Authors: William H Gass
When are we to know we have the final solution to the Jewish question? When we shall not have to live in the world of their awareness.
Richard Evans’s three volumes of disagreeable details, masterfully ordered and presented with ruthless clarity, are not centrally concerned with actual fighting, although a good account can be found there. His indictment is principally based upon the political and cultural climate that created a monster out of an apparently civilized nation-state. And it does not fail to quote from countless witnesses whose eyes had to shed—like tears—their disbelief of a barbarism for which only the human species could find the evil energies.
Whether one must wear a yellow star … excuses are inadequate; whether one is banished from the queue for daily rations … excuses are inadequate; whether one is murdered in an unimaginably mean way … excuses are inadequate; whether that wretch whom I shot from a passing window turns out to be twenty or two thousand destined to crumple into open graves … excuses are inadequate; and if we feel rage … well … welcome to our ambiguous skin: victor hates victim for making him victorious.
Murder machines, such as those gas-driven engines of death that the Germans designed to facilitate their task, are the sort of thing that catches the popular imagination, but the quiet, at no point wholly observable method of starvation is the ultimate choice: profitable while being cheap, and requiring no implements, no death chambers, no immediate executioners either. Disposing of the bodies when you have shot five hundred in the woods, or at the end of a week of inhalations when you have more corpses than you know how to discreetly burn, becomes an increasingly sensitive and annoying problem; so it is comforting to contemplate how economical starvation is, beginning with the victims feeding on themselves, thus reducing smoky fats, with a good chance they will finally fall upon those of their own who have fallen, and endeavor to devour them. For sport, in some camps for captured Soviet soldiers, guards would bet on which dogs might leave upon their prisoners the most damaging tooth marks, but this was purely for entertainment and not very efficient for murder on a mass scale.
If you kill all the Jews, who will remain to accuse you? Scarcely anyone else will care and many will be quietly grateful.
The war against the Soviet Union began as felicitously as the invasion of Poland: many quick and easy victories, rapid advances, inconveniently large numbers of captive soldiers, much pillaging, including the seasonal collection of winter coats, frequent rapes, pointless vandalism, random killings, and the gradual re-realization that prisoners might be better used as workers than starvelings. Nevertheless, of the approximately 5.7 million Soviet prisoners,
“3,300,000 had perished by the time the war was over.” As if anticipating the counterclaim (which is supposed to alter one’s appalled reaction), Evans immediately continues: “By comparison 356,687 out of about 2 million German prisoners taken by the Red Army, mostly in the later stages of the war, did not survive.” Moreover, many died in Soviet camps from the same straitened circumstances the general population suffered. They starved; we starved; he, she, or it starved with happy uniformity. Even curtains at windows grew thin.
As if to demonstrate who among the barbarous was hun in chief, the Nazis frequently attacked fine homes and furnishings as if the mirrors were shooting back. Soldiers burned Tolstoy manuscripts when they arrived in Yasnaya Polyana, and in Klin drove motorcycles back and forth over sheets of Tchaikovsky’s musical scores. Mostly, though, soldiers complained of the miserable conditions of life that Russian villages offered them. “Partisan resistance prompted further reprisals, leading more to join the partisans, and so the escalating cycle of violence continued.” This inevitability, ironically, seems to have escaped the notice of present-day nations. Still, what is the use of an upper hand if you can’t spank someone with it?
Success has its penalties. The advance was so rapid that many Soviet troops were passed like hitchhikers on the road, and these unattached men joined the local partisans, made a nuisance of themselves behind the lines, and earned for others as well as themselves reprisals, which often meant that hostages would be executed, many by hanging from suitable trees, which often spoiled the view higher officers had from their very temporary accommodations.
Snow and cold began to kill people without regard to race or place of origin. Once more the Jews were going to lose their coats. The eyes of the troops wept in the face of the wind and it spoiled their aim. Their swollen feet had to be cut from their shoes. And Polish lice were now a third force. Like the lice, the Russians were too numerous. Killing them all was impossible, though corpses fell like falling snow into growing heaps. It did begin to look as if the enemy had better shovels.
One of the many shocks this book delivers is the reader’s realization that—after following a trail of murder and usurpation through two and one-half volumes, during which death is more frequent than the words, cruelty and conflict more common than punctuation, murder spread equally over all its pages—the killing is now going to begin in earnest. “There is also some evidence that Ukrainian nationalists in Lemberg nailed bodies to the prison wall, crucified them or amputated breasts and genitals to give the impression that the Soviet atrocities were even worse than they actually were.” I’m glad they had a good reason. Despite the fact that some Ukrainians were mighty busy beating Jews with the poor man’s arsenal—clubs studded with nails—the Nazis complained that their attempts “to incite pogroms against Jews have not met with the success we hoped for.”
Entire cavalry brigades were now assigned the task of destroying Jews. One such group especially distinguished itself by shooting “more than 25,000 Jews in under a month.” At first, the executioners were not to waste bullets on women but simply to drive them into the Pripet Marshes, the greatest area of swampy woodland in Europe, where they might drown; however the marshes were deep enough only for wading, so the women, like the men, had to be shot. The Germans were not to be slowed by these defeats. They found ravines, and in the one called Babi Yar, after undressing and lying down in neat rows—victim placed upon the just victimized as blanket upon sheet—the Jews were bulleted behind the neck to a total of 33,771.
Men cannot imagine such numbers. They can only perform them.
Any reluctance felt by members of the military was overcome by an anti-Semitism almost as old as their age, by fears of reprisal for themselves, because of the shame they felt at being taken for sissies, and on account of the payments in plunder that fed their greed. “The great majority of officers and men took part willingly … and raised no objections.” In some cases, Serbian prisoners would be used to collect from a fresh kill of Jews the contents of their pockets, and
the soldiers would risk giving these people penknives to cut off ring fingers. A handy chart, of which there are many, shows by means of variously striped shades the numbers killed in the area stretching from Leningrad in the north to Vilna (248,468), from Minsk to Kursk (91,012), Kiev to Stalino (105,988), and Taganrog to Simferopol (91,678) during the years 1941–43. Only once more shall I give in to outrage and cite another particularly instructive moment among thousands that might be chosen, in order to draw your attention to Hans Krüger, head of the local security police in Stanislawów, Galicia, who threw a picnic for the shooters to enjoy between shootings, and oversaw the massacre “with a bottle of vodka in one hand and a hot-dog in the other.…” You may think this picture is simply grotesque. There is another in which we see an officer so horrified by the sordid conditions in which some Jewish children were being held that he approved of their immediate execution in order to spare them further pain. This exhibits a concern that might be expected for chickens.
By now (July and August of 1941), few soldiers were squeamish; their Austrian officers were still eager; shooting Jews was a sport as habitual as bowling on weekends; and anyone handy might be murdered just to meet the monthly quotas. The instruction that came down from Hitler was to kill “anyone who even looks askance.” Evans is quite clear about the evidence that “many people in the senior ranks of the Party and state administration were fully informed of the massacres being carried out by the SS Task Forces in the east.”
By the time the United States entered the war, the expansion of Germany’s murderous ambitions had grown from one of forcible Polish relocation to pogroms that involved the whole eastern front, subsequently to the entire continent of Europe, and bore unmistakable signs, finally, of global aspirations. This would mean that the assimilated Jews of Germany, who had lost their homes and many possessions but otherwise were “merely” harassed by a lengthening list of petty bans on buying flowers or being forbidden to sit in deck chairs, to rules denying them cats, would now be removed to camps
in the east. The boxcars began their tryouts for grainy documentary movies. Between November of 1941 and February of 1942, fifty-eight trainloads of those “useless eaters” who were declared unfit for forced labor carried fifty-three thousand Jews to camps in the east.
Who could have imagined there were so many Jews; that just removing them to overnight ghettos in Poland or the Ukraine would put such a strain upon every mile of track and every engine’s boilers; that so many departments of government would be required, soldiers to shoot them, munitions to facilitate this, guards to control them, shovels to dig and to cover their graves? Better methods had to be found for both death and disposal. Perhaps those employed with such success in the programs of euthanasia might be brought into play—sealed chambers and car exhaust—and camps built solely for death’s purpose. So thirty gas vans were built in Berlin. They could kill sixty at a time, an improvement of ten over previous model years. Occasionally a child survived whose mother had so severely swaddled it the fumes could not penetrate the cloth. It was a doubtful stroke of luck, since the guards would smash such babies’ heads against convenient trees.
Timing became important. Himmler had to bawl out one overzealous police chief in Riga who had a trainload of Berlin deportees killed too promptly, thus possibly alarming those Jews still in Berlin and causing them to be more difficult to handle. The range of extermination now clearly included the whole of occupied Europe. Yet it was the twentieth of January, 1942, before the infamous Wannsee meeting on the final solution to the Jewish question took place. No final solution seems to have been reached, but a semifinal one was. Elderly Jews would be sent to old-folks camps. Since the holding stations were about to take on the balance of German Jews, the Eastern Jews who presently filled them would have to be eliminated to make room. Gassing vans were amply available. Jews able to work would build roads and die on waysides. “Extermination through labor” was not a new idea, but it was an economical and effective one. There was no need to coddle these creatures, for when one perished another was available.
The propaganda machine was making its own carbon monoxide. Everything the Germans were doing to the Jews, the Jews had done to Germans, or would do if they could. They had started the war; they were eating away at the Reich’s magnificent culture; they wanted to destroy Germany as it presently stood. Goebbels instructed the media to be unrelenting. “The Jews must now be used in the German press as a political target: the Jews are to blame; the Jews wanted the war; the Jews are making the war worse; and, again and again, the Jews are to blame.” I do think Goebbels had begun to believe his own lies, but could an entire nation be deceived by nonsense so palpable it … But I forget. Nazism was a secular religion. Its sacred book was
Mein Kampf
. The Red Menace embodied another form of worship that held
Das Kapital
to its heart. Their godfathers just weren’t in heaven, and could use the phone. Whether Jew or Christian, Nazi or Commie: they all had plenty of practice living in illusion and hating one another.
During the years 1941–43, Berlin Jews, who were not supposed to have their composure ruffled by hearing the worst of bad news, heard the bad news nevertheless and escaped by suicide. It was a wonder there were any trains left able to carry munitions. The idea that many people still didn’t know what was going on represents another wild lie. If the Jews, who weren’t supposed to know, knew, everybody did. Like the disciplined lines of white crosses at Arlington, numbers representing the sizes of the shipments march across Evans’s text. Perhaps these pages more accurately resemble a schedule of departures than a cemetery, but their meanings are the same.
Jews were not the only victims of the Nazis’ murderous frenzy; nor, on the eastern front, was the Soviet army Germany’s sole enemy; because the moment the Czechs began to act up they were sorted out for deportation, sterilization, and execution, just as the Poles had been, and—as always—the Gypsies too, who were consistently preyed upon, as well as other racial odds and ends. When Czech partisans managed to assassinate their region’s SS protector, Reinhold Heydrich, they hoped to provoke from the Nazis their customary kinds of retaliation, in order to reawaken a resistance movement
that Heydrich’s policies had managed to frighten or lull into passivity. In so doing they demonstrated how easily the same gloves of callousness that the Germans wore could be put on, and how well the fit was. Lidice was only the notorious part of the cost.
Until November of 1941, the extermination camps had not yet been built. A score of SS officers would run them; Ukrainians, taken from their own camps and given special training, would provide the raw manpower; and a few specialists recruited from the victims themselves (tailors, carpenters, cobblers,
und so weiter
) could supply the standard operative skills. All that otherwise might be needed, aside from the airtight gas chambers, were some houses for the SS, and barracks for the auxiliary servants of the industry. These camps were extraordinarily efficient, except that sometimes the wooden killing boxes began to leak and had to be replaced by concrete ones. At Belzec, the first of these specialized death camps, seventy-five thousand Jews were gassed and their bodies burned in its initial thirty days of operation. Eventually, the number would approach six hundred thousand.