By this time, the days of the L’d’ ghetto were already numbered. Following the Warsaw ghetto uprising, Himmler had ordered the ‘liquidation’ of all remaining ghettos in the east on 21 June 1943. All remaining Jews in the Reich were to be deported.
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26,000 inhabitants of the Minsk ghetto were killed in the following months, and a further 9,000, all engaged on labour schemes, were dead by the end of the year.
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In Bialystok the final ‘liquidation’ began on 15 August 1943, taking the resistance movement that had formed there by surprise. Deep divisions between the Communists and Zionists in the resistance further hampered concerted action, and the resisters had little support from the general ghetto population. Nevertheless, the fighting lasted five days. Globocnik, who took personal charge of the operation, sent in tanks and, copying Stroop, burned all the buildings in the ghetto to the ground.
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In other ghettos, the process of dissolution had already begun before Himmler issued his order.
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In Lvov, 40,000 Jews were taken from a labour camp in mid-August 1942 and gassed in Belzec; the remaining Jews were put into a newly created ghetto in the city while twelve members of the Jewish Council were publicly hanged from lamp-posts in the street, or from the roof of the Council’s office building. Over the next few months, further actions took thousands more inhabitants of the ghetto off to the gas chambers of Belzec, until early in 1943 the ghetto was closed down and the remaining Jews transferred back to the labour camp. Only 3,400 out of a total population of 160,000 survived the war.
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Round-ups began in Vilna in April 1943, prompting, as elsewhere, the flight of many young members of the resistance, especially those with Communist beliefs, for whom the principal objective was to aid the Red Army by tying down German forces, into the nearby woods. Most of the ghetto’s remaining 20,000 inhabitants were taken off to be killed, many of them in Sobibor.
The last major ghetto to be closed was the L’d’ ghetto, which was wound down in the summer of 1944. Over 73,000 people were still living there. Deportations to Chelmno began in mid-July, even at this point still carried out with the participation of the Jewish ghetto police, and then from 3 August some 5,000 Jews were ordered to assemble at the railway station every day, with the promise that they would be relocated to better conditions. The trains all went directly to extermination camps. The last one, leaving the now virtually empty ghetto on 28 August 1944, carried on it the Ghetto Elder Chaim Rumkowski and his family. On arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau, they were all sent to the gas chamber. Of nearly 70,000 Jews still living in the ghetto at the end of July 1944, only 877 were still there the following January, charged with the task of clearing up.
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All in all, over 90 per cent of Poland’s 3.3 million Jews had been killed by this time.
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VI
The extermination of the Jews has sometimes been seen as a kind of industrialized, assembly-line kind of mass murder, and this picture has at least some element of truth to it. No other genocide in history has been carried out by mechanical means - gassing - in specially constructed facilities like those in operation at Auschwitz or Treblinka. At the same time, however, these facilities did not operate efficiently or effectively, and if the impression given by calling them industrialized is that they were automated or impersonal, then it is a false one. Men such as Ḧss and Stangl and their subordinates tried to insulate themselves from the human dimension of what they were doing by referring to their victims as ‘cargo’ or ‘items’. Talking to Gerhard Stabenow, the head of the SS Security Service in Warsaw, in September 1942, Wilm Hosenfeld noted how the language Stabenow used distanced himself from the fact that what he was involved in was the mass murder of human beings: ‘He speaks of the Jews as of ants or other vermin, of their “resettlement”, that means their mass murder, as he would of the extermination of bedbugs in the disinfestation of a house.’
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But at the same time such men were not immune from the human emotions they tried so hard to repress, and they remembered incidents in which individual women and children had appealed to their conscience, even if such appeals were in vain. The psychological strain that continual killing of unarmed civilians, including women and children, imposed on such men was considerable, just as it had been in the case of the SS Task Forces, whose troops had been shooting Jews in their hundreds of thousands before the first gas vans were deployed in an attempt not only to speed up the killing but also to make it somehow more impersonal.
What kept such men going was a belief that they were doing Hitler’s bidding, and killing the present and future enemies of the German race. They were not faceless bureaucrats or technologists of death; nor was the killing at any level simply the product of impersonal pressures to obey superior orders or the cold pursuit of material or military advantage for the Third Reich. The careers of SS men like Eichmann, Stangl and Ḧss revealed them to be hardened antisemites; the racial hatred of their subordinates, stoked and fuelled by years of propaganda, training and indoctrination, was scarcely less extreme. Translating visceral hatred of Jews in the abstract to violent acts of mass murder in reality proved not to be difficult for them, nor for a number of the SS Security Service bureaucrats who took over the leadership of the Task Forces in the east. Particularly in the lower ranks of the SS, but also in the regular army, Jews, when encountered individually or in small groups, frequently aroused a degree of personal, sadistic brutality, a desire to humiliate as well as destroy, that was seldom present when they dealt with ordinary Poles, Russians or other Slavs. Slav prisoners were not made to perform gymnastics or dance before they were shot, as Jews were; nor were they made to clean out latrines with their clothes or bare hands, as Jews were. Slavs were mere tools; it was the Jews who were supposedly behind the Stalin regime, who ordered the Soviet secret police to commit bestial massacres of German prisoners, who inspired the partisans to launch cruel and cowardly attacks on German troops from the rear. Rank-and-file German troops, both regular soldiers and SS men, were heavily influenced by propaganda and indoctrination and, if they were young, years of education in the school system of the Third Reich, to believe that Jews in general, and Eastern Jews in particular, were dirty, dangerous dishonest and diseased, the enemies of all civilization.
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The atrocities of the Soviet secret police confirmed German soldiers in their belief that Jews, whom they held to blame, were bestial killers who deserved no mercy. ‘Jewry is good for only one thing,’ wrote one sergeant,
annihilation . . . And I have confirmed to myself that the entire leadership of all [Soviet] institutions consisted of Jews. So their guilt is huge, the suffering they have caused unimaginable, their murderous deeds devilish. This can only be expiated by their annihilation. Up to now I have rejected this way of doing things as immoral. But after seeing the Soviet Paradise for myself I don’t know any other solution. In these Eastern Jews there live the dregs of every kind of criminality, and I am conscious of the uniqueness of our mission.
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Abusing and humiliating Jews could also serve as a compensation for the lowly status and daily privations of the ordinary soldier. ‘The best thing here,’ wrote one from an occupied eastern town in May 1942, ‘is that all the Jews doff their hats to us. If a Jew spots us 100m away, he already doffs his hat. If he doesn’t, then we teach him to. Here you feel yourself to be a soldier, for here we rule the roost.’
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Higher up the chain of command, the army often rationalized the killing of Jews as a step necessary for the maintenance of its own essential food supplies,
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but this claim should not be taken simply at face value. The need to feed the army and the German civilian population at home did at particular junctures create a perceived need to operate what in medical terms might be called a
triage
, distinguishing those thought to need food most urgently and in greatest quantities from those with a lower priority. But what put Jews at the bottom of this hierarchy was not any rationalistic calculation based on an estimate of their contribution to the economy. It derived above all from an obsessively pursued ideology that regarded the Jews not simply as the most dispensable of the inhabitants of occupied Eastern Europe, but as a positive threat to Germany in every respect, conspiring with Jews everywhere else in the world, and especially in Britain and the USA, to wage war on the Third Reich. Had the Jews merely been surplus consumers of scarce resources, Himmler would hardly have undertaken a personal journey to Finland to try to persuade the government there to hand over the very small number of Jews under its control for deportation and extermination.
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As this suggests, the extermination programme was directed and pushed on repeatedly from the centre, above all by Hitler’s continual rhetorical attacks on the Jews in the second half of 1941, repeated on other occasions as the Jews loomed in his mind as a threat once more. There was no single decision, implemented in a rationalistic, bureaucratic way; rather, the extermination programme emerged in a process lasting several months, in which Nazi propaganda created a genocidal mentality that spurred Himmler and other leading Nazis to push forward with the killing of Jews on an ever-wider scale. Altogether during the war, some 3 million Jews were murdered in the extermination camps. 700,000 were killed in mobile gas vans and 1.3 million were shot by SS Task Forces, police units and allied forces or auxiliary militias. Anything up to a million Jews died of hunger, disease or SS brutality and shootings in the concentration camps and especially the ghettos that the Third Reich established in the occupied territories. A precise total is impossible to arrive at, but it is certain that at least 5.5 million Jews were deliberatedly killed in one way or another by the Nazis and their allies. Since the opening of the archives in the former Soviet bloc in the 1990s it has become clear that the probable total is around 6 million, the figure given by Adolf Eichmann at his trial in Jerusalem in 1961. ‘With this terrible murder of the Jews,’ wrote Wilm Hosenfeld on 16 June 1943, ‘we have lost the war. We have brought upon ourselves an indelible disgrace, a curse that can never be lifted. We deserve no mercy, we are all guilty.’
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4
THE NEW ORDER
THE SINEWS OF WAR
I
In the small hours of February 1942, Hitler’s favourite architect and close friend Albert Speer was going over his plans for the rebuilding of Berlin with Hitler in his field headquarters at Rastenburg in East Prussia. The conversation, he recalled later, visibly cheered up the tired Leader, who had spent the previous hours in a dispiriting conference with the Minister of Armaments, Fritz Todt. The Armaments Minister had already concluded during the Battle of Moscow in November - December 1941 that the war could not be won. Not only were British and American industrial resources stronger than Germany’s, but Soviet industry was producing better equipment on a larger scale, better adapted to fighting in the depths of winter. German supplies were running short. Industrialists were advising Todt that they would not be able to match the military production of Germany’s enemies. But Hitler would not listen. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor seemed to him to defer American involvement in the European theatre and give Germany a new chance of victory. On 3 December 1941 he had issued an order for ‘simplification and increased efficiency in armaments production’ intended to bring about ‘mass production on modern principles’. At Hitler’s behest, Todt had reorganized the system of arms production administration into five Principal Committees, respectively for ammunition, weapons, tanks, engineering and equipment, and set up a new advisory committee with industrialists and air force representatives. His visit to Hitler on 7-8 February 1942 is likely to have involved discussions of these new structures and of the benefits they could bring. Despite all these changes, Todt most probably cautioned Hitler during his visit to Rastenburg on 7-8 February 1942 that the situation remained serious if not critical; hence the Leader’s air of despondency when he emerged from their meeting.
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Chatting briefly with Speer over a glass of wine, Todt offered him a seat on the plane that was to take him back to Berlin at 8 a.m. on 8 February. The architect was only in Rastenburg by chance, having been prevented by heavy snow from returning to Berlin from Dnepropetrovsk by rail. He had accepted instead a lift by air to Hitler’s field headquarters, which at least got him closer to his destination. So he was looking for transport, and Todt’s offer was therefore a tempting one. But by the time Hitler and Speer went to bed it was 3 a.m., and Speer sent word that he wanted to sleep in and would not be travelling with the Armaments Minister. Speer was still asleep when the phone beside his bed rang shortly after eight in the morning. Todt’s plane, a converted twin-engined Heinkel 111, had taken off normally but then crashed into the ground, where it had burst into flames. It had been completely destroyed. Everyone on board was killed.
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A later commission of inquiry suggested that the pilot had pulled a self-destruct mechanism in error; but in fact this particular plane did not carry such a mechanism, nor was there any reliable evidence of a mid-air explosion. Nicolaus von Below, Hitler’s air force adjutant, later remembered that Hitler had banned the use of such small twin-engined planes by his senior staff and had been sufficiently concerned about the Heinkel’s airworthiness that he had ordered the pilot to take it up for a trial spin before Todt embarked. Below thought that the poor weather conditions in which the plane had taken off meant that the inexperienced pilot had been unable to see properly and had flown it into the ground. The mystery was never satisfactorily solved. Had Speer planted a bomb on board? It seems unlikely, for while the account of the crash he gave in his memoirs was full of inaccuracies, there is no reason to doubt his story that he was in Rastenburg entirely by chance, and so would not have had the time to plan Todt’s death. Nor, despite a certain strain in the relationship between the two men, was there any obvious reason why he should want him dead. Had Hitler, then, decided to kill his Armaments Minister because he could not stand the constant pessimism of his reports? Had he, perhaps, privately told Speer not to travel on the plane? This speculation too is implausible; this was not the way Hitler dealt with uncomfortable or inconvenient subordinates, and had he wanted to get rid of Todt, he would have been far more likely simply to have dismissed him, or, in an extreme case, had him arrested and shot.
3