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

by Saul Friedlander

  As these vast expansion plans were set in motion and as, in the meantime, the new campaign in the East had started, the function of the camp as a mass murder center was also taking shape. By sheer coincidence, just after the beginning of the Russian campaign, an Auschwitz disinfection team “discovered” that the powerful pesticide Zyklon B—used for the decontamination of ship hulls and military barracks and thus also regularly utilized in Auschwitz—could kill animals and, therefore, human beings.147 Testing on a small group of Soviet prisoners of war successfully took place in early September 1941 in the cellar of Block 11, in the main camp. According to the camp chronicler, Danuta Czech, a major test then followed: This time the victims were first selected from the camp infirmary (some were brought on stretchers) and packed into the basement of Block 11, where all windows had been filled with earth. “Then,” Czech reported, “some 600 Russian war prisoners, officers and commissars who had been selected by the special units of the Gestapo in war prisoners’ camps, are pushed in. As soon as the prisoners have been pushed into the cells and the SS men have thrown in the Zyklon B gas, the doors are closed and isolated. The action takes place during the evening roll-call in the camp; after that, curfew is imposed: it means that the inmates are forbidden to leave their barracks and to move around in the camp.”148 As some of the prisoners were still alive on the next day, the operation was repeated.149

  Even when the gas vans and gas chambers were used at full capacity, the Germans never abandoned mass executions by shooting or starvation, mainly in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union but also in Poland, even close to extermination camps. Their victims were not only Jews. Three and a half million Russian POWs were starved to death by the Wehrmacht, under the expert guidance of Quartermaster General Edward Wagner.150 Hundreds of thousands of Russian civilians were executed by the Army or by the Einsatzgruppen for any reason whatsoever. Further west, the execution of Polish civilians did not reach the same scope but became, from the outset, a matter of routine within the context of “anti-resistance operations.” In that context the diaries of anatomist Hermann Voss, a professor at the Reich University in Posen, leave very little to the imagination. On June 15, 1941, Voss noted: “Yesterday I viewed the cellar for corpses and the cremation oven that is also located in the cellar. This oven was built to eliminate parts of bodies left over from dissection exercises. Now it serves to incinerate executed Poles. The gray car with the gray men—that is, SS men from the Gestapo—comes almost daily with material for the oven.”151 On September 30 Voss had good news: “Today I had a very interesting discussion with the chief prosecutor, Dr. Heise, about obtaining corpses for the anatomical institute. Königsberg and Breslau also get corpses from here. So many people are executed here that there are enough for all three institutes.”152

  VIII

  While technical improvements in the murder methods were progressing apace, alongside common mass executions, at the top of the Nazi hierarchy hesitation between several possible “solutions” of the Jewish question did persist throughout the summer of 1941. On occupied Soviet territory, as we saw, the extermination was first aimed at Jews as carriers of the Soviet system, then at Jews as potential partisans and finally as hostile elements living in territories ultimately destined for German colonization: The three categories merged of course into one but did not apply, at least during the summer and the fall of 1941, to the entire European continent. In terms of mass murder the first phase of what was to become the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe” had started on Soviet territory, but it was probably not yet seen as part of an overall extermination plan of all European Jews. How, then, should we interpret the letter addressed by Göring to Heydrich on July 31, 1941?

  “In completion of the task which was entrusted to you in the edict dated January 24, 1939, of solving the Jewish question by means of emigration or evacuation in the most convenient way possible, given the present conditions,” Göring wrote, “I herewith charge you with making all the necessary preparations with regard to the organizational, practical and financial aspects for an overall solution [Gesamtlösung] of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe.” The letter went on: “Insofar as the competencies of other central organizations are affected, they are to cooperate with you. I further charge you with submitting to me promptly an overall plan of the preliminary organizational, practical and financial measures for the execution of the intended final solution (Endlösung) of the Jewish question.”153

  Göring’s letter had been drafted by Heydrich and submitted to the Reichsmarschall for his signature; this much we know from Eichmann’s deposition at his 1961 trial in Jerusalem.154 Manifestly the document was meant to ensure Himmler’s (and thus Heydrich’s) authority on all matters pertaining to the fate of the Jews, either in regard to all ongoing operations on Russian territory or in regard to the expected deportations after victory in the East. It seems probable that, contrary to what had happened in March 1941 (as we saw in the previous chapter), this time Göring did not demand the inclusion of Rosenberg’s name, precisely in order to limit the new minister’s ambitions. The letter was meant to inform all those concerned that, in practical terms, the solution of the Jewish question was Himmler’s domain (subject, of course, to Hitler’s instructions.)

  Göring’s letter was also appropriately vague concerning any particular time frame, as it seems that Hitler still held to the view that the general evacuation of the Jews to northern Russia would take place only after the end of the campaign. This was confirmed by Eichmann in early August 1941, at a conference of high officials of the Propaganda Ministry convened to prepare Goebbels’s forthcoming visit to his leader. “The Führer,” Eichmann declared, “had rejected Obergruppenführer Heydrich’s official request regarding evacuations [of Jews] during the war.” Consequently Heydrich drew up a proposal for a partial evacuation of Jews from the main cities.155 It was an idea submitted to Hitler when Goebbels met him at the Rastenburg headquarters on August 18, and—as we shall presently see—was also rejected.

  According to Goebbels’s diary entry of August 19 (in which he recorded the events of the previous day), Hitler agreed to the marking of the Jews in the Reich “with a large and clearly visible sign,” but in regard to the deportations he merely indicated that the Jews would be evacuated from Berlin to the East, once the first means of transportation were available. “There [in the East], under a hard climate, they would be worked over.”156 On the next day (August 20), Goebbels again referred to his discussion with Hitler on the eighteenth and, this time, quoted him as promising that the Jews of Berlin would be evacuated “after the end of the Eastern campaign.”157 The two time frames were in fact two complementary elements of one conversation: The Jews would be deported after the victory in the East, when the first transportation means were to become available. According to Hitler’s assessment of the military situation, this meant approximately mid-October 1941.

  During the August 18 conversation, the Nazi leader again mentioned his “prophecy” regarding the price the Jews would pay for unleashing the war. “The Führer is convinced,” Goebbels recorded, “that the prophecy he made in the Reichstag, namely that if Jewry succeeded once again in unleashing a world war, it would end with the extermination of the Jews, is being fulfilled. It [the prophecy] is being confirmed during these last weeks and months with what appears to be an almost uncanny certainty. In the East, the Jews are paying the bill; in Germany, they have already paid it in part and will have to pay more in the future. Their last refuge is North America; and there, either in the long or the short run, they will have to pay as well. Jewry is a foreign body among the cultured nations and its activity over the last three decades has been so devastating that the reaction of the peoples is absolutely understandable, necessary, and one could almost say naturally compelling. In any case, in the world that is coming, the Jews will not have many grounds for laughing. Today, in Europe, there is already in good part a united front against the J
ews.”158

  Significantly, immediately after this tirade Hitler made mention of the eight points of the Roosevelt-Churchill declaration (the Atlantic Charter). Next, he once again returned to the Jewish issue: “And, regarding the Jewish Question one can ascertain today that somebody like Antonescu for example goes ahead in this matter even more radically than we did up to now. But, in this matter, I shall not rest until we too have exacted the ultimate consequences in regard to Jewry (Aber ich werde nicht ruhen und nicht rasten, bis auch wir dem Judentum gegenüber die letzten Konsequenzen gezogen haben).”159

  Hitler’s declarations to Goebbels were indeed highly threatening; still, it is notable that these threats remained vague. The Jews of Germany “will have to pay more in the future” could mean that after victory was achieved in the East, the Jews of Germany would be deported to northern Russia and there “under a hard climate, they would be worked over.” Mass death was implicit in Hitler’s words; however, it is unlikely that at this stage the Nazi leader’s declaration meant organized, generalized, and immediate extermination.160

  IX

  There is something at once profoundly disturbing yet rapidly numbing in the narration of the anti-Jewish campaign that developed in the territories newly occupied by the Germans or their allies. History seems to turn into a succession of mass killing operations and, on the face of it, little else. The chief of Einsatzkommando 3 (belonging to Einsatzgruppe A), the notorious SS colonel Karl Jäger, reported, by September 10, 1941, the massacre of 76,355 persons, almost all Jews; by December 1, 1941 the number of the Jews murdered had reached 137,346. Two months later Stahlecker, the commander of Einsatzgruppe A, reported the results achieved by his unit (excluding mass executions in Riga): 218,050 Jews killed by February 1, 1942.161 All there is to report, it seems, is a rising curve of murder statistics, in the North, the Center, the South, and the Extreme South. And yet another history unfolds, over short or longer periods from prewar years and decades to the last moment, literally to the edge of the execution pits.

  For long periods before the beginning of the war, notwithstanding the political and social tensions to which we alluded, there were also close relations on an individual basis between the Jews and their gentile neighbors; at times, after the German conquest, some of these relations included the occupiers. Thus, in the smaller communities, the killers, whether local auxiliaries or Germans, often knew their victims, adding a further layer of horror to the massacres. In any case, each community, large or small, had an existence of its own, as did each Judenrat, each resistance organization, or, for that matter, every Jewish inhabitant. In some cases the “meeting of East and West” (Jews deported from central Europe and local Jews) in Lodz or in Minsk, for example, would create difficult problems and add yet another dimension to the history of the victims. As for the extermination of the ghetto populations, it took place at different sites, at different times, under different circumstances, all of importance and significance for historians—but it inexorably took place, before the arrival of any liberating force, even during the very last months of the war.

  In Vilna a first Judenrat was established in July; most of its members were among the Jews murdered in early September. A second council was appointed under the chairmanship of Anatol Fried; the real authority, however, was increasingly in the hands of Jacob Gens, the Jewish police chief, who was to become the head of the council in July 1942. On September 6, 1941, the remaining Jews were ordered to move into the ghetto.

  “They came before dawn today,” Kruk recorded, “and gave half an hour to pack and take whatever you can. Flocks of wagons drove in and, right in front of the inhabitants who were already gathered in the courtyard, the last pieces of furniture were dragged out of their abandoned homes…. The mournful track of being driven out of your home into the ghetto lasts for hours.”162 Rudashevski also recorded the miserable exodus from the city into the ghetto: “The small number of Jews of our courtyard begin to drag the bundles to the gate. Gentiles are standing and taking part in our sorrow…. People are harnessed to bundles which they drag across the pavement. People fall, bundles scatter. Before me a woman bends under her bundle. From the bundle a thin string of rice keeps pouring over the street.”163

  The young diarist then went on to describe the first hours of ghetto life: “The newcomers begin to settle down, each in his tiny bit of space, on his bundles. Additional Jews keep streaming in constantly. We settle down in our place. Besides the four of us there are eleven persons in the room. The room is a dirty and stuffy one. It is crowded. The first ghetto night. We lay three together on two doors…. I hear the restless breathing of people with whom I have been suddenly thrown together, people who have just like us suddenly been uprooted from their homes.”164 The ghetto area, previously inhabited by some 4,000 people, was now home to 29,000 Jews.

  In Kovno, after the first wave of killings, the remaining 30,000 Jews were expelled into the old Jewish suburb of Slobodka, across the river, where on July 10, 1941, a ghetto was officially established. The ghettoization was of course a German measure, but in Kovno, as in most cities and towns of Eastern Europe, it was fully supported by local authorities and populations. Abraham Tory, a former law office clerk and, from June 22, 1941, the chronicler of Kovno Jewry, noted a conversation between the newly appointed Lithuanian finance minister, Jonas Matulionis, and a Kovno Jewish personality, Jacob Goldberg: “The Lithuanians are divided on the Jewish question,” Matulionis explained. “There are three main views: according to the most extreme view all the Jews in Lithuania must be exterminated; a more moderate view demands setting up a concentration camp where Jews will atone with blood and sweat for their crimes against the Lithuanian people. As for the third view? I am a practicing Roman Catholic; I—and other believers like me—believe that man cannot take the life of a human being like himself…but during the period of Soviet rule I and my friends realized that we did not have a common path with the Jews and never will. In our view, the Lithuanians and the Jews should be separated from each other and the sooner the better. For that purpose the Ghetto is essential. There you will be separated and no longer able to harm us. This is a Christian position.”165

  In late July the Germans ordered the appointment of a “chief Jew” (Oberjude). On August 4 delegates of the Jewish community met to choose their main representative. According to Tory, “There was one candidate nobody was prepared to let go, Dr. Elchanan Elkes.” Elkes, a physician, argued that he lacked experience for the position. It was then that a member of the assembly, Rabbi Shmukler, rose and delivered a memorable speech: The Kovno Jewish community stands on the brink of disaster…. The German authorities insist that we appoint an Oberjude, but what we need is a “head of the community,” a trustworthy public servant. The man most fitting for this position at this tragic moment is Dr. Elkes. We therefore turn to you and say: Dr. Elkes, you may be our Oberjude for whoever wants to regard you as such, but for us you will be our community leader. We all know that your path will be fraught with hardship and danger, but we will go with you all the way and may God come to our aid.”166

  Elkes accepted, but there was little he could do to fend off or mutigate the German decrees that from the outset descended on the ghetto inhabitants, mainly by way of SA captain Fritz Jordan, the spokesman of the town commander. One of the first edicts, issued on August 10, forbade Jews “to walk on the shores of the Viliga River” and also “to walk in the streets with their hands in their pockets.”167

  During these same days, at the end of August 1941, Klukowski took a week off and traveled to Warsaw. “I passed through the Jewish ghetto a few times,” he noted in his diary. “It is almost impossible to figure out how something like this can happen. All points of entry are guarded by Germans. High brick walls around the perimeter divide the Jewish ghetto from the rest of the city. Traffic on the streets is rather heavy; many stores are open. That’s how it looks from the streetcar. From a friend of mine I learned that the mortality rate in the ghetto is very h
igh, especially among the poor Jews, who are living in terrible conditions.”168

  Nothing out of the ordinary daily misery happened on the other side of the walls that Klukowski saw from his streetcar. In August 1941, as may be recalled, the monthly death rate in the ghetto was stabilizing at around 5,500 persons. Thus, if the Germans had been aiming at a slow death of the population, tighter controls and some patience would have sufficed. Auerswald told Czerniaków as much on July 8: “The Jews should show good will by volunteering for labor. Otherwise the ghetto would be surrounded by barbed wire. There is plenty of it, the spoils of war captured in Russia. The ring will be tightened more and more and the whole population will slowly die out.”169 Outbreaks of typhus added their toll, and nobody was immune from the danger, not even the chairman himself: “Last night,” he noted on July 10, “I spotted a louse on my nightshirt. A white, many-footed, revolting louse.”170

  And, against this background of desolation, none of the ongoing power struggles, none of the distrust, none of the hatreds of old lost any of their virulence—quite the contrary. Converted Jews whom the Germans had herded together with their “racial brethren” supposedly got the better positions in the ghetto hierarchy. In some cases they did (commander of the Jewish police, chairman of the health council, director of the ghetto hospital), as a result of their former training and professional ability. Such reasoning did not assuage the more militantly “Jewish” members of the community: “The rabbis are in an uproar,” Czerniaków noted on July 2, “because Ettinger [Dr. Adam Ettinger, a former professor of criminology at Warsaw Free University], who was engaged as criminal counsel, is a baptized Jew.”171