As Christopher Browning has shown, the new policy led to some improvement in the food supply for the working Jews in the ghettos—and to the rapid extermination of the nonworking population. On May 5, 1942, Bühler declared to the heads of his administration: “According to the latest information, there are plans to dissolve the Jewish ghettos, keep the Jews capable of work, and deport the rest farther east. The Jews capable of work are to be lodged in numerous large concentration camps that are now in the process of being constructed.” Actually Bühler was concerned about the effect of such a reorganization on the working-capacity of the Jews and so did other high-ranking officials of the General Government administration.51
In other words, at the beginning of the summer of 1942, the presence of Jewish labor in the General Government seemed assured; HSSPF Krüger went so far as to promise, in June, “that not only would Jewish workers in the armaments industry be retained but their families would also be.”52 Yet, precisely as Krüger was outlining these new perspectives, German policy regarding Jewish workers was modified once again: The security risk represented by Jewish workers and other able-bodied Jews had become a major issue.
There is no straightforward documentary proof that two unrelated events that followed each other during the second half of May 1942 led to the general acceleration and radicalization of the “Final Solution.” Yet this connection, mentioned in discussions, speeches, and orders, is likely.
On May 18 an incendiary device exploded on the site of the anti-Soviet exhibition, “The Soviet Paradise,” in Berlin’s Lustgarten. Within days the Gestapo caught most members of the small pro-communist “Herbert Baum group,” which had organized the attack. As Goebbels wrote on May 24, “characteristically five [of the members of the group] are Jews, three half-Jews and four Aryans.”53 The propaganda minister then recorded Hitler’s reaction: “He is extraordinarily outraged and orders me to see to it as soon as possible that the Jews of Berlin be evacuated. Speer objects to the inclusion of those Jews who work in the armaments industry; we must find a way to get replacements. It is incidentally quite funny that nowadays we consider the Jews as irreplaceable high-quality workers, whereas not too long ago we constantly declared that Jews did not work at all and understood nothing about work…. Moreover the Führer allows me to arrest 500 Jewish hostages and to react with executions to any new attempts.”54
That same afternoon (May 23) Hitler spoke to the Reichsleiter and Gauleiter assembled at the Reich Chancellery. “The Jews,” the Nazi leader declared, “were determined to achieve victory in this war, under any circumstances, as they know that defeat would mean their personal liquidation…. Now we clearly see what Stalin, in fact as front man for the Jews, had prepared for this war against the Reich.”55
Goebbels remained agitated. On May 28, he recorded that he did not want “to be shot by some 22-year-old Ostjude like one of those types who are among the perpetrators of the attack against the anti-soviet exhibition.”56 After being tortured Baum committed suicide. All the other members of the group were executed. Moreover, 250 Jewish men were shot at Sachsenhausen in reprisal, and a further 250 Berlin Jews were sent to the camp.57
On May 29 the Nazi leader and his propaganda minister once more discussed the attack and its wider implications. “I again present to the Führer my plan to completely evacuate the Jews from Berlin,” Goebbels recorded on the next day. “He is in total agreement and gives the order to Speer to replace the Jews employed in the armament industries with foreign workers as soon as possible. That 40,000 Jews who have nothing to lose can still freely roam around Berlin represents a great danger. It is a challenge and an invitation to assassinations. If this ever starts, then one’s life is not safe anymore. In the most recent fire-bomb attacks, even 22-year-old Eastern Jews participated; this speaks volumes. I plead once again for a more radical policy against the Jews, whereby I encounter the Führer’s complete agreement. The Führer thinks that for us personally the danger will grow if the war situation becomes more critical.”58
After both Hitler and his minister agreed that the situation of the Reich was much better than it had been in 1917 and that, this time no uprisings or strikes threatened in any way, Hitler added that “the Germans participated in subversive movements only when incited by the Jews.”59 Hitler then launched into one of his usual diatribes, stressing the brutality of the Jews and their thirst for vengeance; therefore sending the Jews to Siberia could be dangerous, as under difficult living conditions they could regain their vitality. The best course of action, in his view, would be to send them to Central Africa: “There they would live in a climate that would certainly not make them strong and resistant.”60
The reference to 1917 and the uprisings and strikes was indeed telling: In Hitler’s mind the elimination of the Jews ensured that no repeat performance of the revolutionary activities of 1917–18 would occur; the Baum attempt was a warning: The extermination of the Jews had to be completed as rapidly as possible.
A second event may also have accelerated the extermination process, albeit indirectly. On May 27 Heydrich was fatally wounded by Czech commandos parachuted by the British into the Protectorate; he died on June 4. Five days later, on the day of the state funeral, Hitler ordered the murder of most of the population of Lidice (a village near Prague, where the Germans thought Heydrich’s assailants had hidden). All men aged fifteen to ninety were shot; all women sent to concentration camps, where most of them perished; some children were “germanized” and brought up in German families under new identities; the great majority of the children who did not show Germanic traits were sent to Chelmno and gassed. As for the village, it was leveled to the ground.61 After an interim period during which Himmler himself took over the leadership of the RSHA, he appointed the Austrian Ernst Kaltenbrunner as Heydrich’s successor, in January 1943.62
Himmler met Hitler on June 3, 4, and 5.63 Whether it was during these meetings that the Nazi leader and his henchman decided to accelerate the extermination process and set a deadline for the completion of the “Final Solution” is not known, but seems plausible in light of the Baum attempt and Heydrich’s death. More than ever, the Jews were an internal threat. On June 9, in the course of a lengthy memorial address for the RSHA chief, delivered to a gathering of SS generals, Himmler declared, as if incidentally: “We will certainly complete the migration of the Jews within a year; after that, none of them will wander anymore. It is time now to wipe the slate clean.”64 Then, on July 19, after a two-day visit to Auschwitz, the Reichsführer sent Krüger the following order: The resettlement of the entire Jewish population of the General Government should be implemented and completed by December 31, 1942. On December 31, 1942, no persons of Jewish origin are allowed to stay in the General Government, except if they are in assembly camps in Warsaw, Kraków, Czestochowa, Radom, and Lublin. All projects that employ Jewish labor have to be completed by that date or transferred to the assembly camps.”
The Reichsführer could not leave it at that; he had to adduce some ideological elements to explain this sudden acceleration of the murder process: “These measures are necessary for the separation of races and peoples demanded by the new organization of Europe and for the security and cleanness of the German Reich and of its sphere of interest. Every infraction of these regulations represents a danger for the calm and order in the overall German sphere of interest, a starting point for the resistance movement and a source of moral and physical infection. For all these reasons, the total cleansing is necessary and has to be implemented. Any foreseeable delays have to be reported to me, to allow a timely search for assistance. Any attempt by other agencies to change [these instructions] or seek exceptions have to be submitted personally to me.”65 Himmler was probably alluding to potential demands from the Wehrmacht.
IV
The majority of the Jews of Europe were exterminated after being held for different periods of time (between several months and several years) in camps or assembly areas in the West (Drancy, Westerbor
k, Malines [Mechlen]) or in ghettos in the East. Most of these concentration or assembly areas were established before general extermination was decided on, but some were set up as part ghettos, part holding pens at the very outset of the “Final Solution”: Theresienstadt, for example, or Izbica, near Lublin.
Theresienstadt (Terezín in Czech), which was to become an assembly camp and the Jewish “model camp” of the concentration and extermination system, was a small fortified town in northern Bohemia that, by the end of 1941, housed some 7,000 German soldiers and Czech civilians; an annex (the small fortress) was already the central Gestapo prison in the Protectorate. At the end of 1941 (November and December) Jewish labor details started preparing Terezín for its new function, and at the very beginning of January 1942, the first transports arrived with around 10,000 Jews.66
An “elder of the Jews” and a council of thirteen members were appointed. The first “elder” was the widely respected Jakob Edelstein. A native of Horodenka in eastern Galicia, Edelstein moved to Czechoslovakia and settled in Teplitz, in the Sudetenland. Politically he turned to socialism, but mainly to Zionism. Although quite unremarkable in appearance and in his professional life as a salesman, Edelstein soon proved to be an able public speaker, much in demand at Zionist meetings.67 Shortly after the Nazi accession to power in Germany, Edelstein was called to head the “Palestine office” in Prague, in other words to assist the growing flow of refugees ready to emigrate to Eretz Israel.
The German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia and the establishment of the Protectorate led, as we saw, to the setting up of a Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Prague, along the pattern already honed in Vienna, then in Berlin. While the Vienna center was left in the hands of Rolf Günther and Alois Brunner, Eichmann himself took over emigration from the Protectorate together with another Günther brother, Hans.
Edelstein’s common sense—and his courage—made him, de facto, the central personality of Czech Jewry in its contacts with the Germans. In October 1939, he was ordered to head the groups of Jews evacuated from Ostrava to Nisko; the deportees from Austria were shepherded by Storfer, the emigration specialist, and by Rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein who, in 1942, would become Edelstein’s problematic colleague in Theresienstadt. The failure of the Nisko attempt brought Edelstein back to Prague.68 Soon thereafter, in March 1941, Eichmann dispatched him together with another member of the Prague community, Richard Friedmann, to advise Asscher and Cohen in Amsterdam on the setting up of their Council. Edelstein tried to warn his Dutch counterparts about the dangers that awaited them, including the possibility of deportations to the East, but to no avail.69
When in the fall of that same year, Heydrich decided to deport the Jews of the Protectorate to an assembly camp on Bohemian territory, Edelstein was naturally chosen to head the “model ghetto.” In mid-December 1941, a few days after Edelstein’s arrival in Theresienstadt, Hans Günther came on an inspection tour: “Now, Jews,” the SS officer declared, “when you are im Dreck [in shit] let’s see what you can do.” The Jews thought that this was a challenge they could handle.70
At the outset the camp leadership was criticized for its Zionist slant; yet the growing number of inmates and the increasing harshness of everyday life soon dampened ideological confrontations, and the Zionist commitment of the majority of the leadership remained unchanged. Thus a twenty-three-year-old teacher in a Jewish school in Prague, Egon “Gonda” Redlich, became head of the Youth Welfare Department. Redlich and his associate Fredy Hirsch (mainly responsible for sports and physical education) created a quasi-autonomous domain of the young for the young (that over time comprised on average three to four thousand youngsters); there in particular a strongly Zionist-inspired youth culture developed.
Nothing, however, could protect either the young or the old from deportation to killing areas or sites. “I heard a terrible piece of news,” Redlich noted in his diary on January 6, 1942, “a transport will go from Terezin to Riga. We argued for a long while if the time had not yet come to say ‘enough.’” Redlich’s next-day entry continued in the same vein: “Our mood is very bad. We prepared for the transport. We worked practically all night. With Fredy’s help, we managed to spare the children from the transport.” And on January 7: “We were not able to work because we were locked in the barracks. I asked the authorities to remove children from the transport and was told that the children will not be traveling…. Our work is like that of the Youth Aliyah [the organized emigration of children and youngsters to Palestine]. There we brought children to freedom. Here we attempt to save the children from death.”71
Saving children from the transports soon became impossible; when Redlich spoke of “death,” he actually did not know what the fate of deportees “to the East” would be. The “counselors” debated whether they should volunteer for the transports, to continue providing assistance and education to their charges. But, in historian Ruth Bondy’s words, “The arguments remained theoretical: in the end, family considerations, and the will to cling to Theresienstadt for as long as possible, prevailed.”72 On January 10 Redlich noted: “Yesterday we read in the orders of the day that another ten transports will go. There is reason to believe that an additional four will also depart.” He added: “An order of the day: nine men were hanged. The reason for the order: they insulted German honor.”73
As the summer of 1942 began, tens of transports of elderly Jews from the Reich and the Protectorate were sent on their way to the Czech “ghetto.” “In June,” Redlich recorded, “twenty-four transports arrived and four left. Of those entering, fifteen thousand came from Germany proper [Altreich], most of them very old.”74 On June 30: “I helped Viennese Jews yesterday. They are old, lice-ridden, and they have a few insane people among them.”75
Among its “insane” passengers the transport from Vienna included Trude Herzl-Neumann, the younger daughter of the founder of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl.76 Edelstein was not impressed and refused to come and greet the new inmate. But Trude Herzl was not to be dismissed so easily: “I, the younger daughter of the deceased Zionist leader, Dr. Theodor Herzl,” she wrote to the ghetto leaders and to the “Zionist branch” in Theresienstadt, “take the liberty of informing the local Zionists of my arrival and asking them for help and support during the present difficult times. With Zionist and faithful greetings, T. Neumann-Herzl.”77 Her many messages reflected her mental state, and six months after her arrival, she died.
A small ceremony took place at the camp’s mortuary, after which, as usual, the corpse was carried on a farm cart to the crematorium, outside the walls. There the ashes of all the dead were kept in numbered cardboard boxes. The residents hoped that once the ordeal was over, they would find the ashes of their loved ones and bury them in a decent grave. In late 1944, to erase evidence, the Germans ordered all the ashes to be thrown into the nearby Eger River.78
The number of incoming transports kept growing throughout July. “People arrive by the thousands,” Redlich wrote on August 1, “the aged that do not have the strength to get the food. Fifty die daily.”79 Indeed the mortality rate in the “old people’s ghetto” shot up, and in September 1942 alone, some 3,900 people from a total population of 58,000 died. At approximately the same time transports of the elderly inmates from Theresienstadt to Treblinka started. By then, as we shall see, the waves of deportations from Warsaw were subsiding and the gas chambers of Treblinka could take in the 18,000 new arrivals from the Protectorate ghetto.
It was in one of the September transports from Vienna, the “hospital transport,” that Ruth Kluger (the young girl who had received an orange in the subway after the star was introduced in the Reich) and her mother arrived in Theresienstadt. Ruth was sent to one of the youth barracks that were under Redlich and Hirsch’s supervision. There, as she writes, she became a Jew: The lectures, the all-pervading Zionist atmosphere, the sense of belonging to a community of haverim and haveroth (male and female comrades, in Hebrew) where one didn’t say gute Nacht but Laila tov
(“good night,” in Hebrew), gave the young girl a new feeling of belonging. And yet, even in Theresienstadt, even among the young, some of the inmates kept feeling superior to the other and showed it: “The Czechs in L410 [the children’s barracks] looked down on us because we spoke the enemy’s language. Besides, they really were the elite, because they were in their own country…. So even here we were disdained for something that wasn’t in our power to change: our mother tongue.”80
Throughout its existence Theresienstadt offered a dual face: On the one hand, transports were departing to Auschwitz and Treblinka, on the other, the Germans set up a “Potemkin village” meant to fool the world. “Will money be introduced?” Redlich asked in an entry on November 7, 1942. “Of course it could be. The thing could be an interesting experiment in national economics. Anyway, a coffee house has been opened (they say there will even be music there, a bank, a reading room). Two days later: “They are making a film. Jewish actors, satisfied, happy faces in the film, only in the film.” This was to be the first of two Nazi films about Theresienstadt.81
Whereas Theresienstadt, designated a ghetto, was part assembly camp and part concentration camp, the nondescript Izbica, in the Lublin district, was in fact a ghetto without walls. Two-thirds of Izbica’s initial Jewish population had been deported to Belzec and, from March 1942 on, transports of Jews from the Protectorate, then from any deportation center in the Reich, filled the town with its new inhabitants. A remarkable “report from Izbica,” offers a detailed description of daily life in this waiting room to Belzec or Sobibor.82 This eighteen-page letter was written in August 1942 by a deportee from Essen, Ernst Krombach, to his fiancée, Marianne Ellenbogen, whom we encountered in the previous chapter, and delivered to her by an SS employee from Essen whom the couple knew.
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