A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism (46 page)

For a time, the Nazis thought about shipping Jews to Madagascar, a French colony off the east coast of Africa, but the extended war with Britain meant that Germany did not control the seas; Jews could not be shipped to Africa. Instead, the Germans expelled Jews from rural areas in Poland and concentrated them in crowded ghettos in large cities. The ghettos and the hundreds of concentration camps the Germans built in Poland quickly became a source of slave labor for the German occupation authorities as well as for large businesses.

Turning points in both World War II and Hitler’s “great racial war” came in 1941. That spring, the Germans moved south into Greece and Yugoslavia in the hope of securing their rear areas and removing the possibility of British-led opposition. In June, despite the pact Hitler signed with Joseph Stalin, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. As part of that assault, the Germans drove the Soviet army out of eastern Poland. On the day the invasion began, Hitler escalated the war against the Jews. It was no longer a war of containment; increasingly, it was one of annihilation. The goal was the destruction of the Jewish people. There had been killings earlier, but the murders now became more systematic, deliberate, and routine.

In the summer of 1941, the
Einsatzgruppen
—four paramilitary units whose mission was to find and murder Jews—followed the German army as it advanced into previously held Soviet territory. They would enter a village or town and remove all Jews to a nearby isolated area, where they were shot and killed. In larger cities, the
Einsatzgruppen
could not kill everyone at once. Instead, they collected hundreds of people and trucked them to open pits, where they were slaughtered.

German soldiers and local residents took photographs of the mass murders. These pictures showed Jews taken to isolated areas where they were shot and killed.

Historians estimate that 1.5 million Jews died in massacres like the one that occurred near Kiev on September 29–30, 1941. In two days, 33,771 Jewish children, women, and men were shot and buried in a ravine known as Babi Yar; this is believed to be the largest mass murder of the war.

Rivka Yosselevska, a survivor of one of those massacres, later testified about what happened when the
Einsatzgruppen
entered her town on a Sabbath afternoon in August 1942. She and other Jews were herded out of their homes while soldiers searched for valuables. Toward sunrise, a large truck took the Jews away. Those who could not fit into the truck—including Yosselevscka and her child—were forced to run behind it. When they arrived at their destination, they were ordered to undress and then line up. At that point the killings began.

The Germans murdered Yosselevscka’s entire family, including her 80-year-old grandmother. Only she and her young daughter remained alive. Then it was their turn. She recalled:

We turned towards the grave and then [a soldier] turned around and asked “Whom shall I shoot first?”… I did not answer. I felt him take the child from my arms. The child cried out and was shot immediately. And then he aimed at me…. I heard a shot, but I continued to stand…. Then I fell to the ground into the pit amongst the bodies…. I thought I was dead, that this was the feeling which comes after death. Then I felt that I was choking; people falling over me…. I was choking, strangling, but I tried to save myself, to find some air to breathe, and then I felt that I was climbing to the top of the grave above the bodies…. I came up on top of the grave…. I did not know the place, so many bodies were lying all over… not all of them dead, but in their last sufferings; naked; shot, but not dead.
²⁰

A few others emerged from the mass grave, and together they tried to pull out other survivors. Then, suddenly, the Germans returned. This time, Yosselevska was one of just four survivors.

I was praying for death to come. I was praying for the grave to be opened and to swallow me alive. Blood was spurting from the grave in many places, like a well of water…. I cried out to my mother, to my father, “Why did they not kill me? What was my sin? I have no
one to go to. I saw them all being killed. Why was I spared? Why was I not killed?”
²¹

Rivka Yosselevscka’s questions have no answers. But historians and scholars have struggled to respond to other questions raised by the mass murders. How did the perpetrators come to accept as “necessary” or “good” what, until then, had been widely understood as “evil”—the murder of an entire people? Some historians have studied testimony given at trials in the 1960s and 1970s by 210 men from German Reserve Police Battalion 101. The men were specifically asked about their participation in the battalion’s first mass killing on July 13, 1942.

Before the mission got under way, the battalion commander offered to reassign anyone unwilling to participate in the killings. About a dozen men stepped forward. They were not punished but were told to await further orders. Once the killing began, a few more asked to be relieved, but most continued to the end. Very few belonged to the Nazi Party, and not one described himself as an antisemite.

Why would a soldier kill an 80-year-old grandmother or a child in her mother’s arms? Some people point to years of antisemitic propaganda and the teaching of contempt for Jews by both political and religious leaders. Others focus on the way war desensitizes soldiers. Still others stress the importance of obedience in wartime or the ambitions of soldiers eager to move up in the ranks. All of these factors may have come together in a “perfect storm.”

Historian Christopher Browning, who studied interviews with the men of Police Battalion 101, has expressed doubt as to whether most of the men embraced the Nazi ideology, but he warned:

[I]t is also doubtful that they were immune to “the influence of the times,”… to the incessant proclamation of German superiority and incitement of contempt and hatred for the Jewish enemy. Nothing helped the Nazis to wage a race war so much as the war itself. In wartime, when it was all too usual to exclude the enemy from the community of human obligation, it was also all too easy to subsume the Jews into the “image of the enemy.”
²²

Mass killings like the one Rivka Yosselevscka described were impossible to keep secret. Too many people participated in them. So the Germans looked for alternatives. Before long, they were testing the idea of using concentration camps as death camps. In these camps, the Germans
would use a killing method that they were already secretly employing on Germans with physical or mental disabilities: gassing.

On December 7, 1941, as this plan was taking shape, Japan, one of the Axis powers, bombed the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii—then a U.S. territory. The next day, the United States declared war on Japan. On December 11, Germany, as an ally of Japan, declared war on the United States, and the United States responded with its own declaration of war.

By late 1942, the tide had turned in the war. Hitler had expected to easily defeat the Soviet Union. To his surprise, the Soviets fought fiercely and even put the German army on the defensive. At the same time, British and American forces began pushing the Germans out of North Africa, where they were threatening British colonies.

In January 1942, top Nazi and government officials met in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to work out the details of their plans for “the final solution of the Jewish question.” Although mass shootings continued, death camps, complete with gas chambers, would now play the major role in the genocide. Chelmno was the first; it opened in December of 1941, a few weeks before the meeting at Wannsee. By mid-summer, three additional camps were ready—Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. In these four camps alone, the Nazis murdered nearly two million Jews. Mass killings also took place at Majdanek (about 200,000 Jews and Poles) and Auschwitz-Birkenau, in German-occupied Poland.

Auschwitz was the largest and the most infamous of the camps. At the peak of its operations, more than 12,000 people were murdered there each day—about one million in total, and all but about 122,000 were Jews. Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz, later described the “extermination procedure” there:

Jews selected for gassing were taken as quietly as possible to the crematoriums, the men being separated from the women. In the undressing rooms, prisoners of the special detachment, detailed for this purpose, would tell them in their own language that they were going to be bathed and deloused, that they must leave their clothes neatly together and above all remember where they had put them, so that they would be able to find them again quickly after the delousing…. After undressing, the Jews went into the gas chambers, which were
furnished with showers and water pipes and gave a realistic impression of a bath house.
²³

Hoess’ words made the process seem orderly and almost clinical. In fact, it was neither. Each day, hundreds of terrified children, women, and men were pushed into gas chambers. The Germans sometimes watched through peepholes as their victims gasped for air; the heavy doors muffled their screams. Within 20 minutes, everyone in the chamber was dead. The door was then opened so that Jewish prisoners who were kept alive for a time could dispose of the corpses, remove gold teeth, and cut off the hair of the women.

The Nazis melted down the gold, and they sent the women’s hair to mattress factories to use as stuffing. Clothing and other possessions were also shipped to Germany. The German state railway company even charged fares for transporting Jews to their deaths, with children at half price. Officials at the Reich Security main office paid for the tickets with money and other property they confiscated from Jewish prisoners.
²⁴

Topf & Sons, an engineering firm, designed and maintained the furnaces used in the crematoria at Auschwitz. Medical researchers carried out medical “experiments” on the victims and reported their findings in scientific journals. For them and many other people the murders were a business or professional opportunity.

Not everyone brought to a camp like Auschwitz was killed immediately; some were used for slave labor. Filip Müller, a Slovakian Jew, was deported to Auschwitz and then assigned to a
Sonderkommado
, or special work unit. He later wrote:

The Ten Commandments… did not prevail here: Auschwitz had its own laws and macabre values. At Auschwitz gold teeth might buy a bowl of turnip soup; at Auschwitz a camp orchestra would play cheerful military music, not only in the morning when the prisoners marched out to work, but also at night when, bruised and battered, they struggled back carrying their dead comrades
.

…. Auschwitz was a place where every European language was spoken; it was also a place where people died, not only from starvation, sickness and epidemics, but from being battered to death, killed by having phenol [a poisonous acid] injected into their heart, or driven into the gas chamber. This wretched piece of land in eastern Europe was under the sway of the SS whose members regarded themselves
as the elite of the German nation, a nation which had given to the world not only great writers and composers but also men like Adolf Hitler. The little Polish town of Oswiecim, which the Nazis called Auschwitz, had been turned into an inferno, and anyone taken there by an unkind fate might regard himself truly forsaken by God and his fellow men.
²⁵

Hitler was not satisfied with just eliminating Jews from German-occupied territory. He wanted his allies to turn over their Jews as well. In southern France, the Nazis had set up a puppet government under French leadership; it was known as Vichy France, because the town of Vichy served as its capital. In May 1942, Vichy’s leaders voluntarily gave up Jewish refugees from Germany and central Europe, but they were more reluctant to expel French Jews.

Hungarians also resisted the idea of deporting their own Jews but willingly turned over to the Nazis 20,000 Jewish refugees from other parts of Europe. Italy was Germany’s chief ally. It had its own racial laws and concentration camps but refused to take part in the genocide. Only after Germany took over the country in 1943 were Italian Jews shipped to death camps.

Bulgaria was also an ally of Germany. In March 1943, Bulgarian authorities deported all of the Jews from the territories Bulgaria had annexed in Macedonia (formerly part of Yugoslavia) and Thrace (formerly part of Greece). When the Germans pressured Bulgaria to deport its own Jews, the king initially agreed. He canceled the order only after receiving protests from thousands of ordinary citizens as well as leaders in the Bulgarian parliament and the Eastern Orthodox Church. As a result, most of Bulgaria’s approximately 48,000 Jews survived the Holocaust.