The Holocaust: A New History

by Laurence Rees

  Israel Cymlich escaped in April 1943 from a labour camp close to Treblinka and – just like Toivi Blatt – he found it hard to survive in Nazi-occupied Poland. He managed to reach Warsaw, but soon came to the conclusion that, even if Jews could make it beyond the wire of the ghetto, ‘In many cases, having failed to find a shelter, overcome by hunger, and realizing the hopelessness of his situation, such a person voluntarily surrendered to the police.’46

  But this is only part of the history, for Israel Cymlich – just like Toivi Blatt – owed his life to the compassion of non-Jewish Poles. A Polish couple, Mr and Mrs Kobos, sheltered him in the attic of their house in Warsaw, letting him stay even after his money had run out. They risked their lives, motivated by a sense that they were doing what was right. Israel Cymlich wrote that he was ‘puzzled’ by ‘the fact that those people did so much for me and had been keeping me for so long. For people as poor as they were, this was a serious burden.’47

  Large numbers of non-Jewish Poles helped the Jews, and the methods they used were often ingenious. Dr Eugene Lazowski, for instance, managed to convince the Germans that there was an outbreak of typhoid in the area around Rozwadów. He did this by injecting the population – including many Jews – with a safe substance that mimicked typhoid so that when the Germans conducted blood tests they believed the whole district was infected. As a result the Germans stayed well clear of the area and thousands of Jews and Poles were not deported.48

  In Warsaw, around 28,000 Jews lived in defiance of German restrictions outside the ghetto. Most were hidden by non-Jewish Poles. Of these 28,000 Jews, about 11,500 survived the war. One credible estimate is that between 7 and 9 per cent of the non-Jewish population of Warsaw gave assistance to the Jews – that is 70,000–90,000 people.49 It is a statistic that gives the lie to the lazy stereotype that the Poles did little to help the Jews. In fact, as one scholar concludes, the survival rate of Jewish fugitives in Warsaw ‘was not much less than that observed in a Western European country such as the Netherlands’.50

  A similar, nuanced judgement needs to be made about the actions of the resistance forces fighting within Poland, most notably the Polish Home Army. That’s because while there were undoubtedly many units in the Home Army that were anti-Semitic, there were also units that accepted Jews into their ranks. Samuel Willenberg, for instance, who had escaped from Treblinka, joined the Home Army and participated in the Warsaw uprising in the summer of 1944. He remembers that he took a risk in revealing to the non-Jewish Poles that he was a Jew, but he wanted to ‘die under my own name’. While, he says, ‘there were characters in the Home Army who gave me trouble,’ in the particular section he belonged to they were ‘nice people’ and even though they ‘knew I was a Jew’ it was not a problem.51

  The Home Army also occasionally helped Jewish resistance fighters. They provided some weapons to Jews for use during the Warsaw ghetto uprising, for instance, though some Jews felt they should have given much more assistance than they did. The truth, as one scholar says, is that ‘because the Home Army was an umbrella organization of disparate Polish organizations numbering more than 300,000, from all regions ranging from socialists to nationalists, its attitude and behavior towards the Jews varied widely.’52 The history – as Samuel Willenberg experienced personally – was thus a multifaceted one.

  During 1943 the Nazi leadership watched as the morale of the German population fell still further. The fire bombing of Hamburg by the RAF in late July had a devastating effect; 40,000 Germans died – more than British losses in the whole of the Blitz. ‘The losses in Hamburg were great,’ said Albert Speer, Nazi Armaments Minister, after the war, ‘the greatest we had suffered in any raid, particularly from the burning houses. And the depression among the population was extraordinary.’53 In such circumstances, it was vital for Hitler that the Nazi leadership stand firm. As he said in his speech on 10 September, ‘the party must set an example in everything.’54 An obvious concern lay behind his words – some Nazis might try and follow the example of the Italians, and exit the war.

  Himmler knew one way of countering such defeatism – broaden the knowledge of the extermination of the Jews. This crime, which up to now had been conducted in such secrecy, would now be talked about in meetings attended by more than a hundred Nazi leaders. It was a remarkable turnaround of policy, but the thinking behind it was clear. Once many more Nazis understood the extent of the atrocities that had been committed in their name, what choice would they have but to ‘burn their boats’ and never give up? The Italian elite – the King and senior Fascists – had been able to walk away from the war untainted by the crime of mass murder, but that was not going to be an option for the broader Nazi leadership.

  In October 1943 Heinrich Himmler gave two speeches at Posen in Poland – one to around ninety senior SS leaders and another to senior party figures including Reichsleiters and Gauleiters. In these speeches Himmler was open about the extermination of the Jews and thus made everyone who listened into a co-conspirator. For example, he told the Reichsleiters and Gauleiters on 6 October, ‘I didn’t believe myself to be justified in eradicating the [Jewish] men – that is killing them or having them killed – and then letting their children grow up to take revenge on our sons and grandsons. The tough decision to make this people disappear from the face of the earth had to be taken. For the organization which had to carry out the task, it was the hardest we have ever had to undertake.’55 Himmler could scarcely have been more explicit.

  In parallel with telling Nazi leaders the true extent of their collective guilt, Himmler wanted to wind up the extermination operation of the Reinhard camps. The revolts at Treblinka and Sobibór, together with the Jewish resistance in a number of ghettos – not only in Warsaw in April, but more recently in Białystok in August – had reinforced his desire to centralize much of the killing process on the more secure facility at Auschwitz.56 He was also influenced by bureaucratic considerations. He wanted to eliminate the possibility that the Jews in the area could be used as forced labour by any German agency other than the SS.57 As a result, in October 1943, he told Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger, the SS and police chief in the General Government, to liquidate the large camps still operating in the Lublin district.58

  Himmler’s order to murder the remaining Jews at Majdanek in the suburbs of Lublin was carried out in November 1943 in a series of massacres known as the Harvest Festival killings. Henryk Nieścior, a Polish political prisoner in Majdanek at the time, witnessed the preparations for the crime. ‘Near the crematorium in Field V [different areas within Majdanek were known as “fields”] in late October 1943 the Germans assigned Jews to dig ditches, which were dug in zigzag form.’59 He remembered that the Germans tried to reassure the Jews that the ditches were nothing sinister – merely defence works, necessary because the front line was getting ever closer. On 3 November, the Germans ordered all the Jews in the camp to ‘step forward’ and they were taken up towards the area where the ditches had been dug. Shortly afterwards the SS started shooting the Jews with machine guns while music played through loudspeakers.

  Jews from surrounding camps were also murdered in Majdanek. They were ordered in small groups to lie down in ditches and then shot. Members of the next group to be killed were told to lie on top of the corpses of those who had just died and then the guns were turned on them. Not everyone died at once and it was to drown out their screams – and the screams of the Jews who were about to die – that two ‘radio cars’ blared out popular music.60 On 3 November around 18,000 people were killed at Majdanek – the largest number ever killed in a death camp on a single day. It is another reminder that gas chambers were not needed in order to murder en masse.

  The overall Harvest Festival operation also included killings in two other nearby camps, Trawniki and Poniatowa. At Poniatowa a number of Jews resisted as the Germans attempted to kill them. They managed to snatch some weapons and opened fire on their captors, but the Germans set fire to the barracks in which they sought refuge and
burnt them alive. Their brave resistance would only have confirmed to Himmler that his judgement that the Jews in these camps should be liquidated was correct. In total around 43,000 Jews died as a result of the Harvest Festival action.

  Treblinka and Sobibór ceased to operate as death camps around the same time. Both were now dismantled and an attempt was made to eliminate all traces of the crime. These camps – along with Bełżec, the first Operation Reinhard fixed-killing installation – had always been seen by the Nazis as transitory places, and since by now there were hardly any Jews left alive in the General Government, and Auschwitz had more than adequate killing capacity for Jews from western Europe, there was no need for them to exist. Bełżec had ceased to kill people in large numbers by December 1942 and was fully dismantled by the summer of 1943. As for Treblinka, the last transport arrived in August 1943, two weeks after the revolt, and the camp was subsequently destroyed during the autumn. Sobibór was the final Reinhard death camp to be dismantled. And since the prisoners who had not managed to escape had been killed the day after the revolt, another Sonderkommando unit was sent to take the camp apart. After they had completed their task, they too were murdered.

  By December 1943 all these camps had vanished. In their place were farms and fields. ‘For reasons of surveillance,’ wrote Globocnik to Himmler, ‘a small farm was created in each camp which is occupied by a guard. A pension must be paid regularly to him in order that he can maintain the farm.’61 But a problem remained for the Nazis: a large number of the local population knew what had been going on. Many of them believed that jewellery, gold and other valuables left by the murdered Jews lay concealed among the soil and the ashes of the site. So one function of the ‘farmer’ was to stop the locals scavenging for plunder.

  Operation Reinhard was officially over. On 30 November 1943, Himmler wrote to Globocnik thanking him for the ‘great and unique services that you carried out for the German people by implementing Operation Reinhard’.62 In total, around 1.7 million people had been murdered in this action between March 1942 and November 1943. Most of them had died in one of three camps – Bełżec, Sobibór or Treblinka.

  When images are used to symbolize the Holocaust, it is mostly Auschwitz that is featured. The centrality of Auschwitz in the memorialization of the crime is almost ubiquitous. In Britain, the very date of Holocaust Memorial Day is the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Of course, Auschwitz did, as we shall see, go on to become the most murderous death camp of them all. But there is a danger that these three Reinhard camps – Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka – become, if not forgotten, then somehow overlooked. The Nazis would have approved of this. They wanted no one to remember these places. But in many respects it is these camps that symbolize the singularity of the crime. It needed only a handful of Germans to direct the murder of 1.7 million people. Every one of these individuals died not because of anything they had ever done, but simply because of who their grandparents had happened to be. Once their lives had been erased, the places in which they had been murdered were erased as well. One does not see images of Bełżec, Treblinka or Sobibór in Holocaust memorialization because there are no images of the camps to show. In a way, that, as much as anything else, demonstrates the bleakness of the crime. Those who were murdered were turned to nothing, and the places where they died were turned to nothing along with them.

  As for the leading perpetrators, they swiftly left the scene of the crime. In September 1943, Globocnik departed for northern Italy, where he had been appointed Higher SS and Police Leader. He took many of his co-conspirators with him, including Christian Wirth and Franz Stangl. They soon found use for their particular talents in Trieste, in a region now annexed to the Reich. At Risiera di San Sabba, a factory in the south of the city, they helped to create one of the most notorious concentration camps and prisons in the Mediterranean. The majority of those killed here were not Jews, but partisans. At least 3,000 people were murdered at Risiera di San Sabba – most beaten to death or executed by firing squad in the courtyard of the building. Just as at Majdanek, music was played loudly in an attempt to drown out the noise of the killing. From April 1944, the bodies of those who had been murdered were burnt in a purpose-built crematorium on the site – created by Erwin Lambert, who had previously constructed gas chambers not just for the T4 programme but also at Sobibór and Treblinka. Once the bodies had been burnt, the ashes were thrown into the nearby harbour.63

  Franz Stangl, former commandant of Treblinka, believed that he knew the reason why he and the other Operation Reinhard staff had been sent to this hazardous area – one designated a Bandenkampfgebiet, a ‘bandit-fighting district’. ‘I realized quite well’, he said after the war, ‘that we were an embarrassment to the brass: they wanted to find ways and means to “incinerate” us. So we were assigned the most dangerous jobs – anything to do with anti-partisan combat in that part of the world was very perilous.’64 But while it is true that Christian Wirth was killed in May 1944 by partisans, both Stangl and Globocnik survived the war – Globocnik only by a matter of days, since he committed suicide after the British captured him on 31 May 1945. As for Franz Stangl, he escaped to South America where he was eventually arrested in 1967. He was subsequently sentenced in West Germany to life in prison.

  The era of the Reinhard camps was over. But the most infamous period in the life of Auschwitz – one that would make this place the site of the largest mass murder in history – was just about to begin.

  16. Auschwitz

  (1943–1944)

  Only now did Auschwitz become central to the Holocaust. But it is important to remember that even after the new gas-chamber complexes had opened at Birkenau, vastly increasing the camp’s capacity to kill, Auschwitz continued to perform a variety of functions in the Nazi state – not just extermination.

  One of the most surprising, given the reality of what took place there, was to provide a possible propaganda alibi for the Nazis. In early September 1943, 5,000 Jews were sent to Auschwitz Birkenau from Theresienstadt, north-west of Prague.1 Uniquely among the Jewish prisoners, they were permitted to live in a ‘family camp’ within Birkenau. Though men lived in separate barracks from women, children were not sent directly to the gas chambers, but were allowed to live with one of their parents. The Jews were told to write postcards to their relatives still in the camp at Theresienstadt. The idea was that the Red Cross staff who inspected Theresienstadt would, via this ruse, believe that Birkenau was merely a labour camp. Several months later, once the Nazis had used them in this way, almost all of the Jews in the family camp were murdered in the gas chambers.

  Another function of Auschwitz, which distinguished the place from the Reinhard camps, was the increasing instance of medical experimentation. The most infamous medical practitioner at Auschwitz arrived in spring 1943 – Dr Josef Mengele. His ‘research’ into twins and dwarfs would shock the world when it was revealed in all its cruelty. In his work he was assisted by a number of prisoners. One of them was Wilhelm Brasse, who had been sent to Auschwitz as a Polish political prisoner in 1940 at the age of twenty-two, and so by 1943 was one of the longest-serving inmates in the camp. He had trained as a photographer, and it was this skill that the German doctors at Auschwitz sought to exploit. ‘I spoke to Dr Mengele,’ he says. ‘He explained to me that he would send women to me, Jewish women, twins and triplets and all kinds of cases, and he wanted photos to show the whole person from the front, from the side, profile and from the back. Also naked [photos] … These women were very much ashamed and intimidated. The children were terribly intimidated. They were afraid even to speak to one another. As far as what they looked like those were young women, young girls just developing – they were not worn out. He [Mengele] would take them from the transports … I felt ashamed and it was painful, unpleasant …’ Wilhelm Brasse took pictures of some appalling sights. ‘He [Mengele] explained to me he would send from the Gypsy camp a case of water cancer. I’ve forgotten the other name of this illness, the pro
fessional name [a disease known as noma, which was prevalent in the Gypsy camp] … They sent a young Gypsy who had the cancer, water cancer on his face, you could see the whole jaw, you could see the bone visible, and he [Mengele] explained to me it must be photographed from profile so the bone would be visible … These things are constantly before my eyes. After the war I had recurring dreams, either of someone brought from Dr Mengele or they’re looking for me, taking me to be shot.’2

  Dr Mengele and his activities have dominated the public memory about the corruption of medical ideals at Auschwitz. And it is not hard to see why. Mengele was thirty-two years old when he arrived at Auschwitz, a handsome, decorated veteran of the war. He was undoubtedly brave – he had won the Iron Cross for rescuing two soldiers from a burning tank – and he was always perfectly turned out. Survivors often remark, for instance, on his immaculate uniform and his beautifully polished boots. He was the opposite of the caricature image of the sweating, red-faced SS killer.

  Mengele was a staunch Nazi. He had joined the party in 1937 and had demonstrated a commitment to the nationalist cause even before Hitler came to power. He was also a dedicated racist and believed he was a member of a master race. But nothing in his previous background before Auschwitz suggested that he had a capacity for sadism on a gigantic scale – yet that is what he demonstrated in the camp. He seemed to relish the power he had during selections, not just on the ramp but in the hospital barracks when he chose who was to die from among the existing inmates.