The Holocaust: A New History

by Laurence Rees

  In part, Kasztner was attacked because the train contained many of his own relations – including his mother and brother – as well as a disproportionate number of Jews from his hometown of Cluj. Out of a total of 1,684 passengers, 388 came from this one small city in Transylvania. Éva Speter, then twenty-nine years old, was selected for the Kasztner train, along with her husband and son. Their places had been assured because her father was one of those, along with Kasztner, who chose who travelled. ‘Everybody tried for himself to stay alive,’ she says. ‘If you have to save your life you’ll try it in every way, even in a criminal way if it comes to that, but you have to save yourself. Your life is the first, you are nearest to yourself, whatever people try to say.’36

  Éva Speter and her family were well aware of what had happened to the Hungarian Jews who were deported. She believed that the Germans wanted ‘to kill all the 11 million Jews who are living in Europe, including the Jews of Russia’. She had even learnt that the Germans gassed Jews after pretending that they were about to take a shower. And just before she left Budapest she discovered that many more people also knew that the Germans were deporting Jews to their deaths: ‘There came a working woman, and she had seen my son, we were all with the yellow star, [and she] said: “Give me your son, I’ll take care of him. He will grow up, and don’t take him to be murdered with you.” Of course I didn’t give her my son, but I thought – this working woman, whom I never knew, wanted this beautiful little child to grow up: a Jewish child. For that I can’t be really angry with the Hungarians.’37

  When Éva Speter left Budapest on 30 June aboard the Kasztner train she didn’t trust the Germans to keep their word, and when the train stopped at Linz in Austria she grew increasingly concerned about what was going to happen to them. Here the Jews were told to disembark because they were to be medically examined and had to take a ‘shower’. She remembers that ‘I was standing naked before the doctor, and still looking very proud, into his eyes, and I thought he should see how a proud Jewish woman is going to die.’ Once in the showers, from the taps came ‘fine warm water … a very relieving experience after we were ready to die there.’38 The Nazis, it turned out, had told the truth about the showers for once.

  But in at least one respect Eichmann had lied, because the train’s immediate destination was not Switzerland but the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen in the north of Germany. A section of the camp had been set aside for so-called ‘exchange Jews’ – those the Nazis might try and ransom – and these Jews received better treatment than Jews elsewhere. For example, Shmuel Huppert, who was sent to the exchange camp with his mother in 1943, remembers that not only did he receive enough food to survive in Bergen-Belsen, but he also learnt to play chess in the camp.39 The Jews from the Kasztner train received similar preferential treatment, and after months of protracted negotiations the vast majority eventually reached safety in Switzerland.

  After the war Kasztner was criticized not only for giving places on the train to his friends and relations, but for causing the deaths of large numbers of other Hungarian Jews by not warning them that the Nazis planned on deporting them to Auschwitz. On the first charge he is guilty, but on the second the evidence is less clear cut. While it is true that on a visit to his hometown of Cluj he didn’t alert people to the Nazis’ true intentions, it is doubtful if an intervention by him would have made any difference. Jewish youth movements within Hungary, like Hashomer Hatzair, Maccabi Hatzair and Bnei Akiva, had made a concerted effort to warn Jews in the provinces of the dangers they faced, but in every case their warnings were ignored.40 In part that was because of the lack of options the Jews faced – there were few mountains or thick forests in which to hide, and many of the non-Jewish locals were anti-Semitic – and partly it was a desire to block out the idea that the terrible rumours might be true. ‘People didn’t listen to whatever they heard,’ says Éva Speter, ‘because people don’t want to believe – never want to believe – the worst. They always try to believe something that’s better … Hope is one of the best qualities that men get from when they are born.’41

  Kasztner knew about the mass killings at Auschwitz because he had read a report written by two former inmates, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler. They had managed to escape from the camp in April 1944 and had made their way back to their homeland of Slovakia. There they recorded what was happening at Auschwitz Birkenau. Prior to this, few people in the world knew about the true function of Birkenau. Because Birkenau was partially a work camp, at the centre of a whole network of other work camps, many observers outside the Reich had misunderstood its primary purpose. Richard Lichtheim, for instance, of the Jewish Agency in Geneva, had thought – prior to reading the Vrba–Wetzler report – that the Germans were deporting Jews to Auschwitz in order ‘to exploit more Jewish labour in the industrial centres of Upper Silesia’.42 But the Vrba–Wetzler report left no room for doubt about the real purpose of Auschwitz. It accurately described the opening of the new crematoria/gas-chamber complexes at Birkenau in 1943 and the way in which the murders were conducted. It wasn’t surprising that the report was so authentic, because one of the Sonderkommandos working in the crematoria, Filip Müller, had told the two Slovaks exactly what went on there. ‘I had handed to Alfred [Wetzler] a plan of the crematoria and gas chambers as well as a list of names of the SS men who were on duty there,’ wrote Müller after the war. ‘In addition I had given to both of them notes I had been making for some time of almost all transports gassed in crematoria 4 and 5. I had described to them in full detail the process of extermination so that they would be able to report to the outside world …’43

  The Vrba–Wetzler report circulated in Budapest during May 1944. By late June the news had reached London and by early July the authorities in Washington had been informed. Armed with such authentic intelligence, a whole variety of people – from Roosevelt to the King of Sweden – protested to Admiral Horthy about the deportation of the Hungarian Jews. Even the Pope wrote to Horthy in a letter of 25 June, calling on him to reconsider his actions.44 Archbishop Gennaro Verolino, a papal diplomat in Budapest, remembers that even before the Vrba–Wetzler report had surfaced, ‘Gradually we came to the conclusion that “compulsory work abroad” meant deportation. And deportation meant extermination, annihilation. We then protested very vigorously, at first the nuncio himself, and then with the other diplomats.’45 The papal nuncio in Hungary gave up to 15,000 letters of safe conduct to Jews in Budapest. ‘It saved my life once,’ says Ferenc Wiener, a Hungarian Jew. ‘It saved my life when I showed it to a German officer. And they were executing all the others. I was next to be killed. I then showed my letter and the officer told me I could move on.’46 In the light of incidents like this, Gerhart Riegner, the wartime representative of the World Jewish Congress in Switzerland, maintains that the Vatican’s intervention in Hungary was ‘the only example in the history of the Holocaust where the Vatican systematically took the right decision.’47

  Admiral Horthy now had to decide what to do. Should he try and stop the transports to Auschwitz and so incur the wrath of the Germans, or let them continue despite the protests? Leading Nazis like Joseph Goebbels had previously felt secure in their hold over him – not just because they had successfully bullied Horthy into ‘inviting’ German troops into Hungary in March and cooperating in the deportation of the Jews, but because they believed that he now welcomed the chance to expel the Jews from his country. ‘At any rate,’ wrote Goebbels in his diary on 27 April, ‘he now no longer obstructs the cleansers of public life in Hungary; on the contrary, he is now murderously angry with the Jews and has no objections to us using them as hostages. He even suggested the same thing himself … At any rate the Hungarians will not escape the rhythm of the Jewish question. Whoever says A must say B, and the Hungarians, having started with Judenpolitik, can for that reason not halt it. From a certain point onwards Judenpolitik propels itself.’48 This is a particularly revealing diary entry, for Goebbels states unequivocally how he belie
ved the Nazis could handle their allies over the question of the Jews. If the Nazis managed to get blood on the hands of their allies, they would have no choice but to stick with the Third Reich come what may.

  But Horthy didn’t react as predicted. Even though he was already massively compromised, he reversed his position and on 6 July told the Germans that he wanted the deportations to end. The transports to Auschwitz officially stopped three days later. The pressure on Horthy had been just too much. While he had felt able to sanction the deportations when there were only rumours – however strong and compelling – that the Jews were being killed, now that there was clear evidence that the Jews were being sent to a murder factory he wasn’t prepared to permit them to continue. Especially when not only was he receiving protests from the international community, but Budapest was under direct attack from the Allies with the Americans bombing the Hungarian capital on 2 July. Now that the Western Allies were fighting in France and the Red Army was advancing into eastern Europe, there was no hiding from reality – the Germans were losing the war, and one day the victorious powers would call their collaborators to account. By stopping the deportations now Horthy must have thought he stood a chance of constructing an alibi for himself. His judgement was right. Notwithstanding Hungarian participation in previous atrocities against the Jews, Horthy escaped without punishment at the end of the war. He retired to a seaside town near Lisbon where he died in 1957 aged eighty-eight.

  The Germans, having already deported 430,000 Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz, were prepared to pause before deporting the rest. After all, this was just one setback the Nazis faced that summer among many. They had to deal not just with the desperate situation on the front line, but with a crisis at the top of the Nazi state when, on 20 July, disaffected Wehrmacht officers tried to kill Hitler by exploding a bomb at his headquarters in East Prussia. Hitler was not seriously hurt, but the search for the perpetrators now became an immediate priority for the German security services.

  In the aftermath of the attack on his life Hitler – always at heart an angry man – became even angrier. According to General Heinz Guderian, newly appointed Chief of Staff of the German Army, ‘the deep distrust he [Hitler] already felt for mankind in general, and for General Staff officers and generals in particular, now became profound hatred … It had already been difficult enough dealing with him; it now became a torture that grew steadily worse from month to month. He frequently lost all self-control and his language grew increasingly violent.’49

  A month later another disaster loomed for the Germans – this time on the diplomatic front. The Romanians wanted to quit the war. On 5 August, Hitler met the Romanian leader, Marshal Antonescu, and used all his rhetorical skills to try and convince him to keep fighting, but mere words could not alter the dire reality for the Romanian soldiers on the front line. On 20 August large sections of the Romanian Army simply fell apart as the Red Army attacked in the Jassy–Kishinev offensive. On 23 August, Antonescu was removed from office. The Romanians now changed sides and announced that they were at war with Germany.

  But Hitler, true to character, would not alter course. And his determination to prolong the war until Red Army soldiers were in the streets of Berlin led inevitably to one final period of appalling destruction.

  18. Murder to the End

  (1944–1945)

  In the wake of Hitler’s resolution to fight to the end, the Allies had their own politically controversial issues to confront – not least what to do with the detailed knowledge they now possessed about the murders the Nazis were committing at Auschwitz.

  One point on which they all agreed was the magnitude of the horror. ‘There is no doubt that this is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world,’ wrote Churchill on 11 July 1944, ‘and it has been done by scientific machinery by nominally civilized men in the name of a great State and one of the leading races of Europe … Declarations should be made in public, so that everyone connected with it will be hunted down and put to death.’1 But words of outrage and threat on their own, of course, didn’t directly help the Jews who were dying in Auschwitz.

  Various Jewish groups suggested one practical response to the crime – drop bombs on the camp. The World Jewish Congress in Geneva called in June for the Americans to destroy the gas chambers, and Churchill, when he heard about the idea, wrote on 7 July to Anthony Eden: ‘Get anything out of the Air Force you can and invoke me if necessary.’2 But calls to bomb Auschwitz were ultimately rejected. In Britain the Air Ministry was unenthusiastic about the idea for practical reasons. One problem was the difficulty of bombing the gas chambers while avoiding killing many of the prisoners at Birkenau. The British suggested that the request be considered by the Americans, who specialized in daytime bombing. On behalf of the Americans, John McCloy, the Assistant Secretary of War, was dismissive. He expressed doubts about the feasibility of the plan, and said that in any case it would divert bombers from other, more important operations.3

  However, even if the immense practical difficulties could have been overcome and the gas chambers of Auschwitz bombed, it is hard to see how this would have stopped the killings. The Harvest Festival massacre at Majdanek the year before had demonstrated that the Germans did not need gas chambers to murder large numbers of Jews – machine guns could kill just as many.

  Nonetheless, the dismissive way in which many of those involved in the decision-making process treated the question of the bombing of Auschwitz – one of McCloy’s staff even wrote an inter-office memo admitting that McCloy wanted to ‘kill’ the idea4 – reflects a broader issue of significance. It is encapsulated by a question to the Allies posed by David Ben Gurion, chairman of the Jewish Agency executive and later one of the founders of modern Israel, in a speech on 10 July 1944: ‘If instead of Jews, thousands of English, American or Russian women, children and aged had been tortured every day, burnt to death, asphyxiated in gas chambers – would you have acted in the same way?’5

  The answer to Ben Gurion’s question is, almost certainly, no. The Allies would surely not ‘have acted in the same way’ if, for example, British prisoners of war were being gassed at Auschwitz. That is a judgement that is supported by the evidence. As we have seen, the Allies didn’t want to commit themselves at the Bermuda conference in 1943 to admitting large number of Jews into their countries – even though at the end of 1942 they had condemned the Nazis’ extermination of the Jews. In Washington in March 1943, a month before the Bermuda conference, Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary, had said in a meeting that it was imperative ‘to move very cautiously about offering to take all Jews out of a country’ because ‘if we do that, then the Jews of the world will be wanting us to make similar efforts in Poland and Germany. Hitler might well take us up on any such offer, and there simply are not enough ships and means of transportation in the world to handle them.’6 To paraphrase Ben Gurion’s question in the light of Eden’s words, does anyone think such an excuse for inaction would have been thought acceptable if the Germans were murdering British or American prisoners of war? Would the British and Americans seriously have let their soldiers be massacred just because ships couldn’t be diverted to take them across the English Channel to safety, especially when ships were found during the war to transport several hundred thousand captured enemy prisoners across the Atlantic to North America? No, Eden’s excuse is simply not credible.

  Linda Breder, a Jewish inmate of Auschwitz, felt that ‘God forgot us and [the] people of the war forgot us, didn’t care about what’s going on and they knew what’s going on [at Auschwitz].’ She says, ‘We wanted them to put the bombs on the camp, at least we could run and hundreds and hundreds of planes were coming [to bomb other targets in Poland] and we are looking up and no bombs. So this we could not understand.’7

  The Allied position regarding the Jews remained simple – the only sure way to stop their extermination was to defeat the Nazis. In the summer of 1944 that strategy seemed to en
joy some success when the Red Army captured Majdanek camp in late July. Majdanek was a revelation to the world. Much of the extermination machinery had not been destroyed by the retreating Germans, and the remaining gas chambers and crematorium were incontrovertible proof of the Nazis’ murderous activities. ‘What I am now about to relate is too enormous and too gruesome to be fully conceived,’ wrote Konstantin Simonov, a Soviet war correspondent, after examining the camp. Simonov described how the gas chambers functioned, with ‘specially trained operators wearing gas masks’ who ‘poured the “cyclone [sic]” out of the cylindrical tins into the chamber’. He was also appalled by the immense number of shoes he saw, taken from those who had been murdered. ‘They spill over out of the hut through the windows and the doors. In one spot the weight of them pushed out part of the wall, which fell outwards together with piles of shoes … it is hard to imagine anything more gruesome than this sight.’8

  At Auschwitz, after the Hungarian transports had stopped in early July, and the majority of the Łódź ghetto Jews had been murdered a few weeks later, the peak period of killing was over. As a result, the SS decided to reduce the number of Sonderkommandos in the camp from the high point of 900 reached at the time of the Hungarian transports to a much lower figure. They planned to do this by murdering surplus Sonderkommandos. ‘We knew that our days were always numbered and we didn’t know when the end would be,’ says Dario Gabbai, one of the Sonderkommando at Birkenau. The Nazis, especially in the light of the publicity about Majdanek, did not want any Sonderkommandos to survive the war. They knew too much about the intimate details of the killing process. So at the end of September, SS Scharführer (Sergeant Major) Busch asked for 200 ‘volunteers’ from the Sonderkommandos at Crematorium IV to come forward. He claimed that they would be transported to a new camp. But the Sonderkommandos were aware that the number of transports to the camp had been tailing off, and had no doubt what that meant for their own fate. ‘Was Busch really so naïve, I thought,’ wrote Filip Müller, one of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando, ‘to believe any one of us would volunteer for his own slaughter?’9 Not surprisingly, no one came forward. So Scharführer Busch was forced to pick the 200 Sonderkommandos himself. Of course, there was no ‘new camp’ and the selected prisoners were taken away and killed. That night – in an unprecedented event – the SS themselves burnt the bodies of the Sonderkommandos in crematoria ovens away from the eyes of the other prisoners. Their excuse was that they were burning the bodies of people killed in an Allied bombing raid. The remaining Sonderkommandos were not deceived, and their suspicions about the fate of their comrades were confirmed when several of the bodies were found in the ovens the next morning, burnt but still recognizable. As a consequence, when the SS told the Kapos at the crematoria to come up with a list of 300 more Sonderkommandos who were allegedly to be transferred to ‘rubber factories’, the Sonderkommandos decided to launch an uprising.10