The Third Reich at War

by Richard J. Evans

  The operation was accompanied by scenes of terrifying brutality, as Emanuel Ringelblum reported:

  At the corner of Chlodna and Zelazne Streets, those who are slow to take their hats off to Germans are forced to do callisthenics using paving stones or tiles as weights. Elderly Jews, too, are ordered to do push-ups. They [i.e., the Germans] tear paper up small, scatter the pieces in the mud, and order people to pick them up, beating them as they stoop over. In the Polish quarter Jews are ordered to lie on the ground and they walk over them. On Leszno Street a soldier came through in a wagon and stopped to beat a Jewish pedestrian. Ordered him to lie down in the mud and kiss the pavement. - A wave of evil rolled over the whole city, as if in response to a nod from above.191

  The ghetto area had been created, as a German administrator reported, ‘by the utilization of existing walls and by walling up streets, windows, doors and gaps between buildings. The walls,’ he added, ‘are three metres high and are raised a further metre by barbed wire placed on top. They are also guarded by motorized and mounted police patrols.’ There were fifteen checkpoints where Polish and German police regulated traffic in and out of the ghetto, which was divided into a larger and a smaller section separated by an ‘Aryan’ street crossed by a wooden bridge.192

  Inside the walls, the ghetto was run, on lines already established in L’d’, by a Jewish Council headed by an Elder, the engineer Adam Czerniak’w, a leading member of the local Jewish community now in his mid-sixties. Working long hours, Czerniak’w did his best to obtain small concessions by exploiting divisions within the German occupation authorities, and constantly brought the poor conditions in the ghetto to their attention. He was highly critical of the imperious attitude and corrupt practices of the L’d’ ghetto Elder Rumkowski (‘a conceited and witless man. A dangerous man too since he keeps telling the authorities that all is well in his preserve’).193 Czerniak’w’s attitude led to his arrest by the SS on 4 November 1940 and again in April 1941. He was tortured and humiliated, but refused to modify his stubborn attempts to defend the interests of the ghetto’s inhabitants. Only occasionally was he able to record any success in winning concessions from the Germans. Many of the promises they made to him at the end of lengthy negotiation sessions remained unfulfilled. ‘All this toil, as I see it,’ he wrote on 1 November 1941, ‘bears no fruit. My head spins and my thinking is getting muddled. Not one single positive achievement.’194

  The creation of the Warsaw ghetto involved the concentration of nearly a third of the city’s population into 2.4 per cent of its territory. After a further 66,000 Jews from the surrounding district were brought in during the first three months of 1941, some 445,000 people were crammed into an area of about 400 hectares in extent, with an average density, according to an official German estimate, of over 15 people per apartment or between 6 and 7 to a room, double the density of the population living in the rest of the city. Some rooms no more than 24 square metres in area had to provide living accommodation for as many as 25 or 30 people.195 Fuel was so scarce that few apartments were heated, even in the coldest winter. The death rate among Warsaw’s Jewish population rose from 1 per thousand in 1939 to 10.7 in 1941; in L’d’ it was even higher, at 43.3 in 1940 and 75.9 the following year. Children were particularly vulnerable; one in four children in the Warsaw ghetto shelters died in June 1941 alone, and so bad was the situation of children overall that a number of families tried to give their offspring away to non-Jewish families in the surrounding city.196 Orphaned children began to roam the streets of the ghetto in growing numbers. ‘A terrifying, simply monstrous impression is made,’ Emanuel Ringelblum confessed, by ‘. . . the wailing of children who . . . beg for alms, or whine that they have nowhere to sleep. At the corner of Leszno and Markelicka streets,’ he reported, ‘children weep bitterly at night. Although I hear this weeping every night, I cannot fall asleep until late. The couple of pence I give them nightly cannot ease my conscience.’197

  Death rates reached a new high in the spring of 1941 as typhus spread amongst the overcrowded, lice-ridden population of the Warsaw ghetto. ‘One walks past corpses with indifference,’ confessed Emanuel Ringelblum in May 1941. ‘The corpses are mere skeletons, with a thin covering of skin over their bones.’198 Passing through the ghetto, Stanislav Royzicki saw its inhabitants as ‘nightmare figures, ghosts of former human beings’ and noted ‘the prominent bones around their eye sockets, the yellow facial colour, the slack pendulous skin, the alarming emaciation and sickliness. And, in addition, this miserable, frightened, restless, apathetic and resigned expression.’ Patients were lying two or three to a bed in the hospitals.199 In the autumn of 1941 the hospitals were treating around 900 typhus cases a day, with 6,000 more ill in their homes. Tuberculosis spread as well, and contamination of the water supply led to many cases of typhoid. Malnutrition weakened people’s resistance to disease, and medical services were unable to cope. Death became an inescapable feature of the ghetto experience in Warsaw; during its whole period of existence, some 140,000 people died inside the ghetto.200 Travelling through the Jewish ghetto in a tram in early September 1941, Zygmunt Klukowski noted the terrible living conditions and high mortality rate of the Jews. ‘It is almost impossible to figure out how something like this can happen,’ he wrote.201 While all this was going on, as Ringelblum recorded, a German film crew visited the ghetto, staging scenes for cinema audiences back home in which kindly German soldiers stepped in to protect Jews from the cruelty of the Polish police.202

  Hunger led to a deterioration in social relations, and people fought over scraps, forged ration cards, or snatched food from passers-by, eating it as they ran away. Families began to quarrel over rations, and new arrivals sold everything they had to pay for black market food. Small children slipped out of the ghetto where it was only fenced off with barbed wire, risking being shot by the guards as they went off into the surrounding city to scavenge for food. Labourers on work details outside the ghetto often managed to smuggle food back in, while organized gangs of smugglers waged a kind of guerrilla warfare with the German guards.203 Some 28,000 Jews of all ages managed to find hiding-places outside the Warsaw ghetto, mostly with the aid of non-Jewish Poles, using social contacts, friendships and acquaintanceships that had existed before the Germans came. Parents frequently tried to send their children across the ghetto boundary to safety. Sometimes concealed in attics or cellars, sometimes passed off as ‘Aryan’, the children lived a precarious life; many were arrested and if, as was often the case, their parents were no longer alive, they were put into prison-like orphanages. Some Poles helped conceal Jews for financial gain, some out of nothing more complicated than human sympathy; others still betrayed them to the German police if they discovered that they were Jewish. A few even employed Jews on work that they succeeded in getting classified as essential, then took more on than they really needed, defending them against all attempts by the Germans to take them away. Most of the 11,000 Jews who survived the war in the Polish capital owed their lives to Polish helpers. The Poles who aided Jews in this, and many other ways, were a small minority, however, far outweighed by the antisemites who willingly participated in, and profited from, the creation of the ghetto and the removal of the Jewish population from the city at large. Neither the Polish nationalist underground ‘Home Army’ nor the Polish government in exile in London nor, finally, the Polish Catholic Church took a clear stance against the Germans’ murderous policies towards Polish Jews; if anything, the opposite was the case, with all three institutions regarding Poland’s Jewish population as supporters of ‘Bolshevism’. As a semi-official report of the Polish Church to the exiled government declared in the summer of 1941, the Germans ‘have shown that liberation of Polish society from the Jewish plague is possible’.204

  Polish police too played their part in keeping the ghetto sealed off from the rest of the city as far as possible. Walking past the ghetto in September 1941, Wilm Hosenfeld noted:

  There are water culverts at the ghetto wal
l, and Jewish children who live outside the ghetto smuggle potatoes in through them. I saw a Polish policeman beating a boy who was trying to do this. As I caught sight of the emaciated legs under the child’s coat, and his face filled with fear, I was seized by an enormous pity. I’d very much have liked to have given the boy my fruit.205

  But the penalties for such a gesture, even for a German officer, were too severe for him to risk it. Even silent sympathy like Hosenfeld’s was extremely rare. German officials, troops, police and SS men frequently came into the ghetto, beating and clubbing the Jews they encountered at will. Looking out of his window one day in February 1941, Chaim Kaplan saw crowds running in wild panic through the street below, before ‘a Nazi murderer with a face as red as fire, whose every movement expressed burning wrath, came striding with a singularly heavy step in search of a victim. In his hand was a whip.’ When he came across a beggar he started beating him mercilessly, then, when the beggar fell to the ground, the German stamped on him, and kicked and punched him ‘for twenty minutes’, until long after the man was dead. ‘It was hard to comprehend the secret of this sadistic phenomenon,’ wrote Kaplan in his diary:

  After all, the victim was a stranger, not an old enemy; he did not speak rudely to him, let alone touch him. Then why this cruel wrath? How is it possible to attack a stranger to me, a man of flesh and blood like myself, to wound him and trample upon him, and cover his body with sores, bruises, and welts, without any reason? How is it possible? Yet I swear I saw all this with my own eyes.206

  For many among the occupying German forces, the ghetto offered the opportunity to vent almost unimaginable violence upon the helpless Jews without the slightest threat of retribution.

  Some Germans, indeed, regularly drove through the ghetto singling out victims. Others merely came to watch, to take photographs, or on occasion to take posed pictures for propaganda purposes. It was even claimed by the Polish government-in-exile that the Nazi leisure organization ‘Strength Through Joy’ organized tourist visits to the ghetto, where the conditions the Germans themselves had created confirmed visitors in their sense of superiority over the ragged, starving and disease-ridden Jews they encountered.207 Passing a Jewish ghetto in Kutno, Melita Maschmann was shocked to see the lethargic poverty of the people penned in behind the high wire fence. Some children were begging, their hands stretched out through the wire.

  The wretchedness of the children brought a lump to my throat. But I clenched my teeth. Gradually I learned to switch off my “private feelings” quickly and utterly in such situations. This is terrible, I said to myself, but the driving out of the Jews is one of the unfortunate things we must bargain for if the “Warthegau” is to become a German country.

  She saw some German railway officials going to the fence and gawping at the Jews as if they were animals in a zoo.208 What they saw, though it was the result of German oppression, confirmed their prejudices against ‘Eastern Jews’. As one army NCO wrote on 30 June 1941:

  We drove through the quarter of the Jews and the epidemics. I cannot describe the condition of this area and its inhabitants . . . Many hundreds of people were queuing at groceries, tobacconists and liquor stores . . . As we drove by, we saw a man fall over for no obvious cause; it must have been hunger that made him fall, for a number of these riff-raff starve to death every day. A few are still well dressed in prewar clothes, but the most are shrouded in sacks and rags, a terrible picture of hunger and poverty. Children and women run after us and scream ‘bread, bread!’209

  Rare indeed was a German officer like Wilm Hosenfeld, who found ‘terrible conditions’ in the ghetto when he visited it on business early in 1941, ‘all an indictment against us’.210

  Despite these miserable and often terrifying conditions, the ghetto inhabitants managed to keep some kind of cultural, religious and social life going, even when the pressures imposed by working to survive made observation of the Sabbath difficult, and the desperate state of hygiene and sanitation prevented most Jews from keeping to traditional norms of personal cleanliness. In Warsaw actors and musicians staged theatrical productions and concerts, while in L’d’, true to form, Rumkowski organized all cultural activity himself. Adam Czerniak’w recorded in his diary regular visits to chamber music recitals, and as late as 6 June 1942 he was considering having an opera staged - Carmen, or perhaps The Tales of Hoffman. One of the most important projects in the Warsaw ghetto was devised by the young historian Emanuel Ringelblum, who gathered together people of many different political persuasions to collect an archive of diaries, letters, memoirs, interviews and documents, and to keep a record of the ghetto’s history for posterity. He even managed to write a serious study of Polish-Jewish relations during the war while simultaneously trying to survive in the increasingly intolerable conditions of life in the ghetto.211

  IV

  In Germany itself, conditions for the remaining Jewish population continued to deteriorate steadily in the first two years of the war. Numbering 207,000 in September 1939, according to the official racial classification of the Nazis, it was mostly middle-aged or elderly. Germany’s Jews had been despoiled of almost all their assets. They were effectively ostracized from German society and dependent on their own organizations for the maintenance of any kind of collective life. Many of those younger Jewish men who stayed in Germany had already been drafted into forced-labour schemes well before the outbreak of war. Compulsory labour, often in hard and dirty physical jobs such as digging ditches or shovelling snow, continued through 1940. In the spring of that year, however, the shelving of plans to create a Jewish reservation in the Lublin area, coupled with serious labour shortages in the arms industry, led to a change of policy. Jewish men of military age were banned from emigrating, in case they took up arms against Germany, and all Jews between the ages of fifteen and fifty-five for men and fifteen and fifty for women were ordered to register for labour. By October 1940 there were 40,000 Jews working on forced labour schemes, increasing numbers of them in war-related industries. Indeed, Goebbels noted in his diary on 22 March 1941 that 30,000 Jews in Berlin were working in arms factories (‘who would ever have thought that possible?’). Jewish labourers could be got very cheaply, and they did not require the provision of special accommodation or the hiring of translators, as did Polish or Czech workers.212

  Emigration, which had seen more than half Germany’s Jewish inhabitants leave since the beginning of 1933, thus became a lesser priority under the impact of the demand for Jewish labour. Only perhaps 15,000 or so more Jews managed to find refuge in a neutral country in the course of 1940. Around 1,000 got to Brazil with the help of visas arranged by the Vatican in 1939, funded by American donors. Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, a Japanese consul stationed variously in Lithuania, Prague and K̈nigsberg in 1939- 41, Chiune Sugihara, whose main function was supposed to be observing military matters, began on his own initiative to issue transit visas to Japan to any Jews who approached him, even though they had no permission to enter the country; out of perhaps 10,000 Jews who obtained these documents, possibly half managed to find their way illegally eventually to Canada, the USA or other destinations.213 Illegal emigration to Palestine continued, encouraged by the Gestapo, but the British mandate authorities in the country began to put obstacles in its path, fearing that it would alienate the Palestinians: in November 1940 they turned away a shipload of Jewish refugees who had come via the Danube and the Black Sea; the refugees were transferred to another ship to take them back to Romania, and only after the ship had exploded and sunk, killing 251 passengers, did the British authorities allow the rest to disembark and settle. The international treaty port of Shanghai, by contrast, imposed few restrictions on immigration, and remained open until December 1941, when the war in the Pacific broke out; by the summer of 1941, over 25,000 Jewish refugees from a variety of European countries including Germany had managed to flee there, travelling through Hungary or Scandinavia via the Trans-Siberian Railway and thence by sea.214

  Those who re
mained in Germany were now overwhelmingly concentrated in Berlin. Despite their extremely difficult situation they were able to continue some sort of social and cultural life not least because of the existence of the Jewish Culture League, which published books and periodicals, staged concerts and plays, arranged lectures and put on film shows. Everything of course had to be approved by its Nazi head, Hans Hinkel, who banned ‘German’ cultural heritage from being disseminated by the League. Under the restrictive conditions of wartime, it was also more difficult to keep going than before, especially outside Berlin.215 The overall interests of the Jewish community in the Reich were represented by the Reich Association of Jews in Germany, which was given the task by the regime, on Hitler’s explicit orders, of dispensing charity, organizing education and apprenticeships, arranging emigration and finding jobs for members of the Jewish community where possible. In January 1939 the Culture League had been effectively integrated into the Association by order of the Nazis, not least in order to make its financial resources available to the latter to assist Jewish emigration. A new executive committee was installed, consisting of representatives of the Association and the Jewish religious congregations of Berlin and Vienna. Nevertheless, despite its depleted funds, the quality of the League’s offerings continued to be high, with performances of classic French plays by Molière and others, symphonies by Mahler and Tchaikovsky, and chamber music groups playing in provincial cities for Jewish audiences. Religious life, for those who belonged to the Jewish faith, continued too, though after the destruction of Germany’s synagogues in the pogrom of 9-10 November 1938, it was obviously on a restricted scale.216

  No ghettos as such were set up inside the Reich, but in the course of 1940 and 1941, Jews began to be evicted from their dwellings and moved into ‘Jews’ houses’, where they were forced to live under increasingly overcrowded conditions, an echo of what was simultaneously happening on a much larger scale and in a far more brutal manner to Jews in occupied Poland. Basing their actions on a law of 30 April 1939 that allowed landlords to evict Jewish tenants if alternative accommodation was available, municipalities began to concentrate the Jewish population, using further powers created in the same law to compel Jewish homeowners to take in Jewish tenants. In many cases the alternative accommodation was found in disused barracks and similar buildings: in M̈ngersdorf, near Cologne, 2,000 Jews were put into a dipalidated fort, twenty to a room. Some thirty-eight such ‘residence camps’ were created after the outbreak of war. War also brought the confiscation of all radio sets from German Jews, followed in 1940 by telephones. New taxes were imposed on their now-meagre incomes. Ration cards for shoes, clothing and fabrics were withdrawn from the Jews. A host of new police regulations and decrees made their lives more difficult and increased their chances of falling foul of the law. Immediately after the outbreak of hostilities, German Jews were subjected to a curfew, and severe restrictions were imposed on the hours during which they could go shopping. They were only allowed to buy supplies in designated, Aryan-owned shops at particular times (there were no more Jewish-owned shops). They were allotted lower rations for food and clothing than non-Jews were and banned from buying chocolates. Himmler announced in October 1939 that any Jew who contravened any regulation, failed to obey any instruction, or showed any kind of resistance to the state and its dictates was to be arrested and put into a concentration camp. The powers of the police and other authorities to harass and persecute Jews grew correspondingly: in the Rhenish town of Krefeld, for instance, cases involving Jews, which had made up 20 per cent of all cases handled by the Gestapo before the war, rose to 35 per cent after the war had started. And in the spring of 1941, Himmler announced that any Jew imprisoned in a concentration camp would remain there for the duration of the war.217