The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (104 page)

On September 27, 1944, Paul Eppstein was arrested on the trumped-up charge of attempting to escape. He was brought to the small fortress and executed.
¹²²
The inmates of Theresienstadt were now led by the last of the three elders, the Viennese Murmelstein: He remained a controversial figure, notwithstanding his postwar judicial rehabilitation. When he died in Rome in 1989, the chief rabbi of the city did not allow his burial next to his wife, but only at the outer limit of the Jewish graveyard, a symbolic rejection.
¹²³
In the camp Murmelstein’s German protagonist was the ex-“curator” of the Prague Jewish museum, SS commandant Karl Rahm.

In the autumn of 1944 a second film was shot in Theresienstadt, this time by Kurt Gerron. Gerron was a well-known Jewish actor, director, and overall Weimar star performer, who had been deported to Theresienstadt from Holland. It presented Theresienstadt as a happy resort town, complete with parks, swimming pools, soccer tournaments, schools, and endless cultural activities (concerts, theater, and so on); it featured “happy faces” all around. Completed in November 1944, this second hoax on a grand scale, titled
Theresienstadt: A Documentary from the Jewish Settlement Area
—and not, as is often mentioned,
The Führer Gives a Town to the Jews
(an ironic title made up by the inmates themselves)—was never shown in public. Gerron left Theresienstadt on the last transport to Auschwitz and was gassed on arrival.
¹²⁴

In April 1945, after some further improvement work, a second ICRC delegation visited the camp, once more in the company of a vast SS retinue that included Adolf Eichmann. Once again the Geneva delegates were satisfied: In their report Theresienstadt became a “small Jewish state.” Incidentally they were the only audience to see Gerron’s film; even they found it “slightly too propagandistic.”
¹²⁵

There was no armed uprising in Theresienstadt, although it seems that the Germans took such a possibility into account in the fall of 1944, after the events in Treblinka and Sobibor, and the desperate and immediately-beaten-down rebellion of the Auschwitz
Sonderkommando
Jews in October. Thus, mainly young people boarded the transports to Auschwitz during the deportations of those months.
¹²⁶

There was no lack of defiance in the ghetto-camp, however, some of it quite open. The performance of Verdi’s
Requiem
, with its
Dies Irae
and particularly its
Libera me
, was meant as a powerful message. The conductor, Raphael Schächter, had assembled a very large choir, soloists, and a sizable orchestra. The first performance took place at the end of the summer of 1944. Schächter reworked the
Libera me
, too tame in its original rendition, “giving to those final words the Beethoven victory code: three short notes, one long.” Whether or not Eichmann sat in the audience, as he was in the camp to bestow a medal on Rahm in Himmler’s name, is unclear. Be that as it may, on September 28, on the morrow of the final performance (during which they already knew of their deportation), the members of the choir, the soloists and the orchestra boarded the transport for Auschwitz.
¹²⁷

Throughout October eleven transports followed the September 28 one, leaving 11,077 Jews in the camp, which, in mid-September, still had had a population of 29,481 detainees. As deportees from Slovakia, the Protectorate, and the Reich (mainly
Mischlinge
and mixed couples) trickled in over the following months, the number of inmates grew again to some 30,000 (in the meantime a first transport of some 1,200 detainees was sent to Switzerland following negotiations between Himmler and the former Swiss president, Jean-Marie Musy, which we will discuss further on). In February 1945 Rahm ordered the building of two sites, a vast hall whose doors closed hermetically, and a covered pit of huge proportions: Both sites could have been used to exterminate the entire Jewish population on the spot, had the decision been taken to liquidate the camp before the arrival of the Soviet forces. The detainees were ultimately spared: 141,184 Jews had at one time or another been sent to Theresienstadt; at the end of the war, 16,832 were still alive.
¹²⁸

The final entry in Redlich’s diary, dated October 6, 1944, was part of the “Diary of Dan” [the name of his newborn son], in which he commented on events by addressing his infant child: “Tomorrow, we travel, my son. We will travel on a transport like thousands before us. As usual, we did not register for this transport. They put us in without a reason. But never mind, my son, it is nothing. All of our family already left in the last weeks. Your uncle went, your aunt, and also your beloved grandmother…. Parting with her was especially difficult. We hope to see her there.

“It seems they want to eliminate the ghetto and leave only the elderly and people of mixed origin. In our generation, the enemy is not only cruel but also full of cunning and malice. They promise [something] but do not fulfill their promise. They send small children, and their prams are left here. Separated families. On one transport a father goes. On another, a son. On a third, the mother. “Tomorrow, we go too, my son. Hopefully, the time of our redemption is near.”
¹²⁹

For Redlich sending the child and leaving the pram behind meant death. On the eve of his deportation he had exchanged food to get a pram for his son. He was authorized to take it along. This, in his mind, allowed for optimism. To his friend Willy Groag, Redlich said: “Why else would they permit us to take a baby carriage with us?”
¹³⁰
Redlich and his infant son, Dan, were murdered on arrival. Dan’s pram, with tens of thousands of other baby carriages, probably found its way to the Reich.

After her arrest in Kassel, in August 1943, Lilli Jahn, the physician from Immenhausen, was sent to a “corrective labor camp” in Breitenau. Such relatively mild treatment (non-Jewish inmates, the majority, were often liberated after a few weeks of detention) may have been due at first to Lilli’s five
mischling
children or to the intervention of her former husband’s acquaintance, a Gestapo official in Kassel. Yet after six months in Breitenau, Lilli was deported to Auschwitz, in March 1944. By early June, she must have become very weak, as she was barely able to sign her name at the bottom of a letter sent to her sister-in-law and manifestly written by another inmate. The end came soon thereafter.

An official death certificate indicating that Lilli Sara Jahn died on June 19, 1944, was sent to her children’s address in Kassel, on September 28; her identity card was returned to the mayor of Immenhausen as “District Police Authority.” A short announcement appended to the card indicated that the death had taken place on June 17.
¹³¹
Whether Lilli Sara Jahn died on June 17 or 19 was all the same to the Auschwitz administration.

VIII

In Slovakia the uprising of the underground was premature, notwithstanding the rapid advance of the Red Army: The Germans and their Hlinka Guard auxiliaries rapidly overcame the local partisans. The Jews who had joined the armed rebellion were usually shot whenever caught, and so were three of the four parachutists sent by the Yishuv; the remnants of the community were mainly deported to Auschwitz, also to some other camps, including Theresienstadt, during the last months of 1944 and early 1945.
¹³²

Once again the Vatican tried to intervene to halt the deportations, at least those of converted Jews, but without success. Tiso, who previously had been less extreme than his closest aides, now defended the deportations in a letter to Pius XII: “The rumors about cruelties are but an exaggeration of hostile enemy propaganda…. The deportations were undertaken in order to defend the nation from its foe…. We owe this as [an expression] of gratitude and loyalty to the Germans for our national sovereignty…. This debt is in our Catholic eyes the highest honor…. Holy Father, we shall remain faithful to our program:—For God and the Nation Signed: Dr. Josephus Tiso (sacerdos) [priest].”
¹³³
As noted by a Catholic historian, the Reverend John Morley: Tiso was reprimanded on several occasions by the Vatican, but not excommunicated; the Holy See lost the opportunity “for a great humanitarian and moral gesture.”
¹³⁴

In the meantime the events in neighboring Hungary took again a sharp turn for the worse. On October 15 Horthy announced his country’s withdrawal from the war. On the same day the Germans took control of Budapest, arrested the regent and his son, and appointed an Arrow Cross (Niylas) government led by Szalasi and backed by most of the Hungarian army. On October 18 Eichmann returned to Budapest.

Over the following days and weeks the Germans sent some 50,000 Jews on a trek from the Hungarian capital to the Austrian border, under the escort of Hungarian gendarmerie first, then of German guards. The aim was to march these Jews to the vicinity of Vienna, where they would build fortifications to defend the Austrian capital. Thousands of marchers perished from exhaustion and mistreatment or were shot by the guards.

Another 35,000 Jews were organized into labor battalions to build fortifications around Budapest: They became prime targets for Niylas thugs whose fury increased as the Soviet forces approached the capital. When compelled to retreat into the city with the fleeing army units, the members of the Jewish labor battalions were killed on the bridges or on the banks of the Danube and thrown into the river. The carnage took such proportions that “special police units had to be called out to protect the Jews from the raging Niylas.”
¹³⁵

In fact local Arrow Cross gangs had started murdering Jews in Budapest immediately after the change of government. As Arrow Cross deputy Karoly Marothy put it in a speech in parliament: “We must not allow individual cases to create compassion for them [the Jews]…. Something must also be done to stop the death rattle going on in the ditches all day, and the population must not be allowed to see the masses [of Jews] dying…. The deaths should not be recorded in the Hungarian death register.”
¹³⁶
National Police Commissioner Pal Hódosy shared Marothy’s worries: “The problem is not that Jews are being murdered; the only trouble is the method. The bodies must be made to disappear, not put out in the streets.”
¹³⁷
As in Croatia, some priests excelled in the killings. Thus a Father Kun admitted to having murdered some 500 Jews. Usually he would order: “In the name of Christ—fire!”
¹³⁸
Women, too, were active participants in the mass murders.
¹³⁹

A few days after the Arrow Cross came to power, Ribbentrop advised Veesenmayer that the Hungarians should “be encouraged in every way to continue taking measures that compromise them in the eyes of our enemies…. It is particularly in our interest,” the minister added, “that the Hungarians should now proceed against the Jews in the most extreme way.”
¹⁴⁰
It does not seem that the Hungarians were in need of any German prodding.

The Jews who remained in the city for the most part lived in two ghettos. At the end of November, according to Veesenmayer, a minority inhabited a so-called international ghetto or special ghetto; they were protected by various foreign countries, particularly by Sweden and Switzerland. The others, the great majority, had been packed into an ordinary ghetto. A few hundred Jews were granted immunity by the Arrow Cross itself.

In fact Veesenmayer’s assessment was off the mark: By the end of November only 32,000 Jews lived in the “ordinary ghetto,” while tens of thousands, mostly protected by forged papers, stayed in the international ghetto. The Arrow Cross regularly raided both ghettos, and once the forged papers were discovered, mass deportations from the international to the ordinary ghetto started. Soon, some 60,000 Jews were enclosed in some 4,500 apartments, at times as many as 14 to a room.
¹⁴¹
In January, most of the inhabitants of the international ghetto were marched into the “ordinary ghetto,” where daily deaths were reaching ten times the pre-occupation rate.
¹⁴²

About 150,000 protection papers, some 50,000 of these genuine and the others forged, were in circulation.
¹⁴³
The Arrow Cross recognized some 34,800 of these documents, under the pressure of foreign governments. A group of foreign diplomats and delegates of humanitarian organizations spared no effort, sometimes at the risk of their own lives, to help the Jews of Budapest, in the ghettos, in “protected houses,” on the trek from Budapest to Vienna. The Swiss diplomats, Carl Lutz, and the delegate of the ICRC, Friedrich Born; the Italian Giorgio Perlasca, impersonating a “Spanish chargé d’affaires”; the Portuguese, Carlos Branquinho; and, of course, the Swede, Raoul Wallenberg, became the tireless rescuers of thousands of Budapest Jews and their main sources of hope.
¹⁴⁴

The Niylas remained undeterred, to the very end. As Soviet troops were already fighting in the city, the killings went on, including mostly Jews but also other “enemies.” A Hungarian lieutenant described events that probably occured in mid-January 1945: “I peeped round the corner of the Vigadó Concert Hall and saw victims standing on the track of the number 2 streetcar line in a long row, completely resigned to their fate. Those close to the Danube were already naked; the others were slowly walking down and undressing. It all happened in total silence, with only the occasional sound of a gunshot or machine-gun salvo. In the afternoon, when there was nobody left, we took another look. The dead were lying in their blood on the ice slabs or floating in the Danube. Among them were women, children, Jews, Gentiles, soldiers, and officers.”
¹⁴⁵
The last word should be left to Ferenc Orsós, a Hungarian professor of medicine who had belonged to the international commission that investigated the Katyn massacre: “Throw the dead Jews into the Danube; we don’t want another Katyn.”
¹⁴⁶