The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (108 page)

Volk
and soldiers got their share of praise: The seeds had been sown, Hitler declared, that would lead to the rebirth of National Socialism. Then he settled accounts with Göring and Himmler, whom he demoted and expelled from the party for their dealings with the Western Powers, nominated Grand Adm. Karl Dönitz as the new head of state (“president,” not “Führer,” of course) and chief of the armed forces, Goebbels as chancellor, and designated the new ministers. Hitler reached the inevitable final exhortation: “Most of all, I commit the leadership of the nation and its followers to the strictest keeping of the race laws and the merciless struggle against the universal poisoner of all people, international Jewry.”
²⁰¹

The wording of such a document, dictated in the direst of circumstances, cannot be taken in the same way as if it had been carefully prepared at the height of the Nazi leader’s power. And yet isn’t it plausible that precisely the historical importance (in Hitler’s eyes) of this last message would bring forth only the essentials, the barest tenets, of Hitler’s faith?

That “Providence” or “fate”—still invoked less than two weeks earlier—had disappeared from the Nazi leader’s rhetoric needs no explanation. That the “Reich” and the “party” also remained unmentioned (except for “Berlin, the capital of the Reich”) is not surprising either. The Reich was in ruins and the party replete with traitors. Not only were Göring and Himmler negotiating with the enemy but, in the West, the
Gauleiter
were surrendering one after another, and SS generals were sending false reports on the military situation. The party, whose members should have been ready to die for the Reich and their leader, had ceased to exist.

All this was in line with Hitler’s usual reactions toward anyone daring to wander off the path he alone was allowed to dictate. But besides such foreseeable reactions, one aspect of the testament was utterly unexpected: In Hitler’s final message there was no trace of Bolshevism.

Hitler had probably decided to concentrate his entire apologia on demonstrating that neither Germany’s catastrophic end nor the murder of the Jews was
his
responsibility. The responsibility was laid squarely upon those who, in September 1939, pushed for war, whereas he sought only compromise: the Western plutocrats and the warmongering Jews. Stalin, his ally at the time, was better left unmentioned as the partition of Poland within days of the invasion showed that the Reich and the Soviet Union had decided to share the Polish spoils in a pact that considerably facilitated the German attack and proved that Hitler was intent on launching the war.

On April 30, shortly after 3:00 p.m., Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide. On Dönitz’s order, German radio broadcast the following announcement on May 1 at 10:26 p.m.: “The Führer’s headquarters announce that this afternoon, our Führer, Adolf Hitler, fell at his command post in the Reich Chancellery, in fighting against Bolshevism to his last breath.”
²⁰²
Seven days later Germany surrendered.

Either on May 1 or 2, as he was informed of Hitler’s death, Cardinal Bertram—who in the meantime had left Breslau for safer surroundings—requested, in a handwritten letter addressed to all the parish priests of his diocese, that they “hold a solemn requiem mass in memory of the Führer.”
²⁰³

Before continuing their trek to the West the Klemperers, as mentioned, stayed briefly in an acquaintances’ house near Dresden. On the night of March 21, all the inhabitants huddled in the corridor during an air raid warning. The Klemperers struck up a conversation with one Fräulein Dumpier: “She cautiously began to come out of her shell,” Victor later noted. “She gradually came out with strong doubts on National Socialist teaching…. She turned the conversation toward the Jewish question. I side-stepped carefully…. I went through quite a few contortions. The girl’s last words were amusing…she believed in the rights of nations, she found the arrogance and brutalization in Germany repugnant—‘It’s only the Jews I hate. I think I have been influenced a bit in that.’ I would have liked to ask her how many Jews she knew, but swallowed it down and merely smiled. And noted for myself, how demagogically justified National Socialism was in putting anti-Semitism at the center.”
²⁰⁴

Two weeks later the Klemperers, now ordinary German refugees, reached Upper Bavaria; their identity had not been discovered: They were saved. And so were some other diarists: Mihail Sebastian, in Bucharest (who soon after the Russian takeover was killed in an accident); Abraham Tory, from Kovno; Hersch Wasser, from Warsaw. So also were the dazed survivors who had been left behind in the camps, those who remained alive during the death marches, those who emerged from their hiding places in Christian institutions, in “Aryan” families, in mountains or forests, among partisans or in Resistance movements, those who lived in the open under false identities, those who had fled in time from German-dominated areas, those who kept their new identities, and those, known or unknown, who had betrayed and collaborated for the sake of survival.

Between five and six million Jews had been killed; among them almost a million and a half were under the age of fourteen.
²⁰⁵
They comprised the immense mass of silent victims and also most of the diarists and authors of letters whose voices we heard in these pages. Etty Hillesum, Anne Frank, Ben Wessels, and Philip Mechanicus, from Amsterdam;
²⁰⁶
Raymond-Raoul Lambert, Jacques Biélinky, and Louise Jacobson, from Paris; Moshe Flinker, from The Hague and Brussels; Jochen Klepper and Hertha Feiner, from Berlin; Lilli Jahn, from Cologne; Ernst Krombach from Essen; Gonda Redlich and Oskar Rosenfeld, from Prague; Dawid Sierakowiak, Josef Zelkowicz, the other “chroniclers,” and at least three anonymous young diarists, from Lodz; Elisheva (Elsa Binder) and her unknown “guest diarist” from Stanislawów; Adam Czerniaków, Emanuel Ringelblum, Shimon Huberband, Chaim Kaplan, Abraham Lewin, and Janusz Korczak, from Warsaw; Calel Perechodnik, from Ottwock; Dawid Rubinowicz, from Kielce; Aryeh and Malwina Klonicki, from Kovel and Buczacz; Herman Kruk, Itzhok Rudashevski, and Zelig Kalmanovitch, from Vilna; and the diarist of the Auschwitz
Sonderkommando
, Zalman Gradowski. Many more diarists, of course, were murdered, and another handful remained alive.
²⁰⁷

From among the few hundreds of thousands of Jews who had stayed in occupied Europe and survived, most struck roots in new surroundings, either by necessity or by choice; they built their lives, resolutely hid their scars, and experienced the common share of joys and sorrows dealt by everyday existence. For several decades, many evoked the past mainly among themselves, behind closed doors, so to speak; some became occasional witnesses, others opted for silence. Yet, whatever the path they chose, for all of them those years remained the most significant period of their lives. They were entrapped in it: Recurrently, it pulled them back into overwhelming terror and, throughout, notwithstanding the passage of time, it carried along with it the indelible memory of the dead.

Notes

Introduction

1. This photograph is reproduced on the cover of “Photography and the Holocaust,” ed. Sybil Milton and Genya Markon, special issue,
History of Photography
23, no. 4 (Winter 1999). All details about the individuals depicted are from the caption of the photograph.

2. Ibid.

3. For some reviews (particularly the devastating assessment of Zygmunt Bauman,
Modernity and the Holocaust
(Cambridge, 1989), see Yehuda Bauer,
Rethinking the Holocaust
(New Haven, 2001), particularly pp. 70ff.

4. For one of the best examples of this approach see the essays collected in Ulrich Herbert,
National Socialist Extermination Policies: Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies
(New York, 2000).

5. Regarding this approach see in particular Götz Aly, Belinda Cooper, and Allison Brown,
“Final Solution”: Nazi Population Policy and the Murder of the European Jews
(London and New York, 1999); Götz Aly,
Hitlers Volksstaat
(Munich, 2005).

6. See Saul Friedländer,
Nazi Germany and the Jews
,
Volume 1: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939
(New York, 1997).

7. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen,
Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
(New York, 1996).

8. Christopher R. Browning,
Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
(New York, 1992).

9. Quoted in Ute Deichmann,
Biologen unter Hitler: Porträt einer Wissenschaft im NS-Staat
(Frankfurt am Main, 1995), p. 372.

10. For a very thorough analysis of the Jewish historiography of the Holocaust, see Dan Michman,
Holocaust Historiography: A Jewish Perspective
(London and Portland, OR, 2003).

11. Hannah Arendt,
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
(New York, 1963).

12. I do not share Raul Hilberg’s skepticism about diaries as valid sources for our understanding of the events. See Raul Hilberg,
Sources of Holocaust Research: An Analysis
(Chicago, 2001), mainly pp. 141–42, 155–59, and 161–62. The problems with some of the diaries are easily recognizable when the case arises.

13. Walter Laqueur, “Three Witnesses: The Legacy of Viktor Klemperer, Willy Cohn and Richard Koch,”
Holocaust and Genocide Studies
10, no. 3 (1996), p. 266.

14. For a very close position, see Tom Laqueur, “The Sound of Voices Intoning Names,”
London Review of Books
(1997), pp. 3ff.

Chapter 1: September 1939–May 1940

1. Victor Klemperer,
I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933–41
(New York, 1998), p. 306.

2. Ibid.

3. Chaim Aron Kaplan,
Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan
, ed. Abraham I. Katsh (Bloomington, 1999), p. 19.

4. Ibid., p. 20.

5. Dawid Sierakowiak,
The Diary of David Sierakowiak
, ed. Alan Adelson (New York, 1996), p. 36.

6. Adam Czerniaków,
The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków
, ed. Raul Hilberg, Stanislaw Staron, and Josef Kermisz (New York, 1979), p. 74.

7. Ibid., p. 76.

8. Sierakowiak,
Diary
, p. 93. For details on Sierakowiak’s background, see Adelson’s “Introduction” to the
Diary
.

9. There were some Jewish members of several European fascist parties—of course not in the Nazi Party—but it seems that in Italy at least one-fifth of the native population of 47,000 Jews was at one stage or another affiliated with Mussolini’s party.

10. Peter Gay,
Freud: A Life for Our Time
(New York, 1989), pp. 646–47.

11. For an excellent overview of the political scene, see Ezra Mendelsohn,
The Jews of East Central Europe Between the World Wars
(Bloomington, 1983).

12. Ibid., p. 255.

13. For this analysis see, among many publications, Shmuel Ettinger, “Jews and Non-Jews in Eastern and Central Europe between the World Wars: An Outline,” in
Jews and Non-Jews in Eastern Europe, 1918–1945
, ed. Bela Vago and George L. Mosse (New York, 1974), pp. 1ff.

14. William W. Hagen, “Before the ‘Final Solution’: Toward a Comparative Analysis of Political Anti-Semitism in Interwar Germany and Poland,”
Journal of Modern History
68, no. 2, (1996), pp. 351ff.

15. For the idealizing trend see Steven E. Aschheim,
Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923
(Madison, 1982).

16. For the fate of German Jewry see Friedländer,
Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 1
.

17. Primo Levi,
Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity
(New York, 1958; reprint, 1996), p. 13.

18. Hannah Arendt,
The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age
, ed. Ron H. Feldman (New York, 1978), p. 84.

19. Norman Rose,
Chaim Weizmann: A Biography
(New York, 1986), p. 354.

20. Alfred Rosenberg,
Das politische Tagebuch Alfred Rosenbergs, 1934/35 und 1939/40
, ed. Hans Günther Seraphim (Munich, 1964), p. 81. (For the translation see Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham, eds.,
Nazism, 1919–1945: A Documentary Reader
, vol. 3,
Foreign Policy, War and Racial Extermination
(Exeter, UK: 1997), p. 319.

21. For an analysis of Stalin’s policy at this point see Gabriel Gorodetsky,
Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia
(New Haven, 1999), pp. 5ff.

22. Adolf Hitler,
Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen, 1932–1945: Kommentiert von einem deutschen Zeitgenossen
, ed. Max Domarus, vol. 2, part 1 (Munich, 1965), pp. 1377ff, particularly 1391.

23. First called Reichsgau Posen, the area became the Warthegau in January 1940. The region of Lodz, inhabited by some 500,000 Poles and 300,000 Jews, was annexed to the Reichsgau Posen in November 1939, on the assumption that the Poles and the Jews would be transferred to the General Government and that ethnic Germans would occupy the vacated urban area. Cf. Götz Aly,
Endlösung: Völkerverschiebung und der Mord an den europäischen Juden
(Frankfurt am Main, 1995), p. 59.

24. See mainly Franz Halder,
Kriegstagebuch: Tägliche Aufzeichnungen des Chefs des Generalstabes des Heeres, 1939–1942
, ed. Hans Adolf Jacobsen (Stuttgart, 1962–64) vol. 1, p. 107.

25. For an excellent presentation of the
Volkstumskampf
as applied to Poland, see Alexander B. Rossino,
Hitler Strikes Poland: Blitzkrieg, Ideology and Atrocity
(Lawrence, KS, 2003), pp. 1ff.

26. For the preparation of the operation see ibid., pp. 14ff.

27. For the various significations of this code name see Richard Breitman,
The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution
(New York, 1991), p. 68.

28. For Heydrich’s letter to Daluege, see Helmut Krausnick, “Hitler und die Morde in Polen,”
Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte
11 (1963), pp. 206–9.

29. Martin Broszat,
Nationalsozialistische Polenpolitik 1939–1945
(Frankfurt am Main and Hamburg, 1965), p. 20.

30. Kurt Pätzold, ed.,
Verfolgung, Vertreibung, Vernichtung: Dokumente des faschistischen Antisemitismus 1933 bis 1942
(Frankfurt am Main, 1984), p. 234.

31. Ibid., p. 239.

32. Broszat,
Nationalsozialistische Polenpolitik
, p. 42. The double Dr. indicates, according to German academic custom, that Rasch had more than one doctoral degree (he had doctorates in law and in political science).

33. Michael Burleigh,
Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich
(Cambridge, UK, 1988). For a more detailed discussion of the German terror measures in Krakow see Czeslaw Madajczyk,
Die Deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Polen (1939–45)
(Wiesbaden, 1967), pp. 13ff. According to Bogdan Musial, the number of victims was 39,500 Poles and 7,000 Jews; see Bogdan Musial, “Das Schlachtfeld zweier totalitären Systems. Polen unter deutscher und sowjetischer Herrschaft 1939–1941,” in
Genesis des Genozids: Polen 1939–1941
, ed. Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Bogdan Musial (Darmstadt, 2004), pp. 13ff, particularly 15. Although I disagree with many of Musial’s interpretations and with those of some contributors to this volume, the factual details contained in several of the essays are useful.

34. Aly estimates the number of these victims at 10,000 to 15,000. Götz Aly, “Judenumsiedlung,” in
Nationalsozialistische Vernichtungspolitik, 1939–1945: Neue Forschungen und Kontroversen
, ed. Ulrich Herbert (Frankfurt am Main, 1998), p. 85.

35. Aly, “Judenumsiedlung,” pp. 85–87.

36. Michael Burleigh,
Death and Deliverance: “Euthanasia” in Germany c. 1900–1945
(Cambridge, 1994), pp. 131–32. See also an excerpt of the verdict against Kurt Eimann in Ernst Klee, ed.,
Dokumente zur Euthanasie
. (Frankfurt: 1985).

37. Klee, ed.,
Dokumente zur Euthanasie
. p. 112.

38. Ibid. pp. 117ff.

39. Henry Friedlander,
Der Weg zum NS-Genozid: Von der Euthanasie zur Endlösung
(Berlin, 1997), pp. 431ff.

40. See Ernst Klee,
“Euthanasie” im NS-Staat: Die “Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens”
(Frankfurt am Main, 1983), pp. 260ff; see also Leni Yahil,
The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932–1945
(New York, 1990), p. 310.

41. Otto Dietrich,
Auf den Strassen des Sieges: Erlebnisse mit dem Führer in Polen: Ein Gemeinschaftsbuch
(Munich, 1939), quoted in Breitman,
The Architect of Genocide
, p. 73.

42. Joseph Goebbels,
Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels
, ed. Elke Fröhlich, part 1, vol. 7, (Munich, 1998), p. 141.

43. Ibid., p. 180.

44. Ibid., p. 186.

45. Ibid., p. 250.

46. Hitler,
Reden
, vol. 2, part 1, p. 1340.

47. Ibid., p. 1342.

48. Ibid.

49. Ibid., vol. 3, pp. 1442 and 1443.

50. Ibid., pp. 1465 and 1468.

51. Joseph Goebbels,
Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels: Sämtliche Fragmente
, ed. Elke Fröhlich, part 1, vol. 7, (Munich, 1987), p. 180.

52. Felix Moeller,
Der Filmminister: Goebbels und der Film im Dritten Reich
(Berlin, 1998), p. 240.

53. For indications about the early films and the “coincidence” between the choice of the latter topics with that of the prior ones see Susan Tegel, “The Politics of Censorship: Britain’s ‘Jew Süss’, (1934) in London, New York and Vienna,”
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television
15, no. 2 (1995), pp. 219ff.

54. Ibid., p. 221ff.

55. Ibid., p. 230ff.

56. Ibid., p. 227.

57. Goebbels,
Tagebücher
part 1, vol. 7, p. 140. Also Moeller,
Der Filmminister
, p. 239.

58. For the connection between both films see Evelyn Hampicke and Hanno Loewy, “Juden ohne Maske: Vorlüfige Bemerkungen zur Geschichte eines Kompilationsfilms,” in
“Beseitigung des jüdischen Einflusses—”: Antisemitische Forschung, Eliten und Karrieren im Nationalsozialismus
, ed. Fritz Bauer Institut,
Jahrbuch 1998/99 zur Geschichte und Wirkung des Holocaust
(Frankfurt, 1999), pp. 259–60.

59. Goebbels,
Tagebücher,
part 1, vol. 7, p. 140.

60. For a summary of the literature about
Der Ewige Jude
and the main aspects of its production and distribution, see Yizhak Ahren, Stig Hornshøj-Møller, and Christoph B. Melchers,
Der ewige Jude: Wie Goebbels hetzte: Untersuchungen zum nationalsozialistischen Propagandafilm
(Aachen, 1990).

61. Goebbels,
Tagebücher
, part 1, vol. 7, p. 157.

62. Ibid.

63. Ibid., p. 166.

64. Ibid., p. 172.

65. Ibid., p. 177.

66. Ibid., p. 202.

67. Shimon
Huberband
, “The Destruction of the Synagogues in Lodz,” in
Lodz Ghetto: Inside a Community under Siege
, ed. Alan Adelson and Robert Lapides (New York, 1983), p. 70.

68. Ibid.

69. Ibid., 70–71.

70. Daniel Uziel, “Wehrmacht Propaganda Troops and the Jews,”
Yad Vashem Studies
29 (2001), p. 33.

71. Ibid., p. 34.

72.
Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals
, vol. 13,
U.S. v. von Weizsäcker: The Ministries Case
, (Washington, DC: US GPO., 1952), Nuremberg doc. NG-4699, p. 143. (When quoting original translations from documents presented at the Nuremberg trials, I mostly kept the text as is, despite the poor quality of some of the translations.)

73. Quoted in Josef Wulf, ed.,
Presse und Funk im Dritten Reich: Eine Dokumentation
, vol. 5,
Kunst und Kultur im Dritten Reich
(Gütersloh, 1964), p. 102.

74. Quoted in Ronald M. Smelser,
Robert Ley: Hitler’s Labor Front Leader
(Oxford and New York, 1988), p. 261.

75. Goebbels,
Tagebücher
, part 1, vol. 7, p. 337.

76. Eberhard Röhm and Jörg Thierfelder,
Juden, Christen, Deutsche, 1933–1945
vol. 3, part 2 (Stuttgart, 1990—), p. 67.

77. David Vital,
A People Apart: A Political History of the Jews in Europe, 1789–1939
(Oxford, 2001), p. 776.

78. Ibid., pp. 776–77.

79. Mendelsohn,
The Jews
, p. 74.

80. One of the most significant indicators of the cultural autonomy of the Jews of Poland can be found in educational statistics. At the primary-school level, a vast number of Jewish children still attended the traditional religious
heder
. Moreover, almost 20 percent of Jewish pupils at that level went to either Yiddish or Hebrew schools; about 50 percent of all Jewish pupils at the secondary-school level went to either Yiddish or Hebrew schools, and so did around 60 percent of the pupils in the vocational schools. For these statistics see Salo Baron’s testimony at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961. Cf. Adolf Eichmann,
The Trial of Adolf Eichmann: Record of Proceedings in the District Court of Jerusalem
, vol. 1 (Jerusalem, 1992–) pp. 176ff.