The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (55 page)

Kovner was asked to write a proclamation that would be read at a gathering of members from all youth movements in the ghetto.
²⁵⁹
The meeting, which took place under the guise of a New Year’s celebration, brought together some 150 young men and women at the “Pioneers’ Public Kitchen,” 2 Straszun Street, on December 31, 1941. There Kovner read the manifesto that was to become the first call for a Jewish armed resistance.
²⁶⁰
“Jewish Youth,” Kovner proclaimed, “do not believe those that are trying to deceive you…. Of those taken through the gates of the ghetto not a single one has returned. All the Gestapo roads lead to Ponar, and Ponar means death.

“Ponar is not a concentration camp. They have all been shot there. Hitler plans to destroy all the Jews of Europe, and the Jews of Lithuania have been chosen as the first in line.

“We will not be led like sheep to the slaughter. True, we are weak and helpless, but the only response to the murderer is revolt! Brothers! It is better to die fighting like free men than to live at the mercy of the murderers. Arise! Arise with your last breath!”
²⁶¹

Within a short time Kovner’s appeal led to the creation of the first Jewish resistance organization in occupied Europe, the FPO (Fereynegte Partizaner Organizatsye [United Partisans Organization]). It brought together young Jews from the most diverse political frameworks, from the communists to the right-wing zionists of Betar.
²⁶²
Yet, precisely in Vilna, the situation seemed to change again: A relative stability that was to last for more than two years settled on the remaining 24,000 Jews of the ghetto—most of whom worked for the Germans—and on the members of their immediate families.

When the Vilna massacres of the summer and fall of 1941 became known in Warsaw, they were generally interpreted as German retribution for the support given by the Jews of Lithuania to the Soviet occupation. It was only among a minority within the youth movements that, there too, a different assessment was taking shape. Zuckerman explained the change of perception that was emerging in his group: “My comrades [from Dror] and the members of Hashomer Hatzair had already heard the story of Vilna [the massacres of Jews in Ponar]. We took the information to the Movement leadership, to the political activists in Warsaw. The responses were different. The youth absorbed not only the information but also accepted the interpretation that this was the beginning of the end. A total death sentence for the Jews. We didn’t accept the interpretation…that this was all because of Communism…. Why did I reject it? Because if it had been German revenge against Jewish Communists, it would have been done right after the occupation. But these were planned and organized acts, not immediately after the occupation, but premeditated actions…. That was even before the news about Chelmno, which came in December-January.”
²⁶³

A few weeks later, in early 1942, “Antek” would grasp from the comments of a Dror female emissary, Lonka, that his own family in Vilna had perished: “Among other things, she said, but not explicitly, that she [Lonka] and Frumka [another female Dror courier] had decided to save my sister’s only son, but hadn’t managed to do it. Then it was clear to me that my family was no longer alive. My family—my father and mother, my sister, her husband, and the child Ben-Zion whom the girls had decided to rescue, only him, because they couldn’t save any more and, ultimately, they couldn’t save him either…. Uncles, aunts, a big tribe of the Kleinstein and Zuckerman families, a big widespread clan, in Vilna.”
²⁶⁴

As the fateful year 1941 reached its last day and the course of the war seemed to be turning, the mood of a vast majority of European Jews differed starkly for a short while from that of a tiny minority. In Bucharest, Sebastian had overcome his worst fears: “The Russians have landed in eastern Crimea,” he noted on December 31, “recapturing Kerch and Fedosiya. The last day of the year…. I carry inside myself the 364 terrible days of the dreadful year we are closing tonight. But we are alive. We can still wait for something. There is still time; we still have some time left.”
²⁶⁵
Klemperer, for once, was even more ebuliant than Sebastian. At a small New Year’s Eve gathering at his downstairs neighbors, the Kreidls, he made a speech for the occasion: “It was our most dreadful year, dreadful because of our own real experience, more dreadful because of the constant state of threat, most dreadful of all because of what we saw others suffering (deportations, murder), but…at the end it brought optimism…. My adhortatio was: Head held high for the difficult last five minutes!”
²⁶⁶

Of course Klemperer’s optimism had been fueled by the news from the Eastern Front. Herman Kruk, less emphatically so, also sought solace in the “latest information.” The gathering of friends at his home was suffused with sadness: “In sad silence we assembled, and in sad silence we wished each other to hold out, survive, and be able to tell about all this! Meanwhile we consoled ourselves with the latest information: Kerch has fallen. Kaluga has fallen. An Italian regiment surrendered and promised to fight against the Germans. On the front 2,000 [Germans] are found frozen.”
²⁶⁷
As for Elisheva, in her Stanisl
^/
awów ghetto, she expressed both the hope and the dread ultimately shared by all: “I welcome you, 1942, may you bring salvation and defeat. I welcome you, my longed-for year. Maybe you will be more propitious for our ancient, miserable race whose fate lies in the hands of the unjust one. And one more thing. Whatever you are bringing for me, life or death, bring it fast.”
²⁶⁸

On that last day of the year, incidentally, the freezing weather was celebrated by many an inhabitant of occupied Europe, and not only by the small community of Jews: “We watch as military ambulances and trains go west,” Klukowski noted on December 31, “loaded with wounded and frostbitten soldiers. Most frostbite occurs on hands, feet, ears, noses, and genitals. You can judge the desperation of the German military situation by the fact that Hitler has taken direct responsibility for all military action in Russia.”
²⁶⁹
Klukowski’s entry for the last day of 1941 ended with words that, again, must have become increasingly common throughout Europe: “Many people are dying, but everyone still alive feels sure that our time of revenge and victory will come.”
²⁷⁰

In the same entry Klukowski also mentioned that all Jews had been ordered to deliver any furs or parts of furs in their possession within three days, under threat of the death penalty. “Some people,” he wrote, “are boiling mad, but some are happy because this fur business shows that the Germans are suffering. The temperature is very low. We lack fuel and people are freezing, but everyone hopes for an even colder winter, because it will help defeat the Germans.”
²⁷¹

For some young Jews like Kovner in Vilna or Zuckerman in Warsaw, the closing days of 1941 also meant a profound change, but a different one. “Antek” defined this psychological turning point: “A new chapter began in our lives…. One of its first signs was a sense of the end.”
²⁷²

CHAPTER VI

December 1941–July 1942

On December 15, 1941, the SS
Struma
, with 769 Jewish refugees from Romania on board, was towed into Istanbul harbor and put under quarantine. The ship, a rickety schooner originally built in the 1830s, patched up over the decades and equipped with a small engine that hardly enabled it to sail on the Danube, had left Constanta, on the Black Sea, a week beforehand and somehow made it to Turkish waters, after several mechanical failures.
¹

Five days later the British ambassador in Ankara, Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, gave a wrong impression of British policy to a Turkish Foreign Ministry official: “His Majesty’s Government did not want these people in Palestine,” the ambassador declared, “they have no permission to go there, but…from the humanitarian point of view, I did not like his [the Turkish official’s] proposal to send the ship back into the Black Sea. If the Turkish government must interfere with the ship on the ground that they could not keep the distressed Jews in Turkey, let her rather go towards the Dardanelles [on the way into the Mediterranean]. It might be that if they reached Palestine, they might, despite their illegality, receive humane treatment.”
²

The ambassador’s message provoked outrage in official circles in London. The sharpest rebuff came from the colonial secretary, Lord Moyne, in a letter sent on December 24 to the parliamentary undersecretary at the Foreign Office, Richard Law: “The landing [in Palestine] of seven hundred more immigrants will not only be a formidable addition to the difficulties of the High Commissioner…but it will also have a deplorable effect throughout the Balkans in encouraging further Jews to embark on a traffic which has now been condoned by His Majesty’s Ambassador…. I find it difficult to write with moderation about this occurrence which is in flat contradiction of established Government policy, and I should be very glad if you could perhaps even now do something to retrieve the position, and to urge that [the] Turkish authorities should be asked to send the ship back to the Black Sea, as they originally proposed.” The Colonial Office’s argument was and would remain throughout that Nazi agents could infiltrate Palestine under the guise of Jewish refugees.
³

As weeks went by the British decided to grant visas to Palestine to the seventy children on board. The Turks however, remained adamant: None of the refugees would be allowed to disembark. On February 23 they towed the boat back into the Black Sea. Soon thereafter a torpedo, almost certainly fired by mistake from a Soviet submarine, hit the ship: The
Struma
sank with all its passengers, except for one survivor.
⁴

“Yesterday evening,” Sebastian noted on February 26, “a Rador dispatch reported that the
Struma
had sunk with all on board in the Black Sea. This morning brought a correction in the sense that most of the passengers—perhaps all of them—have been saved and are now ashore. But before I heard what had really happened, I went through several hours of depression. It seemed that the whole of our fate was in this shipwreck.”
⁵

During the first half of 1942, the Germans rapidly expanded and organized the murder campaign. Apart from the setting up of the deportation, selection, extermination, and slave labor systems as such (or expanding already existing operations), the “Final Solution” also implied major political-administrative decisions: establishing a clear line of command regarding the responsibility for and the implementing of the extermination, as well as determining the criteria for the identification of the victims. It also demanded negotiated arrangements with various national or local authorities in the occupied countries and with the Reich’s allies. Throughout these six months (once again a time of German military successes), no major interference with the increasingly more obvious aims of the German operation took place either in the Reich, in occupied Europe, or beyond. And, during the same period, the Jews, under tight control, segregated from their environment and often physically debilitated, waited passively, in the hope of somehow escaping a fate that looked increasingly ominous but that, as before, the immense majority was unable to surmise.

I

On December 19, 1941, Hitler dismissed Brauchitsch and personally took over the command of the army. During the following weeks the Nazi leader stabilized the Eastern Front. But despite the hard-earned respite and despite his own rhetorical posturing, Hitler probably knew that 1942 would be the year of “last chance.” Only a breakthrough in the East would turn the tide in favor of Germany.

On May 8, 1942, the first stage of the German offensive started in the southern sector of the Russian front. After Army Group South withstood a Soviet counteroffensive near Kharkov and inflicted heavy losses on Marshal Semyon Timoshenko’s divisions, the German forces rolled on. Once again the Wehrmacht reached the Donets. Farther south Manstein recaptured the Crimea, and by mid-June, Sebastopol was surrounded. On June 28 the full-scale German onslaught (Operation Blue) began. Voronezh was taken, and while the bulk of the German forces moved southward toward the oil fields and the Caucasus foothills, Friedrich Paulus’s Sixth Army advanced along the Don in the direction of Stalingrad. In North Africa, Bir Hakeim and Tobruk fell into Rommel’s hands, and the Afrika Korps crossed the Egyptian border: Alexandria was threatened. On all fronts—and in the Atlantic—the Germans heaped success on success; so did their Japanese allies in the Pacific and in Southeast Asia. Would the strategic balance tip to Hitler’s side?

In the meantime the Nazi leader’s anti-Jewish exhortations continued relentlessly, broadly hinting at the extermination that was unfolding and endlessly repeating the arguments which, in his eyes, justified it. Raging anti-Jewish assaults surfaced in literally all Hitler’s major speeches and utterances. The overwhelming fury that had burst out in October 1941 did not abate. In most cases the “prophecy” reappeared, with some particularly vile accusations added for good measure. The Führer’s harangues could sound to some Germans, other Europeans, and Americans like undiluted madness; obversely, though, they may have convinced others that the pitiful groups of Jews marching to the “assembly points” with their suitcases and bundles throughout the streets of European towns, were but the deceitful incarnations of a hidden satanic force—“the Jew”—ruling over a secret empire extending from Washington to London and from London to Moscow, threatening to destroy the very sinews of the Reich and the “new Europe.”

The prophecy had been present, let us recall, as 1942 started and Hitler addressed his New Year’s message to the nation.
⁶
On January 25 historical “insights” and unusually open remarks about the fate of the Jews were volunteered for the benefit of two cognoscenti, Lammers and Himmler: “It must be done quickly,” Hitler told them. “The Jew must be ousted from Europe. If not, we shall get no European cooperation. He incites everywhere. In the end I don’t know: I am so immensely humane [
Ich bin so kolossal human
]. At the time of papal rule in Rome, the Jews were mistreated. Until 1830 every year eight Jews were driven through the city on donkeys. I only say: he [the Jew] must go. If he is destroyed in the process, I can’t help it. I see only one thing: total extermination, if they do not leave voluntarily. Why should I look at a Jew any differently from a Russian prisoner? In the prisoners’ camps many die, because we have been pushed into this situation by the Jews. But what can I do? Why did the Jews start this war?”
⁷

On January 30, 1942, in the ritual yearly address to the Reichstag, this time delivered at the Berlin Sportpalast, Hitler reverted in full force to his seer’s rhetoric: “We should be in no doubt that this war can only end either with the extermination of the Aryan peoples or with the disappearance of Jewry from Europe.” And, after again reminding the audience of his prophecy, Hitler went on: “For the first time, the ancient Jewish rule will now be applied: ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth!’” Thereupon messianic ardor took hold of the Nazi leader: “World Jewry should know that the more the war spreads, the more anti-Semitism will also spread. It will grow in every prisoner-of-war camp, in every family that will understand the reasons for which it has, ultimately, to make its sacrifices. And, the hour will strike when
the most evil world enemy of all times
will have ended his role at least for a thousand years.”
⁸
The millennial vision of a final redemption capped off the litany of hatred.

The
Volk
’s intuition was unerring. A general SD opinion report of February 2 showed how well the January 30 speech had been understood. The population interpreted Hitler’s use of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” as proof that their Führer was “pursuing his campaign against Jewry with inexorable single-mindedness to its very end and that soon the last Jew would be expelled from European soil.”
⁹
According to a February 21 report from Minden, people were saying: “When one speaks to soldiers about the East, one recognizes that here, in Germany, the Jews are treated much too humanely. The right thing would be to exterminate the entire brood” [
Es wäre das richtige, die ganze Brut müsste vernichtet werden
].
¹⁰

In Warsaw, Kaplan also understood the main thrust of Hitler’s speech: “The day before yesterday,” he noted on February 2, “we read the speech the Führer delivered celebrating January 30, 1933, when he boasted that his prophecy was beginning to come true. Had he not stated that if war erupted in Europe, the Jewish race would be annihilated? This process has begun and will continue until the end is achieved. For us the speech serves as proof that what we thought were rumors are in effect reports of actual occurrences. The Judenrat and the Joint have documents which confirm the new direction of Nazi policy toward the Jews in the conquered territories: death by extermination for entire Jewish communities.”
¹¹

Hitler’s apocalyptic vision surfaced once again in his February 24 message to the “Old Fighters” assembled in Munich for the annual gathering celebrating the proclamation of the party program. The Nazi leader bandied his prophecy once more. They had been a small group of “believers,” the leader told the party inner core, who as early as in 1919 “had not only recognized the international enemy of humankind, but also fought him.” Much had changed since those heroic beginnings, and now their ideas were embraced by powerful states. The messianic incantation followed: “Whatever the present struggle may bring or whatever its duration may be, this will be its final outcome [the extermination of the Jews]. And only then, after the elimination of these parasites, the suffering world will attain a long period of understanding among nations and thus achieve true peace.”
¹²
On the March 15, “Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers” (
Heldengedenktag
), Hitler’s furious anti-Jewish campaign went on, as threatening as ever.

Again and again the Nazi leader announced the extermination of the Jews, and each time many Germans understood perfectly well that he meant it. Thus, after reading the February 24 speech in the next day’s
Niedersächsische Tages Zeitung (NTZ)
, Karl Dürkefälden, an employee in an industrial enterprise near Hannover, noted Hitler’s threats in his diary; in his view the threats had to be taken seriously, and he quoted the title given to the Nazi leader’s speech in the
NTZ
: “The Jew will be exterminated” (
Der Jude wird ausgerottet
).
¹³
A few days beforehand Dürkefälden had listened to a speech by Thomas Mann, broadcast on the BBC, in which the writer had mentioned the gassing of 400 young Dutch Jews. Dürkefälden commented that such gassings were entirely credible given Hitler’s constant harangues against the Jews.
¹⁴
In other words, as early as during the first months of 1942, even “ordinary Germans” knew that the Jews were being pitilessly murdered.

As usual Goebbels was his master’s voice, but he was also the scribe of his master’s private tirades and, at times, a keen observer on his own. On January 13, for example, he noted that a people was defenseless against the Jewish threat if it lacked the right “anti-Semitic instinct”: “That,” he added, “cannot be said of the German people.”
¹⁵
At each of his meetings with Hitler, the minister was invariably told that the Jews had to be eradicated: “Together with Bolshevism,” Hitler declared to his minister on February 14, “Jewry will undoubtedly experience its great catastrophe. The Führer declares once again that he has decided to do away ruthlessly with the Jews in Europe. In this matter one should not have any sentimental impulses. The Jews have deserved the catastrophe that they are now experiencing. We must accelerate this process with cold determination, as in so doing we render a priceless service to humanity, which for millennia was tortured by Jewry. This clear-cut anti-Jewish position must also be impressed upon one’s own people against all willfully opposed groups. The Führer repeated this explicitly, somewhat later, to a gathering of officers.”
¹⁶

On March 7 the minister alluded for the first time to the Wannsee conference. Twenty days later he recorded the sequence of the extermination process: “Starting with Lublin, the Jews are now being deported from the General Government to the East. The procedure used is quite barbaric and should not be described in any further detail. Not much remains anymore of the Jews themselves. In general terms one has to admit that some 60 percent have to be liquidated, whereas only 40 percent can be used for work. The former Gauleiter of Vienna [Globocnik], who is in charge of this operation, proceeds quite cautiously and in a way that does not draw much attention. The Jews are being subjected to a sentence that is barbaric, but they have fully deserved it. The prophecy that the Führer made to them for provoking a new world war starts to come true in the most terrible way. In these things no sentimentality should be allowed. If we didn’t defend ourselves, the Jews would exterminate us. It is a life-or-death struggle between the Aryan race and the Jewish microbe. No other government and no other regime would have been able to muster the strength to find a general solution to this issue. Here too the Führer is the unswerving pioneer and spokesman of a radical solution, which the state of things requires and which appears, therefore, as unavoidable. Thank God, during the war we now have a whole range of possibilities that we couldn’t use in peacetime; we have to exploit them. The ghettos of the General Government that are being liberated will now be filled with Jews deported from the Reich and, after a certain time, the same process will take place again. Jewry has nothing to laugh about and the fact that its representatives in England and America organize and propagate the war against Germany must be paid for very dearly by its representatives in Europe; this also is justified.”
¹⁷