121. Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, vol. 3, p. 984.
122. Ibid.
123. The process has often been described, also in the diaries of the Sonderkommando members. Here, the indications are mainly taken from Gideon Greif, Wir weinten tränenlos…. Augenzeugenberichte der jüdischen “Sonderkommandos” in Auschwitz (Cologne, 1995), pp. xxxivff.
124. This notorious diary is quoted here from Henry Friedlander, “Physicians as Killers in Nazi Germany: Hadamar, Treblinka, and Auschwitz,” in Medicine and Medical Ethics in Nazi Germany, ed. Francis R. Nicosia and Jonathan Huener (New York, 2002), pp. 69–70.
125. Lifton and Hackett, “Nazi Doctors,” p. 310.
126. Kogon, Langbein, and Rückerl, Nazi Mass Murder, p. 154.
127. Quoted in Danuta Czech, “The Auschwitz Prisoner Administration,” in Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum. Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp (Bloomington, 1994), p. 374. For the periodic liquidiation of members of the Sonderkommando see Greif, Wir weinten tränenlos, p. xxv.
128. The camp experience does not seem to have changed the violence of Polish anti-Semitism. Among a long list of examples, Langbein quotes a Polish woman inmate who declared that notwithstanding the horrible means utilized, the Jewish problem in Poland was being solved: “This may sound paradoxical,” she concluded, “but we owe this to Hitler.” See Langbein, People in Auschwitz, p. 75.
129. Yisrael Gutman, “Social Stratification in the Concentration Camps,” in The Nazi Concentration Camps: Structure and Aims, the Image of the Prisoner, the Jews in the Camps, ed. Yisrael Gutman and Avital Saf (Jerusalem, 1984), p. 172.
130. Quoted in Langbein, People in Auschwitz, pp. 78–79.
131. See Danuta Czech, “The Auschwitz Prisoner Administration” in Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp (Bloomington, 1994), pp. 363ff.
132. Peter Hayes, “Auschwitz, Capital of the Holocaust,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 17, no. 2 (2003), p. 330.
133. Walter Manoschek, ed., “Es gibt nur eines für das Judentum—Vernichtung”: Das Judenbild in deutschen Soldatenbriefen 1939–1944 (Hamburg, 1997), p. 63.
134. For the total number of SS personnel see Steinbacher, Auschwitz: A History, p. 40.
135. See for example Norbert Frei et al., ed., Standort-und Kommandanturbefehle des Konzentrationslagers Auschwitz 1940–1945 (Munich, 2000), p. 472.
136. See in particular Gabriele Knapp, Das Frauenorchester in Auschwitz: Musikalische Zwangsarbeit und ihre Bewältigung (Hamburg, 1996).
137. Steinbacher, Auschwitz, a History, p. 42.
138. Sybille Steinbacher, “Musterstadt” Auschwitz: Germanisierungspolitik und Judenmord in Ostoberschlesien (Munich, 2000), p. 247
139. Rudolf Höss, Kommandant in Auschwitz: Autobiographische Aufzeichnungen, ed. Martin Broszat (Stuttgart, 1958), p. 190.
140. Elizabeth Harvey, Women and the Nazi East: Agents and Witnesses of Germanization (New Haven, 2003), p. 216.
141. Ibid., p. 216–17.
142. Peter Longerich, “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!”: Die Deutschen und die Judenverfolgung 1933–1945 (München, 2006), p. 236–37.
143. Ibid., p. 237.
144. Quoted in Noakes and Pridham, Nazism, vol. 3, p. 614.
145. Hans Mommsen, “Der Widerstand gegen Hitler und die nationalsozialistische Jundenverfolgung,” in Alternative zu Hitler: Studien zur Geschichte des deutschen Widerstandes, (Munich, 2000), pp. 396ff.
146. Helmuth James von Moltke, Letters to Freya: 1939–1945, ed. Beate Ruhm von Oppen (New York, 1990), p. 252.
147. For the details and the quotations, see Wolfgang Gerlach, And the Witnesses Were Silent: The Confessing Church and the Persecution of the Jews, ed. Victoria Barnett (Lincoln, NE, 2000), pp. 210 and 212ff.
148. Ibid., p. 213.
149. Ibid.
150. For the text of the leaflet see Inge Scholl, The White Rose: Munich, 1942–1943 (Middletown, CT, 1983), p. 78.
151. SD-Aussenstelle Detmold, 31.7.42, Staatsarchiv Detmold, Preußische Regierung Minden. I thank Dr. Sybille Steinbacher for examination of this document.
152. Otto Dov Kulka and Eberhard Jäckel, Die Juden in den geheimen NS-Stimmungsberichten 1933–1945 (Düsseldorf, 2004), p. 503.
153. Ibid., p. 527n2.
154. Ibid., p. 528.
155. Ibid., p. 529.
156. Michael Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930–1965 (Bloomington, 2000), pp. 70–71.
157. Ibid., p. 71.
158. For the quotation see ibid., pp. 73–74.
159. Ibid., p. 75.
160. Ibid., p. 76.
161. For Pius XII’s answer to Preysing enunciating the freedom left to the bishops, see Saul Friedländer, Pius XII, pp. 135ff.
162. Ibid.
163. For the full text of Wurm’s letter, Richard Gutteridge, Open Thy Mouth for the Dumb! The German Evangelical Church and the Jews 1879–1950 (Oxford, 1976), pp. 353ff.
164. Gerlach, And the Witnesses Were Silent, p. 204.
165. See Martin Doerry, My Wounded Heart: The Life of Lilli Jahn, 1900–1944 (London, 2004), pp. 113ff.
166. Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years 1942–1945, p. 278.
167. Ibid., p. 277.
168. Ibid., p. 295.
169. Cordelia Edvardson, Gebranntes Kind sucht das Feuer (Munich, 1989), pp. 58ff and 68.
170. Beate Meyer, “Gratwanderung zwischen Verantwortung und Verstrickung: Die Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland und die Jüdische Gemeinde zu Berlin 1938–1945,” in Juden in Berlin, 1938–1945, ed. Beate Meyer and Hermann Simon (Berlin, 2000), pp. 323 and 325ff.
171. Edvardson, Gebranntes Kind sucht das Feuer, pp. 69ff.
172. Ibid., pp. 73–74.
173. Ibid., pp. 74–75.
174. Yisrael Gutman, Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (Boston, 1994), pp. 152ff.
175. Yisrael Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw, 1939–1943: Ghetto, Underground, Revolt (Bloomington, 1982), p. 272.
176. Abraham Lewin, A Cup of Tears: A Diary of the Warsaw Ghetto, ed. Antony Polonsky (Oxford, 1988), p. 186.
177. Ibid., p. 188.
178. Ibid., p. 203.
179. Ibid., p. 205.
180. Ibid., p. 225.
181. Ibid., p. 240.
182. Ibid., pp. 241–42.
183. These negotiations are described in detail in an abundant literature. For a useful and concise presentation see Shmuel Krakowski, The War of the Doomed: Jewish Armed Resistance in Poland, 1942–1944 (New York, 1984), pp. 167–68.
184. Ibid., pp 168–69.
185. Antony Polonsky, introduction to Lewin, A Cup of Tears, p. 53.
186. Nuremberg doc. NO-2494, in 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), p. 292.
187. Yitzhak Zuckerman, A Surplus of Memory: Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (Berkeley, 1993), pp. 319–36.
188. Apart from the already mentioned studies on the Jews of Warsaw and on Jewish resistance (Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw; Gutman, Resistance; Krakowski, The War of the Doomed) and the memoirs of Zuckerman, A Surplus of Memory, I have used a number of widely known books, in particular Marek Edelman, The Ghetto Fights (1945; reprint, London, 1990); Kazik [Simha Rotem], Memoirs of a Warsaw Ghetto Fighter (New Haven, 1994).
189. About the Jewish armed underground in Kraków and the “Cyganeria” action, see Yael Peled, Jewish Cracow, 1939–1943: Resistance, Underground, Struggle [Krakov ha-Yehudit, 1939–1943: Amidah, Mahteret, Ma’avak] (Tel Aviv, 1993) (In Hebrew), particularly pp. 216ff.
190. Emanuel Ringelblum, “Little Stalingrad defends itself,” in To Live with Honor and Die with Honor!…: Selected Documents from the Warsaw Ghetto Underground Archives “O.S.” (“Oneg Shabbath”) ed. Joseph Kermish (Jerusalem, 1986), pp. 599–600.
191. This topography of the
early fighting is based on Moshe Arens, “The Warsaw Ghetto Revolt: The Narrative,” p. 1.
192. See mainly Moshe Arens, “The Jewish Military Organization (ZZW) in the Warsaw Ghetto,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 19, no. 2 (Fall 2005), pp. 201ff.
193. Ibid.
194. “The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw Is No More!” Sybil Milton, ed., The Stroop Report (New York, 1979), May 24, 1943 entry.
195. U.S. Office of Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality and International Military Tribunal, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, pp. 726–27.
196. Goebbels, Tagebücher, part 2, vol. 8, p. 192. Regarding the “military reports,” the minister was referring to the communiqués issued by Adolf Berman and Yitzhak Zuckerman on April 19, 20, and 21 and the subsequent ones issued in the name of the Coordinating Committee with the participation of Feiner from the Bund. The reports were passed on to the Polish underground, which broadcast some of them on its secret radio station.
197. Ibid., p. 343.
198. Frank, Diensttagebuch, p. 682.
199. Moltke, Letters to Freya: 1939–1945, p. 330.
200. Ulrich von Hassell, Die Hassell-Tagebücher 1938–1944: Aufzeichnungen vom Andern Deutschland, ed. Klaus Peter Reiss and Freiherr Friedrich Hiller von Gaertringen (Berlin, 1988), p. 365.
201. Helmut Heiber and David M. Glantz, eds., Hitler and His Generals: Military Conferences 1942–1945: The First Complete Stenographic Record of the Military Situation Conferences, From Stalingrad to Berlin. (London, 2002), p. 472.
202. Nuremberg doc. NO-2496.
203. Note by Heiber in Heiber and Glantz, Hitler and His Generals, pp. 993–94.
204. Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1942–1945, p. 234.
205. Oskar Rosenfeld, Wozu noch Welt: Aufzeichnungen aus dem Ghetto Lodz, ed. Hanno Loewy (Frankfurt am Main, 1994), p. 207.
206. Avraham Tory, Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary, ed. Martin Gilbert and Dina Porat (Cambridge, UK, 1990), pp. 304–5.
207. Herman Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939–1944, ed. Benjamin Harshav (New Haven, 2002), p. 520.
208. Ibid., p. 524.
209. David G. Roskies, “Landkentenish: Yiddish Belles Lettres in the Warsaw Ghetto,” in Holocaust Chronicles: Individualizing the Holocaust through Diaries and Other Contemporaneous Personal Accounts, ed. Robert Moses Shapiro (Hoboken, NJ, 1999), pp. 20–21.
210. Alf Lüdtke, “The Appeal of Exterminating “Others”: German Workers and the Limits of Resistance,” in Resistance Against the Third Reich, 1933–1990, ed. Michael Geyer and John W. Boyer (Chicago, 1994), p. 72.
211. For the events in Bialystok see Sara Bender, Facing Death: The Jews of Bialystok 1939–1943 (Tel Aviv, 1997) [Hebrew].
212. Berenstein, Faschismus, Getto, Massenmord, p. 449.
213. Bender, Facing Death: The Jews of Bialystok 1939–1943, pp. 233ff.
214. Ibid., pp. 260ff.
215. Ibid., pp. 274ff.
216. Bernhard Chiari, Alltag hinter der Front: Besatzung, Kollaboration und Widerstand in Weissrussland 1941–1944 (Düsseldorf, 1998), p. 240.
217. Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, p. 566.
218. Arad, Gutman, and Margaliot, Documents on the Holocaust, p. 450.
219. Isaac Rudashevski, The Diary of the Vilna Ghetto, June 1941–April 1943, ed. Percy Matenko (Tel Aviv, 1973), pp. 138–39.
220. Heiber, Reichsführer! Briefe an und von Himmler, p. 214.
221. For these debates see Dina Porat, Beyond the Reaches of Our Souls: The Life and Times of Abba Kovner (Tel Aviv, 2000), pp. 135ff [Hebrew].
222. Ibid.
223. Ibid., pp. 140ff.
224. Ibid., pp. 134ff.
225. See Harshav, introduction to Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, pp. xlviiiff.
226. Zelig Kalmanovitch, Diary in the Vilna Ghetto [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv, 1977), pp. 114ff.
227. Yitzhak Arad, Ghetto in Flames: The Struggle and Destruction of the Jews in Vilna in the Holocaust (Jerusalem, 1980), p. 425. Gens’s leadership was not only praised by an eminent contemporary such as Kalmanovitch as against the FPO, but years later it received recognition from quite an unexpected side. Nathan Alterman was undoubtedly Israel’s most prominent poet, the voice of “heroic” Zionism from the mid-1930s to the late 1960s. He interrogated Kovner at great length about the history of the Vilna ghetto and, in the end, declared: “Had I been in the ghetto, I would have been on the side of the Judenrat.” Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (New York, 1993), p. 292.
228. Leni Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932–1945 (New York, 1990), pp. 466ff.
229. Porat, Beyond the Reach of Our Souls, pp. 155ff. According to historian Yehuda Bauer, various degrees of armed resistance took place in 24 ghettos in western and central Poland; moreover, there were sixty-three armed groups in the 110 ghettos and other Jewish concentrations in western Belorussia, and some forms of armed preparedness in another 30 ghettos. See Yehuda Bauer and Nili Keren, A History of the Holocaust (New York, 1982), p. 270.
230. Rudashevski, The Diary of the Vilna Ghetto, June 1941–April 1943, p. 140.
231. Ibid., p. 12.
232. Dawid Sierakowiak, The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak, ed. Alan Adelson (New York, 1996), p. 268.
233. Alan Adelson’s note, ibid.
234. For the text of the poem and Milosz’s comment on it, see Jan Blonski, “The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto,” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 4 (1989), pp. 322–23.
235. Quoted in Michael Steinlauf, Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust (Syracuse, 1997), p. 32.
236. Marcel Reich-Ranicki, The Author of Himself: The Life of Marcel Reich-Ranicki (London, 2001), pp. 190ff. and 194.
237. Ibid.
238. Ibid., pp. 197ff.
239. Arad, Belzec, p. 348.
240. Jan T. Gross, “A Tangled Web: Confronting Stereotypes Concerning Relations between Poles, Germans, Jews and Communists,” in The Politics of Retribution, ed. István Deák, Jan T. Gross, and Tony Judt (Princeton, 2000), p. 80 (emphasis in original).
241. Quoted in Shmuel Krakowski, “The Attitude of the Polish Underground to the Jewish Question during the Second World War,” in Contested Memories: Poles and Jews during the Holocaust and Its Aftermath, ed. Joshua D. Zimmerman (New Brunswick, NJ, 2003), pp. 100–01.
242. Aryeh Klonicki and Malwina Klonicki, The Diary of Adam’s Father: The Diary of Aryeh Klonicki (Klonymus) and His Wife Malwina, With Letters Concerning the Fate of Their Child Adam (Jerusalem, 1973), p. 25.
243. Ibid., pp. 31–32.
244. Ibid., p. 34.
245. Ibid., pp. 78–79. Klonicki’s diary, written in Hebrew, was retrieved in 1948 from Franka’s brother, Stanislaw Wanshik, by New York relatives of the author; a series of letters exchanged between the family in the United States and the Wanshiks was appended to the published diary; it provides the details about the Klonickis’ end and Adam’s disappearance.
246. Karel C. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule (Cambridge, MA, 2004), pp. 71ff.
247. Ibid., p. 73.
248. For a description of the anti-Jewish violence in the Ukraine in the last year of the war and later, see Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, 2002), pp. 191ff.
249. In the Polish context of the summer of 1942, Kossak’s declaration made a difference; yet the attitude towards the Jews that it expressed remained highly problematic. For a convincing analysis, see Jan Blonski, “Polish-Catholics and Catholic Poles: The Gospel, National Interest, Civic Solidarity, and the Destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto,” Yad Vashem Studies 25 (1996), pp. 181ff.
250. All details and quotations are taken from Joseph Kermish, “The Activities of the Council for Aid to Jews (“Zegota”) in Occupied Poland,” in Yisrael
Gutman and Efraim Zuroff, eds., Rescue Attempts During the Holocaust. (Jerusalem, 1977), pp. 367ff.
251. Ibid., p. 372.
252. Goebbels, Tagebücher, part 2, vol. 7, p. 454.
Chapter Nine: October 1943–March 1944
1. Saul Friedländer, Kurt Gerstein, The Ambiguity of Good (New York, 1969), pp. 201ff.
2. Ibid., p. 108.
3. For these strategic plans, see Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (Cambridge, England, 1994), pp. 656ff. and particularly pp. 665–66.
4. Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs (New York, 1970), p. 299.
5. Tatiana Berenstein, ed., Faschismus, Getto, Massenmord: Dokumentation über Ausrottung und Widerstand der Juden in Polen während des zweiten Weltkrieges (East Berlin, 1961), p. 296.
6. The pamphlet appropriately opened with a Himmler quotation from 1935: “As long as there are human beings on earth, the fight between humans and subhumans will be a historical law and the fight led by the Jew against the nations belongs, as far back as we can see, to the natural course of life on our planet. One can safely arrive at the conclusion that this struggle for life and death is as much a law of nature as the fight of the plague germ against the healthy body.” See Walter Hofer, ed., Der Nationalsozialismus: Dokumente 1933–1945 (Frankfurt am Main, 1957), p. 280 (doc. 1576).
7. Berenstein, Faschismus, Getto, Massenmord, pp. 357–58.
8. Heinrich Himmler, Heinrich Himmler: Geheimreden, 1933 bis 1945, und andere Ansprachen, ed. Bradley F. Smith and Agnes F. Peterson (Frankfurt am Main, 1974), p. 169.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., pp. 201ff.
11. Joseph Goebbels, Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels: ed. Elke Fröhlich (Munich, 1995), vol. 10, p. 72.
12. Nuremberg doc. PS-1919, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, vol. 4 (Washington, DC, 1946), pp. 563–64. The translation has been slightly amended.
13. Höss may have been treated with such care because of his close ties to Bormann. See Raul Hilberg, “Auschwitz and the Final Solution,” in Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, ed. Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum (Bloomington, IN, 1994), p. 83.
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