The Łόdź ghetto, however, was to be a step change for the worse in the suffering of the Jewish population. Conditions within the ghetto were unsanitary and overcrowded. By the time the ghetto was sealed 70,000 Jews had left Łόdź – many had either been deported or had fled to other parts of Poland – but 164,000 Jews still remained, all of whom were now crammed into an area of 1.5 square miles.
Max Epstein, a fifteen-year-old schoolboy, was one of the Łόdź Jews imprisoned within the ghetto. Before the war he had lived a comfortable life – his father was a prosperous businessman who owned a lumberyard in the city. Now, Max, his father and his mother were confined to one room in an old house within the ghetto. As soon as Max’s father arrived in the ghetto he made a fateful decision. ‘My father was already in his middle fifties,’ says Max Epstein, ‘and his philosophy was, I don’t want to live. He didn’t dare to commit suicide, because you just don’t. But he said: “That’s the end of it. I really don’t want this. I’ve lived my life and I don’t want to live.” So he closed the shutters, it was always dark in our room … He didn’t shave, he just sat there with our shutters closed. He didn’t want to see the world outside.’ But Max, supported by his mother, tried to make the best of life in this new world. ‘When you are young,’ he says, ‘you don’t think of death. I’m not suggesting that we were not aware of the gravity of the situation … But you still think of the ridiculously mundane things.’29
Estera Frenkiel, another Jewish teenager trapped in the ghetto, felt ‘just as though a bomb had gone off over our heads … We were used to anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism was also rife amongst the Poles … Polish anti-Semitism was perhaps more financial. But German anti-Semitism was: “Why do you exist? You shouldn’t be! You ought to disappear!” ’30
Part of the Nazis’ plan was to make the ghetto as self-governing as possible. They imposed a ‘Jewish Council’ or ‘Council of Elders’ to oversee the ghetto and established a Jewish police force to keep discipline. The German authorities told the chairman of the Council of Elders, ‘You must particularly ensure order in economic life, food provisions, use of manpower, public health, and public welfare. You are authorized to take all necessary measures and issue all necessary instructions to attain this goal, and to enforce them by means of the Jewish police force that is under your command.’31
The Nazis had sought to establish Jewish committees across Poland in the wake of their invasion and now transferred the idea to the ghettos. Their creation helped the Nazis in a number of important ways. Chiefly, the Jewish leadership groups distanced the German occupiers from contact with most of the other Jews. This meant, in turn, that the perceived risk of ‘infection’ from the Jewish population was reduced. In January 1940, four months before the ghetto had been sealed, the police-president of Łόdź had warned about the ‘danger’ of ‘typhoid fever’ and ‘dysentery’32 spreading from the Jewish-occupied districts of the city. The Nazis had precipitated this situation, of course, by previously depriving the Jews of adequate food and healthcare. An additional consequence of this distancing effect was that German soldiers did not have to see the suffering within the ghetto – there was little danger of them witnessing sights that might potentially cause them emotional disquiet. Another benefit for the Nazis in devolving administrative responsibility to the Jews was the consequent conflict within the ghetto. The Jewish councils eventually were forced by the Germans to choose some of those who would be deported from the ghetto – thus deciding who among their fellow Jews would be sent to an even worse fate. The members of the Jewish councils could also decide to give themselves a less onerous existence, which in turn made many other Jews angry. And a ghetto divided against itself suited the Germans perfectly.
In Łόdź, the chairman of the Council of Elders was a sixty-three-year-old Jew called Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski. A former director of a Łόdź orphanage, he was a domineering character with little formal education. In his role as chairman of the ghetto he would become one of the most controversial Jewish figures of the Holocaust.
Rumkowski knew from the beginning that he was a servant of the Germans, and that they would punish him severely if he did not do as he was asked. On 11 November 1939, every single member of the original Łόdź Jewish Council – apart from Rumkowski and two others – had been arrested and sent to Radogoszcz prison. More than twenty of them were subsequently killed. Their only crime had been not to function as effectively as the Germans had wished. Members of the new Jewish Council, formed shortly afterwards and still under Rumkowski’s chairmanship, were thus well aware that their position of relative privilege could potentially lead to their torture and death.
Within the ghetto, Rumkowski’s power was immense. ‘Toward his fellow Jews,’ wrote Yehuda Leib Gerst, a survivor of the ghetto, ‘he was an incomparable tyrant who behaved just like a Führer and cast deathly terror on anyone who dared to oppose his lowly ways.’33 When Rumkowski subsequently visited the Warsaw ghetto, the Jewish leader, Adam Czerniaków, thought him ‘replete with self-praise’ and ‘conceited’. Rumkowski was also ‘dangerous’, wrote Czerniaków, because ‘he keeps telling the authorities that all is well in his preserve.’ Czerniaków came to the conclusion, having read the newspaper published by Jews in the Łόdź ghetto, that Rumkowski’s ‘main concern’ appeared to be ‘that “his people” should not bother him in the streets by handing him propositions and petitions’.34
The initial Nazi plan, after the Łόdź ghetto had been sealed, was to make the Jews pay for their own food. As a consequence, Jews were forced to part with whatever they owned at a fraction of its real value. One ethnic German who profited on the black market from these one-sided exchanges later confessed that ‘I saw it from the point of view of a businessman. They [the inhabitants of the ghetto] couldn’t nibble on a ring, but if they could get a piece of bread for it, then they could survive for a day or two. If I got something in my hand for 100 marks and it was worth 5000 marks, then I’d be stupid not to buy it.’35
Jacob Zylberstein and his family had no money to buy food from the Germans at the inflated prices they demanded. So he realized that, if he didn’t find a way of smuggling in food and bypassing the Germans, they would all die. He knew that their lives depended on his ability to make contact with a Pole outside the ghetto. This was a task that was immensely difficult since Jews worked almost exclusively within the confines of the ghetto. But Jacob had one advantage – his house backed on to the ghetto fence. Because of this proximity, in the early days of the ghetto he was able to come to an arrangement with a Pole on the other side of the wire. The Pole gave Jacob a loaf of bread; Jacob kept half for his family to eat, sold the other half within the ghetto and then passed on to the Pole the money he had earned. ‘He helped us for two months,’ says Jacob. But then the Pole was caught and killed by the Germans. ‘Still,’ remembers Jacob, ‘two months was a very long time.’
Jacob could not believe that the Germans could be so cruel: ‘You can’t comprehend it as a human being, that such a thing can happen to you. How could a normal human being understand it? Hundreds died – weeks after the ghetto was closed … I remember that the hunger was so colossal that my mother went to pick weeds, and she cooked the weeds. You [even] got hold of potato peels – it’s more than a luxury, it was the best food ever.’36
The outbreak of war did not just bring increased suffering to Jews and Poles. Other categories of people who had been targeted in the past by the Nazis were also at much greater risk – most notably the mentally and physically disabled. The way in which they were now treated would, in turn, have an impact on the development of the Holocaust.
As we have seen, Hitler despised the disabled. But, while the Nazis had introduced compulsory sterilization, they had so far refrained from authorizing the killing of the disabled – a policy known euphemistically as ‘euthanasia’. That all changed just before the war began, when Philipp Bouhler, head of the Führer’s Chancellery, brought to Hitler’s attention a letter written by th
e father of a severely disabled child. The father, a believer in ‘euthanasia’, asked Hitler for permission for his child, who was a few months old, to be killed.
Hitler authorized his own doctor, Karl Brandt, to investigate the case and, if he found that the father’s description of his son’s condition was accurate, to arrange the child’s murder. Brandt did as he was asked and subsequently organized the killing. Recent research has shown that the murder was carried out towards the end of July 1939.37 That is several months later than had previously been thought, and offers further evidence that Hitler believed the forthcoming war would provide useful cover for drastic action against the disabled. He was fulfilling the prophecy he had made to Gerhard Wagner, Leader of the Reich Doctors, back in 1935, that he would ‘radically solve’ the ‘problem’ of the mentally ill in the event of a future conflict.38
The death of this one child led Hitler to authorize Bouhler and Brandt to murder other children who were similarly disabled – not just babies but older children as well. A whole administrative structure was subsequently constructed to oversee the process. In August 1939 the Interior Ministry issued confidential guidelines that called on midwives to report any newborn children who were suffering from conditions such as deformity or paralysis. These reports were then sent to three separate doctors who marked each document with a plus or a minus. If a majority wrote down a minus, the child was sent to a special clinic. Here the children who had been selected to die were killed, often by an overdose of morphine or another sedative. In the official record their deaths were recorded as the result of another plausible disease like measles.
The whole operation was conducted in great secrecy. The general public was never supposed to find out what was happening to children inside these special units. But within the walls of the hospital, it was difficult to hide the evidence of the crime. During the war, Paul Eggert – assessed as a ‘delinquent’ – was sent to Aplerbeck, one of the children’s hospitals that also served as a killing centre. He remembers how every few weeks a nurse would come into the dining room during supper and select children. Next morning they were taken to the doctor’s consulting room – supposedly they were to be immunized against diphtheria or scarlet fever. But Paul noticed that these children ‘never came back’ from their visit to the consulting room. He remembers that on occasion the selected children would hold on to the older boys in an attempt not to be taken away, but ‘the doctor or the nurse would say, “Come now”, or something [like that].’ Long after the war Paul recalled ‘the screams’ and the terrified backward ‘glances’ from the children as they were led away to be killed. It was ‘hopeless’, he says, ‘it was terrible.’39
Hitler didn’t just want to kill disabled children, he also wanted to murder disabled adults. In June or July 1939 – the exact date isn’t known – he asked Dr Leonardo Conti, the state secretary for health, to widen the ‘euthanasia’ scheme. Philipp Bouhler, of the Chancellery of the Führer, wasn’t happy about Conti’s planned role, as his department was already involved with the children’s euthanasia operation. An expert in internal Nazi politics, Bouhler quickly managed to manoeuvre Conti out of the way and control both schemes.40
What this bureaucratic manoeuvring demonstrated was the flexibility of the administrative structure of the Nazi state – especially when it came to secret tasks like the killing of the disabled. German doctors were already murdering children in special units without any law to permit their action having been passed, and without the knowledge of the vast majority of Germans – including those in the government departments that would have expected to oversee such a policy had it been approved by the state in any formal way.
Job titles meant nothing to Hitler, as long as you could fulfil the task he wanted. The department that was running this large murder operation was called the Chancellery of the Führer and had previously had nothing to do with medical issues. Bouhler, the head of the Chancellery, was a thirty-nine-year-old party bureaucrat who, up to now, had worked on party-related business. His deputy, Viktor Brack, had once been Himmler’s chauffeur. Neither Brack nor Bouhler possessed any medical qualifications.41 But in the Nazi state, all this was irrelevant. What mattered was that these were ideologically committed, ambitious men keen to progress their careers and serve their Führer. If Hitler wanted mentally and physically disabled patients to be killed, then they would make it happen.
On 9 October 1939 Viktor Brack chaired a meeting attended by medical professionals sympathetic to the idea of killing the adult disabled. Here they discussed the mechanics of how the system should work. They decided that first a list of all the institutions where ‘mental patients, epileptics, and the feebleminded’ were currently treated should be compiled.42 Staff at the named institutions would then be told to fill in forms outlining the nature of each patient’s disability. Medical professionals would examine these forms, and decide who should live and who should die. One factor these doctors used in reaching their verdict was the extent to which the patients could still perform useful work. The selection was thus made on economic as well as medical grounds.43
The question of how exactly to kill the adult disabled was also discussed at the 9 October meeting. The Nazis were aware that there would probably be too many people to murder – an estimated 70,000 – just by medication, injection or starvation. So Brack consulted Arthur Nebe, head of the Criminal Police, about the best method of killing the disabled in large numbers. Nebe in turn suggested that Brack talk to Dr Albert Widmann, who ran the chemical department of the Criminal Technical Institute. Like a number of those who came to be involved in these secret schemes, Widmann was young and relatively inexperienced. He was just twenty-seven years old when he was asked to help devise methods to kill the disabled, and had received his doctorate in chemical engineering only the year before. At his trial after the war, Widmann said that he had been told by Nebe that ‘animals in human form’ were to be killed under the new scheme. At a subsequent meeting, Widmann said that in his expert opinion ‘carbon monoxide gas’ would be the best killing agent. He suggested that the gas could be ‘discharged into the wards at night and thus “euthanize” the mental patients’.44
In an attempt to ensure the secrecy of this enormous murder operation, the euthanasia action was known only as ‘T4’ after the address of the headquarters of the scheme, Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Berlin. A number of those involved even adopted pseudonyms. Brack himself used the alias ‘Jennerwein’, the name of an infamous nineteenth-century poacher. But there still came a point, late in 1939, when those involved thought some kind of official authorization for their actions was necessary. So Hitler was approached, most likely by Bouhler, and asked to confirm in writing that he had ordered the project. The result was a short note, signed by Hitler, which said that Bouhler and Dr Brandt had been given the ‘responsibility’ of authorizing doctors to grant ‘a mercy death’ to those suffering from ‘incurable’ illnesses. Significantly, Hitler backdated the note to ‘1 September 1939’, the day of the invasion of Poland. He thus emphasized once again the connection between his decision to kill the disabled and the outbreak of war. This link between the war and the creation of an apparatus for the mass murder of the disabled was important not just for Hitler. As many of those involved in the killings were told, why should the disabled and unproductive be allowed to live at a time when the healthy were dying on the battlefield?45
Hitler’s intense loathing of the disabled – particularly the mentally disabled – was on show that autumn during a meeting attended by Hans Lammers, head of the Reich Chancellery and Hitler’s closest legal adviser. At the Nuremberg trials after the war, Lammers testified: ‘On this occasion, the Führer discussed, in my presence for the first time, the problem of euthanasia. He explained that he thought it fit to remove “life unworthy of life” – that is the lives of the seriously mentally ill – through medical intervention causing death. He mentioned, if I recall correctly, by way of example, serious mental illnesses in which mentally
ill people could only sleep on sand or sawdust because they would soil themselves constantly – cases in which these sick people would eat their own excrement as food. And he explained how it was the right thing to end this “life unworthy of life”. He also explained how through this, there could be savings in the cost of hospitals, doctors and nursing staff.’46
On 4 January 1940, Dr Widmann conducted a gassing experiment in Brandenburg an der Havel at a prison converted into a euthanasia unit. The gassings took place in a tiled room with fake water pipes along the ceiling. The patients to be murdered were told to undress outside the room because they had to take a shower. Once the patients were locked inside the pretend shower room, Widmann personally turned on the valve to release the gas from bottles of carbon monoxide. The gas flowed through pipes into the room and the twenty or so patients were murdered. After they had died the room was ventilated and the bodies taken away to be burnt.
Dr Widmann’s original idea of gassing the patients as they slept in their dormitories had been considered impractical, but this fake-shower method proved to be an effective method of committing mass murder. From the Nazi perspective it solved a number of practical problems. First, the patients who were to be killed were calm almost until the last moments of their lives. There was no need for them to be anxious about something as prosaic as taking a shower. Large numbers of patients could also be killed simultaneously, and fewer staff needed to be involved than in any previous killing method. Finally, the use of fake showers meant that the killers were distanced from the act of killing. Instead of having to look into the eyes of patients as they injected or shot them, all the killers needed to do now was to turn on a valve. The murderers were not just emotionally separated from the moment of killing, but physically separated as well.
The Holocaust: A New History Page 22