The Holocaust: A New History

by Laurence Rees

  This trade was strictly prohibited and Otto Pressburger risked his life to pursue it. ‘There was always an SS man at the gates to the crematorium,’ he says. ‘I used to make up fake reasons for my arrival. Most of the time I said I was told to deliver sand to the crematorium. But of course I was coming to do “business”. So they let me in. Sand was never a reason and I always dumped it. The problem was to hide the goods. They [other prisoners involved in the trading] made me a little wooden storage box [on the cart] under my feet … Once I was delivering a thousand cigarettes to the crematorium. As I was taking them out of my storage box someone hit me on my back and over my head. It was an old SS man. He always used to ride a bicycle around and watch for prisoners doing “business” … He asked where I got the cigarettes from and accused me of doing “business”. But I lied. I said I was only hungry and had stolen a bag believing I would find a sandwich inside. Instead I found the cigarettes. He said that was a lie … He was only a corporal but I called him officer, which apparently helped a lot. He punched me in my face and I pretended it hurt much more than it really did. At the end he took my cigarettes and let me go. If he had reported the incident I would have been killed the same day.’ As Otto Pressburger saw it, he had ‘no choice’ but to get involved in ‘doing “business” ’ within the camp because he ‘wanted to live’.27

  The Sonderkommandos formed relationships not just with prisoners in the rest of the camp, but also with the SS who supervised their work in the crematoria/gas chambers. The SS had already discovered at death camps like Sobibór that it was counter-productive for them to kill all the Sonderkommandos after a brief period and then select a new group. Similarly, at Auschwitz it became common for the Sonderkommandos to be kept alive for many months. As a result, and because of the proximity in which they worked with the SS, a kind of intimacy developed, with the SS overseers often treating the Sonderkommandos much better than other prisoners at Auschwitz. Dr Miklós Nyiszli even witnessed them playing football together – a team of Sonderkommandos versus a team of SS.28 Dario Gabbai remembers one Dutch member of the SS almost with fondness, describing him as ‘a very nice guy’.29 Morris Venezia, another Sonderkommando, confirms that this Dutchman was ‘The best guard we had in the crematoria. He treated us sometimes to a cigarette. Sometimes we treated him to a cigarette. A very, very good man, very friendly with us.’ But even this ‘nice guy’, says Morris, ‘was always willing to go and kill people. And he was one of the best of our guards. I couldn’t understand that – why?’30

  Other SS working at the crematoria/gas chambers took the opportunity to indulge their sadistic desires. In testimony written at the time by a member of the Sonderkommando and discovered only after the war, a chronicler describes how one particular SS man liked to feel the sexual parts of naked young women as they walked by him on the way to the gas chamber.31

  Chief among these sadists was Otto Moll, the SS man who supervised the operation of the crematoria. Dario Gabbai remembers how he liked to kill naked girls by shooting them ‘on their breasts’. In 1944, when the arrival of enormous numbers of Hungarian Jews meant that bodies had to be burnt in the open air in giant pits – since the crematoria could not cope with the volume – Moll on occasion threw children directly into the flames so that they were burnt alive.32 Alter Feinsilber, one of the Sonderkommando, witnessed another of Moll’s sadistic acts. Moll ordered a naked woman to jump about and sing on a pile of corpses near the flaming pit while he shot prisoners and threw their bodies into the fire. When he had finished shooting them, he turned his gun on the woman and killed her.33 Such was Moll’s all-pervasive sadism that long after the war was over Dario Gabbai’s heart still ‘bumps at maybe two hundred a minute’ whenever he hears a motorcycle engine – because Moll used to arrive at the crematoria on a motorbike. ‘When you see this guy [Moll],’ says Dario, ‘it’s just problems – nothing else. You don’t want to be around him. In 1951 I was going to the city college in Los Angeles to learn English, and the first thing that teacher told me was to write something about the camps you were in. The first thing I wrote – I still have it from 1951 – I wrote two pages about Moll.’34

  Many of the Sonderkommando were profoundly troubled by their work. Not just the appalling nature of it, but the knowledge that they were assisting the SS in the destruction of fellow Jews. ‘We became animals,’ says Morris Venezia. ‘We feel that we should kill ourselves and not work for the Germans. But even to kill yourself is not so easy.’ Dario Gabbai found that ‘After a while you don’t know nothing. Nothing bothers you. That’s why your conscience gets inside of you and stays there until today. What happened? Why did we do such a thing?’ The only explanation Dario can give is that ‘You always find the strength to live for the next day,’ because the desire to live is so ‘powerful’.35

  One account, written by a member of the Sonderkommando during the war, described how children from Lithuania, just before they died, admonished the Jews who were helping the Germans. One young girl shouted at a Sonderkommando who tried to undress her younger brother, calling him a ‘Jewish murderer’. She said that she was her brother’s ‘good mummy’ and that her brother ‘will die in my arms, together with me’. Another child asked a Sonderkommando why fellow Jews were taking the children to be killed – was it, the child suggested, ‘only in order to live’ themselves? Was their life among the ‘murderers’ really worth ‘the lives of so many’ other Jews?36

  ‘We got liberated,’ says Morris Venezia. ‘For what? To remember all those barbarous things? We didn’t want our lives actually. This is the way we feel – we’re still feeling. Until now I’m just saying, why [did] God let me live, for what? To remember all those things? Always, even now, when I’m going to bed, everything comes in my mind before I close my eyes. Everything, everything, every night, every night.’37

  The purpose-built crematoria/gas chambers of Birkenau began their murderous work after the majority of Jews had died in the Holocaust. Around 1.1 million were killed in 1941 and 2.7 million in 1942.38 Most of these Jews died either in the Einsatzgruppen actions in the east, or in the Reinhard death camps within Poland. Auschwitz accounted for 200,000 deaths in 1942, a fraction of the total catalogue of murder. In 1943 the number of dead fell to 500,000 – with around half that number murdered in Auschwitz. The newly created murder machinery in Auschwitz Birkenau was thus functioning well below capacity. In part this reduced figure for 1943 reflected the difficulties that the Nazis encountered in finding and transporting Jews to the death camps once it became clear that the Germans were losing the war.

  During 1943, the Nazis didn’t just transport Jews to Auschwitz. They also sent other categories of people they considered a threat, including Sinti and Roma – those the Nazis called ‘Gypsies’. A Gypsy camp was created within Birkenau, and the first transport of several hundred Sinti and Roma arrived at Auschwitz in February 1943. At its height the Gypsy camp at Birkenau contained 15,000 people. Unusually, the Sinti and Roma were not selected on arrival but were permitted to stay in family groups. This was most probably because a final decision about their collective fate had not yet been taken, but the fact that they could remain together did not mean that the Sinti and Roma received preferential treatment in any physical sense – they were still brutally mistreated. Hermann Höllenreiner, who came from a Sinti background and was sent to Birkenau as a child, remembers that he and the other children were so hungry that ‘We would pull out the grass like rabbits so that we could just eat it. And if an SS caught us we would get beaten. That was also bad. But then everything that happened in Birkenau was bad … We lived in constant fear. Every moment we thought now they will beat my father or my mother to death, or that we will be gassed; we knew that every moment could be the one we are gassed.’39

  Franz Rosenbach, also from a Sinti family, was fifteen when he was sent with his mother to Auschwitz Birkenau. He remembers that when he arrived at the camp he was shocked that he and his mother had to get completely undressed in front of
each other. ‘I don’t know if you know that we have our own customs,’ he says. ‘A mother would never get undressed in front of her children, nor would the father. There is some kind of sense of shame and respect. But in this instance, we were forced to do it. We were undressed and I called out, “Mum, where are you?” She was standing behind me, she was hiding behind me. And when her hair was cut off – her braid – I wanted to go and grab it. So I was hit a few more times on the back with a rubber truncheon or something like that, some kind of hosepipe. You know, it was a sight that you cannot imagine. The SS came in with a cane and hit the men’s penises, making a point of [saying] … please excuse the expression, I can’t say it, something like “Gypsy dick” or whatever you call it … that kind of thing, derogatory terms, discriminatory terms.’40

  Imprisoned with his mother in the Gypsy camp, Franz Rosenbach was ‘totally shocked’ at the conditions in which the Sinti and Roma existed. ‘The atmosphere was terrible, because many of the small children and [other] people in the blocks were ill, everyone was mixed up together. The children were screaming, “Mum, I’m hungry, Mum, [give me] something to eat, do we have anything to drink?” They weren’t allowed to drink the water because of the risk of [catching] typhoid fever and that kind of thing. “Mum, [give me] …” this and that. And the women had nothing to give them, they didn’t have anything. We were beaten, kicked, degraded, but you didn’t know why, you had no idea why … You know, these young SS men, the older ones too, had been trained, [to think] that we, the Sinti and Roma, were not human beings. We weren’t people. We were to be destroyed. Anyone could do whatever he liked to us. The Sinti were fair game to them, do you understand?’

  Women imprisoned in the Gypsy camp were particularly vulnerable to sexual abuse. Hermann Höllenreiner recalls how Kapos would come into the camp at night, select individual women – the ‘beautiful Gypsies’41 – and then take them outside to be raped. Franz Rosenbach, also imprisoned in the Gypsy camp, recalls members of the SS committing the same crime. ‘I witnessed this twice,’ he says. ‘At night, young SS men would come in with a torch and approach the women. Most of the time the women didn’t know what was going on, they had to take off their headscarves so that they could get a look at them. Sometimes they picked out young women and [took them] behind the block … you didn’t hear a shot ring out, you didn’t hear a thing. Next morning they’d be lying there dead. They’d been murdered.’42 According to Sonderkommando Alter Feinsilber, there were also instances of women in the Gypsy camp selling themselves out of desperation. He said that prisoners from outside the Gypsy camp, ‘who could afford a bribe’, would give cigarettes to the Blockführer of the Gypsy camp and then enter the camp ‘with the SS man’s leave. There they had sexual relations with Gypsy women, who were starving and were ready for sexual intercourse to get some cigarettes or some other trifle. The husbands or fathers of the Gypsy women put up with this state of things as they were starving, too …’43

  Though around 23,000 Sinti and Roma were sent to Auschwitz, Nazi policy about the Gypsies remained confused. The Nazis, for instance, never put the same kind of pressure on their allies to send Sinti and Roma to the camps as they did Jews. Not that Sinti and Roma escaped persecution. While, for example, the considerable Sinti and Roma population in Romania was not subjected to systematic extermination, thousands were still deported to Transnistria. In Croatia, during the same period, the Ustaše targeted ‘Gypsies’, passing discriminatory legislation, imprisoning them in camps and eventually murdering around 26,000 Sinti and Roma.44 Undoubtedly, enormous numbers of Sinti and Roma died during the war – the precise figure is unknown, but it was certainly more than 200,000.

  Part of the reason for the lack of clarity in Nazi policy towards Sinti and Roma was that Himmler himself did not offer precise guidelines to those under his command. On the one hand the Einsatzgruppen in the east regularly killed Sinti and Roma along with Jews, and thousands of Sinti and Roma were deported to ghettos in Poland from the Old Reich, but on the other hand Himmler issued a decree on 13 October 1942 stating that ‘racially pure’ Sinti might be allowed to wander over designated areas under ‘Gypsy headmen’.45 This order arose from the work conducted by Dr Robert Ritter, Himmler’s ‘expert’ on Gypsies. Ritter had concluded that ‘racially pure Gypsies’ living in the Reich were not a threat, but that the much larger number of Sinti and Roma who had ‘mingled’ their blood with other races were potentially dangerous. This was not just bad science, but produced a discriminatory policy almost impossible to implement in practice.

  Even so, when Himmler issued a further decree on 29 January 1943 which resulted in the deportation of the Sinti and Roma to Auschwitz, specific exceptions were made – for example, for those considered ‘racially pure’, for Gypsies married to Germans who could be vouched for by the police and so on. They were still liable to sterilization, but they had – in theory at least – a chance to escape Auschwitz and the other camps. In practice, however, all these various distinctions were largely ignored during the deportation process.46

  At the same time as the Sinti and Roma suffered in Auschwitz, Hitler was digesting what for him was dispiriting – almost disastrous – news on the military front. The surrender of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad had been bad enough for the Germans at the start of 1943, but the series of defeats that followed made matters even worse. By mid-May that year the Wehrmacht had lost their campaign in North Africa, and Hitler – according to Goebbels – feared that the defeat of the Germans at Tunis might ‘be on the scale of Stalingrad’.47 That same month Grand Admiral Dönitz ordered U-boat action in the north Atlantic to stop – Allied counter-measures had made it almost impossible for the U-boats to wage war successfully.

  None of these setbacks, serious as they were, altered Hitler’s desire to murder the Jews. He told Goebbels on 13 May 1943 that because they were ‘parasites’ there was ‘nothing else open for modern people to do other than to eradicate the Jews’. He added, ‘World Jewry believes it is on the brink of a world victory. This world victory will not come … The peoples who were the first to have recognized and fought the Jew will instead gain world domination.’48

  Hitler’s obsession with Jews had not abated. If anything it seemed to have intensified – as events in the summer and autumn of 1943 would confirm in the most disturbing ways imaginable.

  15. Oppression and Revolt

  (1943)

  One of the many tragic aspects of this history is that so many Jews lost their lives even though they lived in countries that had, by now, decided they wanted to exit the war. But there was no easy way out of this conflict, and Hitler’s vengeance on those of his Axis partners who sought to break with him could be devastating.

  The Italians, for instance, certainly recognized by the summer of 1943 how disastrous it had been to link themselves with Nazi Germany. On 10 July 1943 the Allies landed in Sicily and on 19 July Rome was bombed. ‘Everybody understood that the war was lost,’ says Mario Mondello, an Italian diplomat and member of the Fascist Party. ‘And, of course, everybody was thinking that Italy had to get out [of the war] and not to stay with Mussolini … We’re more realistic sometimes than the Germans are. Of course being more realistic we are not faithful to the present chief, and so on. I don’t say it is a noble thing, but it is our character.’1

  On 24 July 1943, at a meeting of the Fascist Grand Council, Mussolini was criticized by his colleagues and his policies attacked. The next day, at an audience with the King, the Duce was told his services were no longer required as Prime Minister. He was arrested as he left the room.

  Marshal Badoglio replaced Mussolini as Prime Minister and tried to negotiate a way out of the war. On 3 September 1943, the same day the first Allied troops crossed from Sicily to the Italian mainland, the new Italian government agreed an armistice, and on 8 September General Eisenhower, broadcast the news that the Italians had surrendered unconditionally.

  The exit of Italy from the Axis alliance proved calamitous for the
Jews living in the country. The time lag between Mussolini’s removal and the final surrender of the Italians allowed the Germans to prepare their response, and as soon as the Italians quit the war German forces seized Italian bases and installations. By 10 September the Germans were in control of Rome and most Italian troops had been disarmed. The same day the Germans occupied the Italian capital, Hitler recorded a speech, broadcast that evening. In it he denounced the duplicity of the new Italian government and said that Germany would never surrender in such a way. ‘We all know’, he said, ‘that in this merciless struggle the loser will be annihilated, in accordance with the wishes of our enemies, while only the victor will retain the means for living.’2

  It would not have gone unnoticed – especially to Germany’s other allies – that one way of interpreting events was that the Italians had managed to avoid fighting to the end because they were not party to the crime of mass extermination. Even though Mussolini’s regime had persecuted the Jews inside Italy, they had not sent Jews en masse to be murdered in the Nazi death camps. Not just that, but up until the moment of their surrender, the Italians had been protecting Jews from deportation on territory outside Italy. In spring 1943, for instance, at the same time as the Bulgarians were deporting Jews from Thrace and Macedonia, the Italian consul in German-occupied Salonica organized the transfer of a number of Greek Jews to relative safety in Athens, then in the Italian zone of Greece.3 There were even cases of Italian soldiers visiting the camps in which the Germans held Jews in Salonica and claiming that selected women were their ‘wives’ and so could not be deported.4