Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 2: The Years of Extermination

by Saul Friedlander

  The forced laborers in eastern Poland, like the others, had at first been snatched off the streets of the Jewish quarters or ghettos, then subjected to compulsory draft by Frank’s decree of October 26, 1939, and, as we saw, later recruited by the councils. Many would be shipped off to the Lublin labor camps for periods that could stretch for weeks or even months. According to the report of a medical commission that visited the Belzec work camp in the Lublin district in September 1940, “The barracks are totally unfit to hold so many people. They are dark, filthy and overrun with lice. About thirty percent of the workers have no shoes, pants, or shirts. All of them sleep on the ground, without straw. The roofs leak everywhere, and the windows have no panes. Space is terribly lacking: for example, within a space of five by six meters, some seventy-five people sleep on the ground on top of each other…. Soap is lacking, and even water is hard to get. The sick lie and sleep together with the healthy. At night, it is forbidden to leave the barracks so that all needs have to be fulfilled on the spot. Thus, it is no wonder that sickness spreads. Yet it is extremely difficult to be excused from work, even for a day. Everybody, including the sick, has to report for work.”105

  Czerniaków was well aware of the situation in the labor camps. The Lublin district was the worst, but conditions in the Warsaw area were not much better. On May 10, 1941, after receiving a report from two council members who had just been allowed a short visit, he noted: “The camp huts have spoiled straw to sleep on and the wind is blowing through the walls. The workers are shivering at night. There are no showers and restrooms. The workers’ boots were ruined in wet sand and clay. There are no drugs or bandages. Treatment of the workers by the Lagerschutz [camp guards] in many localities is bad. Meissner [the commander of the camp guards in the area in which the visit took place—the Kampinos barracks] did issue orders forbidding the beatings of the workers.” And yet, the ghetto poor kept volunteering, in the hope of receiving some money and some food. In the same entry, Czerniaków added: “Wages are not paid…. Everything depends on nutrition.” Barely a fraction of the promised food was distributed.106

  Money would protect you from the labor camps. “If you have not appeared before the [mustering] commission yet,” Wasser noted on April 28, 1941, “you can go to one of the doctors, pay down 150 zl. [zlotys] on the fee, and he will find some medical reason for requesting your release…. And for an additional 200 zl., a work card is miraculously whisked into your home without toil or trouble. And if, God forbid, you have already undergone the medical examination and—o, woe!—been found ‘tauglich’ [capable], the procedure costs around 500 zl. for a certificate of being immune, inviolable.”107

  As for taxes, particularly in Warsaw, they were blatantly unjust. The council had opted for indirect taxation of the ghetto’s most basic commodities and services, instead of direct taxation of the wealthy inhabitants; it meant that the poorest segments of the population (the immense majority) were carrying most of the tax burden. The wealthy inhabitants, the big smugglers, the profiteers of various ilks, practically avoided all direct levies on their assets.108

  Possibly the most common target of popular anger was the Jewish police, the Jewish uniformed “order service,” which in principle was under the orders of the council and of the Germans. In Warsaw, the ghetto police was some 2,000 men strong and headed by a convert, a former lieutenant colonel in the Polish police, Józef Szerynski.

  The policemen were mainly young men from the “better” class, from the “intelligentsia” at times. They had the necessary connections to get the coveted jobs, and once in uniform, they did not hesitate to enforce the most unpopular orders issued by the councils (tax collection, escorting men to forced labor, guarding the inner fence of the ghetto, confiscations of property and the like) or by the Germans, often brutally so. Although, the policemen argued at the time—and after the war—that things would have been much worse if their jobs had been solely implemented by Germans or Poles, there is no doubt that “considerable segments of the ghetto police were morally and materially corrupt, that they enriched themselves on account of the oppressed and persecuted inmates when carrying out their assignments.”109

  Nothing of this stigma is apparent in the memoir that Calel Perechodnik, a Jewish policeman from Ottwock, near Warsaw, wrote in 1944, shortly before his death on the “Aryan” side of the city. More precisely, nothing is apparent as long as the memoir deals with the predeportation period (before the summer of 1942). “In February 1941,” Perechodnik recorded, “seeing that the war was not coming to an end and in order to be free from the roundup for labor camps, I entered the ranks of the Ghetto Polizei.”110 The Ottwock Jewish policeman had little to report about his daily activities: “And what did I do during this time? Truthfully speaking, nothing. I didn’t go out to seize people because I found it unbecoming. I was afraid of what people would say. In any case, I did not have the ‘sporting instinct’ for that…I collected the bread quota at the Jewish bakery and…distributed it at the command post or for the functionaries of the Ghetto Polizei.”111 Too tame to be entirely trustworthy? Probably.

  For the Germans, Jewish policemen were as contemptible as any other Jews. Mary Berg, a Jewish girl who lived in the ghetto with her American mother (and was allowed to emigrate in 1941), noted on January 4, 1941: “Yesterday, I myself saw a Nazi gendarme ‘exercise’ a Jewish policeman near the passage from the little to the big ghetto on Chlodna street. The young man finally lost his breath but the Nazi still forced him to fall and rise until he collapsed in a pool of blood.”112

  The Germans also bypassed the Warsaw council and the Jewish police, and supported their own Jewish agents, variously involved with the Gestapo. Such, for example, were the “Thirteen” (the name derived from the address of their headquarters on 13 Leszno Street), a group of some three hundred shady characters, under the command of one Abraham Ganzweich, whose official job was to fight price hiking and other forms of corruption. Ganzweich was an informer, and so were the owners of the horse-drawn tram service, Kohn and Heller. Although Ganzweich did attempt to achieve some legitimacy in the community by supporting “social work” and “cultural activities,”113 he was considered with much suspicion by Czerniaków and many others.114 Most informers, big or small, did not report on political life in the ghetto; they denounced the inhabitants who had hidden some jewelry or cash and usually received a “compensation” from the Germans for their services.115

  The threat of disease and starvation never disappeared. Two reports on the food and health situation in the Warsaw ghetto, one German and the other Jewish, were written at approximately the same time, in September 1941. The German report, signed by Commissar Auerswald, covered the first eight months of the year and tallied almost exactly with the figures established by the ghetto statisticians.116 The monthly number of deaths grew approximately sixfold from January (898) to August 1941 (5,560). In both reports stabilization was noted in August and September.

  The Jewish statisticians meant essentially to compare the mortality of children under fifteen with that of adults. According to the results collected from January to September 1941, while the death of children grew at a slower rate at first, it overtook that of the general population in the last four months. According to the ghetto statisticians’ interpretation, at the outset parents were still able to protect their children from starvation; soon, however, the worsening overall food situation made any such efforts impossible.117

  The dramatic deterioration of the children’s situation at the beginning of the summer of 1941 found an immediate expression in the diarists’ entries. “A special class of beggars,” Ringelblum recorded on July 11, 1941, “consists of those who beg after nine o’clock at night. You stand at your window, and suddenly see new faces, beggars you haven’t seen all day. They walk out right in the middle of the street, begging for bread. Most of them are children. In the surrounding silence of night, the cries of hungry beggar children are terribly insistent and, however hard your heart, event
ually you have to throw a piece of bread down to them—or else leave the house. Those beggars are completely unconcerned about curfews and you can hear their voices late at night at eleven or even at twelve. They are afraid of nothing and of no one…. It is a common thing for beggar children like these to die on the sidewalk at night. I was told about such a horrible scene…where a six-year-old beggar boy lay gasping all night, too weak to roll over to the piece of bread that had been thrown down to him from the balcony.”118

  Given the conditions prevailing in the Warsaw ghetto during the summer of 1941, however, death—of children or of adults—was increasingly becoming a matter of indifference. Typhus was spreading, and there was little the hospitals—“places of execution” according to the director of the ghetto health department—could do: Either the patients died from the epidemics or from the lack of food at the hospital.119

  “In front of 16 Krochmalna Street,” Czerniaków recorded on July 24, 1941, “I was stopped by a commander of a military sanitary column and shown the corpse of a child in an advanced stage of decay. According to information obtained on the site, the corpse, already decomposed, was abandoned there yesterday. On the basis of subsequent investigation it was established that the body was left behind by its own mother, Chudesa Borensztajn…and that the child’s name was Moszek, age 6. In the same apartment there was the body of Molka Ruda, age 43, in which rigor mortis had not yet set in, and in the courtyard of the same house lay the body of Chindel Gersztenzang…. The sanitary column stopped a passing funeral cart belonging to the funeral firm ‘Eternity’ and ordered the removal of the remains.”120

  Because increasing numbers of Wehrmacht units were once again moving to Poland in the early stages of Aufbau Ost from the summer of 1940 onward, soldiers’ descriptions of their encounters with the Jewish population streamed steadily back to the Reich. On September 11 Private HN described, in the usual terms, the “disgusting look” of the thousands of Jews he was encountering. The mostly Orthodox Jews he described apparently provided quite a show for the amusement of throngs of soldiers standing around (zum Gaudium der Zuschauer), mainly when these Jews had to perform some heavy work.121 For Private E his observation of the Jews led to some radical conclusions: “When one looks at these people,” he wrote on November 17, “one gets the impression that they really have no justification for living on God’s earth” (dass die wirklich keine Berechtigung haben, überhaupt auf Gottes Erdboden zu leben).122 The more extreme opinions were apparently quite widespread, as indicated in a letter written by Cpl. WH, on May 28, 1941: “As I was still having dinner, the conversation moved to the Jewish question in the General Government and in the world; for me, listening to such conversations is very interesting. To my amazement, everybody agreed in the end that the Jews have to disappear completely from the world” (Zu meinem Erstaunen waren sich schliesslich doch alle einig, dass die Juden ganz von der Welt verschwinden müssen).123

  On September 9, 1940, Dr. Zygmunt Klukowski recorded an event that took place in front of his hospital. An elderly Jew was standing across the street, talking to some Jewish women. A group of German soldiers came by: “Suddenly one of the soldiers grabbed the old man and threw him headfirst into the cellar [of a burned-out house in front of which the Jews were standing]…. The soldiers calmly walked away. I was puzzled by this incident, but a few minutes later the man was brought to me for treatment. I was told that he forgot to take his hat off when the Germans passed by…. During the last few days the Germans have again begun beating Jews on the streets.”124

  The situation in the large ghettos was not different from that in the “provinces.” On February 14, 1941, Kaplan noted an incident on Karmelicka Street. Suddenly the street was empty of the crowds that had filled it throughout the day. Two Germans had appeared, one of them with a whip in hand: They discovered a peddler who had not managed to flee in time. “The unfortunate peddler became a target for the blows of the murdering beasts. He fell to the ground at once, and one of them left him and went away. But not so his companion. The very physical weakness of his victim inflamed the soldier. As soon as the peddler fell, he began stamping on him and beating him mercilessly with his whip…. The beaten man lay flat, without a breath of life. But the tormentor would not let him alone. It would be no exaggeration to say that he beat him without stopping, without pity, for about twenty minutes. It was hard to comprehend the secret of this sadistic phenomenon.”125

  In an unrelated entry on May 10, 1941, Ringelblum described, as already alluded to, how dead Jews were becoming a sight not to be missed by German tourists: “The dead are buried at night between 1 and 5 a.m., without shrouds—in white paper which is later removed—and in mass graves,” Ringelblum recorded on May 10, 1941. “Various groups of [German] excursionists—military men, private citizens—keep visiting the graveyard. Most of them show no sympathy at all for the Jews. On the contrary some of them maintain that the mortality among the Jews is too low. Others take all kinds of photographs. The shed where dozens of corpses lie during the day awaiting burial at night is particularly popular.”126

  IV

  While the Germans were still searching for some way of expelling the Jews from the Continent, the struggle against “the Jew” developed apace. Anti-Semitic propaganda and major channels of anti-Jewish political agitation were mainly in Goebbels’s hands, although, as we saw, Rosenberg, Himmler, and Ribbentrop never abandoned the field to the tireless propaganda minister. Apart from his major anti-Semitic films, it may be remembered that one of Goebbels’s most effective channels for reaching millions of Germans were the weekly UFA newsreels. During the first half of 1941, as the onslaught against the Soviet Union was approaching, the OKW propaganda units were particularly active in gathering material throughout occupied Poland (the Lodz ghetto seems to have been a favorite of PK film crews). The material would be of major use after the beginning of the campaign.127 It is altogether hard to assess whether the deluge of press attacks against the Jews was more or less effective than the ongoing barrage of sickening images, and whether both had the same effect as the constant anti-Jewish radio propaganda, but—directly or indirectly—the overall orchestration of the campaign followed the instructions of the Propaganda Ministry.

  At times, of course, the propaganda minister had to assert his presence. Thus, when Das Reich was launched in May 1940, as Germany’s highbrow, even modestly independent political-cultural weekly, Goebbels had no direct say regarding the decisions of Editor in Chief Rolf Reinhardt. Before long, though, the minister was signing a weekly editorial in the most successful of the regime’s publications and these editorials carried his major written anti-Jewish attacks (usually read on the same day on the radio).128 Not that Das Reich suffered from a paucity of its own independent contributions to anti-Jewish incitement. In the spring of 1941 a journalist, Elisabeth Noelle, published an article on the Jewish-dominated American press, and her colleague Erich-Peter Neumann, offered a very “evocative” description of the Warsaw ghetto;129 the two, connected by many bonds, were to become the luminaries of public opinion research in postwar West Germany. The average tone of these in-depth studies of the ghetto Jews can be surmised from a report by Hubert Neun about scenes from the Warsaw ghetto published in Das Reich on March 9, 1941: “There surely cannot be a place on the continent,” Neun told his German readers, “that offers such a graphic cross-section of the chaos and degeneracy of the Semitic mass. At a glance one can take in the enormous, repellent variety of all the Jewish types of the East: a gathering of the asocial, it floods out of dirty houses and greasy shops, up and down the streets, and behind the windows the series of bearded, spectacled rabbinical faces continues—a dreadful panorama.”130

  Actually Goebbels’s tentacles extended well beyond his obvious sphere of activity. Among other forays into domains not his, the minister supported Grundmann’s institute in its campaign to “de-Judaize” Christian teaching. While the propaganda chief was vilifying the Jews in the political sphere, another lumi
nary of the Jena theological faculty and a colleague of Grundmann’s at the institute, Wolf Meyer-Erlach, was touring occupied Europe to demonstrate that Judaism had poisoned England by way of the English Reformation: It explained the English war against Germany. The lectures were published by Goebbels’s ministry.131

  Of course the regime’s ongoing struggle against “the Jew” demanded constant research about its object—and research there was. It encompassed every imaginable domain, from physics and mathematics to musicology, from theology to history, from genetics and anthropology to philosophy and literature. It drew on a formidable amount of “scholarship” accumulated mainly since the late nineteenth century, which grew into a torrent during the Weimar period and a boundless flood in the prewar years of Hitler’s regime.132 Part of this work became affiliated with one of two major and mutually hostile institutions: Each had its party patronage, its bureaucratic supporters, and its foreign ties.

  The establishment of Walter Frank’s “Reich Institute for the History of the New Germany” in 1935 in Berlin, under the aegis of the education minister, did not initially create any problem, nor did that of its Munich branch, which was entirely devoted to the Jewish question and led by the young and ambitious Dr. Wilhelm Grau. In 1938 however, Frank, probably annoyed by Grau’s self-importance and growing independence, dismissed him. Grau soon found his way to a new center that was about to start its activities in Frankfurt, Rosenberg’s “Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question,” actively supported by the city’s mayor, Fritz Krebs.133 The Frankfurt institute was to be the first unit of the “Hohe Schule,” the party university, Rosenberg’s pet project.