The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (100 page)

No Jewish community in the Aegean was forgotten, not even the smallest. Most of the Jews of the Greek islands were arrested in the course of July 1944. On July 23 the 1,750 Jews of Rhodes and the 96 Jews of the tiny island of Kos were rounded up, crammed into three barges, on their way to the mainland. Due to bad weather the transport left on the twenty-eighth, sailing in full view of the Turkish coast, within a short flying distance of the British airfields in Cyprus and through an area of the eastern Mediterranean fully controlled by the British navy. On August 1 the convoy reached mainland Greece. There 1,673 Jews from Rhodes and 94 from Kos who had survived the sea voyage and rough treatment on arrival were herded into the usual freight cars, and on August 16 they reached Auschwitz. One hundred fifty-one deportees from Rhodes survived the war, as did twelve Jews from Kos.
⁴⁰

III

The Wehrmacht occupied Hungary on March 19, 1944. On the previous day Horthy had met Hitler at Klessheim. Under threat of unilateral military action, the Nazi leader compelled the regent to accept the German occupation and set up a pro-German government.
⁴¹
Hitler also demanded that some 100,000 Jews be delivered “for labor” in Germany. Horthy submitted. The train that took the regent back to Budapest carried another prominent passenger: Edmund Veesenmayer, Hitler’s special delegate to the new Hungarian government. On that same day, Eichmann also arrived in the Hungarian capital, soon followed by the members of his “special intervention unit Hungary” (
Sondereinsatzkommando Ungarn
).

The appointment of Döme Sztójay, the former ambassador to Berlin, as prime minister did not lead to major changes in the political structure of the cabinet or in the functioning of the existing administration, although in a meeting with Goebbels, on March 3, Hitler told his minister that the occupation of Hungary would be followed by an immediate disarming of the Hungarian military forces, as well as by a rapid move against the country’s aristocratic elites—and against the Jews.
⁴²
The anti-Jewish measures were indeed immediately launched.

A Jewish Council was set up on March 12; additional anti-Semitic legislation followed, including the introduction of the star, on April 7. The appointment of two violently anti-Semitic secretaries of state, Laszlo Endre and Laszlo Baky, in Andor Jaross’s Ministry of the Interior gave the Germans all the assistance they needed to round up the Jewish population. On April 7 the roundups started in the Hungarian provinces, with the enthusiastic cooperation of the Hungarian gendarmerie. Within less than a month, ghettos or camps for hundreds of thousands of Jews sprang up in Carpatho-Ruthenia, in Transylvania, and later in the southern part of the country.
⁴³

The furious pace of the German-Hungarian operation ensured the quasi-total success of the concentration phase. One may wonder, however, whether the attitude adopted by the Jewish Council did not, more than in most other places, add to the passivity and subservience of the Jewish masses. The council was well informed, and so were many Hungarian Jews, especially in Budapest. Returning members of the labor batallions, Hungarian soldiers back from the Eastern Front, Jewish refugees from Poland and Slovakia spread the information they had gathered about the mass extermination of Jews, as did the Hungarian services of the BBC. Moreover, on April 7, two Slovak Jews, Rudolf Vrba (Walter Rosenberg) and Alfred Wetzler, escaped from Auschwitz and on the twenty-first reached Slovakia. Within days they had written a detailed report about the extermination process in the Upper Silesian camp and delivered it to the “Working Group” in Bratislava. These “Auschwitz Protocols” reached Switzerland and the Allied countries; large excerpts were soon published in the Swiss and the American press. To this day, however, it isn’t exactly clear how long it took for the report to reach the Jewish Council in Budapest.

Vrba himself expressed the view that the “Working Group” did not act rapidly enough and that, once it received the report, the council kept the information to itself; thus the Jews of the Hungarian provinces were not warned against boarding the trains to Auschwitz. Yehuda Bauer has countered Vrba’s accusation: The report may have reached Budapest and the council as early as the end of April;
⁴⁴
but nothing could have been done in any case to stop the masses of Jews in the provinces from following the deportation orders.
⁴⁵
In fact the Budapest council members admitted after the war to having had precise knowledge of what was happening to the Jews all over occupied Europe and, in that sense, whether they received the “protocols” at the end of April or at a somewhat later date was not of major importance.
⁴⁶

The Budapest council, headed by Samu (Samuel) Stern, included representatives of all the major religious and political groups of the community. It may have assumed that any warning to Jews of the provinces would be useless. Possibly for that reason and because the council members were utterly assimilated, law-abiding Magyar citizens, the council made no attempt to inform the heads of communities in the provinces covertly;
⁴⁷
its announcements were soothing all along, as if the Budapest leaders mainly wanted to avoid panic among the hapless Jewish masses. The council’s attitude did not change after two more Jews, Czeslaw Mordowicz and Arnost Rosin, escaped from Auschwitz at the end of April and confirmed the previous information. Some of the council members, such as the Orthodox Fülöp Freudiger, were in close touch with Wisliceny (on Weissmandel’s recommendation) and succeeded in saving themselves, members of their family, and some other closely related Orthodox Jews by crossing over to Romania.
⁴⁸
Others, after being threatened by the Gestapo, went into hiding.
⁴⁹

Almost from the outset of the German occupation several thousand Jews, mostly public figures, journalists, known antifascists, and the like, were seized and sent to concentration camps in Austria.
⁵⁰
On May 14 the full-scale deportations from the Hungarian provinces to Auschwitz started, at the rate of approximately 12,000 to 14,000 deportees a day. Hungarian trains ran to the Slovak border; there the deportees were transferred to German trains that carried them to Auschwitz. The crematoriums of Birkenau could not keep up with the gassing pace, and open-air cremation pits had to be added.

According to SS officer Perry Broad’s testimony at the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt, “a triple track railway line leading to the new crematoria enabled a train to be unloaded while the next one was arriving. The percentage of those who were assigned to ‘special accommodation’—the term that had been used for some time in place of ‘special treatment’—was particularly high in the case of these transports…. All four crematoria operated at full blast. However, soon the ovens were burnt out as a result of the continuous heavy use and only crematorium No. III was still smoking…. The special commandos had been increased and worked feverishly to keep emptying the gas chambers. The ‘white farmhouse’ was brought back into use…. It was given the title ‘Bunker 5.’…The last body had hardly been pulled from the gas chambers and dragged across the yard behind the crematorium, which was covered in corpses, to the burning pit, when the next lot were already undressing in the hall ready for gassing.”
⁵¹

Paul Steinberg, a young Jewish deportee from France, described the situation from his perspective, that of a Buna inmate. In the background a discussion was taking place about the advantages of an uprising as against staying put, just after D-day: “And while this strange debate is going on,” Steinberg reminisced, “the Hungarians arrive, whole trainloads of them, two or three a day…. Almost all transports wind up in the gas chamber: men, women, children. The labor camps are stuffed to bursting; they wouldn’t know what to do with more workers…. The crematoria are going full bore around the clock. We hear from Birkenau that they’ve burned 3,000, then 3,500, and last week up to 4,000 bodies a day. The new Sonderkommando had been doubled to keep everything running smoothly between the gas chambers and the ovens, day and night. From the chimneys flames shoot thirty feet into the air, visible for leagues around at night, and the oppressive stench of burnt flesh can be smelt as far as Buna.”
⁵²
Höss himself described the cremation in the open pits: “The fires in the pits had to be stoked, the surplus fat drained off, and the mountain of burning corpses constantly turned over so that the draught might fan the flames.”
⁵³

In Buna, Steinberg had merely heard some details of the mass extermination, but a few of the Hungarian Jews did in fact arrive at the I.G. Farben site. One of them, unforgettably evoked by Levi, was called Kraus: “He is Hungarian, he understands German badly and does not know a word of French. He is tall and thin, wears glasses and has a curious, small, twisted face; when he laughs he looks like a child, and he often laughs.”
⁵⁴
Kraus is clumsy, works too hard, cannot communicate, in short has none of the attributes that may help survival, even in Buna. Levi talks to Kraus very slowly in some pidgin German; he tries to comfort him; he invents a dream about Kraus returning home to his family; Kraus must have understood something of this idyllic fantasy: “What a good boy Kraus must have been as a civilian,” Levi muses. “He will not survive very long here, one can see it at a first glance, it is as logical as a theorem. I am sorry I do not know Hungarian, for his emotion has broken the dykes, and he is breaking out in a flood of outlandish Magyar words…. Poor silly Kraus. If he only knew that it is not true, that I have really dreamt nothing about him, that he is nothing to me except for a brief moment, nothing like everything is nothing down here, except the hunger inside and the cold and the rain around.”
⁵⁵

Soon after the beginning of the deportations, pressure from within the country, particularly from Horthy’s longtime conservative political allies and from his closest circle of advisers, started building up to bring a halt to cooperation with the German deportations.
⁵⁶
That in this matter at least the regent wished to extricate Hungary from Hitler’s clutches finds an indirect expression in the conversation which took place on June 7 (after the Allied landing in Normandy) between Prime Minister Sztójay and the Nazi leader, at Klessheim.

The Hungarian prime minister started by assuring the Führer of the regent’s and the country’s will to fight on faithfully alongside the German ally; yet the activities of the German state police in Hungary could give the impression of interference in the country’s internal affairs and of a limitation of its sovereignty. Hitler did not need any further explanations. He answered by reminding the prime minister that during the previous year he had already pressed the regent to take steps against the Jews but unfortunately Horthy had not followed his advice; he then reviewed Hungarian attempts to change sides and, implicitly, linked them to the strong presence of the Jews. The regent, Hitler continued, had been warned about the dimensions of the country’s “Jewification” but had dismissed the warnings by referring to the important role played by the Jews in Hungary’s economy. The Führer then explained at length that eliminating the Jews would only bring new opportunities that the Hungarians would undoubtedly be able to master. “Moreover,” he declared, “even as Horthy tried to stroke the Jews, the Jews nonetheless hated him, as could be daily surmised from the world press.” The conclusion was obvious: The Germans were not limiting Hungarian sovereignty but rather defending Hungary against the Jews and the agents of the Jews.

As Sztójay turned to the internal difficulties that had hindered Horthy’s intended measures against the Jews, and also mentioned Horthy’s age (seventy-five), Hitler did not show any sign of understanding. Horthy, the Führer declared, is a man who shies away from violence; so did he, Hitler, try to avoid the war by offering a compromise about the Polish corridor. But, Hitler reminded Sztójay, the Jewish press clamored for war and he then warned the Jews, in his Reichstag speech: The Nazi leader, needless to say, spelled out his prophecy once again. Then he significantly added: “When, moreover, he had to remember that in Hamburg 46,000 German women and children had been burnt to death, nobody could demand of him to have the least pity for this world pest; he now went by the ancient Jewish proverb: ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’…If the Jewish race were to win, at least 30 million Germans would be exterminated and many millions would starve to death.”
⁵⁷

Toward the end of June international intervention strengthened internal Hungarian opposition to continuing the deportations: the king of Sweden, the pope, the American president—all intervened with the regent. On July 2 a heavy American raid on Budapest emphasized Roosevelt’s message.
⁵⁸
Horthy vacillated, ready to comply with these demands, yet unable for several weeks to impose his will on the pro-Nazi members of his government.
⁵⁹
Finally, on July 8, the deportations were officially stopped. Nonetheless, Eichmann succeeded in getting two more transports out of country to Auschwitz, the first from the Kistarcsa camp on July 19, the second from Starvar, on July 24.
⁶⁰

According to a report sent by Veesenmayer on June 30, a total of 381,661 Jews had been deported to Auschwitz from Zones I to IV in the Hungarian provinces. “Concentration in Zone V (an area so far not included, west of the Danube, not comprising Budapest),” Veesenmayer added, “has started on June 29. Simultaneously small special actions in suburbs of Budapest as preparatory measures have been launched. Furthermore a few small special transports with political Jews, intellectual Jews, Jews with many children and especially skilled Jewish workers are still on the way.”
⁶¹
When, on July 9, the deportations from the Hungarian provinces finally stopped, 438,000 Jews had been sent to Auschwitz and approximately 394,000 immediately exterminated. Of those selected for work, very few were still alive at the end of the war.
⁶²
In Budapest about 250,000 Jews were still awaiting their fate.