The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (88 page)

Sometimes the wind from burning houses

Would bring the kites along

And people on the merry-go-round

Caught the flying charred bits.

This wind from the burning houses

Blew open the girls’ skirts

And the happy throngs laughed

On a beautiful Warsaw Sunday.

It was during the uprising that Czeslaw Milosz wrote “Campo di Fiori,” his best-known poem, “as an ordinary human gesture.”
²³⁴
The poet compares the burning at the stake of the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno on the Campo di Fiori, while busy and indifferent Roman crowds are milling around, to the indifference of the Polish masses during the agony of the ghetto Jews. And so it was. There is nothing unlikely, therefore, about the assessment sent in August 1943, a few months after the uprising, by a representative of the Polish underground to the government-in-exile regarding the “Jewish question” in postwar Poland:

“In the Homeland as a whole—independently of the general psychological situation at any given moment—the position is such that the return of the Jews to their jobs and workshops is completely out of the question, even if the number of Jews were greatly reduced. The non-Jewish population has filled the places of the Jews in the towns and cities; in a large part of Poland this is a fundamental change, final in character. The return of masses of Jews would be experienced by the population not as a restitution but as an invasion against which they would defend themselves, even with physical means.”
²³⁵

In the meantime, in Poland as in much of occupied Europe, money did help. Marcel Reich-Ranicki, whom we encountered in the Warsaw ghetto as music critic, then as typist during the fateful meeting of the council at which Höfle announced the beginning of the deportations, had escaped the main
Aktion
and that of January 1943, as employee of the Council. Tosia, Marcel’s wife, was left alive; his parents were shipped to Treblinka. In February 1943, Marcel and Tosia fled the ghetto. The underground had given him some money for his assistance in getting hold of a large sum from the council’s safe.

Marcel bribed a Jewish guard, then two Polish policemen, and the couple reached the Aryan side of the city. But as they were moving from one hiding place to another, like most fleeing Jews they were confronted with the same constantly recurring pattern: “Extortion and escape…. Thousands of Poles, often unemployed adolescents…spent their days suspiciously watching all passers-by. They were everywhere, especially near the ghetto boundary, looking for Jews, hunting down Jews. This pastime was their profession and probably also their passion. It was said that, even if there were no other signs, they were able to identify Jews by the sadness in their eyes.”
²³⁶
These “Schmaltsovniks,” as they were commonly called, did not aim at delivering Jews to the Germans; they wanted money or anything of value, “at least a jacket or a winter coat.”
²³⁷

And yet some Poles offered help, at great danger to themselves and their families. Thus Marcel and Tosia were hidden and saved by a Polish couple living in the Warsaw suburbs, “by Bolek, the typesetter, and by Genia, his wife.”
²³⁸
It happened in the capital, and it happened in the provinces. In the words of a survivor: “These people helped us and risked their lives because they had to fear every neighbor, every passerby, every child, who might inform on them.”
²³⁹
This, however, is precisely the point made by historian Jan Gross: “
Because
the Poles were not ready to assist the Jews and by and large refrained from doing so, the death punishment for harboring Jews was meted out by the Germans systematically and without reprieve and the task of helping was so difficult.”
²⁴⁰

The diary kept by a Polish teacher, Franciszka Reizer, living in a village in the Rszezow province, starkly illustrates these various outcomes: “20 November 1942. The Germans drove many peasants and firemen from the villages and, with their help, arranged a hunt for Jews…. In the course of this action seven Jews were captured, old, young and children. These Jews were taken to the firemen’s station and shot the next day.” November 21: “On the fields belonging to Augustyn Bator Jews arranged themselves an earth bunker…. They were caught by the gendarmes who were hunting after Jews. All of them were shot on the spot.” On November 30, Reizer mentioned the death of a Jewish woman who tried to find shelter in the village. A year later, on October 2, 1943: “These days the last Jews in the vicinity were tracked down and murdered. They were shot near the tannery which belonged to the Jew Blank. Here, 48 Jews were buried.”
²⁴¹
A year later again, the diary mentions that the Germans murdered a Polish family who had hidden Jews.

In the vast rural areas of eastern Poland (or western Ukraine) there was no difference of attitude between Polish and Ukrainian peasants: traditional hatred, isolated instances of courage, and mostly, almost everywhere, the insatiable greed for money or other spoils.

Aryeh Klonicki (Klonymus) had, as may be remembered, described in his diary the fate of Jews in Tarnopol, eastern Galicia, during the first days of the German invasion. Together with his wife, Malwina (Hertzmann), Aryeh returned to Buczacz, where he had lived and been a high school teacher for many years. In July 1942 their son Adam was born. In July 1943 Aryeh and Malwina fled to the neighboring villages desperately trying to save their son and themselves. The Klonickis’ bitterness emerges in the very first entry (July 7) of Aryeh’s short diary: “A new period has begun here since the end of 1943: it is the era of liquidation. A Jew is no longer allowed to remain alive…. If it weren’t for the hatred of local inhabitants one could still find a way of hiding. But, as things are, it is difficult. Every shepherd or Christian child who sees a Jew immediately reports him to the authorities, who lose no time following up these reports. There are some Christians who are ostensibly prepared to hide Jews for full payment. But actually no sooner have they robbed their victims of all their belongings than they hand them over to the authorities. There are some local Christians who have gained distinction in the discovery of Jewish hideouts. There is an eight-year-old boy (a Christian one, of course) who loiters all day long in Jewish houses and has uncovered many a hideout.”
²⁴²

The Klonickis tried one hideout after another and each time were cheated out of their money or possessions. Their former maid, Franka was ready to help save the child, while they hid in nearby fields. “Franka is really displaying considerable devotion towards us and very much wants to help us. But she is afraid. Posters throughout town announce the death penalty for anyone hiding Jews. This is the reason for our being out in the field rather than at her home. We gave Franka all our money amounting to 2,000 zloty and 15 ‘lokschen’ (i.e., dollars). Should we succeed in finding a place for our child we could stay here for some time—as long as our presence is not discovered in the village.”
²⁴³

The child, Adam, was finally taken in by nuns. Aryeh and Malwina had to leave him at night in the entrance of the convent: “On a dark night as the rain was coming down in torrents my wife and I took our boy with a sackful of belongings…. We left him together with the sack in the corridor of the convent and hurriedly ran off. We are overjoyed at having succeeded in arranging for our child’s keep under such favorable conditions. I was not bothered by the fact that they would baptize the child.”
²⁴⁴

As the days went by, the Klonickis survived precariously, fleeing from one place to another. On July 27 Aryeh started his last diary entry; it was never completed: “The situation is very bad. All through the night it was raining and in the morning too…. At midday Samen once again looked us up in the company of someone called Vaitek and they took from us another three hundred zloty. What can we do! It is impossible to stay here any longer.”
²⁴⁵
According to Franka’s brother, Aryeh and Malvina were killed by the Germans in a forest near Buczacz, in January 1944. As for their son, Adam, baptized Taras, all traces of him disappeared.

Farther east the Ukrainian populations of Volhynia and of “Dnieper Ukraine” displayed generally the same mix of anti-Jewish attitudes as their western brethren. Jewish dominance in the local Soviet institutions replaced the argument of Jewish collaboration. Here too greed, envy, religious hatred, and some form of Ukrainian nationalism and anti-Bolshevism contributed in various degrees to the same brew. Yet, as the careful assessment by historian Karel C. Berkhoff ’s has shown, a clear picture is hard to establish.
²⁴⁶

Hostility toward Jews was widespread, but for many ordinary Ukrainians there clearly existed a distinction between anti-Jewish hostility, even hatred, and outright mass murder. Many Kiev inhabitants had expressed disbelief and then horror when faced with the Babi Yar massacres. According to
Einsatzgruppen
reports of the summer and fall of 1941, in the Ukraine as such, local anti-Jewish violence was not easily triggered: “To persecute Jews using the Ukrainian population is not feasible because the leaders and the spiritual drive are lacking; all still remember the harsh penalties which Bolshevism imposed on everyone who proceeded against the Jews,” one report stated. Another report repeated the same complaint: “The careful efforts once undertaken to bring about Jewish pogroms unfortunately have not produced the hoped-for success.”
²⁴⁷

Yet paradoxically, once the Red Army reconquered the Ukraine, local anti-Semitism became more virulent. In the eastern Ukraine pogroms erupted in the summer of 1944, followed by fierce anti-Jewish riots in Kiev in September 1945. The reaction of the local authorities was hesitant; some of the key leaders of the restored Ukrainian Communist Party were themselves outspoken anti-Semites.
²⁴⁸

It is in this overall Eastern European context that an outstanding initiative was taken in 1942 by a group of Polish Catholics, under the impulse of a well-known female writer, Zofia Kossak-Szezucka. A declaration (“Protest”), written by Kossak in August 1942, during the deportation of the ghetto inhabitants to Treblinka, stated that, despite the fact that the Jews were and remained the enemies of Poland, the general silence in the face of the murder of millions of innocent people was unacceptable and Polish Catholics had the obligation to raise their voices: “We are unable to do anything against the murderous German action, we are unable to take action to save one person, but we protest from the depth of our hearts, full of compassion, anger and dread. This protest is demanded by the Almighty God who forbade killing. It is demanded by Christian conscience.”
²⁴⁹
At the end of September, a Provisional Committee for Aid to Jews was established. Its first meetings took place in October, and in December it was reorganized and became the Council to Aid Jews, or Zegota, recognized and supported by the Delegatura.
²⁵⁰

Over the ensuing months and until the occupation of Poland by the Soviet army, Zegota saved and assisted thousands of hidden Jews mainly on the Aryan side of Warsaw. The political-ideological composition of the leadership changed, however, over time. The right-wing Catholic movement, which had initiated the establishment of the council, left it in July 1943; its anti-Semitic ideology could not, at length, countenance the assistance given to the Jews.
²⁵¹
The withdrawal of these conservative Catholics from the rescue operations tallied with the positions taken by much of the Polish Catholic Church, and of course with those of the majority of the population and of the underground movements.

On March 2, 1943, following a lengthy conversation with Göring, Goebbels noted in his diary: “Goering is completely aware of what would threaten us all, if we were to weaken in this war. He has no illusions in this regard. In the Jewish question in particular, we are so fully committed that for us there is no escape anymore. And it is good that way. Experience shows us that a movement and a people which have burnt their bridges fight by far more unconditionally than those who still have a way back.
²⁵²

CHAPTER IX

October 1943–March 1944

“I am taking advantage of a lonely Sunday evening to write you a letter that I have owed you for a long time.” Thus began the plea that Kurt Gerstein—the deeply religious Protestant, Waffen SS officer, and haunted witness of extermination who, in vain, had tried to inform the world—addressed on March 5, 1944, to his father, a retired judge and a firm supporter of the regime. “I do not know what goes inside you, and would not presume to claim the smallest right to know. But when a man has spent his professional life in the service of the law, something must have happened inside him during these last few years. I was deeply perturbed by one thing you said to me, or rather wrote to me…. You said: Hard times demand tough methods!—No, no maxim of that kind is adequate to justify what has happened.

“I cannot believe that this is the last word my father has to say on such unparalleled happenings: my old father cannot depart from this place with such words and thoughts. It seems to me that all of us with some time left to live have more than enough cause to reflect on the practical possibilities and limits, as well as on the consequences of this casting away of all restraint…. However tight the limitations on a man may be and however much, in many things, he may follow the principle that discretion is the better part of valor, he must never lose his standards or his ideas. He must never exonerate himself before his conscience and before the higher order of things to which he is subject by saying: that is not my business, I can do nothing to change things…. He keeps silent but he thinks: that
is
my business. I am involved in this responsibility and guilt, having knowledge of what is happening and a corresponding measure of blame.

“Dear father, there are situations in which a son is obliged to offer advice to the very father who laid the foundations and formed the ideas in him. The time will come when you, along with others, will have to stand up and be called to account for the age in which you live and for what is happening in it. There would be no understanding left between us…if it were not possible or permissible for me to ask you not to underestimate this responsibility, this obligation on your part to answer for yourself. The call may come sooner than we think. I am aware of this obligation and, admittedly, it is devouring me (
consumor in ea
). But that is immaterial.”
¹

The father did not understand. Gerstein added in a further and last letter: “If you look around you, you will find that this is a rift that is cutting through many families and friendships that were once close.”
²
Gerstein was exceptional and lonely in his ways as a morally tormented and “treasonous” member of the extermination system; however, the religious source of his attitude of course also played a role for other Germans and Europeans, some of whom we mentioned and thousands of whom we know nothing about. Their oppositional stand, whatever form it may have taken, albeit of limited impact, should be part of any reflections on the role of Christianity in the years of extermination. Generally speaking, however, their path was not the one chosen by the Christian churches as major institutions in the Western world and even less so, as we shall primarily see in this chapter, by their most exalted leaders.

I

In strictly military terms, the last months of 1943 and early 1944 were dominated by steady Soviet progress in all sectors of the Eastern Front, whereas the Western Allies edged only very slowly up the Italian peninsula and actually stalled at the German “Gustav Line.” Yet in terms of the Grand Alliance, the defining event of these months took place at the Roosevelt-Churchill-Stalin meeting in Tehran, from November 28 to December 1. Notwithstanding British fears and hesitations, the American strategy was accepted: American and British forces would land on the coast of Normandy sometime in May 1944. Simultaneously the Soviet Union would launch a major offensive, thus precluding the shift of any German forces to the West.

Hitler anticipated the Allied landing with much confidence. The German defenses along the Atlantic and North Sea coasts, and the Wehrmacht forces in the West, would turn the Anglo-American operation into a catastrophic defeat for the invaders. Then, immune for a long time to the further threat of a landing, the Nazi leader would turn the entire German might against the Soviet army, recapture the lost territories, and eventually force Stalin to sue for peace.
³
In the meantime, unable to effectively counter the allied bombing offensive, the Führer was, in Speer’s words, “in the habit of raging against the British government and the Jews, who were to blame for the air raids.”
⁴
And, indeed, the bombings added an element of blind fury and even stronger thirst for murderous vengeance to Hitler’s anti-Jewish obsession: The Jews were guilty!

In his deluge of anti-Jewish tirades, Hitler donned all garbs: prophet, statesman, rabble-rouser; Goebbels was mostly the latter—an extraordinarily effective rabble-rouser who, as Moshe Flinker had sensed, totally believed in his message. And, in unison with the leading tenors, the Rosenbergs, the Darrés, the Leys, sundry
Gauleiter, Kreisleiter, Ortsleiter, Blockleiter
, clergymen, academics, high school teachers, Hitler Youth, and BdM leaders all spewed the same invectives. Amid this tremendous howling, another voice, on a par with that of Goebbels but different and more ominous, regularly explained and threatened: the voice of Heinrich Himmler. The Reichsführer did not address the mass audiences of grass-root party rallies; he usually kept the presentation of his murderous activities, his admonishments suffused with “moral health” principles, and the lessons he drew from his far-flung “research” for the elite: SS officers or the highest levels of party and Wehrmacht. While Hitler never missed an occasion to let his audience know that, in prophesing and ordering the disappearance of the Jews, he was fulfilling a quasi-divine mission, a task dictated by Providence, fate, history—that in other words he was the exceptional leader chosen for this mission by higher powers and thus beyond doubts and qualms—Himmler’s approach was different.

The Reichsführer regularly presented the extermination of the Jews as a heavy responsibility delegated to him by the Führer and thus not open to discussion; it demanded, from him and from his men, a steady devotion to their task and a steady spirit of self-sacrifice. When, on July 26, 1942, the SS chief rebuffed Rosenberg’s attempts to come up with a definition of “Jew” in the eastern occupied territories, he typically added: “The eastern occupied territories will be freed of Jews: The Führer has laid on my shoulders the implementation of this very difficult order. Nobody can take this responsibility from me in any case. Hence, I strongly resent all intervening” [
Also verbiete ich mir alles mitreden
].
⁵

At times, aside from fulfilling his “difficult orders,” the Reichsführer conceived of grandiose anti-Jewish propaganda operations of his own. The
Untermensch
pamphlet, for example, published by the SS, was circulated throughout the Continent in fifteen languages.
⁶
In early 1943, another such large-scale project took shape. Impressed by a book on
Jewish Ritual Murders
, Himmler informed Kaltenbrunner on May 19 that he was having it distributed to SS officers up to the rank of Standartenführer; he was sending him one hundred copies for distribution to the
Einsatzkommandos
and “particularly to the men who have to deal with the Jewish question.” Moreover, the Reichsführer ordered inquiries into ritual murders among those Jews who had not yet been “evacuated” in order to stage some public trials; these inquiries had to be particularly intensive in Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria to allow the Nazi press to publicize the results and thus enhance the effort to deport Jews from these countries.

Finally the SS chief suggested the creation, together with the Foreign Ministry, of a special radio program aimed at England and the United States, and exclusively focused on anti-Semitic material, of the kind Streicher’s
Der Stürmer
had used during “the years of struggle.” The English press and English police announcements should be combed through for any report about a missing child; Himmler’s program would then broadcast that the child had probably been victim of Jewish ritual murder. “In conclusion,” the Reichsführer suggested,” I believe that by launching a vast anti-Jewish propaganda action in English, possibly even in Russian, centered on ritual murder, we could enormously increase worldwide anti-Semitism.”
⁷

When he addressed the higher SS echelons or other prominent audiences, Himmler often adopted a matter-of-fact, poised, and rational tone. He confidentially reported about the fate of the Jews, and indicated why what was done had to be done. In 1943 and 1944 the Reichsführer discussed the “Final Solution” with audiences which were well informed and involved in its implementation in one form or another; each time, Himmler offered encouragement and justification. It was in this vein that he addressed SS generals on October 4, 1943, and
Gauleiter
on October 6, in both cases in Posen (the address to the SS generals is the better known of the two very similar speeches). Once more, on October 6, Himmler described the extermination of the Jews as “the task which became the most difficult of my life.”
⁸

“The question has been asked of us,” the Reichsführer declared in his October 6, 1943, address, “how is it with the women and children? I have taken the decision to achieve a clear solution also in this matter. I did not consider that I had the right to eliminate the men—that is to kill them or have them killed—and to let their children grow up to become the avengers against our own sons and grandsons. The difficult decision had to be taken to have this people disappear from the face of the earth.”
⁹
Himmler was to repeat the same arguments to an assembly of Wehrmacht generals in May 1944, and on several further occasions throughout that year.
¹⁰

Goebbels attended the daylong
Gauleiter
s’ conference on October 6: “As far as the Jewish question is concerned,” the propaganda minister recorded on October 9, “he [Himmler] gives a very unvarnished and frank presentation. He is convinced that we can solve the Jewish question throughout Europe by the end of this year. He proposes the harshest and most radical solution: to exterminate the Jews root and branch [
Kind und Kegel
]. It is certainly a logical solution, even if it is a brutal one. We have to take the responsibility of completely solving this issue in our time. Later generations will certainly not handle this problem with the courage and the ardor that are ours.”
¹¹

Himmler adorned his speech to the SS generals, on October 4, with some flights of rhetoric: “The evacuation of the Jews…is a never-written-down and never-to-be-written page of glory of our history.” The explanation that followed closely toed the line of Hitler’s ever-repeated argument: “We know,” Himmler went on, “how difficult it would be if today, given the bombings, the burdens, and the privations of the war, we still had, in every city, the Jews as secret saboteurs, agitators and inciters. We would probably have now reached the 1916–1917 stage, when the Jews were still part of the German national body.” The Reichsführer found it necessary to sustain the sense of a grim, hard, but glorious and vital task among his highest-ranking officers at a time when the threat of defeat was becoming more concrete and, with it, the danger of retribution. There may also have been another aim to Himmler’s praise: to soften but nonetheless convey the message that followed the praise, threatening with death those who used the extermination for their own profit (“even one fur, even one watch, even one Mark or cigarette”).
¹²

In fact, while the Reichsführer was both praising and threatening, an inquiry commission, headed by SS investigating judge Konrad Morgen, had uncovered widespread corruption and unauthorized killings of political prisoners (mainly Poles and Russians) at the very center of the extermination system, in Auschwitz. Rudolf Höss was relieved of his command (but transferred to a more elevated position in Berlin);
¹³
others also had to leave: the head of the political section, Maximilian Grabner; the head of the Kattowitz Gestapo, Rudolf Mildner; even one of the chief physicians whom we already met, Friedrich Entress (who also specialized in phenol injections into the hearts of inmates in the infirmary of the main camp), and smaller fry.
¹⁴

Himmler was of course confronted with an ongoing and intractable issue: How to stem wanton murder in an organization set up for mass murder; how to stem widespread corruption in an organization set up for huge-scale looting. Relatively speaking, however, such internal problems of discipline were minor and the Reichsführer’s authority was never in question. Simultaneously his power within the overall structure of the regime was steadily growing.

The Waffen SS had become an army within the Wehrmacht, and in 1944 it comprised some thirty-eight divisions (approximately 600,000 men).
¹⁵
As we saw, under Pohl’s leadership both the camp system and the SS industrial enterprises were growing apace; so did the number of their slave laborers. In August 1943 the Reichsführer replaced Frick as minister of the interior. After a brief clash with Bormann over the autonomy of the
Gauleiter
, Himmler did not further insist on imposing his authority over the party stalwarts, and he soon joined forces with Hitler’s all-powerful “secretary” in an alliance that could crush any competing force.
¹⁶
Finally, in early 1944, military intelligence (the Abwehr) was liquidated after accusations of plotting against the regime; its chief, Admiral Canaris, arrested; and the entire organization taken over by the RSHA.
¹⁷