When they forced Jews to wear the yellow star on their clothing, the better for people to identify them, many non-Jewish Germans did not react in the way that Goebbels wanted them to. Jews reported being greeted on the street with unusual politeness, people coming up to them and apologizing, or offering them a seat on the tram. Foreign diplomats, among them the Swedish Ambassador and the US Consul-General in Berlin, noted similarly sympathetic reactions on the part of the majority population, particularly from older people. The public advertisement of the Jews’ persecuted status produced feelings of shame and guilt when it was attached to visible, living human beings.
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Popular reactions to the introduction of the Jewish star were overwhelmingly negative, and those who took it as the opportunity to abuse and attack Jews were in a small minority.
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When, not long afterwards, the police began rounding up Jews in German cities and taking them to the local railway station for deportation to the east, negative public reactions outweighed the positive ones again. Older Germans in particular found the deportations shocking. The Security Service of the SS reported in December 1941 that people in Minden were saying that it was ‘incomprehensible how human beings could be treated so brutally; whether they were Jews or Aryans, all of them in the end were people created by God.’
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The religiously inclined were particularly critical of the deportations.
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In Lemgo a crowd gathered to see the last transport of Jews off at the end of July 1942. Many citizens, particularly in the older generations, were critical, and even Nazi Party members said it was too hard on the Jews, who had been living in the town for many decades, even centuries.
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‘On the train,’ noted Luise Solmitz in Hamburg on 7 November 1941, ‘people are craning their necks; apparently a fresh trainload of Non-Aryans to be sent away is being put together at Logenähs.’
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Not long afterwards, she heard a passer-by comment as an elderly Jewish woman was taken away from a Jewish old people’s home, ‘driven together in such a little pile of misery’: ‘Good, that the rabble is being cleaned out!’ But another witness to the action took exception to this comment: ‘Are you talking to me?’ he asked. ‘Please shut up.’
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All through the summer of 1942 Luise Solmitz witnessed the repeated deportations of elderly Jews to Theresienstadt. ‘The whole of Hamburg is filled with the deportation even of the oldest people,’ she noted. An acquaintance reported that ‘whooping children had accompanied the removal’, although Solmitz herself had never seen such behaviour. ‘Once more, Jews have gone to Warsaw,’ she reported on 14 July 1942. ‘I found confirmation of this in the rubbish-bins outside their home, which were full to the brim with the miserable remains of their few possessions, with coloured tin cans, old bedside lamps, torn handbags. Children were rummaging about in them, cheering, making an indescribable mess.’
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An unexpected new challenge was posed to the Solmitz family when Friedrich and Luise’s daughter Gisela fell in love with a Belgian man working in a Hamburg factory and they decided to marry. At the Registry Office, an official told Luise that the Reich Ministry of Justice had turned down the couple’s application to marry, adding:
‘Do the young man’s parents know that your daughter is a half-breed of the first grade? I’m sure they’ve given their consent, but do they know that?’ - ‘Belgium doesn’t recognize such laws or such views.’ - ‘What do you mean, “Belgium”? Today we don’t even use the term “Germany”. We think: “Europe”. No Jew is to remain in Europe. This is my personal view - not the official one, but I notice it from signs that the Jews will be dealt with even more severely than before.’ He said that to me twice. And there I sat, defenceless. ‘Look,’ he continued to lecture me, ‘at what the Jews have done in Russia, in America. Now we’re noticing it for the first time.’
When Luise Solmitz made so bold as to mention her Jewish husband, the official was thoroughly taken aback. ‘Your husband is still here?!’ he exclaimed in disbelief.
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IV
A few people tried to rescue such Jews as they could. The story of the businessman Oskar Schindler is well known: a Czech German and member of the Nazi Party, he obtained an enamel factory in Cracow when its Jewish owner was dispossessed, and employed 1,100 Jewish forced labourers there while also engaging in widespread black market activities, trading in looted art and pursuing other forms of corruption. As time went on, however, Schindler began to be outraged at the treatment meted out to Polish Jews, and managed to use his money and connections to protect those who were working for him. As the Red Army approached, he obtained permission to evacuate his workers to an arms factory in the Sudetenland, although it never produced any arms. The Jews survived the war, but Schindler had lost most of his fortune in protecting them, and he did not prosper in the more orderly business world of the postwar years. He moved to Argentina in 1948, but was forced into bankruptcy a decade later, and returned to Germany, living first in Frankfurt then in Hildesheim, and dying a relatively poor man in 1974, aged sixty-six.
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Another rescuer, the Catholic German army officer and former schoolteacher Wilm Hosenfeld, also began employing Poles and Jews in his army sports administration in Warsaw, to protect them from arrest. ‘How many have I already helped!’ he wrote to his wife on 31 March 1943, adding a few months later: ‘I don’t have such a bad conscience that I must be afraid of any retribution.’
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On 17 November 1944 Hosenfeld stumbled upon a starving Jewish survivor of the ghetto, living in an abandoned house that Hosenfeld was prospecting for use as the new army command headquarters.
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The man turned out to be a well-known professional pianist, Wladyslaw Szpilman, whose radio recitals had made him a household name in Poland before the war. Hosenfeld hid him in the attic while the German army command moved in downstairs, and kept him supplied with food and winter clothing until the Germans left the city. He never told Szpilman his name, nor did he, for obvious reasons of security, make any mention in his diary of what he had done. It was not until the 1950s that the pianist, who by this time had revived his career in Poland, discovered his rescuer’s identity.
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There were others, less well known, who helped keep a total of several thousand Jews in hiding in Berlin, Warsaw, Amsterdam and many other occupied cities. They included clandestine groups stimulated by socialist or religious or sometimes simply humanitarian beliefs, such as scouting troops, charitable organizations, student clubs and a whole variety of pre-existing networks. A number of Jews, especially in France, were able to hide in the countryside with the help of friendly or compassionate farmers and villagers. One of many groups devoted to rescue was the Organization for Rescuing Children and Protecting the Health of Jewish Populations, founded in Russia in 1912. Its French branch hid several hundred Jewish children, many of them refugees from Germany and Austria, provided them with false identity papers, dispersed them to non-Jewish families who were willing to take the risk, or smuggled them into Spain or Switzerland. All in all, underground groups such as this managed to hide many thousands of Jews or send them into safety outside German-occupied Europe.
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But these thousands, of course, have to be set against the millions who did not survive.
A small number of individuals also tried to get news of the extermination to the world outside German-dominated Europe. At the end of July 1942 the German industrialist Eduard Schulte, who enjoyed good relations with leading members of the regime, travelled to Zurich, where he told a Jewish business friend that Hitler had planned the complete annihilation of Europe’s Jews by the end of the year. Up to 4 million would be transported to the east to be killed, possibly by sulphuric acid, he said. The information reached Gerhart Riegner of the Jewish World Congress, who organized the British and US embassies to transmit it via telegram to his headquarters in New York. Such reports frequently encountered scepticism amongst those to whom they were addressed. The enormity of the crime seemed beyond belief. The US government advised the Congress to keep Riegner’s report confidential until it could be independently verified.
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More reliable and precise information could only come from an eyewitness. One of the most extraordinary of these was Kurt Gerstein, a disinfection expert in the Hygiene Institute of the Military SS. Gerstein was sent by the Reich Security Head Office in the summer of 1942 to deliver 100 kilos of Zyklon-B to Lublin for an undisclosed purpose. On 2 August 1942 he arrived in Belzec and was present as a trainload of Jews from Lvov came in, were forced to undress, and were driven by Ukrainian auxiliaries into the gas chambers, where they were told they would be disinfected. There they had to wait for two and a half hours, weeping and crying, while mechanics outside tried to get the diesel motor going. Once it started working, Gerstein noted punctiliously, it took thirty-two minutes to kill the people inside the chamber. A devout Protestant, Gerstein was shocked by what he witnessed. On the journey back from Warsaw to Berlin, he told it all to Göran von Otter, a Swedish diplomat, who reported the details in a dispatch to the Swedish Foreign Office after discreetly checking Gerstein’s credentials. The dispatch languished there until the end of the war, kept secret by officials who feared it would offend the Germans. Back in Berlin, Gerstein pestered the Papal Nuncio, the leaders of the Confessing Church and the Swiss Embassy with his story, all to no effect. Gerstein did not, however, as one might have expected, resign his post or ask for a transfer. He continued to deliver consignments of Zyklon-B to the camp, while redoubling his futile efforts to spread information about what was going on. Finally he wrote three separate reports on what he had seen, augmented by information gained by talking to others involved. He kept them secret, however, and it was only at the end of the war that he made them public by handing them over to the Americans. Arrested as an alleged war criminal, Gerstein hanged himself in his cell on 25 July 1945, most probably out of remorse at his failure, or guilt at not having done more.
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It was from Poland that the most determined attempts to inform the world of the extermination programme came. Members of the resistance sent information about the gassings at Treblinka to the exiled Polish government in London almost as soon as they began. On 17 September 1942 the Polish government in exile approved a public protest against the crimes the Germans were committing against the Jews, but it undertook no concrete action, encouraging neither Poles to give shelter to the Jews, nor Jews to seek refuge with Poles. Drawing too much attention to the Jews would in the exiled Polish government’s view distract world opinion from the sufferings of the Poles, undermining the government’s attempt to fight Stalin’s policy of getting the Allies to recognize the Nazi-Soviet border agreed before the partition of Poland in September 1939. Some politicians in the exiled government believed that Jewish influence stood behind not only Stalin but also Churchill and Roosevelt. It might be exerted in favour of the recognition of the Curzon Line.
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The situation only changed when, in 1942, Jan Karski, a member of the Polish underground, was commissioned by the resistance to go to the west and report on Poland’s plight. The murder of the Jews was fairly low on the list of priorities he was given. Hearing of his mission, however, two members of a Jewish underground group persuaded him to visit the Warsaw ghetto and most probably also the camp at Belzec. Karski reported what he had seen when he eventually reached London.
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His report had a dramatic effect. On 29 October 1942 the Archbishop of Canterbury chaired a large public protest meeting at the Albert Hall in London, with representatives of the Jewish and Polish communities in attendance. On 27 November 1942 the Polish government-in-exile in London finally gave official recognition to the fact that Jews from Poland and other parts of Europe were being murdered on the territory it claimed for its own. Representatives of the government informed Churchill, and on 14 December 1942 Foreign Secretary Eden delivered an official report on the genocide to the British Cabinet. Three days later, the Allied governments issued a joint declaration promising retribution to those responsible for the mass murder of Europe’s Jews.
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The Allies concluded that the best way to stop the genocide was to concentrate everything on winning the war as quickly as possible. Bombing the railway lines to Auschwitz and other camps would only have achieved a temporary respite for the Jews, and distracted attention and resources from the larger purpose of overthrowing the regime that was killing them.
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What the Allies did do, however, was to direct a massive propaganda campaign against the Nazi regime. Beginning in December 1942, British and other Allied propaganda media bombarded German citizens with broadcast and written information about the genocide, promising retribution.
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In Berlin, faced with these accusations, Nazi propagandists did not even trouble any more to issue a denial. In terms of counter-propaganda, Goebbels said,
there is no question of a complete or partial refutation of the Jewish atrocity claims but simply a German action that will concern itself with English and American acts of violence in the whole world . . . It must be so, that every party accuses every party of committing atrocities. This general clamour will in the end lead to this topic being removed from the programme.
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