were deported to Treblinka. From the Warsaw ghetto some transports with Jews were sent to this camp in the second half of January 1943. The Warsaw ghetto was totally liquidated at the end of April 1943. The Jewish response to this deportation was the big uprising there. From one of the transports that arrived in Treblinka late in April 1943, some 220 young men were selected and sent to a labor camp in Budzyn, near Lublin. In the period January-April 1943, 31,5000 Jews were deported to Treblinka from the General Government.
From the beginning of the extermination activities in Treblinka, on July 23, 1942, until the end of April 1943, about 763,000 Jews from the ghettos of the General Government were murdered there (see Appendix A).6
Sobibor
The deportations and killing operations were renewed in Sobibor at the beginning of October 1942, after the repair works on the Lublin-Chelm railway were accomplished. This stage of the deportations from the ghettos in the General Government continued at a relatively slow pace, until the beginning of May 1943.
Dov Freiberg, who was in Sobibor at that time, wrote about these transports from Poland:
The people who arrived from the last ghettos and labor camps of Poland had already passed through the seven circles
of hell before they reached Sobibor. They were in despair; they already knew what awaited them; and there was no need to tell them stories. The Germans did not even address them. They shouted at them to take off their clothes quickly, maltreated and struck them until the last moment. The deportees asked whether it would take much time until the gas chambers. There were among them people who had escaped from the Aktionen, who had jumped from the trains, who had been in the forests, who had gone into hiding, but did not find refuge and had returned to the ghettos knowing exactly what awaited them.7
One transport to Sobibor that left an especially shocking impression on the prisoners there included Jews from Majdanek concentration camp. In this transport there were about 5,000 prisoners. They wore the striped prisoners’ clothes, and many of these utterly weakened Jews had died en route. When this transport arrived, the gas chambers were inactive because of a mechanical breakdown, so the prisoners were kept during the day and night in an open area between Camp I and Camp II. During the night, 200 of them died, some of exhaustion and others from the blows and shootings of the SS men. The people were so weak that they could not even cry; only groans were heard. In the morning those who still had some strength were forced to support the weak, and all of them were taken to the gas chambers.8 A group of Jewish prisoners from the camp staff was ordered to remove the corpses that remained on the square. Dov Freiberg, one of these prisoners, writes:
The SS man Frenzel selected twenty prisoners and told us that we should work naked because the corpses were dirty and full of lice. We had to take the dead to the trolley, a distance of about 200 meters. In spite of the fact that we were used to this kind of work, I cannot describe our feelings when we carried the dead on our naked bodies. The Germans urged us with shouts and blows. While I was dragging a man’s body, I stopped for a while and, not seeing a German nearby, I laid it on the ground. And then the body, which I thought was of dead man, rose up, looked at me with great eyes and asked: “Is it still far?” He said these words with great effort and collapsed. . . . At that moment I felt lashes on my head and back. The SS man Frenzel whipped me. I caught the living dead by his feet and dragged him to the trolley. . . .9
In October and in the beginning of November 1942, close to 28,000 people were deported to Sobibor from the Lublin district. From that time until the beginning of May 1943, more transports arrived sporadically in the Lublin district with an additional 4,500 Jews.
In the winter of 1942/43 and in the spring and summer of 1943, transports arrived in Sobibor with Jews from the Lvov district. In some of the transports the Jews were naked. They were forced to undress before entering the freight cars, to make it more difficult for them to escape from the train. One of these transports during the winter stopped at Belzec, but this camp was already in its closing stage and could not receive the human cargo: the transport was subsequently dispatched to Sobibor.10
In her testimony Ada Lichtman told of a transport that arrived from Lvov in the winter; nude corpses were removed from the closed freight cars. “The prisoner ‘Platform Workers’ said that the corpses were frozen and stuck to one another, and when they were laid on the trolley, they disintegrated, and parts of them fell off. These people had had a long voyage and their corpses crumbled. . . .”11
Leon Feldhendler, a prisoner in Sobibor, wrote about a transport that arrived from Lvov in June 1943:
There were fifty freight cars all together—twenty-five of them with living prisoners, and twenty-five with corpses. The living were nude. In the freight cars with the killed, the corpses were mingled, without any wounds, only swollen. The prisoners were forced to unload the freight cars and put the corpses on the trolley to the crematorium. The smell of the corpses made it impossible to enter the freight cars. The Germans whipped us to force us to enter them. From the state of disintegration of the bodies, these people had been dead for about two weeks. . . .12
From these testimonies it is difficult to evaluate the number of Jews from the Lvov district who were deported to Sobibor and murdered there after the Belzec camp stopped its extermination activities. There were some such transports, and the number of Jews in them can be estimated at between 15,000 and 25,000.13
The number of Jews deported to Sobibor from the General Government from October 1942 through June 1943 was between 70,000 and 80,000. The total number of Jews from the General Government deported to Sobibor was between 145,000 and 155,000 (see Appendix A).
The mass deportations in the General Government were completed by mid-November 1942. Following the intervention of German army authorities in charge of military enterprises and supply, Jewish workers and their families were left in some ghettos. On October 9, 1942, in response to the army’s request, Himmler issued an order that Jews who worked for the military as tailors, furriers, and shoemakers should be collected in concentration camps in Warsaw and Lublin, where they would continue their work for the army under the direction of the SS. The order further stated that Jews who were directly employed as workers in war industries should temporarily remain at their work places, but that efforts should be made to replace them with Poles and then send the Jews to concentration camps in eastern Poland. Himmler stressed that all these measures were temporary because, “in accordance with the wish of the Führer, the Jews should some day disappear.”14
Friedrich Krüger, the Higher SS and Police Leader of the General Government who received Himmler’s order, himself issued an order on November 10, 1942, which listed fifty-four ghettos where Jewish workers would temporarily remain.15 According to the report of Richard Korherr, the head of the Statistics Department in Himmler’s office, on December 31, 1942, the estimated number of Jews in the Cracow district was 37,000; Radom district, 29,400; Lublin district, 20,000; Warsaw district, 50,000; Lvov district, 161,514; a total of 297,914. When Krüger’s order was issued, with the exception of the Lvov district, the bulk of the Jews had already been exterminated.16
These few remaining Jewish ghettos in the Warsaw, Radom, and Lublin districts were liquidated between January and May 1943. About 36,000 Jews from these ghettos were sent to Treblinka and Sobibor, and the remainder to concentration camps. The last ghettos in the Lvov district were liquidated by June 1943. According to Fritz Katzman, the Police and SS Leader of the Lvov district, until Krüger’s order of November 10, 1942, 254,989 Jews had been evacuated.17 All these Jews had found their death in Belzec, where the killing operations stopped after this mission had been completed. The remaining Jews of the Lvov district were killed in local Aktionen in the first half of 1943. Some transports were sent via Belzec to Sobibor.18 On June 27, 1943, 21,156 Jews remained in the Lvov district in closed camps.
Operation Reinhard, which had begun in March 1942, was completed. No ghettos remained in the General Government and, with a few minor exceptions, it was free of Jews. In an address given by Hans Frank in Cracow on August 2, 1943, the Nazi head of the General Government said: “We started here with three and a half million Jews, and what remains of them—a few working companies only.”19
18
Deportations from Bialystok General District and Ostland
Bialystok General District
The Bialystok General District comprised the regions of Bialystok, Grodno, and Volkovysk. It constituted an independent administrative district within the German regime in occupied Poland and was under the authority of Erich Koch, the Gauleiter of East Prussia and Reichskommissar of the Ukraine. Bialystok General District was divided administratively into five Kreiskommissariats or sub-districts.
During the first months of the German occupation, at the end of June 1941, the Jewish population of the Bialystok General District suffered a wave of mass murders. From July to September 1941, 31,000 Jews, mostly men, were shot by the Einsatzgruppen near their homes. On the eve of the mass deportations to Treblinka and Auschwitz, in the autumn of 1942, there were about 210,000 Jews in the district, concentrated in ghettos. The largest of these were Bialystok ghetto, with over 41,000 Jews, and Grodno gh
etto, with 23,000 Jews.
In the first half of October 1942, the Reich Security Main Office issued an order to local SS authorities in the Bialystok General District to liquidate all the ghettos in the district and deport the Jews. But after the intervention of the German army and German civilian authorities that employed Jewish labor in war-economy enterprises, it was decided that the liquidation of the Bialystok ghetto would be postponed.1
The deportation of the Jews from the Bialystok district to Treblinka and, in part, to Auschwitz commenced after the deportation of most of the General Government Jews had been completed. It began in mid-October 1942, and continued until mid-February 1943. The first to be deported were the Jews from the small ghettos; the last were from the Grodno ghetto and some from the Bialystok ghetto. At the end of this period, only 30,000 Jews from the entire General District remained in the Bialystok ghetto.
When the deportation began, on November 2, 1942, most of the Jews in the district, except those from Bialystok, Grodno, and a few other ghettos, were concentrated in five collection camps (Sammellager), located at Bialystok, at Kelbasin near Grodno, at Bogusze near Grajewo, and at Volkovysk and Zambrow near Lomza. All the Jews in these camps were sent to Treblinka, with the exception of the Zambrow Jews, who were deported to Auschwitz. The Jews of Bielsk Podlaski, which was in the southern part of the district and thus relatively close to Treblinka, were sent directly to the extermination camp, without passing through a collection camp.