The Holocaust

by Martin Gilbert

  The Jews who had been sent to the right were taken out of Nowogrodek to the tiny suburb of Pereshike, whose twenty-two houses had now to accommodate two thousand people. First, the Germans drove out the Polish and White Russian inhabitants of the houses. Then they built a fence around the area. More than eighteen Jewish families were forced into each room, and two labour groups created, one skilled and one unskilled. The skilled were put in workshops where they made gloves, boots and other items of clothing for the German army.64

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  In the General Government of Poland, and in Western Europe, it was not the massacres in a nearby ravine, as at Nowogrodek, but deportation to distant sites, as far as a thousand miles away, that was emerging as the plan: with gassing, not shooting, as the method of death.

  The authorities in Berlin had begun the process needed to implement this ‘final solution’. On November 19, when the German Foreign Ministry raised with Eichmann the request of Flora Bucher to leave Germany, in order to join her mother at Gurs camp in the French Pyrenees, Eichmann replied, as he had done in a similar case three weeks earlier, using the same words as before: ‘In view of the forthcoming final solution of the problem of European Jewry, one has to prevent the immigration of this Jewess into the unoccupied zone of France.’65

  THE NOWOGRODEK REGION

  On November 24, five days after Eichmann wrote this letter, a ghetto was set up in the eighteenth-century fortress of the Bohemian town of Theresienstadt, to which Jews were to be sent from throughout the Old Reich, and in particular from Vienna, Prague and Berlin. Uprooted from their homes, penniless, deprived of their belongings, ill-fed, overcrowded, thirty-two thousand were to die there of hunger and disease.66 Many of the deportees to Theresienstadt were to be old people. But that November morning it was 342 young men who were brought, from Prague, to work at a construction camp, preparing Theresienstadt for its new occupants.67

  The first deportees reached Theresienstadt on November 30, from Prague. They consisted mostly of women, children and old people. A second train arrived on December 2, from Brno.68

  Neither deportation to the eastern ghettos nor deportation to Theresienstadt was the ‘final solution’. That was still being prepared, brought one step nearer that October, at Buchenwald, when twelve hundred Jews had been medically examined by Dr Fritz Mennecke, a euthanasia expert, and then subjected to ‘Action 14 f 13’ in a clinic at Bernburg, one hundred miles away.69 ‘Action 14 f 13’ was death by gassing: a method in use since 1939 in the mass murder of tens of thousands of mentally defective Germans in more than a dozen special institutions.

  The origin of the euthanasia killings of 1939, as of these subsequent killings, was an order issued by Hitler, backdated to 1 September 1939, the day of the German invasion of Poland. In this order, Hitler empowered the chief of his Chancellery, as well as his own personal physician, ‘to widen the authority of individual doctors with a view to enabling them, after the most critical examination, in the realm of human knowledge, to administer incurably sick persons to a mercy death’.70 The qualifying phrases had quickly been abandoned. In Germany, the chief of the Criminal Police Office in Stuttgart, Christian Wirth, an expert in tracking down criminals—took charge of the technical side of a more ‘humane’ method of killing, constructing gas-chambers in which the victim was exposed to carbon monoxide gas, ‘a device’, one SS officer later explained, ‘which overwhelmed its victims without their apprehension and which caused them no pain’.71

  Between January 1940 and August 1941, more than seventy thousand Germans had been killed by gas in five separate euthanasia institutions, by what was called sonderbehandlung, ‘special treatment’. The principal victims were the chronically sick, gypsies, people judged ‘unworthy of life’ because of mental disorders, and, after June 1941, Soviet prisoners-of-war.

  On 3 September 1941, at Auschwitz Main Camp, hitherto used principally for the imprisonment and torture of Polish opponents of Nazism, an experiment had been carried out against six hundred Soviet prisoners-of-war, and three hundred Jews, brought specially to the camp. There, in the cellar of Block II, a gas called Cyclon B, prussic acid initially in crystal form, was used to murder the chosen victims. The experiment was judged a success.72

  At Buchenwald, Dr Mennecke had continued with his own experiments. ‘Our second batch’, he wrote to his wife Mathilde on November 25 from the Zum Elefant hotel in nearby Weimar, ‘consisted of 1,200 Jews who do not have to be “examined”; for them it was enough to pull from their files the reasons for their arrest and write them down on the questionnaires.’73

  Five days after Dr Mennecke’s second experimental selection at Buchenwald, Reinhard Heydrich decided that, considering ‘the enormous importance which had to be given to these questions’, and in the interest ‘of achieving the same point of view by the central agencies concerned with the remaining work connected with the final solution’, that a ‘joint conversation’ should be held by all concerned. Such a discussion was especially needed, he wrote on November 29, ‘since Jews have been undergoing evacuation in continuous transports from the Reich territory, including Bohemia and Moravia, to the East, since 15 October 1941’.74

  Heydrich’s conference was called for 2 January 1942. Before it met, one further experiment was to be tried, near the remote Polish village of Chelmno. There, on the evening of 7 December 1941, seven hundred Jews arrived in lorries. They had come from the nearby town of Kolo, having been told that they were being taken to a railway station at Barlogi, ten kilometres from Kolo, and thence to work in ‘the East’.

  Michael Podklebnik, one of the Jews assembled by the SS at the Jewish Council building in Kolo, but himself registered as a resident of nearby Bugaj, later recalled how ‘I brought to the lorry my own father, my mother, sister with five children, my brother and his wife and three children. I volunteered to go with them, but was not allowed.’ Podklebnik also saw how a Jew by the name of Goldberg, the owner of a saw-mill, ‘approached the Germans with a request to be appointed manager of a Jewish camp in the East. His application was accepted and he was promised the requested position.75

  It was not to Barlogi railway station, however, but to a small villa known as the ‘Palace’ or the ‘Mansion’, on the road to Chelmno, that the seven hundred Kolo deportees were brought; and kept there overnight.

  On the following morning, December 8, eighty of the Kolo Jews were transferred to a special van. The van set off towards a clearing in the Chelmno woods, a few miles away, on the River Ner. By the time the journey was over, the eighty Jews were dead, gassed by exhaust fumes channelled back into the van. Their bodies were thrown out of the back of the van, and it returned to the Mansion. After eight or nine journeys, all seven hundred Jews from this first day’s deportation from Kolo had been gassed.76

  For four more days, until December 11, the lorries came to Kolo. Each day up to a thousand Jews were deported, as they believed, to the ‘East’ to agricultural work, or to work in factories. Michael Podklebnik later recalled how, on the last day, when it was the turn of the sick Jews of Kolo to be deported, the drivers were advised ‘to drive carefully and slowly’.77 All went to Chelmno, the sick and the able-bodied alike, men and women; and all were gassed there on the morning after their arrival. The new scheme was now in being: the deportation of whole communities ‘to work’ in the so-called ‘East’, a deception which was followed by the immediate murder of the community by gas.

  ***

  On 7 December 1941, as the first seven hundred Jews were being deported to the death camp at Chelmno, Japanese aircraft attacked the United States Fleet at Pearl Harbor. Unknown at the time either to the Allies or to the Jews of Europe, Roosevelt’s day that would ‘live in infamy’ was also the first day of the ‘final solution’.

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  The ‘final solution’

  The news of Pearl Harbor reached the Jews of German-occupied Europe within forty-eight hours. ‘Most people believe that the war will not last lo
ng now,’ Mary Berg noted in her Warsaw diary on 9 December 1941, ‘and that the Allies’ victory is certain.’ America’s entry into the war, she added, ‘has inspired the hundreds of thousands of dejected Jews in the ghetto with a new breath of hope’.1

  This hope was tragically misplaced, On December 10, just over one thousand Jews who had been deported from seven villages to the ‘rural’ ghetto at Kowale Panskie were deported yet again, to Chelmno, to be pushed into the vans which had carried the Jews of Kolo to their death.2 Four days later, on December 14, all 975 Jews from the nearby riverside village of Dabie were likewise driven to Chelmno, kept overnight in the Palace, and gassed in the vans on the morning of December 15.

  The Einsatzkommando killings also continued unabated: 14,300 Jews were murdered in the Crimean city of Simferopol on December 13, 14 and 15.

  None of this was known in the Warsaw ghetto, beset by its own troubles, starvation, executions and random shootings. On December 14, Ringelblum recorded, at a Jewish funeral, a German policeman ‘suddenly, without warning, began shooting at the funeral procession’. Two of the mourners, Ringelblum noted, ‘fell dead on the spot’, one of them ‘Mrs Runda, the director of the old people’s home’. Five Jews, including a child of ten, were wounded. ‘Jews have no peace,’ Ringelblum commented, ‘even when accompanying their dead to eternal rest.’3 In Paris, on the following day, more than forty Polish-born Jews were shot for resistance, among them Nysin Alterleib, Simon Nadel and Israel Bursztyn, each of whom had been born in Warsaw forty-five years before, and the twenty-five-year-old Albert Borenheim, also born in Warsaw.4

  December 15, the day of these executions in Paris, marked the first day of the Jewish festival of Chanukkah, during the eight days of which Jews recall the triumph of the Maccabees more than two thousand years earlier. That same morning, in Warsaw, fifteen Jews were shot to death in the courtyard of the ghetto prison, ‘within earshot’, Chaim Kaplan noted, ‘of thousands of people’. His account continued:

  The cries of the victims in the prison courtyard were heard by the throng outside. Rage and frustration turned into mass weeping. Other prisoners locked inside the prison began to shout and beat their heads against the walls. There is nothing more nerve-shattering than the concerted weeping of a great crowd. The wailing at this hour in history was an echo of the weeping and lamentation decreed upon the generations of the people of Israel. It was a protest against the loss of our human rights. The sentence was carried out by Polish policemen in the presence of rabbis and other representatives of the Jews. The Poles fired the shots—and they too wept. They had been given no choice either.5

  In the East, the Einsatzkommando continued its work throughout December. After the Channukah festival, it was the Jews in one of the smallest ghettos, that in Radom, near Lida, who were its target. Avraham Aviel was a witness to what occurred:

  …suddenly a group of Germans arrived. They wore special uniforms and came from Lida. They were on motorcycles. They went from house to house and were searching for people who were not local residents. And they did find about forty Jewish refugees who had been living for quite some time in Radom. They took them outside of town, up on a hill about one and a half kilometers out of the town. We heard shots immediately. Thereupon a few moments later they returned and gave instructions that we had to go out and bury these men. I was among these people. We had been living at the edge of the ghetto near the hill. We were driven out there and we buried these bodies. That was the first time I had ever seen so much Jewish blood spilled. It was very cold then. There was frost. The ground was frozen….6

  In Riga, a forty-year-old Latvian, Yanis Lipke, who worked as a loader in the German air force storehouse in the city, was charged by the Germans to take a group of Jews from the ghetto each morning to the storehouse, and to supervise their work. Outraged by the massacres he had witnessed in the first weeks of the German occupation, Lipke was determined to find ways of helping as many Jews as possible. During his daily journey into the ghetto, he would smuggle in food and medicine. He also befriended two Latvian drivers, working for the German air force, Karl Yankovsky and Janis Briedys, with whom he planned to rescue as many Jews as possible from the ghetto.

  On December 15, with the help of Briedys, Lipke smuggled ten Jews out of the ghetto, finding them hiding places in the cellars of houses belonging to his friends, and hiding four Jews in his own house.

  When a further six Jews were smuggled out of the ghetto, Lipke took three of them to his home. It was then that he decided to build a special hiding place underneath a shed near his house. Bringing logs and cement, and building a henhouse above the entrance to the hide-out, Lipke built a secure haven, helped in his task by his wife Iohanna and their eldest son, Alfred.7

  Each week, more Jews reached Riga from the Reich. One of the arrivals in December was Joseph Carlebach, the Chief Rabbi of Hamburg and Altona. Among the deportees on the same train was Josef Katz, a twenty-three-year-old Jew from Lubeck, who later recalled:

  A tall, thin man with a long, flowing beard stands before SS Major Lange and the other SS officers. With his furrowed face and stooped back, he looks like one of the Jewish patriarchs of old. It seems as if the whole burden of the past centuries were resting on his shoulders.

  ‘Stand up straight, buddy, when I’m talking to you,’ the Major tells him sharply. ‘What’s your occupation?’

  ‘Chief Rabbi,’ the Jew says clearly and proudly, eyeing the Major from top to bottom.

  ‘Ha, ha, ha! Chief Rabbi! Just see you don’t open up shop here again. You hear, Chief Rabbi?’

  No reply comes from the lips of the Jew.

  ‘Did you hear me, Judas?’

  Still no reply.

  Suddenly the SS Lieutenant-Colonel reaches out and strikes the Chief Rabbi full in the face with his fist.8

  In the Lodz ghetto, Jewish doctors worked in a special Gypsy section which had been attached to the ghetto, and into which several thousand German, Austrian and Czech Gypsies had been deported. One of these doctors, Dr Dubski, himself a recent deportee from Prague, died on December 17 while performing a consultation in the Gypsy camp. Dubski died of the spotted typhus which he was trying to treat.9 A second Jewish doctor, Karol Boetim, also from Prague, died on December 29 of spotted typhus, likewise contracted while he was working in the Gypsy camp.10 A third doctor then drew his turn by lot to replace Dr Boetim. The third doctor was the thirty-two-year-old Aron Nikelburg, a paediatrician, who had completed his studies in Berlin before returning to Poland to practise in Warsaw. He was one of thirteen doctors brought from Warsaw to Lodz in May 1941 by Chaim Rumkowski, the Eldest of the Lodz ghetto. Dr Nikelburg died of typhus on 26 January 1942, ‘the latest victim’, the Chronicle noted, ‘of his own profession’.11

  Among the German, Czech and Austrian Jews who had been deported to the Lodz ghetto were 250 who were only Jews according to Nazi designation. Although of Jewish birth, all 250 were baptized Christians. On Christmas Eve they held two services, one for Catholics and the other for Protestants. The Catholic service, attended by forty people, was conducted by Sister Maria Regina Fuhrmann, a Carmelite nun from Vienna, and a Master of Theology. Two Catholic priests, both Jews by birth, were among those at the service.12

  Since November 1941, the German authorities in Lodz had instituted a Jewish postal service, for postcards to be sent out of the ghetto. Hundreds of cards were written by the dwellers of the ghetto, addressed to relatives and friends in Poland and Czechoslovakia. For seven months, until it was suspended on 5 June 1942, this postal service gave those in the ghetto a sense of security, of a link with the outside world. Most of the cards which have survived never left the ghetto: on them are overprinted messages which indicate that the Germans did not want them to reach their destination. These overprints read: ‘Write legibly!’ ‘dirty!’ ‘Not understandable’, or ‘Hebrew, Yiddish language not allowed’.13

  Some cards, however, did reach their destination. Oskar and Paula Stein, who had been deported from
Prague to Lodz in October 1941, wrote three cards to a relative in Prague. Each card reached its destination. ‘Send us as often as possible’, one message read, ‘the maximum permitted amount, because we need money most urgently.’ One of the cards sent to the Steins, however, was sent back to Prague with the rubber stamp notation: ‘Return. At the moment there is no mail delivery on the addressee’s street.’14

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  The discussion planned by Heydrich for January 2 had been postponed because of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and Germany’s declaration of war on the United States. One of those who would be sending a delegate to Heydrich’s discussion was Hans Frank. On December 16, in Cracow, he explained to his Cabinet the reason for this Berlin meeting. ‘I want to tell you quite frankly,’ he began, ‘the Jews must be done away with in one way or another.’ The war would only be a ‘partial success’, he said, ‘if the Jewish clan survived it’, and he reminded his Cabinet of Hitler’s words in January 1939: ‘Should united Jewry again succeed in provoking a world war, not only will the nations forced into the war by them shed their blood, but the Jew will have found his end in Europe.’

  Frank, who had recently visited Berlin, told his colleagues that a ‘great discussion’ would take place at the meeting in January, as a result of which ‘a great Jewish migration will begin, in any case’. His remarks continued:

  But what should be done with the Jews? Do you think they will be settled in the Ostland, in villages? We were told in Berlin: ‘Why all this bother? We can do nothing with them either in the Ostland or in the Reichskommissariat. So liquidate them yourselves’.

  Gentlemen, I must ask you to rid yourself of all feelings of pity. We must annihilate the Jews wherever we find them and wherever it is possible, in order to maintain here the integral structure of the Reich.15