The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (86 page)

In the meantime the ZOB had overcome the crisis triggered by the events of September 1942. Yet, even under the dire new circumstances, unification of all political forces in support of armed resistance occurred only stagewise and not in full. The lengthy negotiations proved once more how deeply divisive ideological issues remained even among the younger generation of ghetto Jews. A Jewish National Committee was first established in October 1942, uniting all left-wing and centrist Zionist youth movements with the communists. The Bund, however, again refused to join, and only after further—and lengthy—discussions did it agree to “coordinate” its activities with the national committee. A Jewish Coordinating Committee was set up.
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As for the right-wing Zionists (the Revisionists and their youth movement, Betar), they had already established an independent armed organization, the Jewish Military Union (Zydowski Zwiazek Wojskowski, or ZZW), prior to (and without any link with) the Jewish Coordinating Committee.
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Whether the Revisionists did not want to cooperate with the “leftists” of the ZOB or whether the ZOB kept them at arm’s length remains unclear. Ideological divisiveness persisted to the end.

On January 18, 1943, following a brief visit by Himmler, the Germans launched a new
Aktion
(albeit a limited one at this stage); their plan was partly foiled. Resistance members—Mordechai Anielewicz, the commander of the ZOB, among them—attacked the German escort of the front column and the Jews dispersed. Some 5,000 to 6,000 Jews were ultimately caught during the January operation. Lewin and his daughter were among them; they were deported to Treblinka and murdered.
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This first sign of armed resistance probably led Himmler to issue an order to Krüger on February 16 to liquidate the ghetto entirely, “for security reasons.”
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The January events considerably bolstered the authority of the fighting organization among the ghetto population and garnered praise from various Polish circles. During the weeks that followed, the ZOB executed a few Jewish traitors (Jacob Lejkin, the second-in-command of the Jewish police; Alfred Nossig, a shady eccentric who apparently worked for the Gestapo; and some others); it collected—at times “extorted”—money from some wealthy ghetto inhabitants, acquired a few weapons from the communist Gwardia Ludowa and also from private dealers, and mainly organized its “combat groups” in expectation of the forthcoming German operation. In the meantime the inhabitants, increasingly ready to face an armed struggle in the ghetto, were hoarding whatever food they could get and preparing underground shelters for a lengthy standoff. The council, now chaired by a nonentity, Marc Lichtenbaum, and reduced to utter passivity, nonetheless contacted Polish resistance groups, mainly the Home Army (Armeia Krajowa, or AK), to denounce the ZOB as a group of reckless adventurers without any backing in the ghetto.
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The council’s denunciations were not the source of the AK’s reticence to provide help for the ZOB, although after the January events it accepted to sell some weapons. Gen. Stefan Rowecki, the commander in chief of the Home Army remained evasive when asked for stronger support. The traditional anti-Semitism of nationalist conservative Poles may have played a role but there was more to this basically negative stand. The Armeia Krajowa was suspicious of the leftist and pro-Soviet leanings of part of the ZOB (while it was ready to supply some weapons to the Revisionists); furthermore, and mainly so it seems, the Polish command was worried that fighting could spread from the ghetto to the city while its own plans for an uprising and its own forces were not yet ready. As a result AK even offered its help to transfer the Jewish fighters from the ghetto to partisan groups in the forests. The offer was turned down.
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The Germans did not expect major difficulties in the final “evacuation” of the ghetto, notwithstanding the January events and other signs indicating that some ghetto Jews throughout the General Government were opting for armed action (such as the attack, on December 22, 1942, by a Jewish group in Kraków on a coffeehouse popular with Wehrmacht personnel, the Cyganeria).
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Nor were the Germans attaching any significance to the failure of the campaign organized by their largest entrepreneurs in the ghetto, Toebbens and Schultz, to transfer Jewish workers to workshops in the Lublin area.

As for the leaders and members of the ZOB, they had no illusions about the outcome of the approaching struggle. “I remember a conversation I had with Mordechai Anielewicz,” Ringelblum wrote. “He gave an accurate appraisal of the uneven struggle, he foresaw the destruction of the ghetto and he was sure that neither he nor his combatants would survive the liquidation of the ghetto. He was sure that they would die like stray dogs and no one would even know their last resting place.”
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When the final liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto started on April 19, 1943, the eve of Passover, the Jews were not caught by surprise: The streets were empty, and as soon as German units entered the area, firing started. The early street battles took place mainly in three distinct and unconnected areas: parts of what had been the Central Ghetto, the Brushmakers Workshop surroundings, and the Toebbers-Schultz Workshop surroundings.
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The ideological opposition that precluded some arrangement between the Revisionists and ZOB before the uprising apparently persisted during the fighting and in the later historiography. According to Moshe Arens’s painstaking reconstruction of the combat, the role of the ZZW in the bitter street battle around Muranowski Square and their hoisting of a Polish and a Zionist flag on the tallest building in the area are generally left unmentioned in later renditions of the uprising. And the names of the ZZW commanders, Pawel Frenkel, Leon Rodal, and David Apfelbaum, are rarely mentioned; all three fell in battle.
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Fighting in the open lasted for several days (mainly from April 19 to April 28) until the Jewish combattants were compelled to retreat into the underground bunkers. Each bunker became a small fortress, and only the systematic burning down of the buildings and the massive use of flame throwers, tear gas, and hand grenades finally drove the remaining fighters and inhabitants into the streets. On May 8 Anielewicz was killed in the command bunker at Mila Street 18. Combat continued sporadically while some groups of fighters succeeded in reaching the Aryan side of the city by way of the sewers. Days later some of the fighters, “Kazik” for example, took again to the sewers and returned to the ghetto ruins to try and save some remnants: They found nobody alive.

On May 16 SS general Jürgen Stroop proclaimed the end of the
Grossaktion
: “The Jewish quarter in Warsaw exists no more.” Symbolically the Germans concluded the operations by blowing up the Warsaw [Great] Synagogue at 20:15 hours.
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According to Stroop, fifteen Germans and auxiliaries had been killed and some ninety wounded during the fighting. “Of the total of 56,065 Jews caught,” the SS general reported further, “about 7,000 were exterminated within the former Ghetto in the course of the action, and 6,929 by transporting them to T.II [Treblinka], which means 14,000 Jews were exterminated altogether. Beyond the number of 56,065 Jews, an estimated number of 5,000 to 6,000 were killed by explosions or in fires.”
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Posters informed the Polish population that anybody hiding a Jew would be executed. Moreover, according to Stroop, “permission was granted to the Polish police to pay one-third of the cash seized, to any of its men who arrested a Jew in the Aryan part of Warsaw. This measure already produced results,” he wrote. Finally the SS general reported, “for the most part the Polish population approved the measures taken against the Jews. Shortly before the end of the large-scale operation, the governor issued a special proclamation…to the Polish population; in it he informed them of the reasons for destroying the former Jewish Ghetto by mentioning the assassinations carried out lately in the Warsaw area and the mass graves found in Catyn [Katyn]; at the same time they were asked to assist us in our fight against Communist agents and Jews.”
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On May 1 the uprising found its first echo in Goebbels’s diary: “Reports from the occupied territories do not bring anything sensationally new. Noteworthy though is the exceptionally sharp fighting in Warsaw between our police and even Wehrmacht units and the rebelling Jews. The Jews have managed to organize the defense of the ghetto. The fighting there is very hard; it goes so far that the Jewish command issues daily military reports. This whole fun will probably not last long. One sees though what one may expect from the Jews when they manage to set their hands on weapons. Unfortunately they have in part also good German weapons, mainly machine guns. God knows how they got them.”
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During the following days and weeks the minister regularly mentioned the ghetto uprising. According to him the Jews had bought their weapons from Germany’s allies returning home via Warsaw; the Jews fought with such desperation because they knew what was awaiting them and so on. On May 22 he noted: “The fighting for the Warsaw ghetto continues. The Jews are still resisting. But, all in all, it can be considered as not dangerous and overcome.”
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The desperate Jewish resistance further came up on May 31, 1943, at a high-level meeting in the General Government convened to discuss the worsening security situation, in the presence of RSHA chief Kaltenbrunner, a representative of the Führer Chancellery and senior Wehrmacht officers. Frank’s second-in-command, President Ludwig Losacker, reported on the ghetto uprising: “[The liquidation of the ghetto] was, by the way, very difficult. The police forces lost 15 dead and suffered 88 wounded. One noticed that…armed Jewish women fought to the last against the Waffen-SS and policemen.”
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German opposition circles were also informed, although details were at times strangely off the mark. In a letter to his wife dated May 4, 1943, Helmuth von Moltke described a brief stay in Warsaw during these same days. “A big cloud of smoke stood above the city and could still be seen a good half hour after my departure by the express train, that means about 30 km. It was caused by a fight which had been raging for some days in the ghetto. The remaining Jews—30,000—reinforced by airborne Russians, German deserters, and Polish communists, had turned part of it into an underground fortress. It is said that they have made passages between the cellars of houses while the Germans were patrolling the streets, and reinforced the ceilings of the cellars; exits are said to lead by underground passages from the ghetto to other houses. I was told that cows and pigs had been kept in those catacombs and large food depots and wells had been installed. In any case it was said that something like partisan fighting in the town had been directed from these headquarters, so that it was decided to clear out the ghetto: but the resistance was so strong that a real assault with guns and flamethrowers was needed. And that is why the ghetto is still burning. It had already been going on for several days when I got there and was still burning on my return journey yesterday.”
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German or Polish sources must have supplied Moltke with some of the fantastic stories about “airborne Russians, German deserters, and Polish communists”; such tales may have stemmed from the generally shared belief that Jews would not be able to put up a fight on their own. In Hassell’s diary the ghetto uprising appeared a few days later, preceded by a few lines about the gassing of hundreds of thousands of Jews “in specially built halls.” Then: “In the meantime the hopeless Jewish remnant in the ghetto defended itself; there has been heavy fighting which will end in total extermination by the SS.”
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Some sixteen months later, on September 1, 1944, during a military conference dealing, among other issues, with the Polish uprising in Warsaw, Hitler was told by Gen. Walter Wenck that the center of the city had been the area of the ghetto. “Has that been eliminated now?” Hitler asked. The (incompletely transmitted) answer came of course from Himmler’s representative at the military conferences, SS general Hermann Fegelein (the hero of the drowning attempt of Jewish women and children in the Pripet Marshes at the end of July 1941): “As such already everything.”
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In fact, on June 11, 1943, Himmler had to order again “that the city area of the former ghetto be totally flattened, every cellar and every sewer be filled up. After completion of this work, topsoil will be placed over the area and a large park will be laid out.”
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In one year, between July 1943 and July 1944 (when the Red Army approached the city), the full destruction of the ghetto ruins was the only completed part of Himmler’s project.
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The news of the ghetto uprising rapidly spread among Jews in Germany and in most occupied countries: “On Sunday [May 30],” Klemperer recorded on June 1, “Lewinsky related as an entirely vouched for and widespread rumor (originating with soldiers): there had been a bloodbath in Warsaw, revolt by Poles and Jews, German tanks had been destroyed by mines at the entrance of the Jewish town, whereupon the Germans had shot the whole ghetto to pieces—fires burning for days and many thousands of dead. Yesterday I asked several people about it. Whispered reply: yes, they too had heard the same or similar, but not dared to pass it on. Eva, coming from the dentist, reported that Simon stated with certainty, 3,000 German deserters had also taken part in this revolt, and that battles lasting weeks (!) had taken place before the Germans had mastered the situation. Simon’s credibility is limited. Nevertheless:
that
such rumors are in circulation is symptomatic.” Simon had added that there was also unrest in other occupied countries.
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