While there were rumours about the true function of Treblinka and some of the other death camps, Majdanek remained relatively unknown. When, for example, Halina Birenbaum was sent to the camp with her mother from the Warsaw ghetto, in the second wave of deportations in the spring of 1943, she remembers that there was ‘hugging and kissing’ among the Jews when they discovered that they were not en route to Treblinka. ‘If it’s not Treblinka,’ she says, ‘and we hadn’t heard of Majdanek, then it’s a sign that we are going to a labour camp and not to our deaths. So, big celebration!’39 Halina was further reassured by her first sight of Majdanek. ‘There is a camp, and there are barracks, and we will work. Now they’ll take us to a shower and give us different clothes, and they’ll take us to these barracks and whoever is willing and can work, nothing will happen to you. The barracks you see over there, there’s probably beds and food and water and everything will be good.’
The SS directed Halina along with a group of other Jews to one of the shower blocks at the camp. As she entered the building she suddenly became anxious: ‘My mum is not coming in, and everything is turning upside down in my stomach. What? Is she not going to come? She’ll never be here again, my mother?’ Halina looked frantically around to try and find her but without success. Suddenly she realized that her mother must have been taken away, and that Majdanek, like Treblinka, was a place of murder: ‘I have no words at all. I didn’t cry. It was beyond tears. It’s all over. There is nothing any more. There is no sky. No more earth. As if they took and broke my legs and hands. So I started to go round the shower. “Mother is gone. Mother is gone. Mother is gone.” ’40
Halina was admitted to Majdanek, and after a short time she consoled herself with the knowledge that at least her mother had been spared the experience of life in the camp. When she saw how the prisoners were beaten she couldn’t bear the thought that her ‘distinguished, modest, clean’ mother would have been hurt in such a way. ‘What could be worse than Majdanek?’ she says.41
Stefania Perzanowska, a Polish doctor imprisoned in Majdanek, confirmed the brutality of the regime in the camp. ‘Above all there was beating,’ she said. ‘Beating for any reason and for no reason. Beating over the head with a bullwhip at roll call, with a fist to face, over a special stool with a piece of rubber or cane … They all beat us.’ She remembers one SS guard ‘who was capable of coming into the hospital even at two in the morning to beat us across the face because he was drunk and had to take it out on someone, right down through all the camp ranks’. But it was a female guard called Else Ehrich who ‘probably broke all the records. She beat women with a passion with frigid cruelty in her eyes. No SS woman could match her for strength or inflicting pain. She always beat us until she drew blood.’42
Another Majdanek survivor confirms how violent Else Ehrich could be towards inmates. ‘It seemed to us that she hit us with complete intentionality, short and hard,’ said Hanna Narkiewicz-Jodko, ‘and employed particularly humiliating and denigrating language. She usually kicked and hit us with her riding crop, which I saw over and over again.’43
Such testimony reminds us that it was not just men who abused prisoners in the camps, women participated in the mistreatment as well. Known as Aufseherinnen, ‘female overseers’, a number of women were used as guards in camps such as Majdanek and Auschwitz – their appearance coinciding with the arrival of female prisoners. Himmler never gave the Aufseherinnen full SS status, although they nonetheless held the power of life and death over the inmates. But women only ever made up a small percentage of the overall garrison of these particular camps – there were just twenty-eight during the period of operation of Majdanek, for instance, and fewer than 10 per cent of concentration camp guards were women across the whole Nazi system during the war.44
Though the regime was particularly brutal, Majdanek always remained small in comparison to Auschwitz. Just under 25,000 prisoners were incarcerated in Majdanek at peak capacity in the spring of 1943. And uniquely among the camps that contained gas chambers, Majdanek’s killers could murder with either bottled carbon monoxide – like the extermination chambers of the adult euthanasia scheme – or Zyklon B – like the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Why Majdanek, of all the camps, had the capacity to kill with both methods has never been determined.
For many years after the war it was only possible to calculate the death toll approximately at the camps of Majdanek, Treblinka, Bełżec and Sobibór. But in 2000 a decrypted German telegram was found in files held at the Public Record Office in London that revealed the Nazis’ own estimate. This telegram, dated 11 January 1943 and written by SS Sturmbannführer (Major) Hermann Höfle, one of the organizers of Operation Reinhard, recorded in detail the number killed at each of the camps up to the end of 1942: the figures were 24,733 at Majdanek, 101,370 at Sobibór, 434,508 at Bełżec and 713,55545 at Treblinka – a total of 1,274,166 human beings murdered.46
The Nazis managed to commit mass murder on this incredible scale with only a small number of SS supervising the process. Treblinka, the camp where more than half of this vast total died, required only two dozen or so SS to oversee the whole extermination operation. The contrast with the thousands and thousands of SS, Einsatzgruppen and other security forces needed to shoot Jews en masse in the Soviet Union is stark. Significantly, Majdanek, the place on Höfle’s list that killed fewest people, needed a larger SS garrison than the others, because more prisoners were kept alive for longer.
The insight the Höfle telegram offers is thus straightforward. Just a handful of SS could kill large numbers of their fellow human beings in a small area, as long as mechanized means were employed and the new arrivals were killed within hours of disembarking.
At the start of 1942 the Nazis had not known if it was possible to kill so many people so quickly. By the end of the year they had discovered the answer – it was.
14. Killing, and Persuading Others to Help
(1942–1943)
All these murders took place against the background of the bloodiest war in history. And the course of that war would, in turn, influence the extent to which the Nazis’ allies were willing to cooperate with the Holocaust. But it was not always easy, during 1942, for observers to work out exactly what the result of the war was likely to be.
While it was certainly true that the Red Army had prevented the Germans taking Moscow in December 1941, that Soviet victory had been followed by defeat. In May 1942 the Soviets had attacked the Germans around Kharkov in Ukraine, at a point where the Red Army had a large advantage, outnumbering the Germans two to one. But, in an action that demonstrated that numerical superiority does not guarantee success if tactics are deficient, the Soviet soldiers soon ran into trouble. The Germans retreated and allowed the Red Army to move forward, only to move in subsequently from the flanks and encircle large numbers of them. Soviet soldiers panicked. Many tried to run, but they were already caught in the German trap. More than a quarter of a million Red Army soldiers were killed, wounded or captured.
Boris Vitman, an officer in the Soviet 6th Army, was one of those who were taken prisoner. Once captured, he remembers how the Germans immediately demonstrated that they were fighting a brutal, ideological war. The Germans first looked for Jews and commissars among the Red Army prisoners, and when they found them, they split them into two groups. They took the commissars away and Boris Vitman never saw them again, but he did witness what happened to the ten or so Jews they had identified: ‘The Jews were given spades and told to dig a trench. It began to rain. After a while I could only see the tops of their heads. An SS man was hitting them to make them dig faster. When the trench was deep enough, he picked up a Russian machine gun and fired, shooting several salvos into the trench. We could hear them moaning. Then some more SS men turned up and finished them off. They were killed only because they were Jews. This had a shocking effect on me because then I saw what Nazism was. We were told [by the Germans] that the Jews and commissars cannot have control over us any more, that the Germans ha
d come to liberate us and soon we’re going home. But I only knew I had to fight the Germans to the very end.’1
Having humiliated the Red Army at Kharkov, Hitler now launched his own offensive, codenamed Operation Blue. The idea was for the Wehrmacht to advance towards the River Volga in the south-east of the Soviet Union and then down into the mountains of the Caucasus and the Soviet oil fields that lay beyond. It was a wildly ambitious plan. And to start with, it seemed to be working. But the problem the Germans faced was that the further they advanced to the east, the more their supply lines were stretched, a difficulty that was exacerbated by Hitler’s decision to separate his forces and send one thrust south to the Caucasus and the other east to the Volga. As far as General Halder, Chief of Staff of the German Army, was concerned, Hitler was in danger of letting his over-confidence damage his judgement. ‘This chronic tendency to underrate enemy capabilities is gradually assuming grotesque proportions and develops into a positive danger,’ Halder wrote in his diary on 23 July 1942. ‘The situation is getting more and more intolerable.’2 Halder’s words were prophetic. A few months later the German Army was engaged in an intractable, war-defining fight in the streets of a city on the western bank of the Volga called Stalingrad.
The Germans didn’t have the resources or expertise to remove the Red Army soldiers from the rubble in Stalingrad. ‘The Russians had the advantage in trench warfare and hand-to-hand combat – there’s no doubt,’ says Joachim Stempel, a German officer who fought in Stalingrad. ‘As a tank unit, we were used to driving tanks and trying to bring the enemy down with tanks and then stopping, clearing the area and moving forward. But that was all forgotten in the past, a long time ago.’3 Now it was the turn of the Red Army to show that they could mount encirclement operations on a large scale. On 19 November 1942, the Soviets launched Operation Uranus, an attempt to trap the German Sixth Army in Stalingrad. The plan worked and the Sixth Army finally surrendered on 2 February 1943.
Hitler had told the German people in a speech on 30 September 1942: ‘you can rest assured, no man will take us away from this place [Stalingrad].’4 Now his promise was revealed as worthless. To make matters worse for the Germans, the defeat at Stalingrad was part of a pattern that seemed to show by the start of 1943 that they were losing the war. In the autumn of 1942 Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s forces had been defeated at El Alamein – less because of the talents of the British commander Bernard Montgomery than because Rommel’s soldiers, who were outnumbered by the Allies, didn’t have enough fuel to manoeuvre their tanks effectively. At sea, the German fleet was hampered by a combination of lack of fuel and inadequate air cover. Finally, on 8 November 1942, the Allies had landed in North Africa and begun the long fight that would eventually take them in the summer and autumn of 1943 first into Sicily and then on to the Italian mainland.
In January 1943, the Allies had publicly proclaimed at the Casablanca conference that they would accept nothing less from the Germans than ‘unconditional surrender’ and that they intended to ‘impose punishment and retribution in full’ on the ‘guilty, barbaric leaders’5 of the countries currently opposing them. But behind the scenes matters were not quite as clear cut. Take the case of Admiral François Darlan, the former Prime Minister of Vichy France and collaborator with the Nazis. He was captured during the Allied invasion of North Africa but he wasn’t imprisoned, or tried for any offence. Instead, in an extreme example of pragmatic politics, he was confirmed by the Allies as head of the civil government in French North Africa. The Allies needed to ensure the cooperation of the former Vichy forces in France as swiftly as possible, and this was one way to do it. Admiral Darlan remained deeply unpopular with the British and Americans, and was killed on Christmas Eve 1942 by an anti-Vichy assassin.
Shortly after Darlan’s death, President Roosevelt revealed the same deeply pragmatic side of his nature during discussions about the Jews with General Charles Noguès, the former Vichy commander in Morocco. At the time of the Casablanca conference, General Noguès remarked that it would be ‘sad’ if after the war the Jews could dominate the economy of North Africa. Roosevelt sought to dispel his anxiety by saying that if the Jews were restricted to a certain proportion of professions, this would ‘eliminate the specific and understandable complaints which the Germans have towards the Jews in Germany, namely, that while they represented a small part of the population, over fifty percent of the lawyers, doctors, school teachers, college professors, etc, in Germany were Jews’.6 Leaving aside the obvious factual inaccuracies in Roosevelt’s statement – Jewish representation in these professions in Germany had certainly not been 50 per cent – his words demonstrated how even the leader of the largest Western democracy was prepared to give voice to slurs against the Jews.
This kind of confidential conversation was not made public during the war. So the message that went out from Casablanca remained one of unshakeable resolve to punish the ‘guilty’ and ‘barbaric’ leaders of the countries that opposed the Allies. For the Nazi leadership, of course, such threats were meaningless as they already knew there was no way back. In March 1943, Goebbels recorded in his diary a conversation with Hermann Göring that revealed their thinking: ‘Göring is fully aware of what we would be faced with if we weakened in this war. He has no illusions about this. Particularly when it comes to the Jewish question, we are so involved that there is no escape for us any more. And that is a good thing. Experience shows that a movement and a people that have burnt all bridges, fight with even more determination than those who still have an opportunity of retreat.’7
For those who collaborated with the Germans, the situation was not so clear cut. Many of them did not appear to think they had necessarily ‘burnt all bridges’. In France, for example, the French police were less cooperative with the Germans than they had been the previous year. The police particularly disliked arresting and sending French nationals to Germany as forced labour – a measure the Germans had introduced in February 1943.8
In Romania, events over the winter of 1942–3 had strengthened the resolve of Marshal Antonescu, and he now refused outright to hand over the remaining Romanian Jews to the Nazis. He met Hitler in April 1943 and resisted pressure to cooperate further on the Jewish question. The meeting was a clash between one political leader – Hitler – who believed that any setbacks on the battlefield should act as an incentive to treat the Jews still more harshly, and another – Antonescu – who was looking for a way out of the mess in which he and his country were now wallowing. Some members of Antonescu’s government were even trying to contact the Allies in order to extricate their country from the war – a development that Hitler knew about.9
Hitler was even more forthright in the discussions he held shortly afterwards with another ally, Admiral Horthy. In Hitler’s view, Horthy’s Hungary had been extremely dilatory in its treatment of the Jews. And like Antonescu, Horthy’s colleagues were attempting to sound out the Allies about a way of exiting the war. This wasn’t a surprising development, since Horthy knew better than most the scale of the Stalingrad defeat. The Hungarian Second Army, fighting alongside the Germans on the eastern front near Stalingrad, had been virtually annihilated. Half of the army of 200,000 soldiers were killed outright, and most of the rest were wounded or taken prisoner. A unit of Jewish forced labourers from Hungary, attached to the Second Army, also suffered appalling casualties. It was one of the worst battlefield defeats in Hungary’s history.
Hitler deployed all his powers of persuasion in an attempt to convince Horthy to keep fighting. He told him that ‘Germany and its allies were in a boat on a stormy sea. It was clear that anyone who wanted to get off in this situation would drown immediately.’ Hitler also attacked Horthy’s policy over the Jews, saying that ‘the pro-Jewish attitude in Hungary was completely incomprehensible to him … Why should the Jews be handled with kid gloves? After all, they had incited the world war.’ When the meeting resumed the next day Horthy demanded to know what more he was expected to do, since he had alrea
dy stopped the Jews earning a living and ‘he could not kill them.’ Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Nazi Foreign Minister, replied that the Jews should be imprisoned in camps or ‘annihilated’. Hitler pointed out approvingly that the Jewish situation in Poland had been ‘thoroughly cleaned up’ and explained to Horthy that the Jews ‘were to be treated like tuberculosis bacilli that could infect a healthy body. This was not cruel if you considered that even innocent creatures of nature like rabbits and deer would have to be killed in [such a situation] in order that no harm would be caused. Why should the beasts that wanted to bring Bolshevism to us be spared?’10
The talks with Horthy were not a success from Hitler’s perspective. And Goebbels thought he knew the reason why. As he wrote in his diary on 7 May 1943, the ‘Hungarians are clear in their mind that a war cannot be won with words alone. They obviously know our weak position and are slowly adjusting to it.’11 Moreover, a report of 30 April by Edmund Veesenmayer, an SS officer sent to Hungary to assess the situation, revealed that the Hungarian authorities ‘see the Jews as a guarantee for the protection of ‘Hungarian interests’, and they believe that through the Jews they can provide proof that they waged this war alongside the Axis Powers only out of necessity, but that in practice they have indirectly made a contribution to the enemies of the Axis Powers through hidden sabotage [by not handing over the Jews].’12
Hitler responded to the vacillations of the Hungarians and Romanians in a typical way. He concluded – as he told his Gauleiters in May 1943 – that ‘small states’ should be ‘liquidated as fast as possible’. After all, he said, ‘today we live in a world of destroying and being destroyed.’13 It was an early sign that Hitler might contemplate a German occupation of Hungary if Horthy didn’t do what he was told.
The Holocaust: A New History Page 41