On August 2 the Germans announced “the relocation of the ghetto.” Beginning on August 3, 5,000 Jews a day had to assemble at the railway station. Part of the population, which at the outset had been slow in responding, was fooled once again by Biebow’s appeals to reason and by his reassurances: “The relocation of the ghetto should proceed with calm, order and benevolence…. I assure you that we will do our very best to continue to achieve the utmost and to save your life through the relocation of the ghetto…. I know you want to live and eat, and that’s what you will do…. If you are not reasonable, the ghetto administration will resign and forcible measures will be taken…. There’s room enough in the railway cars, the machinery is adequately relocated. Come with your families, take your pots, drinking vessels and flatware; we don’t have those in Germany since everything has been distributed to bombing victims.”104
While Rosenfeld’s last entry was suffused with hope, the anonymous adolescent’s last entry [written in English], dated August 3, was of a very different tone. It may have been the most unconstrained expression of anti-German hatred expressed in a Jewish diary in those days; it was also an outburst of anger at the meekness of the Jews, of intense compassion for his people, of challenge to God. After quoting one of Biebow’s arguments (“In order that the German Reich should win, our Führer has ordered the use of every worker”), the diarist commented: “Evidently! The only right which entitles us to live under the same sky with Germans—though to live as the lowest slaves—is the privilege of working for their victory, working much! and eating nothing. Really, they are even more abominable in their diabolical cruelty than any mind could follow…. He asked the crowd if they are ready to work faithfully for the Reich and everyone answered “Jawohl”—I thought about the abjectedness of such a situation! What sort of people are the Germans that they managed to transform us into such low, crawling creatures, as to say “Jawohl.” Is life really so worthy? Is it not better not [to] live in a world where there are 80 millions of Germans? Or, is it not a shame to be a man on the same earth as the Ger-man?…What will they do with our sick? With our old? With our young? Oh, God in Heaven, why didst thou create Germans to destroy humanity?” An undated entry followed: “My God, why do you allow them to say that you are neutral? Why will you not punish, with all your wrath, those who are destroying us? Are we the sinners and they the righteous? Is that the truth? Surely you are intelligent enough to understand that it is not so, that we are not the sinners and they are not the Messiah!”105
Some of the inhabitants tried to hide. As the Jewish police were unable to deal with the situation, German police and firemen units from the city moved into the ghetto and started dragging out the rapidly dwindling number of Jews. On August 28 the ghetto’s end had come. Rumkowski, his wife, the son they had adopted, and his brother with his wife were on the last transport that left that day for Auschwitz-Birkenau.106 Neither Rumkowski nor any member of his family survived.
The last entry of the “Chronicle,” on July 30, 1944, had included the usual indications about the weather, vital statistics (“Deaths: one; Births: none”), and the number of inhabitants (68,561), before recording the “news of the day”: “Today, Sunday, also passed very calmly. The Chairman held various meetings. But all in all, the ghetto is peaceful and orderly. Langiewnicka Street now has a different look. Traffic is extraordinarily lively. One can see the war gradually approaching Litzmannstadt. The ghetto dweller peers curiously at the motor vehicles of various service branches as they speed through; for him, though, the crucial question remains: What is there to eat?”
Information about the arrival of potatoes, white cabbage, and kohlrabi followed: “If no flour arrives tomorrow, Monday, then the situation will be extremely critical. It is claimed that flour supplies will suffice for barely two or three more days.” No cases of contagious disease were reported. The cause of the single death was suicide.107 The chroniclers, including Zelkowicz and Rosenfeld, were all deported to Auschwitz and murdered. When the Red Army occupied the city, in January 1945, 877 ghetto Jews were still alive.
Poland was liberated. Over the months and years some Polish Jews who had hidden as Aryans resurfaced; larger groups who had fled in 1939 to the Soviet occupation area and had been evacuated into the Soviet interior, returned. Of the 3.3 million Jews who had lived in Poland in 1939, some 300,000 survived the war; among these some 40,000 at most survived in hiding on Polish territory.108
In early July 1944, as the Red Army reached the eastern borders of Lithuania, 33,000 Jews were still alive in the German-occupied Baltic countries, mainly in the Kovno and Shavli ghettos and in the labor camps of Estonia. On July 14 and 15, as we saw, the Kovno ghetto was liquidated: Some 2,000 of its inhabitants were killed on the spot and 7,000 to 8,000, deported to camps in Germany.109 Between July 15 and 22 some 8,000 Jews were deported from Shavli to the Stutthof camp near Danzig.110
Kalmanovitch died in the Narva slave labor camp in Estonia before the end of 1943. Kruk, in the meantime, was an inmate of Klooga, the main Estonian slave labor camp. He had resumed his chronicling, although less systematically than in Vilna. At the end of August 1944, he was transferred again, this time to neighboring Lagedi. “So far I have slept on the bare ground,” he wrote on August 29. “Today I built a lair for myself, boarded up the holes in the barrack—an achievement for Lagedi…. If possible, I shall continue to record.”111 He did so for a few more days. “Sunday, we had some tension,” the entry for September 5 reads. “The chief butcher came, the chief doctor. But everything remained as it was. Today again some anxiety. The commandant came here, the so-called Vaivarchik, the so-called Sortovshchik” [Selectioner].112 And on September 8: “Again experienced some anxiety: the Vaivarchik, Dr. Botmann, was here, with Schwartzer, the whole “butcher shop,” as it is called. Everybody was sure something horrible was imminent, in the best case, transport to Germany. The result is zero—we remain. He orders underwear, clothes, etc., sent; it seems we are staying. Thus we are playing for time.”113
The last entry in Kruk’s diary was dated September 17, 1944. He recorded the hiding of his manuscripts in the presence of witnesses: “Today, the eve of Rosh Hashanah, a year after we arrived in Estonia, I bury the manuscripts in Lagedi, in a barrack of Mrs. Shulma, right across from the guard’s house. Six persons are present at the burial. My coexistence with my neighbors [the Germans] is difficult.”114
“The next day,” according to Benjamin Harshav, the editor of the English translation of Kruk’s diary, “all Jews from Klooga and Lagedi, including Herman Kruk, were hastily exterminated. The inmates were ordered to carry logs and spread them in a layer, and then they were forced to undress and lie down naked on the logs, where they were shot in the neck. Layer was piled on top of layer, and the entire pyre was burned. The next morning, the first Red Army units reached the area. One of the six witnesses mentioned by Kruk in his final entry, survived. He returned to Lagedi, dug up the diary, and brought it to Vilna.”115
VI
As Germany was swaying under Allied military pressure on all fronts in the summer of 1944, an event of major importance took place in the Reich itself: the attempt on Hitler’s life.
A growing number of officers, many of whom had previously been unquestioning, even enthusiastic devotees of the regime and of its leader, were ready in 1944 to support the small circle of determined opponents of Nazism who were conspiring to kill the Nazi leader and save Germany from total catastrophe. Although several prior attempts had been unsuccessful, the assassination plan meticulously prepared by Claus von Stauffenberg and set for July 20, 1944, seemed foolproof. Once again, though, the plot failed due to sheer bad luck. It brought frightful retribution in its wake. Over the following months and up to the last weeks of the war, reprisals did not stop, not only against the main plotters but against most of the opposition groups and personalities we encountered throughout this history: Moltke was executed and so were Hassell, Goerdeler, Bonhoeffer, Oster, Canaris, and thousands more with
them.
Yet, as heroic and significant as July 20, 1944, is for the history of Germany, more immediately fateful was the unwavering loyalty to Hitler and his regime displayed at this crucial juncture—and into 1945—by a majority of Germans, the bulk of the Wehrmacht and of course the party and its organizations. If anything, the attempt on Hitler’s life seemed, in historian Stephen G. Fritz’s words “to bind more Landser [soldiers] to him.” Wrote BP indignantly: “Thank God that Providence allowed our Führer to continue his task of the salvation of Europe, and our holiest duty is now to cling to him even more strongly, in order to make good what the few criminals…did without regard for [the welfare] of the entire nation.” Lt. KN thought it “unspeakably tragic that the enemy nations will see symptoms of disunity, where before they perhaps supposed only unanimous solidarity.” “These bandits tried to destroy that for which millions are ready to risk their lives,” exclaimed Lt. HWM. “It is a good feeling to know that a November 1918 cannot be repeated.”116
The Jews were never absent for long. On August 8 Sergeant E lashed out: “We are totally convinced that we shall soon overcome the damage caused by these damned traitors; then the greatest difficulties will be behind us and it means: full speed to victory! You can see how these pigs wanted to deprive us of everything, at the very last moment. We know that all these bandits are Freemasons and therefore in cahoots with international Jewry, or, better said, dominated by it. Too bad that I could not be part of the operation against these criminals. It would have been a pleasure to see the smoke come out of my gun.”117
The tragic irony of such an identification of the plotters and the Jews stems from the fact that, as repeatedly mentioned, many of these conservative opponents of the regime were themselves anti-Semites to various degrees. This became clear once again during their interrogation by the Gestapo about their political and ideological beliefs. The reports of the interrogations (“The Kaltenbrunner Reports”) were forwarded to Bormann by the head of the RSHA. A report of October 16, 1944, dwelled at length on the Jewish question.
The former finance minister of Prussia, Popitz (a friend of Moltke and Preysing), said: “As somebody who was very familiar with conditions in the system period [that is, Weimar] my view of the Jewish question was that the Jews ought to disappear from the life of the state and the economy. However, as far as the methods were concerned I repeatedly advocated a somewhat more gradual approach, particularly in the light of diplomatic considerations.” Popitz reasserted the same view at greater length in the course of the interrogation. The report then emphasized that: “A number of other persons who were interrogated expressed similar views. Thus Count Yorck von Wartenburg, for example, said that the extermination measures against the Jews, which went beyond law and justice, caused him to break with National Socialism. Count Lehndorff declared ‘that although he was hostile to Jews, nevertheless he had never quite approved of the National Socialist view of race, in particular its practical implementation.’ Count Alexander von Stauffenberg [Alexander and Berthold von Stauffenberg were brothers of Claus] said he ‘took the view that the Jewish question should have been dealt with in a less extreme manner because then it would have produced less disturbance among the population.’ Count Berthold von Stauffenberg took a similar line: ‘He and his brother had basically approved of the racial principle of National Socialism but considered it to be exaggerated and excessive.’”
Further on, Kaltenbrunner’s report quoted Goerdeler’s memorandum “The Goal”: “The Jewish persecution, which has taken the most inhuman, merciless and deeply shaming forms, for which no compensation can be adequate, is to be halted immediately. Anyone who believed that he could enrich himself with Jewish property will discover that it is a disgrace for any German to seek such dishonestly acquired property. The German people truly want nothing to do with marauders and hyenas among God’s creatures.”118
As the Reich was sliding into total defeat, few Germans remained indifferent to the “Jewish question.” Whether influenced by Goebbels’s propaganda or partaking of more traditional forms of anti-Semitism, Germans of all walks of life were obsessed with the Jews. The most prevalent attitudes were hatred of course, but also fear, as we saw—the fear of retribution. Many a party member must have shared the feelings of Cpl. KB. In a letter written to his mother, on August 27, 1944, KB asked her to hide his party uniform or, better, to burn it. He admitted that these outward signs of his former commitment to National Socialism did not let him sleep at night; his fear had its good reasons: “You well know that the Jew will take a bloody vengeance, particularly against party members.”119
On August 5 Hitler had had his last chance to lecture Antonescu on the Jewish question. He explained to the Romanian marshal that Germany’s exemplary fight was due to the “pitiless destruction of the inner enemies. The Jews, the accomplices and instigators of revolutions, did not exist in Germany anymore. If somebody believed that by sparing the Jews, one could expect them to become advocates of their host nation in the event of defeat, this was a complete mistake as shown by the events in Bavaria and Hungary after the World War. In those countries the Jews proved to be the absolute organizers of the Bolshevik overthrow.”120 Thus, against all odds, as Antonescu’s regime was about to collapse, Hitler was still trying to persuade his ally to resume his anti-Jewish campaign.
VII
Jakob Edelstein had been arrested in the fall of 1943 for having helped some inmates to escape from Theresienstadt by manipulating numbers and names on the registration lists of the camp. He was sent to Auschwitz with his wife, Miriam; his son, Aryeh; and old Mrs. Olliner, Miriam’s mother. While Edelstein was kept in block 11 of the main camp, his family members were detained in the “family camp” in Birkenau. On June 20, 1944, they were all reunited in front of Crematorium III and shot. Jakob was shot last, after he had to witness the killing of his son, his wife, and his mother-in-law.121
On September 27, 1944, Paul Eppstein was arrested on the trumped-up charge of attempting to escape. He was brought to the small fortress and executed.122 The inmates of Theresienstadt were now led by the last of the three elders, the Viennese Murmelstein: He remained a controversial figure, notwithstanding his postwar judicial rehabilitation. When he died in Rome in 1989, the chief rabbi of the city did not allow his burial next to his wife, but only at the outer limit of the Jewish graveyard, a symbolic rejection.123 In the camp Murmelstein’s German protagonist was the ex-“curator” of the Prague Jewish museum, SS commandant Karl Rahm.
In the autumn of 1944 a second film was shot in Theresienstadt, this time by Kurt Gerron. Gerron was a well-known Jewish actor, director, and overall Weimar star performer, who had been deported to Theresienstadt from Holland. It presented Theresienstadt as a happy resort town, complete with parks, swimming pools, soccer tournaments, schools, and endless cultural activities (concerts, theater, and so on); it featured “happy faces” all around. Completed in November 1944, this second hoax on a grand scale, titled Theresienstadt: A Documentary from the Jewish Settlement Area—and not, as is often mentioned, The Führer Gives a Town to the Jews (an ironic title made up by the inmates themselves)—was never shown in public. Gerron left Theresienstadt on the last transport to Auschwitz and was gassed on arrival.124
In April 1945, after some further improvement work, a second ICRC delegation visited the camp, once more in the company of a vast SS retinue that included Adolf Eichmann. Once again the Geneva delegates were satisfied: In their report Theresienstadt became a “small Jewish state.” Incidentally they were the only audience to see Gerron’s film; even they found it “slightly too propagandistic.”125
There was no armed uprising in Theresienstadt, although it seems that the Germans took such a possibility into account in the fall of 1944, after the events in Treblinka and Sobibor, and the desperate and immediately-beaten-down rebellion of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando Jews in October. Thus, mainly young people boarded the transports to Auschwitz during the deportations of those months.126
There was no lack of defiance in the ghetto-camp, however, some of it quite open. The performance of Verdi’s Requiem, with its Dies Irae and particularly its Libera me, was meant as a powerful message. The conductor, Raphael Schächter, had assembled a very large choir, soloists, and a sizable orchestra. The first performance took place at the end of the summer of 1944. Schächter reworked the Libera me, too tame in its original rendition, “giving to those final words the Beethoven victory code: three short notes, one long.” Whether or not Eichmann sat in the audience, as he was in the camp to bestow a medal on Rahm in Himmler’s name, is unclear. Be that as it may, on September 28, on the morrow of the final performance (during which they already knew of their deportation), the members of the choir, the soloists and the orchestra boarded the transport for Auschwitz.127
Throughout October eleven transports followed the September 28 one, leaving 11,077 Jews in the camp, which, in mid-September, still had had a population of 29,481 detainees. As deportees from Slovakia, the Protectorate, and the Reich (mainly Mischlinge and mixed couples) trickled in over the following months, the number of inmates grew again to some 30,000 (in the meantime a first transport of some 1,200 detainees was sent to Switzerland following negotiations between Himmler and the former Swiss president, Jean-Marie Musy, which we will discuss further on). In February 1945 Rahm ordered the building of two sites, a vast hall whose doors closed hermetically, and a covered pit of huge proportions: Both sites could have been used to exterminate the entire Jewish population on the spot, had the decision been taken to liquidate the camp before the arrival of the Soviet forces. The detainees were ultimately spared: 141,184 Jews had at one time or another been sent to Theresienstadt; at the end of the war, 16,832 were still alive.128
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