The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (91 page)

Historian Dan Diner has assumed that the Jewish Councils’ frantic search for a strategy to save their communities from extermination, given their attempts to understand the various “rational interests” of the Germans they were facing (the Wehrmacht as well as the SD), offers a starting point for inquiry into the “counterrational” world of extermination policies.
⁵⁸
Such an indirect approach may not be necessary if we recognize that the policy ordered by Hitler and implemented by Himmler and the entire murder system stemmed from a single postulate: The Jews were an
active threat
, for all of Aryan humanity in the long run, and in the immediate future for a Reich embroiled in a world war. Thus the Jews had to be exterminated before they could harm “Fortress Europe” from within or join forces with the enemy coalition they had themselves set against the Reich.

Whether or not they recognized the exact nature of German reasoning during the extermination phase, Jewish leaders could not know that dilatory tactics were hopeless in the end and that, at the last moment, the Germans would attempt to exterminate everyone without taking any “interests” into account. Whatever choice they made, Jewish leaders during the extermination phase were confronted with insuperable dilemmas; neither their organizational and diplomatic talents nor their moral “red lines” and political allegiances had any impact whatsoever on the ultimate fate of their communities.

When no hope of survival remained and no German promise sounded believable anymore, psychological conditions were ready for an uprising: Such was the situation in Warsaw after the January 1943
Aktion,
and such it was, in the summer and fall of 1943, for the Jewish workers’ teams left alive in Treblinka and Sobibor. As the deportations to both camps were winding down, these Jews understood that their own liquidation could not be far off.

According to Shmuel Wilenberg, one of the survivors of the Treblinka uprising, by May 1943, after the extermination of the remaining Warsaw ghetto population, not much doubt remained about the outcome: “The workload in the camp was dwindling…. For some time we had been receiving better and more satisfying portions of food. We got the impression that the Germans wanted to kill us all and were trying to dull our senses and deceive us with their behavior.”
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In late July 1943, as the exhuming and burning of corpses that had been going on in the upper camp (the extermination area) was coming to an end, the decision was finalized: The uprising had to take place as soon as possible in order to allow as many inmates as possible to flee before the final liquidation of the camp. The date and time were set for August 2, at four-thirty in the afternoon. The head of the main organizing committee in the lower camp, Marceli Galewski, an engineer from Lodz and a former camp elder, could in principle coordinate the exact time for the beginning of the operation with the upper camp, given the fact that master carpenter Jacob Wiernik was allowed by the Germans to move freely throughout both areas.
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At the decisive moment, however, nothing went according to plan.

The first shot was fired half an hour ahead of the time set for the beginning of the revolt, due to unforeseen circumstances and, soon, coordination between the different combat teams broke down. Nonetheless, as chaos was spreading and part of the camp was set on fire, hundreds of inmates, either in groups or on their own, succeeded in breaking through the fences and escaping.
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In his prison conversations with Gitta Sereny, camp commander Stangl described the scene: “Looking out of my window I could see some Jews on the other side of the inner fence—they must have jumped down from the roof of the SS billets and they were shooting…. In an emergency like this my first duty was to inform the chief of the external security police. By the time I had done that our petrol station blew up…. Next thing the whole ghetto camp was burning and then, Matthess, the German in charge of the
Totenlager
[upper camp] arrived at a run and said everything was burning up there too.”
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According to various estimates, of the 850 inmates living in the camp on the day of the uprising, 100 were caught at the outset, 350 to 400 perished during the fighting, and some 400 fled but half of them were caught within hours; of the remaining 200, approximately 100 succeeded in escaping the German dragnet and the hostile population; the number of those who ultimately survived is unknown.
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After fleeing the immediate surroundings of the camp, Galewski was unable to go on and poisoned himself.
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Wiernik survived and became an essential witness.
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The immediate reason for the uprising in Sobibor was the same as in Treblinka, and from early 1943 on, a small group of the camp’s working Jews started planning the operation. Yet only in late September, when a young Jewish Red Army lieutenant, Alexander Pechersky, who had arrived from Minsk with a group of Soviet POWs, joined the planning group, were concrete steps rapidly taken.
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The date of the uprising was set for October 14. The plan foresaw the luring of key SS members to various workshops under some fictitious pretext, and killing them. The first phase of the plan, the liquidation of the SS personnel, succeeded almost without a hitch; although the second phase, the collective moving through the main gate, soon turned into uncontrolled fleeing, more than three hundred inmates succeeded in escaping to the surrounding forests.
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Pechersky and his group crossed the Bug River and joined the partisans.

The cooperation of Jewish inmates and Soviet POWs in the breakout was a unique aspect of the Sobibor uprising. Yet it added a further dimension to the security scare in Berlin. Coming after the Warsaw rebellion, the uprisings in Treblinka and Sobibor convinced Himmler that the murder of most Jewish workers, even in the Lublin district, should be completed as rapidly as possible. On November 3, 1943, the SS killed 18,400 inmates in Majdanek while music was played over loudspeakers to cover the sounds of shooting and the cries of the dying prisoners. In July 1942 the roundup of Jews in Paris had been baptized “Spring Wind”; in November 1943 the mass murder of the Jews of Majdanek received an equally idyllic code name: “Harvest Festival.”

IV

Barely two weeks after the German occupation of Rome, the main leaders of the community, Ugo Foà and Dante Almansi, were summoned by SS Obersturmbannführer Herbert Kappler, the SD chief in the Italian capital. They were ordered to deliver fifty kilograms of gold within thirty-six hours. If the ransom was paid on time, no harm would befall the city’s Jews. Although Kappler had been secretly instructed by Himmler to prepare the deportation from Rome, it now appears (from declassified OSS documents) that the extortion was Kappler’s own idea, meant to avoid the deportation and eventually help instead in sending the Jews of Rome to work at local fortifications.
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Kappler, who had very few police forces at his disposal, preferred to use them in order to arrest Italian
carabinieri
, a far more real danger in his eyes than the mostly impoverished Jews of the city.
⁶⁹

The gold was collected in time from members of the community (a loan offered by the pope proved unnecessary) and shipped to the RSHA on October 7.
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Foà and Almansi believed Kappler’s assurances and, when warned by Chief Rabbi Israel Zolli and by leading officials of Delasem that further German steps could be expected, they chose for a while to ignore the omens: What had happened elsewhere could not happen in Rome. The community itself, mostly the 7,000 poorer Jews living in or near the former ghetto area, also remained unconcerned, like their leaders.
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And indeed, during the following days, the Germans appeared more interested in looting than in anything else. The priceless treasures of the Biblioteca della Comunità Israelitica (the Library of the Israelite Community) became a special target. For good reasons. In the words of historian Stanislao G. Pugliese, “among the manuscripts were works of the rabbi and medical doctor Moses Rieti; manuscripts spirited out of Spain and Sicily during the Jewish expulsion in 1492; a Portuguese incunabulum of 1494; a mathematics text of Elia Mizrahi; and an extremely rare edition of a Hebrew-Italian-Arabic vocabulary published in Naples in 1488. There were also twenty-one Talmudic tracts published by Soncino [in the early sixteenth-century]…and a rare eight-volume edition of the Talmud by the famous sixteenth-century Venetian printer Daniel Bomberg.”
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In early October the Rosenberg agency specialists examined the collection. While some precious artifacts belonging to the main synagogue of the ghetto were hidden in the walls of the mikvah [the ritual bath for purification], the library could not be saved: On October 14 Rosenberg’s men loaded the books into two railroad cars and shipped them off to Germany.
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And, although some of the Jews of Rome argued that “crimes against books were not crimes against people,” panic started spreading.
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Frantically Jews looked for hiding places; the richer among them were soon gone.

On October 6 Theodor Dannecker arrived in Rome at the head of a small unit of Waffen SS officers and men. A few days later, on October 11, Kaltenbrunner reminded Kappler of the priorities he seemed to ignore: “It is precisely the immediate and thorough eradication of the Jews in Italy which is the special interest of the present internal political situation and the general security in Italy,” the message, decoded and translated by the British, stated. “To postpone the expulsion of the Jews until the Carabinieri and the Italian army officers have been removed can no more be considered than the idea mentioned of calling up the Jews in Italy for what would probably be very unproductive labor under responsible direction by Italian authorities. The longer the delay, the more the Jews who are doubtless reckoning on evacuation measures have an opportunity by moving to the houses of pro-Jewish Italians of disappearing completely. [undecoded] has been instructed in executing the RFSS orders to proceed with the evacuation of the Jews without further delay.”
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Kappler had no choice but to submit.

On October 16 Dannecker’s unit, with small Wehrmacht reinforcements, arrested 1,259 Jews in the Italian capital. After
Mischlinge
, partners in mixed marriages, and some foreigners had been released, 1,030 Jews, including a majority of women and some 200 children under the age of ten, remained imprisoned at the Military College. Two days later these Jews were transported to the Tiburtina railway station and from there to Auschwitz. Most of the deportees were gassed immediately, 196 were selected for labor; 15 survived the war.
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Throughout the country the roundups continued until the end of 1944: The Jews were usually transferred to an assembly camp at Fossoli (later to Risiera di San Sabba, near Trieste) and, from there, sent to Auschwitz. Thousands managed to hide among a generally friendly population or in religious institutions; some managed to flee across the Swiss border or to the areas liberated by the Allies. Nonetheless, throughout Italy about 7,000 Jews, some 20 percent of the Jewish population, were caught and murdered.
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Since the end of the war the arrest and deportation of the Jews of Rome (and of Italy) have been the object of particular scholarly attention and of a number of fictional renditions, given their direct relevance to the attitude of Pope Pius XII. The events as such are known in detail; the reasons for some of the most crucial decisions can only be surmised at best.

By early October 1943, several German officials in the Italian capital, including Eitel Friedrich Möllhausen, embassy councillor with the German diplomatic mission to Mussolini’s Salo Republic but himself posted in Rome, Ernst von Weizsäcker, former state secretary at the Wilhelmstrasse and newly appointed Ambassador to the Vatican, as well as Gen. Rainer Stahel, the Wehrmacht commander of the city, became aware of Himmler’s deportation order.

For a variety of reasons (fear of unrest among the population, wariness about the possibility of a public protest by Pius XII and its potential consequences), these officials attempted to have the order partly changed: The Jews would be used for labor in and around Rome. Möllhausen went so far as to convey his worries to Ribbentrop, on October 6, in unusually explicit terms: “Obersturmbannführer Kappler has received the order from Berlin to arrest the eight thousand Jews living in Rome and to transport them to northern Italy where they will be liquidated. The city commander of Rome, General Stahel, informs me that he will allow the operation only if the Foreign Minister agrees to it. I am personally of the opinion that it would be a better deal (
besseres Geschäft
) to use the Jews for work on fortifications, like in Tunis, and together with Stahel, I would present the case to Field Marshall Kesselring.”
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The next day Luther’s successor, Eberhard von Thadden, replied: “By order of the Führer, the 8,000 Jews living in Rome have to be taken to Mauthausen as hostages. The Minister asks you to avoid interfering in this matter under any circumstances and leave it to the SS.”
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On October 16, as we saw, the roundup took place.
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On the morning of the raid a friend of the pope, Countess Enza Pignatelli, informed him of the events. Immediately Maglione summoned Weizsäcker and mentioned the possibility of a papal protest if the raid went on. Strangely enough, however, after hinting that such a step could trigger a reaction “at the highest level,” Weizsäcker asked whether he was allowed
not
to report the conversation, and Maglione agreed. “I observed,” Maglione noted, “that I had asked him to intervene appealing to his sentiments of humanity. I was leaving it to his judgment whether or not to mention our conservation, which had been so friendly.”
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