The story of Rudi Coburg is inspired by two men who did their best to alert the world to the horrors of the death camps as early as 1942. They are an SS officer named Kurt Gerstein and a Polish resistance fighter called Jan Karski.
Gerstein, the thirty-seven-year-old son of a judge from Münster, was both a Christian and a Nazi, having joined the party in 1933. But his relationship with the party was difficult. He was once beaten up by a group of Nazis for protesting against their anti-religious policies and was imprisoned twice – once in a concentration camp – for possessing anti-Nazi literature.
Despite this, he had powerful connections and managed to join the Waffen SS in 1941, later testifying that he had wanted to witness their actions from the inside.
In August 1942, when part of the hygiene section of the SS’s medical department, he visited several concentration camps. At Belzec in Poland he witnessed the slaughter of a trainload of Jews by carbon monoxide. His recollection of the event is harrowing:
‘Forty-five carriages arrived from Lemberg (now Lviv in Ukraine) carrying more than 6,000 people. Two hundred Ukrainians opened the doors and drove the Jews out with whips. A loudspeaker gave instructions: “Strip, even artificial limbs and glasses. Hand all money and jewellery in at the Valuables Window. Women and girls are to have their hair cut in the barber’s hut.”
Then the march began. Barbed wire on both sides, followed by two dozen Ukrainians with rifles. Christian Wirth (the camp commandant) and I found ourselves in front of the death chambers. Stark naked men, women, children and cripples passed by. A tall SS man in the corner called to the unfortunates in a loud voice: “Nothing is going to hurt you. Just breathe deep and it will strengthen your lungs. It’s a way to prevent contagious diseases. It’s a good disinfectant.” They asked him what was going to happen and he answered: “The men will have to work, build houses and streets. The women won’t have to do that. They will be busy with the housework and the kitchen.”
The majority knew what was going to really happen; the smell betrayed it. They climbed a little wooden stair and entered the death chamber, most of them silently, pushed by those behind them. A woman of forty with eyes like fire cursed the murderers. She disappeared into the chamber after being struck by Wirth’s whip. Many prayed. SS men pushed the men into the chamber. “Fill it up,” Wirth ordered. Seven to eight hundred people in ninety-three square metres. The door closed. Heckenholt, the driver of the diesel whose exhaust was to kill these poor unfortunates, tried to start the motor. It wouldn’t start. Wirth came up and whipped the Ukrainian who helped Heckenholt. My watch clocked it all. Fifty minutes, seventy minutes and the diesel would not start. You could hear them weeping in the chamber. The diesel engine started after two hours and forty-nine minutes. Twenty-five minutes passed. You could see through the window that many were already dead. All were dead after thirty-two minutes.
Jewish workers on the other side opened the wooden doors. They had been promised their lives for doing this horrible work. The people in the chamber were standing like columns of stone with no room to fall. Even in death you could tell the families, all holding hands. The bodies were tossed out. Two dozen workers were busy checking mouths which they opened with iron hooks. Dentists knocked out gold teeth with hammers. Captain Wirth was in the middle of them, in his element, showing me a big box filled with teeth. “See the weight in gold. Just from yesterday and the day before. You can’t imagine what we find every day – dollars, diamonds, gold.” Then the bodies were tossed into a big pit.’
The next day, Gerstein travelled on to Treblinka where he saw more gassings. Then on 22 August, he went by train back to Berlin. In the same compartment was a Swedish diplomat named Baron Göran von Otter. Gerstein, deeply distressed and weeping, told von Otter what he had witnessed at Belzec and Treblinka and begged him to alert the Allies so that they might act to stop the killings.
Von Otter had no doubt about the truth of what he had been told and later testified that he passed the story on to the Swedish government. But that was as far as it went. The Allies were not informed. It has since been suggested that this was because the Swedish government did not want to harm trade relations with Germany.
Gerstein spent the rest of the war trying to tell members of the Church in Germany and the Vatican what he had seen, but with little effect. In 1945, he gave himself up to the French but was treated as a Nazi war criminal. He committed suicide in his cell using a strip of blanket to hang himself.
Jan Karski’s story is very different. He was a man of immense courage who survived torture by the Gestapo and the deaths of many friends and fellow Polish resistance fighters.
Born in Lodz, he was the youngest son of eight and was extremely gifted, with ambitions to become a diplomat. While at university, he enlisted in the reserve cadets of the Polish Horse Artillery and won the Sword of Honour. He began working in the foreign office but was called up to defend Poland when the Germans invaded in 1939. After the occupation, he was taken prisoner by the Soviet army and narrowly escaped the Katyn Forest massacre of 30,000 Polish officers by Stalin’s NKVD.
Returning home by a circuitous route, he became a vital courier for the Polish underground.
Captured by the Gestapo, his arms and legs were broken by iron bars. Again he survived and escaped and resumed his work for the resistance.
Aged twenty-eight, in the summer of 1942, he accepted an offer from Jewish leaders to witness the terrible conditions in the Warsaw ghetto at a time when the Nazis were taking daily transports of thousands of people from there to the death camps. The Jewish leaders made it clear they were certain that those being ‘relocated to the East’ were all, in fact, being murdered.
With ridiculous courage, Karski entered Belzec (or perhaps a sub-camp; this is uncertain) disguised as a guard and witnessed the horrors for himself. He then made an incredible journey across Nazi-occupied Europe, via Spain and Gibraltar to London, arriving in November 1942.
Among others, he met Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, several important MPs and exiled Polish leaders. Eden was disgusted by the Nazi outrages, but lack of photographic or documentary evidence weakened Karski’s case. In December, he contributed to a testament on behalf of the Polish government in exile, headed: THE MASS EXTERMINATION OF THE JEWS IN GERMAN OCCUPIED POLAND. This was sent to the twenty-six signatories of the United Nations. Later in the month, the BBC broadcast a speech by Edward Raczynski, Polish foreign minister in exile, in which he referred to the Nazis’ ‘final solution’, based on Karski’s testimony.
The BBC broadcast Karski’s story again in May 1943, this time read on his behalf by the author Arthur Koestler (because Karski’s accent was too strong for a British audience). Part of it said:
‘From the ghettos the Jews are “taken East” as the official term goes, that is, to the extermination camps of Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibor. In these camps they are killed in batches of 1,000 to 6,000 by various methods, including gas. In the course of my investigation I succeeded in witnessing a mass-execution in the camp of Belzec. With the help of our underground organisation, I gained access to that camp in the disguise of a Latvian special policeman. I was in fact one of the executioners but I believe that my course of action was justified.’
Sadly, these broadcasts made little impact in the wider world.
From London, Karski went to America where he met President Roosevelt. Like Anthony Eden, the President was appalled, but for him too the lack of photographs was crucial. Also, there were powerful voices in America who did not believe the tales of atrocity, thinking them merely Polish propaganda to gain support in the West.
When Karski asked the President what message he could send back to Poland, Roosevelt said: ‘Tell them that we are going to win the war and tell them that they have a friend in the White House.’ It wasn’t much. Karski then went to the United Nations where he placed his testimony on record before the War Crimes Commission.
Unlike Gerstein, Karski survived and thrived, staying in America and becoming a professor at Georgetown University. He gives extensive testimony in the nine-hour holocaust documentary film Shoah. Karski died aged eighty-six in 2000.