Authors: Martin Gilbert
In Yugoslavia, in the last week of January, Hungarian soldiers ran amok, killing several thousand Jews and Serbs. On January 23, at Novi Sad, 550 Jews and 292 Serbs were driven on to the ice of the
Danube, which was then shelled. The ice broke, and the victims drowned. At Stari Becej, on January 26 and the two following days, a hundred Jews and a hundred Serbs were slaughtered. At Titel, thirty-five of the thirty-six Jews living in the village were killed.
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These killings, seen and publicized, led the Hungarian government to charge the senior Hungarian officer responsible for the murder of six thousand Serbs and four thousand Jews: before he could be brought to trial, however, he fled to Germany.
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Six weeks after the Wannsee Conference, a second death camp was opened, at Belzec. In those six weeks, in addition to the continuing gassings at Chelmno, tens of thousands of Jews were to die elsewhere: the largest number, 5,123, died of starvation in Warsaw in January.
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Thousands also died in each of the ghettos in the General Government, and, further east, in White Russia, the Ukraine and Volhynia, of starvation, typhus and shooting. On January 24, in the Volhynian town of Luck, the dead from typhus included the distinguished neurosurgeon, Dr Pawel Goldstein, born in Tsarist Poland in 1884, a graduate of Freiburg University, who between the wars had worked in the surgical department of the Jewish hospital in Warsaw. In 1939 Goldstein had been the Chief Surgeon of the Polish army hospital in Chelm.
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In 1940 he had managed to cross the Soviet border and reached the safety of Luck.
On January 26, in the Volhynian village of Teofipol, three hundred Jews were assembled from the village itself and the neighbouring hamlets, stripped naked, ‘and led down a stretch of three miles in zero weather and then were shot down’: among them eight members of the Spivack family.
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January 1942 saw the final destruction of the Jewish community of Odessa. Following the mass murder and deportation of the Jews of Odessa in October 1941, the thirty thousand survivors had been driven into an enclosed area in the Slobodka suburb of the city. Because most of the houses in that area had been destroyed during the battle for the city, several thousand of the Jews had to lie in the open, in the rain and snow, and many perished. Some Jews committed suicide rather than go to Slobodka. A few were able to hand over their children to Christian families for conversion and adoption, the conversion ceremonies being performed by Russian Orthodox priests.
On January 12 the deportations from the Slobodka ‘ghetto’ began. Within six weeks, a total of 19,582 Odessa Jews, the majority women, children and old people, had been taken by rail in sealed cattle trucks to Berezovka, and then on to two concentration camps in the Golta district. If someone died while the trucks were being loaded, the body would be put in the truck ‘just the same’, as Dora Litani, the historian of the fate of Odessa Jewry, has recorded, ‘because the exact number that appeared on the list had to be handed over in Berezovka.’ These bodies and those of persons who died on the way, she added, fifty to sixty in each shipment, were taken off the train and piled up near the Berezovka railway station platform, gasoline was poured on them, and they were burned before the eyes of their families and all those present. There were instances where those burned included dying persons, who still had breath in their bodies.
Once the deportees had reached the Golta district, Dora Litani has written, they were sent to two camps, one at Bogdanovka, the other at Domanovka. There they were packed into partly destroyed houses, without doors or windows, and into warehouses, stables and pigpens. ‘Disease cut short the lives of hundreds of people, for they lay without food or medical care.’ Those capable of working were sent to farms in the region, some nearby, others some distance away. ‘They lived like work-animals, but unlike animals they received neither food nor care of any kind.’
Within a year and a half, almost none of these 19,582 deportees were alive. Most had died of starvation, severe cold, untreated disease, or in repeated mass executions in which several hundreds would be shot at a time.
In Odessa, many of the apartments in which the Jews had lived before the war were assigned, together with their furniture, to the 7,500 Ethnic Germans living in the city. Even the tombstones in the Jewish cemetery were made use of, being shipped to Rumania and sold to stonemasons. A year later, in Bucharest, 831 cubic metres of marble, all from the Odessa Jewish cemetery, were found in a stone-cutting plant. Among the marble slabs was the gravestone of the poet Simon Frug.
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Evidence survives of some non-Jewish attempts to help Jews during these Eastern slaughters. On January 16 the Einsatzkommando unit at Kremenchug reported that they had shot a Red Army officer, Major Senitsa Vershovsky, because he had ‘tried to protect the Jews’.
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Throughout January the deportations of elderly Jews to Theresienstadt, and of whole communities from the Old Reich to Riga had continued. On January 28 Eichmann personally rejected a request from the Swedish explorer, Sven Hedin, to prevent the deportation of Alfred Phillipson, a Jew living in Bonn. ‘It cannot be agreed that he stays in Bonn until he dies,’ Eichmann noted, ‘because when we deal with a final solution of the Jewish problem, the plan is that Jews above the age of sixty-five will be put in a special Ghetto for the aged.’
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Three days later Eichmann’s office, IV-D-4, sent a note to all its officials in the Reich, urging them to miss no ‘opportunity’ to forward more deportations from the Old Reich. ‘For additional deportations’, the note explained, ‘it is necessary to draw up a list of the Jews still in the Reich….’
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One of those who witnessed the deportations from the Reich was Gertrude Schneider, who was deported on February 6 from Vienna. The transport commander was Alois Brunner, one of whose charges during the long journey was the Viennese financier, Siegmund Bosel. During the second night of the train journey, Brunner chained Bosel, still in his pyjamas, to the floor of the first wagon and berated him for having been a ‘profiteer’. The old man repeatedly asked for mercy; he was very ill, and it was bitterly cold. Finally, Brunner wearied of the game and shot him. Afterwards Brunner walked into the second wagon and asked whether anyone had heard anything. ‘After being assured that no one had,’ Gertrude Schneider later recalled, ‘he seemed satisfied and left.’
This Viennese transport reached Riga on February 10. It was met at the station by Dr Rudolph Lange, one of the Nazi officials who had been present at the Wannsee Conference. Gertrude Schneider later recalled how Lange told these latest arrivals that those who were ‘unwilling or unable’ to walk the seven kilometres to the ghetto could make the journey on trucks which had been especially reserved for them. ‘In this way,’ he said, ‘those of you who ride can prepare a place for those who walk.’ Gertrude Schneider’s account continued:
It was an extremely cold day—forty-two degrees below zero, to be exact—and so the majority of the hapless, unsuspecting Jews from Vienna took his advice and lined up to board the trucks. They did not know that those greyish-blue trucks had been manufactured by the Saurer Works in Austria especially for the implementation of the ‘final solution’. These trucks were the famous gas-vans, which were used from time to time despite the fact that the SS did not especially like them because they always had mechanical problems.
At the time of the arrival of this train on February 10, more than five thousand of the twenty thousand Riga Jews who had come from the Reich had already been murdered. From Jungfernhof continual selections were made for ‘resettlement’. The Jews were told that they were to go as a workforce to the city of Duenamuende where they would be working in fish-canning factories. ‘To the Jews,’ Gertrude Schneider later wrote, ‘the plan sounded credible. The Baltic Sea was rich in fish, and everyone knew that workers were badly needed everywhere.’ To the hungry old people who were ordered to go to Duenamuende, she added, ‘the magic words “fish canneries” implied food as well as a certain security and reprieve from the cold. While most of those selected for this work were elderly or ailing or parents with small children, some of the ghetto functionaries were chosen as well. A number of physicians were also put on the lists, ostensibly to take care of workers who might get sick.’
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At Auschwitz, a further experiment had been carried out using Cyclon B to murder several hundred Jews who had been brought to the camp from several cities in Upper Silesia. This gassing took place, not in Auschwitz Main Camp, but across the railway line, in a cottage at the village of Birkenau. This cottage had been specially adapted for the purpose. Once more, the experiment was judged a success. The corpses were then buried in a number of mass graves in the adjoining meadow.
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On March 6, at a meeting of experts at the Head Office for Reich Security, Adolf Eichmann spoke of the forthcoming deportation of fifty thousand Jews from the Old Reich—Germany,
Ostmark—Austria and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. ‘Among others,’ Eichmann explained, ‘we include herewith Prague with twenty thousand; Vienna with eighteen thousand Jews; all these have to be deported.’ A representative from the Reich Security Office in Dusseldorf, Mann, told the meeting: ‘One must never permit Jews to learn about preparations for deportation. Therefore strict secrecy is required.’
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Strict secrecy was indeed meticulously maintained: bureaucrats in Berlin, and construction experts in the ‘East’, worked under the protection of wartime censorship and silence.
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Not only in Europe, but also in North Africa, Jews were murdered in remote, unknown camps. One such camp was at Hadjerat M’Guil, in the Sahara desert. There, on January 13, a Jew, Paul Levinstein, was murdered. Ten months earlier, on 22 March 1941, Marshal Petain had signed a law authorizing the construction of a railway across the Sahara. As a result of this law, several forced labour camps had been opened in the Sahara desert.
Of the fifteen hundred prisoners sent to these camps, two hundred and fifty were Jews. The rest were Spaniards who had been interned in Vichy France at the time of the Franco—German armistice in June 1940, most of them refugees from the Spanish civil war who had fled to France for safety in March 1939, with the defeat of the Republican forces. The Jews were mostly German and Austrian Jews who, like Paul Levinstein, on release from concentration camps in Germany early in 1939, had fled to France, and had then enlisted in the French Foreign Legion. This had enabled them, although not French nationals, to fight alongside French forces in May 1940. First German or Austrian citizens, then prisoners, then refugees, then soldiers, they were prisoners once more, in circumstances of considerable hardship.
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The camp at Hadjerat M’Guil was opened on 1 November 1941, as a punishment and isolation camp. It contained one hundred and seventy prisoners, nine of whom were tortured and murdered in conditions of the worst brutality. Two of those murdered were Jews.
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Paul Levinstein, murdered on January 13, was the son of Dr
Oswald Levinstein who, with his wife, had found refuge in Britain shortly before the outbreak of war. On learning of their son’s murder, they committed suicide.
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Throughout February 1942 the deportations to the death camp at Chelmno continued, systematically destroying the Jewish communities of western Poland. Also throughout February, gas-chambers were under construction at Belzec and Sobibor. But even as these preparations were being made, the Jews of German-occupied Poland and western Russia continued to suffer from the earlier German policies of spasmodic massacre and deliberate starvation. In the Warsaw ghetto, deaths from starvation in 1941 had approached the horrific total of fifty thousand.
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As that figure was reached, during February 1942, thirty-three Jewish doctors living in the ghetto decided that, as they could not alleviate the hunger, they should at least study it scientifically, for whatever benefits could be accrued for post-war medicine.
To coordinate their researches, these thirty-three doctors met once a month, knowing that their work was likely to come to an abrupt end, for they were starving as were their patients. They decided to focus on two age groups, children between the ages of six and twelve, and adults between twenty and forty, hoping by this means to exclude from their investigations the chemical and biological imbalances created in the normal course of infancy, puberty and old age. During more than a year of research, the doctors carried out tens of thousands of examinations, and 3,658 autopsies.
Only eight of the thirty-three doctors were to survive the war, but their work, which did survive, was to serve as a basis for a fuller understanding of the process of starvation. In their book, which was published in Warsaw in 1946, the doctors made no mention either of Hitler’s name or of the word ‘Nazi’. Hugo Gryn, himself a survivor of the Holocaust, has written of how, through this book,
the spirit of the doctors emerged ‘not so much triumphant, but civilized and with human dignity intact’.
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As the doctors worked on their study of starvation, the Warsaw ghetto’s torment continued. ‘The Germans impose the death penalty on people who leave the ghetto,’ Mary Berg noted in her diary at the end of February, ‘and several people have recently been shot for this crime. But’, she added, ‘no one cares. It is better to die of a bullet than of hunger.’
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In the Minsk ghetto, on February 13, the Germans shot the leaders of those Jews deported from Hamburg the previous November.
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That same month, somewhere behind the lines on the Russian front, a German soldier, Private Christian, noted in his diary: ‘Since we have been in this town we have already shot more than thirteen thousand Jews. We are south of Kiev.’
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