The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (119 page)

151. Götz Aly, ed.,
Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene
(Baltimore: 1994), p. 130.

152. Ibid., p. 135.

153. Nuremberg Doc. PS-710.

154. See Eichmann’s memoirs in Adolf Eichmann,
Ich, Adolf Eichmann
, ed. R. Aschenauer (Leoni am Starnberger See, 1980), p. 479.

155. Notes of the meeting were taken by Bernhard Lösener, the adviser on Jewish affairs at the Ministry of the Interior. See Peter Witte, “Two Decisions Concerning the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”: Deportations to Lodz and Mass Murder in Chelmno,”
Holocaust and Genocide Studies
9, no. 3 (1995), p. 322.

156. Goebbels,
Tagebücher
, part 2, vol. 1, pp. 265–66.

157. Ibid., p. 278.

158. Ibid., p. 269.

159. Ibid.

160. Heydrich was ready to start the deportations from the Reich forthwith, but, as we saw, Hitler vetoed any such immediate step as he vetoed the immediate implementation of Goebbels’s evacuation plans. It is thus difficult to follow Christopher Browning’s interpretation of Göring’s letter as “Heydrich’s charter” instructing the chief of the RSHA to draw up a “feasibility study” for the mass murder of European Jewry. “Heydrich needed the July 1941 authorization because he now faced a new and awesome task that would dwarf even the systematic murder program emerging on Soviet territory.” See Christopher R. Browning and Jürgen Matthäus,
The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942
(Lincoln, NE, 2004), pp. 315–16. Two documents adduced to bolster the “feasibility study” thesis can also be read differently. On August 28, Eichmann rejected a demand from the Wilhelmstrasse to allow Jewish emigration from the occupied countries in the West, “in view of the imminent ‘Final Solution,’
now in preparation
.” Ibid., p. 322. This formula could, however, be applied either to the preparation of a general deportation of all European Jews to northern Russia or to the preparation for their extermination. However, as there was no preparation that we know of, Eichmann may simiply have used a general formula to explain his refusal.
      A second document, a memorandum sent on September 3 by the chief of the Emigration Central Office [
Umwandererzentrale
, or UWZ] of the RKF in Posen, SS Sturmbannführer Rolf-Heinz Höppner, to Eichmann, seems to confirm that the “preparations” were aimed at the deportation of European Jewry to the Russian North. Höppner suggested the expansion of the Berlin Central Office for Emigration to the whole of European Jewry; he also suggested that control over the “reception areas” be granted to the new central agency. But precisely this document indicated that no decision had yet been taken: “I could well imagine,” Höppner wrote, “that
large areas of the present Soviet Russia
are being prepared to receive the undesired ethnic elements of the greater German settlement area…. To go into further details about the organization of the reception area would be fantasy, because first of all the basic decisions must be made. It is essential in this regard, by the way, that total clarity prevails about what finally shall happen to those undesirable ethnic elements deported from the Greater German settlement area. Is the goal to ensure them a certain level of life in the long run, or shall they be totally eradicated?” Ibid.
      In a further section of the September memorandum, Höppner stressed that “his proposals concerning ‘reception areas’ [Russia] had to remain ‘patchwork’ for the moment, as he did not yet ‘know the intentions’ of Hitler, Himmler and Heydrich.” Christopher R. Browning,
Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers
(Cambridge, MA, 2000), p. 37. Had a “feasibility study” for total extermination been in preparation when Höppner wrote his memorandum, Eichmann would probably have hinted about it and the entire memorandum would not have been so tentative and open-ended.

161. For these numbers see Wolfgang Scheffler, “Die Einsatzgruppe A 1941/2,” in Klein, ed.,
Die Einsatzgruppen in der besetzen Sowjetunion 1941/42
, pp. 34–35.

162. Kruk,
The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania
, pp. 96–99.

163. Rudashevski,
The Diary of the Vilna Ghetto, June 1941–April 1943
, pp. 31–32.

164. Ibid., pp. 32–33.

165. Avraham Tory,
Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary
, ed. Martin Gilbert and Dina Porat (Cambridge, UK, 1990), p. 13.

166. Ibid., pp. 26–28.

167. Ibid., p. 32.

168. Zygmunt Klukowski,
Diary from the Years of Occupation, 1939–44
, ed. Andrew Klukowski and Helen Klukowski May (Urbana, IL, 1993), p. 168.

169. Czerniaków,
Warsaw Diary
, p. 256.

170. Ibid., p. 257.

171. Ibid. On January 1, 1941, 1,761 inhabitants of the ghetto belonged to non-Jewish denominations. See Raul Hilberg,
Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933–1945
(New York, 1992), pp. 154ff.

172. Ibid.

173. See mainly Havi Ben-Sasson, “Christians in the Ghetto: All Saints’ Church, Birth of the Holy Virgin Mary Church, and the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto,”
Yad Vashem Studies
31 (2003), pp. 153ff.

174. Ibid.

175. Ibid., p. 165.

176. Czerniaków,
Warsaw Diary
, p. 261.

177. Ben-Sasson, “Christians in the Ghetto,” pp. 163–64.

178. Himmler,
Der Dienstkalender
, p. 167 n. 7.

179. Dobroszycki, ed.,
The Chronicle
, p. 71.

180. Ibid., p. 67n.

181. Ibid., pp. 68–69.

182. Ibid., p. 69. On July 29, the day the patients were removed, Rumkowski’s secretary, Szmul Rozensztajn, tersely noted in his diary: “All efforts by the Chairman to save the mentally ill were to no avail. At 11 A.M. today, a van arrived at the hospital on 3 Wesola Street to take 58 persons. They had been given injections of the sedative scopolamine.” Quoted in Alan Adelson and Robert Lapides, eds.,
Lodz Ghetto: Inside a Community Under Siege
(New York, 1989), p. 156.

183. Isaiah Trunk,
Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation
(New York, 1972), p. 84.

184. Ibid.

185. All details about Bruno Schulz are taken from Jerzy Ficowski,
Regions of the Great Heresy: Bruno Schulz: A Biographical Portrait
(New York, 2003).

186. Ibid., pp. 164–65.

187. All details about Dubnow’s life are taken from Sophie Dubnov-Erlich,
The Life and World of S. M. Dubnov: Diaspora Nationalism and Jewish History
(New York, 1991).

188. Ibid., p. 229.

189. Ibid., pp. 245–46.

190. Ibid., p. 218.

191. For the spreading of information, see Mordechai Altschuler, “Escape and Evacuation of Soviet Jews at the Time of the Nazi Invasion,” in Lucjan Dobroszycki and Jeffrey S. Gurock,
The Holocaust in the Soviet Union
(Armonk, NY, 1993), pp. 84ff.

192. For an overview of these attitudes see Berkhoff,
Harvest of Despair
, pp. 61–62.

193. Mordechai Altschuler,
Soviet Jewry on the Eve of the Holocaust: A Social and Demographic Profile
(Jerusalem, 1998), p. 188.

194. Yuri Slezkine,
The Jewish Century
(Princeton, 2004), p. 221.

195. Ibid., p. 245.

196. Quoted in ibid., p. 288.

197. See mainly Joshua Rubenstein,
Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg
(New York, 1996), pp. 189ff.

198. Jonathan Frankel, “Empire tsariste et Union Sovietique,” in
Les juifs et le XXe siècle: Dictionnaire critique
, ed. Elie Barnavi and Saul Friedländer (Paris, 2000), p. 298.

199. David Engel,
In the Shadow of Auschwitz: The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews, 1939–1942
(Chapel Hill, NC, 1987), p. 136.

200. See mainly Nechama Tec,
Defiance: The Bielski Partisans
(New York, 1993). See also Peter Duffy,
The Bielski Brothers: The True Story of Three Men Who Defied the Nazis, Saved 1,200 Jews, and Built a Village in the Forest
(New York, 2003).

201. Nechama Tec and Daniel Weiss, “The Heroine of Minsk: Eight Photographs of an Execution,” in “Photography and the Holocaust,” ed. Sybil Milton and Genya Markon, special issue,
History of Photography
(1999), pp. 322ff. Also in Minsk, another Jewish woman, Yelena Mazanik, planted the bomb that killed Reichskommissar Wilhelm Kube in September 1943. Cf. John Garrard, “Russia and the Soviet Union” in Walter Laqueur and Judith Tydor Baumel, eds.,
The Holocaust Encyclopedia.
(New Haven, 2001), p. 590.

202. For a detailed account of the genesis and activities of the committee, see Shimon Redlich,
Propaganda and Nationalism in Wartime Russia: The Jewish Antifascist Committee in the USSR, 1941–1948
(Boulder, CO, 1982).

203. The Erlich-Alter affair has generated an abundant scholarly literature. For the above mentioned rendition of the events, see Daniel Blatman,
Notre liberté et la vôtre: Le mouvement ouvrier juif Bund en Pologne, 1939–1949
(Paris, 2002), pp. 101ff.

204. Joseph Walk, ed.,
Das Sonderrecht für die Juden im NS-Staat: Eine Sammlung der gesetzlichen Massnahmen und Richtlinien, Inhalt und Bedeutung
(Heidelberg, 1981), p. 229.

205. Ibid., p. 347.

206. Paul Sauer, ed.,
Dokumente über die Verfolgung der jüdischen Bürger in Baden-Württemberg durch das nationalsozialistische Regime 1933–1945
, 2 vols., vol. 2, (Stuttgart, 1966), p. 214.

207. Quoted in Léon Poliakov and Josef Wulf,
Das Dritte Reich und seine Denker: Dokumente
(Berlin, 1959), p. 452.

208. Klemperer,
I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933–41
, vol. 1, p. 434.

209. Kulka and Jäckel,
Die Juden in den geheimen NS-Stimmungsberichten 1933–1945
, p. 450.

210. Boberach, ed.,
Meldungen,
pp. 2645ff.

211. Kulka and Jäckel,
Die Juden in den geheimen NS-Stimmungsberichten 1933–1945
, p. 458.

212. Ibid., pp. 456–57.

213. Klemperer,
I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933–41
, p. 434.

214. Ibid., p. 445.

215. Ibid., p. 441.

216. Elisabeth Freund, “Waiting,” in
Hitler’s Exiles: Personal Stories of the Flight from Nazi Germany to America
, ed. Mark M. Anderson (New York, 1998), p. 122.

217. Ibid., p. 123.

218. Telegram from Morris to Secretary of State, September 30, 1941, reproduced in John Mendelsohn and Donald S. Detwiler, eds.,
The Holocaust: Selected Documents in Eighteen Volumes
(New York: Garland Publishing, 1982), vol. 2, p. 280.

219. For the manifold confirmations of these attitudes see David Bankier,
The Germans and the Final Solution: Public Opinion under Nazism
(Oxford, 1992), pp. 124ff.

220. Ibid., p. 129.

221. Quoted in Paul A. Levine,
From Indifference to Activism: Swedish Diplomacy and the Holocaust, 1938–1944
(Uppsala, 1996), p. 118.

222. Eric A. Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband,
What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany: An Oral History
(Cambridge, MA, 2005), pp. 362–63.

223. Ruth Kluger,
Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered
(New York, 2001), p. 49.

224. Michael H. Kater,
The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich
(New York, 1997), p. 103.

225. Renée Poznanski, “The Jews of France and the Statutes on Jews, 1940–1941,”
Yad Vashem Studies
22 (1992), pp. 115–16.

226. René Rémond,
Le “Fichier juif”
(Paris, 1996), pp. 67–68.

227. Ibid., p. 68.

228. Ibid., p. 74.

229. Raymond-Raoul Lambert,
Carnet d’un témoin: 1940–1943
, ed. Richard I. Cohen (Paris, 1985), p. 105.

230. Ibid., p. 187.

231. Jacques Biélinky,
Journal, 1940–1942: Un journaliste juif à Paris sous l’Occupation
, ed. Renée Poznanski (Paris, 1992), p. 146.

232. About the exhibition see Joseph Billig,
L’Institut d’étude des questions Juives
(Paris, 1974), pp. 160ff.

233. Lucien Steinberg and Jean Marie Fitère,
Les Allemands en France: 1940–1944
(Paris, 1980), pp. 75–76. Jacques Adler,
The Jews of Paris and the Final Solution: Communal Response and Internal Conflicts, 1940–1944
(New York, 1987), pp. 75ff; Renée Poznanski,
Être juif en France pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale
(Paris, 1994), p. 311.

234. For a detailed history of local French life in the Nantes region during the war, see Robert Gildea,
Marianne in Chains: Everyday Life in the French Heartland under the German Occupation
(New York, 2003), pp. 229ff.

235. On this issue, see in particular Philippe Burrin,
Hitler und die Juden: Die Entscheidung für den Völkermord
(Frankfurt am Main, 1993), pp. 144–45.

236. Ulrich Herbert,
Best: Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft, 1903–1989
(Bonn, 1996), p. 312.

237. Ibid.

238. Adler,
The Jews of Paris
, pp. 79–80.

239. Ibid., p. 105–6.

240. See particularly Lambert,
Carnet d’un témoin
, pp. 129ff.

241. Exact statistics are unavailable. See Rudi von Doorslaer, “Jewish Immigration and Communism in Belgium, 1925–1939,” in
Belgium and the Holocaust: Jews, Belgians, Germans
, ed. Dan Michman (Jerusalem, 1998), p. 63. For the early measures taken in Belgium, see Maxime Steinberg,
La Persécution des Juifs en Belgique (1940–1945)
(Brussels, 2004), pp. 33ff.

242. Ibid.

243. For the Antwerp events and the text of the “protest” see Lieven Saerens, “Antwerp’s Attitude Toward the Jews from 1918 to 1940 and Its Implications for the Period of Occupation,” in
Belgium and the Holocaust: Jews, Belgians, Germans
, ed. Dan Michman (Jerusalem, 1998), pp. 192–193.