Chapter 20
Extermination
After the invasion of Poland, all Polish Jews and non-Jews over the age of twelve residing in the German-occupied regions of Poland designated as the “General Government” were compelled to undertake forced labor.1 An estimated twelve million forced laborers, mainly from Eastern Europe, were employed in the armament sector in Germany during the war.2 The German demand for slave labor escalated to the point that in a campaign called the Heu-Aktion (hay operation), children were sometimes abducted for work assignments. Over two thousand German corporations reaped the benefits of forced labor during the National Socialist regime, many of which are still globally recognizable brands today.3
A large number of Jews who did not manage to escape Austria in 1938 were expatriated to occupied Poland and to other destinations in German-occupied Eastern Europe such as Minsk, Riga, and Lodz, and to ghettos in the Lublin region of Poland. Most Jews sent to Minsk and Riga were shot by detachments of the paramilitary death squads known as Einsatzgruppen shortly after arrival. Others found themselves interned in the numerous forced labor camps or, worse yet, in extermination camps. Over fifteen thousand Viennese Jews were deported to Theresienstadt in Bohemia, and thousands more ended up in work camps in Germany.4
The “Jewish Threat” or Threatening the Jews?
In response to what Hitler termed “propagandistic objections” regarding his party’s antisemitism and mistreatment of the German Jewish population, he menaced the Jews in general with mass extermination if they stirred international criticism of Germany’s efforts in claiming its justifiable domination over Europe: “I have very often been a prophet in my life and have mostly been laughed at,” he declared. “I will again be a prophet today: If international Jewry in and outside of Europe should succeed in driving the peoples once more into a World War, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and therewith the victory of the Jews, but it will mean the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe.”5
From Deportation to Extermination
The invasion of the Soviet Union by Germany in June 1941 marked a significant change in policy regarding the Jewish populations of Europe. The invasion not only aimed to forcibly remove unwanted residents from areas that Hitler deemed part of Germany’s Lebensraum in Poland, Ukraine, and Crimea but also resulted in the manifestation of mass extermination plans. Richard Heydrich was charged with either directing the Jews to the malarial swamps of Siberia or relocating them to the harsh Arctic regions of Russia. This malevolent agenda marked the transition from ethnic cleansing to systematic genocide.
Indoctrinating Einsatzgruppen and Ordinary Soldiers
The Commissar Order, passed down by Wilhelm Keitel, who was in charge of the Combined Armed Forces Supreme Command, directed the Wehrmacht to execute any Soviet political commissars captured among troops. These commissars were believed to be enforcing the ideology of “Judeo-Bolshevism” in the military and were seen as the “originators of barbaric, Asiatic methods of fighting.” Years of National Socialist indoctrination had led soldiers, particularly their officers and commanders, to view the conflict as a racial one. The extensive propaganda campaign had convinced them that they were fighting against Jewish Bolshevism and World Jewry, and that their role was to protect the very existence of the German people.6
German advances were also hindered by enemy “partisan” units that were responsible for harassing German forces, sabotaging supply lines and communication networks, and gathering intelligence. Partisan fighters would often engage in guerrilla warfare, making sudden attacks on German forces and then disappearing back into the countryside. The partisans played an important role in disrupting German operations and were instrumental in helping the Soviet army push back the German advance. One of the Commissar Order campaign slogans was “The Jew is a partisan, and the partisan is the Jew.”7 The Jews were portrayed as a significant security threat and subjected to violence by both the SS and regular army personnel. This systematic killing of Jews not only impacted the rational thought but also the irrational beliefs of German soldiers fighting at the front, who justified such murders on the basis of the misguided conviction that Jews were saboteurs and hence an enemy of the fatherland.
National Socialist ideology comingled the Soviet brute and the Jewish fiend into a shared image of evil. Unlike the Germans’ attacks on France or Great Britain, their invasion of Soviet lands was regarded as a war of survival against the threat of perceived international Bolshevism and an international Jewish conspiracy. In the soldiers’ minds, this was mankind’s opportunity and obligation to rid the world, once and for all, of the “Jewish-Bolshevik” demons. Wehrmacht soldiers were brainwashed into believing that the enemy encountered in the east was not a fellow soldier but an Untermensch (subhuman) and the source of all evil. A pamphlet distributed to the ordinary troops affirmed, “Anyone who has ever looked at the face of a red Commissar knows what the Bolsheviks are like. . . . We would insult the animals if we described these mostly Jewish men as beasts. They are the embodiment of the Satanic and insane hatred against the whole of noble humanity. The shape of these commissars reveals to us the rebellion of the Untermenschen against noble blood.”8
The indoctrination was successful as the Wehrmacht alone can be held accountable directly or indirectly for the murder of between one and one and a half million victims.9 Before an official decision was made to carry out the genocide of Europe’s Jews, mass killings of Jews in Belorussia, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Galicia during the summer of 1941 set the stage for the acceptance of the industrialized and officially sanctioned extermination of Jews.10
In addition to the military forces, four SS units were formed to implement the Commissar Order. These units consisted of around six thousand personnel who were dispatched to follow the army into Russia, along with small groups of SS and police forces, which added up to a total of approximately twelve thousand men. The volunteers for these units were mainly drawn from lower-middle-class former Free Corps or SA members who were subjected to intense ideological indoctrination by the SS with the purpose of reinforcing their already existing biases against Slavs and Jews. The primary targets of these task forces were the communist intelligentsia and Jewish leadership, but they often killed any Jews they encountered, leading to the indiscriminate killing of both men and women as well as children. As a result, the number of victims increased significantly, with one brigade alone responsible for the murder of around twenty-five thousand Jews within a month.11
By December 1941, Hitler decided to once and for all “deal with the Jewish question” and gave Himmler and his Stormtroopers the green light to liquidate the Jews. Goebbels reviewed Hitler’s orders as follows:
As far as the Jewish question is concerned, the Führer has decided to clear the table of the matter. He had prophesied to the Jews that if they once again bring about a world war, they would experience their destruction. Those were no mere phrases. World war has come, the destruction of the Jews is the necessary consequence. This question should be looked at without any sentimentality. We are not here to take pity on the Jews, but only to have sympathy for the German people. If the German people has again sacrificed in the Eastern campaign at present 160,000 dead, so the originator of this bloody conflict should have to pay with their lives for it.12
The statement in question likely pertains to the pivotal decision to implement the systematic annihilation of Jews and other minority groups during World War II, which is now recognized as the Holocaust or the Shoah. The war in Europe served as a pretext for the genocide, enabling the National Socialists to carry out their strategy of mass murder, which included the extermination of Jews, Gypsies, Poles, and other Slavic peoples as well as people with disabilities or chronic illnesses. On January 20, 1942, the director of the Reich Security Main Office, Richard Heydrich, hosted a meeting at a villa on Lake Wannsee near Berlin to ensure cooperation among various government departments in executing the Final Solution, which involved exterminating Europe’s Jews through industrialized methods like gassing, forced labor, and starvation. During this meeting, state officials were made aware of the systematic plan for carrying out the genocide.13
The Wannsee Conference, a seminal moment in the history of the Holocaust, highlights the distinction between the Jewish Holocaust and other instances of persecution, ethnic cleansing, or genocide throughout history. History has showcased multiple examples of persecution, exploitation, expropriation, internment, pogroms, or extermination, which usually resulted from an outburst of hatred against a minority and an escalation of group violence such as the genocide of the Armenians in the late 1800s and early twentieth century or that of the Herero and Namaqua people in South West Africa in 1904–1908.14
The Holocaust exposed the National Socialist regime’s systematic, industrialized, and highly efficient plan for carrying out the premeditated murder of millions of people. Unlike other cases of ethnic cleansing, the NS genocide was based on the creation of a fictitious “antirace” of “infectious” Jews through propaganda. The German population was encouraged to yearn for the global eradication of Jews, and Hitler aimed to hunt down every single Jew, regardless of their location. The extent of hatred generated by Hitler’s propaganda was unparalleled and constituted a type of Rassenwahn, or racial madness, that transformed persecution into extermination.
The Extermination Camps
In 1942 and 1943, the weapons industry and war machine were in such high need of supplies that forced labor camps increased exponentially throughout large parts of Europe. Despite the high death quota at these camps and factories, the aim was not to kill the inmates but to exploit their work potential to a maximum.15 The inmates who died from exhaustion, malnutrition, or disease were viewed simply as one of the risks, or costs, of the detention policy.
However, somewhat earlier—between 1941 and 1942—within the framework of the diabolical “Final Solution” plan, as many Jews as possible who were living in Eastern Europe were to be eliminated within a short time frame. Adolf Eichmann was responsible for the deportation of Jews from Germany and from territories annexed or occupied by Germany to ghettos, concentration camps, and extermination camps.16 Apart from the Einsatztruppen’s shooting operations aimed at annihilating entire Jewish communities, the SS and police introduced mobile gas vans. These paneled trucks had exhaust pipes reconfigured to pump poisonous carbon monoxide gas into sealed spaces, killing those locked within. Up until the first half of 1944, the German terror apparatus, aided by the armed forces, decimated between one and one and a half million Jews in shooting operations or in gas vans in the occupied Soviet Union.17
In October 1941, Himmler had ordered the regional SS and Police Chief General Odilo Globocnik to elaborate a plan to methodically kill all Jews residing in the German-controlled Polish territories. In 1942, this project was code-named Operation Reinhard, a reference to Reinhard Heydrich, who had been authorized to direct the implementation of the Final Solution but who was assassinated by Czech agents in May 1942 in Prague. Globocnik’s goals were to “resettle” (i.e., to kill) the Polish Jews, to exploit the skilled or manual labor of some Polish Jews before killing them, to secure the personal property of the Jews (clothing, currency, jewelry, and other possessions), and to identify and secure alleged hidden and immovable assets such as factories, apartments, and land.18
To carry out the genocide of up to two million Jews, Globocnik ordered the creation of three killing centers in German-occupied Poland: Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka II. He and his staff implemented the mass murder of up to 1,700,000 Jews in these Operation Reinhard killing centers and in shooting operations throughout the Polish General Government territory. The majority of victims were Polish Jews, although German, Austrian, Czech, Dutch, French, Yugoslav, and Greek Jews were also murdered at the Reinhard killing centers.19
The first official extermination camp, called Kulmhof in German or Chełmno in Polish, was located about fifty kilometers (31 mi) north of Lodz, next to the village of Chelmno nad Nere. The camp was especially created to carry out mass murder and, parallel to Operation Reinhard, was in use from December 1941 to March 1943, and again in June and July 1944.20 At the very least, 152,000 people were murdered at Kulmhof, making it the fifth deadliest extermination camp after Sobibor, Belzec, Treblinka, and Auschwitz.21
Majdanek Camp, also known as Maidanek or Lublin-Majdanek, was established near the city of Lublin in Poland. It served a dual purpose as a forced labor camp and an extermination camp, receiving prisoners from nearly thirty different countries. The majority of the inmates were Polish citizens, including Jews, with additional prisoners hailing from the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia. Alongside Poles and Jews, Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians made up the largest groups of inmates, with a small percentage of prisoners representing other nationalities, such as French and Germans. Due to the appalling living conditions, executions, and murders in gas chambers, of an estimated 150,000 prisoners who were sent to Majdanek, eighty thousand people were killed, according to the most recent research. The largest group of victims was Jews, with around sixty thousand killed, followed by Poles, Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Russians. To conceal evidence of these crimes, the corpses of those who died or were killed were burned in pyres or in the crematorium.22
Auschwitz, located in the part of occupied Poland directly annexed by the Third Reich, was the largest of the German concentration and extermination camps. It began operating in May 1940 as a camp for Polish prisoners and eventually included three camp zones: the main camp (Auschwitz I), Birkenau Camp (Auschwitz II), and Monowitz Camp, as well as external camps (Auschwitz III). Experimentation in mass executions at Auschwitz began in 1941, and from March 1942, Jews from all parts of Europe were herded there for “selection”: either to be sent straight into the gas chambers or into forced labor. Even among those who were “lucky” enough to work—rather than be gassed with Zyklon B—very few survived. Over a million people perished in the nightmare that was Auschwitz.23
Did the World Know What Was Going On?
During the summer of 1941, British intelligence intercepted classified German radio transmissions that reported organized mass murders in Lithuania, Latvia, and later Ukraine. Soviet Russia also supplied reports of the horrific crimes being committed on the front. On August 14, 1941, Winston Churchill informed the public as follows:
As [Hitler’s] armies advance, whole districts are being exterminated. Scores of thousands, literally scores of thousands of executions in cold blood, are being perpetrated by the German police troops upon the Russian patriots who defend their native soil. . . . And this is but the beginning. Famine and pestilence have yet to follow in the bloody ruts of Hitler’s tanks. We are in the presence of a crime without a name.
In the spring of 1942, additional evidence of heinous crimes against humanity emerged when American journalists, who had been stranded in Germany after the United States entered the war, were exchanged for Axis nationals trapped in the United States. These journalists recounted the mass killing of approximately four hundred thousand Jews in the Baltic states. As Poland fell to Germany, its leaders established a temporary government in exile in Britain. In June 1942, they received a confidential report from occupied Poland confirming that the Germans were carrying out executions of Jews across the country. This report was widely covered by newspapers around the world, with headlines proclaiming the Jewish death toll to be in the millions.24
Citing atrocity reports dating back to World War I that were later proven to be fabricated, American and other international journalists were very cautious regarding accusations of genocide. Their reports did not receive front-page attention, and the writers were careful not to accentuate claims of atrocities. Nonetheless, on December 13, 1942, Edward R. Murrow of CBS Radio openly reported, “Millions of human beings, most of them Jews, are being gathered up with ruthless efficiency and murdered. The phrase ‘concentration camps’ is obsolete, as out of date as economic sanctions or non-recognition. It is now possible only to speak of extermination camps.” Four days later, the governments of the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union released a joint statement that “the German authorities, not content with denying to persons of the Jewish race in all the territories over which their barbarous rule has been extended the most elementary human rights, are now carrying into effect Hitler’s oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people of Europe.”25
The Allies were of the opinion that the best way to help the Jews’ plight was to win the war, and they warned the German leaders that they would be held responsible for their crimes. Tragically, the war was not won for another two and a half years, during which time the mass murder relentlessly continued.
Death Marches
As Germany’s military defeat steadily neared, the Allied armies closed in on the known NS forced labor camps and extermination camps: the Soviets approached from the east, while the British, French, and Americans advanced from the west. The SS frantically attempted to move the prisoners out of the camps and away from the respective fronts in order to continue to employ them as slave labor. Many of these relocations began or ended with long stretches covered on foot in the winter of 1944–1945, which came to be known as “death marches.” Camp inmates were forced to walk great distances in freezing cold, with little or no food, water, or rest. Those who fell behind were shot. Nine days before the Soviets arrived at Auschwitz, the guards marched some sixty thousand prisoners out of the camp toward various destinations such as Gliwice or Wodzislaw Slaski, a town fifty-five kilometers (35 mi) away, where the inmates were crammed into freight trains headed for other camps. Roughly one-quarter of the prisoners died before ever reaching their destination.
Some marches were implemented simply as a means of killing large groups of prisoners before the arrival of the Allied troops. During one such march, seven thousand Jewish prisoners, six thousand of them women, were moved from camps in the Danzig region, bordered on the north by the Baltic Sea. On the ten-day march, seven hundred were killed, and those still alive when the prisoners reached the shores of the sea were driven into the water and executed.
Nearly fifty thousand prisoners, mostly Jews, were evacuated from the Stutthof camp system in northern Poland. Roughly five thousand prisoners from Stutthof subcamps were marched up to the Baltic Sea coast, where they were forced into the water and gunned down. Though others were taken away on more circuitous routes, over twenty-five thousand of the prisoners from Stutthof—one out of two—perished during the evacuation.
As American forces approached, the SS initiated a mass evacuation of prisoners from the Buchenwald concentration camp and its external camps. Close to thirty thousand prisoners were forced to flee the advancing U.S. troops on death marches, during which about one-third died.26
The SS also evacuated countless other camps in much the same manner—on death marches that sometimes lasted weeks. Sadly, an estimated 250,000 people died due to the appalling conditions they faced either through marching on foot or being overcrowded into freight cars just before their liberation by Allied forces.27
Liberating the Camps
During the spring of 1944, the SS transported a great number of the eastern territories’ prisoners to concentration camps farther west. Soviet troops arrived at Majdanek during the night of July 22–23 and found it to have remained intact: this was, in fact, the first major concentration camp to be liberated. Soviet officials requested that journalists should inspect the camp to witness firsthand the atrocities that had taken place there. In the summer of 1944, the Soviets seized the Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka mass-murder compounds. The Germans had already disassembled these camps in 1943, once most of Poland’s Jews had been liquidated.28
As Allied troops advanced across Europe from both the east and the west, they came across hundreds of thousands of concentration camp captives. Large numbers of these prisoners had been lucky enough to survive forced marches from camps in occupied Poland into Germany. Unfortunately, most all the prisoners were suffering from starvation or disease.29
When the Soviets liberated Auschwitz, the largest killing compound and concentration camp, in January 1945, the camp leaders had forced most of the prisoners to march. Left behind were some seven thousand emaciated prisoners still alive, which provided more than sufficient evidence of mass murder in Auschwitz. Though the SS had demolished most of the camp warehouses, the Soviet soldiers still found plenty of personal items that had belonged to the victims: hundreds of thousands of men’s suits, more than eight hundred thousand women’s outfits, thousands of suitcases, and more than fourteen thousand pounds of human hair. In the months to come, the Soviet forces liberated more camps in the Baltic region and in Poland as well as the Stutthof, Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbrück concentration camps in Germany.30
U.S. troops liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany, on April 11, 1945, with some twenty thousand prisoners. They also liberated the large forced labor camps of Dora-Mittelbau, Flossenbürg, Dachau, and Mauthausen, as well as their corresponding subcamps.31
British armed forces liberated camps in northern Germany, including Neuengamme and Bergen-Belsen. In the latter camp, about sixty thousand prisoners, the majority of whom were in critical condition because of a typhus epidemic, were still alive. Regrettably, over ten thousand of them died from the effects of malnutrition or disease within a few weeks of liberation.32
The SS’s attempts to move camp inmates from the east to camps in Germany during the war’s final months led to horrendous overcrowding, exacerbating the already dire conditions in these facilities. Consequently, Allied liberators encountered unimaginable conditions in Germany’s concentration camps, where countless bodies lay in decaying heaps. Only with the discovery of these camps could the world comprehend the full reality of the barbaric cruelty and unspeakable massacres that had occurred. The handful of prisoners who had survived the abuse, forced labor, and malnutrition were mere living skeletons, many too weak to even move. Rampant disease posed an ever-present danger, necessitating the burning down of many of the camps to curb the spread of epidemics. Survivors of the camps, although grateful for having escaped death, had to confront a long and arduous path to recovery, both physically and mentally.33
On October 7, 1943, Joseph Goebbels wrote about the Final Solution in his diary:
Regarding the Jewish question, he [Himmler] gives us a blunt and straightforward image. He is convinced that we can solve the Jewish issue in the whole of Europe by the end of this year. He advocates the most radical and toughest solution, which is to wipe out the Jews with kith and kin. Of course this is a brutal, but also an effective solution. We are the ones who must assume the responsibility that this issue is dealt with once and for all in our time. Future generations will surely no longer dare to deal with this problem with the courage and the obsession with which we can still do it today.34
In the operations carried out to implement the final Solution, the Third Reich’s terror apparatus murdered approximately six million Jews—two-thirds of the Jews living in Europe in 1939.35 In addition to the Holocaust, Hitler and his regime launched a war that proved to be the deadliest military conflict in history. It is estimated that a total of seventy to eighty-five million people perished, which was at that time about 3 percent of the world population, estimated at 2.3 billion.36
Concentration Camp Memorial Sites
Numerous former concentration camp memorial sites, as well as some former euthanasia centers, are open to the public in Germany and neighboring countries. Each of these victim sites documents that particular establishment’s history and horrors and is often complemented by an interpretive center. More information about camp memorial sites in Germany is provided in this book’s last chapter.
Notes
1. Diemut Majer, “Non-Germans” under the Third Reich: The Nazi Judicial and Administrative System in Germany and Occupied Eastern Europe with Special Regard to Occupied Poland, 1939–1945 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
2. Michael Marek, “Final Compensation Pending for Former Nazi Forced Labourers,” Deutsche Welle, October 17, 2005.
3. American Jewish Committee, “Comprehensive List of German Companies That Used Slave or Forced Labour during World War II Released,” December 7, 1999.
4. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Austria.”
5. Speech to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, in Max Domanus, ed., Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen 1932–1945 (Munich: Süddeutscher Verlag, 1963), 2:1058.
6. Evans, Third Reich at War, 175–76.
7. Hannes Heer, “Killing Fields: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belorussia, 1941–1942,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 11, no. 1 (1997): 79–101.
8. Omer Bartov, Murder in Our Midst (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 83.
9. Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 83–92.
10. Naimark, Fires of Hatred, 77.
11. Dahm, Die Tödliche Utopie, 382.
12. Elke Fröhlich, ed., Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, pt. 2, vol. 2 (Munich: Sauer, 1995), 498–99.
13. Naimark, Fires of Hatred, 79–80.
14. Ibid., 226.
15. Pohl et al., “Rassenpolitik, Judenverfolgung, Völkermord,” 453.
16. Ibid., 445.
17. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Gassing Operations,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/gassing-operations.
18. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Operation Reinhard,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/operation-reinhard-einsatz-reinhard.
19. Ibid.
20. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Chelmno,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/chelmno.
21. “Jewish Survivors of Chelmno Camp Testify at Trial of Guards,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency Archive, January 22, 1963, https://www.jta.org/archive/jewish-survivors-of-chelmno-camp-testify-at-trial-of-guards.
22. Majdanek Camp website, https://www.majdanek.eu/en.
23. Pohl et al., “Rassenpolitik, Judenverfolgung, Völkermord,” 449.
24. Facing History & Ourselves, “Holocaust and Human Behavior,” https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/holocaust-human-behavior.
25. Ibid.
26. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Death Marches,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/death-marches.
27. Wiener Holocaust Museum, “Death Marches,” The Holocaust Explained, https://www.theholocaustexplained.org/death-marches/.
28. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Liberation of Nazi Camps,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/liberation-of-nazi-camps.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. Pohl et al., “Rassenpolitik, Judenverfolgung, Völkermord,” 450.
35. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “‘Final Solution’: In Depth,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/final-solution-in-depth.
36. U.S. Census Bureau, “Historical Estimates of World Population,” https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/international-programs/historical-est-worldpop.html.