There was now a divergence between those who believed there might be a chance of exiting the war before absolute defeat, and those who understood that they had ‘burnt all bridges’ and would keep fighting until the end. These fanatics would continue to murder Jews out of conviction – almost regardless of the consequences. Setbacks on the battlefield would never divert them from their course. Indeed, as time went on, many of these same ideologues would feel their resolve to kill the Jews harden as military difficulties increased. For the war against the Jews, they felt, was one fight they could win.
13. Nazi Death Camps in Poland
(1942)
In the Nazi war against the Jews, the main battleground was in Poland – and never more so than during 1942. Not just because all of the major death camps were built on Polish soil, and Poland was the destination for the vast majority of the transports from across Europe, but because more Polish Jews died in the Holocaust than Jews from any other nation – around 3 million.1 Half of all the Jews murdered in the course of the entire Final Solution.
On 19 July 1942, on a visit to Poland, Himmler ordered that the ‘resettlement of the entire Jewish population of the General Government’ should be ‘carried out and completed by 31 December 1942’.2 According to Himmler, a ‘comprehensive clearing out’ was necessary. This was a euphemistic way of saying that he wanted virtually all of these Jews to be murdered by the end of the year.
Enormous numbers of Polish Jews would now be sent direct to death camps where the vast majority would be murdered within hours of arrival. Only a handful would either temporarily be spared deportation because their work was deemed essential or be selected for the Jewish Sonderkommando units when they arrived at the death camp, and be forced to help the SS with the extermination process.
Himmler’s order is a key moment in the history of the Holocaust – a vital part of an evolutionary process. At the start of 1942 the Nazis did not know for sure how many Jews they were going to kill in the short term. For Heydrich at Wannsee the confrontation with the Jews was still potentially a long-term process of attrition with large numbers of Jews worked to death over a period of time. What Himmler did in July 1942 was to say in effect, ‘We will kill vast numbers of Jews, right now.’ While that was a leap forward, it was one that was possible only because the Nazis had previously embarked on a gradual process of killing selected Jews. Only because of that past history, and the experience that they had gained along the way, could Himmler now be confident of committing mass murder on such a scale.
This was undoubtedly a decision taken in the weeks and months after the Wannsee conference, rather than the implementation of a decision taken at Wannsee or before. We know this partly because of the physical changes that were needed at the two existing specialized death camps with fixed gas chambers. Neither Bełżec nor Sobibór had the capacity to murder the numbers of Jews that Himmler now imagined. Only at this point were both expanded. At Bełżec all transports were temporarily suspended in June while larger gas chambers were built which would allow just over a thousand people to be murdered simultaneously. In the second week of July, transports began again, just in time to fulfil Himmler’s programme of expansion. Similarly, at Sobibór there was a halt in the extermination programme – this time at the end of July. This was partly to allow repairs to be made to the railway line that transported Jews to the camp, but also to enlarge the existing gas chambers. Killing capacity now increased from 600 people at a time within the gas chambers to 1,200. Most significantly of all, an entirely new extermination camp at Treblinka – close to the main railway line to Warsaw, 60 miles away to the south-west – opened on 23 July just four days after Himmler’s announcement. More Jews would eventually be murdered at Treblinka than at any other camp with the exception of Auschwitz.
A number of other factors came together at this point – all of which had occurred since the Wannsee conference. The first was an administrative change of considerable consequence. During the early months of 1942 Hans Frank, ruler of the General Government, had been called to account over allegations of corruption. As Frank’s power weakened, Himmler assumed control over Jewish policy within the General Government subject only to Hitler’s wishes. This was especially important because more Jews lived in the General Government than anywhere else – around 1.7 million. Himmler already had a subordinate in place in Lublin in the General Government – the Higher SS and Police Chief, Odilo Globocnik – who could be relied upon to organize the practical side of any expansion in the extermination plan.
There was also the question of the availability of food. A cut in rations to the German people in April 1942 had proved understandably unpopular, and the Nazi leadership remained determined that before any German went short of food others should starve first. Göring expressed this view at a meeting on 6 August 1942 when he imposed new demands on the occupied territories. ‘This everlasting concern about foreign peoples must cease now, once and for all,’ he told a group of senior officials. ‘I have here before me reports on what you are expected to deliver. It is nothing at all when I consider your territories. It makes no difference to me in this connection if you say that your people will starve. Let them do so, as long as no German collapses from hunger.’3 A few days before the meeting, Himmler had ordered that food deliveries to Warsaw in August should be restricted, and any farmers who didn’t hand over the produce the Germans expected should be executed.4 Another way, of course, of reducing the demand for food in the occupied territories was to kill many of the people who were currently eating it. In this case the Jews of the General Government.
An additional external event that would have intensified the murderous determination of both Hitler and Himmler was the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. In an operation planned by the British SOE (Special Operations Executive), two Czech operatives attacked Heydrich’s open-top Mercedes as he drove through Prague on the morning of 27 May 1942. Heydrich died of his wounds eight days later. At his funeral on 9 June, Himmler said, ‘We have the sacred duty to atone for his death, to carry forward his work, and now, even more than before, mercilessly to annihilate the enemies of our people without showing any weakness.’5 That evening, at a gathering of senior SS figures, Himmler declared that ‘within a year … no one [i.e. Jews] will be migrating any more. For now things have finally got to be sorted out.’6 The action to murder the Jews of the General Government would be named Operation Reinhard in honour of Heydrich.
Himmler met Hitler on many occasions during this period, and one persuasive analysis is that crucial discussions between them about the expansion of the killing were held on 23 April and 3 May. Himmler even met Hitler in July the day before he announced the ‘comprehensive clearing out’ of the Jews in the General Government, and it is inconceivable that the two of them did not once again discuss the forthcoming killings.7 When Hitler crowed that the Jews would ‘soon not feel like laughing anymore’ two months later, it is very possible that he was referring obliquely to the massive increase in the extermination programme in Poland that had occurred since July.
Around this same time, Himmler and Hitler were also contemplating the mass murder of millions of non-Jews. On 16 July, three days before he gave the order that almost all the Jews of the General Government should be killed by the end of the year, Himmler remarked privately that he had experienced the ‘happiest day of his life’, because he had just discussed with Hitler ‘the greatest piece of colonization which the world will ever have seen’8 and his own key role in creating it. This was the infamous General Plan for the East by which tens of millions of Slavic people would be condemned to slavery and death. Indeed, an indication of how ruthless Himmler would now be in pursuit of racial ‘cleansing’ occurred in the months following this ‘happiest day’. In a massive ‘Germanization’ action that has not received the public attention post-war that it deserves, Himmler ordered the expulsion of large numbers of Poles from the region around Zamość in south-east Poland. Himmler’s senior commander in Lub
lin, Odilo Globocnik, oversaw the forcible deportation of more than 50,000 Poles. The idea was that this whole area, rich in fertile soil, would be colonized by ethnic Germans. But once again the Nazis had overestimated their ability to accomplish the task, and their racial arrogance worked against them. Many Poles fled to the forests, formed resistance units and fought back. It was obviously impractical at this moment for the Nazis to pursue this plan in addition to the deportation of the Jews, and Himmler’s colonization of the region was left unrealized.9
In the General Government more Jews were imprisoned in the Warsaw ghetto than anywhere else. More than twice as many Jews lived in this one small area of the Polish capital than Eichmann had said he wanted to deport that summer from France, Belgium and the Netherlands put together. Not surprisingly, therefore, in the summer of 1942 the more than 300,000 Jews in the Warsaw ghetto were an immediate target for the SS. Adam Czerniaków, chairman of the Jewish Council in the ghetto, wrote in his diary on 18 July that there were ‘rumours’ about deportation. The next day he recorded that he had done his best to reassure those Jews who were anxious. ‘I try to hearten the delegations which come to see me,’ he wrote. ‘What it costs me they do not see. Today I took 2 headache powders, another pain reliever, and a sedative, but my head is still splitting. I am trying not to let the smile leave my face.’ The following day an SS officer said to Czerniaków that he could tell the ghetto population that all talk of deportations was ‘utter nonsense’. But it was a lie. Two days later, on 22 July, Czerniaków wrote: ‘We were told that all the Jews irrespective of sex and age, with certain exceptions, will be deported to the East. By 4 p.m. today a contingent of 6,000 people must be provided. And this (at the minimum) will be the daily quota.’10 Czerniaków’s despair was focused, in particular, on what he called the ‘tragic dilemma’ of the children in orphanages. Did he have to hand them over as well? The answer, of course, was bound to be yes. The SS saw the children as a particular target – to them they were the most ‘useless’ of ‘useless eaters’.
Unbeknown to Adam Czerniaków, one of Odilo Globocnik’s officers had arrived several days before to plan the deportations with the help of the SS who oversaw the ghetto. They now sought the cooperation of the Jewish Council in organizing the transports via a combination of incentive and threat. The incentive was simple: the SS offered to exclude the members of the Jewish Council and their families from deportation. The threat was even more straightforward – if the Jewish Council didn’t cooperate, their loved ones would be killed. Czerniaków was told on 22 July that ‘if the deportation was impeded in any way’ his wife would ‘be the first one to be shot as a hostage’.11
All this was too much for Adam Czerniaków. On 23 July he committed suicide by swallowing a capsule of cyanide. This made no difference to the SS or to the deportations. They appointed another head of the Jewish Council, Marek Lichtenbaum, and carried on as before. More than 2,000 members of the Jewish Order Police within the ghetto now helped organize the deportations. Like the members of the Jewish Council, by doing so they saved – temporarily at least – their own lives and the lives of their wives and children.
No one living inside the ghetto knew for certain what would happen to the Jews who were deported. But some information about what was happening to Jews had filtered back to Warsaw. Emmanuel Ringelblum was particularly well informed and had even heard about one of the death camps by name. He wrote in his diary in June 1942, just before the deportations began, that the Germans were ‘following this plan: The “non-productive elements”, children up to the age of ten and old people over sixty, are locked in sealed railroad cars, which are guarded by a German detail and transported to an unknown destination … where every trace of the “resettled” Jews disappears. The fact that no one has so far succeeded in escaping from the death camp in Belzec, that up till now not a single Jewish or Polish witness of the extermination operation in Belzec has survived, is the clearest indication of how careful they are that the news not be published among their own people.’12
Ringelblum was particularly critical of the role of the Jewish police during the deportations, who ‘said not a single word of protest against this revolting assignment to lead their own brothers to the slaughter’. In his judgement, and based on his own observations, ‘For the most part, the Jewish police showed an incomprehensible brutality … Merciless and violent, they beat those who tried to resist.’13
The action against the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto, starting on 23 July, was one of the most atrocious of all the horrors of the Holocaust. ‘The turmoil and terror is appalling,’ wrote Abraham Lewin in his diary on 1 August. ‘Mothers lose their children. A weak old woman is carried onto the bus. The tragedies cannot be captured in words. The Rabbi from 17 Dzielna Street has been seized and apparently shot. Children walking in the street are seized.’14
Halina Birenbaum, then twelve years old, remembers, ‘Every day there were less and less people, every day more and more empty apartments.’ The Jews took to hiding within the fabric of their apartments ‘behind the wardrobe or behind the bed’, but soon ‘the Germans and their Ukrainian helpers, together with the Jewish police’, started to ‘go from floor to floor in each apartment breaking the doors with iron bars … I heard when they were getting the Jews out, and the screaming, and the shots. Every day is like that – from the morning until evening.’15
Sixty-five thousand Jews were deported to Treblinka in the first ten days of the action. To begin with the SS didn’t deport those who had been granted exemption, but soon, if they had trouble filling a train, they would take anyone they could find. The Jewish police were told that if they did not serve up five people each – every single day – then their own loved ones would be sent in their place. By such methods the great majority of the Jews were expelled from the ghetto by the end of September.
Almost all of the Jews from the Warsaw ghetto were sent to the death camp at Treblinka. This, the last specialized death camp to be constructed, was the largest and most deadly.16 Around 850,000 people – some estimates say over 900,000 – were murdered here between summer 1942 and autumn 1943. And within that timeframe, the most murderous period was from the end of July until the end of August 1942 when an estimated 312,500 people were killed – around a quarter of a million of them from the Warsaw ghetto.17 The SS achieved this appalling killing record in part because Treblinka had been built with a railway spur leading directly into the camp. This was of great assistance to the SS, who were able to speed up the unloading of the Jews and their transportation to the gas chambers. As for the internal layout of the camp, it was similar to Bełżec and Sobibór. There was an arrival area and an extermination area containing the gas chambers, with the two connected via a narrow pathway or ‘tube’, plus separate sections for the guards’ and Sonderkommandos’ accommodation.
Another reason for the astonishing scale of the murders at Treblinka in the summer of 1942 was not technical, but personal – the ambition of thirty-one-year-old Dr Irmfried Eberl, the commandant of Treblinka and the only medical doctor ever to run an extermination camp. Dr Eberl has already featured in this history, when he was the director of the euthanasia killing centre at Brandenburg. He thus had plenty of experience in mass murder before starting work at Treblinka. And just as he showed every sign of liking his work at Brandenburg, so he appeared to relish the opportunity to murder Jews. In June 1942, while preparing the extermination camp for the arrival of the first transport from Warsaw, he wrote to his wife, Ruth, that his life was ‘very busy’ and that he ‘enjoyed it’.18 In another letter to her at the end of July, shortly after the Jews had started arriving, he said: ‘I know that I haven’t written much lately, but I couldn’t help that, as the last “Warsaw weeks” have gone by in an unimaginable rush.’ He said that even if the day had ‘a hundred hours’ it would not be ‘quite enough’ for him to complete his work, and that in the pursuit of his duties he had managed to gain ‘nerves of steel’. He was also, he claimed, able to get his s
taff to ‘go along’ with him and he was ‘glad and proud of this achievement’.19
The key to operating an efficient death camp, the SS had learnt from experience, was subterfuge. So Treblinka was disguised as a transit camp, with the new arrivals hurried through the killing process as swiftly as possible towards the ‘showers’ in the ‘disinfecting’ block. An obvious precondition for this deception was that the presence of large numbers of dead bodies was hidden from the arriving Jews. This was accomplished not just by seeking to bury the corpses as quickly as possible but also by weaving dead branches into the wire fences that divided different areas within the camp in order to hide what was happening.
To begin with, the killing appeared to progress efficiently for the SS, with about 5,000 to 7,000 Jews murdered each day. But around the middle of August the systems at the killing factory at Treblinka started to fall apart. Part of the reason was an increase in the number of Jews sent to the camp – arrivals almost doubled to over 10,000 a day. This meant that the SS and their helpers could not adequately clean up the camp between transports in order to preserve the fiction that this was merely a transit camp. Once this task was not accomplished on schedule, the consequences for the rest of the murder process were immediate. The SS had to order arriving trains to wait at Treblinka station before the carriages were shunted up the railway spur into the camp. This only exacerbated the collapse of the deception, because it meant that large numbers of Jews died within the freight wagons. Cleaning the wagons of corpses took much longer than escorting the Jews to the gas chambers, adding yet more delays to the working of the camp.
The Holocaust: A New History Page 39