The Holocaust: A New History

by Laurence Rees

  As we have already seen, the security levels at Auschwitz were of a higher level than other death camps like Sobibór and Treblinka. The crematoria/gas-chamber buildings were in their own fenced-off sub-camps within the giant complex of Auschwitz Birkenau, which itself sat within the security area of the Auschwitz zone of interest. There had been attempts at a mass breakout before – most notably a revolt of Poles within the penal company at Birkenau on 10 June 1942. But of the fifty or so prisoners who attempted that escape, only one is known for certain to have survived.

  However, even knowing that the chances of a successful uprising were slim to non-existent, on 7 October 1944 the Sonderkommandos at Crematoria IV turned on their SS guards. They fought with axes and hammers against SS armed with guns, and managed to set the crematorium on fire. Hearing the noise coming from Crematorium IV, the Sonderkommandos at Crematorium II also attacked their SS overseers, killing two of them – even throwing one into a burning furnace. SS reinforcements arrived and started to hunt down any prisoners who had managed to escape the perimeter of the camp. When they found some Sonderkommandos hiding inside a barn they set it on fire. Not one of the Sonderkommandos who rose up against the SS that day survived the attempted escape. Around 250 Sonderkommandos had taken part in the revolt and the SS made sure every single one of them died. But the revenge of the SS did not stop there. In an attempt to terrorize the remaining Sonderkommandos they selected a further 200 and killed them as well.11 Henryk Mandelbaum, one of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando, remembers that they ‘told us to lie face down on the ground holding our hands behind our backs and every third person was shot. Some of my friends in the Sonderkommando lost their lives and the rest had to go back to work. There was never much hope for us. I’m telling it like it is.’12 Despite enduring this ordeal himself, and witnessing the death of so many of his comrades, Henryk Mandelbaum still feels that those who fought back ‘did a good thing’ because ‘we were the living dead, you have to remember. Now we’re speaking freely, peacefully and we can have assumptions, we can pose questions, we can add, we can subtract, but then it was very different. Human beings were condemned …’13

  After the war, Auschwitz survivors sometimes had to endure taunts that they had lacked the courage to resist. Halina Birenbaum remembers that when she reached Israel in 1947 she was distraught when other members of the kibbutz said to her, ‘You just followed like sheep. You didn’t defend yourselves. Why didn’t you defend yourselves? What happened to you? You’re to blame. You didn’t do anything. That kind of thing wouldn’t happen to us. Don’t tell us about it. It’s a disgrace. Don’t tell the young people, you’ll crush their fighting spirit.’14

  The history of the Sonderkommando revolt at Auschwitz in October 1944 demonstrates the injustice of such accusations. The Sonderkommandos did not go like ‘sheep’ to the slaughter. They fought back and died as a consequence. They lost their lives because effective resistance in Auschwitz was almost impossible. Auschwitz lasted as an institution for four and a half years and in that time out of the more than 1 million people sent there, about 800 attempted to escape. But fewer than 150 of them managed to get away from the area and an unknown number of these successful escapees were subsequently killed in the war.15 It was thus not so much lack of courage that prevented the mass of inmates from escaping as lack of opportunity.

  By the time of the Sonderkommando revolt in October 1944, the Germans had lost yet more allies. On 8 September, the Red Army entered Bulgaria and hours later the Bulgarians followed the example of the Italians and Romanians – they changed sides and declared war on Germany. Less than two weeks later Finland exited the war as well.16 Hitler’s erstwhile friends had recognized the inevitable – the Germans had lost the war. Even members of the Nazi elite wanted to explore ways of escape. Not just Himmler, but Joseph Goebbels as well. When Goebbels heard via Japanese sources a rumour that Stalin might possibly consider a separate peace, he composed a letter to Hitler supporting the idea. ‘What we would attain’, he wrote on 20 September 1944, ‘would not be the victory that we dreamed of in 1941, but it would still be the greatest victory in German history. The sacrifices that the German people had made in this war would thereby be fully justified.’17 But Hitler didn’t even bother to engage with Goebbels’ suggestion and never discussed it with him. For Hitler, either Germany triumphed or Germany would be destroyed. What had been his greatest strength in the eyes of supporters like Goebbels – his refusal to compromise – was now revealed as his greatest weakness.

  One obvious consequence of Hitler’s intransigence was that the suffering of the Jews continued. In Slovakia, for instance, German security forces deported more than 12,000 Jews between September and December 1944, after the Germans suppressed an uprising by the Slovak resistance. In Hungary, Hitler’s determination to stop Admiral Horthy from taking the country out of the war led to another crisis for the Hungarian Jews. After ending the deportations to Auschwitz in early July, Horthy had once again been plotting to make peace with the Allies. In early October, a Hungarian delegation even signed a deal with the Soviets in Moscow. On 15 October, the Germans responded. Otto Skorzeny, the SS officer who had led the team that rescued Mussolini from prison the year before, captured Horthy’s son Miklós in Budapest, rolled him up in a carpet and took him to Mauthausen camp in Austria. The Germans now blackmailed Horthy into transferring power to Ferenc Szálasi, leader of the Hungarian fascist party, the Arrow Cross. Horthy, wanting to save his son, collaborated with the Germans once again, and then spent the rest of the war as Hitler’s ‘guest’ in a castle in Bavaria.

  With Horthy out of the way and Hungary in the hands of fascists, the Jews were vulnerable once again. On 18 October Eichmann began discussions with Szálasi about deporting Jews – not this time to Auschwitz, but direct to the Reich as forced labourers. Eichmann’s problem was that there was no means of transporting tens of thousands of Jews to the west. But he came up with a solution. If the Jews could not be carried by railway or truck, then they could walk – for more than a hundred miles. By the end of November, 27,000 Jews were walking to the Reich and 40,000 more were supposed to follow them. Conditions on the march were, predictably, appalling. Indeed, they were so bad that when a group of SS officers passed the marching Jews they were so concerned about what they saw that they complained to Otto Winkelmann, Higher SS and Police Chief for Hungary. Incredibly, one of those who voiced their objections was Rudolf Höss, one-time commandant of Auschwitz and now in an administrative role in the SS. It wasn’t that Höss had suddenly developed a sense of humanity, but that he didn’t see the value in sending Jews to the Reich who, when they arrived, couldn’t work.18 Another SS officer, Kurt Becher, who had been involved in the negotiations about the Hungarian Jews earlier in the year, complained to Himmler about Eichmann’s actions. This led to an extraordinary meeting in Himmler’s private train in the Black Forest in November 1944. Himmler told Eichmann to stop deporting the Budapest Jews, adding, ‘If until now you have exterminated Jews, from now on, if I order you, you must be a fosterer of Jews.’19

  Himmler’s apparently bizarre remark was, like Höss’s, motivated not by a change of ideological heart, but by purely practical concerns – not just the desire to use the Jews as both potential labour and hostages in any future discussions with the Allies, but also an understanding of the military reality. As Himmler talked to Eichmann, the Red Army were advancing further into Hungary. Thus discussions about any potential deportation of Hungarian Jews were shortly to become of only theoretical interest.

  By late December the Red Army had encircled Budapest. Hitler declared the city a ‘fortified place’ and called on the defenders to fight to the death. The ensuing battle lasted until 13 February 1945 and around 40,000 civilians died. In the aftermath of the Soviet victory, soldiers of the Red Army attacked the women of Budapest and thousands were raped – one estimate is as many as 50,000. Barna Andrásofszky, a medical student, witnessed the aftermath of one such attack in a village outside
Budapest. He was called to help a young woman who said she had been gang-raped by ‘maybe ten or fifteen men’. Barna could not stop the woman’s massive internal bleeding and she was taken to hospital. ‘It was very difficult to come to terms that this was happening in the twentieth century,’ he says. ‘It was very difficult to see as a reality what the Nazi propaganda was spreading. But here we could see that in reality. And also we heard about many other terrible situations like this.’20

  Such testimony is relevant in a history of the Holocaust because it reminds us once again that the extermination of the Jews took place in the context of a war of the most horrendous brutality, though that must not, of course, be considered any form of excuse for the Nazis’ crime. Significantly, the appalling scenes in Budapest were not replicated in Bucharest in Romania or in Sofia in Bulgaria after the Red Army arrived. Hitler had, to a large extent, brought this suffering upon the Hungarians. For a necessary precondition of the Red Army’s atrocities in Hungary had been Hitler’s decision that the Hungarians were to be prevented, unlike the Romanians and Bulgarians, from changing sides as the Soviets neared. Hitler’s stubbornness was ultimately futile anyway. At the end of December, with Budapest surrounded, the new Hungarian government, sponsored by the Soviets, declared war on Germany.

  Hitler continued, in the face of the Allied advance, to voice his hatred of the Jews. In a decree of 25 September 1944 he referred to ‘the total annihilatory will of our Jewish-international enemies’,21 and in a proclamation in Munich on 12 November he talked about the Jews’ ‘satanic will to persecute and destroy’.22 In a sign of Hitler’s own reluctance to face an audience when events were going against him, the Munich address was actually delivered by Himmler, but the sentiments were undeniably Hitler’s. Yet again the German leader marvelled at the ‘incomprehensible absurdity’ of the Western democracies in forming an alliance with the forces of ‘Bolshevism’, and claimed that this apparently nonsensical position could be explained ‘at the moment you realize that the Jew is always behind the stupidity and weakness of man, his lack of character on the one hand, and his deficiencies on the other’. The reality, he said, was that ‘the Jew is the wire-puller in the democracies, as well as the creator and driving force of the Bolshevik international beast of the world.’ Hitler thus remained a consistent fantasist. For this was the same argument he had made in the beer halls of Munich in the early 1920s when he alleged that the Jews were simultaneously behind both ‘Bolshevism’ and the excesses of capitalism.

  In a piece of the most twisted logic imaginable, Hitler even argued in his 1945 New Year proclamation to German soldiers that the fact that Germany was now engaged in ‘a merciless struggle for existence or non-existence’ was because ‘the goal of the Jewish-international world conspiracy opposing us is the extermination of our Volk.’ The correct explanation, of course, was that Germans were now in danger because Hitler had pursued a racist war of expansionism that had backfired, not that ‘the Jewish-eastern Bolshevism reflects in its exterminationist tendencies the goals of Jewish-western capitalism.’23

  As Hitler offered this New Year message to German soldiers, their ‘Bolshevik’ enemies were not far from Auschwitz, where around 67,000 inmates still remained. In a new offensive, beginning on 12 January, Soviet soldiers from the First and Fourth Ukrainian Fronts closed in on Kraków, little more than 30 miles east of the camp. At Auschwitz, the Germans now followed orders not to allow their prisoners to fall into enemy hands. The SS marched most of the remaining Auschwitz prisoners – around 58,000 of them – out into the icy wind and snow of the Polish winter. The prisoners left behind, just under 9,000, were judged too sick to embark on the march. They were supposed to be shot by SS Sturmbannführer (Major) Franz Xaver Kraus and his men before the Red Army liberated Auschwitz. SS units did go on to murder about 300 prisoners at Birkenau, together with several hundred more in four sub-camps, but most of the sick at Auschwitz survived. Once again, this wasn’t because the SS had suddenly become ashamed of their murderous work, but because the discipline of the SS had started to crack as the Red Army approached. Rather than spend time killing the inmates, the SS preferred to increase their chances of saving themselves by escaping the area. Prisoners recalled that during the ‘evacuation’ there was ‘chaos’ and ‘panic’ among ‘the drunken SS’.24

  Amid this confusion, even some of the Sonderkommando managed to survive. Morris Kesselman, an eighteen-year-old member of the Sonderkommando, remembers that as thousands of prisoners were milling about, waiting to join the march out of the camp, the ‘guy in charge’ of his block – ‘a French Jew’ – came and said that the SS appeared to have left the immediate area because the camp was being ‘liquidated’. ‘So we all went out,’ says Morris, ‘we mixed in [with the other prisoners] and marched out.’

  During his time in the Auschwitz Sonderkommando, Morris Kesselman had tried to ‘strengthen himself’ with ‘whatever [food] was available’. He had also learnt to give himself an edge during selections in Birkenau by standing next to someone who looked weak. ‘If it wouldn’t be him it would be me,’ he says. ‘Did I feel sorry? Sure I felt sorry, but I couldn’t help him. But at that point I only watched out for myself. I was not in a position to help anybody.’25 Once assigned to the Sonderkommando, though horrified by the work he had to do, he believes his chances of survival were increased by the fact that he was young and ‘didn’t know much about anything’. He remembers that it was predominantly the ‘elderly people, the intelligent people’ who committed suicide by flinging themselves on the electric fences. He believes the young and less well educated found it easier to cope. As a member of the Sonderkommando he had access to the clothes of the murdered Jews and so in January 1945, ‘when I marched out of the camp … I was very well dressed. I had a Russian hat, a fur hat, with a heavy coat, and good shoes. And the only thing is, I don’t know what made me do it, but I had my pockets full of lumps of sugar. Why I did it, I don’t know – other people took meat. The sugar and the snow [mixed together], I survived because of that.’26

  Conditions on the march out of Auschwitz were life-threatening. Dario Gabbai, another Sonderkommando who had managed to join the exodus, remembers that ‘The German Army was killing anyone who couldn’t walk.’27 Silvia Veselá, a Slovakian Jew who had spent more than two years in Auschwitz, confirms that ‘Those who couldn’t go further were shot dead. We were all mixed up, men and women. The road was covered in dead …’28

  The guards shot prisoners not only because they could not keep up with the pace of the march, but for stopping to urinate or to bend down and tie their laces. At night, there wasn’t space in the barns or other shelters for all the prisoners, so many slept in the open.29 After several days on the road, Ibi Mann, a Czech Jew, remembers, ‘it seemed to me to be the end of the world already, it was very hard … There were less and less and less people marching … we weren’t hungry but we were thirsty. We were terribly thirsty and people simply dropped. They dropped or they were shot.’30

  The majority of prisoners were marched to one of two destinations – either Gliwice, 30 miles to the north-west, or Wodzisław, a similar distance due west. There they were shoved on to open railway trucks for the next stage of their ordeal. Morris Venezia, a Greek Jew, remembers that it was ‘terrible’ in the trucks because ‘the snow was coming down on top of us’ and ‘the wagon was packed.’ As a result ‘many people died’ on the journey to camps further away from the front line.31

  Just days after the march out of Auschwitz, at Stutthof concentration camp in West Prussia, thousands of other prisoners were also forced out into the snow. Around 11,000 inmates, mostly Jews, were marched out of Stutthof and nearby satellite camps. Some headed towards Königsberg in East Prussia while others headed due west.32 On the journey the accompanying guards shot around 2,000 of the prisoners. ‘On both sides of the road,’ recalled Schoschana Rabinovici, one of those forced to march through the freezing cold, ‘we saw corpses of the prisoners from the columns marchi
ng in front of us. You could tell that some of the dead had collapsed and died of hunger, others had been shot, and the blood flowing from their wounds turned the snow red.’33 On 31 January several thousand prisoners were machine-gunned on the seashore at Palmnicken on the Sambian peninsula in the far east of Prussia, after an attempt to trap them in an amber mine and blow them up had been thwarted.34 Only 200 are thought to have survived the massacre.