The Holocaust: A New History

by Laurence Rees

  Six months earlier the commandant of Stutthof had been ordered by the SS economic and administrative department to ensure that no Jewish prisoner at the camp was left alive by the end of 1944. As a consequence gas chambers had been improvised in the camp. Starting in the early autumn of 1944, the gassing took place in a converted delousing room, but after a short time a new gassing installation was created in a railway wagon in a siding near the crematorium. The idea was that the prisoners to be gassed were first tricked into believing that they were boarding a train, rather than entering a gas chamber. To assist in that deception an SS man put on a railway uniform ‘complete with signal whistle’ and told the prisoners to hurry up and get on board as the train was about to leave for Danzig.35 But the capacity of these makeshift gas chambers was limited, and there were still many thousands of Jews left alive at Stutthof by the end of the year.

  What the Stutthof massacre confirmed was that for all Himmler’s talk of ‘fostering’ the Jews, a desire to murder them still existed within the Nazi state, even as the Red Army moved ever closer. Although the situation was certainly confused – almost chaotic – on the ground, the ideological imperative to destroy the Jews still remained. While Himmler understood that for tactical reasons it might be worth bargaining with the Allies over the lives of some Jewish ‘hostages’, the central objective had not altered.

  The level of suffering on what became known as the ‘death marches’ was immense. One estimate – almost certainly on the low side – is that out of 113,000 concentration camp prisoners who were forced on to the winter roads in January and February 1945, more than one in three died.36 In Poland there were examples of locals trying to offer help to the desperate prisoners as they trudged by,37 but within Germany, while there may well have been individual displays of kindness, the general attitude was less forgiving – summed up by the comment of one German bystander at the sight of prisoners on a death march: ‘What crimes they must have committed to be treated so cruelly.’38

  Once the surviving prisoners reached their destinations their torment continued. Most were sent to camps within the Reich, including Buchenwald, Dora-Mittelbau and Mauthausen. About 20,000 former Auschwitz prisoners ended up at Bergen-Belsen, north-west of Hanover. The camp had been the holding destination for the so-called ‘exchange Jews’ in 1943, but conditions had deteriorated badly by the time the prisoners from the death marches arrived. In part that was the result of gross overcrowding. The camp expanded from 15,000 inmates at the end of 1944 to 60,000 in April 1945. ‘Bergen-Belsen cannot be described in human language,’ says Alice Lok Cahana, who was sent there from Auschwitz. Prisoners cried out ‘for “Mother! Water! Water! Mother!” You heard chanting, day and night.’ The Kapo in charge of Alice’s group of prisoners ‘went berserk’ and started whipping them ‘because she wanted to silence the dying’. During the night the Kapo kicked out at the prisoners. Once she stamped on Alice’s head, and Alice knew that ‘if I move she [the Kapo] will beat me to death.’39

  A Polish Catholic woman imprisoned in Bergen-Belsen remembered the arrival of Hungarian Jews. ‘During December 1944 and January and February 1945 multitudes of women stood for hours in this freezing weather,’ she said, in testimony she gave immediately after the end of the war. ‘This horrible picture was not enough to describe the conditions of those miserable Hungarian Jewish women, particularly the elderly ones who dropped like flies from starvation and cold. [A] special detail of Ukrainian prisoners picked up the corpses lying by the blocks and carted them off to be cremated. Each night women died in [their] blocks and each day they died during the roll calls. They came from transports that lasted for days, sometimes even weeks, were totally exhausted, became crowded into blocks one thousand or twelve hundred in each, having to use one bed by four people.’40 Another prisoner recalled that there was no water and that ‘intestinal illnesses were rampant; diarrhea and typhoid fever decimated people.’41

  As the Third Reich neared collapse, conditions at other camps were equally horrific. Mauthausen and the network of sub-camps close by became vast zones of death – 11,000 died in April 1945 alone. At Ravensbrück, north of Berlin, conditions had been worsening during 1944, and early in 1945 a gas chamber was improvised to murder several thousand prisoners.42 Estera Frenkiel, who had previously been in the Łódź ghetto, was sent to Ravensbrück in the summer of 1944. She remembers the camp as ‘pure hell’. ‘The ghetto was a story in its own right,’ she says. ‘That was a tale of hunger. That was a battle for food, avoiding deportation. But there [in Ravensbrück] it was hell: neither day, nor night.’43

  Yet, at the same time as the death marches left the camps, Himmler personally negotiated the ransom of Jews. In January 1945 he met in the Black Forest with Jean-Marie Musy, a Swiss politician, and discussed releasing a number of Jews for money. In early February a transport containing around 1,200 Jews left Theresienstadt camp, north-east of Prague, for Switzerland. Rita Reh, one of the Jews on board, remembers, ‘When we were on the train the SS came and told us to put on some make-up, comb our hair and dress up, so we’d look all right when we arrived. They wanted us to make a good impression on the Swiss. They didn’t want us to look like camp inmates, overworked. They wanted us to look good.’44 When Himmler’s ‘humanitarian’ gesture was publicized in the Swiss papers, Hitler was furious.45 Even though he had agreed in December 1942 that Himmler could pursue the ransoming of Jews, this was too much. Almost certainly, he was concerned about the sense of despair that might emanate from sending Jews to safety at a time when the German people were suffering as the bombing attacks intensified. Hitler ordered Himmler to stop ransoming Jews at once. It was clear once again that Hitler would fight to the very end. Bernd Freiherr Freytag von Loringhoven, an adjutant to the army Chief of Staff, who observed Hitler during this period, maintains that ‘Officially there was no political solution. Foreign policy did not exist any more. For Hitler there was only a military solution. A political solution was beyond discussion, and if it had been mentioned, Hitler would have labelled it as defeatism.’46

  Himmler’s relationship with Hitler was now under great strain. Hitler was already furious with Himmler for his perceived failure as a military leader. Dissatisfied with the performance of his traditionally trained military experts, Hitler had recently appointed him to a series of leadership posts, including Commander of Army Group Vistula. But having an amateur commander – albeit one with the necessary ideological fervour – had not benefited the soldiers concerned, and Himmler had been no more successful at holding back the Red Army than his predecessors had been. On 15 March 1945, according to Goebbels, Hitler remarked that Himmler bore ‘the historic guilt’ for the fact that ‘Pomerania and a large part of its population had fallen into the hands of the Soviets’.47 The following day Hitler told Goebbels that he had given Himmler ‘an exceptionally vigorous telling off’.48 Goebbels’ consequent judgement on Himmler was cutting: ‘Unfortunately, he was tempted to pursue military laurels, but he has failed completely. He’ll do nothing but ruin his good political reputation by this.’49

  However, by this point Himmler seems to have been less concerned with his ‘political reputation’ among the Nazi elite, and a great deal more interested in how he might be perceived by the victorious powers. He ignored Hitler’s instructions and instead decided to intensify his contacts with the West. During February and March 1945 he met with Count Folke Bernadotte of the Swedish Red Cross and discussed sending Scandinavian prisoners held in concentration camps to Sweden. Himmler’s personal masseur and physical therapist, Felix Kersten, played a part in lobbying Himmler to release not just the Scandinavian prisoners – both Jews and non-Jews – but also large numbers of Jews of other nationalities. It was in this context that Himmler wrote a bizarre letter to Kersten in the middle of March, in which he revealed how he would try and explain his previous actions to any representative of the Jews. He said that he had always wanted to allow Jews to move safely to the West ‘until the war and the irrationalit
y unleashed by it’ made this policy impossible. He now wanted ‘all differences’ to be put to one side so that ‘wisdom and rationality’ and ‘the desire to help’ would appear in their place.50

  We see Himmler’s words today, understandably, as wholly mendacious. But it is possible that he genuinely believed what he was writing. The words reflect the warped, paranoid world in which the Nazi leadership existed. Himmler almost certainly thought that, had the war not intervened, the policy Eichmann had operated in Vienna in 1938 – of robbing the Jews and deporting them – might have removed all the Jews from the Reich. This policy had been thwarted, the Nazis argued at the time, only by the unwillingness of the rest of the world to take the Jews. From the Nazi perspective, the problem had been not that the German government wanted to expel the Jews, but that none of the nations of the world gathered at the Evian conference in 1938 had wanted to receive them. In this context, Himmler would have argued that the Nazis were the true victims. Not just that, but – according to the Nazis – the war was not their fault either. It had happened because Germany had been denied the return of territory stolen after the end of the First World War. As for the extermination camps, they had been constructed only because the British had irrationally acted against their best interests and refused to make peace in the summer of 1940. Likewise, Germany had been forced to fight a preventative war against the Bolsheviks who, had Germany not intervened, would have invaded and conquered Europe. The fact that the Bolsheviks were even now fighting their way towards the Atlantic was proof that this analysis had been correct all along.

  It was all a fantasy, of course – not least because Hitler had for years intended to launch a war of territorial conquest in the east. But within the confines of the Nazi universe Himmler’s arguments made sense. Outrageous and full of falsehoods as his letter of explanation to Kersten was, it remains valuable as an insight into how he seriously thought he could argue that the Holocaust was not his fault.

  Given that Himmler had no problem deluding himself about the fate of the Jews, what about the mass of ordinary Germans? What did they know about the Final Solution and how many of them were prepared to help the Jews? That there was some German opposition to the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews is undeniable. Most famously the White Rose group in Munich, including brother and sister Hans and Sophie Scholl, distributed a series of leaflets in 1942 and 1943 protesting about many aspects of Hitler’s rule. But while the White Rose group condemned the Nazi treatment of the Jews, the wording of their protest leaflet is enlightening. They focused on the murder of ‘three hundred thousand Jews’ in Poland ‘in the most bestial manner imaginable’, which they saw as ‘a terrible crime against the dignity of mankind, a crime that cannot be compared with any other in the history of mankind’. However, they immediately felt the need to add these words: ‘Jews are human beings too – it makes no difference what your opinion is regarding the Jewish question – and these crimes are being committed against human beings. Perhaps someone will say, the Jews deserve this fate. Saying this is in itself a colossal effrontery.’51 That the White Rose protesters felt the need to argue against those who thought the Jews ‘deserve their fate’ is significant. They obviously believed that, because the victims were Jews, they could not count on all their fellow non-Jewish Germans to condemn the crime automatically.

  It must not be forgotten, however, that there were a number of brave Germans who protected Jews during the war. In Berlin, for example, Otto Jogmin, a caretaker living in a house in Charlottenburg, concealed Jews in the basement of his building and managed to supply them with food and medicine. He was one of around 550 Germans who were honoured in Israel after the war as ‘Righteous among the Nations’.52

  Altogether around 1,700 Jews managed to survive the war in hiding in Berlin, and an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 non-Jewish Germans assisted them in one way or another.53 That is a much smaller number of Jews than were helped in Warsaw during the same period. As we have seen, around 28,000 Jews were hidden in Warsaw, of whom about 11,500 survived the war. Up to 90,000 non-Jewish Poles risked their lives to help them.

  The stark fact is that nearly seven times as many Jews survived the war in Warsaw, helped by non-Jews, as in Berlin. Yet Berlin was more than three times the size of the Polish capital, albeit with fewer Jewish inhabitants at the start of the war (about 80,000) than Warsaw (350,000). While there are a number of possible explanations for this disparity, the most persuasive is that there was simply less desire among the broad German population to take risks for the Jews. As one leading scholar concludes: ‘Many, probably the great majority of the population, were convinced by 1939 if not before that the Jews had been a harmful influence in German society, and that it would be better if those still remaining left (or were forced to leave) as soon as possible.’54 That is not to say, of course, that large numbers of Germans were content that the Jews should be killed.

  As for the ordinary German’s knowledge of the fate of the deported Jews, that varied considerably. But while detailed information about the murder factories was not commonplace, the idea that something bad was happening to the Jews in the east was widespread. After all, as we have seen, in a number of speeches during the war Hitler referred openly to the fulfilment of his ‘prophecy’ about the extermination of the Jews in the event of a ‘world war’. In that context, the concern of many non-Jewish Germans seems to have been less for the Jews and more for their own fate if the war did not go to plan. One SD report for Franconia in southern Germany from December 1942 reads: ‘One of the strongest causes of unease among those attached to the church and in the rural population is at the present time formed by news from Russia in which shooting and extermination of the Jews is spoken about. The news frequently leaves great anxiety, care and worry in those sections of the population. According to widely held opinion in the rural population, it is not at all certain that we will win the war, and if the Jews come again to Germany, they will exact dreadful revenge upon us.’55

  Charles Bleeker Kohlsaat, an ethnic German living in the Warthegau in Poland, heard this fear expressed first hand. His uncle had learnt what was happening in Auschwitz and warned: ‘Should the world ever find out what is going on there, we have had it.’ Bleeker Kohlsaat asked his mother: ‘Mummy, what does Uncle Willy mean?’ And she replied: ‘Well, it is very difficult to explain, and there is no need for you to know.’ He remembers that ‘We [had] assumed it [Auschwitz] to be a severe prison or something of the kind, where people received extremely meagre food and might even be treated badly, meaning that they were shouted at – not beaten – but received meagre food and had to work very hard. That’s what we believed. We thought they were being punished in a severe prison, that’s what we imagined. Our imagination did not stretch far enough to guess what was concealed behind the scenes.’56

  When Manfred von Schröder, a German officer, discovered the reality of Auschwitz before the end of the war, he was ‘terrified’ and thought, ‘Oh goodness, what will happen to the Germans when we lose that war?’ Previously, fighting against the Red Army, he had felt that ‘Human life is cheap in a war. If you hear that somewhere near by some Russian prisoners or partisans or even Jews have been shot, then the feeling was – when the same day five of your comrades were shot – you think, And, so what? There were thousands dying every day … so you thought, “How do you try to be alive yourself?” And everything else doesn’t interest you very much, you know.’57

  Himmler was certainly concerned about his own fate once Germany lost the war. As part of his strategy to show himself in the best possible light, he allowed Bergen-Belsen to be captured intact on 15 April 1945. But the plan – from his perspective – was a disaster. When the British entered the camp they saw the surviving prisoners living in the most horrendous conditions. ‘I think they [the British soldiers] were the bravest people I ever saw in my life,’ says Jacob Zylberstein, previously of the Łódź ghetto but who was now in Bergen-Belsen, ‘because there was typhus, dysentery, cholera, eve
rything there.’58 Shortly afterwards ‘the English bulldozers started to dig graves’ for the thousands of dead.

  Himmler’s reaction was to protest, on 21 April, to Norbert Masur, a Swedish official of the World Jewish Congress – and a Jew – that he had not received the thanks he deserved for handing over the camps to the Allies.59 During the discussion he also repeated many of the self-serving lies and excuses he had made in his letter to Kersten in mid-March: the Jews were a foreign element in Germany and had needed to be removed; the Jews were dangerous because they were linked to Bolshevism; he had wanted peaceful emigration for the Jews, but other countries had not cooperated; Jews from the east carried typhus and the Germans had built crematoria to dispose of the sick who had died; the German people had suffered along with the Jews in this war; concentration camps were really re-education camps, and so on.

  After the Masur meeting, Himmler still persevered in a doomed attempt to refashion his reputation. Two days later, on 23 April, he told the Swedish diplomat Count Bernadotte he could approach the Allies and tell them that Germany would surrender unconditionally to Britain and America on the western front – but not to the Soviet Union. At the time, Himmler thought that Hitler might already have committed suicide. But Hitler was still very much alive in his fortified bunker beneath the garden of the Reich Chancellery, and he was outraged when he learnt of Himmler’s offer of surrender, broadcast on radio on 27 April. ‘The news hit the bunker like a bombshell,’ remembers Bernd Freiherr Freytag von Loringhoven. ‘It had the greatest impact on Hitler.’60 Himmler’s attempt to surrender to the Western powers was, said Hitler, ‘the most shameful betrayal in human history’.61 He now prepared to commit suicide, believing that his ‘loyal Heinrich’ had turned against him at the last.