Between July and September 1942, hundreds of thousands were sent to Treblinka. By early October the Warsaw ghetto had been reduced to at most sixty thousand. The weak, sick, and elderly were among the first to go, so the majority remaining were in their twenties and thirties. Jewish resistance began to organize. Most political factions, from the Communists to the Zionists, merged and prepared to fight.42
When Himmler visited Warsaw in early January 1943, he was displeased to hear that as many as 40,000 remained in the ghetto (the number was even higher) and ordered the immediate deportation of 8,000. Another 16,000 involved in war industry were to be sent to Lublin. For the rest, it was irrelevant whether they did useful work or not: all were to be destroyed. The shock attack caught the would-be resisters off guard, but they fought back. Something on the order of 6,500 were sent to their deaths, another 1,171 were shot in Warsaw, all at the cost of wounding one German police captain. That was enough of an excuse for Himmler to order the complete destruction of the ghetto in early February.43
The last remaining Jews went into hiding, and within days their armed resistance began. They were given modest but important help by non-Jewish Polish resistance groups. The Jews knew their fate was sealed but were determined to fight back. Yitzhak Zuckerman, one of the leaders, put it this way: “We saw ourselves as a Jewish underground whose fate was a tragic one… a pioneer force not only from the Jewish standpoint but also from the standpoint of the entire embattled world—the first to fight. For our hour had come without any sign of hope or rescue.”44
The resistance in Warsaw reinforced Himmler’s determination to complete the “final solution” in the General Government as quickly as possible. In the meantime, a Jewish fighting organization took shape. Their resistance was remarkable because they had no illusions about the desperate situation and realized there was no chance of success as that word is usually understood.
On April 19, the eve of Passover, Himmler put SS General Jürgen Stroop in charge of the “action.” Stroop had a reputation for ruthlessness and wanted to snuff out resistance as quickly as possible. He had just over two thousand heavily armed men, including units from the German order police, the SS, and the Wehrmacht.45 Far from crumbling, the Jews beat the Germans back, on that day and on subsequent days as well. The fighting turned into a struggle for city blocks and then individual houses. On April 27, Zegota, the Council for Aid to Jews Among the Poles, announced: “The opposition of the Jewish Fighting Organization now continues for nine days, which at first was fought from defensive positions and has now adopted partisan tactics, and has made a tremendous impression among the Polish population of Warsaw. The Poles now call the ghetto Ghettograd.”46 The reference here was to the siege at Stalingrad. With their backs to the wall, the Jews fought bravely and gave the German forces all they could handle.
The last letter from Mordecai Anielewicz on April 23 conveyed a sense of the dire situation the resistance faced, but also gave a hint of his own sense of fulfillment: “I cannot describe the conditions in which the Jews of the ghetto now live. Only an unusually determined person could hold out. The remainder will die sooner or later. Their fate has been decided. In almost all the bunkers in which thousands are hiding it is impossible to light a candle because of the lack of air.”47
On May 16, nearly a month later, Stroop boasted, “The Jewish quarter in Warsaw is no more!” He reported that his forces caught 56, 065, of whom 7,000 were shot on the spot and the same number sent to Treblinka. In addition, 15,000 were shipped to the killing center at Lublin (Majdanek), while the rest went (for the moment) to labor camps.48 The Nazi attack wrote a whole new chapter in the annals of horror. What remained of the ghetto was systematically leveled. The ferocity of the assault was, however, soon matched elsewhere. On June 19, Himmler reported to Hitler and came away from the meeting with a decision that “the evacuation of the Jews, despite the unrest that would thereby still arise in the next three to four months, had to be radically carried out and seen through.”49
In the shadow of the events in Warsaw, the decision to liquidate all the ghettos was reinforced. The acceleration of what was euphemistically called “ghetto clearing” as well as the destruction of Jews in work camps—including those producing war-related materials—involved the murder of untold thousands.
The Lvov (Lemberg) ghetto, for example, counted twenty-four thousand in early January 1943, but in reality there were more. In one “action” after the next, most inhabitants were shot. As district SS and police leaders complained about “their” Jews, surveys were taken, death squads sent in, and tens of thousands more executed. In terms of the numbers of victims, these killings—though carried out over a somewhat longer period—were almost as great as those committed by the SS Einsatzgruppen at the beginning of the war against the Soviet Union.50
The Warsaw ghetto uprising led to a consensus among Nazi leaders that the remaining Jews in the General Government should—as Goebbels put it—be “removed as quickly as possible.”51 Himmler and Hitler had apparently backed away from their earlier decision to use Jews as forced labor, and on May 10 Himmler said that the approximately 300,000 who remained in this district were to be “resettled,” which is to say, murdered.52
Blood flowed in the streets, as can be imagined when the executioners were given, as they were in places, a quota of 1,000 to kill in a day.53 A sense of the scale of the killing can be gathered from a report of Friedrich Katzmann, the SS and police leader in Galicia. In what must rank as one of the most chilling accounts of the “final solution” ever written, he noted on June 30 that since early 1942, at least 434, 329 Jews had been “resettled,” that is, killed, on his orders. If some of the reports on which this total was based were too high, other murders went unreported, so that Katzmann’s figures were fairly accurate. When the Germans arrived, there were more than a half million Jews in Galicia. At the end of Katzmann’s posting there, only 21,156 survived, confined to twenty-one work camps. That number, he reported, was “being steadily reduced.”54
Katzmann complained about the Jews’ lack of cooperation and their armed resistance. He said it was only through the energetic work of the SS and police that they could “overcome this plague as quickly as possible.”55 There were additional uprisings throughout 1943 in Treblinka (August), Sobibor (October), and elsewhere. Until 1943 there was little resistance, mostly because Jews had been clinging to the hope they would “merely” be exploited.
As the last illusions faded, their will to resist increased. Himmler set up a surprise attack in the Lublin camps. In late October the Jews were put to work digging trenches outside the camps at Majdanek, Trawniki, and Poniatowa. Operation Harvest Festival was sprung early in the morning of November 3, and the killing continued all day and into the next. Most of those shot were so-called work Jews employed in various activities, all of them profitable.
None of the wanton destruction of life made economic sense but was consistent with Nazi ideology as understood and implemented by Himmler and the SS. Himmler had his mission to kill and had been “plagued with complaints from industrial and military authorities” who began losing essential Jewish workers as the killing picked up after 1942. Now he was acting on Hitler’s “wishes” and killed off the Jews en masse. The executioners were the SS, but also groups like the reserve police battalions. The activities of Reserve Police Battalion 101, a group of about five hundred older men, show how it and other units carried out “Jew hunts” to find anyone who had escaped the “festival.”56
An estimated forty-two thousand were shot in two days or so of Operation Harvest Festival, which stood out even in the context of the serial mass murders of that time.57
“GLORIFYING” THE MURDER OF THE JEWS
At Posen on October 6, Himmler addressed a meeting of Party and Reich leaders, which included not only upper-level SS officers, as is often supposed, but many other influential persons, like Albert Speer—who later steadfastly denied he knew anything about the mass murder of the Je
ws.58 Fifty typewritten pages, the speech was more than three hours long.
Himmler began by mentioning the Soviet Union. Echoing Hitler’s words earlier that year, he claimed the Germans had been wrong to suppose that Stalin’s purges in 1937 and 1938 had weakened the Red Army. Like the führer, he believed they had replaced the equivocal old tsarist generals and the doubters with politically committed Bolsheviks.
Himmler thought the German advance was stopped at Moscow partly because of the political commissars, whose “fanatical, brutal will” turned the raw Slavic and Mongolian people into a force.
He spoke also about the Soviet system and the NKVD. “The Russians,” he said, “know themselves very well and had invented a very practical system,” whether it was the tsars and their Okhrana “or Mr. Lenin and Mr. Stalin with the GPU or the NKVD.” That system provided “absolute security” and was impervious to conspiracy, backed up by the pistol or deportation, “and that’s the way these people are governed.”
Germans had to operate that way, and he thought their “idealism” was completely out of place. The basic principle for the SS man was “honor, honesty, trust, and comradely feelings for members of our own blood and otherwise to no one else. What happens to the Russian, how the Czech gets along is totally irrelevant to me.” The “good blood” of other peoples, insofar as there was any, would be taken as needed by “robbing their children and raising them as Germans.” But if the rest lived in prosperity or perished, it was of interest to him “only insofar as we need them as slaves for our culture.”
These “human animals” (Menschentieren) would be treated appropriately, Himmler said, but added it was “a crime against our own blood” to become overly humane, because the Germans who came after would pay. “If someone comes to me and says, ‘I cannot build antitank ditches with children and women. That’s inhumane, because they will die in the process,’ then I have to say, ‘You are a murderer of your own blood, because, if the ditches are not built, then German soldiers will die and they are the sons of German mothers. That’s our blood.’” The duty was to “our people and our blood.”
He surveyed the war fronts. He was not worried about the coming winter offensive by the Communists, which he saw as “the last blow of a desperate beast.” As for the home front in Germany, he said he would go after the defeatists with as many executions as needed. Expressing satisfaction that Communists in Germany were locked up, he cheerfully pointed to fifty to sixty thousand “political and criminal” prisoners in concentration camps who, along with a “small number” of Jews and many more Poles and Russians, were “working” for Party comrade Speer.
After a review of SS activities, Himmler turned to what he called “the evacuation of the Jews.” He spoke of their “extermination” as a people.
He began with the ominous phrase “I also want to speak to you quite frankly about a very grave matter. We can talk about it completely openly among ourselves, and yet we will never speak of it publicly. I mean here the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. It is one of those things that are easy to talk about. ‘The Jewish people will be exterminated,’ says every Party comrade. ‘It’s clear, it’s in our program. Elimination of the Jews, extermination and we’ll do it.’”
Himmler congratulated SS officers and other leaders for what he viewed as the professional way they had gone about fulfilling Hitler’s promise. In a particularly chilling passage he uttered the following: “Not one of those who talk like that has watched it happening, not one of them has been through it. Most of you will know what it means when a hundred corpses are lying side by side, or five hundred or a thousand are lying there. To have stuck it out and—apart from a few exceptions due to human weakness—to have remained decent, that is what has made us tough. This is a glorious page in our history and one that has never been written and can never be written.”
He proceeded to reassure any wavering listener by reciting the Hitlerian and robotlike rationale for exterminating the Jewish people: “For we know how difficult we would have made it for ourselves if, on top of the bombing raids, the burdens and deprivations of war, we still had Jews today in every town as secret saboteurs, agitators, and troublemakers. We would probably have reached the 1916-17 stage when the Jews were still part of the German body politic.”59 This last point tied into Hitler’s longtime insistence that German soldiers had been stabbed in the back by the home front in the First World War.
Himmler mentioned that they had taken everything the Jews owned for the German state. This was one of the few times any major Nazi leader ever made that point. Material gain was never the real issue, however. It was easy enough to steal Jewish property, and it could have been done with less wastage. The Jews might have been allowed to work longer and produce more. The obsessive desire to kill all the Jews became foundational to Hitler’s thinking from at least January 30, 1939. In the war years, certainly after the attack on the Soviet Union, their complete annihilation became one of Germany’s war aims.
It was Himmler’s hope that “the Jewish question in the countries occupied by us will be finished off by the end of the year.” He concluded the long speech on a note of cautious optimism, pointing out that the coming winter was going to be the real test. His vision of the future, when peace came, was of an empire stretching to the Urals. After another century the empire would reach beyond the Urals to challenge Asia.60
36
STALIN TAKES THE UPPER HAND
Stalin’s brief visit to the front in August 1943 gave him a psychological advantage over Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. He was in the thick of war, and the Red Army was carrying the fight to the Germans. He told Roosevelt and Churchill he was unable to meet with them because he had to be at the front. He never let them forget that his country had done the bleeding and should be given its due.1
Stalin managed to project himself as larger than life in international affairs. But he had not been outside the USSR since before 1914 and never flown in an aircraft. No one was sure what he was really like. Churchill had met him briefly in Moscow in 1942, but otherwise he was known mostly by reputation. Churchill and the Americans—represented by Averell Harriman—faithfully promised that the Allies intended a major offensive in Western Europe in 1943.2
Stalin was difficult to read or predict. At close quarters he impressed many clever people, including Churchill. Harriman had contact with him at wartime meetings and said he was more than just a tin-pot dictator:
I saw the other side as well—his high intelligence, that fantastic grasp of detail, his shrewdness and the surprising human sensitivity that he was capable of showing, at least in the war years. I found him better informed than Roosevelt, more realistic than Churchill, in some ways the most effective of the war leaders. At the same time he was, of course, a murderous tyrant. I must confess that for me Stalin remains the most inscrutable and contradictory character I have known—and leave the final judgment to history.3
The Battle of Stalingrad elevated him in the eyes of the Western Allies and put to rest the widely held belief that Russia could not survive. As we have seen, the Americans scaled back the Victory Program of 1941, reducing the amount of troops they thought they needed to mobilize.4
Stalin was grateful to receive goods under the lend-lease program, and Roosevelt’s decision to provide such aid helped to keep the Soviet Union in the war. But what Stalin desperately needed was another battle-front in Western Europe that would draw German troops out of the Soviet Union and give the Red Army some relief.
TEHRAN CONFERENCE
From November 28 to December 3, 1943, he pressed his case at the first Big Three meeting. The event took place in Tehran, a convenient location on neutral turf. Never missing an opportunity to proselytize, Stalin paid the young shah a visit and tried to foster Soviet influence by offering arms. These were declined.5
His main prey was Roosevelt, and he wanted to separate the president from Churchill, who was known as a died-in-the-wool an
ti-Communist. FDR was considered likely more sympathetic. He also wanted to impress the Soviet dictator and embraced the opportunity to act independently of Churchill and to show there was no basis for suspecting American intentions.
Stalin invited FDR to stay in the Soviet embassy for security reasons. He manipulated Roosevelt with care, striking various poses during the meetings. He favored the facade of a contemplative and heavily burdened leader of the nation bearing the brunt of the war.
Just after 3: 00 p.m. on November 28 the two met (with their translators), and Roosevelt asked the perfect first question: How were things going on the Soviet battlefront? That opened the door for Stalin to underline the Germans’ resistance. Within five minutes FDR was apologizing for not being able to do more. He shifted to global concerns, including the fate of the British Empire, a matter of great interest to Stalin, who never lost sight of his ultimate aim of spreading Communism.6
Roosevelt said later that Stalin was not like the men he was used to dealing with: he was “correct, stiff, solemn, no smiling, nothing human to get a hold of…. I had come there to accommodate Stalin. I felt pretty discouraged because I was making no personal headway.” Even before the conference began, Stalin established his advantage. During the meetings Roosevelt would go to great lengths to agree with him, often at Churchill’s expense, so as to cut through Stalin’s “icy surface.”7
American officials and experts on the USSR were still not sure the Soviets would stay in the war; they thought Stalin might try for a separate peace with Hitler. Churchill continued to share these misgivings, reinforced when Stalin frankly admitted the Red Army was “war weary” and might not carry on if there was still no new front in the west to take off the pressure.8 An alternative scenario among American officials was that the Soviets might not want Anglo-American troops in Europe, even if Stalin said that was what he needed. Perhaps he hoped to defeat Germany on his own and have Europe to absorb as he saw fit. In either case, Roosevelt and his advisers favored an Allied invasion of Western Europe and decided with Churchill to call it Operation Overlord.9
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