The Third Reich at War

by Richard J. Evans

  If Theresienstadt was a model ghetto, then Auschwitz in many ways was a model German town in the newly conquered east. By March 1941 there were 700 SS guards working in the camp, a number that had grown to more than 2,000 by June 1942; in all, over the period of the camp’s existence, some 7,000 SS men worked there at one time or another. The SS and their families, if they had them, lived in the town, along with secretaries and administrators; there were concert parties, theatrical performances by visiting companies like the Dresden State Theatre, a pub (with an upstairs flat for Himmler, which in fact he never used) and a medical centre. The SS men were supplied with plenty to eat, and were allowed regular periods of leave. If they were unmarried, they could receive visits from their girl-friends, or, if they were married and their families lived elsewhere in the Reich, from their wives, usually during the warmer weather in summer. New houses were built for the camp staff, and nearby there was the gigantic I. G. Farben chemical plant at Monowitz, which made Auschwitz into a major economic centre and employed German managers, scientists, administrators and secretaries. The creation in a single complex of a residential area, a factory, a labour camp and an extermination centre looked forward to the kind of urban community that might have been founded in other parts of the German east, at least until the General Plan for the East was carried out completely. The only cause for complaint on the part of the town’s inhabitants was the unpleasant smell that wafted across to the town and the SS living quarters from the camp crematoria.284

  Over the whole period of the camp’s existence, at least 1.1 million and possibly as many as 1.5 million people were killed at Auschwitz; 90 per cent of them, probably about 960,000, were Jews, amounting to between a fifth and a quarter of all Jews killed in the war. They included 300,000 Jews from Poland, 69,000 from France, 60,000 from Holland, 55,000 from Greece, 46,000 from Czechoslovakia (the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia), 27,000 from Slovakia, 25,000 from Belgium, 23,000 from Germany (the ‘Old Reich’), 10,000 from Croatia, 6,000 from Italy, the same number from Belarus, 1,600 from Austria and 700 from Norway. At a late stage in the war, as we shall see, some 394,000 Hungarian Jews were taken to the gas chambers and put to death. More than 70,000 non-Jewish Poles were killed, 21,000 Gypsies, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and up to 15,000 people of a whole variety of nationalities, mainly East Europeans. The minority who were ‘selected’ for work on arrival were registered, and a number tattooed on their forearm. There were about 400,000 of these, and about half of them were Jewish. At least half of the registered prisoners died from malnutrition, disease, exhaustion or hypothermia.285

  Rudolf Ḧss later confessed he had found his duties as commandant of the biggest murder factory in the history of the world difficult to carry out with equanimity.

  I had to see everything. I had to watch hour after hour, by day and by night, the removal and burning of the bodies, the extraction of the teeth, the cutting of the hair, the whole grisly, interminable business . . . I had to look through the peephole of the gas-chambers and watch the process of death itself, because the doctors wanted me to see it. I had to do all this because I was the one to whom everyone looked, because I had to show them all that I did not merely issue the orders and make the regulations but was also prepared myself to be present at whatever task I had assigned to my subordinates.286

  His subordinates often asked him ‘is it necessary that we do all this? Is it necessary that hundreds of thousands of women and children be destroyed?’ Ḧss felt that he ‘had to tell them that this extermination of Jewry had to be, so that Germany and our posterity might be freed for ever from their relentless adversaries’.287 Antisemitic to the end, Ḧss reflected after the war that antisemitism had ‘only come into the limelight when the Jews have pushed themselves forward too much in their quest for power, and when their evil machinations have become too obvious for the general public to stomach’.288 Bound by these beliefs to his job, Ḧss felt he had to suppress any doubts in carrying out what he believed to be Hitler’s orders. He owed it to his subordinates not to show any sign of weakness. ‘Hardness’ was after all a core value of the SS. ‘I had to appear cold and indifferent to events that must have wrung the heart of anyone possessed of human feelings,’ he later recalled. ‘I had to watch coldly, while the mothers with laughing or crying children went into the gas-chambers.’289 Particularly after an evening’s drinking with Adolf Eichmann, who ‘showed that he was completely obsessed with the idea of destroying every single Jew that he could lay his hands on’, Ḧss felt he had to suppress his human feelings: ‘after these conversations with Eichmann I almost came to regard such emotions as a betrayal of the Leader’.290

  Ḧss could not help thinking of his own wife and children as he watched Jewish families go into the gas chamber. At home, he was haunted by memories of such scenes. But he also felt beleaguered in Auschwitz. The constant demands for expansion, the incompetence and deceitfulness of his subordinates and the ever-increasing number of prisoners to manage drove him into himself and he turned to drink. His wife, who lived in a house just outside the camp perimeter with him and their four children (a fifth was born in 1943), tried to organize parties and excursions to improve his quality of life, but Ḧss quickly became known for his bad temper, despite the fact that he was able to requisition whatever he wanted (illegally) from the camp stores. ‘My wife’s garden,’ he wrote later, ‘was a paradise of flowers . . . The children were perpetually begging me for cigarettes for the prisoners. They were particularly fond of the ones who worked in the garden.’ Ḧss’s children kept many animals in the garden, including tortoises and lizards; on Sundays he walked the family across the fields to visit their horses and foals, or, in summer, went swimming in the river that formed the eastern boundary of the camp complex.291

  V

  Many of the Jews who arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau, especially in the later phases of the camp’s existence, were taken there directly from their home countries. But many others went through the transitional stage of confinement in a ghetto, as did all the Jews who were killed in the Reinhard Action camps. There they might survive for months or even years. The largest of the ghettos, as we have seen, were founded shortly after the conquest of Poland in 1939. Some of them lasted well into the second half of the war. In practice, of course, the conditions in the ghettos were so terrible that they already meant a slow death for many of their inhabitants. Starved of supplies, even for those in them who worked for the German war economy, they were desperately overcrowded, deprived of proper sanitation and rife with disease. Throughout the winter of 1941-2, Adam Czerniak’w, the Jewish Elder of the Warsaw ghetto, continued to do his best to combat the rapid deterioration of the situation under the impact of hunger and disease. ‘In the public assistance shelters,’ he noted on 19 November 1941, ‘mothers are hiding dead children under the beds for 8 days in order to receive a larger food ration.’ Meeting a group of children on 14 June 1942, Czerniak’w noted despairingly that they were ‘living skeletons . . . I am ashamed to admit it,’ he wrote, ‘but I wept as I have not wept for a long time.’ As large contingents of Jews deported from Germany began to arrive and stay in the ghetto for a few days before being transported to Treblinka, and rumours of the death camps began to spread, Czerniak’w did his best to try to halt the mounting panic. He even organized play activities for the ghetto children, comparing himself to the captain of the Titanic (‘a ship is sinking and the captain, to raise the spirits of the passengers, orders the orchestra to play a jazz piece. I had made up my mind to emulate the captain’).292

  Assured repeatedly by the German authorities that the ‘terrifying rumours’ of imminent deportations were untrue, he toured the ghetto, trying to ‘calm the population’ (‘what it costs me they do not see’). But on 21 July 1942 the German Security Police began arresting members of the Jewish Council and other officials in his presence in order to hold them hostage for the collaboration of the rest. The next morning, the deportation specialist of the regional SS,
Hermann Ḧfle, called Czerniak’w and the remaining leading Jewish officials in the ghetto to a meeting. While his young Jewish interpreter, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, typed the minutes, the sound of Johann Strauss’s Blue Danube waltz, played by the SS on a portable gramophone in the street outside, drifted in through the open window. Czerniak’w was officially told that all the Jews would be deported, in consignments of 6,000 a day, starting immediately. Anyone who tried to stop the action would be shot. Throughout his time as Elder, Czerniak’w had kept a cyanide tablet ready to use if he received any orders he could not reconcile with his conscience. One of the SS officers in charge of the deportations had told him that children were included, and Czerniak’w could not agree to hand them over to be killed. ‘I am powerless,’ he wrote in a final letter, ‘my heart trembles in sorrow and compassion. I can no longer bear all this. My act will show everyone the right thing to do.’ Refusing to sign the deportation order, he swallowed the tablet and died instantly. Doubts about him in the ghetto community were immediately quelled. ‘His end justifies his beginning,’ wrote Chaim Kaplan. ‘Czerniak’w earned eternity in one moment.’293

  The Catholic German army officer Wilm Hosenfeld, stationed in Warsaw and charged with organizing sporting activities for the troops, became aware of the deportations to Treblinka almost as soon as they began. ‘That a whole people, men, women, children, are simply being slaughtered, in the twentieth century, by us, us of all people, who are fighting a crusade against Bolshevism: this is such a dreadful blood-guilt that one wants to sink into the ground with the shame of it.’294 30,000 Jews were transported for mass extermination in the last week of July 1942 alone, he reported. Even in the days of the guillotine and the French Revolutionary Terror, he noted caustically, ‘such virtuosity in mass murder was never achieved’.295 The Jews, he told his son in August 1942, ‘are to be exterminated, and it’s already being done. What immeasurable quantities of human suffering are coming to light on the one hand, of human malice and bestiality on the other. How many innocent people have to die, who is demanding justice and legality? Does this all have to happen?’296 ‘Death paces the streets of the ghetto,’ Chaim Kaplan reported in his diary in June 1942. ‘Every day Polish Jewry is being brought to slaughter. It is estimated, and there is some basis for the figures, that three-quarters of a million Polish Jews have already passed from this earth.’ Kaplan recorded terrible scenes as people were rounded up and taken off to Treblinka every day in the repeated deportations of the summer of 1942. On 5 August 1942 it was the turn of the children living in orphanages and other children’s homes. These actions were neither orderly nor peaceful. German troops, SS men and auxiliaries used unbridled force in rounding up the Jews and forcing them on to the trains. Over 10,000 Jews were shot in the ghetto during the round-ups; some of them must have tried to resist. In early August 1942, visiting Warsaw, Zygmunt Klukowski was kept awake by the sound of machine-gun fire coming from the ghetto. ‘I was told that about 5,000 people a day were being killed.’297 By the time the round-ups came to an end on 12 September 1942, more than 253,000 inhabitants of the ghetto had been taken to Treblinka and gassed. Already in August 1942, fearing the worst for himself, Kaplan gave his diary to a friend. His friend smuggled it out of the ghetto and passed it on to a member of the Polish underground, who took it with him when he emigrated to New York in 1962, after which it was finally published. Kaplan’s own fears had been more than justified: he was rounded up not long after he passed the diary on, and perished with his wife in the gas chambers of Treblinka in December 1942 or January 1943.298

  By November 1942, only 36,000 Jews were left in the Warsaw ghetto, all engaged on labour schemes of one kind or another.299 Few now doubted what would happen to those who were taken off in an ‘action’. They knew they were going to their death even if they were hazy about the way it was done. The mass deportations gave rise to anguished self-examination amongst politically active Jews. ‘Why did we allow ourselves to be led like sheep to the slaughter,’ was the agonized question that Emanuel Ringelblum asked himself.300 Ringelblum thought that the Jews had been terrorized by the extreme violence of the Germans into passivity. People knew that if they tried to revolt, many others who had not been involved would also be the target of German reprisals. Religious Jews, who probably formed the majority of the ghettos’ inhabitants, were perhaps inclined to regard suffering and death as merely transient, and to accept what was happening as the outcome of the Divine Will, however difficult that may have been. The role of the Jewish police in carrying out selections and deportations also made resistance more difficult. Often people trusted the ghetto leadership, which almost always tried to reassure them about the future rather than create problems by spreading alarm. Arms were hard to come by, the Polish resistance was often (though not always) reluctant to supply them, and weapons frequently had to be purchased on the black market at very high prices. There was always hope, and the need for it frequently meant that ghetto inhabitants preferred to disbelieve the stories of extermination camps that were told to them. Often, particularly in the early stages of the murder programme, the German authorities convinced those selected for deportation that they were merely being moved to another ghetto or another camp. The vast majority of Jews were too weakened by prolonged hunger, privation and disease, and too preoccupied with the daily struggle to stay alive, to offer any resistance. Nevertheless, young and politically active Jews in a number of ghettos formed clandestine resistance movements to prepare for armed revolt or to organize an escape to the forests to join the partisans, the favoured tactic of the Communists (but which also undercut the possibility of resistance within the ghetto itself). A group of this kind was particularly active in Vilna, but it was generally unable to act because of internal political divisions between Communists, socialists and Zionists, the disapproval of the Jewish Councils that ran the ghettos, and the violent intervention of the German authorities at the slightest hint of resistance.301

  In Warsaw, however, the resistance did come to fruition. In the course of 1942, Jewish underground organizations began to form, and Polish Communists supplied them with arms. On 18 January 1943 insurgents attacked the German guards accompanying a deportation column, and the deportees escaped. Himmler now regarded the ghetto as a security risk and ordered its final ‘liquidation’ on 16 February 1943. But the raid had made the resistance movement widely known and admired amongst the remaining Jewish population in Warsaw, which now began collecting and hoarding food supplies and preparing for an uprising despite the hostility of the ghetto’s Jewish Council to any armed action. Alarmed at the prospect of an armed confrontation and concerned at the left-wing politics of some of the underground leaders in the ghetto, the Polish nationalist resistance rejected their call for help and offered instead to smuggle the Jewish fighters out to safety; the offer was refused. Fundamental to the resistance was the certainty that the entire population of the ghetto was about to be killed; there was no hope left, and the resisters, overwhelmingly young men, became convinced that it would be better to go down fighting and die with dignity than submit meekly to extermination. As the SS marched in to begin the final round-up on 19 April 1943, they were fired on at several points, and had to work their way forward in a series of bitter street-fights.302

  J̈rgen Stroop, the SS officer in charge of putting down the revolt, described how his men fought day and night against the desperate resistance. On 23 April 1943, Himmler ordered him to proceed with ‘the greatest harshness, ruthlessness and toughness’. ‘I now therefore decided,’ Stroop wrote,