256. Either during the visit or in preparation for it, Roosevelt was handed a memorandum prepared by the World Jewish Congress that described the extermination in precise details and mentioned in particular Ozwiecim as one of the main killing centers. For early knowledge in London and Washington about the function of Auschwitz as a major extermination camp, see Barbara Rogers, “British Intelligence and the Holocaust,” Journal of Holocaust Education 8, no. 1 (1999), pp. 89ff. and particularly 100.
257. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews, p. 72.
258. Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe, 1939–1945, p. 173.
259. Willi A. Boelcke, ed., Wollt Ihr den totalen Krieg? Die geheimen Goebbels Konferenzen 1939–1943 (Herrsching, 1989), p. 313.
260. For Wise’s information, see Henry L. Feingold, The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust, 1938–1945 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1970), p. 170. See, moreover, Heinrich Himmler, Der Dienstkalender Heinrich Himmlers 1941/42, ed. Peter Witte et al. (Hamburg, 1999), p. 619, n. 43.
261. Heiber, Reichsführer! Briefe an und von Himmler, p. 169.
262. Friedländer, Pius XII, pp. 104ff. Strangely enough Bernardini’s report has not been included in the volumes of documents published by the Vatican.
263. Pierre Blet, Angelo Martini, and Burkhart Schneider, eds., Actes et documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la Seconde Guerre mondiale (Vatican City, 1974), vol. 8, p. 453.
264. Ibid., p. 534 (quoted and translated in Zuccotti, Under His Very Windows, p. 102).
265. For most of the details, see Shimon Redlich, “Metropolitan Andrei Sheptys’kyi, Ukrainians and Jews During and After the Holocaust,” in Holocaust and Genocide Studies 5, no. 1 (1990), pp. 39ff.
266. Blet, Martini, and Schneider, Actes et documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la Seconde Guerre mondiale (Vatican City, 1967), vol. 3, part 2, pp. 625 and 628. Excerpted and translated in Redlich, “Metropolitan Andrei Sheptys’kyi, Ukrainians and Jews During and After the Holocaust,” pp. 45–46.
267. Friedländer, Pius XII, pp. 121–22.
268. Cable from Tittman to Hull, 10/10/1942 in ibid., pp. 123–24.
269. John Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (New York, 1999), pp. 290–91.
270. Ibid. About Maglione’s answer, see also Friedländer, Pius XII, p. 125.
271. Friedländer, Pius XII, p. 131.
272. On these reactions, see Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, p. 293.
273. Goebbels, Tagebücher, part 2, vol. 6, p. 508.
274. For this anonymous report see Kulka/Jäckel, Die Juden, p. 511.
275. Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies (New York, 1981), p. 105.
276. For this text, see Saul Friedländer, “History, Memory and the Historian: Dilemmas and Responsibilities,” New German Critique 80 (Spring-Summer 2000), pp. 3–4.
Chapter Eight: March 1943–October 1943
1. Louise Jacobson and Nadia Kaluski-Jacobson, Les Lettres de Louise Jacobson et de ses proches: Fresnes, Drancy, 1942–1943 (Paris, 1997), p. 141.
2. Ibid., pp. 41–42.
3. For a vivid description of the Battle of Kursk, see Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (London, 2000), pp. 510–11.
4. For a good summary of these developments see Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1936–45: Nemesis (New York, 2000), pp. 566ff. For a lively but obviously self-serving description of the intrigues that swirled at the highest reaches of the regime, particularly around the “Committee of Three” and other attempts at reorganization, see Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs (New York, 1970), pp. 252ff.
5. For the translation of the speech excerpts and the reference to Körner’s verse, see Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham, eds., Nazism, 1919–1945: A Documentary Reader, vol. 4: The German Home Front in World War II (Exeter, UK, 1998), pp. 490ff.
6. Moses Flinker, Young Moshe’s Diary: The Spiritual Torment of a Jewish Boy in Nazi Europe, ed. Shaul Esh and Geoffrey Wigoder (Jerusalem, 1971), pp. 78–79.
7. Mihail Sebastian, Journal, 1935–1944 (Chicago, 2000), p. 546.
8. Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years 1942–1945 (New York, 1999), p. 202.
9. Joseph Goebbels, Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels: Sämtliche Fragmente, ed. Elke Fröhlich (Munich, 1996), part 2, vol. 7, p. 287.
10. Adolf Hitler, Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen, 1932–1945: Kommentiert von einem deutschen Zeitgenossen, ed. Max Domarus, 4 vols. (Leonberg, 1987–88), part 2, vol. 4, p. 2001.
11. Goebbels, Tagebücher, part 2, vol. 8, p. 119.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., p. 235.
14. Ibid., p. 261.
15. Ibid., pp. 287ff.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., pp. 287–88.
18. Ibid., pp. 288ff and 90.
19. Quoted and translated in Noakes and Pridham, eds., Nazism, vol. 4, p. 497.
20. Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years 1942–1945, pp. 230–31.
21. Ibid., p. 234.
22. Ibid., pp. 235–36.
23. Kulka and Jäckel, Die Juden, p. 517.
24. Ibid.
25. Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years 1942–1945, p. 304.
26. For ideological fanaticism in the RSHA, see mainly Michael Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten: Das Führungskorps des Reichssicherheitshauptamtes (Hamburg, 2002), and Yaacov Lozowick, Hitlers Bürokraten: Eichmann, seine willigen Vollstrecker und die Banalität des Bösen (Zurich, 2000); for the WVHA main figures see in particular Michael Thad Allen, The Business of Genocide: The SS, Slave Labor and the Concentration Camps (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002).
27. All the details about these documents (which were declassified by the British Public Record Office in 2001) are taken from Peter Witte and Stephen Tyas, “A New Document on the Deportation and Murder of Jews during ‘Einsatz Reinhardt 1942,’” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 15, no. 3 (2001), pp. 468ff.
28. Ibid., p. 470.
29. Heinrich Himmler, Der Dienstkalender Heinrich Himmlers 1941/42, ed. Peter Witte et al. (Hamburg, 1999), p. 513 n. 32.
30. Witte and Tyas, “A New Document on the Deportation and Murder of Jews during ‘Einsatz Reinhardt 1942,’” p. 476.
31. Helmut Heiber, Reichsführer! Briefe an und von Himmler (Munich, 1970), p. 183. Quoted and translated in Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution (Berkeley, 1984), p. 136.
32. Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution, p. 136.
33. Ibid., p. 137. See also Raul Hilberg, “Le bilan démographique du génocide,” in L’Allemagne nazie et le génocide juif: Colloque de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), ed. École des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris, 1985), pp. 265ff.
34. For the report and the estimate see the introduction to Wolfgang Benz, ed., Dimension des Völkermords: Die Zahl der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus (Munich, 1991), p. 3.
35. For this argument see Hilberg, “Le bilan démographique du génocide,” p. 265.
36. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New Haven, 1961), vol. 1, pp. 407–8.
37. Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution, p. 138.
38. Nuremberg doc. 015-PS, U.S. Office of Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality and International Military Tribunal, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, 8 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1946), vol. 3, pp. 41–45.
39. Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution, p. 139.
40. Ibid., p. 137.
41. Andreas Hillgruber, Staatsmänner und Diplomaten bei Hitler: Vertrauliche Aufzeichnungen über Unterredungen mit Vertretern des Auslandes (Frankfurt am Main, 1970), vol. 2, pp. 256–57.
42. Eugene Levai, Black Book on the Martyrdom of Hungarian Jewry (Zurich, 1948), p. 33.
43. Translated and excerpted in Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, vol. 2, pp. 877–78.
44. The most detailed survey of the events in Bulgaria remains Frederick B. Chary, The Bulgarian Jew
s and the Final Solution, 1940–1944 (Pittsburgh, 1972).
45. Ingrid Krüger-Bulcke and Hans George Lehmann, eds., Akten zur deutschen auswärtigen Politik, 1918–1945, Ser. E, 1941–1945 (Göttingen, 1978), vol. 5, p. 521.
46. Ibid., p. 538.
47. Livia Rothkirchen, “The Situation of the Jews in Slovakia between 1939 and 1945,” Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 7 (1998).
48. For Ludin’s report see Ingrid Krüger-Bulcke and Hans Georg Lehmann, Aktien zur deutschen auswärtige Politik, 1918–1945, Ser. E, 1941–1945, vol. 5 (Göttingen, 1978) pp. 581ff.
49. Hillgruber, Staatsmänner, vol. 2, p. 268. Hitler’s unbridled obsession with all aspects of the Jewish question took on yet another weird aspect when he corrected Tiso about Lord Rothermere; according to the Nazi leader, Rothermere was not a Jew but had a Jewish mistress, Princess Hohenlohe, born Richter from Vienna. Ibid., p. 268.
50. Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals, 15 vols., vol. 13 U.S. v. von Weizsaecker: The Ministries Case. (Washington, DC, 1952), Nuremberg doc. Steengracht 64, pp. 300–301.
51. On the extermination of Croatian Jewry see mainly Menachem Shelach, ed., Yugoslavia (Jerusalem: 1990), pp. 137ff [Hebrew].
52. For the exact date of Wisliceny’s and Brunner’s arrival in Salonika, see Daniel Carpi, “Salonika during the Holocaust: A New Approach,” in The Last Ottoman Century and Beyond: The Jews in Turkey and the Balkans 1808–1945, ed. Minna Rozen (Ramat-Aviv, 2002), p. 263n9.
53. Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430–1950 (New York, 2004), pp. 402 and 411.
54. For the role played by Simonides and Altenburg, see in particular Andrew Apostolou, “The Exception of Salonika: Bystanders and Collaborators in Northern Greece,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 14, no. 2 (Fall 2000), pp. 179ff.
55. Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts, pp. 392ff. and 411.
56. Ibid., p. 405.
57. Ibid., pp. 392ff.
58. For a more nuanced view of Koretz’s role, see Minna Rozen, “Jews and Greeks Remember Their Past: The Political Career of Tsevi Koretz (1933–43),” Jewish Social Studies 12, no. 1 (2005), pp. 111ff.
59. Ibid., p. 401.
60. Apostolou, “The Exception of Salonika,” pp. 181ff.
61. Ibid., p. 183.
62. Carpi, “Salonika During the Holocaust: A New Approach,” p. 271.
63. Ibid., p. 272.
64. Ingrid Krüger-Bulcke and Hans Georg Lehmann, Aktien zur deutschen auswärtige Politik, 1918–1945, Ser. E, 1941–1945, vol. 5 (Göttingen, 1978), pp. 731ff.
65. Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts, p. 407.
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid., pp. 397–99.
68. Henry Friedlander and Sybil Milton, eds., Archives of the Holocaust: An International Collection of Selected Documents, 22 vols. (New York, 1993), vol. 20, doc. 7, pp. 17–18. The “Da” appellation (Da 152) was generally used for deportation trains; it was most probably an abbreviation for “Durchgangaussiedler-[Zug]” (“evacuees’ transit train”). See Götz Aly, Im Tunnel: Das kurze Leben der Marion Samuel 1931–1943 (Frankfurt am Main, 2004), p. 137.
69. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3 vols. (New Haven, Conn., 2003), vol. 2, pp. 424ff and particularly p. 429.
70. Quoted in Tatiana Berenstein, ed., Faschismus, Getto, Massenmord: Dokumentation über Ausrottung und Widerstand der Juden in Polen während des zweiten Weltkrieges (East Berlin, 1961), p. 321.
71. Adalbert Rückerl, ed., NS-Prozesse. Nach 25 Jahren Strafverfolgung: Möglichkeiten, Grenzen, Ergebnisse (Karlsruhe, 1971), p. 114 (quoted in Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington, IN, 1987), p. 51).
72. Alfred C. Mierzejewski, “A Public Enterprise in the Service of Mass Murder: The Deutsche Reichsbahn and the Holocaust,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 15, no. 1 (Spring 2001), p. 36.
73. Ibid.
74. Nuremberg doc. PS-3688 (quoted in Arad, Belzec, p. 52).
75. Berenstein, Faschismus, Getto, Massenmord, p. 346.
76. Friedlander and Milton, Archives of the Holocaust, vol. 20, doc. 8. Incidentally the matter received its formal closure on May 26. On that day the Regierungspräsident in Düsseldorf informed the Gestapo that all the assets of Elsa Sara Frankenberg, Julius Israel Meier, and Augusta Sara Meier from Krefeld, who had committed suicide before their deportation to Izbica, had been credited to the Reich. The relevant ordinance was published in the Deutsche Reichsanzeiger und Preussische Staatsanzeiger no. 112 of May 15, 1942. Ibid., vol. 20, doc 10.
77. Quoted and translated in Arad, Belzec, p. 145.
78. Oskar Rosenfeld, In the Beginning Was the Ghetto: Notebooks from Lódz, ed. Hanno Loewy (Evanston, IL, 2002), pp. 11–12.
79. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity (New York, 1958; reprint, 1996), p. 18.
80. Ibid.
81. Ruth Kluger, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (New York, 2001), pp. 91–92.
82. Christopher R. Browning, Collected Memories: Holocaust History and Postwar Testimony (Madison, WI, 2003), p. 75.
83. Ibid., p. 76.
84. Ibid., pp. 76–77.
85. Ibid., pp. 78ff.
86. Ibid., p. 81.
87. Yitzhak Arad, Yisrael Gutman, and Abraham Margaliot, eds., Documents on the Holocaust: Selected Sources on the Destruction of the Jews of Germany and Austria, Poland, and the Soviet Union (Jerusalem, 1981), pp. 287ff.
88. Ibid., p. 289–90.
89. For various aspects of these plans see Allen, The Business of Genocide: The SS, Slave Labor and the Concentration Camps, pp. 245ff.
90. Berenstein, Faschismus, Getto, Massenmord, pp. 354–55.
91. Ibid., p. 356.
92. Hans Frank, Das Diensttagebuch des deutschen Generalgouverneurs in Polen 1939–1945, ed. Werner Präg and Wolfgang Jacobmeyer (Stuttgart, 1975), pp. 681–82.
93. Each category of stolen goods demanded the issuing and implementing of precise rulings, mostly issued by the Finance Ministry for customs’ use. See, among others, Michael MacQueen, “The Conversion of Looted Assets to Run the German War Machine,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 18, no. 1 (Spring 2004), p. 31.
94. Ibid., p. 30.
95. Ibid., p. 31.
96. For the Degussa involvement see now Peter Hayes, From Cooperation to Complicity: Degussa in the Third Reich (Cambridge, MA, 2004).
97. MacQueen, “The Conversion of Looted Assets to Run the German War Machine,” pp. 34ff.
98. Nuremberg doc. NO-724, quoted in Rückerl, NS-Prozesse, pp. 109–11.
99. For these details see Bertrand Perz and Thomas Sandkühler, “Auschwitz und die ‘Aktion Reinhard’ 1942–1945: Judenmord und Raubpraxis in neuer Sicht,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 5, no. 26 (1999), p. 291.
100. Note included in Nuremberg doc. NG-3058, The Ministries Case, pp. 201–4. Much of this booty must have found its way to the Judenmärkte (Jew markets) described in Frank Bajohr, “Arisierung” in Hamburg: Die Verdrängung der jüdischen Unternehmer 1933–1945 (Hamburg, 1997), and particularly Bajohr, “The Beneficiaries of ‘Aryanization’: Hamburg as a Case Study,” Yad Vashem Studies 26 (1998), pp. 198ff.
101. Filip Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers (Chicago, 1999), p. 12.
102. For these specific details see Götz Aly, “Arisierung: Enteignung: Was geschah mit den Besitztümern der ermodeten Juden Europas? Zur Ökonomie der Nazis,” Die Zeit 47 (2002), p. 47.
103. Berenstein, Faschismus, Getto, Massenmord, pp. 421–22.
104. Tatiana Berenstein, ed., Faschismus, Getto, Massenmord: Dokumentation über Ausrottung und Widerstand der Juden in Polen während des zweiten Weltkrieges (East Berlin, 1961), pp. 412–13.
105. Joseph Walk, ed., Das Sonderrecht für die Juden im NS-Staat: Eine Sammlung der gesetzlichen Massnahmen und Richtlinien, Inhalt und Bedeutung (Heidelberg, 1981), p. 399.
106. Perz and Sandkühler,
“Auschwitz und die ‘Aktion Reinhard’ 1942–1945: Judenmord und Raubpraxis in neuer Sicht,” p. 292.
107. See Raul Hilberg, “Auschwitz,” in Laqueur and Baumel, The Holocaust Encyclopedia (New Haven, 2001), p. 37.
108. According to Wolfgang Sofsky’s computation, the gassing capacity of Bunker I was 800 persons, of Bunker II: 1,200 persons, of crematoriums II, III, IV, and V, 3,000 persons each. See Wolfgang Sofsky, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp (Princeton, 1997), p. 263.
109. Allen, The Business of Genocide, p. 141.
110. Quoted in ibid. On Kammler see, moreover, Rainer Fröbe, “Hans Kammler, Technokrat der Vernichtung,” in Die SS: Elite unter dem Totenkopf: 30 Lebensläufe, ed. Ronald M. Smelser and Enrico Syring (Paderborn, 2000), pp. 305ff. and particularly pp. 310ff.
111. Quoted in Eugen Kogon, Hermann Langbein, and Adalbert Rückerl, eds., Nazi Mass Murder: A Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas (New Haven, 1993), pp. 157–58.
112. All the technical details about the functioning of the gas chamber in Crematorium II are taken from Jamie McCarthy, Daniel Keren, and Harry W. Mazal, “The Ruins of the Gas Chambers: A Forensic Investigation of Crematoriums at Auschwitz I and Auschwitz-Birkenau,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies (2004), pp. 68ff.
113. Sybille Steinbacher, Auschwitz: A History (London, 2005), p. 99.
114. Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, vol. 3, p. 946.
115. Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, pp. 19–20. Exactly 536 members of Levi’s transport were immediately gassed. See Myriam Anissimov, Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist (Woodstock, NY, 2000), p. 105.
116. Kluger, Still Alive, p. 94.
117. Quoted in Hermann Langbein, People in Auschwitz (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004), pp. 65–66.
118. Kogon, Langbein, and Rückerl, Nazi Mass Murder, p. 133.
119. Robert Jay Lifton and Amy Hackett, “Nazi Doctors,” in Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, ed. Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum (Bloomington, 1994), p. 313. For an overview of the medical experiments in Auschwitz and in other camps, see, among a vast literature, Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York, 1986).
120. See for example Eugen Kogon, Der SS-Staat: Das System der deutschen Konzentrationslager (Frankfurt, 1964 [1946]), pp. 50–51, as well as almost all general studies about Auschwitz. Thus, see also Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp (Bloomington, 1994), pp. 20, 312, 398, and others.
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