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

by Saul Friedlander

  129. Michael Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930–1965 (Bloomington, 2000), pp. 31ff. and 37–38.

  130. For this section see Steinberg, All or Nothing, pp. 15ff. and particularly pp. 29ff.

  131. Ibid., p. 47.

  132. On Slovakia, see Jörg K. Hoensch, “Slovakia: “One God, One People, One Party!” The Development, Aim and Failure of Political Catholicism,” in Catholics, the State, and the European Radical Right, 1919–1945, ed. Richard J. Wolff and Jörg K. Hoensch (Highland Lakes, NJ, 1987), pp. 158ff.

  133. For an overview of the anti-Jewish policies of the Slovak state, see Livia Rothkirchen, “The Situation of the Jews in Slovakia between 1939 and 1945,” in Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 7 (1998), pp. 46ff.

  134. Ibid., p. 49.

  135. See Supra, chapter 2, p. 80.

  136. Rothkirchen, “The Situation of the Jews in Slovakia between 1939 and 1945,” pp. 49–50.

  137. For this synthesis I relied mainly on Randolph L. Braham, The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, abridged edition (Detroit, 2000); Randolph L. Braham, “The Holocaust in Hungary: A Retrospective Analysis,” in Genocide and Rescue: The Holocaust in Hungary 1944, ed. David Cesarani (Oxford, 1997); Ivan T. Berend, Decades of Crisis: Central and Eastern Europe before World War II (Berkeley, 1998); Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914–1945 (Madison, WI, 1995); Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe Between the World Wars (Bloomington, 1983); and István Deák, “A Fatal Compromise? The Debate over Collaboration and Resistance in Hungary,” in István Deák, Jan T. Gross, and Tony Judt., The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and its Aftermath (Princeton, 2000), pp. 39ff.

  138. On the attitude of the Hungarian Churches see Randolph L. Braham, “The Christian Churches of Hungary and the Holocaust,” Yad Vashem Studies 29 (2001), pp. 244ff.

  139. Braham, The Politics of Genocide (condensed), p. 34. While HSSPF Friedrich Jeckeln volunteered to murder the 18,000 Jews expelled by the Hungarians, more than 27,000 Jews expelled by the Romanians into German-controlled territory were pushed back into the Romanian-controlled area by Einsatzgruppe D. These contrary initiatives indicate that no clear overall policy had yet been decided by the end of August 1941 regarding the fate of large Jewish groups of this kind (that is, not local Jewish communities). On this point see Klaus-Michael Mallmann, “Der qualitative Sprung im Vernichtungsprozess: Das Massaker von Kamenetz-Podolsk Ende August 1941,” Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 10 (2001), pp. 239ff. and in particular, 255.

  140. Himmler, Der Dienstkalender, p. 185 n. 15.

  141. On July 17, Himmler had appointed Globocnik as “delegate of the Reichsführer-SS for the establishment of the SS and police strongholds in the new Eastern territories.” Ibid., n. 14.

  142. Ibid.

  143. For details about the testing of the van and its use in Poltava, see Eugen Kogon, Hermann Langbein, and Adalbert Rückerl, eds., Nazi Mass Murder: A Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas (New Haven, 1993), pp. 54ff and 60ff.

  144. Part of the details on the origins and the early history of Auschwitz are taken from Danuta Czech, “Entstehungsgeschichte des KL Auschwitz, Aufbau und Ausbauperiode,” in Auschwitz: Nationalsozialistisches Vernichtungslager, ed. Franciszek Piper and Teresa Swiebocka (Oswiecim [Auschwitz], 1997), pp. 30ff. It seems, however, that no Polish caserns were used but rather a workers’ and refugees’ camp. For these indications see Sybille Steinbacher, Auschwitz: Geschichte und Nachgeschichte (Munich, 2004), p. 13.

  145. On the successive stages of IG Farben’s involvement in the Auschwitz Buna plant, see mainly Peter Hayes, Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era (New York, 1987), pp. 347ff.

  146. For details see Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Auschwitz (New York, 2002), pp. 197ff; Himmler, Der Dienstkalender, p. 123n.; Danuta Czech, Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau 1939–1945 (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1989), p. 79. Contrarily to Höss’s testimony, during this visit Himmler did not order the construction in Birkenau of a camp for (future) Soviet prisoners. The construction of the Birkenau prisoners’ camp started in October 1941, and, as will be seen further on, only several months later would it be turned into an extermination camp. Sybille Steinbacher, “Musterstadt” Auschwitz: Germanisierungspolitik und Judenmord in Ostoberschlesien (Munich, 2000), pp. 238ff.

  147. Since World War I, prussic acid—as Zyklon B was then called—was increasingly used as a powerful pesticide for major disinfection purposes. In September 1939, at the outset of operation T4, the use of Zyklon B was considered as a possible method for the killing of the mentally ill, yet it was rejected in favor of carbon monoxide, which was deemed more efficient. Although the potential of Zyklon B for killing human beings was underrated at first, it was widely used as a disinfectant. Thus, in early 1940, as the decision to set up a concentration camp in Auschwitz was taken, Zyklon B was utilized to disinfect the first buildings of the new camp. Over the coming year and a half, Auschwitz, like all other concentration camps, regularly used Zyklon B to this end.

  In the early summer, smaller, thus much more effective, disinfection rooms for processing clothes, blankets, and the like were introduced after being suggested by the Zyklon producer, DEGESCH (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung). According to postwar testimony, during one such operation the slave workers in charge and their SS overseer noticed the rapid death of a cat that had remained in one of these rooms. “Why not use it on human beings?” the overseer supposedly commented. An idea too hastily abandoned in 1939 was born again.

  There were plenty of inmates on whom the product could be tested. We saw that mainly after August 1941, within the context of the 14f13 killing program, camp detainees in the hundreds were selected and sent to their death in the T4 institutions. Although some of these institutions remained “operational” until the end of the war, it became obvious that the murder on site, in the camps, would be more efficient. Moreover, following the attack on the Soviet Union, the killing of political commissars, other functionaries of the communist party and all Jewish prisoners of war started. The POW camps were searched by the Gestapo, and those destined for execution were either killed on the spot or transferred to nearby concentration camps to be murdered there. The killing procedures differed from one camp to another; the shot in the back of the neck seems to have been the most common method, but much leeway was left for the inventiveness of the executioners. In Auschwitz, Zyklon B was chosen. On these developments see Florent Brayard, La “Solution finale de la question juive”: La Technique, le temps et les catégories de la décision (Paris, 2004), pp. 262ff.

  148. Danuta Czech, Auschwitz Chronicle, 1939–1945 (New York, 1990), pp. 85–86.

  149. Ibid.

  150. For Wagner’s role in the starving to death of the Soviet POWs see mainly Christian Gerlach, “Militärische ‘Versorgungszwänge,’ Besatzungspolitik und Massenverbrechen: Die Rolle des Generalquartiermeister des Heeres und seiner Dienststellen im Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion,” in Ausbeutung, Vernichtung, Öffentlichkeit, ed. Norbert Frei et al. (Munich, 2000), pp. 175ff. The most thorough study concerning the German treatment of Soviet POWs remains Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden: Die Wehrmacht und die Sowjetischen Kriegsfangenen 1941–1945 (Stuttgart, 1978).

  151. Götz Aly, ed., Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene (Baltimore: 1994), p. 130.

  152. Ibid., p. 135.

  153. Nuremberg Doc. PS-710.

  154. See Eichmann’s memoirs in Adolf Eichmann, Ich, Adolf Eichmann, ed. R. Aschenauer (Leoni am Starnberger See, 1980), p. 479.

  155. Notes of the meeting were taken by Bernhard Lösener, the adviser on Jewish affairs at the Ministry of the Interior. See Peter Witte, “Two Decisions Concerning the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”: Deportations to Lodz and Mass Murder in Chelmno,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 9, no. 3 (1995), p. 322.

  156. Goebbels, Tagebücher, part 2, vol. 1, pp. 265–66
.

  157. Ibid., p. 278.

  158. Ibid., p. 269.

  159. Ibid.

  160. Heydrich was ready to start the deportations from the Reich forthwith, but, as we saw, Hitler vetoed any such immediate step as he vetoed the immediate implementation of Goebbels’s evacuation plans. It is thus difficult to follow Christopher Browning’s interpretation of Göring’s letter as “Heydrich’s charter” instructing the chief of the RSHA to draw up a “feasibility study” for the mass murder of European Jewry. “Heydrich needed the July 1941 authorization because he now faced a new and awesome task that would dwarf even the systematic murder program emerging on Soviet territory.” See Christopher R. Browning and Jürgen Matthäus, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 (Lincoln, NE, 2004), pp. 315–16. Two documents adduced to bolster the “feasibility study” thesis can also be read differently. On August 28, Eichmann rejected a demand from the Wilhelmstrasse to allow Jewish emigration from the occupied countries in the West, “in view of the imminent ‘Final Solution,’ now in preparation.” Ibid., p. 322. This formula could, however, be applied either to the preparation of a general deportation of all European Jews to northern Russia or to the preparation for their extermination. However, as there was no preparation that we know of, Eichmann may simiply have used a general formula to explain his refusal.

  A second document, a memorandum sent on September 3 by the chief of the Emigration Central Office [Umwandererzentrale, or UWZ] of the RKF in Posen, SS Sturmbannführer Rolf-Heinz Höppner, to Eichmann, seems to confirm that the “preparations” were aimed at the deportation of European Jewry to the Russian North. Höppner suggested the expansion of the Berlin Central Office for Emigration to the whole of European Jewry; he also suggested that control over the “reception areas” be granted to the new central agency. But precisely this document indicated that no decision had yet been taken: “I could well imagine,” Höppner wrote, “that large areas of the present Soviet Russia are being prepared to receive the undesired ethnic elements of the greater German settlement area…. To go into further details about the organization of the reception area would be fantasy, because first of all the basic decisions must be made. It is essential in this regard, by the way, that total clarity prevails about what finally shall happen to those undesirable ethnic elements deported from the Greater German settlement area. Is the goal to ensure them a certain level of life in the long run, or shall they be totally eradicated?” Ibid.

  In a further section of the September memorandum, Höppner stressed that “his proposals concerning ‘reception areas’ [Russia] had to remain ‘patchwork’ for the moment, as he did not yet ‘know the intentions’ of Hitler, Himmler and Heydrich.” Christopher R. Browning, Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers (Cambridge, MA, 2000), p. 37. Had a “feasibility study” for total extermination been in preparation when Höppner wrote his memorandum, Eichmann would probably have hinted about it and the entire memorandum would not have been so tentative and open-ended.

  161. For these numbers see Wolfgang Scheffler, “Die Einsatzgruppe A 1941/2,” in Klein, ed., Die Einsatzgruppen in der besetzen Sowjetunion 1941/42, pp. 34–35.

  162. Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, pp. 96–99.

  163. Rudashevski, The Diary of the Vilna Ghetto, June 1941–April 1943, pp. 31–32.

  164. Ibid., pp. 32–33.

  165. Avraham Tory, Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary, ed. Martin Gilbert and Dina Porat (Cambridge, UK, 1990), p. 13.

  166. Ibid., pp. 26–28.

  167. Ibid., p. 32.

  168. Zygmunt Klukowski, Diary from the Years of Occupation, 1939–44, ed. Andrew Klukowski and Helen Klukowski May (Urbana, IL, 1993), p. 168.

  169. Czerniaków, Warsaw Diary, p. 256.

  170. Ibid., p. 257.

  171. Ibid. On January 1, 1941, 1,761 inhabitants of the ghetto belonged to non-Jewish denominations. See Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933–1945 (New York, 1992), pp. 154ff.

  172. Ibid.

  173. See mainly Havi Ben-Sasson, “Christians in the Ghetto: All Saints’ Church, Birth of the Holy Virgin Mary Church, and the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto,” Yad Vashem Studies 31 (2003), pp. 153ff.

  174. Ibid.

  175. Ibid., p. 165.

  176. Czerniaków, Warsaw Diary, p. 261.

  177. Ben-Sasson, “Christians in the Ghetto,” pp. 163–64.

  178. Himmler, Der Dienstkalender, p. 167 n. 7.

  179. Dobroszycki, ed., The Chronicle, p. 71.

  180. Ibid., p. 67n.

  181. Ibid., pp. 68–69.

  182. Ibid., p. 69. On July 29, the day the patients were removed, Rumkowski’s secretary, Szmul Rozensztajn, tersely noted in his diary: “All efforts by the Chairman to save the mentally ill were to no avail. At 11 A.M. today, a van arrived at the hospital on 3 Wesola Street to take 58 persons. They had been given injections of the sedative scopolamine.” Quoted in Alan Adelson and Robert Lapides, eds., Lodz Ghetto: Inside a Community Under Siege (New York, 1989), p. 156.

  183. Isaiah Trunk, Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation (New York, 1972), p. 84.

  184. Ibid.

  185. All details about Bruno Schulz are taken from Jerzy Ficowski, Regions of the Great Heresy: Bruno Schulz: A Biographical Portrait (New York, 2003).

  186. Ibid., pp. 164–65.

  187. All details about Dubnow’s life are taken from Sophie Dubnov-Erlich, The Life and World of S. M. Dubnov: Diaspora Nationalism and Jewish History (New York, 1991).

  188. Ibid., p. 229.

  189. Ibid., pp. 245–46.

  190. Ibid., p. 218.

  191. For the spreading of information, see Mordechai Altschuler, “Escape and Evacuation of Soviet Jews at the Time of the Nazi Invasion,” in Lucjan Dobroszycki and Jeffrey S. Gurock, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union (Armonk, NY, 1993), pp. 84ff.

  192. For an overview of these attitudes see Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair, pp. 61–62.

  193. Mordechai Altschuler, Soviet Jewry on the Eve of the Holocaust: A Social and Demographic Profile (Jerusalem, 1998), p. 188.

  194. Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, 2004), p. 221.

  195. Ibid., p. 245.

  196. Quoted in ibid., p. 288.

  197. See mainly Joshua Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg (New York, 1996), pp. 189ff.

  198. Jonathan Frankel, “Empire tsariste et Union Sovietique,” in Les juifs et le XXe siècle: Dictionnaire critique, ed. Elie Barnavi and Saul Friedländer (Paris, 2000), p. 298.

  199. David Engel, In the Shadow of Auschwitz: The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews, 1939–1942 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1987), p. 136.

  200. See mainly Nechama Tec, Defiance: The Bielski Partisans (New York, 1993). See also Peter Duffy, The Bielski Brothers: The True Story of Three Men Who Defied the Nazis, Saved 1,200 Jews, and Built a Village in the Forest (New York, 2003).

  201. Nechama Tec and Daniel Weiss, “The Heroine of Minsk: Eight Photographs of an Execution,” in “Photography and the Holocaust,” ed. Sybil Milton and Genya Markon, special issue, History of Photography (1999), pp. 322ff. Also in Minsk, another Jewish woman, Yelena Mazanik, planted the bomb that killed Reichskommissar Wilhelm Kube in September 1943. Cf. John Garrard, “Russia and the Soviet Union” in Walter Laqueur and Judith Tydor Baumel, eds., The Holocaust Encyclopedia. (New Haven, 2001), p. 590.

  202. For a detailed account of the genesis and activities of the committee, see Shimon Redlich, Propaganda and Nationalism in Wartime Russia: The Jewish Antifascist Committee in the USSR, 1941–1948 (Boulder, CO, 1982).

  203. The Erlich-Alter affair has generated an abundant scholarly literature. For the above mentioned rendition of the events, see Daniel Blatman, Notre liberté et la vôtre: Le mouvement ouvrier juif Bund en Pologne, 1939–1949 (Paris, 2002), pp. 101ff.

  204. Joseph Walk, ed., Das Sonderre
cht für die Juden im NS-Staat: Eine Sammlung der gesetzlichen Massnahmen und Richtlinien, Inhalt und Bedeutung (Heidelberg, 1981), p. 229.

  205. Ibid., p. 347.

  206. Paul Sauer, ed., Dokumente über die Verfolgung der jüdischen Bürger in Baden-Württemberg durch das nationalsozialistische Regime 1933–1945, 2 vols., vol. 2, (Stuttgart, 1966), p. 214.

  207. Quoted in Léon Poliakov and Josef Wulf, Das Dritte Reich und seine Denker: Dokumente (Berlin, 1959), p. 452.

  208. Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933–41, vol. 1, p. 434.

  209. Kulka and Jäckel, Die Juden in den geheimen NS-Stimmungsberichten 1933–1945, p. 450.

  210. Boberach, ed., Meldungen, pp. 2645ff.

  211. Kulka and Jäckel, Die Juden in den geheimen NS-Stimmungsberichten 1933–1945, p. 458.

  212. Ibid., pp. 456–57.

  213. Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933–41, p. 434.

  214. Ibid., p. 445.

  215. Ibid., p. 441.

  216. Elisabeth Freund, “Waiting,” in Hitler’s Exiles: Personal Stories of the Flight from Nazi Germany to America, ed. Mark M. Anderson (New York, 1998), p. 122.

  217. Ibid., p. 123.

  218. Telegram from Morris to Secretary of State, September 30, 1941, reproduced in John Mendelsohn and Donald S. Detwiler, eds., The Holocaust: Selected Documents in Eighteen Volumes (New York: Garland Publishing, 1982), vol. 2, p. 280.

  219. For the manifold confirmations of these attitudes see David Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution: Public Opinion under Nazism (Oxford, 1992), pp. 124ff.

  220. Ibid., p. 129.

  221. Quoted in Paul A. Levine, From Indifference to Activism: Swedish Diplomacy and the Holocaust, 1938–1944 (Uppsala, 1996), p. 118.

  222. Eric A. Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany: An Oral History (Cambridge, MA, 2005), pp. 362–63.

  223. Ruth Kluger, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (New York, 2001), p. 49.