The Holocaust: A New History

by Laurence Rees

  Hitler’s worldview, as he demonstrated in his 30 January 1944 speech, remained as consistent as it was warped and murderous. The Jews were to blame for Germany’s misfortune. Just as they had sabotaged the war effort in 1914–18, they were sabotaging the war effort now. All that was clear to Hitler. The only thing that was incomprehensible was why the ‘English’ didn’t come to their senses and realize that they were being duped by the Jews.

  It is impossible to quantify how many Germans actually believed this fantasy when they heard Hitler speak these words in January 1944. What is certain is that approval for Hitler and his regime was in decline after the defeat in Stalingrad at the start of 1943. A whole host of indicators demonstrated that truth – not least the Nazi party’s own reports of the public’s mood. A typical one stated that members of the public were now ‘daring to express open criticism of the person of the Führer and to attack him in hateful and mean fashion’.23 One of the many jokes now told was that Hitler was currently writing a follow-up to Mein Kampf – My Struggle – to be called Mein Fehler – My Error.24 Of course, if such views had reached the Gestapo then the retribution inflicted on the individual concerned would have been draconian.

  But the threat from the ‘Bolsheviks’ in the east remained real whether one believed Hitler’s rhetoric or not – arguably, even whether Germany surrendered or not. The Italians could change sides in this war and face a comparatively benign occupation by the Western Allies. The Germans knew that their soldiers were fighting a ‘war of extermination’ on the eastern front and that the Red Army was approaching. That reality meant that Hitler’s warning that a defeated Germany faced ‘annihilation’ sounded less like a rhetorical exaggeration and more like an accurate forecast of the future. In such circumstances there seemed little practical option to many people but to fight on. As Fritz Darges, Hitler’s SS adjutant, puts it, one cannot ‘get off a moving train’.25

  Hitler, when he spoke in private to his generals on 26 May 1944, emphasized the importance of the battle against the Jews in the context of the rest of the war. ‘By removing the Jew,’ he said, ‘I have eliminated the possibilities of the formation of any revolutionary nucleus. Of course, you can say to me: “Well, couldn’t you have solved this more simply – or not more simply, because everything else would have been more complicated, but more humanely?” Gentlemen, officers, we are in a life-or-death struggle.’26

  Consequently, the war against the Jews continued, indeed it intensified. The capitulation of Italy, combined with the German occupation of the whole of France and the resulting changes in French security personnel, meant that the Germans were in a stronger position to enforce the deportation of Jews in a number of territories than they had been before. In France, the appointment of Joseph Darnand in December 1943 as General Secretary of the Police symbolized the desire of the Germans to move swiftly against French Jews.27 Darnand, leader of the Milice, the French paramilitary collaborators, had previously accepted the SS rank of Sturmbannführer (Major). This meant that by the end of 1943 a French SS man ran the French police force. There was now a sudden increase in the number of Jews deported from France – between 20 January and 17 August 1944 nearly 15,000 Jews were sent to Auschwitz.28 All pretence that the French security forces were somehow protecting French Jews was cast aside.

  Early in 1944, Ida Grinspan, a teenage Jew hiding in the village of Le Jeune Lié in the south-west of the country, was shocked when French police came for her. ‘I didn’t understand,’ she says. ‘I thought they would be German policemen. I didn’t know that the French police were making arrests. So when the policemen arrived I said, “How can French policemen arrest someone like me, a French girl who was born here?” I felt a sort of contempt. And that’s why I held in my tears, and that I did not want to cry, I stayed firm.’29

  Once she arrived in Auschwitz that same strength of will enabled her to cope: ‘You had to adapt to that way of life. Do you see what I’m saying? You had to adapt to sleeping in conditions like that, you had to adapt to working hard, you had to adapt to spending hours and hours being ordered about, poorly dressed. Yes, when the mentality is there the body adapts. If you’re not there mentally, the body won’t follow suit … That is why young people managed much better than those who were thirty-five or forty years old. Forty was the maximum. The will to survive was stronger in us younger ones.’

  Soon after she arrived she was told by other inmates that ‘there are gas chambers here,’ but it just didn’t seem possible that such places could exist. ‘Nobody believed them,’ says Ida. ‘Not one of us believed them. It was beyond belief. We said either they’re joking or they’ve lost their minds.’ Only after she smelt the noxious odours coming from the Birkenau crematoria did she ‘finally’ accept that ‘perhaps they were right about the smell, that they were actually burning people.’

  Ida says she never felt ‘why me?’ as she tried to survive in Auschwitz. She always knew who was really guilty for her arrest and her subsequent suffering. And to this day, as a proud Frenchwoman, she has never forgotten the role her fellow countrymen played in facilitating the Nazis’ murderous assault on the Jews.30

  Even though Jews from all over occupied Europe were now dying in the gas chambers of Birkenau, and the whole mechanism of what we now call the Holocaust had long been established, the overall picture was still not a straightforward one. For example, while the majority of ghettos in Poland had been liquidated, there remained one major exception – the Łódź ghetto, a place where large numbers of Jews still survived. The continued existence of the Łódź ghetto into 1944 demonstrates once again how the way the Holocaust was implemented could alter from place to place. At the start of 1944 there were still more than 75,000 Jews in the Łódź ghetto, permitted to live because Arthur Greiser, the ruler of the Warthegau, had convinced Himmler that the work produced by the Jews justified their continued existence.

  Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, the leader of the ghetto, had done whatever he thought necessary in order to please the Germans. Notoriously, in September 1942, he had collaborated with the Germans in the deportation of thousands of the most vulnerable Jews. On 4 September 1942, he gave a speech in the ghetto in which he said: ‘I never imagined that I would be forced to deliver this sacrifice to the altar with my own hands. In my old age I must stretch out my hands and beg: Brothers and sisters, hand them over to me! Fathers and mothers, give me your children!’31 Rumkowski spoke those words because the Nazis had told him that they wanted to reduce the number of ‘useless eaters’ in the ghetto – and, since small children could not work, in the eyes of the Nazis they were ‘useless’. The reaction of the audience was one of ‘terrifying wailing’ at the news that children would be taken from their parents and sent out of the ghetto. But Rumkowski didn’t only say the children would be deported. The sick would also have to leave. ‘There are, in the ghetto,’ he said, ‘many patients who can expect to live only a few days more, maybe a few weeks. I don’t know if the idea is diabolical or not, but I must say it: “Give me the sick. In their place, we can save the healthy.” ’32 Rumkowski pleaded with the inhabitants of the ghetto to ‘think logically’ and to put themselves in his place. Then, he claimed, ‘you’ll reach the conclusion that I cannot proceed any other way.’33

  Many who listened to him felt very differently about the plan. ‘I was seventeen when I heard that speech,’ says Lucille Eichengreen. ‘I could not comprehend how somebody could ask parents for their children. I still cannot comprehend that. People were crying out, “How can you ask this? How can we do this?” ’34 Jacob Zylberstein was another Jew in the ghetto who heard the speech, and he too was outraged by it. ‘Rumkowski was such a coward,’ he says. ‘He should have killed himself before giving the children away.’35

  When the Jewish police came for the children and the sick, the scenes were – predictably – emotionally devastating. ‘And it’s no use that the child is clinging with both little arms to the mother’s neck,’ wrote Josef Zelkowicz in his dia
ry. ‘It’s no use that the father throws himself down before the threshold and howls like a dying ox: “Only over my dead body will you take my child.” It’s no use that the old man clings with his bony arms to the cold walls and bed: “Let me die here quietly” … It’s no [use] that the old woman falls at their feet, kisses their boots, and pleads: “I have grown grandchildren just [as old as you].” It’s no use that the sick man buries his feverish head in the damp, sweat-covered pillow and there sobs out perhaps his last tears. It’s no use. The police must deliver their consignment.’36

  The German security forces, who worked alongside the Jewish police in organizing the deportations, were extremely brutal during the action. When one mother refused to give up her four-year-old daughter she was given three minutes to reconsider her decision. When she still refused, both she and her daughter were shot.37

  Estera Frenkiel, a young woman who worked in the ghetto administration, remembers that as the children were snatched from their parents ‘their screams reached the sky.’ But she herself, in the context of the ghetto, was relatively fortunate. Though she had no children herself, she had been given ten release forms that would save the lives of ten children or sick people – and she could choose who to give them to. Just like the Jewish police who participated in the action, members of the ghetto administration staff could save their own loved ones. ‘I also had close family,’ she says. ‘I had an uncle who had to be saved. I had a cousin. To me, one’s own family is always closer. I had to take care of them all. Out of these certificates I had first to consider my own relatives … in these cases tears are shed, but when there are so many tears, then one thinks only of one’s own situation.’38

  The fact that a small proportion of Jews could save their own families – and that those who benefited were often the very ones charged with taking the children of others – caused considerable resentment. The Łódź ghetto chronicle, a record of life in the ghetto compiled by Jews at the time, mentioned that those who were saved from deportation in this way ‘were not people who were making any contribution to society, not even people able to perform any especially valuable work in the ghetto but were, we repeat, people with connections’.39

  During the action, Jacob Zylberstein discovered that his mother was about to be deported from a hospital within the ghetto. Panic-stricken he ran to the hospital and discovered two Jewish policemen standing outside the entrance. Luckily, one of them was a friend called Romek. He and Romek went into the hospital and Jacob started shouting, ‘Mamma, Mamma, Mamma!’ The hospital was packed, and it was hard to find her. But eventually he heard his mother calling back, ‘Here! Here!’ from behind a locked door. Jacob opened the door, and let loose an avalanche of people. ‘I grabbed my mother,’ says Jacob, ‘and went to the second floor, because the Jewish police started to run to put everybody back into the room.’ Using Romek as an intermediary, he attempted, with the offer of a watch, to bribe a German policeman who now guarded the entrance to the hospital. But that failed. ‘The only way out’ was via the window. So, with his mother hanging on to him, Jacob climbed down a cast-iron drainpipe to the ground and took her back home. Then, says Jacob, they had ‘the biggest celebration ever’.40

  Although no one in the ghetto could be certain that the children and the sick were being sent to their deaths, they knew that a horrible fate of some kind awaited them. After all, they reasoned, why would the Nazis want to care for children or the sick? So those left in the ghetto – the parents in particular – were tormented by the idea of the suffering that their loved ones would now be forced to endure on their own.

  Over time, knowledge of the existence of the death camps seeped through the ghetto. By the start of 1944, for instance, Jacob Zylberstein knew all about Auschwitz. He had met a Polish carpenter on a building site who had said to him, ‘I was in Auschwitz.’ Jacob ‘took no notice, because I never heard of the city of Auschwitz. And I passed by. On the way back, he stopped me and said, “Do you know what Auschwitz is?” And I said, “Where is Auschwitz?” And he said, “Not far from Kraków. But you know what they do there? They are gassing and killing Jews.” And I said, “How do you know that?” He said, “I was there, I was working as a carpenter there.” Of course, for me it was the biggest shock ever.’ Jacob hurried to seek an audience with Rumkowski, to tell him what he had heard. Having listened to him, Rumkowski slapped Jacob in the face and ‘started to scream at me, “I’ll send you out from the ghetto [he said], if you say one word to anybody I’ll send you out from the ghetto” ’.41

  After the deportations of September 1942, the ghetto entered a period of comparative calm. But within the Nazi leadership a power struggle developed over the future of the place. Arthur Greiser wanted to keep the ghetto within his aegis. Almost certainly he was motivated in large part by personal greed, since he siphoned off money from the ghetto for himself. Even those in the ghetto administration, like Estera Frenkiel, knew that the Nazi in direct charge of the ghetto, Hans Biebow, was sending Greiser backhanded payments. ‘Biebow took it for granted’, says Estera, ‘that if he turned up with presents for high-ranking people then he would be allowed to keep the ghetto going and he would still be master of life and death.’42

  In 1943 Himmler tried to gain control of the ghetto by turning it into a concentration camp. But he faced opposition not just from Greiser but from the Wehrmacht, who saw the ghetto as a useful source of forced labour. The dispute rumbled on, with Greiser’s staff at one point demanding a huge payment for handing over the ghetto – a request which was refused.43 By May 1944 Himmler had finally lost patience with the negotiations and ordered that the ghetto should cease to exist. External events shortly made such a course of action inevitable, since the following month the Red Army began a major advance that threatened to break through towards Łódź. As a consequence, on 23 June the first of ten transports, taking in total around 7,000 people, left for the 40-mile journey to the gas vans at Chełmno – the murder facility that had been reopened for the task of murdering the Łódź Jews.

  In 1942 the static facilities at Chełmno had been destroyed, after the initial transports of Jews selected from Łódź and elsewhere in Poland had ceased and the Reinhard death camps had been established. This attempt to erase the evidence of the crime had included blowing up the building known as the ‘mansion’ that had served as the base for the gas vans in Chełmno village. Now that the killing squad had returned, under the command of SS officer Hans Bothmann, they had to rethink the mechanism of the murder process. They decided, instead of basing the gas vans in the village, to transfer the killing operation to the nearby forest where the bodies had previously been buried. They built barracks, which they pretended were part of a larger camp, and a crematorium near by. When the first transport arrived from Łódź in June 1944, the Jews were taken to spend the night in the church in the village. The next day they were transferred to the barracks in the forest in groups – the number in each group determined by the capacity of the gas vans that were now based in the forest. Once assembled outside the barracks, the Jews were told that they were to be sent to Germany to work. A specific city was always named as their destination. This was a more sophisticated attempt to reassure the Jews than usual, as the name of the city was identical to the one the Jews had been told was their ultimate destination on leaving the Łódź ghetto. The SS then said that the Jews would have to be medically examined and disinfected in a delousing station, so it was necessary for them to take their clothes off. Once inside the barracks, after a mock examination by an SS man dressed in a white coat masquerading as a doctor, the Jews were led forward into a space they thought was the disinfecting chamber. In fact, it was the back of the gas van. ‘The doors were closed, locked and bolted,’ said Szymon Srebrnik, a member of the Chełmno Sonderkommando. ‘The motor was started. The exhaust gas was directed into the van by a special exhaust pipe and it poisoned the people inside … Screams and knocking on the walls of the van continued … When the screams ceased, the van
moved and took the bodies to the crematorium.’44

  A few of the Jews were spared immediate death and told to write postcards back to the ghetto, pretending that they were already in Germany. Once they had done this, they too were killed. The sinister trick seemed to work. ‘Thirty-one postcards have arrived,’ reads an entry in the Łódź ghetto chronicle for 25 July 1944, ‘all of them postmarked July 19, 1944. Fortunately, it is apparent from these cards that people are faring well and, what is more, that families have stayed together … The ghetto is elated and hopes that similar reports will soon be arriving from all the other resettled workers.’45

  While the gas vans, from the Nazi perspective, had many advantages as a method of murder, chiefly that they could be deployed swiftly, they also had many weaknesses – most obviously that they could not murder in large numbers. That had been the case in the spring of 1942 when the gas vans had been unable to compete with the fixed gas chambers at places like Bełżec and Sobibór, and it remained the case now when compared with the potential murder capacity of Auschwitz Birkenau. The SS realized that it would take a considerable time for Chełmno to kill all the remaining Łódź Jews, and so the plan was changed. Deportations to Chełmno stopped on 15 July, and when they began again in August the destination for the Łódź Jews was not Chełmno but Auschwitz Birkenau.46