The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (13 page)

While in Germany there was a continuity of Jewish leadership, in former Poland much of the prewar leadership was replaced, as we saw, when the Germans occupied the country and many Jewish community leaders fled. Both Adam Czerniaków in Warsaw and Chaim Rumkowski in Lodz were new to top leadership positions, and both were now appointed chairmen of the councils of their cities.

On the face of it Czerniaków’s ordinariness was his most notable characteristic. Yet his diary shows him to have been anything but an ordinary person. Czerniaków’s basic decency is striking in a time of unbridled ruthlessness. Not only did he devote every single day to his community, but he particularly cared for the humblest and the weakest among his four hundred thousand wards: the children, the beggars, the insane.

An engineer by training (he had studied in Warsaw and in Dresden), Czerniaków filled a variety of rather obscure positions and, over the years, also dabbled in city politics and in the Jewish politics of Warsaw. He was a member of the Warsaw city council and of the Jewish community city council, and when Maurycy Mayzel, the chairman of the community, fled at the outbreak of the war, Mayor Stefan Starzynski nominated Czerniaków in his stead. On October 4, 1939,
Einsatzgruppe
IV appointed the fifty-nine-year-old Czerniaków head of Warsaw Jewish Council.
²³⁶

It seems that Czerniaków did some maneuvering to secure this latest appointment.
²³⁷
Was it sheer ambition? If so, he soon understood the nature of his role and the overwhelming challenge that confronted him. He knew the Germans; soon he also lost many illusions about the Poles: “In the cemetery, not one tree,” he noted on April 28, 1940. “All uprooted. The tombstones shattered. A fence together with its oak posts pillaged. Nearby at Powaski [Christian cemetery] the trees are intact.”
²³⁸
He reserved some of his harshest comments for his fellow Jews, though never forgetting the growing horror of their common situation.

Czerniaków could have left, but he stayed. In October 1939 he obviously could not foresee what was about to happen less than three years later, yet some of his witticisms have a premonitory tone: “Expulsions from Krakow,” he writes on May 22, 1940. “The optimists, the pessimists and the sophists.”
²³⁹
In Hebrew
soph
means “end.” A witness, Apolinary Hartglas, relates that when the council convened for the first time, Czerniaków showed several members a drawer in his desk where he had put “a small bottle with 24 cyanide tablets, one for each of us, and he showed us where the key to the drawer could be found, should the need arise.”
²⁴⁰

Czerniaków had his foibles of course, as we shall see, but foibles that bring a smile, nothing more. And yet, during his tenure as enslaved mayor of the largest Jewish urban concentration in the world after New York, this mild administrator was mostly reviled and hated for evil measures that were none of his doing and that he had no way of mitigating.

It is in stark contrast to Czerniaków’s mostly posthumous image of decency and self-sacrifice that any number of diarists, memoirists, and not a few later historians describe the leader of the second largest Jewish community in former Poland: Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, the “Elder” of Lodz. Rumkowski’s life to age sixty-two was undistinguished: in business he apparently failed several times, in the Zionist politics of Lodz he did not leave much of an impact and even his stewardship of several orphanages was criticized by some contemporaries.

As in Warsaw, the head of the prewar Lodz community, Leon Minzberg, fled; he was replaced by his deputy, and Rumkowski was elevated to the vice-presidency of the community. It was Rumkowski, however, whom the Germans chose to lead the Jews of Lodz. The new “Elder” appointed a council of thirty-one members. Within less than a month these council members were arrested by the Gestapo and shot. The hatred Rumkowski inspired years after his death finds a telling expression in the ambiguous comments of one of the earliest and most distinguished historians of the Holocaust, Philip Friedman, regarding this episode: “What was Rumkowski’s part in the fate of the original council? Had he complained to the Germans about the intransigence of the council members? If so, did he know what was in store for them? These are grave questions, which we cannot answer on the basis of the evidence at our disposal.”
²⁴¹
A second council was put in place in February 1940.

Czerniaków had no great respect for his Lodz counterpart: “It seems that Rumkowski in Lodz issued his own currency ‘Chaimki’; he has been nicknamed ‘Chaim the Terrible,’” the Warsaw chairman noted on August 29, 1940.
²⁴²
And on September 7 Ringelblum recorded Rumkowski’s visit to Warsaw: “Today there arrived from Lodz, Chaim, or, as he is called, ‘King Chaim,’ Rumkowski, an old man of seventy, extraordinarily ambitious and pretty nutty. He recited the marvels of his ghetto. He has a Jewish kingdom there with 400 policemen, three jails. He has a foreign ministry and all other ministries too. When asked why, if things were so good there, the mortality is so high, he did not answer. He considers himself God anointed.”
²⁴³

Most contemporaries agree about Rumkowski’s ambition, his despotic behavior toward his fellow Jews, and his weird megalomania. Yet a keen observer who lived in the Lodz ghetto (and died just before the mass deportations of early 1942), Jacob Szulman, while recognizing and listing some glaringly repulsive aspects of the Elder’s personality, in a memoir written sometime in 1941, nonetheless compared his stewardship favorably to that of his opposite number, Czerniaków.
²⁴⁴
Actually the comparison between the Jewish leaders in Lodz and Warsaw should be pushed even further. Rumkowski, historian Yisrael Gutman argues, created a situation of social equality in the ghetto “where a rich man was the one who still had a piece of bread…. Czerniaków, who on the other hand was indisputably a decent man, came to terms with scandalous incidents in the Warsaw ghetto.”
²⁴⁵

Jewish diarists—their chronicles, their reflections, their witnessing—will take center stage in this volume. These diarists were a very heterogenous lot. Klemperer was the son of a Reform rabbi. His conversion to Protestantism, his marriage to a Christian wife, clearly demonstrated his goal: total assimilation. Entirely different was Kaplan’s relation to his Jewishness: A Talmudic education at the Yeshiva of Mir (and later, specialized training at the Pedagogical Institute in Vilna) prepared him for his lifelong commitment: Hebrew education. For forty years Kaplan was the principal of the Hebrew elementary school he had established in Warsaw in 1902.
²⁴⁶
Whereas Klemperer’s prose had the light ironic touch of his revered Voltaire, Kaplan’s diary writing—which had already begun in 1933—carried something of the emphatic style of biblical Hebrew. Kaplan was a Zionist who, like Czerniaków, refused to leave his Warsaw community when offered a visa to Palestine. Klemperer, on the other hand, fervently hated Zionism and in some of his outbursts compared it to Nazism. Yet this self-centered neurotic scholar wrote with total honesty about others and about himself.

Ringelblum was the only professionally trained historian among these Jewish witnesses. The dissertation that earned him a doctorate from Warsaw University dealt with “The History of the Jews in Warsaw up to the Expulsion of 1527.”
²⁴⁷
From 1927 to 1939 he taught history in a Warsaw gymnasium, and during the years before the war he helped to set up the Warsaw branch of the Vilna Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO) and a circle of young historians. Ringelblum was an active socialist and a committed left-wing Zionist. From the outset, in line with his political leanings, he was hostile to the Jewish Council—the corrupt “establishment” in his eyes—and a devoted spokesman of the “Jewish masses.”

Jochen Klepper’s diary is different: Suffused with intense Christian religiosity, it should not be read in the same way as the Jewish chroniclers’ recordings. Because of his Jewish wife, Klepper had been dismissed from his job at German radio, then from the Ullstein publishing house. However, the bureaucracy did hesitate for a time about the category to which he belonged, the more so because he was the author of successful novels, even of a nationalist bestseller,
Der Vater
(The Father), a biography of King Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia. Thus Klepper’s tortured life turned him into a witness of an unusual kind, one who shared the fate of the victims yet perceived them from outside the pale in a way, as a German and a Christian.

Many more Jewish diarists will add their voices to those encountered so far, from West and East, from diverse walks of life, of different ages. Dawid Sierakowiak, the high school diarist from Lodz, will soon be joined by the youngest chronicler of all, twelve-year-old Dawid Rubinowicz from the neighborhood of Kielce in the General Government; by the high school chronicler Itzhok Rudashevski in Vilna; the adolescent Moshe Flinker in Brussels, and the thirteen-year-old Anne Frank, in Amsterdam. Other adolescents will be heard, more briefly. None of them survived; very few of the adult chroniclers survived either, but hundreds of hidden diaries were found. Tragically the chroniclers had achieved their aim.

CHAPTER II

May 1940–December 1940

On October 22, 1940, the 6,500 Jews of the German provinces of Baden and the Saar-Palatinate were suddenly deported into nonoccupied France. According to a report from the prosecutor’s office in Mannheim, on the morning of that day, eight local Jews committed suicide: Gustav Israel Lefo (age seventy-four) and his wife Sara Lefo (sixty-five), gas; Klara Sara Schorff (sixty-four) and her brother Otto Israel Strauss (fifty-four), gas; Olga Sara Strauss (sixty-one), sleeping pills; Jenny Sara Dreyfuss (forty-seven), sleeping pills; Nanette Sara Feitler (seventy-three), by hanging herself on the door of her bathroom; Alfred Israel Bodenheimer (sixty-nine), sleeping pills.
¹

Registration of the property left behind by the deportees was thorough. Thus the gendarmerie station of Walldorf, in the district of Heidelberg, reported on October 23 that nine hens, four roosters, and one goose were found at Blanca Salomon’s; Sara Mayer owned ten hens and three roosters; Albert Israel Vogel was the possessor of four hens and Sara Weil, of three hens and one rooster. As for Moritz Mayer, he owned a German shepherd who responded to the name “Baldo.”
²
On December 7, 1940, the gendarmerie of Graben opened and searched the apartment previously shared by four deportees: two Jewish widows, Sophie Herz and Caroline Ott, and a couple named Prager. The officials registered a golden medal—Paris Eiffel Tower—1889, a golden medal—Paris—1878, a gilded wristwatch bracelet, a gilded brooch, three golden rings, seven foreign copper coins, six silver kitchen knives, seven silver coffee spoons in their
étuis
, and so on.
³

I

No major military operations had taken place from the end of the Polish campaign to early April 1940. The “winter war,” which started with the Soviet attack against Finland in December 1939, ended in March 1940 after the Finns gave in to Soviet territorial demands in the province of Karelia. This conflict in northern Europe had no direct impact on the major confrontation except, possibly, by strengthening Hitler’s low opinion of the Red Army. During these same months of military inaction on the Western Front (the “phony war”) optimism was rife in London and in Paris, and consequently among Jewish officials who kept in touch with Western governments. On November 4, 1939, Nahum Goldmann, the representative of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva, reported to Stephen Wise, president of the World Jewish Congress in New York, that both in London and Paris people in the know had the highest expectations. Goldmann himself was slightly more prudent: “I would not go as far as some do to say that the breakdown of Hitler is already sealed, but it seems indeed that the Reich is in a terrible position. Italy is definitely no more on the Axis’ side…. Next spring the Allies will have twice or three times as many aeroplanes as Germany, whose aeroplanes, by the way, seem to be inferior to those of the Allies…. Most of those who still a month ago in France and Britain believed in a very long war, do not believe in it anymore and very important people hold the view that by next spring or summer the war may be over. The internal situation of Germany seems to be very bad. It is Germany at the end of 1917.”
⁴

On April 9, in a sudden swoop, German troops occupied Denmark and landed in Norway. On May 10 the Wehrmacht attacked in the West. On the fifteenth, the Dutch surrendered; on the eighteenth, Belgium followed. On May 13 the Germans had crossed the Meuse River, and on the twentieth they were in sight of the Channel Coast near Dunkirk. Some 340,000 British and French soldiers were evacuated back to England, thanks in part to Hitler’s order to stop for three days before attacking and taking Dunkirk. At the time the decision appeared of “secondary importance,” in German terms.
⁵
In hindsight it may have been one of the turning points of the war.

In early June the Wehrmacht moved south. On the tenth Mussolini joined the war on Hitler’s side. On the fourteenth German troops entered Paris. On the seventeenth French prime minister Paul Reynaud resigned and was replaced by his deputy, the elderly hero of World War I, Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain. Without consulting France’s British ally, Pétain asked for an armistice. The German and Italian conditions were accepted, and on June 25, shortly after midnight, the armistice took effect. In the meantime the British government had been reshuffled. On May 10, the day of the German attack on the Western Front, Neville Chamberlain had been forced to resign; the new prime minister was Winston Churchill.

On July 19, in a triumphal address to the Reichstag, Hitler taunted England with a “peace offer.” In a radio broadcast three days later, British foreign secretary Lord Halifax (who, a month earlier, had still been the supporter of a “peace of compromise”), rejected the German proposal and vowed that his country would continue to fight, whatever the cost. Did England have the military resources, and did its population and its leadership have the resolve, to pursue the war alone? None of this was obvious in the early summer of 1940. The appeasement camp, although it had lost one of its champions in Lord Halifax, remained vocal, and some highly visible personalities, the Duke of Windsor in particular, did not hide their desire to come to terms with Hitler’s Germany.

Stalin, who within days of the French collapse had occupied the Baltic countries and wrung Bessarabia and northern Bukovina from Romania, snubbed Churchill’s carefully worded query about a possible rapprochement. The American scene was contradictory. Roosevelt, an uncompromising “interventionist” if there ever was one, had been nominated again as Democratic candidate at the Chicago convention on July 19; his opponent, the Republican Wendell Willkie, was no less a determined interventionist, which augured well for Great Britain. But in Congress and among the American population, isolationism remained strong; soon the America First Committee would give it a firm political basis and a framework for militant propaganda. At this stage, however, even Roosevelt’s reelection would be no guarantee that the United States would move closer to war. Throughout Europe, in occupied countries and among neutrals, a majority of the political elite and possibly a majority of the populations did not doubt in the summer of 1940 that Germany would soon prevail. Many were those who aspired to a “new order” and were open to the “temptation of fascism.” The sources of this surge of antiliberalism were deeper than the immediate impact of German military might; as alluded to in the introduction, they were the outcome of a gradual evolution that had unfolded throughout the previous five or six decades.

A vast literature has described and analyzed all the twists and turns of antiliberalism and the rise of a new “revolutionary Right” (and Left), mainly on the European scene, from the end of the nineteenth century onward. In terms of this “New Right,” as opposed to the traditional, essentially conservative Right, it is generally accepted by now that the wide array of movements that came under this rubric did not spring only from a narrow social background (the lower middle classes), inspired mainly by fear of the mounting force of the organized Left on the one hand and of the brutal and unaccountable ups and downs of unrestrained capitalism on the other. The social background of the New Right was wider and extended to parts of a disenchanted working class as well as to the upper middle classes and elements of the former aristocracy. It expressed violent opposition to liberalism and to “the ideas of 1789,” to social democracy and mainly to Marxism (later communism or Bolshevism), as well as to conservative policies of compromise with the democratic status quo; it searched for a “third way” that would overcome both the threat of proletarian revolution and capitalist takeover. Such a “third way” had to be authoritarian in the eyes of the new revolutionaries; it carried a mystique of its own, usually an extreme brand of nationalism and a vague aspiration for an antimaterialist regeneration of society.
⁶

Whereas the antimaterialist, antibourgeois spirit surfaced both on the Right and among segments of the Left in pre–World War I Europe and found strong support among Catholics and Protestants alike, its fusion with exacerbated nationalism, and the related cult of camaraderie, heroism, and death in the aftermath of the war, became standard fare of the New Right and of early fascism. Following the revolution of 1917 the fear of Bolshevism added an apocalyptic dimension to the sense of looming catastrophe. It is in this context that the attraction of a “new order” (as the political expression of the “third way”), under the leadership of a political savior who could rescue a world adrift from the weak and corrupt paralysis of liberal democracy, grew in the minds of many.

The world economic crisis of the thirties merely brought the fears and the urges of earlier decades to a head: the fascist regime in Italy, inaugurated by Benito Mussolini’s so-called march on Rome in October 1922, was outdistanced by the considerably more powerful and impressive Nazi phenomenon: The “new order” was becoming a formidable political and military reality. The defeat of France seemed to confirm the superiority of the new order over the old, of the new values over those that had so utterly failed.

The Danish government, kept in place by the Germans, issued a statement in July 1940 expressing its “admiration” for the “great German victories” [that] “have brought about a new era in Europe, which will result in a new order in a political and economic sense, under the leadership of Germany.”
⁷
For several months the Belgian government, which had taken refuge in London, considered the possibility of rejoining King Leopold III (who had stayed) and accepting German domination; in October 1940 it finally chose opposition and exile. By then Marshal Pétain’s government had openly chosen the path of collaboration with the Reich. As for the populations in most of Western Europe, they soon accommodated to the presence of an occupation army widely praised for its correct, even polite behavior.

Intellectual accommodation to the new order and intellectual collaboration with it will be a recurring theme in this book. Suffice it to mention here that not only the far right of the European intellectual scene welcomed the German triumph. A strong contingent of Christian thinkers hailed the demise of materialism and modernity and acclaimed the rise of the “new spirit.” Thus, in a letter from Peking, the Jesuit paleontologist and a philosophical luminary of post-1945 Paris, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, showed an impressive understanding of the new times: “Personally, I stick to my idea that we are watching the birth, more than the death of a world…. Peace cannot mean anything but a higher process of conquest…. The world is bound to belong to its most active elements…. Just now, the Germans deserve to win because, however bad or mixed is their spirit, they have more spirit than the rest of the world.”
⁸

Teilhard’s voice was one among many, even on the Catholic left. “Europe divided against itself is giving birth to a new order, not only perhaps for Europe but for the whole world,” the French left-wing Catholic thinker, Emmanuel Mounier, wrote in October 1940. “Only a spiritual revolution and an institutional rebirth of the same scope as the fascist revolution could perhaps have saved France from destruction…. Germany against the West is Sparta against Athens, the hard life against the pleasant life.” And Mounier foresaw the birth of a Europe that “will be an authoritarian Europe, because too long it was a libertarian Europe.”
⁹

More significant for the ready acceptance of a “new order” than the enthusiasm of some Christian thinkers was the coalition between the carriers of this new order and most of the right-wing authoritarian regimes on the Continent. As the nationalist Right in Germany had become the natural ally of National Socialism during the crucial period preceding and immediately following the “seizure of power,” and then went along as a submissive partner with the policies of the new Reich, so did the European Right during the thirties and, with even greater enthusiasm, after Hitler’s early victories. As in Germany—and in Italy—common enemies, mainly Bolshevism and liberal democracy, superseded the social (and ideological) antagonisms between the traditional elites and the extremism inherent in Nazism or even Italian fascism. And, in order to accommodate its conservative partners, mainly in east central Europe, Hitler at times sided with the authoritarian-conservative governments against their internal fascist opposition; thus, for example, the Nazi leader supported Romanian marshal Ion Antonescu’s regime against Horia Sima’s fascist “Iron Guard” during the guard’s attempted putsch of January 1941.

The ideological ambitions of a “new order” and the Nazi-fascist-authoritarian power coalition were undermined from the outset by contrary forces, weak at first but growing in strength as time went by. When it became clear that Great Britain would not give in and that the United States would mobilize its industrial power to support the British war effort, doubts about a final German victory surfaced here and there. Hatred of the Germans spread, intensely in Poland, then in the Balkans, more slowly yet persistently in the West. Generally speaking, during the early years of the war, before the German attack against the Soviet Union, the majority of the European populations was neither psychologically nor practically ready for some form of anti-German resistance (despite armed attacks against the Wehrmacht in Poland and later in Serbia). In the West in particular the population concentrated on overcoming everyday difficulties and opted for various strategies of “accommodation.”
¹⁰

One of the major factors that bolstered accommodation with the existing power coalition on the European continent was the conciliatory attitude of the traditionally conservative Christian churches, and particularly—in terms of its influence—that of the Catholic Church. During the rise of Nazism to power in Germany, and during the 1930s, the tension between Hitler’s movement and then between his regime and the Catholic Church had been considerable, as already alluded to; yet, as we shall see, Pius XII’s accession to the pontificate signaled a resolute quest on the part of the Vatican for an arrangement with the Reich. Catholicism would not give in on matters of dogma (the sanctity of baptism and its precedence over the notion of race) or on issues of canon law. Yet political considerations outweighed any thought of adopting a strong stand against the fascist-authoritarian front.