The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (105 page)

In February 1945 the Soviet army occupied the whole of Budapest.

While the march of the 50,000 Jews from Budapest to Vienna may be considered as the first large-scale death march, smaller groups of Jewish slave laborers from Hungary had already started their treks at least a month earlier. The well-known Hungarian Jewish poet Miklós Radnoti, then thirty-five, was among the “labor servicemen” who had been dispatched to Serbia, to the neighborhood of the Bor copper mines. On September 15, 1944, Radnoti and his group were ordered back to Bor, and on September 17 their march toward Hungary began.
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Attempts by the officers in command of the escort to leave the marches at railway stations failed; the column passed Belgrade and, on the road to Novi Sad, the Hungarian guards were reinforced by
Volksdeutsche
. From then on the number of Jews murdered along the road grew into the hundreds. On October 6 the column reached Cservenka, where it was divided into two groups: some eight hundred men, Radnoti among them, continued on their way; the other group, one thousand strong, was exterminated by SS in the local brickyards. Two days later, in Oszivac, Radnoti’s group was surrounded by an SS cavalry unit: The “servicemen” were ordered to lie on the ground and were shot at random. As one of those wounded, a violinist, tried to get up and continue to march, one of the SS men exclaimed:
“Der Springt noch auf!”
(“He is still jumping up!”) and shot him. A few days later Radnoti scribbled his last poem on a piece of paper that he probably found on the ground, and placed it in his notebook:

I fell beside him and his corpse turned over,

tight already as a snapping string.

Shot in the neck. “And that’s how you’ll end too,”

I whispered to myself; “lie still; no moving.

Now patience flowers into death.” Then I could hear

“Der springt noch auf,” above, and very near.

Blood mixed with mud was drying on my ear.

About a month later Radnoti and a few other “servicemen” were murdered by their guards.
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“For English soldiers.” That was the address of a letter left on the kitchen table in a house abandoned by the Germans somewhere on the Italian front in the last days of 1944; its message was unambiguous: “Dear Kamerad, on the Western front German troops are attacking the line of Americans. German tanks have destroyed a great deal of the enemy troops. The new German Luftwaffe is on the West front and she is very, very good. The war is in a new station, she is over when the Germans are victorious. Germans are fighting for their lives. The English are fighting for the Jews. A GERMAN SOLDIER.”
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Beyond the anti-Jewish hate outburst, the soldier’s message carried faint echoes of Hitler’s last major military initiative: the Ardennes offensive (Operation Autumn Mist), launched against mainly American forces on December 16 and stopped less than ten days later. A “new Luftwaffe,” flying the first jet planes, did indeed participate in the operations, with no major results, however. The first phase of Germany’s collapse was over, sometime in the early days of 1945.

IX

The disintegration of the Reich accelerated as weeks went by and as, between January and March 1945, the command and control systems increasingly broke down. In the West, Belgium and Holland were liberated; the Rhineland and the Ruhr fell into Allied hands and, on March 7, the ninth U.S. Armored Division crossed the Rhine at Remagen. On the Eastern Front in the meantime, after taking control of Budapest, Soviet forces were moving toward Vienna; to the northeast, the Baltic countries were again in Stalin’s grip; most East Prussian strongholds fell one after another, and millions of German civilians were fleeing westward in an increasingly chaotic panic as news of Soviet savagery was spreading. In March, Soviet units crossed the river Oder: The road to Berlin was open. A few weeks beforehand Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill had met at Yalta and redrawn the borders of Eastern Europe—and divided Germany into occupation zones. And, in those same days of February 1945, Dresden, filled with refugees fleeing the Russians, was turned into a burning inferno by two successive air raids: a British and then an American one. During the first days of March, the short-lived and last German offensive of the war unfolded and petered out near Lake Balaton, in a desperate attempt to secure the control of Hungarian oil fields and bauxite mines.
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As the Nazi leader lived in an increasingly delusional world, it is not certain that even in early 1945 he recognized that the game was over. Of course in his morbid mind, mulling over the Jewish issue never stopped: “Jesus was certainly not a Jew,” he explained to Bormann on November 30, 1944. “The Jews would never have delivered one of their own to the Romans and to a Roman court; they would have convicted him themselves. It seems that many descendants of Roman legionaires lived in Galilee and Jesus was one of them. It could be that his mother was Jewish.” The usual themes followed: Jewish materialism, the perversion of Jesus’ ideals by Paul, the link between Jews and communism, etc.
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Nothing seemed to have changed in Hitler’s innermost ideological landscape from his earliest forays into political propaganda in 1919 to the last months of his crusade against “the Jew.”

In his 1945 New Year’s address to the party, the people, and the troops, Hitler brandished once again the omnipresent Jewish threat: Didn’t Ilya Ehrenburg and Henry Morgenthau represent the two faces of the identical Jewish will to destroy and exterminate the German nation?
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On January 30 it was the Jewish-Asiatic-Bolshevik conspiracy to undermine Germany after World War I that resurfaced in the endlessly repeated self-justificatory history of the rise of the party and of Hitler’s own providential-political destiny.
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On February 24, in his traditional address commemorating the February 1920 proclamation of the party program, Hitler avoided traveling from Berlin to Munich; old-timer Hermann Esser read his address to the assembled Nazi elite. The Führer may have wished to avoid meeting the “old guard,” but his message remained the same and the archenemy was the same: “At the time” [of the party’s beginnings], Hitler reminded the faithful, “the semblance of an opposition between the forces that acted together was but the expression of the single will of the one inciter and beneficiary. For a long time international Jewry used both forms [capitalism and Bolshevism] to exterminate the freedom and social happiness of nations.”
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In case such a statement sounded too abstract and too vague, Hitler turned to the ongoing events in the eastern provinces of the Reich that were already in Soviet hands: “What this Jewish pest inflicts there upon our women, children and men is the most horrible fate that a human brain can imagine.”
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The concluding exhortation followed in all “logic”: “The life that has been left to us can serve but one commandment: to restore and regain what the international Jewish criminals and their handymen have caused to our people.”
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Goebbels did not let go of the Jews either: “This afternoon,” he recorded on January 7, 1945, “I write an article on the Jewish question. It is again necessary to deal with the Jewish question on the widest scale. This theme cannot be allowed to rest. The Jews all over the world will not rejoice about my arguments.”
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The minister, needless to say, was not bereft of “compelling proofs” to make his anti-Jewish points: “That Bolshevism is essentially inspired by the Jews,” he noted on February 6, “is demonstrated in the news coming from Moscow, that Stalin has married for a third time, now the sister of the vice-chairman of the Council of the people’s representatives, Kaganowitch, a Jewess through and through. She will see to it that Bolshevism does not follow any wrong path.”
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Notwithstanding the continuous fury of the anti-Jewish propaganda, which was to reach its ultimate stage (in both meanings of the word) in Hitler’s “political testament,” German policies regarding the fate of the remaining Jews became increasingly inconsistent. On the one hand Hitler himself and part of the SS apparatus directly involved in the implementation of the “Final Solution” did not waver to the very end in the policy of extermination, although it was delayed at times by last-minute need for slave labor. In fact, in early 1944 already, Hitler had been ready to compromise regarding the presence of Jewish slave laborers on German soil. Speer confirmed, in a memorandum dated April 1944, that the Nazi leader authorized the use of 100,000 Hungarian Jews in urgent building projects for munitions factories to be located in the Protectorate.
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Soon thereafter Jewish camp inmates would be brought back to the Reich.

Thus in the late summer of 1944, some 40,000 Jews selected in Auschwitz and Stutthof had been shipped to two major satellite camps of Dachau—Kaufering and Mühldorf (in the vicinity of Munich)—where Organization Todt used them to build the heavily protected, semiunder-ground halls needed for the production of aircraft. Somewhat later, mainly in the wake of the Auschwitz evacuation, other Jewish workers would be marched to the Harz Mountains, to slave in the tunnels of Dora-Mittelbau where, some Germans still believed, the ongoing production of V-2 rockets would save the Reich.
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The Jewish workers shipped to the Dachau satellite camps were joined by thousands of Hungarian Jews marched directly from Budapest to the Bavarian construction sites.
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OT rapidly proved itself equal to the SS in its mistreatment of the slave laborers, and by the fall of 1944, hundreds had been killed or were too weak to continue working. At this point the Dachau commandant decided to send these Jews back to Auschwitz for gassing.
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Some of these transports left Bavaria at the end of September, others in October 1944.
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It is at this point, in late 1944, that Himmler’s hesitant search for a way out becomes apparent. It seems that at some stage the Reichsführer countermanded the steps taken by his underlings (and approved by his master) to pursue the “Final Solution” but was unable to sustain this alternative, afraid as he was of Hitler’s reaction. Nonetheless, from early 1945 on, in order to find an opening to the West, Himmler was ready to give up
some small groups
of Jews to prove his goodwill.

During his earlier forays into secret diplomacy, the Reichsführer was represented by the head of the Foreign Intelligence Department of the SD, Walter Schellenberg, who in 1944 had taken over the operations and most of the agents of the disbanded Abwehr. Apart from Schellenberg and his outfit, Himmler’s main delegate had been and continued to be, until the fall of 1944, the business-savvy Becher and, at times, Becher’s colleagues in Budapest, Gerhard Clages, Wisliceny, and Hermann Krumey. Himmler would allow contacts with representatives of Jewish organizations in Switzerland, the War Refugee Board delegates in Bern and various Swiss personalities, without giving any firm commitment about what he was ready to undertake. Simultaneously he would be in touch with Jewish and non-Jewish personalities in Sweden.

According to Becher’s postwar testimony, sometime in the fall of 1944, he convinced Himmler to order an end to the deportations, as an opening to further negotiations with representatives of the Joint and, more specifically with its representative in Switzerland, Sally Mayer. The Jewish representatives were asked to transfer money.
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It seems that in reciprocation, along the lines suggested by Becher, Himmler did indeed issue some order both to Kaltenbrunner and to Pohl; it also appears that in response Mayer, with the agreement of the representative of the War Refugee Board in Switzerland, was ready to set up a blocked account for the Germans in a Swiss bank. But Himmler, who must have sensed that Hitler would not agree to any major compromise in Jewish matters, probably backed down.

Yet, other negotiations went on between the Reichsführer and an old friend of his, the Swiss Federal Councillor Jean-Marie Musy, aiming at the release of tens of thousands of Jews as an opening to negotiations with the Western Powers. As already mentioned, a first train carrying 1,200 Jews from Theresienstadt arrived in Switzerland in January 1945. Informed of the deal, Hitler put an immediate end to it.
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At that stage a third channel appeared more promising: negotiations by way of Sweden. The Swedes informed Himmler in February 1945 that they were ready to undertake a series of humanitarian missions, which, if agreed to by the Germans, could possibly open the way for wider contacts. To that effect Count Folke Bernadotte was dispatched to Germany.
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