1944

by Jay Winik

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  CONTENTS

  Prelude: The Sphinx

  Part One

  SPRING 1944: EVERYTHING ALL AT ONCE

  1. Tehran

  2. “I Want to Sleep and Sleep Twelve Hours a Day”

  3. Escape, Part 1

  4. Escape, Part 2

  5. “This Is the Year 1944”

  6. “Could We Be Granted Victory This Year, 1944?”

  Part Two

  THE ROAD TO 1944

  7. Beginnings

  8. Mills of the Gods

  9. Giant Cemeteries

  10. Riegner

  11. 1943

  12. “The Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews”

  Part Three

  THE FATEFUL DECISION

  13. Trapped Between Knowing and Not Knowing

  14. The Wind and the Silence

  Part Four

  1945

  15. Reckoning

  Acknowledgments

  Photographs

  About the Author

  Illustration Credits

  Notes

  Index

  To Nathaniel and Evan “BC”

  My treasures—and the future

  At the Cairo conference en route to Tehran, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill view the Pyramids and the Sphinx. As it turned out, Roosevelt was often as inscrutable in 1944 as the Sphinx itself.

  PRELUDE

  The Sphinx

  November 22–23, 1943

  STRETCHING TO THE HORIZON, it was among the most serene and sublime plots of land on the face of the earth. As the last cliff bordering the Sahara desert, it was also one of the most dangerous. During the summer, the sun-soaked grounds around the Sphinx shimmered and swelled, while the temperature perilously rose to above 110 degrees. Unknowing travelers grew disoriented, having never before encountered such pitiless heat, such enervating thirst, such relentless quiet, or such a trackless desert. So blazing was the light, reflected up from the sand, that the eye could not bear its dazzling glare. Even the weather itself played odd tricks with space and time. Then in late March came the dreaded khamsin, a torrential storm of great winds and grainy dust that often rendered the Giza plateau nearly uninhabitable for as long as fifty days. Over the years, whole flocks of sheep had been consumed in these hellacious blizzards, as had countless people, simply swallowed by the sand. For a millennium, the Sphinx itself, one of the world’s oldest and most storied of monuments, had lain hidden beneath a mountain of shifting desert.

  Here, under the vast blue skies, was one of the most intriguing intersections of cultures ever recorded, marrying the allure of antiquity with the romance of history. The pharaohs had once walked these lands; so had Queen Cleopatra and mighty Caesar. Ancient Roman senators in flowing white robes were showered with an abundance of gold, silver, and numerous other riches, while in later centuries, holy men supplicated themselves in prayer and crowds lined the Nile to cheer for their leaders or marvel at their conquerors. Spreading out around the Nile’s banks, medieval Cairo was one of the largest cities in the world. It became a trophy for the Arab caliphate and later a dominion for the Ottoman sultans. Napoleon, too, came here, seeking to subjugate this magical, mystical region, but ultimately to no avail. Like so many other empires, this one, stretching over the desert and along the riverbanks, had ebbed and flowed, and eventually it largely faded away. Even the digging of the Suez Canal was not enough to completely reverse Egypt’s fortunes. In the twentieth century, it remained a pawn of larger powers: this time, a strategic prize in the global tussle between England and France.

  Yet if the glory of the Egyptian empire had long since disappeared, in the wartime fall of 1943, its breathtaking mystery had not. It was still a land of color, of dazzling sunsets and gorgeous tropical gardens, of golden fields and a profusion of flowers. Palm trees swayed in the wind; donkeys hauled carts and packs. Mosques and minarets were filled with believers, and bustling streets were a hodgepodge of coffee kiosks and sumptuous spice bazaars, buzzing with the short peals of commerce and talk of politics. Cairo itself was a densely packed warren, alive with the sights of snake charmers and fakirs, not to mention the overwhelming scent of communal Egypt. And in its environs, the past was always present.

  To the southwest, the fabled Pyramids rose like ancient skyscrapers or man-made mountains that ruled the horizon. For centuries, Muslims, Christians, and Jews had forgotten the history of these massive stone peaks, and had instead largely settled on one common explanation: these were the ancient granaries of the biblical patriarch Joseph. But not everyone agreed. More than one ruler believed that the Pyramids covered stores of ancient gold. Once, a caliph from Baghdad had commanded his forces to attack the Great Pyramid. Another time, a ruler issued a decree to demolish the Pyramids. Drillers and stonecutters spent eight months laboring to remove one or two of the mammoth stones each day, but then, simply gave up, remaining, as one chronicler wrote, very “far from accomplishing what they had set out to do.” So the Pyramids were largely left alone, but not so the Sphinx. When the Ottomans bequeathed their Egyptian empire to the care of the Mamelukes, these ruling custodians used its venerable face for target practice.

  Ironically, when the Pyramids were opened in the nineteenth century, it was primarily western adventurers who made off with the remaining spoils. Statues, mummies, paintings, and ancient stones were crated and bundled out of Egyptian ports, bound for the capitals of Europe. By the time a young Winston Churchill arrived to paint the Pyramids, their secrets had been largely unlocked and their treasures were displayed at the British Museum.

  Only the harsh terrain of shifting sands and the vast sky remained constant in this part of the world. At night, the huge stars shone brightly as they had for millennia. According to legend, the Milky Way glimmering overhead had been crafted to form “the river Nile in the sky.” Ancient priests believed it contained signposts to help the dead pharaohs navigate their way to the afterlife.

  But in 1943, to look up and see this pathway of stars was perhaps to be reminded not of the ancient legend but of something else altogether. With World War II raging, the pathways to the afterlife were crowded. At a rate of one every three seconds, another human life on earth was being snuffed out.

  In Cairo, meanwhile, westerners had arrived en masse once more.

  Just over a year before, German forces under General Erwin Rommel had reached El Alamein, 150 miles from Cairo, from where they planned to capture the Suez Canal and move north through British Palestine, until they could link up with Nazi forces heading south from the Soviet Union. Instead, in a brutal battle, England’s General Bernard Montgomery had forced them to retreat to the relative safety of Libya and Tunisia. It was the Allies’ first major victory over the Germans, and the first turning point of the war. Now the war had come to Egypt again.

  This afternoon, it came with a terrific roar: a caravan of dark cars, winding its way to the Pyramids and the Sphinx. Inside were the key leaders of the Allied war effort: admirals, generals, doctors, and the two men in whose hands lay the fate of western democracy—Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt.

  It was November 23, and a cool wind was blowing over the faint ripples in the sand. Taking a break from their Cairo summit—for the Allies, this was to be the first of three separate rounds of discussions, and among the most important of the war—the leaders of the United States and Great Britain were sightseeing. The trip was Churchill’s idea. His eyes flashing, his h
usky voice filled with warmth and humor—he was suffering from a cold—he was seized with his customary enthusiasm. When the prime minister had first proposed the idea earlier in the day over tea at the president’s villa, Roosevelt was so taken by it that he tried to rise out of his chair—a rare lapse—only to painfully realize as he gripped the handles and his knuckles whitened that he couldn’t. “Mr. President,” an insistent Churchill boomed, “you simply must come and see the Sphinx and Pyramids. I’ve arranged it all.”

  They drove over at sunset, as the temperature dropped and the night shadows lengthened. To the east were the three Pyramids on the plateau, and to the west was a royal cemetery containing over four thousand mummies. A local guide was procured at the last moment to help them find their way around. But it was the riddle of the Sphinx, with its body of a lion and the head of a king, that most captivated Roosevelt and Churchill. Modern Egyptians had dubbed the Sphinx Abu al-Hol, or “Father of Terror,” but to those who built it, the Sphinx was an enduring symbol of good, embodying humor and awe. Now, examining the Sphinx from “every angle,” the two men pondered its inscrutable smile, its missing nose, and its mysterious eagle-shaped wings. Their eyes turned to follow its confident gaze over the desolate Giza plain and far beyond. Churchill wondered to himself: what did she have to say?

  As the sun dipped behind the Pyramids, Roosevelt and Churchill, normally the wittiest of conversationalists, fell strangely quiet. Coptic monks had once called this stirring plateau wind the “voice of eternity.” It was as though, in the midst of this terrible war, far away from the killing fields of Europe, North Africa, and the Pacific, Roosevelt and Churchill had found a place of respite, a place suspended in time. And fittingly, they had done it together.

  As the minutes passed, the sky was bathed in a comforting afterglow, a thin pink line pulled across the horizon, signaling the end of this day and the slow arrival of the next. Looking over at Roosevelt, Churchill was jubilant. With tears in his eyes, he announced softly, “I love that man.”

  But the ever-charming Roosevelt, squinting in the fading light, gave nothing away. He was in many ways as inscrutable as the Sphinx; at his core, he remained shrouded, unknowable, dispassionate. Fittingly, history would call this summit the “Sphinx Conference.” And when it was over, in the days and months that followed, Roosevelt would make some of the most profound and painful decisions of the entire war.

  THAT SAME LATE-NOVEMBER SUN was also setting over Adolf Hitler’s Festung Europa. As dusk approached, at air bases in England some six hundred miles northeast of Berlin, there began a distant, deep hum in the sky. For hours, planes lined up and wave after wave of Allied aircraft took off. The voices of hundreds of pilots crackled over their interphones, while hundreds more airmen positioned themselves in their cockpits and checked their tachometers. Some crewmembers hastily reviewed crash procedures, while others examined maps. Ground crews stood outside and looked up at the semidark sky, marveling at how many planes there were. Tonight’s raid was a follow-up of the previous evening, when eventually 764 had converged in the air, flying tightly in formation.

  As the planes rose aloft, clouds pressed around them—an armada of 469 Lancaster heavy bombers, 234 Halifaxes, and 50 Stirlings, all escorted by a jewel of the RAF, 11 stunningly fast Mosquitos, made almost entirely of lightweight wood. After crossing the English Channel, they flew low to evade German radar. Within thirty minutes they had sliced across the upper regions of the Netherlands before going over the terraced plateaus of the Harz Mountains on their way deep into German airspace. They already knew what awaited them. November 22–23 had been the second mission and the fourth night of the Battle of Berlin, a concerted air campaign of sixteen raids against the nerve center of the Nazi state. In conjunction with the evening before, these would soon prove to be the most devastating raids of the war on the German capital.

  Berlin itself was like an impenetrable fortress, the most heavily defended city in the Third Reich. It had a state-of-the-art network of air defenses, including three concrete flak towers—the deadly flak burst into razor-sharp shrapnel that shredded planes open, cutting through their aluminum underbellies like a hot knife through butter. Berlin also had a ring of highly accurate 88-millimeter guns, and a command center located in, of all places, the zoo. Searchlights combed the skies around the capital, and noisy smoke generators sent up foul, billowing puffs to obscure the city during times of attack. There was even camouflage netting strung between buildings, making it difficult for pilots, gunners, and bombardiers to identify individual streets.

  Yet any calm that the German people may have felt within these meticulous defenses had been rudely shattered since July, when the city of Hamburg had been hit by a series of concentrated American and British raids. An ensuing firestorm had raced through the ancient Hanseatic port, Hitler’s gateway to the world, where most of the homes were made of timber. The fire soon became insatiable. The flames scaled walls and rooftops, and quickly spread block by block, consuming everything in their path. One woman reported that entire districts had been “engulfed in a sea of flames”; she did not overstate. Within four days the Allies had killed some forty-three thousand civilians and half of Hamburg had been laid waste. The result was chaos. Traumatized refugees were sent through Berlin to the relative safety of the east. It was a futile gesture. Soon Berliners themselves were desperate to get out of the city before the Allied bombers arrived.

  On November 18, the bombers had appeared with a vengeance.

  This time the Allied forces, in a convoy stretching miles across the sky, prepared to concentrate their attacks in the western districts of the city. Passing south of the northern European plains, they swung northeast across the forests along the Elbe. When they were fifty miles away from Berlin, the bombers, as usual, observed radio silence to preserve the element of surprise, and quietly began picking their targets. Flying at an altitude of ten thousand feet, where the oxygen noticeably thinned and the air became icy, the Lancasters approached the city’s outskirts, preparing to drop seven thousand pounds of bombs. The bomb bays were opened; there was a high-pitched whistle as the missiles fell, then a series of thunderous booms as they hit their targets, followed by a cascade of mushroom clouds spiking up into the sky. As one bombardier later jubilantly recounted, he cheered when his plane released its explosive cargo. “This,” he noted, “was Hitler’s town!”

  On the ground below, the city itself shook. All across the capital, walls began to crack and break. Streets were abruptly filled with flying bricks and broken glass. The air was split with the sounds of doors being ripped off their hinges, windows shattering, and whole structures collapsing, crushed like paper bags. Above, the flashes from the explosions were so intense that the cockpits of the bombers were filled with a vivid, almost blinding yellow-orange light, as if the pilots were flying directly into the sun. Then, just as rapidly, they were plunged back into darkness. As the antiaircraft defenses launched their counterattacks, the Allied pilots had to fly through enemy artillery fire, ubiquitous flak, explosions from the ground, and dense black smoke. Each minute that the raid continued, Allied losses escalated. A number of crewmembers, including pilots, were hit by flak or by German machine-gun fire, or were disabled by frostbite—some had urinated in their jumpsuits during the stress of combat, and at the high altitudes in unheated cockpits the liquid froze. Eventually, the German flak crisscrossing the sky seemed thick enough to walk on; with nowhere to escape, some planes simply became balls of fire.

  But in the city beneath, Berliners were stunned by the sheer vehemence of the raids. On many streets, the fires were so bright that one could have mistaken night for day. As the bluish smoke curled upward from the windows of stricken buildings, people began to fear that they would be buried alive or killed by the falling bombs, and to wonder if their corpses would even be recovered. Those who could do so hastily made their way to the public bunkers. Many, however, couldn’t. With sirens wailing and the sky lit up with showers of antiaircra
ft fire, people began to scramble for safety, and in their desperation they were soon pushing and shoving and trampling one another to death.

  For the Berliners, there would be no respite. The planes kept coming; the raids and the ensuing carnage lasted for hours. Residents could hear the ominous forward march of aircraft and bombs as the explosions crossed the city, each seeming a bit louder, a bit closer, and a bit more intense than the one before. “Everywhere it is still burning,” one Berliner wrote in desperation. “Ruins are constantly collapsing.” The inferno was indiscriminate. Even the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels confessed, “What I saw was truly shattering.” Terrified residents staggered through the streets, faces wrapped in scarves, coughing as they wound their way through collapsed walls and shattered glass and clouds of dust. Everywhere, there were mounds of smoking rubble, leaking water pipes, and wrecked trams. Everywhere, the atmosphere was thick with heated air and the odor of smoke and charred brick.

  Everywhere, the Allied planes were overhead.

  Entire streets ceased to exist. The diplomatic quarter was burned out. The railway stations were badly hit. So were the arsenal and the Academy of Music. The whole Tiergarten quarter, with its elegant mansions, a 630-acre park, and the German War Ministry, was destroyed. As the smoke rose skyward, the list of devastated targets included the State Opera, the German Theater, the National Gallery, the Hotel Bristol, the Charity Hospital, the City Hospital, the Maternity Hospital, and the historic Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. It also included the Iranian, Italian, French, and Slovak embassies, and the Potsdam train station. Most humiliating of all to the Germans was the fact that the Ministry of Weapons and Munitions was severely damaged, as were the Waffen SS administrative college and the barracks of the Imperial Guard. Some residents watched in dumb horror as others hysterically pushed and shoved and squeezed themselves into the bunker inside the zoo. Meanwhile, at the S-Bahn, more people were screaming on the railway platforms or inside the trains or simply wandering aimlessly in shock. It was the suburbs, however, that were hit worst. They lost electricity and telephone service. And there were the ghastly sights of people being buried alive, and of charred, crackling bodies, shrunken to the size of small children, and of corpses littering the roads.