The Polish underground worker Jan Karski made his way to London in the autumn of 1942 after a fantastic odyssey across Europe, to provide an eyewitness account not only of his country’s sufferings, but explicitly of conditions in the Jewish ghettos, and of the extraordinary achievement he claimed, in having penetrated the Nazi death camp at Bełec. While he was received courteously enough by Polish exile prime minister Gen. Sikorski, by foreign secretary Anthony Eden and later in Washington by President Roosevelt, he was afflicted by a dismal sense of awareness that the horrors he described somehow lost their force and magnitude in safe, unoccupied Allied capitals. ‘In London these things bulked small,’ he wrote. ‘London was the hub of a vast military wheel, the spokes of which were made up of billions of dollars, armadas of bombers and ships and staggering armies that had suffered great loss. Then, too, people asked where did Polish sacrifice rank next to the immeasurable heroism, sacrifice and sufferings of the Russian people? What was the share of Poland in this titanic undertaking? Who were the Poles? … We Poles had no luck in this war.’ Karski was discouraged by his own leaders from over-emphasising the Jewish persecution, lest it should detract from the force of his account of the plight of Poland as a whole.
Arthur Schlesinger, relatively highly informed by his work for the Office of Strategic Services, wrote of his own state of knowledge about the fate of Europe’s Jews in 1944: ‘Most of us were still thinking of an increase in persecution rather than a new and barbaric policy of genocide … I cannot find colleagues who recall a moment of blazing revelation about the Final Solution.’ Likewise British intelligence officer Noel Annan: ‘It took some time … for the enormity of Germany’s crimes against the Jews to sink in. In intelligence we knew of the gas ovens, but not of the scale, the thoroughness, the bureaucratic efficiency with which Jews had been hunted down and slaughtered. No one at the end of the war, as I recollect, realised that the figure of Jewish dead ran into millions.’ In the entire archive of Britain’s wartime secret service, no mention occurs – or none at least which survives – about persecution of the Jews or the Holocaust, probably because SIS was never invited to investigate these issues.
Contrary to much popular modern mythology, the operational difficulties of bombing transport links to the death camps would have been very great, especially in 1942 when most of the Holocaust killings took place. Allied leaders considered reports of Jewish suffering in the context of atrocities being committed against occupied populations all over Europe. American diplomat George Ball wrote later: ‘Perhaps we were so preoccupied with the squalid menace of the war we did not focus on this unspeakable ghastliness. It may also be that the idea of mass extermination was so far beyond the traditional comprehension of most Americans that we instinctively refused to believe in its existence.’ Many Europeans and Americans who had been appalled by reported German atrocities in Belgium in 1914 concluded angrily after the First World War that they had allowed themselves to be fooled by Allied propaganda, for it emerged that the killings of civilians had been exaggerated. A world war later, the Western Powers were determined not to be similarly deluded again. It was to the perverse credit of British and American decency that many people were reluctant to suppose their enemies as barbaric as later evidence showed them to have been. George Orwell wrote in 1944: ‘“Atrocities” had come to be looked on as synonymous with “lies”. The stories about German concentration camps were atrocity stories: therefore they were lies – so reasoned the average man.’ Surveys found that most Americans continued to regard the Germans as fundamentally decent and peaceful folk, led astray by their leaders. In May 1945, when newsreels of the concentration camps had been shown around the world, 53.7 per cent of American respondents told pollsters they thought only a small part of the German people were ‘naturally cruel and brutal’.
None of the above diminishes in the smallest degree the responsibility of the Nazis, and of the German people, for the Holocaust. But it should be acknowledged that, even when overwhelming evidence became available, the Allied nations were slow to respond to the death camps. Though little could have been done to save their inmates, any more than the millions of Russian prisoners who died in German hands, an insouciance pervades Allied documentation of the period which does scant credit to Britain or the United States. Even if Jews were not persecuted in the Anglo-Saxon societies, nor were they widely loved. There remained until 1945 a resolute official unwillingness to assess their tragedy in a separate dimension from the sufferings of Hitler’s other captives, and of the occupied societies of Europe. Such insensitivity merits understanding, but rightly troubles posterity.
In the winter of 1941–42, a large number of Jewish deportees from Germany were shot immediately on their arrival at eastern destinations, but these killings were carried out at the discretion of local SS commanders; no general order was issued, decreeing either their preservation or their extinction. Late in November there was an eccentric intervention by Himmler himself, ordering a temporary halt to the killing of Reich Jews as distinct from easterners, though this check was soon reversed. To a remarkable degree, regional autonomy and logistical convenience – shortage of accommodation and food or, contrarily, of labour – still decided who lived and who died; but large-scale killings of eastern Jews, especially those unfit for work, continued through the winter. In Serbia, thousands of Jews and gypsies were executed in retaliation for partisan activity: local German commanders knew that prioritising such people as victims ensured Berlin’s approval.
Only one further step remained to be taken by the Nazi leadership: to order a transition from inflicting death arbitrarily and regionally towards imposing it by direct order from the top, in pursuit of an agreed policy of total extermination. In a speech on 12 December 1941, following his declaration of war on the United States, Hitler made plain his commitment to the destruction of the Jews, in supposed retaliation for their responsibility for the conflict. The implementation of the genocide programme was entrusted to the SS’s deputy chief, Reinhard Heydrich, to whom Himmler later paid unstinting posthumous tribute: ‘He was a character of rare purity with an intelligence of penetrating greatness and clarity. He was filled with an incorruptible sense of justice. Truthful and decent people could always rely on his chivalrous sentiment and humane understanding.’ These virtues were skilfully concealed on 20 January 1942, when at the Wannsee conference Heydrich mapped the road to the death camps. There is no record that he articulated an explicit commitment to murder all of Europe’s Jews, not least because the logistical obstacles remained formidable. Starvation still had a useful part to play; where convenient, victims could be worked to death. But the intended outcome was no longer in doubt: the ‘Final Solution’ of the Jewish problem would be accomplished in stages, only the last of which must await the war’s end.
There was considerable detailed discussion about the construction of extermination camps and the virtues of gas. The principal outcome of the conference was agreement that the SS would in future exercise absolute authority over the fate of Europe’s Jews; that no other Reich agency could appeal against its decisions; and that henceforward, policy would be directed towards the overarching aim of cleansing the entire Nazi empire. This was implemented with remarkable speed: in mid-March 1942, almost three-quarters of all those who perished in the Holocaust were still alive; eleven months later, the same proportion were dead.
A ministerial adviser enquired of SS-Brigadeführer Odilo Globocnik whether it might not be prudent to burn the bodies of the Nazis’ Jewish victims, rather than bury them: ‘After us there might come a generation that doesn’t understand the whole business!’ Globocnik replied, ‘Gentlemen, if there is ever a generation after us so feeble and weak-kneed that it doesn’t understand our great achievement, the whole of National Socialism will have been in vain … Bronze tablets should be buried stating that it was we who had the courage to carry out this momentous and so necessary task.’ Yet it is striking that, while Nazi leaders repeatedly and publicly av
erred their commitment to eliminating Europe’s Jews, detailed implementation of the Final Solution remained a closely guarded secret: even Hitler and his associates feared the global response, and especially the impact upon their own people, of public revelation of the death camps.
In the spring of 1942 Himmler refined a scheme to exploit concentration camp labour for both armaments production and the private profit of the SS. However, systemic incompetence and corruption ensured that little of value to the Reich was produced under SS auspices; on the contrary, the camp programme was a drain on Germany’s transport, manpower and general economic resources. Though millions of prisoners were put to work, mostly of a primitive kind, the SS never seriously attempted to reconcile its desire to extract useful services from its slaves with a consequent need to treat them with minimal humanity. Because its foremost aspiration was to produce mass death, it failed to produce much else save a ghastly harvest of human hair, gold teeth and discarded clothing.
At the beginning of June 1942, amid further mass deportations from the districts of Lublin and Galicia, the SS extended the policy of dispatching victims immediately on their arrival in camp reception areas. The concept of resettling Jews in the east had been abandoned, although a figleaf of pretence was sustained. Germany’s leaders now anticipated that their summer offensive in Russia would end the war, and the usefulness of Jewish slave labour. The Slovakian government allowed the shipment of 50,000 of its citizens to Auschwitz. A programme of deportations of western European Jews was introduced, conducted in collaboration with national security forces – the Nazi empire lacked resources to cleanse the occupied territories without the assistance of indigenous bureaucracies and law-enforcement agencies. Among the explicit purposes of the German government was to ensure that as many foreign regimes as possible were complicit in the massacre of Jews. In this, it achieved considerable success.
Posterity is fascinated by the ease with which the Nazis found so many ordinary men – to borrow the title of Christopher Browning’s classic study – willing to murder in cold blood vast numbers of innocents, of all ages and both sexes. Yet there is ample evidence in modern experience that many people are ready to kill others to order, once satisfied that this fulfils the wishes of those whose authority they accept. Hundreds of thousands of Russians were complicit in the deaths of millions of their fellow countrymen at the behest of Stalin and Beria, before the Holocaust was thought of. Germany’s generals may not themselves have killed civilians, but they were happy to acquiesce in, and even enthuse about, others doing so.
Post-war testimony shows that implementation of the Final Solution required only a modicum of patience and practice to overcome the scruples of some novice mass-murderers. On 13 July 1942, Reserve Police Battalion 101 arrived in a convoy of trucks at the Polish village of Josefów, whose inhabitants included 1,800 Jews. Mostly middle-aged reservists from Hamburg, on their arrival they were ordered to gather around their commander, fifty-three-year-old Major Wilhelm Trapp, a career policeman affectionately known to the unit as ‘Papa Trapp’. In a choking voice and with tears in his eyes, he told them they had a most unwelcome assignment, ordered at the highest level: to arrest all Jews in the village, remove to a work camp men of working age, and kill the remainder. He said this was justified by Jewish involvement with partisans, and the Jews’ instigation of the American boycott that had injured Germany. He then invited any man who felt unable to perform this unpleasant duty to step aside. Several policemen indeed declined to participate, and after the killings began their number increased. At least twenty were permitted to return to barracks.
Yet a sufficiency of others stayed to do the business: one man later recalled that his first victim vainly begged for mercy, on the grounds that he was a decorated World War I veteran. Georg Kageler, a thirty-seven-year-old tailor, killed his initial batch easily enough, but then fell into conversation with a mother and daughter from Kassel, who were destined to die next. He appealed to his platoon leader to be excused, and was sent to guard the marketplace while others did his share of shooting. Another man who quit during the slaughter explained that he became distressed by the poor marksmanship of a comrade: ‘He always aimed his gun too high, producing terrible wounds in his victims. In many cases the entire backs of victims’ heads were torn off, so that the brains sprayed all over. I simply couldn’t watch it any longer.’ One member of the battalion, Walter Zimmerman, later gave evidence: ‘In no case can I remember that anyone was forced to continue participating in the executions when he declared that he was no longer able to … There were always some comrades who found it easier to shoot Jews than did others, so that the respective commando leaders never had difficulty finding suitable shooters.’
Christopher Browning shows that during the weeks and months that followed, most of Reserve Police Battalion 101’s members overcame initial revulsion, and became hardened killers. To be sure, they resorted to alcohol to render their duties tolerable, but they performed them with a growing accession of brutality. Lt. Hartwig Gnade, for instance, degenerated from a mere murderer into a sadist: at a mass killing at Łomazy on 16 August, while he waited for 1,700 Jews to finish digging their own mass grave, he selected twenty elderly, heavily bearded Jews and made them crawl naked before him. As they did so, he screamed at his squad, ‘“Where are my non-commissioned officers? Don’t you have any clubs yet?” The NCOs went to the edge of the forest, fetched themselves clubs, and vigorously beat the Jews with them.’ By the time Battalion 101 completed its contribution to the Holocaust in November 1943, its five hundred men had shot at least 38,000 Jews, and herded a further 45,000 aboard trains for Treblinka. Browning found no evidence that any sanction was imposed upon those who refused to kill; in one of the most highly educated societies in Europe, it was easy to find men willing to murder those whom their rulers defined as state enemies, without employing duress.
Many Jews sought the help of the Almighty as killers descended upon their communities. Nineteen-year-old Ephrahim Bleichman’s uncle was shot by Polish gendarmes after fresh meat was found in his house, and his cousin Brucha was killed by scavengers who wanted her fresh bread. Young Bleichman thought: ‘If this tragedy was God’s will, nothing could be done. Yet my family … depended on God, not man to rectify the situation. I could neither abide by their philosophy, nor dispute it. The propaganda machine combined with systematic harassment cowed many of us into apathy. [They] felt powerless.’ Ephrahim took to the forest when he heard that a German deportation was imminent, and survived in hiding for many months. ‘We shared the forest with owls, snakes, wild hogs and deer. On windy nights, the tree branches made strange noises. The shadows of bushes resembled intruders ready to pounce on us. The natural movements of animals made us always worry that enemies were afoot. It took us a long time to accustom ourselves to the nights.’ By the summer of 1942, all Soviet Jews in areas under Nazi control had been killed. Thereafter, even as Germany’s military predicament worsened, the pace of slaughter quickened. There were wholesale deportations from Greece and Bulgaria in 1943. The Warsaw ghetto rising in April that year provoked intensified persecution in Poland, Holland, Belgium, France, Croatia and Slovakia.
Many great testimonies by victims of the Holocaust have been preserved, but one of the most astonishing was revealed to the world only sixty years after its author’s death. Irène Némirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903, daughter of a rich banker who had translated himself from the Ukrainian ghettos and pogroms to a large mansion in St Petersburg. She grew up in lonely luxury, travelling regularly with her family to France. They fled the Revolution in 1917, enduring considerable hardships before reaching Paris two years later, where her father rebuilt his fortune. Irène had been writing since she was fourteen. In 1927, she published her first novella; by the outbreak of war she was an established French literary figure, author of nine novels, one of which had been filmed, and married with two daughters. In 1940, when the Germans occupied Paris, she retreated to a rented house in the village
of Issy-l’Evêque, in Saône-et-Loire. There, in the following year, she embarked upon what she intended to become a trilogy about the war, on the epic scale of War and Peace. She had few illusions about her own likely fate, and wrote despairingly in 1942: ‘Just let it be over – one way or the other!’ Though she had converted to Catholicism, there was no escape from the Nazi blight upon her race: on 13 July she was arrested by French police and deported to Auschwitz, to be murdered at Birkenau on 17 August. Her husband was killed shortly afterwards.
Némirovsky had completed the first two volumes of her remarkable work. Her daughters, who survived the war in hiding, miraculously preserved her manuscripts, written in a tiny script reflecting the author’s shortage of ink and paper. The girls could not bring themselves to read this sole memorial of their mother until more than half a century had passed. Then one of them, Denise, painstakingly transcribed the manuscript with the aid of a magnifying glass, and hesitantly passed it to a publisher. Suite française was published in France in 2004, and became a worldwide sensation. Its first volume describes the French experience of June 1940, the plight of millions of refugees. The second focuses upon the relationship between a German soldier of the occupying army and a Frenchwoman. The pathos is extraordinary, of a Jew doomed to die portraying with acute sympathy the sentiments and behaviour of those who would become her murderers. Her account of French society under occupation, its sufferings, manifestations of quiet courage and also of moral betrayal, forms one of the most remarkable literary legacies of the war. Cool, wry analysis was matched by a warm compassion, displayed as she herself awaited a death in which she knew that the French people were complicit with the Germans. Némirovsky is now recognised as one of the most remarkable witnesses of her time and of her race’s tragedy.
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