Hitler and the Holocaust (13 page)

The Jewish population, to a much greater extent than any other, had the terrifying experience of being hunted down like wild animals. To make matters worse, they found themselves—at least in eastern Europe—in a generally hostile and anti-Semitic environment. Even in the event of escape, Jewish men were still marked by circumcision, often easily identified by their beards and facial features or else by their distinctive garb. Despite these great obstacles, Jews did subsequently rebel in the ghettos of Warsaw and Bialystok, in the death camps of Treblinka, Sobibór, and Auschwitz, and took up arms with the partisans wherever they succeeded in escaping their tormentors. It was probably no accident that the progenitors of militant resistance came from Lithuanian Jewry, the first to be subjected to savage and massive killing conducted by the Germans, with enthusiastic participation from the local population.
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It was as if they sensed that Lithuania was a kind of experimental laboratory for the “Final Solution.” This realization gave birth to the armed struggle in the Vilna ghetto in January 1942. It was based on the prophetic insight of the Zionist Pioneer Youth Group (Hashomer Ha-Tsair) that “Hitler aims to destroy all the Jews of Europe” and that the Lithuanian Jews were “fated to be the first in line.”
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In his manifesto of 31 December 1941, Abba Kovner, the leader of the group, warned that only one quarter of the eighty thousand Jews of Vilna remained and that those taken from the ghetto would never return. It was in this context that he added, “Let us not be led like sheep to the slaughter. True we are weak and helpless, but the only response to the murders is self-defence.”
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The revolt was a desperate gesture of defiance that led to the formation of a United Partisan
Organization, drawn from all groups in Jewish political life but principally Zionists, Bundists, and Communists. The Jewish youth groups were unburdened by family responsibilities and more receptive to revolutionary action. They instinctively opposed those
Judenräte
that advocated obedience and passivity in the vain hope of warding off greater evils. In the summer of 1943, some of the young Jewish fighters managed to escape from the Vilna ghetto, forming partisan units and contributing to the eventual liberation of their city.

Armed revolts also broke out elsewhere in at least twenty ghettos in eastern Europe, the best known of them being the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto, which lasted from 19 April until 15 May 1943.
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It was the first armed rebellion by civilians anywhere in Nazi-occupied Europe, taking the Germans completely by surprise. The ghetto fighters consisted initially of the six-hundred-member Jewish Fighting Organization, led by twenty-four-year-old Mordechai Anielewicz, and the National Military Organization, which had four hundred men and women in its force. Armed with only a few machine guns and rifles and a larger number of grenades and Molotov cocktails, the ghetto fighters had little training and minimal help from the local Polish resistance. They had witnessed the disappearance of the bulk of the ghetto inhabitants, whether through deportations to the death camps or by death from starvation and disease. The remaining sixty thousand Jews in the ghetto, many of them teenagers, were the most able-bodied survivors, who had been left for last. When the SS entered the ghetto to round up more Jews for deportation, to their great astonishment they were met by bombs, shooting, and mine explosions. It eventually took three thousand troops under the command of SS General Jürgen Stroop, equipped with heavy machine guns, howitzers, artillery, and armored vehicles—subsequently reinforced by bombers and tanks—to overcome the hopelessly outgunned Jewish resistance. The Jews held on in the sewers until the ghetto had been totally razed by German forces, some of the fighters jumping from
the burning buildings rather than surrendering to their oppressors. They knew from the outset that they were engaged in a hopeless battle, but they were determined to die with honor and dignity. In his last letter from the ghetto on 23 April 1943, Mordechai Anielewicz observed that “what happened exceeded our boldest dreams” and that “what we dared do is of great, enormous importance.”
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He had no illusions about his own fate or that of his comrades. What mattered most was that self-defense in the ghetto and Jewish armed resistance had finally become a reality. More than fifteen thousand Jews died in battle, and more than fifty thousand were captured and sent to death camps.

It is important to note that there were also revolts in the death camps themselves, including one at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where prisoners blew up one of the crematoriums, killing several SS guards; there was also a much bigger rising in Treblinka (August 1943). At Sobibór, on 14 October 1943, several hundred prisoners stormed the gates in a rebellion that led to the shutting down of the camp two days later. Though a majority of the prisoners perished in the breakout attempt, more than one hundred managed to escape, many joining partisan units in the forests. Tens of thousands of Jews across Nazi-occupied Europe took part in the various partisan or resistance movements, some to seek revenge on their murderous enemy, others to save their own lives and, where possible, those of their fellow Jews. Jewish partisans fought bravely in the forests of the Ukraine and Poland, in the Carpathian mountains, and in white Russia and Lithuania.
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In eastern Europe, the partisan activity usually took place in exclusively Jewish units because of the open hostility from the local populations. Sometimes this antagonism extended to the anti-Nazi partisan groups, which in Poland and elsewhere were not infrequently riddled with anti-Semitism. The Jewish Brigade formed in the forests near Vilna under Abba Kovner was the most celebrated of all the Jewish partisan groups. Other focal points of Jewish resistance were in the areas of
Bialystok, Kovno, and Minsk, where Jews were prominent from 1943 in the multinational partisan units under Soviet control. The Soviet High Command, as a matter of principle, did not approve or permit the existence of separate Jewish partisan units.
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In southern and western Europe, Jews faced a less overt form of hostility from the indigenous population and found it easier to operate as part of the national resistance movements in France, Belgium, Holland, Italy, Greece, and Yugoslavia (where about two thousand Jews fought in the ranks of Marshal Tito’s guerrilla movement).
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Despite the adverse conditions, Jews were also prominent among the founders of the partisan movement in Slovakia, with at least 2,500 Jews fighting in the Slovak national rebellion in the summer of 1944.

In France, Jews at one stage represented more than 15 percent of the resistance forces, more than twenty times their proportion of the total population. Their role in positions of leadership and command as well as in the rank and file of the resistance was outstanding. Half of the founders of
Libération
were Jews, and they were almost 20 percent of the members of the National Committee, the highest institution of the French underground. The founder of the Franc Tireurs et Partisans in the Paris region in 1942–1943 was a Jew, as were a disproportionate number of those who rallied to Charles de Gaulle’s Free French forces in London. Often enough, the Jewish resistance fighters in France and western Europe suppressed the fact of their Jewishness. Sometimes this was for security reasons; others may have believed that it would not help the Allied cause, either because the Germans and their French collaborators at Vichy would exploit the fact or out of fear that it might arouse latent anti-Jewish feelings in the Resistance.
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No doubt many also felt their French identity to be more important than their Jewish loyalties or origins. The relatively high number of Jews in the French Communist resistance was also downplayed, both by Jews themselves and by the Communist Party. Mostly this was for political and ideological
reasons not dissimilar from those prevailing in the wartime Soviet Union and eastern Europe. One result of this discretion has been that the story of Jewish resistance in the Holocaust period is less known than it should be, except in Israel, where it assumed overriding importance, though the dominant narratives are often distinctly selective. If we also consider the heroism and skill of the more than half a million Jewish soldiers in the ranks of the Red Army, as well as the distinguished service of more than seven hundred thousand Jews in the British and American armies (not to mention other Allied forces), then the military contribution of Jews to the defeat of Nazi Germany was by no means negligible. Approximately 10 percent of world Jewry (1.6 million out of 16 million) actually fought in the war, including the thirty-five thousand Palestinian Jews who volunteered for the Jewish Brigade in the British Army.

Within Germany itself, there was virtually no armed resistance of any sort, and thus no armed Jewish resistance either. But a significantly high proportion of German (and Austrian) Jews who emigrated from the Reich before 1939 did become involved in Belgian, Dutch, Italian, and French resistance to fascism and in efforts to sabotage the German occupation. Those Jews who remained in Germany had no possibility of direct political resistance, but this did not deter either the rabbis or the official representatives of the German Jewish community from making dignified protests against the persecutions and the first deportations to the east.
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Moreover, the Jewish press in the Third Reich, for as long as it survived, was without doubt the last enclave of liberal and humanist values. Between the lines, one can read many instances in its pages of veiled protest against the state-sponsored propaganda that mercilessly degraded Jews.
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Despite the totally isolated and vulnerable position of German Jewry in the Third Reich, there were probably between two and three thousand Jews, mainly young people, directly active in the German anti-Nazi underground.
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This is
a remarkably high number given that there were only two hundred thousand Jews left in Germany at the outbreak of war in September 1939. (The proportional equivalent of such a figure for the German population would have been about seven hundred thousand antifascist militants, of which there is certainly no evidence.) However, it needs to be remembered that the Jewish antifascists (mainly socialists and Communists) generally felt that their affinities and first loyalties were to the German workers’ movement. Jews were especially numerous in the German Communist resistance, which included the wholly Jewish underground group led by Herbert Baum that was responsible for the courageous though ill-conceived and disastrous attack on the Nazi propaganda exhibition
Das Sowjetparadies
(the Soviet paradise) in the Berlin Lustgarten. The boys and girls of the Baum group were atheists, and their alienation from Jewry was fully reciprocated by Jewish communal feelings about Communist agitation.
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It did not help that the Communists periodically indulged in crude propaganda against “Jewish capitalists,” even after such a social group had ceased to exist in Germany. On the other hand, following Kristallnacht, the Communist underground press did display some real signs of solidarity with the persecuted Jewish population.
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Despite the nondem-ocratic, totalitarian character of their organization and ideology, the Communists were particularly prominent among those who made the greatest sacrifices within the limited German resistance.

The Jewish youth movement in Nazi Germany (which reflected a diversity of cultural and political trends within German Jewry) was a favorable seedbed for antifascist activity. This derived partly from the strong socialist orientation of many of the Zionist youth groups, dating back to the days of the Weimar Republic. The movement led a unique existence under the Third Reich, preserving under the noses of the Gestapo the more humanistic aspects of the pre-1933 German culture, which were fast disappearing in society as a
whole. Until it was banned, the Jewish youth movement provided what Arnold Paucker has called “an oasis of free thinking in a totalitarian Germany” that continued to flourish and stimulate anti-Nazi activity.
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Later, during the terrible war years, antifascist Jews in Germany and outside carried on more dangerous illegal actions ranging from sabotage, assassination attempts, and pacifist propaganda to helping Allied POWs to escape. These activities, like those of Jews in other areas of the resistance, had many motivations and were not always inspired by the “Jewishness” of the individual participants. Nevertheless, the prominence of many Jews in the resistance was not unconnected to their principled and strong emotional identification as members of a specially persecuted minority group.

4

THE “FINAL SOLUTION”

If just once, at the beginning or during the course of the [First World] war, we had exposed twelve or fifteen thousand of those Hebrew corrupters of the people to poison gas … the sacrifice of millions of men would not have been in vain. On the contrary, if we had rid ourselves of those twelve or fifteen thousand fiends, we might perhaps have saved the lives of a million good brave Germans.

ADOLF HITLER,
Mein Kampf
(1925)

And then they all come, those worthy eighty million Germans, and each one has his own decent Jew. Of all who talk that way, none of them has watched, none of them has gone through it. Most of you know what it means to see one hundred bodies lying there, five hundred lying there or one thousand lying there. To have gone through this and, aside from exceptions due to human weakness, to have remained decent, that has made us tough.