169. Ibid.
170. Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, p. 408.
171. On the book rescue operation, see mainly Fishman, “Embers,” pp. 70ff. See also Dina Abramowicz, Guardians of a Tragic Heritage: Reminiscences and Observations of an Eyewitness (New York, 1999).
172. Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, p. 578.
173. For the memorandum, see Kurt Pätzold, ed., Verfolgung, Vertreibung, Vernichtung: Dokumente des faschistischen Antisemitismus 1933 bis 1942 (Frankfurt am Main, 1984), pp. 341–42.
174. For the entire issue, see the painstaking research in Michael H. Kater, Das “Ahnenerbe” der SS 1935–1945: Ein Beitrag zur Kulturpolitik des Dritten Reiches (Stuttgart, 2001), pp. 245ff.
175. Ibid., p. 249.
176. Ibid. The inclusion of “Innerasiaten” may indicate that Schäfer was somehow informed of the project.
177. Ibid.
178. Ibid., p. 250.
179. Ibid., pp. 254–55.
180. On this issue see, most recently, Dirk Rupnow, “‘Ihr müsst sein, auch wenn ihr nicht mehr seid’: The Jewish Central Museum in Prague and Historical Memory in the Third Reich,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 16, no. 1 (2002), pp. 23ff. On this puzzling issue, see also Jan Björn Potthast, Das Jüdische Zentralmuseum der SS in Prag: Gegnerfoschung und Völkermord im Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt, 2002).
181. Rupnow, “‘Ihr müsst sein, auch wenn ihr nicht mehr seid,’” p. 29.
182. Ibid., p. 35.
183. For the quotation, see Ariel Hurwitz, “The Struggle Over the Creation of the War Refugee Board (WRB),” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 6 (1991), p. 19.
184. On Bergson see mainly David S. Wyman and Rafael Medoff, A Race Against Death: Peter Bergson, America, and the Holocaust (New York, 2002).
185. Ibid., p. 211.
186. Quoted in Gulie Ne’eman Arad, America, Its Jews, and the Rise of Nazism (Bloomington, 2000), pp. 220ff.
187. Ibid.
188. Long claimed that since 1933, 580,000 Jewish refugees had entered the United States; it soon became known that the real number was 210,732. See Hurwitz, “The Struggle Over the Creation of the War Refugee Board (WRB),” p. 20.
189. Henry L. Feingold, Bearing Witness: How America and Its Jews Responded to the Holocaust (Syracuse, 1995), pp. 83–84.
190. Dina Porat, The Blue and the Yellow Stars of David: The Zionist Leadership in Palestine and the Holocaust, 1939–1945 (Cambridge, MA, 1990), pp. 62–63.
191. Ibid., p. 78.
192. Ibid., p. 79.
193. Ibid., pp. 82ff. and 86.
194. Blatman, Notre Liberté, p. 195.
195. Ibid., p. 198–99.
196. Quoted 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), pp. 324ff.
197. Blatman, Notre Liberté, p. 199.
198. Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941–1943 (New York, 1983), pp. 220ff.
199. Hillesum, Letters from Westerbork, p. 146.
200. Hillesum, An Interrupted Life, p. xiii.
Chapter Ten: March 1944–May 1945
1. Translated in Serge Klarsfeld, Vichy-Auschwitz: Le rôle de Vichy dans la solution finale de la question juive en France, 2 vols. (Paris, 1983–85), vol. 2, p. 382.
2. Ibid., p. 161.
3. Ingrid Krüger-Bulcke and Hans Georg Lehmann, eds., Akten zur deutschen auswärtigen Politik, 1918–1945, Ser. E, 1941–1945, (Göttingen, 1979), vol. 3, p. 338.
4. Joseph Goebbels, Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, ed. Elke Fröhlich (Munich, 1995), part 2, vol. 12, p. 202.
5. This correlation does incidentally confirm the probable link between the first major military crisis, in December 1941, and the Nazi leader’s final decision to exterminate all the Jews of Europe.
6. Thousands of full-time guidance officers and tens of thousands of part time NSFO lecturers or writers certainly contributed to the intense anti-Semitism so pervasive in the Wehrmacht to the very end. The indoctrination was particularly apparent in a flood of publications issued by the OKW that must have reached soldiers and officers in their hundreds of thousands (probably in their millions). Thus, for example, “Der Jude als Weltparasit” (The Jew as Global Parasite) was issued as number 7 in the series of Richthefte des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht (guidance publications of the OKW), in 1944. See Nuremberg doc. NO-5722.
7. Heinrich Himmler, Heinrich Himmler: Geheimreden, 1933 bis 1945, und andere Ansprachen, ed. Bradley F. Smith and Agnes F. Peterson (Frankfurt am Main, 1974), p. 203.
8. For the full text, see Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, “Hitlers Ansprache vor Generalen und Offizieren am 26 Mai, 1944,” Militärgeschichliche Mitteilungen 2 (1976), pp. 123–70, here p. 136.
9. The quote was excerpted and translated in Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1936–45: Nemesis (New York, 2000), pp. 636–37.
10. Krüger-Bulcke and Lehmann, ADAP, Ser. E, vol. 7, pp. 526ff and in particular 534.
11. Andreas Hillgruber, Staatsmänner und Diplomaten bei Hitler: Vertrauliche Aufzeichnungen über Unterredungen mit Vertretern des Auslandes, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main, 1970), p. 439.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., pp. 389ff.
14. Krüger-Bulcke and Lehmann, ADAP, Series E, vol. 7, pp. 396–97.
15. Philip Mechanicus, Waiting for Death: A Diary (London, 1968), p. 255.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., p. 256.
19. Presser, introduction to ibid.
20. For the postcard see Benjamin Leo Wessels, Ben’s Story: Holocaust Letters with Selections from the Dutch Underground Press, ed. Kees W. Bolle (Carbondale, IL, 2001); for the date of Ben’s death, see ibid., p. 9.
21. Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition, ed. Otto Frank and Mirjam Pressler (New York, 1995), p. 257.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., pp. 297–98.
25. Ibid., p. 298.
26. Ibid.
27. 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. 7–8.
28. Krüger-Bulcke and Lehmann, ADAP, Series E, vol. 7, p. 102.
29. For this ultimate surge of French collaborationism, see Philippe Burrin, France Under the Germans: Collaboration and Compromise (New York, 1996), pp. 448ff. and particularly 451.
30. Quoted in Renée Poznanski, Jews in France during World War II (Waltham, MA, 2001), p. 445.
31. Renée Poznanski, “The Jews of France and the Statutes on Jews, 1940–1941,” Yad Vashem Studies 22 (1992), p. 462.
32. Ibid., p. 463.
33. Jacques Adler, The Jews of Paris and the Final Solution: Communal Response and Internal Conflicts, 1940–1944 (New York, 1987), p. 159.
34. Ibid., p. 159.
35. Klarsfeld, Vichy-Auschwitz, vol. 2, p. 390.
36. Krüger-Bulcke and Lehmann, ADAP, Ser. E, vol. 7, p. 218.
37. Susan Zuccotti, Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy (New Haven, 2000), pp. 267–68. At times the Jews who attempted to flee to Switzerland were turned back by the Swiss and, at times, turned over to Germans by Italian collaborators in the border towns. The Germans did not shy away from executing the betrayed Jews on the spot. In some cases they also burned the corpses on the spot to erase all traces. See, for example, Alexander Stille, Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish families under Fascism (New York, 1993), p. 89.
38. Stille, Benevolence and Betrayal, p. 161.
39. Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941–44 (New Haven, 1993), p. 252.
40. For these details see Götz Aly, “Die Deportation der Juden von Rhodos nach Auschwitz,” Mittelweg 36: Zeitschrift des Hamburger Instituts für Sozialforschung 12 (2003), pp. 83ff. Aly’s argument abou
t the “economic importance” of the booty seized from the Jews of Rhodes and Kos is unconvincing: The booty could have been seized without deporting these Jews to their death. For the further significance of this particular deportation, see also Walter Laqueur, “Auschwitz,” in Michael J. Neufeld and Michael Berenbaum, eds., The Bombing of Auschwitz: Should the Allies Have Attempted It? (New York, 2000), pp. 189–90.
41. Berlin was well informed of the Hungarian intentions to change sides and, moreover, Hungary’s raw material reserves were considered vital for the pursuit of the war. On this aspect see Christian Gerlach and Götz Aly, Das Letzte Kapitel: Realpolitik, Ideologie und der Mord an den ungarischen Juden, 1944/1945 (Stuttgart, 2002), p. 97.
42. Goebbels, Tagebücher, part 2, vol. 11, 1994, pp. 397–98.
43. About the concentration and deportation from the provinces, see Randolph L. Braham, The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, vol. 2, pp. 595ff. Farther on, both the 1981 original two-volume edition of Braham’s The Politics of Genocide and the 2001 abridged edition will be used. The original edition is identifiable by the use of the volume number.
44. See Yehuda Bauer, Jews for Sale? Nazi-Jewish Negotiations, 1933–1945 (New Haven, 1994), p. 157.
45. For various arguments of the controversy, see Rudolf Vrba, “Die missachtete Warnung: Betrachtungen über den Auschwitz-Bericht von 1944,” in Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, vol. 44 (1996), pp. 1–24; and Yehuda Bauer, “Anmerkungen zum ‘Auschwitz-Bericht’ von Rudolf Vrba,” in Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, vol. 2 (1997), pp. 292ff.
46. For this statement see Braham, The Politics of Genocide, vol. 2, p. 705.
47. See in particular Randolph L. Braham, “The Role of the Jewish Council in Hungary: A Tentative Assessment,” Yad Vashem Studies 10 (1974), pp. 69ff. See also Braham, The Politics of Genocide, p. 84.
48. Both groups of Orthodox Jews and Zionist youth groups used escape over the borders as the main avenue to safety. Between 7,000 and 8,000 Jews may have succeeded in escaping Hungary to Yugoslavia, Slovakia and mainly Romania between March and September 1944. Fighting in these areas put an end to the escapes. For these details see Robert Rozett, “Jewish and Hungarian Armed Resistance in Hungary,” Yad Vashem Studies 19 (1988), p. 270. Bauer mentions the much lower number of 4,000 to 4,500. Bauer, Jews for Sale? Nazi-Jewish Negotiations, 1933–1945, p. 160.
49. Braham, The Politics of Genocide, p. 84.
50. See Eleanore Lappin, “The Death Marches of Hungarian Jews Through Austria in the Spring of 1945,” Yad Vashem Studies 28 (2000), p. 203.
51. For the excerpting and translating of Broad’s statement, see Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham, eds., Nazism, 1919–1945: A Documentary Reader, vol. 3: Foreign Policy, War and Racial Extermination (Exeter, UK, 1998), p. 592.
52. Paul Steinberg, Speak You Also: A Survivor’s Reckoning (New York, 2000), pp. 97–98.
53. Rudolf Höss, Kommandant in Auschwitz: Autobiographische Aufzeichnungen., ed. Martin Broszat (Stuttgart, 1958), p. 152.
54. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity (1958, reprint, New York, 1996), p. 132.
55. Ibid., pp. 134–35.
56. Braham, The Politics of Genocide, p. 161.
57. Hillgruber, Staatsmänner, vol. 2, pp. 463–64.
58. Braham, The Politics of Genocide, p. 161.
59. For Horthy’s vacillation during these weeks, see Randolph L. Braham, The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, 2 vols. (New York, 1981), vol. 2, pp. 743ff.
60. See the exchange of documents about these late deportations in Jenö Lévai, Eichmann in Hungary: Documents (Budapest, 1961), pp. 128ff.
61. Nuremberg doc. NG-2263.
62. Randolph L. Braham, “Hungarian Jews,” in Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, ed. Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum (Bloomington, 1994), p. 466.
63. Leni Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932–1945 (New York, 1990), p. 640.
64. First published in Eugene Levai, Black Book on the Martyrdom of Hungarian Jewry (Zurich, 1948), p. 232.
65. Braham, The Politics of Genocide, p. 240.
66. Michael Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930–1965 (Bloomington, 2000), p. 90; Randolph L. Braham, “The Christian Churches of Hungary and the Holocaust,” Yad Vashem Studies 29 (2001), pp. 248–49.
67. Braham, “The Christian Churches of Hungary and the Holocaust,” pp. 250ff.
68. Quoted in ibid., p. 264.
69. Phayer, The Catholic Church, p. 109.
70. Ibid., p. 106.
71. Quoted in Braham, “The Christian Churches of Hungary and the Holocaust,” pp. 258–59.
72. For the details of these contacts, see Bauer, Jews for Sale? Nazi-Jewish Negotiations, 1933–1945, pp. 163ff.
73. Krüger-Bulcke and Lehmann, ADAP, Series E, vol. 7, p. 602.
74. Bauer mentions these arguments but appears inclined to believe that already at that time Himmler was interested in putting out genuine feelers to the West. Despite some circumstantial evidence regarding various contacts apparently initiated by the Reichsführer, the very course of the deportations from Hungary would seem massive evidence to the contrary. See Bauer, Jews for Sale? Nazi-Jewish Negotiations, 1933–1945, pp. 168ff.
75. Tuvia Friling, Arrows in the Dark: David Ben-Gurion, the Yishuv Leadership, and Rescue Attempts during the Holocaust (Madison, WI, 2005), vol. 2, pp. 7ff.
76. According to Brand’s postwar declarations, Eichmann offered to liberate one hundred thousand Jews! See Bauer, Jews for Sale? Nazi-Jewish Negotiations, 1933–1945, p. 174.
77. Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies (New York, 1981), p. 227.
78. Braham, The Politics of Genocide, p. 208.
79. Quoted in Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (New York, 1993), p. 113.
80. Krüger-Bulcke and Lehmann, ADAP, Ser. E, vol. 3, p. 194.
81. Ibid., p. 222.
82. Richard Breitman, “Nazi Jewish Policy in 1944,” in Genocide and Rescue: The Holocaust in Hungary 1944, ed. David Cesarani (New York, 1997), p. 78.
83. Helmut Heiber, Reichsführer! Briefe an und von Himmler (München, 1970), p. 276.
84. Bauer, Jews for Sale? Nazi-Jewish Negotiations, 1933–1945, pp. 196ff.
85. A sensational trial in Israel in the 1950s brought up grave accusations against Kastner and led to his assassination in Tel Aviv. A second trial before Israel’s Supreme Court rehabilitated him posthumously. The core of the public issue focused on Kastner’s choice of whom to include among the train’s passengers.
86. Jean-Claude Favez and Geneviève Billeter, Une Mission impossible?: Le CICR, les déportations et les camps de concentration Nazis (Lausanne, Switzerland, 1988), p. 331. (These details are included only in the original French edition.)
87. Ibid., p. 332.
88. On this well-known deal, see in particular Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3 vols. (New Haven, CT, 2003) vol. 2, pp. 886–87.
89. Quoted in Neufeld and Berenbaum, eds., The Bombing of Auschwitz: Should the Allies Have Attempted It?, p. 250.
90. Weissmandel’s letter is quoted in Lucy S. Dawidowicz, ed., A Holocaust Reader (New York, 1976), p. 321ff.
91. Neufeld and Berenbaum, eds., The Bombing of Auschwitz: Should the Allies Have Attempted It?, p. 256.
92. Ibid., pp. 258, 259.
93. Ibid.
94. Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies, p. 285.
95. Sybille Steinbacher, Auschwitz: A History (London, 2005), p. 109.
96. Zygmunt Klukowski, Diary from the Years of Occupation, 1939–44, ed. Andrew Klukowski and Helen Klukowski May (Urbana, IL, 1993), pp. 344–45.
97. Ibid., p. 345.
98. Ibid.
99. Ibid., p. 346.
100. For a powerful rendering of the Polish uprising see Norman Davies, Rising ’44: The Battle for Warsaw (London, 2003); see also a balanced account of responsibilities East and West in Max Hastings, A
rmageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944–1945 (London, 2004), pp. 99ff.
101. Anonymous diarist quoted and excerpted in Alexandra Zapruder, Salvaged Pages. Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust (New Haven, 2002), pp. 368–96.
102. Lucjan Dobroszycki, ed., The Chronicle of the Lódz Ghetto, 1941–1944 (New Haven, 1984), p. lxii. Sonderkommando Bothmann reactivated Chelmno in April 1944.
103. Oskar Rosenfeld, In the Beginning Was the Ghetto: Notebooks from Lódz, ed. Hanno Loewy (Evanston, IL, 2002), p. 281.
104. Ibid., p. 312.
105. Quoted in Zapruder, Salvaged Pages, pp. 393–94.
106. Introduction, Dobroszycki, The Chronicle, p. lxv.
107. Ibid.
108. For the statistics, see Antony Polonsky, “Beyond Condemnation, Apologetics and Apologies: On the Complexity of Polish Behavior Toward the Jews During the Second World War,” in David Cesarani, ed., Holocaust: Critical Concepts in Historical Studies, 6 vols. (New York, 2004), p. 31.
109. For details and numbers, see mainly Dov Levin, “July 1944—The Crucial Month for the Remnants of Lithuanian Jewry,” in The Nazi Holocaust: Historical Articles on the Destruction of European Jews, ed. Michael Marrus (Westport, CT, 1989), pp. 447ff.
110. Ibid., pp. 458–59.
111. 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, CT, 2002), p. 703.
112. Ibid.
113. Ibid., p. 704.
114. Ibid.
115. Ibid., p. 705.
116. Stephen G. Fritz, “‘We Are Trying to Change the Face of the World’: Ideology and Motivation in the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front: The View from Below.” Journal of the Military History 60, A (Oct. 1996).
117. Walter Manoschek, ed., “Es gibt nur eines für das Judentum—Vernichtung”: Das Judenbild in deutschen Soldatenbriefen 1939–1944 (Hamburg, 1997), p. 73.
118. Quoted and translated in Noakes and Pridham, Nazism, vol. 4, pp. 632–33.
119. Manoschek, “Es gibt nur eines für das Judentum—Vernichtung,” p. 75.
120. Hillgruber, Staatsmänner, vol. 2, p. 494.
121. Ruth Bondy, “Elder of the Jews”: Jakob Edelstein of Theresienstadt (New York, 1989), pp. 396ff. and 441–42.
122. Ibid., p. 446.
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