The Holocaust: A New History

by Laurence Rees

  As the Wehrmacht crossed into Poland, Reinhard Heydrich arranged with the German Army High Command for more than 2,000 ‘Einsatzgruppen’ – ‘operational groups’ or special task forces – to enter the country immediately behind the army in order to combat ‘elements hostile’ to Germany. Heydrich, who in September was appointed head of the Reich Main Security Office, ordered that ‘the higher echelons of the Polish population need to be rendered as good as harmless.’ The result was that around 16,000 Poles were murdered in the first weeks of the invasion – a mix of members of the intelligentsia, priests, Jews and anyone else considered ‘hostile’.

  The atrocities committed by the invading forces were many and various. Erich Ehlers, a member of Einsatzgruppe II, recorded in his diary in September how ‘Polish cutthroats’ were summarily executed. He wrote that ‘one of them still ate a piece of bread, even after the pit had been dug and the guns were already pointed at him’.2 Helmuth Bischoff, commander of an Einsatzkommando, reported that shortly after his arrival in Bydgoszcz he had decided to place ‘14 Jewish and Polish male hostages’ in ‘front of the hotel entrance’ so that ‘the Polish passers-by were well aware that with every shot fired that night in our street, one of them would be killed. Because even this did not discourage the Polish snipers, the fate of the hostages was sealed.’3 One ordinary German soldier, a member of a transport regiment, remembers witnessing the SS Regiment ‘Germania’ conducting a mass execution of Jews near Kraków as the regimental band played.4

  In early November 1939 the Nazis called academics at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków to a meeting in one of the lecture rooms. Once they arrived they were beaten with rifle butts before being transported to concentration camps. ‘I had a very Catholic upbringing,’ says Mieczysław Brożek, an assistant professor at the university, ‘and it did not enter my head that something evil [like this] could happen … It was beyond our life experience.’ Once in Dachau he was so appalled by the suffering that he felt a ‘complete annihilation of values. After the experiences I had in the camp there are no values. I had a vision of the worthlessness of everything. The senselessness of everything. This tormented me desperately, to the brink of suicide.’5

  As for the mass of Polish civilians, they soon discovered that the Nazis wished them to become a nation of slaves. They were classed as Slavs by the Nazis and were therefore deemed to be an inferior race. ‘There were no schools [any more],’ says Michael Preisler, who was twenty years old in September 1939 and lived in the west of Poland. ‘The churches were closed too. Polish people couldn’t ride buses together with Germans. They even said, “not allowed for Poles and dogs”. We were actually treated just like animals. We were treated as something different than humans.’6

  Some members of the German Army were appalled by the atrocities their fellow countrymen were committing in Poland. Major Helmuth Stieff, for example, wrote to his family and said ‘we don’t feel like victors here, more like guilty criminals … This annihilation of whole families with women and children can only be the work of subhumans who no longer deserve to be called “Germans”. I am ashamed to be a German.’7 Famously, General Johannes Blaskowitz wrote a critical report about the activities of the German security forces in Poland that reached Hitler. Hitler was furious, saying that ‘you do not lead a war with Salvation Army methods’ and that ‘he had never trusted General Blaskowitz’.8

  Blaskowitz was an exception. Most senior officers did not complain to their superiors about the atrocities that were committed in Poland. Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, the head of the army, set the tone when he wrote on 1 November that the ‘Jew is the fiercest enemy of the German Volk’. A few months later he reminded his troops that the ‘ethnic-political measures ordered by the Führer for the security of German living space in Poland … inevitably must lead to what would otherwise be regarded as unusual, harsh measures against the Polish population in the occupied territory’.9

  In many cases officers and men of the German Army assisted the Einsatzgruppen in their work – for example, by suggesting groups to be targeted.10 The army also shot hostages as a reprisal for attacks, and this in turn empowered German soldiers to kill innocent Polish civilians.11 Nearly 400 Poles were murdered for this reason in Bydgoszcz in early September.

  All this brutality did not mean, however, that the invasion of Poland marks the beginning of the Holocaust as we know it. Though several thousand Jews were murdered in the early months of the occupation, Hitler and the Nazi leadership were also targeting the ‘leadership class’ within Poland at the same time, and the overarching policy as regards the Jews remained the same as before – persecution and expulsion. But while the outbreak of war appeared to have closed one possible avenue for removing the Jews – the large-scale emigration of the Jews to countries not under German control – it had simultaneously opened another – the possibility of expelling Jews to the furthest reaches of the new Nazi empire. In late September Heydrich said Hitler had approved the idea of deporting the Jews to the east, and as an initial measure Polish Jews were to be concentrated in cities in order to make them easier to control.12

  Hitler announced in October 1939 that German-occupied Poland would be divided into two. One part would be incorporated into the Reich and ‘Germanized’ and a section in the south-east of the country, bordering Soviet-occupied Poland, would remain ‘Polish’, albeit under German occupation. This area, containing around 11 million people and including the cities of Warsaw, Lublin and Kraków, was to be called the General Government of the Occupied Polish Areas – subsequently shortened to the General Government. The potential for this area to become, in Nazi slang, a ‘dustbin’ for the Reich, was obvious from the beginning. The rulers of the territory to be Germanized, notably Albert Forster of Danzig/West Prussia, and Arthur Greiser of the Warthegau – the area centred around Poznań – were both keen to ‘cleanse’ their areas and hoped to send the unwanted Poles and Jews to the General Government. Hitler remarked himself, at the end of September, that territory in the east of Poland between the River Bug – the border with Soviet-occupied Poland – and the River Vistula, should accommodate ‘the whole of Jewry’, while slightly to the west, but still within the General Government, a ‘form of Polish state’ should be created.

  The Jews already living in the General Government rapidly learnt that they were at the very bottom of the new racial order. In the town of Izbica, Toivi Blatt, a twelve-year-old Jewish schoolboy, discovered that it was not only the Germans who were dangerous – non-Jewish Poles could be almost as threatening: ‘I [had] thought that now we have the same enemy – the same Nazis who are hurting Poland, they’re hurting Catholics, they’re hurting Jews – that we will get together.’13 Instead, he could see that some Poles had realized ‘the Jews are second class and you could do with them whatever you wanted.’ Many of the Jewish merchants who traded around Izbica ‘were beaten up’ and had their ‘money taken away’ because Polish villagers understood that the Jews were now without protection from the state. Catholic Poles even turned on each other. Within two weeks of the Germans seizing control of Izbica, Toivi saw a Polish collaborator ‘beating another Pole because he didn’t obey some German order’.

  The first concerted effort to expel Jews into the General Government began in October 1939, little more than a month after the war had started. The head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Müller, ordered Adolf Eichmann – the SD officer who had organized the deportation of many Austrian Jews in the wake of the Anschluss – to plan the expulsion of around 80,000 Jews from Katowice, a city in a part of Poland that was to be Germanized. Almost immediately the planned deportations were broadened to include Jews from within the Reich, and Eichmann started developing plans to expel Jews from Vienna. In a note he sent to the Nazi Gauleiter of Silesia he mentioned that, after the initial transports, he had to send a ‘progress’ report to his superiors, and then ‘in all probability’ this would be given to ‘the Führer’ who would then decide how many more Jews should be sen
t east.14

  The precise destination for these Jews was the town of Nisko on the San river, around 50 miles south of Lublin in the far east of Nazi-occupied Poland. At the end of October nearly 5,000 Jews from Vienna and cities in western Poland were sent to this new Jewish ‘reservation’. When they left the trains, a few of the Jews were told to help in the construction of a camp, but the majority were simply dumped in the countryside without food or shelter. The quasi-genocidal nature of this scheme was obvious from the beginning. As Hans Frank, ruler of the General Government, put it: ‘What a pleasure, finally to be able to tackle the Jewish race physically. The more that die, the better.’15

  Just a few days later these transports were halted on Himmler’s orders16 and the Nisko initiative was dropped. This was almost certainly a pragmatic, rather than an ideological, decision. Himmler now had other problems, or ‘challenges’ as he would have seen them, that impacted on the further transportation of Jews from Germany and Austria into eastern Poland. On 7 October 1939 he had been confirmed as Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of German Nationality. This almost mystical-sounding title concealed a brutal reality. For Himmler was now in charge of deporting large numbers of Poles from the areas of Poland annexed by Germany into the General Government in order to free up homes for hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans. Many of these Volksdeutsche were arriving as part of a deal the Nazis had negotiated with Stalin to allow them to leave territory now controlled by the Soviet Union – such as the Baltic States – and come ‘back to the Reich’ or ‘Heim ins Reich’ as the slogan went. Transporting all these people to the new Reich and then finding homes and jobs for them – all in the midst of a war – was a logistical task of formidable difficulty. But the Nazi leadership believed the racial component of the task was so central that there was never any question of delaying this influx of new German ‘blood’.

  The suffering of the Poles who were thrown out of their homes to make space for these new arrivals was – predictably – immense. Michael Preisler remembers how, a few weeks after Himmler had been appointed to his new job, there was a sudden ‘knock at the door’ at two o’clock in the morning and a gang of Nazis rushed into the family home. ‘They went all over the rooms, where my sisters were dressing, and they were standing over them, watching them. We got dressed and we couldn’t even take anything, they say you cannot take anything, no food, nothing, no extra clothes, nothing. And that’s it – they were pushing, you know like Germans. Everything had to be done right away. Then we were marching on the street to a hall where there were other people. And then finally when they collected more families, they took us to the railway station.’17

  Another Pole, Anna Jeziorkowska, was deported with her family from Posen (the name the Germans gave to Poznań). She remembers that when the Germans ‘burst’ into their flat, ‘there was great chaos, crying, wailing. The Germans pushed us, they hit father on the face, and we got so frightened that we started crying. My younger brother, he was very delicate, started vomiting.’18

  Thousands of Poles like Michael Preisler and Anna Jeziorkowska were taken on trains and dumped in the General Government. Michael Preisler and his family were housed in the west of the General Government, first in a ‘big hall’ and then the whole family was crammed into one room in a house. Anna Jeziorkowska and her family were abandoned in the small town of Golice and huddled together in the open in the town square until an old man took pity on them and offered them space to sleep on his floor.

  The Germans conducted the deportations not only with great brutality but also in an atmosphere of administrative chaos. In January 1940, the Higher SS and Police Leader in the General Government, Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger, estimated that 110,000 Poles had been sent to the General Government – 30,000 of them without proper agreement.19 As Goebbels put it, writing in his diary the same month: ‘Himmler is presently shifting populations. Not always successfully.’20

  Shortly after Goebbels had written those words, Hans Frank, ruler of the General Government, decided that these mass deportations had to stop. Frank acted not out of compassion at the fate of those who had been transported into the General Government, but because of the turmoil that had resulted. As one of Frank’s senior officials puts it: ‘How can you organize anything, when you don’t know [beforehand] that a train will arrive at X or Y or some place? There was nothing to organize … I didn’t know where the transports would arrive. The district leadership didn’t know this either …’21 At a meeting with Göring and Himmler on 12 February, Frank asked for the timetable for the deportations to be reassessed. An uneasy agreement was reached by which future deportations were not supposed to be sent into the General Government without Frank’s prior consent.

  As for the new ethnic German settlers, many of them did not find life as rosy as they had hoped. They had been promised that they were going ‘home to the Reich’ so it was a surprise to discover that while they were – according to the Nazis – arriving in the ‘Reich’, it wasn’t the ‘Reich’ they had necessarily been expecting. Irma Eigi, a seventeen-year-old ethnic German from Estonia, remembers how unhappy she and her family were to discover that they had to begin their new lives not in Germany but in Poland. ‘We hadn’t reckoned on that at all,’ she says. ‘When we were told we were going to the Warthegau, well, it was quite a shock, I can tell you.’22

  A sense of disappointment about this whole enterprise was not confined to the arriving Volksdeutsche – some of the Germans who lived in the part of Poland that had been taken from Germany at the end of the First World War were just as displeased with the new arrivals. ‘Quite a few times we welcomed trains carrying resettlers [from Volhynia, an area that bordered Poland to the east],’ says Charles Bleeker Kohlsaat, from an ethnic German family. ‘They spoke poor German, they had a terrible accent which nobody could understand and we almost took them for Poles. I remember particularly clearly one family with a boy – the boy might have been, perhaps ten years old, perhaps he was only nine … And when this boy arrived with his German parents – “German” in inverted commas – he was wearing a Polish boy scouts’ cap, [and] he had used an indelible pencil to draw a swastika on the cap, this square cap … Basically we were appalled by the quality of these resettlers, because they were shabbily dressed, they arrived with unsightly bundles. Later, as refugees, we also carried such bundles, but we were not to know that at the time … So we said to ourselves, good heavens, what is the point of pushing out these old-established Polish families – farming families – and moving in these semi-Polish resettlers instead? And they gave the impression of being rather under-developed … besides, they were dressed in exactly the same fashion as the Polish farmers. They wore the high fur hat, they wore the long fur made out of unsheared sheepskin, they wore high boots and they rolled their cigarettes like the Poles did. And among themselves they spoke Polish. Well, we said: “One lot out, one lot in, what is the difference?” To us they were not genuine Germans, they were third-class Germans, if that.’23

  Despite the meeting in February, and further protests by Hans Frank, the deportations into the General Government never entirely stopped. Between May 1940 and January 1941 around 90,000 Poles and 2,500 Jews were deported from the Warthegau into the General Government to create space for the arrival of the ethnic Germans.24 Himmler made his own attitude clear in a memo he wrote in May 1940, when he said the population of the General Government should eventually consist of an ‘inferior remnant’.25

  Amid this administrative infighting, the Nazis began to place greater emphasis on a short-term solution to their Jewish ‘problem’ – ghettos. Since it was obviously not possible to transport at once all of the Polish Jews to the General Government, and given that it was a central tenet of Nazi ideological belief that the Jews were dangerous, both as supposed carriers of disease and as spiritual corruptors, it is not surprising that the idea of containing them within designated areas of Polish cities became widespread – nothwithstanding the concerns about ghetto ‘se
curity’ that Heydrich had raised at the time of the November 1938 conference held in the wake of Kristallnacht.26

  The first large ghetto to be constructed was in the city of Łόdź – renamed Litzmannstadt by the Germans – in the Warthegau. This was an enormous task for the Nazis, since one in three of the 700,000 population of Łόdź was Jewish. In a secret order of 10 December 1939, the German governor of the city, Friedrich Uebelhoer, wrote: ‘Of course, the creation of the ghetto is only a transitional arrangement … the ultimate objective must be to completely burn out this plague spot.’27 The first public order, calling for Jews to live within a designated area within the city, was published in early February 1940, and the ghetto was secured on 1 May. After this date any Jew found outside the wire fence of the ghetto without permission was liable to be shot.

  Prior to the creation of the ghetto, the Jews of Łόdź had already suffered at the hands of the Nazis. Soldiers of Einsatzkommando 2 entered the city in the first days of the invasion and with the assistance of ethnic Germans instigated riots, tormented Jews they found on the streets and carried off others to work in forced-labour gangs. In his diary entry for 12 September 1939, one Łόdź Jew, Dawid Sierakowiak, wrote that ‘the local Germans freely indulge their whims.’ Jews were ‘beaten and robbed’, others were ‘sadistically abused. Some Jews were ordered to stop working, to remove their clothes and stand facing the wall, at which point they were told they’d be shot. Shots were fired in their direction, and though nobody was killed this was repeated a few times.’28

  Shortly after they seized control of the city in September 1939, the Nazis banned the Jews from working in the textile industry – a major source of Jewish employment – and all Jewish businesses were handed over to Germans. Jews were told not to ride on buses or possess radios or visit the synagogue or own a car, and from 12 November Jews were ordered to wear a Star of David marking on their clothing.