The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (9 page)

VIII

“In the morning, I proceeded through the streets with an armband,” Czerniaków, the newly appointed chairman of the Warsaw Jewish Council, noted on December 3, 1939. “In view of the rumors about the postponement of the wearing of armbands such a demonstration is necessary.”
¹³⁰
As of December 1 all Jews in the General Government above age ten had to wear a white armband with a blue Star of David on their right arm. And although the definition of “Jew” was applied de facto according to the Nuremberg laws with the German occupation of Poland, it was formally so decreed first in the Warthegau at the end of 1939, and then in Frank’s kingdom, on July 27, 1940.
¹³¹

The armband was rapidly followed by a prohibition from changing residence, the exclusion from a long list of professions, being banned from the use of public transportation and barred from restaurants, parks, and the like. But, although the Jews were increasingly concentrated in specific areas of cities and towns, neither Heydrich nor Frank gave an overall order to establish closed ghettos. The ghettoization stemmed from different circumstances from place to place. It extended from October 1939 (Piotrkow Trybunalski) to March 1941 (Lublin and Kraków) to 1942, even 1943 (Upper Silesia), and in some cases, no ghettos were established before the beginning of deportations to the extermination camps. The Lodz ghetto was established in April 1940 and the Warsaw ghetto in November 1940. Whereas in Warsaw the pretext for sealing the ghetto was mainly sanitary (the Germans’ fear of epidemics), in Lodz it was linked to the resettlement of ethnic Germans from the Baltic countries in the homes vacated by Jews.
¹³²

From the outset the ghettos were considered temporary means of segregating the Jewish population before its expulsion. Once they acquired a measure of permanence, however, one of their functions became the ruthless and systematic exploitation of part of the imprisoned Jewish population for the benefit of the Reich (mainly for the needs of the Wehrmacht) at as low a cost as possible. Moreover, by squeezing the food supply and, in Lodz, by replacing regular money with a special ghetto currency, the Germans put their hands on most of the cash and valuables the Jews had taken along when driven into their miserable quarters.
¹³³

The ghettos also fulfilled a useful psychological and “educational” function in the Nazi order of things: They rapidly became the showplace of Jewish misery and destitution, offering German viewers newsreel sequences that fed existing repulsion and hatred; a constant procession of German tourists (soldiers and some civilians) were presented with the same heady mix.

“What you see,” Fräulein Greiser, the Warthegau
Gauleiter
’s daughter, wrote after touring the Lodz ghetto in mid-April 1940, “is mainly rabble, all of which is just hanging around…. Epidemics are spreading and the air smells disgustingly, as everything is poured into the drain-pipes. There is no water either, and the Jews have to buy it for 10 Pfennigs the bucket; they surely wash themselves even less than usually…. You know, one can really feel no pity for these people; I think that their feelings are completely different from ours and therefore they do not feel this humiliation and everything else…. They surely also hate us, although for other reasons.” In the evening the young lady was back in the city, where she attended a big rally. “This contrast, in the afternoon the ghetto and in the evening the rally, which could not have been more German anywhere else, in one and the same city, that was absolutely unreal…. You know, I was again really happy and terribly proud of being a German.”
¹³⁴

Eduard Koenekamp, an official of the Stuttgart
Auslandsinstitut
, had visited several Jewish quarters in December 1939. In a letter to a friend, Koenekamp showed less restraint than Fraulein Greiser: “The extermination of this subhumanity would be in the interest of the whole world. However, such an extermination is one of the most difficult problems. Shooting would not suffice [
Mit Erschiessung kommt man nicht durch
]. Also, one cannot allow the shooting of women and children. Here and there, one expects losses during the deportations; thus in a transport of 1,000 Jews from Lublin, 450 perished [Koenekamp probably meant
to
Lublin]. All agencies which deal with the Jewish Question are aware of the insufficiency of all these measures. A solution of this complicated problem has not yet been found.”
¹³⁵

The Jewish Council (
Judenrat
) was the most effective instrument of German control of the Jewish population. The English term “Jewish Council” is a misnomer, however. Heydrich’s order of September 21, 1939, demanded the creation of “Jewish Elders’ Councils” (
Jüdische Ältestenräte
), which rapidly became, in most places, the contemptuous
Judenrat
, or “Jews’ Council,” in line with the appellation introduced on November 28 by Hans Frank’s decree. These councils were soon established in all Jewish population centers, large and small.
¹³⁶

Of course the councils were established by the Germans for their own purposes, but even during the early days of the war, communal activities were organized by the Jews themselves according to various patterns, to cater to the basic needs of the population. Thus, as pointed out by historian Aharon Weiss, “This combination of German pressure and interest in the establishment of a Jewish representation, on the one hand, and the need and wish of the Jews for a representative body of their own, forms one of the major aspects of the convoluted question of the
Judenräte
.
¹³⁷

As far as German policies were concerned, the two sets of founding decrees (Heydrich and Frank) indicated that from the outset both the Security Police and the General Government’s civil administration fought for control over the councils. In May 1940, Heydrich’s delegate in Kraków, SS Brigadeführer Bruno Streckenbach, openly argued for the Security Police’s primacy.
¹³⁸
Frank did not give in, but in fact, whether formally or not, the SS apparatus increasingly dominated the appointments and the structure of the councils while Frank’s appointees were mostly involved in the administrative and economic life of the ghettos, until the beginning of the deportations.
¹³⁹
Then the SS apparatus would completely take over.

In principle the twelve or twenty-four council members (according to the size of the community) were to be chosen from the traditional Jewish elites, the recognized community leadership.
¹⁴⁰
Heydrich’s orders, issued as the decimation of the Polish elites was taking place, were probably based on two assumptions: first, that Jewish elites would not be instigators and leaders of rebellion and self-affirmation but rather agents of compliance; and additionally that the Jewish elites—as represented in the councils—would be accepted and, all in all, obeyed by the population. In other words the Polish elites were murdered because they could incite against the Germans; the Jewish elites were kept because they would submit and ensure submission.

In fact in many instances the council members did not belong to the foremost leadership of their communities, but many had previously been active in public life.
¹⁴¹
The
Judenrat
as such was a replica—distorted of course, but a replica nonetheless—of self-government within the framework of the traditional
kehilla
, the centuries-old communal organization of the Jews. And many of those who joined the councils did believe that their participation would benefit the community.
¹⁴²

Some of the councils’ earliest German-ordered tasks took on an ominous significance only when considered in hindsight; the potentially most fateful one was the census. The entries in Czerniaków’s diary show that the census ordered by Heydrich looked like any other administrative measure, fraught with difficulties but not particularly threatening. “From 12 until 2, in the Statistical Office,” the chairman recorded on October 21. “Between 3 and 6 p.m., at the SS…. I point out that the first [of November] is “All Saints Day” and the second “All Souls Day”; hence the Jewish census should be postponed until the 3
^rd
…. A long and difficult conference. It is decided that the census will take place on [October] 28
^th
…. The census forms were discussed and approved. I have to see to it that this German announcement is posted on the walls throughout the city.”
¹⁴³

Actually the
Judenrat
itself needed the census for identifying the pool of laborers at its disposal and for housing, welfare, food distribution, and the like; the immediate needs seemed by far more demanding and urgent than any long-term consequences. Nonetheless Kaplan, usually more farsighted than any other diarist and suspicious on principle of German intentions, sensed that the registration carried threatening possibilities: “Today, notices inform the Jewish population of Warsaw,” he wrote on October 25, “that next Saturday [October 29] there will be a census of the Jewish inhabitants. The
Judenrat
under the leadership of Engineer Czerniaków is required to carry it out. Our hearts tell us evil—some catastrophe for the Jews of Warsaw lies in this census. Otherwise there would be no need for it.”
¹⁴⁴

On January 24, 1940, Jewish enterprises in the General Government were placed under “trusteeship”; they could also be confiscated if “public interest” demanded it. On the same day Frank ordered the registration of all Jewish property: Nonregistered property would be confiscated as “ownerless.” Further expropriation measures followed, and finally, on September 17, 1940, Göring ordered the confiscation of
all
Jewish property and assets except for personal belongings and one thousand reichsmarks in cash.
¹⁴⁵

The expropriation decrees opened the way to profiteering and enrichment on an enormous scale at all levels of the German administration in the annexed Polish provinces and within the General Government. The corruption that had spread throughout all segments of society in the Reich, in annexed Austria, and in the Protectorate was reaching new proportions in occupied Poland and would keep growing throughout the war.
¹⁴⁶
On January 1, 1940, diarist Emanuel Ringelblum—to whom we will return at length—noted: “The Lords and Masters not too bad. If you grease the right palms, you can get along.”
¹⁴⁷
Throughout the second half of November 1939, Czerniaków spent days trying to raise three hundred thousand zlotys to ransom a group of hostages from the Warsaw SS.
¹⁴⁸

Bribery became an integral part of the relations between the Germans and their victims. “The Councils constantly had to satisfy all kinds of demands to remodel and equip German office premises, casinos, and private apartments for various functionaries, as well as to provide expensive gifts, etc. In dealing with a ghetto, each functionary considered himself entitled to be rewarded by its Council. On the other hand, the Councils themselves implemented an intricate system of bribes in an effort to try and ‘soften the hearts’ of the ghetto bosses or to win favors for the ghetto inmates from the ‘good Germans.’ This in turn enhanced the pauperization of the Jews.”
¹⁴⁹
The bribes may have delayed briefly some threats or saved some individuals; but, as the coming months would show, they never changed German policies or, in most cases, major implementation steps. In addition, bribing the Germans or their auxiliaries led to the spreading of corruption among the victims: A “new class” of Jewish profiteers and black marketeers was rising above the miserable majority of the population.

One of the immediate advantages that money could buy was exemption from forced labor. From mid-October 1939 on, the councils, mainly in Warsaw and Lodz, took it upon themselves to deliver the required numbers of laborers to the Germans in order to put an end to the brutal manhunt and the constant roundups that had been the usual procedure. As could have been expected, the poorest part of the population bore the brunt of the new arrangement; the wealthier segments of the community either paid the councils or bribed the Germans. In Warsaw in April 1940, according to statistics found in the Ringelblum archives, “some 107,000 men were forced laborers while during the six months that followed, 33,000 persons payed for the exemption.”
¹⁵⁰

How did the “Jewish masses” respond to the hail of physical and psychological blows that descended on them from day one of the German occupation? Of course each individual response was different, but if we look for a common denominator among a substantial majority, the prevalent reaction was a belief in rumors, even the most absurd, as long as they offered hope: Germany had suffered grievous losses at the hands of the French, Hamburg had been occupied by British forces, Hitler was dead, German soldiers were abandoning their units at a growing rate, and so on and on. Bottomless despair gave way to frantic expectations, sometimes in recurring sequences on one and the same day. “The Jews have reached the stage of messianic prophecies,” Sierakowiak noted on December 9, 1939. “A rabbi from Gora Kalwarii supposedly announced that a liberation miracle will happen on the sixth day of Chanukah. My uncle says that very few soldiers and Germans can be seen in the streets. This tendency to take comfort from nothing irritates me. It’s better not to say anything. In the evening a rumor spread about an armistice,” and so it went.
¹⁵¹

IX

While the German grip on the Jewish population of the Warthegau and the General Government was tightening, in the Soviet-occupied zone of Poland, the 1.2 million local Jews and the approximately 300,000 to 350,000 Jewish refugees from the western part of the country were getting acquainted with the heavy hand of Stalinism. A muddled Polish military announcement calling on men to reassemble in the east of the country, broadcast on September 7, had triggered an eastward exodus, accelerated by the rapid German advance. On the seventeenth, both the refugees and the local population suddenly discovered that they were under Soviet rule. Jews, albeit in much smaller numbers, continued to escape to the Soviet zone until early December, and a trickle of refugees managed to cross the new border until June 1941.
¹⁵²
The elite of Polish Jewry—intellectuals, religious leaders, Zionists, and Bundists among others—fled the Germans but did not feel safe from communist persecution either: They moved on from eastern Poland to independent Lithuania, particularly to Vilna.