The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (97 page)

On November 2, 1942, the acting chief of the
Ahnenerbe
, Wolfram Sievers, wrote to the head of Himmler’s chancellery, Rudolf Brandt, that “for anthropological research purposes,” 150 skeletons of Jews were necessary, that should be made available at Auschwitz. Brandt forwarded the request to Eichmann who in turn informed the Auschwitz authorities. On June 10, 1943, Beger visited the camp, selected his subjects and performed the necessary measurements.
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On the twenty-first, Eichmann reported back to Sievers that the Munich anthropologist had “processed” 115 inmates: 79 Jewish men, 30 Jewish women, 2 Poles and 4 men from “inner Asia” (
Innerasiaten
).
¹⁷⁶
The selected inmates were transported to the Natzweiler camp in Alsace. In the early days of August 1943, the commandant of the Natzweiler-Struthof camp, Joseph Kramer, personally gassed the first batch of Jewish women with the special chemical agent requested by Hirt.
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Over the following days the operation was completed. The corpses were all sent to Hirt’s anatomy laboratory in Strasbourg: Some were preserved and others macerated so that only the skeleton remained.
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The results of Hirt’s research have not been preserved, although Beger survived the war and was briefly sent to jail (Hirt committed suicide). Sievers had ordered the destruction of all related documents and photographs. Yet as the Allied occupied Strasbourg, they nonetheless found some evidence that allowed the record to be kept for posterity.
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Some projects, such as the setting up of a Jewish Central Museum in Prague, remain puzzling.
¹⁸⁰
Whether the idea of establishing such a museum, while the deportations from the Protectorate were putting an end to Jewish life in Bohemia and Moravia, was initiated by officials of the dwindling
Jüdische Kultusgemeinde
(for all practical purposes, the Jewish Council) or by the two senior Eichmann delegates in Prague, Hans Günther and his deputy, Karl Rahm, is irrelevant. Even if the project was initiated by Jewish officials, it had to be accepted by Günther and Rahm and furthered by them. It was.

The museum project started officially on August 3, 1942, on the site of the prewar Jewish museum; it soon extended to all major synagogue buildings in the Jewish quarter and to tens of warehouses. Artifacts left behind by the disappearing communities of Bohemia and Moravia and pertaining to all aspects of their daily life, to religious rituals and specific customs throughout the centuries, were systematically collected and registered. Whereas the Prague Jewish museum’s collection comprised some 1,000 items in 1941, it included 200,000 artifacts by the end of the war.
¹⁸¹

Goebbels’s filming of ghetto life strove to present the most demeaning and repulsive image of Jews to contemporaries and to posterity. All exhibitions dealing with Jewry organized in the Reich during the 1930s or throughout occupied Europe during the war, had a similar aim and so of course, did, full-length films such as
Jud Süss
and
Der Ewige Jude
. As for the two films shot in Theresienstadt in 1942 and in 1944, their aim was propaganda of another kind: to show the world the good life that the Führer granted the Jews.

None of these aims was apparent in the Prague museum project. For example, in preparing the exhibition about Jewish religious customs set up in the spring of 1943, “both sides [the Jewish scholars working at the museum and the SS officers] seem to have had a certain objectivity in mind.”
¹⁸²
Günther and Rahm possibly thought that once the war was (victoriously) over and no Jews were left, the material stored at the museum—not to be shown publicly until then—could easily be molded according to the regime’s needs. Whatever the case may be, Rahm soon had to leave his cultural endeavors to become the last commandant of Theresienstadt.

IX

While throughout 1943 and most of 1944, the Germans were trying to complete the deportations from every corner of the Continent, and while, by then, the Allies had publicly recognized the extermination of the Jews, London and Washington obstinately shied away from any concrete rescue steps, even minor plans. In all fairness it remains difficult to this day to assess whether some of the rescue plans initiated by Germany’s satellites or by some subordinate German officials were genuinely meant as exchanges of some sort or were extortionist ploys, no more.

Thus in late 1942 and during the first months of 1943, the Romanian authorities informed the Jewish Agency that they were ready to release 70,000 Jews from Transnistria for 200,000 lei (or 200 Palestine pounds) per person. The offer could have been an early Romanian feeler for contacts with the Allies but, in a hardly subtle maneuver to keep in the good graces of both sides, Radu Lecca, general secretary for Jewish affairs in Antonescu’s government, who traveled to Istanbul to negotiate with Jewish Agency representatives, soon thereafter informed the German ambassador in Bucharest of the initiative. From that moment on the initiative was doomed.

The Yishuv leadership was divided in its estimate of the proposal and was well aware of the fact that the Allies would not allow the transfer of 70,000 Jews to Palestine. Indeed, the British position, shared by the State Department, was one of adamant rejection. In February 1943 the Romanian offer was reported in Swiss newspapers and in the
New York Times
, leading to some public outcry about the Allied passivity, to no avail. Over the coming weeks the plan was reduced to the transfer of 5,000 Jewish orphans from Transnistria to Palestine. Eichmann agreed to this latter proposal provided the Allies allowed the transfer to Germany of 20,000 able-bodied German prisoners of war, in exchange for the children.

Sporadic negotiations with the Romanians continued nonetheless throughout 1943, and the possibility of bribing whoever had to be bribed in Bucharest seemed to keep the rescue option alive. The operation was definitively scuttled by the obstruction of the U.S. State Department and the British Ministry of Economic Warfare regarding the transfer by the World Jewish Congress of the necessary money to Switzerland. The Treasury Department had given its authorization but to no avail. In December 1943 the Foreign Office delivered a note to the American ambassador in London, John Winant, indicating that the British authorities were “concerned with the difficulty of disposing of any considerable number of Jews should they be rescued from enemy-occupied territories.”
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From early 1943 on, the angry publicity given to the absence of rescue operations had convinced both the Foreign Office and the State Department that some gesture was necessary: A conference on the “refugee situation” was decided. The conference, attended by high-ranking British and American officials (and by a senator and a congressman) opened in Bermuda on April 19, 1943, under the chairmanship of the president of Princeton University, Harold W. Dodds. After twelve days of deliberations, the meeting ended with the release of a statement to the press declaring that “concrete recommendations” would be submitted to both governments; however, due to the war situation, the nature of these recommendations could not be revealed.

American Jewish leaders were themselves anxious to achieve results and well aware of the demand for more forceful initiatives that arose from growing segments of the country’s Jewish population. Moreover, added prodding stemmed not only from the increasingly precise reports about the situation in Europe but also from the relentless campaign for intervention orchestrated by a small but vocal group of right-wing Zionist-Revisionists led by Peter Bergson.
¹⁸⁴
Yet for a Stephen Wise, for example, embarrassing the president by public demonstrations against American inaction was unacceptable. Wise’s restraint was recognized by the administration. On the eve of a major meeting organized by the “Bergsonites”—the “Emergency Conference to Save the Jewish People in Europe”—scheduled for July 1943, Welles sent a message to Myron C. Taylor, the onetime chairman of the 1938 Evian conference on refugees and later Roosevelt’s special envoy to the Vatican: “I have refused this invitation,” Welles informed Taylor. “Not only the more conservative Jewish organizations and leaders but also such leaders as Rabbi Wise, who was with me this morning, are strongly opposed to the holding of this conference, have done everything they could to prevent it, and are trying to get Bishop Tucker and one or two others who have accepted this invitation to withdraw their acceptance.”
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Wise did not hesitate to air his views publicly, however. At the American Jewish Conference held in August 1943, one month after Bergson’s “Emergency Conference,” he told his audience: “We are Americans, first, last, and at all times. Nothing else that we are, whether by faith or race or fate, qualifies our Americanism…. We and our fathers chose to be, and now choose to abide, as Americans…. Our first and sternest task, in common with all other citizens of our beloved country…is to win the anti-Fascist war. Unless that war be won, all else is lost.”
¹⁸⁶

Wise’s views were echoed by most of the participants at the conference and, all in all, by most of American Jewish organizations and their publications such as the
National Jewish Monthly
or
New Palestine
(which expressed the positions of American Zionism). Rare were the mainstream leaders who ready to admit that not enough had been or was being done; one of those was Rabbi Israel Goldstein, who, at the same American Jewish Conference of August 1943, did not hide his feelings: “Let us forthrightly admit that we American Jews, as a community of five millions, have not been stirred deeply enough, have not exercised ourselves passionately enough, have not risked enough of our convenience and our social and civic relations, have not been ready enough to shake the bond of so-called amicability in order to lay our troubles upon the conscience of our Christian neighbors and fellow citizens.”
¹⁸⁷

To the dismay of the administration and that of mainstream American-Jewish leadership, the Bergsonites did not let go. At the end of 1943, they succeeded in persuading Senator Guy Gillette from Iowa and Rep. Will Rogers from California to introduce a rescue resolution into Congress. During the debates Breckinridge Long demanded he be allowed to testify and presented the House Committee on Foreign Affairs with misleading data about the number of Jewish refugees the State Department had allowed to enter the United States.
¹⁸⁸
When Long’s testimony became known, officials at the Treasury Department brought up evidence about the State Department’s ongoing efforts to hide information about the extermination and hinder rescue efforts. This evidence was submitted to the president by secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau. This time Roosevelt considered it politically wise to react and, in January 1944, he announced the establishment of the War Refugee Board (WRB) to be headed by John Pehle, assistant secretary of the treasury. The (WRB) had the mandate to coordinate and lead any rescue operations that its officials would have examined and recommended.
¹⁸⁹

The confirmation of the news about the ongoing extermination of European Jewry led to mass protests in the streets of Tel Aviv, to the proclamation by the Yishuv’s chief rabbis of days of fasting and other manifestations of collective mourning. Soon, however, everyday concerns and even traditional celebrations resurfaced; throughout 1943 major festivals were organized by the kibbutz movement (the Dalia Dance Festival), and Hebrew University students celebrated Purim in the usual carnival procession. In the words of historian Dina Porat, “agony was a part of daily life and when the news was particularly bitter, expressions of pain multiplied. But public attention was not sustained, and life would return to normal for weeks or months, until the next shocking event.”
¹⁹⁰

Even so, the Jewish population in Palestine was probably more responsive to the tragedy of European Jewry than the leadership of the Yishuv itself. Of course, among the leadership as among the population, the individual ties to European Jewry were equally intense, and, as the great majority of the Jewish inhabitants of Palestine stemmed from Central or Eastern Europe, many, at all levels, were aware of the possibility (or already knew) of tragic personal loss.

Yet, as strange and even as callous as it may appear with hindsight, in their public declarations from the end of 1942 on, most Zionist leaders, as already mentioned, considered the extermination first and foremost in terms of its impact on the building of a Jewish state. Ben-Gurion’s despondency regarding the impact of the European situation upon the Zionist project may have contributed to his lack of involvement in rescue operations; thus it was left to the hesitant and weak Gruenbaum to coordinate activities in which he did not believe.

A meeting of the Zionist Executive Committee in Jerusalem in February 1943 starkly illustrated the prevalent mood at the top of the establishment: “We certainly cannot abstain from any action,” Gruenbaum declared. “We should do all we can…but our hopes are infinitesimal…. I think we have only one hope left—and I would say the same thing in Warsaw—the only action, the only effort that provides us with hope, that is unique, is the effort being made in the Land of Israel.”
¹⁹¹
The debate about the 1943 budget better reflected this shared attitude than any declarations: 250,000 Palestine pounds for new settlements, the same amount for agricultural development, vast sums for irrigation and the like, and 15,000 pounds for rescue activities.
¹⁹²

Over the following months the debate concerning the allocation of funds for rescue operations continued. While the Jewish Agency maintained its reticence and Gruenbaum continued to show only apathy, the trade union organization (Histadrut) took the initiative of raising funds by way of a public campaign: “Diaspora Month.” The initiative, launched in mid-September 1943, failed dismally. The skepticism of the population regarding the commitment of the political leadership to the rescue operations certainly contributed to the meager results of the appeal. It seemed to some that “the Yishuv had fallen into atrophy.”
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