Read The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe Online
Authors: William I. Hitchcock
PART IV: TO LIVE AGAIN AS A PEOPLE
Prologue: “ We Felt Ourselves Lost”
1. Primo Levi, The Reawakening, trans. by Stuart Woolf (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 15, 16, 18, 40.
8: A Host of Corpses
For general information on the camp and its history, see “Auschwitz,” in The Oxford Companion to World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 78; Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War (New York: Hen- ry Holt, 1985), 121, 239, 286, 291, 309, 470, 581, 771–78; Leni Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 527–30. The morbid science of calculating the numbers of dead has been the subject of some debate. See for the figures given here Franciszek Piper, “ The numbers of victims at KL Auschwitz,” in Auschwitz: Nazi Death Camp (O wicim: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 1996), 182–95.
“Majdanek Victims Enumerated,” http://www
. auschwitz-muzeum.oswiecim.pl/new/ index. php?tryb=news_big&language=EN&id=879.
“Merchants of Murder: Lublin slaughter,” News- week, September 11, 1944, 64–67; Richard Lauterbach, “Murder, Inc.,” Time, September 11, 1944, 36. For simi-
lar reports: “Lublin Funeral,” Life, August 28, 1944, 34; “ Vernichtungslager,” Time, August 21, 1944, 36–38;
“Sunday in Poland,” Life, September 18, 1944, 17–18. Al- exander Werth provided a remarkable account of his visit to the recently liberated camp in Russia at War (New York: Dutton, 1964), 890–99.
Gilbert, The Holocaust, 711.
Andrzej Strzelecki, The Evacuation, Dismantling, and Liberation of KL Auschwitz, trans. by Witold Zbirohowski-Koscia (O wicim: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2001), tables XVI and XVII, 309–21; and Andrzej Strzelecki, “Evacuation, Liquidation and Lib- eration of the Camp,” in Auschwitz: Nazi Death Camp, 269–89.
Danuta Czech, Auschwitz Chronicle, 1939–1945 (New York: Henry Holt, 1990), 782–84.
Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity, trans. by Stuart Woolf (New York: Collier, 1993), 151, 180. This was originally titled Se questo e un uomo (If This Is a Man), and published in Italy in 1947.
The Vélodrome d’Hiver, an outdoor sporting arena in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, was used to corral 13,152 French and foreign-born Jews on July 16 and 17,
1942. Among them were over 4,000 children; 12,884 of these individuals were deported.
Czech, Auschwitz Chronicle, 793, 794, 798, 800; and Strzelecki, The Evacuation, Dismantling, and Libera- tion of KL Auschwitz, 211.
Marcel W., T-2165, Fortunoff Video Archive, Yale University Library. Another prisoner, Bart S., felt he was too weak to survive the evacuation, and managed to avoid the last roundup by hiding in a pile of bodies. Bart S., T-438, Fortunoff Video Archive, Yale University Library.
Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 169, 171–72.
Henry B., HVT-689, Fortunoff Video Archive, Yale University Library.
“Death Marches,” in Israel Gutman, ed., Encyclope- dia of the Holocaust (New York: Macmillan, 1990), 348–
54. There is also a short introduction to the topic by Ye- huda Bauer, “ The Death Marches, January–May 1945,” in Michael Marrus, ed., The Nazi Holocaust (Westport, Conn.: Meckler, 1989), 491–511.
Filip Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers, trans. by Susanne Flatauer (New
York: Stein & Day, 1979), 165–66.
Elie Wiesel, Night, trans. by Stella Rodway (New York: Bantam Books, 1982), 81–98. Wiesel was trans- ported to Buchenwald. His father, with whom he had endured Auschwitz, died from exhaustion upon arriv- ing at Buchenwald.
Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land, trans. by Roslyn Hirsch (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 128–29.
Marco Nahon, Birkenau: The Camp of Death, trans. by Jacqueline Havaux Bowers (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989), 112–14.
Marcel Stourdze, in Marie-Anne Matard-Bonucci and Edouard Lynch, eds., La Libération des camps et le Retour des déportés: L’Histoire en souffrance (Paris: Editions Complexe, 1995), 48–49; Henry B. (HVT-689), Fred B. (HVT-1497), Henry F. (HVT-1332), Fortunoff Vid- eo Archive, Yale University Library.
Document 053-L, Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, vol. 37, Doc- uments in Evidence, 486–88.
The orders from Fritz Bracht, dated December
21, 1944, have been reproduced in full in Strzelecki, The Evacuation, Dismantling, and Liberation of KL Auschwitz, 275–85. This order to kill any prisoners who tried to escape or who lagged behind the column was emphasized in the orders given by Auschwitz comman- dant SS- Stürmbannführer Richard Baer. Ibid., 135–36.
The evidence for Himmler’s order of January is vague, but it is referred to by the former commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, who at this time was the chief of the department of inspectors of the concentra- tion camp system: Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz, ed. by Steven Paskuly, trans. by Andrew Pollinger (New York: Prometheus Books, 1992), 175, 290.
George S. Patton, Jr., War As I Knew It (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947), 293–94; and on Patton’s nau- sea, Robert H. Abzug, Inside the Vicious Heart: Ameri- cans and the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 27.
Earl F. Ziemke, The US Army in the Occupation of Germany, 1944–46 (Washington, D.C.: Center of Mili- tary History, 1975), 231–35.
The Buchenwald Report, ed. by, David A. Hackett
(Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995), 96–104, 113–15. This report, made up of reports, documents, and testi- monies, was compiled by U.S. Army officers in the Psy- chological Warfare Division soon after the liberation of the camp.
For a detailed account of the Dachau camp at and after the liberation see Harold Marcuse, Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933–2001 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 2001).
For a careful and thoughtful discussion of the role of journalists during the liberation of the camps, see Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
Time, April 30, 1945; and “Report of a Special Con- gressional Committee to the Congress of the United States,” Document 159-L, Trial of the Major War Crimi- nals, vol. 37, Documents in Evidence, 605–26. The con- gressmen visited these sites between April 24 and May
2. Nor would Jews specifically be discussed in any of the articles cited below. For a discussion of this point, see Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Bos- ton: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 21–29, 63–66.
Margaret Bourke-White, “Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly” (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1946), 73; Time, April 30, 1945; Marcus J. Smith, Dachau: The Harrow- ing of Hell (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 105; Patton, War As I Knew It, 300; Al Newman, Newsweek, April 23, 1945; Buchenwald Report, 7; Newsweek, April 30, 1945; Abzug, Inside the Vicious Heart, 132; PFC Ralph Talanian, 71st Infantry Division, in Yaffa Eliach and Brana Gurewitsch, eds., The Libera- tors: Eyewitness Accounts of the Liberation of Concen- tration Camps, vol. 1 (Brooklyn: Center for Holocaust Studies, 1981), 48.
Edward R. Murrow, CBS Radio broadcast, April 15, 1945, from Buchenwald, in Reporting World War II, part 2, American Journalism, 1944–1946 (New York: Library of America, 1995), 682–83; Percy Knauth, Germany in Defeat (New York: Knopf, 1946), 41–43; Sidney Olson, Time, May 7, 1945.
Mrs. Mavis Tate, M.P., “More on Buchenwald,” Spectator, May 4, 1945; Harold Denny, “News of the Week in Review,” New York Times, April 22, 1945.
For a detailed account of Belsen and its history, see Alexandra-Eileen Wenck, Zwischen Menschenhandel und Endlösung: Das Konzentrationslager Bergen-
Belsen (Paderborn, Germany: Schöningh, 2000); and a shorter account is Eberhard Kolb, Bergen-Belsen: From “Detention Camp” to Concentration Camp, 1943– 1945 (Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986).
Derek Sington, Belsen Uncovered (London: Duck- worth, 1946), 16–17.
Testimony of Lt.- Col. J. A. D. Johnston, Alan MacAus- lan, and John Dixey, in The Relief of Belsen, April 1945: Eyewitness Accounts (London: Imperial War Museum, 1991), 10, 14, 16, 20.
Leslie H. Hardman, with Cecily Goodman, The Sur- vivors: The Story of the Belsen Remnant (London: Val- lentine, Mitchell, 1958), 2, 14.
Sington, Belsen Uncovered, 23.
IWM 93/11/1, papers of Capt. R. Barber, Royal Army Medical Corps, “Report on Liberation of Sandbostel Concentration Camp.”
M.B., of the 63rd Infantry Division, in Liberators,
39. The 63rd I.D. entered Germany in February 1945, and on April 29–30, liberated several subcamps at- tached to the Kaufering camp, which was part of the
Dachau network of camps.
Robert Antelme, The Human Race, trans. by Jef- frey Haight and Annie Mahler (Marlboro, Vt: Marlboro Press, 1992), 289. Originally published in 1957 in Paris as L’espèce humaine.
Hanna Lévy-Hass, Inside Belsen, trans. by Ronald Taylor (Brighton, U.K.: Harvester Press, 1982), 52–53, 67; Interview with Fela Lichtheim, in David P. Boder, I Did Not Interview the Dead (Urbana: University of Il- linois Press, 1949), 154–59.
Sora M. (HVT-2826), Fortunoff Video Archive, Yale University Library, and her testimony in Karine Habif, ed., Le jour d’après: Douze témoins de la libération des camps (Paris: Editions Patrick Banon, 1995), where her name is given as Sarah Montard; Fernande H. (HVT- 2667), Fortunoff Video Archive, Yale University Library; Rosensaft in The Liberation of the Nazi Concentra- tion Camps, 1945: Eyewitness Accounts of the Libera- tors, ed. by Brewster Chamberlin and Marcia Feldman (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, 1987), 152–54.
Habif, ed., Le jour d’après, 75, 92, 103, 117.
Habif, ed., Le jour d’après, 171–2; Matard-Bonucci
and Lynch, eds., La Libération des camps, 54–55.
Abzug, Inside the Vicious Heart, 30.
Siggi Wilzig and Elie Wiesel, in The Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps, 158, 14.
9: Americans and Jews in Occupied Germany
Yehuda Bauer and one of his students, Ze’ev Mankow- itz, have written the outstanding works on the subject of the She’erit Hapleitah. See especially Bauer, Flight and Rescue: Brichah (New York: Random House, 1970), and Out of the Ashes: The Impact of American Jews on Post-Holocaust European Jewry (Oxford, U.K.: Perga- mon, 1989); and Mankowitz, Life Between Memory and Hope: The Survivors of the Holocaust in Occupied Ger- many (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Leonard Dinnerstein’s work also remains an es- sential introduction: see America and the Survivors of the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
For contemporary estimates, see “Jews in the Camps in Germany and Austria,” a memo for the World Jew- ish Congress written by Zorach Warhaftig, November 27, 1945, published in Abraham J. Peck, ed., Archives of the Holocaust, vol. 9, American Jewish Archives, The
Papers of the World Jewish Congress, 1945–1950 (New York: Garland, 1990), 110–38, which provides a detailed chart. The AJJDC also placed the number of Jews in Germany in the fall of 1945 at about 55,000. See “Sum- mary of Recent Reports from JDC Representatives in Germany,” December 18, 1945, AJJDC Archives, Ger- many, Displaced Persons, #321. Koppel Pinson, a senior AJJDC official in Germany in 1945–46, also gives 60,000 as a rough figure of Jews in Germany at the end of the war. Pinson, “Jewish Life in Liberated Germany,” Jew- ish Social Studies 9, 2 (April 1947), 101–26. For numbers of Jewish refugees from Poland and the east who ar- rived in Germany in late 1945 and 1946, see Bauer, Out of the Ashes, 88, 126–27.
Judah Nadich, Eisenhower and the Jews (New York: Twayne, 1953), 84–87; Mankowitz, Life Between Memo- ry and Hope, 30–31; Bauer, Flight and Rescue, 59.
For a survey of the predicament of the Jews in the summer and fall, see “Report of the AJJDC Staff Con- ference of the Eastern Military District, 3rd Army, Held at Passing near Munich, October 21, 1945,” AJJDC Ar- chives, Germany, DPs, #321.
Bauer, Flight and Rescue, 70–73; Mankowitz, Life Be- tween Memory and Hope, 49–51.
Judah Nadich, who as special adviser to Eisenhower on Jewish affairs, was Klausner’s nominal superior, describes his irregular status. He was “completely on his own” and “a man without a unit, an officer without a formal military assignment.” But such was the fluid and chaotic situation in the DP camps that Klausner could operate freely in them throughout the summer without any serious intervention by Army authorities. Nadich, Eisenhower and the Jews, 72–77.
Bauer, Flight and Rescue, 59–62. On the UNRRA Uni- versity, see UNRRA Archives, S-0436-0031, reports from UNRRA Team 108, August 18, September 11, and October 15, 1945.
“A Detailed Report on the Liberated Jew as He Now Suffers His Period of Liberation under the Discipline of the Armed Forces of the United States,” by Abraham J. Klausner, Jewish Chaplain, U.S. Army, written on June 24, 1945, in Dachau. AJJDC Archives, Germany, DPs,
#322.
Unsigned letter, dated August 26, 1945, enclosed in a letter from Joseph Leonard of Allentown, Pennsylvania, to Isidor Coons of the JDC, September 6, 1945, AJJDC Archives, Germany, DPs, #329.
Sgt. Edward Mayer to Dr. George Fox, Rabbi, South Shore Temple, Chicago, August 3, 1945; letter from Sgt. L. P. Brewster to his parents, July 6, 1945; Klausner letter to Dr. S. Atlas of Hebrew Union College in Cin- cinnati, Ohio, August 28, 1945, in AJJDC Archives, Ger- many, DPs, #329. Klausner himself has offered his own account of his motives and actions in this period. See his interview for the documentary by Wentworth Films, Liberation/DP, transcript in possession of U.S. Holo- caust Memorial Museum Library.
Outgoing cable, New York to Paris, September 28, 1945, AJJDC, DPs, General, #1025. These worries proved unfounded. The Joint was able to raise significant sums in 1946 and 1947, and spent correspondingly more each successive year on Jewish DPs in Europe. Bauer, Out of the Ashes, xviii.
Dr. Joseph Hyman, September 25, 1945, AJJDC Ar- chives, Germany, DPs, #329. Much of the same text was used repeatedly in letters to other inquiries.
Interview for documentary Voices of the Shoah: Re- membrances of the Holocaust, by David Notowitz, vol. 3 (Notowitz Productions, 2001).
Stimson to Eisenhower, August 7, 1945, and Eisen-
hower to Secretary of War, August 14, 1945, in NARA, RG 84, Foreign Service Posts, Office of Political Adviser to Germany, Classified General Correspondence, box 34; other documents cited in Nadich, Eisenhower and the Jews, 34–35; and Arieh J. Kochavi, Post-Holocaust Politics: Britain, the United States, and Jewish Refu- gees, 1945–1948 (Chapel Hill: University of North Caro- lina Press, 2001), 89–90.
Full text of Truman’s letter to Eisenhower and Harri- son’s report in Department of State, Bulletin, Septem- ber 30, 1945.
Report by Joseph Schwartz, August 19, 1945, AJJDC Archives, Displaced Persons, General, #1025.
Harrison report, U.S. State Department, Bulletin 13 (September 30, 1945).
Eisenhower to Truman, September 14, 1945, in NARA, RG 84, Foreign Service Posts, Office of Politi- cal Adviser to Germany, Classified General Correspon- dence, box 34.
Eisenhower’s order is in NARA, RG 260, Records of U.S. Occupation Headquarters, WWII, U.S. Group Control Council, Adjutant General, General Corre- spondence, 1944–45, box 25; and reproduced in Na-
dich, Eisenhower and the Jews, 130–32. Nadich gave his own account in his “Report on Conditions in Assem- bly Centers for Jewish Displaced Persons,” September 16, 1945, in AJJDC Archives, Germany, DPs, #322. And see telegram from JDC Paris to New York on the visit, which was “enthusiastically received by the internees.” AJJDC Archives, September 20, 1945, Displaced Per- sons, General, #1025.
“Final Report by General Eisenhower on Jewish Displaced Persons in Germany,” cover sheet dated No- vember 5, 1945, report written on October 8, 1945, in NARA, RG 84, Foreign Service Posts, Office of Political Adviser to Germany, Classified General Correspon- dence, box 34.
Reported in the Jewish Chronicle, October 26, 1945.
Report of Staff Conference, October 21, 1945, AJJDC Archives, Germany, DPs, #321.
Warhaftig, November 27, 1945, in Peck, ed., Archives of the Holocaust, 129, 134.
Oscar A. Mintzer, In Defense of the Survivors: The Letters of Oscar A. Mintzer, AJDC Legal Advisor, Ger- many, 1945–46 (Berkeley, Calif.: Judah L. Magnes Mu-
seum, 1999), 47.
Warhaftig, November 27, 1945, in Peck, ed., Archives of the Holocaust, 130.
Pinson, “Jewish Life in Liberated Germany,” 108– 9.
Pinson, “Jewish Life in Liberated Germany,” 118.
Report on Camp Landsberg, October 1945, AJJDC Archives, Germany, DPs, #321; Report by R. G. Mas- trude, Acting Regional Supervisor, XX Corps Regional Office, October 13, 1945, Inspection of Team 311, Lands- berg, UNRRA Archives, S-0436-0042.
Report on Camp Landsberg, October 1945, AJJDC Archives, Germany, DPs, #321.
Among the Survivors of the Holocaust, 1945: The Landsberg DP Camp Letters of Major Irving Heymont, United States Army (Cincinnati: American Jewish Ar- chives, 1982), entry for September 20, 1945.
Among the Survivors, entries for September 20, 22, 25.
Among the Survivors, entries for September 28 and
October 2.
Among the Survivors, entries for October 8, 10. Francesca Wilson, an English UNRRA official who was assigned to Feldafing, expressed the same mixture of sympathy and scorn for the Jewish DPs as Heymont had done at Landsberg. “As for the inmates of the camp,” she wrote in her 1947 memoir, “at first it was hard to look on them without repulsion…. By years of brutal treatment, by the murder of relatives, by the constant fear of death, all that was human had been taken away from them.” As with so many Allied personnel, Wilson saw these bewildered, vulnerable Jews as something less than human, or at least less than adult. A group of Jews from Salonika, for example, she described as filthy and destructive. “How long would their return to infantilism last, I wondered…. I was reminded of some of our evacuee children who, with their families gone and every known tie severed, had, by smashing and soiling and burning and stealing everything revenged themselves on a society which had hounded them into the hideous void of the countryside and made them feel outcasts.” Francesca M. Wilson, Aftermath: France, Germany, Austria, Yugoslavia, 1945 and 1946 (London: Penguin, 1947), 41, 49–50.
Leo Srole, “ Why the DPs Can’t Wait,” Commentary,
vol. 3 (January 1947). An earlier version of his essay was prepared as a report for the Anglo-American Commis- sion for Palestine in August 1946. AJJDC Archives, Ger- many, DPs, #324.
Helen Matouskova, Field Supervisor, UNRRA Dis- trict Headquarters, to S. B. Zieman, District Director, District 5, February 4, 1946, UNRRA Archives, S-0436- 0042.
Heymont speech quoted in Leo W. Schwarz, The Redeemers: A Saga of the Years 1945–1952 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Young, 1953), 66.
Landsberger Lager- Cajtung, October 28, 1945, “Ben- Gurion in Landsberg: A lebediker grus fun E.- J.”
Schwarz, 51. Schwarz’s account of Ben- Gurion’s conversations differs considerably from that reported in the Landsberger Lager- Cajtung.
Heymont, Among the Survivors, entry for October 22; and Warhaftig, November 27, 1945, in Peck, ed., Ar- chives of the Holocaust, 132.
Major General Arthur A. White, Report on Lands- berg Camp, December 22–23, 1945, UNRRA Archives,
S-0436-0042.
Report of Colonel C. A. Nelson, to Brigadier General Walter J. Muller, December 10, 1945, UNRRA Archives, S-0436-0042.
Lt. Col. Charles Agar, Third Army Surgeon’s Office, to Lt. Col. Pollock, Acting Army Surgeon, Third U.S. Army, “Landsberg DP Camp,” December 28, 1945, UN- RRA Archives, S-0436-0042.
Meeting of the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in Bavaria, November 15, 1945, AJJDC Archives, Germany, DPs, #321.
Zorach Warhaftig, “Jews in the Camps,” memo in Archives of the Holocaust; Bauer, Brichah, 75–96; and for numbers see p. 119. Bauer argued that Ben- Gurion transformed what had been Brichah’s mission of saving Jews into an act of political pressure: Brichah, 96.
Joseph Levine to Moses Leavitt, October 24, 1945, AJJDC Archives, Germany, DPs, #321; Eli Rock report, October 25, 1945, part of documents prepared for re- port on the Jewish Community of Bavaria, AJJDC Ar- chives, Germany, DPs, #321; Trobe to Rifkind, AJJDC Archives, DPs, General, #1024.
Cable to War Department, no date; and cover memo by Major G. L. C. Scott and Lt. Col. Harry S. Messec, November 23, 1945, NARA, RG 84, Foreign Service Posts, Office of U.S. Political Adviser to Germany–Ber- lin, Classified General Correspondence, 1945, box 34.
Summary of recent reports from JDC representa- tives in Germany, December 18, 1945, AJJDC Archives, Germany, DPs, #321.
On the Srole affair, see Mankowitz, Life Between Memory and Hope, 109–10; Bauer, Out of the Ashes, 88– 89; Rifkind cable to World Jewish Congress, December 18, 1945, and Rifkind letter, December 7, 1945, to Lech Kubowitzki, in Archives of the Holocaust, 153–56. The Bedell Smith visit and Smith’s account of his visit to Landsberg are detailed in two UNRRA memoranda, in UNRRA, PAG-4/1.3.1.1.1, box 27, telegrams of December 7 and 9, 1945. Smith said of the camp’s Jewish leaders, “in all of my service I have never found such complete ineffectiveness along lines of Administration of large group of people concentrated in one area.”
Lt. Col. Messec memo to General Mickelsen, NARA, RG 84, Foreign Service Posts, Office of U.S. Political Adviser to Germany–Berlin, Classified General Corre- spondence, 1945, box 34. For criticism of the failure to
seize sufficient housing, see Oscar Mintzer’s letters, In Defense of the Survivors, 63–66.
PRO, FO1020/2409, October 2, 1945; November 6, 1945; and November 25, 1945.
PRO, FO1020/2409, Morning News clipping, Janu- ary 4, 1946; New York Times, January 3, 1946.
Judge Simon Rifkind, address to the American Jew- ish Conference, April 2, 1946, NARA, RG 407, Adminis- trative Services Division, Operations Branch, Foreign Occupied Area Reports, 1945–54, Germany, box 1005.