The Holocaust: A New History

by Laurence Rees

  Once in the camp, Tadeusz and the others were told to strip naked and their heads were shaved. ‘The SS men returned from their breakfast,’ he says, ‘and inspected the prisoners standing in lines. We were naked. They walked up and down along our lines and slapped us in our faces, hitting us in the abdomen and stamping on our feet. I waited for my turn. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a young, blue-eyed and blond SS man, maybe in his early twenties. He took a step in my direction. I kept looking straight into his eyes, as he was looking straight into mine for a few seconds, and he did not hit me. He moved towards the next prisoner and hit him. Later my friends were asking how was it possible that he did not hit me. I do not know. I do not know what was on that boy’s mind.’20

  Tadeusz found conditions in the barracks at Mauthausen even worse than those he had endured in the main camp at Auschwitz. Not only were there no spare beds to sleep on, but ‘space was very limited and about sixty of us had to stand during the night. They could lie down [only] if someone left his place to go to the toilet, and on his return he would join the standing.’ Next morning they were ordered to assemble in the roll-call square. ‘It was a very hot day and prisoners were reluctant to stand in lines for hours because those who fell down as a result of the heat were finished off. I was standing in the first line. Those too slow to form the lines were beaten with a truncheon. The beating gained such impetus that they started hitting those who did form the lines and I was suddenly hit on the back of my head. I fell down. Luckily the strike was not too strong and nothing happened to me, but at that very moment I remembered the Polish prisoner [in Auschwitz] who advised me not to stand in the most exposed sides of the prisoners’ lines and not to let them kill me.’21

  Tadeusz was one of a group selected to travel a dozen miles west of Mauthausen to the city of Linz. Here they were told to build a new camp – part of a network of labour camps in the area. Though one or two wooden barracks and a barbed-wire fence were already in place, the prisoners had to construct everything else themselves. The work was so physically debilitating that Tadeusz realized that he stood little chance of surviving for long. But then he heard that a few prisoners were to be selected for easier work in the kitchen. ‘We ran to the kitchen gate where the chef, and an SS man – a Rapportführer – were standing and choosing ten out of a group of sixty candidates. By the time we reached them they had already selected nine, so I only had one chance. I was asked in German about my age and whether I was healthy and strong and what my occupation was. I responded in German and told them I was a baker because I had worked in a bakery before I got arrested. After some deliberation in low voices they took me on as the tenth one. For me it was the happiest moment of the war.’

  As a result of working in the kitchen, he was able to escape the worst vicissitudes of life in the camp – in particular, the hunger. ‘The conditions [in the rest of the camp] were horrible,’ he says. ‘The hunger grew and prisoners fainted from hunger and were dying. Once I saw prisoners carrying a bowl of soup which looked like water from a puddle … As they were walking the soup spilled on the ground covered with trodden snow … and people were licking it out of the snow. Horrible sight.’

  The prisoners were at risk not just as a result of their treatment at the hands of the Nazis, but from Allied bombing as well. Shortly after Tadeusz arrived at the camp in Linz, American bombers targeted military factories close by. Suddenly bombs exploded within the camp. ‘I was seized by an enormous panic,’ he says. ‘Those who were running in front of me simply vanished – they were torn apart and [their bodies] scattered. I noticed a hole in the fence and six prisoners the other side of the wires and I followed them unconcerned that any voluntary departure from the camp meant a death sentence for the prisoners.’ Tadeusz and the other prisoners ran about a mile away from the camp and then rested on grass near an embankment. ‘After fifteen or twenty minutes we suddenly heard “Hände hoch!” We stood up with our hands up. Wehrmacht soldiers stood behind the trees with their machine guns aimed in our direction. They were part of the anti-aircraft artillery and having shot down a few bombers they took us for American paratroopers. They were shouting “American parachutists!” At that moment I had a sort of revelation and I shouted back that we are not Americans but the prisoners of the Mauthausen Camp, Linz 3, which had been bombed by the Americans … and that we were waiting there for our SS men to come and take us back. It later turned out that it saved our lives’. Other prisoners who had fled from the camp were executed, but Tadeusz’s prompt explanation of his conduct meant that he and the other prisoners with him were spared. He remembers that the day after the bombing, ‘two young Russians who had escaped with me’ came ‘to thank me for saving their lives’.

  The bombing of the camp had another lasting impact on Tadeusz Smreczyński. As he watched the doctors, who were also prisoners, tending the wounded he had a sudden insight: ‘I felt that life could only regain sense if you try and do good to other people. I decided that if I survived, I would become a doctor. I was inspired by prisoners who were doctors who were helping others in the camp.’22 After the war, Tadeusz did indeed become a doctor in his native country. But because he refused to join the Polish Communist Party, his career was blighted and he was denied the opportunity to pursue medical research. ‘I totally rejected Communism in the form it existed,’ he says. ‘It was not at all about the poor, the working classes and the peasants; it was for the benefit of the so-called leaders.’ He stayed true to the life philosophy he had developed as a prisoner of the Nazis. ‘Life has sense only when one does good. Am I right? I did not feel the urge to live a public life. I did not care about financial incentives that would let me compare my car with someone else’s car. I did not need to impress anyone.’23

  At Auschwitz, the arrival of the Hungarian Jews in the spring and summer of 1944 led to the most intense period of killing in the history of the camp. Around 430,000 Jews from Hungary were transported to Auschwitz between May and July 1944.24 The majority of them were killed on arrival, with the proportion selected for immediate death varying between 70 and 90 per cent of each transport. To accommodate the vast numbers to be killed, large cremation pits were dug near crematoria/gas chambers IV and V, not far from the original improvised Birkenau extermination centres in the Little Red House and Little White House.

  Amid the vast numbers arriving at Birkenau, individual members of the SS felt free to indulge their sadistic imagination. Morris Venezia, one of the Jewish Sonderkommandos working in the crematoria, remembers that two young Jewish sisters and their friend asked one of the SS men if they could be killed together. He was ‘very happy’ to do as they asked, and in the process thought that he would try and see if he could kill all three of them with one bullet. He placed them in a line and pulled the trigger. All three girls collapsed and appeared to be dead. ‘Right away,’ says Morris, ‘we took them and threw them in the flames [of the open pit]. And then we heard some kind of screaming [from the pit].’ It transpired that one of the girls had only fallen down and had not been killed, so now she was burnt alive. ‘And that German officer was so happy because he killed two of them at least with one shot. These animals … No human brain can believe that or understand it. It’s impossible to believe it. But we saw it.’25

  Not all Jews in Hungary were sent to Auschwitz. Back in Budapest, Eichmann and other members of the SS were pursuing a parallel strategy in an attempt to extort the Jews’ wealth. Kurt Becher, as head of the economic department of the SS in Hungary, spent his time wresting large quantities of money, jewels and other valuables from Jews in exchange for a promise that their lives would be spared. He allowed members of the Weiss family, for example, one of the richest and most prominent Jewish families in Hungary, to escape to a neutral country once they had transferred ownership of the enormous Weiss Steel and Metal Works to the Nazis.

  Eichmann was also directly involved in attempts to extort goods from Hungarian Jews, and in the process he made one of the most extraordinary prop
osals of the Final Solution. On 25 April 1944 he met a leading Budapest Jew called Joel Brand and told him that the Nazis were prepared to let ‘one million’ Jews go free as long as a suitable ransom was paid. ‘We are interested in goods, not in money,’ said Eichmann. ‘Travel abroad and liaise directly with your international authorities and with the Allies. And then come back with a concrete offer.’26 It is likely that Eichmann knew that such an offer was doomed from the beginning. Why would the Allies bargain for Jewish lives by supporting the Nazis with equipment that could be used to prolong the war? Especially when the Nazis said that any material the Allies handed to the Nazis in exchange for Jews would not be used on the western front – an obvious attempt to split the Alliance. But even if the negotiations stood little chance of success, Eichmann must have thought he would still benefit by them. That is because by suggesting this offer he would demonstrate to Himmler that he too could be as flexible as Becher, his SS colleague, at a time when the German war machine needed all the raw materials it could get.

  On 17 May 1944, Brand – together with a shady figure called Bandi Grosz – left Hungary for Istanbul to make contact with the Allies and propose a deal whereby 1 million Jews would be ‘saved’ if the Allies provided the Germans with 10,000 trucks. Once in Istanbul Brand met with the Turkish representatives of the Jewish leadership from Palestine. Subsequently, on 26 May, the British High Commissioner for Palestine, Sir Harold MacMichael, was told of the proposed exchange. The Americans also soon learnt of the Nazi plan, and a divergence in the British and American response to the proposal began to appear. Although both sides rejected the idea in principle, they had different opinions about whether or not to use it to open up negotiations. In America the War Refugee Board, established by Roosevelt in January 1944 to assist those persecuted by the Nazis, took an interest in the idea. The perception of the British, expressed at a meeting of a war cabinet committee on refugees on 30 May, was that Henry Morgenthau, the driving force behind the War Refugee Board, had promised that America would ‘rescue’ Jews, and that this might lead to an ‘offer’ from the Germans ‘to unload an even greater number of Jews on to our hands’.27 Morgenthau, as the British knew, was Jewish, and that thought, plus other factors such as the difficulties the British authorities already had in Palestine, and the challenge of transporting large numbers of Jews during wartime, would have made the British wary of the idea.

  The British and Americans had already discussed the problem of rescuing Jews at the Bermuda conference the year before, in April 1943. This gathering of second-tier politicians and advisers rivalled the Evian conference of 1938 for the reluctance shown to offer safe haven to large numbers of Jews. Just as at Evian, the conference was not even officially about the Jews, but about ‘refugees’. And just as at Evian, the British would not commit to accepting substantial numbers of Jews into Palestine. Only a handful of journalists were permitted into Bermuda to cover the conference and the ‘proposals’ reached were kept ‘confidential’ – ostensibly because they needed to be discussed by the respective governments but also, one suspects, because they amounted to virtually nothing. It was in the wake of this ineffectual response to the extermination of the Jews that Roosevelt created the War Refugee Board.

  By the start of July 1944 the divergent views of the British and Americans over the Brand mission had hardened. The Americans believed that shelter should be offered to ‘Jews and similar persons in imminent danger of death’, while the British countered with a suggestion that such an offer should be made only for certain categories of Jews – like children and religious leaders.28 This discussion turned out to be of little practical importance because on 7 July the Americans decided to notify the Soviets about the Brand mission.

  It is not hard to imagine why the Americans felt it important to tell the Soviets about Eichmann’s proposal. This was a particularly sensitive moment in the relationship between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union. Not only had D Day just been launched in the west, but in the east the Red Army had started Operation Bagration, a massive attack on German Army Group Centre that dwarfed D Day in scale. There were also unresolved political issues connected with the Soviet advance, relating to the future of the eastern European nations that the Red Army was about to liberate. Now was not the time, the Americans felt, to keep the Soviets in the dark about a proposal from the Nazis that would destabilize the alliance. The Soviets, not surprisingly, rejected the Brand deal outright.

  But there was another – sensational – element to the Brand mission that the British discovered in Cairo only once they started to interrogate Bandi Grosz, the minor intelligence agent who had accompanied Brand on his trip. Grosz said that he had been told by leading figures in the SS in Budapest to use the mission to ‘arrange a meeting in any neutral country between two or three senior German security officers and two or three American officers of equal rank, or as a last resort British officers, in order to negotiate for a separate peace between the Sicherheitsdienst [SD] and the Western Allies’.29 This idea that the real purpose of the mission was to open negotiations with the West about a way out of the war was certainly what Joel Brand came to believe. ‘My impression was’, said Brand in 1961 at Eichmann’s trial, ‘that Himmler used the Jews as a bribe, as it were, in order to have a visiting card with which to enter into bigger things. [Eichmann] made it clear to me that the deal originated with Himmler.’30

  That Himmler knew about the ‘Jews for trucks’ deal is confirmed by Kurt Becher’s post-war testimony and by contemporary documents.31 Indeed, it is scarcely possible that the mission could have gone ahead without his knowledge and approval. Himmler would have felt he already had permission to pursue such an approach because in December 1942 Hitler had authorized him to ransom Jews for hard currency – as long as such an action brought in substantial amounts of foreign money.32 But it is unlikely that Himmler also received authorization from Hitler to start discussions about a separate peace with the Western Allies, even if only in an attempt to cause discord between the Western Allies and Stalin. Although Hitler was open to the spreading of false intelligence – he authorized the leaking in Spain, for example, of a fictitious attempt by the Soviets to seek a separate peace33 – it is hard to see how he would ever have entered substantive peace negotiations, not least because if news of the talks became public the consequences for German morale would be disastrous.

  As for Himmler, it is likely that he did attempt to open discussions about a way out of the war at this point. In that context there is an intriguing mystery around a record of a British decrypt made of a telegram from ‘Himmler’ on 31 August 1944. The message was sent direct to Churchill, who clearly didn’t want the document to exist. ‘Himmler telegram. Kept and destroyed by me,’34 he wrote on a note in the file. This is the only record of a decrypted message from Himmler, and apparently the only one out of thousands of other German documents that was destroyed by Churchill. What was in the message – an offer of peace negotiations? It appears we will never know.

  A few months later, in December 1944, Theodor Ondrej, an SS intelligence officer, was shocked to learn from his boss, the Nazi foreign intelligence chief Walter Schellenberg, that Himmler wanted to find a way out of the war. ‘One day, by mid- or end of December 1944, Schellenberg told me that Himmler was trying to secure a separate peace,’ says Ondrej. ‘Schellenberg trusted me, so he also told me that Himmler had taken him into his confidence only because Schellenberg, as Germany’s highest intelligence officer, would learn about peace feelers from his foreign agents anyway. This is why he took him into his confidence. My first thought was that Himmler was the least suitable man for a separate peace settlement. SS General Schellenberg smiled and said, “It’s amazing, isn’t it? I support this, even though I know that he is the least suitable man for this.” So Schellenberg was absolutely clear about it, but at the time we were clutching at straws.’35

  As we will see later, by the spring of 1945 Himmler was pursuing a number of different options in an a
ttempt to deal with the West, ultimately, as Hitler saw it, ‘betraying’ Germany. So it is not too far fetched to imagine that he was behind the Bandi Grosz suggestion in the summer of 1944. Maybe at that time he just wanted to create a split between the Allies with the suggestion of a separate peace, or perhaps he was seriously looking for a way out of the war and wanted to progress talks. Or, equally possible, he hadn’t decided between those two options and was waiting to see what developed. What is extraordinary, as both Schellenberg and Ondrej remarked, is that the man who in a speech in Posen in October 1943 had boasted that he had helped make the Jews ‘disappear’ could imagine that little more than a year later the Allies would negotiate with him. But Himmler’s ability to delude himself was immense.

  In Budapest, in late May and June 1944, Eichmann awaited news of the Brand mission. While he waited, Brand’s wife, Hansi, and an enterprising Hungarian Jew called Rudolf Kasztner held a series of meetings with him. They tried to persuade Eichmann to offer a gesture to the Allies to show that the Nazis were serious about releasing Jews. These discussions crystallized around a proposal to send a trainload of Jews to Switzerland. From Eichmann’s perspective this was not an unwelcome idea. It would demonstrate good faith to the Allies, and also be a means of extorting more money from the Hungarian Jews, as the Nazis could demand payment for every place on the train. Given Eichmann’s interest, Rudolf Kasztner took on the practical task of trying to make it happen. In the process ‘Kasztner’s train’ would become the focus of criticism from the Jewish community – and the repercussions would lead to Kasztner’s assassination in Israel after the war.