The war and the meeting at Wannsee

The end of 1941 saw Germany facing defeat on the Eastern Front. The Soviet offensive launched on 5–6 December fell on units that were under-strength, overstretched, ill-supplied, demoralized by sub-zero temperatures for which they were not equipped, and stranded in open country. While partisans harassed the Germans’ extended lines of communication, security troops were being rushed to the front to stem Russian breakthroughs. Despairing of his generals, Hitler sacked the commander-in-chief, plus a clutch of senior generals, and took command into his own hands. He issued an order that each division, regiment and soldier had to stand and fight where they stood: there would be no repetition of 1815 or 1918. The ‘Haltbefehl’, or halt order, was actually successful: the Red Army exhausted itself in wave after wave of attacks on desperately defended German positions. The Wehrmacht was able to patch up the front line and the immediate crisis was averted. But Hitler and his courtiers knew that at best they had been given a brief second chance.¹

By January 1942, the eastern armies of the Reich had lost 830,000 men or 25 per cent of their strength since the start of Operation Barbarossa. The loss of equipment was equally severe. Yet Hitler believed he had no alternative but to fight on and gamble everything, again, on a decisive victory. The easygoing confidence of summer 1941 gave way to a rather more businesslike approach to waging war. In mid-January, Göring demanded the reorganization of industry onto a war footing. Fritz Todt, the minister for armaments and munitions, set in train reforms to rationalize armaments production and convert civilian production lines to military ends. When Todt was killed in a plane crash, he was succeeded by Albert Speer, who was his equal in energy and clear-sightedness. On 21 March, Hitler appointed another hard-driving Nazi, Fritz Sauckel, as plenipotentiary for labour mobilization. Sauckel found ways to squeeze more out of the German workforce, boosting the number of women in the factories, but devoted his efforts mainly to recruiting and then dragooning foreign labourers to work in the Reich. Bringing millions of foreigners into Germany raised the question of how they would be fed which, in turn, directed Backe’s attention to the food supply and the revision of ration allowances. Each measure had an impact on Judenpolitik; cumulatively, the result was devastating.²

The economic ramifications of military failure were registered in Hitler’s increasingly personal direction of the war. It was clear that in order to continue, the Reich needed to secure supplies of food, raw materials and, most critically, mineral oil. This now became Hitler’s overriding goal. In late March, the high command presented him with operational plans for an offensive aimed at seizing the oil fields of the Caucasus. Success would throttle the Soviet economy and enable Germany to gird itself for the inevitable arrival of the Americans.³

Jewish policy at the turn of the year was framed against this tense and fluid background. On 29 November 1941, Heydrich had invited a number of senior civil servants, representatives of Nazi Party agencies, and leading lights of the RSHA to a meeting to discuss implementation of the mandate Göring gave him in July to deliver a ‘comprehensive solution of the Jewish Question’. The participants were invited ‘in the interest of achieving a common view among the central agencies involved in the relevant tasks’. The request to attend referred explicitly to the circumstances created by the transportation of Jews from the Reich and the Protectorate since mid-October.⁴

The convocation was intended to take place on 9 December, but the declaration of war on the USA compelled Heydrich to postpone it to 20 January. The venue was also shifted, to 56–58 Am Grossen Wansee, a handsome lakeside villa on the south-western outskirts of Berlin. As well as the change of date and location, the guest list changed slightly but significantly. Apart from the party men and the RSHA personnel, the original invitees included state secretaries or their equivalent from the ministry for the occupied eastern territories, the Interior Ministry, the Office of the Four Year Plan, the Ministry of Justice, the Foreign Office and the Reich Chancellery. The revised guest list included Hans Frank and HSSPF Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger from the Government General (although in the event both sent their deputies). This was a noteworthy alteration. In December Heydrich seemed to be concerned mainly with the deportation of Jews from the Reich and the Protectorate to the Reichskommissariat Ostland, which was to be represented at the meeting by Herbert Lange. By 9 January, when the revised invitations were sent out, the inclusion of men responsible for the General Government suggests either an oversight or a broadening of his purposes.⁵

There was, indeed, an ambiguity of purpose about the meeting at Wannsee. Heydrich started by reiterating his appointment by Reich Marshal Göring as plenipotentiary for ‘the Preparation of the Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe’. The meeting was convened, he said, ‘to obtain clarity on questions of principle’ and to allow for ‘prior joint consultation’ with the aim of achieving harmony between the relevant central agencies. Responsibility for handling the ‘final solution’ would lie essentially with Himmler and himself, ‘without regard to geographic boundaries’. This was an astonishing assertion of jurisdiction and gave the RSHA a bridgehead in every single country with a Jewish population. However, Heydrich then reverted to more prosaic matters. Drawing on a statistical summary drafted by Eichmann, he gave a ‘review of the struggle conducted up to now against this foe’. That is to say, he gave an overview of the development of Judenpolitik in the Third Reich from social and economic exclusion to forcing Jews out of German living space. It was as if he went back to reading from a script that had been composed only about Jews in the Reich. As he explained, accelerated emigration had been the ‘only possible provisional solution’ and it was taken in hand by the Sipo-SD through the central emigration office for the Reich. Despite various difficulties, over 530,000 Jews had departed legally from Germany, Austria and the Protectorate. But with the coming of war forced emigration had run its course. It was to be replaced by ‘evacuation of the Jews to the East, as a further possible solution, with the appropriate prior authorization by the Führer’.⁶

Heydrich described the forced emigration from the Reich as ‘a provisional solution’ that was ‘supplying practical experience’ in view of the coming ‘final solution’. This was at best an ex post facto rationalization for the removal of the Reich Jews. The deportations had never before been conceived in such terms and were, on the contrary, depicted at the time (September–October 1941) as an end in themselves. Now they were being retrospectively transformed into a rehearsal for something far bigger.⁷

This ‘final solution’ would apply to eleven million Jews in countries that fell into two categories. First there were Germany, the Axis and client states, plus territories they occupied. Second there were England, the as yet unconquered portions of the USSR, and neutral or non-belligerent states, including Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Spain, Portugal and Ireland. Heydrich explained that the population figures for each country did not always accord with the preferred racial definition and pointed out that ‘the handling of this problem in individual countries will encounter certain difficulties’. He named Hungary and Romania specifically as troublemakers. After a peculiar digression concerning the sociological make-up of Soviet Jewry he proceeded to enlarge on the ‘final solution’. Jews would be ‘utilized for work in the east’, gathered into large labour columns segregated by gender, and deployed for road construction. They would move ever further east as the roads extended. In the process, all but the fittest would expire ‘through natural reduction’ and the remnant would be subject to ‘special treatment’. In the concentration camps, Sonderbehandlung or ‘special treatment’ was already a euphemism for execution. He then spelled out why: history showed that the survivors of the road-building programme could become the germ cell of a ‘new Jewish revival’. So, although the evacuation was not intended to deliver Jews to their deaths immediately it would ultimately eventuate in the destruction of the Jewish people.⁸

The plan was for Europe to be ‘combed through from West to East’, but starting with the Reich and the Protectorate, on account of ‘the housing problem and other socio-political needs’. This awkward conjunction seems to indicate an earlier plan ‘A’ that had been just about the Reich merged into a later plan ‘B’ of far wider scope. Regardless, Heydrich hurried on to the detail: the Jews would be sent in groups first to ‘transit ghettos’ and then further eastwards. To ensure the smooth running of this procedure, previously bedevilled by pleas for exemptions, he proposed to strip out the elderly Jews (those over sixty-five) and those with severe war wounds and medals from the Great War. They would be ‘admitted to the Jewish old-age ghetto’ in Theresienstadt. Yet none of this could happen until the military situation was stabilized. Nor could it begin until appropriate arrangements were made in the countries occupied by or under the influence of Germany. Heydrich then jumped from essentially parochial issues to the European dimension, skipping any of the troublesome aspects that he anticipated in the Reich. This blasé approach would come back to haunt the plan.

Instead, he breezily declared that ‘With regard to the handling of the final solution in European areas occupied by us and under our influence, it was proposed that the officials dealing with this subject in the Foreign Ministry should confer with the appropriate experts in the Security Police and the SD.’ Heydrich did not foresee problems in Slovakia or Croatia, where the first steps had been taken. The Romanians had appointed a plenipotentiary for Jewish affairs, but it would be necessary to ‘impose an adviser for Jewish questions on the Hungarians’. Nor could he see any difficulties rounding up Jews in either the occupied or the unoccupied zones of France. At this point Martin Luther interjected a warning that the evacuations might prove ticklish in the Scandinavian countries. By contrast, south-east and western Europe posed no challenge. Luther’s reminder that the Foreign Office had a stake in the matter prompted a similar, lame intervention by Otto Hoffman of the Head Office for Race and Resettlement.

When Heydrich resumed, it was to deliver a long and complex categorization of Mischlinge and their fate, along with Jews in mixed marriages and Mischlinge in mixed marriages plus their children. This was, again, mainly pertinent to Germany rather than a European-wide ‘final solution’. Half-Jews married to Germans who had German children or were particularly valuable to the Reich would be exempted from evacuation, but would have to submit to sterilization. If they refused, they would be evacuated. The reason for the inordinate attention he applied to this as against his airy treatment of almost everything else is that it was a highly sensitive and contentious issue in Germany. It touched on many thousands of families with impeccable racial credentials who had a relative married to a Jew or a Mischling. Wilhelm Stuckart of the Interior Ministry predicted that offering them a choice would lead to ‘endless administrative work’ and proposed instead compulsory sterilization of Mischlinge. The other potential flashpoint concerned the fate of Jews employed in the armaments industry. Erich Neumann, from the office of the Four Year Plan, objected that they should be retained until replacements could be found. His reservation reflected Göring’s recent prioritization of war production and Heydrich agreed with alacrity.⁹

Towards the end of the discussion, Joseph Bühler, representing Hans Frank, piped up. He wanted it put on record that the Government General ‘would welcome it’ if the ‘final solution’ began there. They had no problem with transportation and the Jews played no significant role in the labour force; but they did present a menace to public health. Furthermore, they destabilized the economy through their ‘continuous black market dealings’. Notwithstanding his zeal, following a discussion of ‘forms which the final solution might take’ (that is to say methods of mass murder), Bühler and also Alfred Meyer, from the ministry for the occupied eastern territories, advocated ‘certain preparatory work’ so as to avoid causing alarm to the local populations.¹⁰

The meeting, which had convened around noon, broke up at about two o’clock in the afternoon. There had been a break in the middle, during which snacks and alcohol had been served. Afterwards, Eichmann retired to a quiet room with his line-manager Heinrich Müller, head of the Gestapo, and Heydrich. They had a smoke and a drink by the fireplace, which Eichmann later recalled was unusual for the normally abstemious Heydrich. It signified that the chief of the Sipo-SD was well pleased with the day’s business. And yet, as with so many of Heydrich’s pet projects, this one was deeply flawed and soon disintegrated. Indeed, Heydrich never lived to see the ‘final solution’ get into first gear. Over subsequent weeks Eichmann engaged in numerous meetings concerning the definition of Mischlinge and the question of their fate; neither was ever resolved. There was constant tension and argument over the retention of Jews for labour, with the Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt (SS-WVHA, the SS Business and Administrative Head Office), tussling with the RSHA over the fate of Jews in the ghettos and the camps. Contrary to the scheme as laid out, the mass murder of Jews intensified first in the annexed territories, then the General Government, and after that in the occupied areas of the Soviet Union. The ‘combing out’ in the west did not get under way until the summer, and in France it did not get the sort of cooperation that Heydrich had lazily assumed. Above all, the scale of the task baulked even the fanatical agents of Eichmann’s office IVB4, which was responsible for coordinating the deportations and driving them on. They would need more resources and more time, but the war did not permit either.¹¹

There are numerous, puzzling features of the meeting in Wannsee. While mass killing using gas vans was already under way in Chelmno and an extermination camp, Vernichtungslager, with fixed-site gas chambers was under construction at Belzec in the General Government, Heydrich did not connect his plan with their operations – not even by means of cautious euphemisms. Then again, these murderous facilities could barely have handled deportees coming from all over Europe for ‘special treatment’. In actuality, none of the killing sites that took shape over the following months was suited to the purposes laid out by the man directing the ‘final solution’. Nor were many resources devoted to preparing for such a gargantuan enterprise. The mass murder facilities that were being developed were cheap, jerry-built affairs that soon proved hopelessly inadequate to the task expected of them. Once again, the centrality of the ‘Jewish question’ was not matched by resource allocation. Compared to the construction of coastal fortifications in north-west Europe, flak defences in the Reich, or practically any other aspect of the war effort, in material terms the war against the Jews was a sideshow. It was ill-planned, under-funded, and carried through haphazardly at breakneck speed. In one respect, though, it resembled the Reich war effort in 1942: the lack of manpower for the ‘final solution’ meant that the Germans would have to rely on their allies and local collaborators.¹²

Deportations from the Lodz ghetto to Chelmno death camp

On 1 January 1942, the Jewish population of the Lodz ghetto stood at 162,681, divided between approximately 67,000 men and 93,000 women. A few days into the new year, Rumkowski gave a sort of ‘state of the union’ speech in the House of Culture to an invited audience, including members of the Beirat, representatives of the workshops, and Jews from the recently arrived transports from central Europe. He acknowledged the shortage of food and fuel, blaming it in part on profiteers and the newcomers, but he took pride in having turned the ghetto into a productive centre, thereby keeping the ‘policy makers’ satisfied. They had compelled him to accept 20,000 more Jews into the ghetto, but he had consented to move out only 10,000 to make space for them. In deciding who would leave he intended to identify only those who were ‘undesirable’. ‘Friends,’ he intoned, ‘I predicted that hard times, perhaps very hard times would be coming, but I am certain that we will struggle though them if we eradicate the evil within ourselves.’ He was sure that ‘if the ghetto does its work well and in earnest the authorities will not apply any repressive measures’. So they had to drive up production and everyone had to work. ‘They respect us’, he assured his audience, ‘because we constitute a centre of productivity.’¹³

Meanwhile, the resettlement commission, comprising medical men and respected figures, drew up lists of who was to be removed. Activists in the various pre-war Jewish political parties put forward names. Rabbis were consulted and offered quickie divorces to men or women whose spouse was condemned to go. Rumkowski, however, turned the deportations into a punitive exercise and used them to reinforce his power. Those deemed criminals, shirkers, speculators, prostitutes and other ‘undesirable’ elements were arbitrarily included. The commission also picked on Jews only lately deported into the ghetto.¹⁴

The deportees were promised 10 Reichmarks and permitted to take clothing and food for the journey. These concessions made the process appear similar to the deportations into the Lodz ghetto or the removals for forced labour. Nobody had any suspicion that another fate awaited those sent out. Once the lists were issued, though, the Jews slated for departure did not meekly obey. Only about half reported at the assembly points where they were held overnight, and they were mostly the homeless with nowhere else to go or invalids with no chance of resisting. Consequently, the Order Service was dispatched to seize the rest. The ghetto chronicle stated baldly, ‘From the start of the campaign the deportees have been brought in forcibly.’ The recalcitrant were mainly taken in night raids, and as a punishment forfeited their luggage allowance. In this way, between 16 and 29 January 1942, the Jewish council and the OS assisted in the ejection of 10,103 Jews on fourteen transports, each comprising twenty freight cars carrying about fifty-five people per car.¹⁵

Shlomo Frank captured the first day of the deportations in his diary. The deportees were moved from the assembly points to Radogoszcz freight yard where they were loaded onto the waiting trains. ‘Most of them – poor, broken, naked and starved. Their deportation was extraordinarily tragic. All of them cried mournfully. Mothers embraced little children … and screamed aloud. If we will die, you at least stay alive in order to be able to get revenge on those who are banishing us.’¹⁶

The transports travelled from Radogoszcz to the small town of Kolo, north-west of Lodz, where the Jews were disembarked. Those too old or frail to walk were taken by truck a short distance to a disused mill in the hamlet of Powiercie; the rest were escorted on foot. They were held there for twenty-four hours and then trucked to Chelmno the next morning. (In May 1942, following complaints from locals about the sight of these miserable processions, a narrow-gauge railway was laid down between Powiercie and Chelmno.) Once they were in Chelmno itself they were ushered into a partly ruined building, dubbed ‘the mansion’, and held in the basement. Here they were stripped of their belongings and told to undress so that they could be showered. They were then herded up a ramp, through an aperture in the wall of the building, and into the back of the gas vans.¹⁷

Initially, the vans used bottled carbon monoxide gas. In later models the exhaust fumes from the motor were piped into the rear compartment where the victims were packed together in the dark. They were asphyxiated on the journey to a nearby patch of woodland. Here, in a clearing known as the forest camp, Polish workers had excavated three mass graves. When a van arrived, the rear compartment was opened and a team of Jewish prisoners wearing shackles pulled the corpses out of the back and dragged them to the burial pits. At the end of each day these poor souls were forced to get into the pit themselves and were shot. The entire process was watched over by a few dozen SS men under the command of Hans Bothmann. The Polish gravediggers proved so helpful that eventually they became accomplices and provided additional manpower. An SS sergeant later testified that one perk of their job was raping Jewish women from the transports. ‘It happened that sometimes a woman was selected from the Jews delivered for gassing for the work squad, which consisted of young men; probably the Poles themselves would choose her. I think that the Poles asked her if she would agree to have sexual intercourse with them. In the basement there was a room set aside for this purpose where the woman stayed one night or sometimes several days and was at the disposal of these Poles. Afterwards, she would be killed in the gas vans with the others.’¹⁸

There were few survivors of Chelmno: none of the deportees evaded their fate and only four Jews escaped from the work crew. Szlama Wiener (Shlomo Winer) was one of the first. He managed to get free around 19 January and reach the Jewish community in Grabow. From there he travelled to Piotrków and eventually made it into the Warsaw ghetto where he gave a deposition to Hersz Wasser, a member of the Oneg Shabat team. His account was later sent to London via the Polish underground.¹⁹

Wiener recalled that he was taken from his home town of Izbica Kujawska on 6 January and deposited in a cell in the basement of the mansion. At 7 a.m. the next morning he and some thirty other men were woken, given coffee and bread, and transported to the forest. They saw a van arrive and watched as the eight-man team was sent to unload it. These victims were actually Roma from the Lodz ghetto. Wiener described how ‘The corpses were thrown out of the vans like garbage onto a heap. They were dragged by the feet and the hair. Two people stood at the edge of the ditch and threw the bodies into the grave. Two others were in the ditch and placed them in layers, face down, in such a way that the head of one was placed next to the feet of another … If there was an empty space, the corpse of a child was stuffed in there. The SS man stood up above with a pine branch in his hand and directed where to place the heads, legs, children and things.’ At five in the afternoon the eight workers were ordered into the pit and shot. Wiener and the other workers, who had been performing various ancillary tasks, were then driven back to the makeshift barracks, where they wept copiously and recited prayers of mourning and penitence. The process was repeated the next day. This time, Wiener was assigned to clean excrement and other detritus from the interior of the van’s cargo compartment. On the third day, he noticed that the clothing of the victims was adorned with the yellow star and realized that the Germans were murdering Jews. Over succeeding days the procedure changed somewhat, with the Germans paying more attention to plunder. ‘After they were thrown out of the van, two German civilians approached and carried out a thorough search of the corpses, looking for valuables. They tore off necklaces, pulled rings off fingers, pulled out gold teeth. They even looked in the anuses and, with the women, genitalia.’ The days of the work-Jews now began with the Shema, or prayers of repentance, and ended with Kaddish, the prayer recited by a mourner. Rather than continue the nauseating work, several committed suicide, sometimes helping to hang each other. On 13 January, the unloading crew discovered a live baby in one of the vans; it had been concealed in a pillow case. ‘The SS men laughed. They shot the child with a machine gun and threw it into the grave.’²⁰

That day, Michal Podchlebnik, one of Wiener’s co-workers, spotted his wife, two children and parents amongst the cadavers. He did not give way to despair, though. Instead, Wiener and Podchlebnik discussed how they might escape and raise the alarm. On the 15th, Shlomo learned that his brother, mother and father were amongst the dead; he was now the sole survivor from a family of sixty. This convinced him that the Germans were killing the whole Jewish population. He escaped a few days later, squeezing through a loose window of the bus transporting the Jewish workforce between the forest and the base camp. Podchlebnik subsequently got away by a similar route.²¹

Notwithstanding these lapses in security, Chelmno was a highly efficient operation employing no more than eighty to a hundred SS guards and a handful of Polish labourers. It was also very profitable. The guards at the mansion carefully collected the clothing, jewellery, gold, silver and cash stripped from the Jews in the moments before they entered the gas van. The valuables and clothing were stored locally before being shipped in a fleet of trucks to warehouses in Lodz under the control of the German ghetto administration. There was so much clothing that in May the ghetto management claimed that they needed fuel for 900 trucks to transport it all. As the quantities piled up, Hans Biebow, the Kripo detachment in Litzmannstadt, and Göring’s Haupttreuhandstelle Ost (responsible for Aryanization in the east) started to quarrel over who got the loot. Biebow sold off some of the best items to German officials and local Volksdeutsche. The criminal police helped themselves to a fair amount. The Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt, the Nazi welfare organization, ordered 3,000 men’s suits and 1,000 items of women’s clothing from the collection. Shortly after taking delivery they complained that some of the items were soiled and bloody, a few still bearing the yellow star.²²

In February, after a three-week hiatus, the deportations resumed. Since there had been no information about the destination of the earlier transports or any word from the deportees, unease gripped the ghetto’s inhabitants. According to the chronicle, ‘This mystery is depriving the ghetto dwellers of sleep.’ Undeterred by the ‘mystery’, the out-settlement commission extended the net to those on relief. But the Germans dispensed with enticements and the 7,000 Jews removed in this wave were handled much more roughly. Oskar Rosenfeld recorded that ‘The police stormed the lodgings of the Jews marked for evacuation.’ Often all they found were ‘the corpses of children who had frozen to death’. The weather, hunger and disease were nearly as lethal as the Germans and those spared evacuation faced a daily battle to survive. In the short term, the removals made things harder. The Germans deliberately constricted the food supply to give Jews a motive for seeking their luck on the transports, while panicky food purchases by the evacuees drove up prices and aggravated the shortage of nutrition.²³

After another three-week pause, the Germans decreed that 15,000 more had to go. This edict shocked the ghetto. According to Dawid Sierakowiak the news ‘burst like thunder’. The chronicle remarked simply that ‘March will long be remembered … as the month of resettlement.’ To fill the quota the commission listed people who were in receipt of welfare payments, anyone guilty of an infraction of ghetto regulations (no matter how minor), and anyone out of work – even if they had only recently become unemployed. Dawid struggled to understand why one thousand people were being driven out each day when ‘the workshops are receiving huge orders and there is enough work for several months’. Although workers were exempted, only one other family member was protected, so many chose to go with their dependants. Rosenfeld raged that ‘When they ran short of the required number of deportees, the Jewish police randomly hunted down people in the streets and herded them to the collection camp.’ Hundreds concealed themselves in rudimentary hideouts or attempted desperate escapes from the columns on the way to Radogoszcz Station. In panic 120 Jews left for Warsaw, preferring their chances there. The chronicle referred to them as ‘rats abandoning a sinking ship’. Dozens committed suicide. Throughout the turmoil Rumkowski remained uncharacteristically silent. The chronicle remarked sardonically that ‘until now the chairman has never missed an occasion to deliver a speech’. Suddenly, on the second day of the Passover festival, the deportations were cancelled. Jews awaiting the trains were abruptly turned loose, their relief tempered by the realization that having sold all their worldly belongings they were destitute. Almost 25,000 Jews (9,267 men and 15,420 women) had been removed and over 2,200 were killed or died in the ghetto.²⁴

Starvation now gripped the remaining inhabitants as never before. Jews from central Europe traded possessions they had brought with them; natives of the ghetto bartered their rations for food on the black market. Malnutrition destroyed morality. ‘For the sake of bread, people turn into hypocrites, fanatics, boasters, miserable wretches,’ Rosenfeld wrote from his vantage point in the statistical department of the Beirat. The Germans and Viennese died like flies. Czech Jews, who either spoke Yiddish or were able to grasp Polish, adapted better. But even Czechs who once prided themselves on their civility and culture degenerated physically and mentally. ‘People had changed in three months of hunger,’ Rosenfeld lamented. ‘Almost everyone walked with a stooped back, had twitching legs. Illnesses of all sorts crept in. Even young people had pneumonia. Thousands tossed and turned in their cots in the prostrate position since their bones were hurting, and day dreamed of foodstuffs …’ People died every day in the overcrowded apartments, houses and tenements but no one cared. ‘Nobody gave a damn about the corpses. Complete indifference towards the fate of the dead or dying neighbour, whose presence did not inhibit any gaiety, laughter, trilling.’ Hunger turned the Jews against one another, ‘father against son, brother against brother, friend against friend’. Yet amidst these horrors the ghetto was still shocked by the exemplary execution of Max Hertz, who had tried to escape back to Germany. Eight hundred German and Austrian Jews were forced to assemble on the Sabbath to watch the Order Service carry out the hanging.²⁵

A third wave of deportations commenced at the start of May. It followed a visit to Lodz by Himmler and marked a fundamental shift in Judenpolitik. For the first time Jews from the Reich were included; the taboo on killing them had been lifted (although, in line with the decisions taken at Wannsee, holders of the Iron Cross and the severely war-wounded were still exempted). Himmler also insisted that from this point the only grounds for sparing a Jew would be the capacity to work. Hence, a German medical commission arrived to examine the entire non-working population over the age of ten to determine who was capable of labour and, if not, liable to removal. Himmler also informed the ghetto administration that the non-productive Jews would be replaced by work Jews transferred in from communities around the Wartheland that were in the process of liquidation.²⁶

The end of the ban on deporting German Jews meant that this time the Beirat was able to soften the blow on the ghetto by taking the majority of deportees from amongst the westerners. Many German Jews actually decided to go voluntarily. They were utterly demoralized, could not bear life in Lodz any longer, and harboured hopes that their unknown destination might offer some improvement.²⁷

Nevertheless, the announcement of the medical commission had ‘a staggeringly depressing effect’ on the residents. The chronicle drew a picture of people ‘walking around in a state of utter helplessness, seeking salvation, help and advice’. Dawid Sierakowiak described the news as a ‘thunderbolt … The ghetto has gone mad. Thousands of endangered unemployed persons are struggling for work in every possible way, mostly using connections.’ Of course, connections benefited the local Jews more than the newcomers, although Rumkowski sought to employ as many as possible through the Beirat. Thanks to the creation of new offices to handle the settlement of German Jews and the labour-intensive task of processing the clothing arriving from Chelmno, the Beirat’s workforce was swollen to 12,880, or nearly 10 per cent of the working population. Those unfortunates who underwent examination were given an ink stamp on their chest. Hundreds, fearing this stigma, went into hiding only to be rooted out by the Order Service and manhandled before the SS doctors. Rosenfeld noted caustically that the Nazi medical men expressed surprise that so many of the Jews they examined were in poor health.²⁸

Panic was heightened by information that the belongings of Jews from the communities in Kolo and Kutno were turning up in the ghetto warehouses, including backpacks that looked as if they had been prepared by deportees. Even so, the German Jews who were condemned to leave mostly accepted their fate. ‘More than five months of hunger and cold, on bare floors, does not in the least dispose them to fight for life in the ghetto’, concluded the chronicle. ‘They say that wherever they may find themselves, things will not be any worse for them …’ Local Polish Jews fell on the departing Reich Jews like ‘hyenas’. A peculiar consequence of the forced exodus was the flood of clothing and goods onto the market; such was the profusion that prices fell and Polish Jews snapped up items they could only have dreamed of obtaining beforehand. The chroniclers did not hide their indignation that ‘There have been many speculators who have made a good profit off the misfortunes of their brothers from the West. Ruthless and cruel, they have flocked around their victims like vultures on a battlefield.’ The grotesque gender imbalance in the ghetto encouraged a different form of predation: single men with a work certificate had their pick of unemployed women willing to sign a marriage certificate. By contrast, Rosenfeld admired the stoicism of the Reich Jews. On the eve of their departure the men ate well, drank, and smoked their last cigarettes. Women went to the ghetto beauty parlour, ‘getting their hair done before the deportation, eagerly embracing life’.²⁹

They were not permitted to retain that dignity. The Order Service utilized the central prison as the collection point, so the deportees spent their penultimate night in the ghetto incarcerated like convicts. Then they were transferred to a transit camp in a school building in the Marysin district, close to the Radogoszcz Station. At four in the morning they were conveyed to the station on trams. At the side of the track the German criminal police tore away their baggage, backpacks and parcels. When word of this thievery reached others scheduled for expulsion they donned as much clothing as possible and filled their pockets with necessities. The chronicle described the strange spectacle: as ‘their faces, cadaverously white or waxy yellow, swollen and despairing, sway disjointedly on top of disproportionately wide bodies that bend and droop under their own weight’. At 6.30 a.m., the Jews were embarked on the trains, seated in third-class passenger carriages. Since there was no platform, OS men had to help up the aged and infirm. Half an hour later they were gone.³⁰

Many sought to preserve a last shred of dignity by taking their own lives. The chronicle charted a ‘frenzy of suicides’ throughout the deportations. The vast majority, unable or unwilling to end their own lives, impressed the chroniclers with their ‘outward display of considerably greater self-control’ than was common amongst their east European co-religionists.³¹

The May deportations carried off just under 11,000 Jews, most of them from central Europe. Over the same period Jews flooded in from surrounding towns, a brutal shuffling of populations that bemused Jewish onlookers. ‘Must paint the zig-zag of in-and-outsettlings!’ Oskar Rosenfeld jotted in his notebook; ‘a. into the ghetto; b. Nuremberg, Cracow; c. Germans in; d. Poles out; e. Germans out; f. Neighbouring Poles in; g. some of the same out; h. Again Poles out. In the course of the confusion, thousands die.’³²

The Jews who entered the ghetto brought with them chilling stories of selections, massacres and deportations. The chronicle recounted in great detail the fate of the Pabianice community, which was liquidated between 16 and 20 May. There had been about 9,000 Jews in the ghetto that was established in February 1940. The town had a thriving textile industry and around 1,400 Jews were employed in clothing manufacture. However, following an edict from Himmler that only working Jews would be allowed to live, a reinforced German police unit surrounded the ghetto and removed the inhabitants to an athletics field where they were divided into two categories, labelled ‘A’ and ‘B’ to denote whether they were considered capable of work or not. The non-working Jews were then removed; subsequently, they were dispatched to Chelmo and murdered. The remnant, numbering about 4,000, almost exclusively fit young men and women, were transferred to Lodz, which was now assuming the characteristics of a vast labour camp.³³

These ghetto clearances were carried out with extreme violence. They were often preceded by executions to intimidate the population. While the cruelty was deliberate and instrumental, it stemmed just as much from the degeneration of men who were being employed day after day in such operations. Furthermore, the Sipo and order police were frequently assisted by non-uniformed militia composed of Volksdeutsche who lacked even a modicum of discipline. The civil administration was not only cognizant of the liquidations, its members participated in them. Hans Biebow often left his desk to take part in selections held during the deportations, hauling out those he considered prime labour for his ghetto enterprises. By mid-1942, about 97,000 Jews from Lodz, including Jews from central Europe and the inhabitants of ghettos across the Wartheland, had been murdered at Chelmno.³⁴

Deportations from the Lublin ghetto to Belzec death camp

The onslaught against the Jewish population of the General Government commenced in March 1942, although plans to reduce the number of Jews had been mooted for much longer, and construction of a mass murder installation to dispose of ‘useless’ Jews had been under way at Belzec for months. By the end of the year the Jewish population in Hans Frank’s domain was almost entirely annihilated and yet the decisions that led to this human cataclysm are obscure. Policy towards the Jews chopped and changed with bewildering frequency, while the ghastly, practical aspects of the mass killing display confusion and contradictions.³⁵

In October 1941, Himmler had charged the SS police chief in Lublin, his protégé Odilo Globocnik, with responsibility for constructing a camp in the General Government with the sole purpose of murdering Jews en masse. It was to be a special, covert operation. Globocnik called in experts from the T-4 programme, notably Christian Wirth, to advise how this could best be done and to supervise construction of the necessary installations. Belzec, a former labour camp under Globocnik’s control, was identified as a suitable site and Wirth got started. This was around early November. Considering that it was a small site with a few simple buildings, it took a surprisingly long time to complete. Compared with the speed at which the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe were capable of erecting far larger base camps, supply dumps, airfields and fortifications, this suggests either a lack of urgency or lack of resources (which may amount to the same thing). Meanwhile, Globocnik assembled a staff of over 400 and recruited thousands of auxiliaries from amongst Soviet POWs. Primarily Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Lithuanians and Latvians, they were trained at Trawniki, a labour camp on the site of a disused sugar factory. By spring 1942 Globocnik had a small army at his disposal consisting of 450 SS men, 2,000 security police, 2,550 ex-Red Army ‘volunteers’ or Hilfswillige prepared at Trawniki, 15,000 order police, and some 14,000 regular Polish and Ukrainian police, not to mention thousands of ethnic Germans enrolled in militia units. Most of these forces would have been available anyway, yet only half of the men who were being specially trained at Trawniki (a total of 5,500) were actually ready for deployment by mid-1942. More puzzling, when Globocnik’s men were let loose on the huge Jewish population in Lublin and its surrounding district, the gas chambers at Belzec soon proved inadequate and the transport system clogged up. Despite a period during which Wirth murdered local Jews to test the gas chambers, no one seems to have calibrated the machinery of destruction to the size of the population to be destroyed. This may be understandable because the categories of those to be murdered were altered several times, always enlarging the pool. This intensification related to the shifting balance of power between the SS and the civil administration and also the course of the war.³⁶

The operation began with Lublin, the heart of Globocnik’s empire and the district that Himmler hoped would become an SS settlement zone planned on racial-utopian lines. In early February, the German authorities ordered the partition of the ghetto into two sections separated by a fence (that the Jewish council erected and paid for). Non-working Jews were placed in ghetto A; those with documents certifying that they were in the service of German-run enterprises went into ghetto B. A month later the security police obliged all Jews in work to get a new stamp on their identity papers signifying that they were employed either on behalf of the Germans or by the Jewish council. A week later, the Jewish council was told that non-working Jews had to be resettled. The selection and assembly of deportees started on 16 March, but the Jewish Order Service proved so ineffectual that the Germans took over, sending in police units. The result was mayhem and bloodshed. Each day over 1,000 Jews were seized from ghetto A, marched, dragged or carried to the Maharshal synagogue, which served as a collection point, then escorted in columns to the station in the Majdan Tartarski district where they were embarked onto freight trains. Hermann Höfle, an SS major who was Globocnik’s deputy and chief of staff, personally supervised these savage evictions, stationing himself and his headquarters in a cafe located inside the ghetto. The cafe, run by a Jew called Shamai Grajer, had the convenience of a telephone and Grajer’s waitresses plied the SS men with refreshments while they went about their business. When the deportations ceased on 29 March, 18,000 Jews had been forcibly removed and over a thousand shot or beaten to death on the streets of the ghetto.³⁷

Desperate to halt the removals, the Jewish council offered a massive bribe to the SS. The Germans took the cash, jewellery, gold and 1,400kg of silver and then shot most of the councilmen. Instead of amelioration, the security police issued new identification documents to the denizens of ghetto B, sufficient for only about one in ten. The round-ups resumed on 1 April and were extended to the working Jews. This time, though, the Germans encountered more resistance and evasion. German police and auxiliaries had to search in basements and attics. Nevertheless, within a fortnight they had netted a further 12,000, who were passed on to Belzec. About 4,000 work Jews remained with Sipo permits, plus a roughly equal number of ‘illegals’, crammed into Majdan Tartarski. The security police conducted a census on 20 April and proceeded to hunt down those without proper documentation. Most were shot inside the diminished ghetto.³⁸

The deportees made the relatively short rail journey from Lublin to Belzec, a distance of eighty miles, in a few hours. The camp that awaited them was compact, under 300 metres long on each of its four sides. It was enclosed by a barbed-wire fence, with guard towers at three corners and one overlooking the centre. The northern perimeter was contiguous with an anti-tank ditch, a relic of the camp’s original function as one of a chain supplying labour to build fortifications on the old Russo-German demarcation line. A spur line extended from the Lublin–Lwow railway through a gateway into the camp. Trains were able to unload at a platform inside the reception area, but only twenty freight cars at a time. Since the average transport consisted of forty to sixty wagons this meant that the train had to be divided into sections, with the locomotive shunting back and forth two or three times. It also meant that Jews packed inside the dark, airless wagons could wait for up to six hours in baking heat or freezing cold. However, it was only a few metres from the platform to the wooden barracks, where men and woman were undressed and the women’s hair shaved off so that it could be recycled for industrial purposes. An exit from these rooms opened onto a narrow barbed-wire corridor, known as ‘the tube’ by the camp staff, that led directly to the building housing the gas chambers. This structure was crudely assembled, with just a concrete floor and a double wooden wall filled with sand beneath a gabled roof. Initially, there were three gas chambers, each 4 by 8 metres and 2 metres high. The chambers had rubber-sealed airtight doors that were especially strong, to resist pressure from inside, and which could also be accessed from the outside to remove the dead. A dismounted Russian tank engine supplied the lethal fumes that were piped into the gas chambers. In another section of the camp, fenced off and concealed from the reception zone, there were four immense pits. After the dead were removed from the gas chambers, and after gold teeth had been removed from their mouths, the corpses were hauled to the pits by a Jewish work team. The Jews who laboured in and around the gas chambers had their living quarters in the sealed extermination area, known as camp II. Another Jewish labour force tidied up the wagons and the platform after each transport was unloaded, collected the belongings of the doomed, and shifted them in double-quick time to a large warehouse where they were roughly sorted. This group, numbering about 500, lived in a barracks in camp I.³⁹

The camp personnel did not exceed 200. The first commandant was Christian Wirth, assisted by about a dozen SS men. A company of sixty to eighty Ukrainians, trained at Trawniki, provided the guards for the perimeter, the watchtower and the disembarkation area. When the Jews from Lublin were unloaded and assembled on the platform, Wirth or one of his subordinates gave a reassuring speech about how they were going to be resettled once they had cleaned up in the showers. They were told to hand over their valuables, but assured that they would get them back. Sometimes the Jews cheered when they heard this. Then the men were directed into the undressing room and through the haircutting room into the tube. They would all be dead within an hour. The women and children followed. Sometimes they had to stand naked and cold in the tube, waiting for the gas chambers to be made ready. Though the technology was elementary the engine was prone to break down.⁴⁰

In mid-April the deportations from Lublin paused for several weeks because Jews were also pouring into Belzec from Lwow and other centres. Meanwhile the ghetto was replenished with Jews from central Europe. Before the process could restart, Wirth halted any further transports. Although the system had proved to work extremely well, the gassing facilities as originally conceived turned out to be far too small to cope with the influx. Moreover, the remit of the entire operation changed significantly, greatly increasing the expected volume of arrivals. So the first wooden gas chamber building was dismantled and replaced with a concrete and brick structure containing six cells, three on each side, opening off a central aisle.⁴¹

During March and June 1942, 85,000–90,000 German, Austrian, Czech and Slovak Jews were deported to Lublin and ghettos in the Lublin district. They were the first to be transported to the east under the rubric of the new ‘final solution’. The Czech Jews had already been uprooted and came mainly from Theresienstadt; the trainloads of German Jews originated in cities across the Reich; the Slovak Jews were dispatched from places where they had been concentrated prior to removal under an agreement reached between the Slovak and the German authorities. The first wave of 25,000 arrived between 11 March and 20 April. They were stuffed into ghettos vacated by Polish Jews and the able-bodied were extracted to work in labour camps scattered across the district. They were not sent directly to Belzec or murdered on arrival. The second wave, from 22 April to 20 June, brought 61,000 Jews into the Lublin area and this time many transports went direct to the newly inaugurated death camp at Sobibor or the gas chambers at Majdanek, a mixed-function concentration and death camp on the outskirts of Lublin. The ghettos now served as selection sites where those deemed capable of work were cruelly parted from their loved ones. For the rest, the ghettos were little more than transit camps where they lingered miserably for days or weeks before being sent to a Vernichtungslager.⁴²

When Belzec resumed its work, huge numbers of Jews were pumped into its maw from small towns across the Lublin district, from the ghettos where Jews from central Europe were held, and from cities in other districts of the General Government and Galicia. The intensification of the murder process was the outcome of an unusually large number of consultations between Himmler and Heydrich in late April and early May, framed by meetings between Himmler and Hitler on 23 April and 3 May. Parallel to these top-level exchanges, a fundamental shift in the balance of power occurred within the General Government between Frank’s civil administration and the SS. In early May 1942, Krüger was appointed secretary of state for security in the General Government. On 3 June, a formal agreement gave the security police free rein over Jewish affairs and obviated the need for tiresome negotiations with the civil authorities. Over the next six months, some 57,000 Jews from the Lublin district would be sent to death camps, while 70,000 Jews would be shot in massacres conducted by German police units and auxiliaries throughout the region.⁴³

The experience of the wretched deportees who arrived at Belzec during this period was captured in testimony by Rudolf Reder, who arrived from Lwow in mid-August. He escaped from the camp workforce in November 1942 and was hidden in the home of his former housekeeper in Lwow. Reder was in his early sixties and ran a soap-making business before the war. He was seized in a round-up and held overnight along with a mass of other Jews in an open field in the precincts of the Janowska labour camp. In the morning he was driven with hundreds of others onto a train. By this time, many Jews in the city had their suspicions about Belzec and throughout the journey individuals tried to escape from the box-cars. Many were shot by the security policemen accompanying the transport, one perched on each wagon and armed with a submachine gun. The train stopped repeatedly to let priority traffic use the line and arrived at noon, whereupon it was held in the siding for hours.

Eventually, Reder was disembarked onto the platform. He heard an SS man welcome the Jews and tell them they would have a shower and that everything would be all right. The men were then led away to a building marked ‘Bade- und Inhalationsräume’. After a few minutes, prisoners appeared with stools and hair-cutting equipment: their job was to shave the women. It was ‘at this moment that they were struck by the terrible truth. It was then that neither the women nor the men – already on their way to the gas – could have any illusions about their fate.’ At that point, ‘There were cries and shrieking. Some women went mad. Others, however, went to their death calmly, young girls in particular.’ Reder and a few other men were held to one side and then detailed to dig pits. But he could see as ‘the women, naked and shaved, were rounded up with whips like cattle to the slaughter, without even being counted – “Faster, Faster” – the men were already dying. Two hours was the time it took to prepare for murder and for murder itself.’ The SS men and Ukrainian guards ‘counted 750 people for each gas chamber. Those women who tried to resist were bayoneted until the blood was running. Eventually all the women were forced into the chambers. I heard the doors being shut; I heard shrieks and cries; I heard desperate calls for help in Polish and Yiddish. I heard the blood-curdling wails of women and the squeals of children, which after a short time became one long, horrifying scream … This went on for fifteen minutes. The engine worked for twenty minutes. Afterwards there was total silence.’

By this stage the old gas chamber building had been reconstructed with doors in the external wall through which to remove the dead. When the Ukrainians unbarred these openings this was the sight that greeted the eyes: ‘the dead were in an upright position. Their faces were not blue. They looked almost unchanged, as if asleep. There was a bit of blood here and there from bayonet wounds. Their mouths were slightly open, hands rigid, often pressed against their chest. Those who were nearest to the now wide-open doors fell out by themselves. Like marionettes.’ The Jewish work team was then commanded to do its job. ‘We pulled out the corpses of the people so recently alive. We dragged them to pits with the help of leather straps while an orchestra played … from morning until night.’⁴⁴

Reder witnessed dozens of transports arrive while he was in Belzec and during his toil at the burial sites saw what became of them. ‘We dug pits, enormous mass graves, and pulled bodies along … There was a mountain of sand which we used to cover the pits when they were filled to overflowing. On average 450 people worked around the pits on a daily basis. What I found most horrible was that we were ordered to pile bodies to a height of about a metre above ground-level, and only then to cover them with sand. Thick, black blood ran from the mounds and covered the whole area like a sea … Ankle deep we waded through the blood of our brothers. We walked over mounds of bodies.’ After hours of this the men were in a daze. Some managed to pray, others moved around like zombies. The SS would sometimes entertain themselves by forcing the Jews to sing songs. After nearly four months Reder was assigned to accompany several SS men to Lwow to pick up some building material. While he was waiting in the truck he noticed that the escort had nodded off and seized his chance to escape. Only one other person is known to have survived Belzec.⁴⁵

By then the Lwow ghetto had been repeatedly culled. For the first months of the year the Jewish population of roughly 110,000 enjoyed relative calm and benefited from a decent Jewish council with a succession of honest, hard-working chairmen. Until December 1941 it was possible to venture into the Aryan portion of the city to buy food to supplement the meagre official ration. For the poor, of course, there was no alternative to slow starvation, and typhus was endemic in their overcrowded lodgings. Notwithstanding the apparent tranquillity, rumours about massacres in other parts of Galicia triggered anxiety about local developments. In March 1942, the security police ordered the Jewish council to prepare a list of unemployed and ‘asocial’ Jews for resettlement. Rabbi David Kahane, now a member of the religious affairs department of the Jewish council, debated the meaning of this instruction with his colleagues. Fearing the worst they formed a delegation to the chairman of the council, a respected lawyer by the name of Henryk Landsberg. ‘We got straight down to business,’ Kahane recalled. ‘We explained to him that in times of trial such as these we were duty bound to draw the attention of the leader of such a large Jewish community to the enormous responsibility associated with complying with the German orders. According to Jewish law and morality, he was to seek other ways. When our enemies come to us saying: “Bring one of you to us so that we may kill him. If not, we will kill you all” – it is better that all die and not one Jew be delivered to the enemy. This is what the Halakah [Jewish law] rules.’ Landsberg retorted that the rabbis were no longer in the pre-war world and the Jewish council was ‘an instrument to carry out the orders of the Gestapo’. On 19 March the council and the Order Service began to move against Jews on welfare and those without work certificates. However, the Order Service proved so ineffectual that the Germans took over, deploying their Ukrainian helpers. By the beginning of April 15,000 Jews had been seized and consigned to Belzec.⁴⁶

After the action the Germans issued new work certificates to those employed in approved occupations plus an armband with an ‘A’ denoting a worker, Arbeiter. The wife of a worker got an armband with an ‘H’, signifying a homemaker, or Hausfrau. Because these identifiers were supposed to protect the bearer from arbitrary seizure there was a mad rush to get employment, with the Jewish council frantically trying to establish new enterprises to serve the Germans. Kahane and other rabbis were kept busy marrying women to men with the right armband, although some of them looked on this practice as the desecration of a holy institution and one that encouraged promiscuity. Many Jews struggled to preserve some shreds of normality and the dignity that came from observing time-honoured, spiritually consoling rituals. Moty Stromer recalled that ‘It was our first Passover under the Germans. One morning before the holiday we baked matzoh in the kitchen … If I am not mistaken we had to hide on that day …’ During the festive meal the assembled Jews ‘shed more tears than the wine we drank’. Plenty of Jews trusted neither God nor the German work certificates. According to Rabbi Kahane, ‘Engineers, architects, and artisans put their brains and hands to work to construct hideouts in cellars and attics. They built double walls that couldn’t be found except by denunciation.’ None of these devices was of much avail.⁴⁷

In late June, the SS, who were now in total control of Jewish affairs in the General Government, staged a raid on the ghetto netting several thousand unemployed. They were taken to the Janowska labour camp on the edge of the city, where some were put to work in armaments factories; most were shot and buried in sandy gullies in one corner of the camp complex. This was a curtain-raiser to nearly two weeks of massive daily round-ups conducted with unimaginable ferocity by German and Ukrainian police. They paid scant attention to work permits and used dogs to sniff out those who were in hiding. Stromer, who clung to his job, looked on as thousands were sent to Janowska. ‘People were shot to death in the streets. Wagons driving through the streets were commandeered to take the old and the sick to the assembly points.’ There was no salvation from the citizens of Lwow. ‘It was not enough that the Christians did not want to help the Jews, but there were special groups of Christians who pointed into the Jewish hideouts. Small Christian children would run through the streets yelling “Jew, Jew!” In this way they helped to destroy the Jews.’⁴⁸

Rabbi Kahane made a desperate bid to secure help from the Metropolitan Sheptytsky, crossing Lwow to secure an interview with the aged cleric at the ecclesiastical palace. Sheptytsky said he would issue a pastoral letter calling on his flock not to abet the Germans in murder, although it was not published until November and did not specifically mention Jews. He adopted a similar tack in a private letter to the pope composed at the end of the month. However, the metropolitan’s brother made arrangements for the abbess of the Studite convent to take in Kahane’s daughter and promised to see if other Jewish children could be saved. Before he could get her to safety, Kahane and his family experienced days of sheer terror. When Ukrainian militia came to their building they joined other fugitives in the concealed bathroom of a Jew who had good papers. ‘Can anyone grasp what goes on in the mind of a human being buried in a hideout like this, dreading the visit by the Gestapo?’ he wrote later while in hiding at Sheptytsky’s residence. ‘Can anyone conceive of the terror seizing more than twenty people pressed together in a small bathroom when they hear the sounds of hard, heavy tread [sic] characteristic of the SS thugs, coming from the courtyard and up the staircase. Can anyone picture the frozen silence, the fainting glances, the heartbeat of twenty people imprisoned in a tiny room, at the time the German opens the door of the closet concealing the entrance to the bathroom?’ Kahane and the others avoided discovery that time; but his mother and father were amongst the 40,000–50,000 deported to the death camps.⁴⁹

The war machine and the killing machine

The expanding scope of anti-Jewish actions in the middle of 1942 and the lethal sorting of Jews into different categories was related to developments in the war. During May, June and July 1942 the Wehrmacht won a string of stunning victories. In early May the Germans crushed a Russian offensive to retake Kharkov. Shortly afterwards, the German 11th Army in the Crimea defeated a far superior Soviet force on the Kerch peninsula, clearing the way for an assault on Sebastopol. The great port-fortress fell on 4 July. In Libya, Rommel’s combined German and Italian troops routed the British Eighth Army in the battle of Gazala and went on to capture Tobruk. The fuel and supply dumps that fell into Rommel’s hands enabled the renamed Panzer Army Africa to make a dash for the Suez Canal. It looked as if nothing could stop them, until they ran into fresh British blocking positions at El Alamein. Rommel was just sixty miles short of Alexandria.⁵⁰

However, the springtime triumphs of the German military were an illusion. They resulted from an ability to focus all the available offensive combat power in a specific theatre on a relatively limited battlefield. The Germans possessed operational and tactical superiority, but they were made to look even better by the ineptitude of Soviet and British generals. And, despite their success, they did not deliver a knock-out blow against the opposition. Indeed, the feats at Kharkov and in the Crimea were merely the preliminaries to ‘Operation Blau’. This campaign required advances across a wide front, deep into enemy territory in search of the elusive strategic victory. It was 400 miles from Kharkov to Stalingrad and 700 miles from Rostov to Baku. In order to mount the attack into the Caucasus, with the goal of reaching the oil fields, Hitler was able to deploy forty fresh divisions, but half of them were Hungarian, Italian and Romanian. These units were poorly equipped, badly led, and had shaky morale. After a few weeks of good progress the German armies began to run out of fuel. Attrition took its toll of men and machines while Soviet resistance stiffened. By September the advance on both axes – towards Stalingrad and towards the oil fields – stalled short of their objectives.⁵¹

Between the victories of May and the stalemate of September 1942, Nazi anti-Jewish policy went through another metamorphosis, reflecting the oscillating fortunes of the Wehrmacht, the demands of the war economy, and morale on the home front. Since the start of the year, economic realities had played an important part in reshaping the Judenpolitik of the SS. Thanks to its control of the concentration camps the SS possessed a reservoir of cheap, expendable labour that could be put to work in its own enterprises or hired out to the military and civilian contractors. Himmler was intent on using this resource to transform the SS into an economic powerhouse, both to assist the war effort and to generate funds for its own growth. To this end he had instructed Richard Glücks, head of the inspectorate of concentration camps, to prepare for an influx of 150,000 Jews into labour camps in the Lublin district and into the camp at Auschwitz. He merged the head office of the SS that handled finance, business affairs, construction and administration with the main leadership office of the SS, placing the new headquarters unit, dubbed the Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt (SS-WVHA, the SS Business and Administrative Head Office), under the capable management of Oswald Pohl. In March 1942, Himmler completed this horizontal integration by moving the inspectorate of concentration camps into the WVHA, too. When applied to Jews, the SS initiative to exploit the work potential of camp inmates translated into ‘annihilation through labour’ although this notion did not acquire doctrinal status until much later.⁵²

At this point, Himmler was thinking in terms of eliminating 60 per cent of the Jews in the Lublin area, people who allegedly could not work, and retaining the balance for economic purposes. To be sure, Himmler and his colleagues did not envisage the long-term survival of this Jewish labour force. Jews with skills or capable of hard labour would be sweated until they either dropped dead or were no longer fit, in which case they would be murdered. Hence, the Jews deported to the General Government from western and central Europe in the spring were not immediately killed. Instead they were subjected to selections and a large part were sent to concentration and labour camps while the rest were dumped in ghettos. When Polish Jews in the ghettos were culled, those who were employed or possessed essential skills were spared while those unable to work went to the extermination camps.⁵³

From late May into July, this policy of selective mass murder morphed into something even more threatening. The change was fed by security fears and anxiety about food supplies. On 18 May members of a communist resistance cell in Berlin consisting entirely of Jews set fire to an exhibition demonizing the USSR. The Jews, led by Herbert Baum, were mostly employed as forced labour in a Siemens electrical engineering plant. It did not take the Gestapo long to track them down (they were executed). The incident, though minor, fomented Himmler’s security paranoia. Then, on 27 May, a group of Czech and Slovak soldiers from the Czechoslovak army-in-exile based in Britain mounted an assassination attempt on Heydrich in Prague. Heydrich was wounded and died in hospital a week later. Although the attack was masterminded by the Special Operations Executive in London, it reinforced Himmler’s belief that he faced an upsurge of resistance activity across Europe that was rooted in the Jewish population. Over the days that Heydrich lay dying Himmler resolved that the Jews of Europe would be removed totally. He used the occasion of Heydrich’s state funeral to tell senior officers of the SS and the police that ‘Within a year we will definitely have completed the mass migration of the Jews; then no more will migrate.’⁵⁴

However, due to the transport needs of the army in the first weeks of Operation Blau, there was a moratorium on all non-military rail traffic in the east. Instead, Himmler triggered deportations in central and western Europe and honed plans for the destruction of the Jews in the General Government. He obtained Hitler’s backing for the allotment of trains once the ban was lifted and issued new guidelines to Krüger and Globocnik. On 19 July Himmler ordered Krüger, ‘The resettlement of the entire Jewish population of the General Government should be implemented and completed by December 31, 1942.’ After that date no people of Jewish origin were to remain except ‘if they are in assembly camps in Warsaw, Krakow, Czestochowa, Radom, and Lublin. All projects that employ Jewish labour have to be completed by that date or transferred to the assembly camps.’ The principle of selection on the basis of usefulness, capacity for labour, was scrapped and only those Jews already in work had any chance of survival. The ensuing programme of mass extermination became known as Operation Reinhard.⁵⁵

These revisions of Judenpolitik overlapped with another July crisis in the management of the war. Operation Blau, as originally conceived, was ‘in ruins’ and Hitler was obliged to improvise the rest of the campaign. This wobble was followed by jitters over rationing and morale on the home front. On 5 August, Göring met with Nazi Party bosses in Germany to review the food situation and on the following day transmitted instructions to the Reichskommissars in the occupied eastern lands and army commanders to extract the maximum foodstuffs for the Reich. When Karl Naumann, who ran the food department of Frank’s administration, pointed out that there was not enough even to feed just the Poles, Herbert Backe retorted, ‘The 3.5 million Jews [sic] remaining in the General Government in Poland will have to be cleansed this year.’ On 24 August, Naumann passed on the message to his colleagues: ‘The maintenance of the estimated 1.5 million Jews in the population has been abandoned, with the exception of 300,000 Jews who are useful to the Reich because of artisan or other work skills … The other 1.2 million Jews will no longer be given food.’⁵⁶

The pressure to dispose of the Jews in Poland was now extreme: policy had moved from presuming that Jews were useful unless proved useless, to assuming they were useless unless proved useful. To make matters worse, during July, the SS under Krüger established their unalloyed control over all the Jewish workers in the General Government. This did not mean an end to friction over the utilization of Jewish labour. Many Jewish workers were highly trained and possessed skills that were not easily replaced; the managers of enterprises that relied on them proved to be obstreperous. However, Sauckel’s effort to pressgang east Europeans to work in German industry was proving so successful that there was no shortage of unskilled hands.⁵⁷

The policy transition was to some extent reflected in the early history of the second purpose-built extermination camp, Sobibor. Construction work had started in March 1942 on the site of a hamlet clustered beside the Chelm–Wlodowa railway line. A derelict chapel and a post office that once served the community actually ended up inside the camp precincts. But building proceeded so slowly that after several weeks Globocnik appointed Franz Stangl, a veteran of T-4 who was known for his efficiency and drive, to speed things up. Stangl visited Belzec to familiarize himself with the modus operandi of these new killing centres and modelled Sobibor very closely on what he saw there. The western side of the perimeter, about 600 metres long, ran parallel to the rail line, with a siding outside and a spur line running inside the formidable three-layered barbed-wire fence. The SS buildings, Stangl’s quarters, and barracks for the Ukrainian Trawniki men were situated in the Vorlager, or Fore-camp, in the southern sector opposite the platform. Here the transports were unloaded, twenty wagons at a time. The Jews were directed through a gateway into wooden buildings where valuables were confiscated and the victims undressed. They proceeded from there across a courtyard into a walkway lined on both sides by tall barbed-wire fencing. The processing area was designated camp II and included large sheds for storing the property of the doomed. It was 150 metres from camp II to the gas chamber building in camp III, and en route women were separated out so that their hair could be shaved. All the victims were then driven into the cells that were entered from a corridor running along one side of the structure. Once the 400 Jews were packed inside the chambers, each 4 by 4 metres, carbon monoxide exhaust fumes were pumped in from a diesel engine housed in an adjacent shed. After about 30 minutes the bodies were removed through doors in the external wall and hauled a short distance to burial pits. A Jewish labour force, including women, was held in camp I, a camp within the camp, in the south-east corner. The entire facility was neat, tidy and well organized. Stangl had Jewish work Sonderkommandos to cover every phase of the operation. Security was tight. In addition to the five watchtowers, one centrally placed, the installation was surrounded by a minefield.⁵⁸

In the first week of May 1942, Jews from the Zamość area and around Pulawy started arriving at Sobibor. They were completely unaware of what awaited them and were further disarmed by the deception the Germans practised. It was almost impossible to see from the wagons what was happening inside the camp and the first sight that greeted the deportees was a country railway station in a sylvan setting. Yaacov Freidberg, deported from the shtetl of Turobin in Krasnystaw county, described what happened next: ‘the people were taken off rapidly and made to run to this place where they separated the men, women and children. That was a kind of half-way station. The people were put into a closed-in yard. The entire path lay between barbed wire fences, and, on the way, there were signs “To the Showers.” Inside the yard, there were also large signs “To the Showers,” and there were also signs “To the Cash Desk.” The cash desk stood in a corner. There was a door there, and that was where the people assembled. Then Oberscharfuehrer Michel would appear, whom we called “the preacher,” and he addressed the people. His speeches were usually adapted to each transport. But, at that time, he would repeat the same story about what would happen there. They were going to the Ukraine where they would establish farms, they would have to work – work hard. And sometimes people used to ask questions: “What is going to happen to the women?” And he would reply: “If they want to live under better conditions, they, too, will have to work.” After that, he would add: “You have to get undressed, but you must leave your belongings in order – we don’t have much time – so that when you come out of the showers, it will not take long.” The people believed him. They undressed, they arranged their possessions: money, gold and securities – these they handed over at the cash desk. In most cases, people handed over their money, but, at any rate, there were also some who buried the money and the gold in the sand – there was sand there – or in all sorts of corners, in the hope that on their return they would have some money. And then they walked through this narrow door, passing between two barbed wire fences, for a distance of three hundred meters.’ Closer to the gas chamber the corridor forked and the women went into the shaving shed. From this point the Ukrainians took over and all pretence ended, to be replaced by shouting, clubbing, and bayonets. Freidberg continued, ‘They would stab them, cut off people’s limbs, hit them continuously. They would urge them on with whips. All the time they kept them on the run. They did not allow people a moment to think of what was happening at all … We were on the outside of this yard and heard what was going on inside. The shrieking was terrible. And, afterwards, when we went in to remove the belongings, we saw enough horrors and a great deal of blood.’⁵⁹

Women faced other horrors. From early June, the SS began to select young females to work in the camp laundry. Their numbers increased when an SS officer requisitioned fifteen more from a transport to knit warm winter woollens for the German guards. Ada Lichtman, deported from Mielec, was amongst the women spared immediate death. After she had been in the camp for a time, she was woken by cries. ‘And what is the meaning of the screams? The Ukrainian guards are raping young girls before pushing them into the gas chambers.’ One SS officer took a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old girl from a group of new arrivals and kept her as his ‘mistress’ for a while. Needless to say, the Jewish women could not afford to become or be seen to be pregnant. Lichtman recorded that one woman who gave birth in the camp was immediately stretchered to the death pits: the newborn baby was drowned in a latrine.⁶⁰

About 57,000 Jews were murdered in Sobibor until late July when Stangl shut down the operation. The main reason for the pause was the need to strengthen the railway line running between Lublin and Chelm: it was unable to cope with the volume of traffic generated by the deportations. But it was also evident that the gassing facilities were too small. Hence, while the railway was being repaired, the gas chamber building was enlarged and three cells added. The doors to the chambers were now entered from a central corridor running the length of the building, though the bodies were extracted in the same way as before. Stangl also commissioned a narrow-gauge railway to run from the platform, past the gas chambers, to the mass graves. The corpses of those who died en route to Sobibor or Jews too feeble to walk were now transported by this means to the extermination area. The trucks doubled-up for removing corpses from the gas chambers to the pits. It also proved necessary to rethink the practice for disposing of the dead. The existing mass grave was filling up fast and the smell of putrefaction was unbearable. So the camp staff decided to begin burning the bodies immediately. At the base of a second, specially excavated pit, they constructed a sort of grille onto which the cadavers could be piled and incinerated. The treatment of the living changed as well as the handling of the dead. Previously, Jews had been sorted at Sobibor and several hundred sent to nearby forced labour camps. That practice now ceased and the only Jews saved from the gas chambers were those inducted into the camp’s own Sonderkommandos. Sobibor had been adapted from a killing centre with facilities that were calibrated to a local or regional task to one that could service mass murder on a larger scale. Freidberg described the first version of the camp as ‘primitive’ compared to the revamped edition.⁶¹

When it resumed operating around 10 October, Sobibor swallowed up 2,400 Jews from Chelm county and 3,000 Jews from Lubartow the next day. Later that month it received 5,000 Jews from the ghetto-camp at Izbica, 3,300 from the Chelm ghetto, 5,000 from Wlodowa on one day alone, and 2,000 from Hrubieszow on another day. By the end of the year, Höfle reported to Berlin that 101,370 Jews had been murdered in what was to the killers an exemplary extermination camp.⁶²

Deportations from the Warsaw ghetto

The first major Jewish community in Poland to feel the effect of the policy decisions made in Berlin and Lublin was the teeming Warsaw ghetto. In mid-1942 there were an estimated 400,000 Jews in the ghetto, including some 4,000 driven in from outlying districts in the spring plus 4,000 recently arrived German Jews. Starvation and disease were reducing this number at an appalling rate: 39,719 Jews died in the first six and half months of the year, which almost equalled the total for the whole of 1941.⁶³

Adam Czerniaków charted the ominous signs in his journal, beginning with word from Hermann Probst, one of Auerswald’s underlings, who warned him ‘in connection with a certain official speech, that the future looks grim for the Jews’. Probst was referring to a menacing oration by Hitler at the Sportpalast on 30 January 1942 in which he stated ‘the war will not end as the Jews imagine it will, namely with the uprooting of the Aryans, but the result of the war will be the complete annihilation of the Jews’. From February onwards Czerniaków heard disturbing rumours about expulsions and violent resettlements; he got word of the deportations from Lwow almost the day after they commenced. In mid-May, Ringelblum noted ‘rumours about extermination squads that are wiping complete Jewish settlements off the face of the earth’. Mary Berg’s uncle brought her family news from Lublin of massacres and deportations. Someone in the Order Service warned her that the same could happen in Warsaw, but she thought that ‘To exterminate such a number of people seems impossible, inconceivable.’ When Abraham Lewin heard about the fate of Jews in Lwow and learned that letters had stopped coming from Jews in Wloclawek, he concluded ‘that all these places where there have been Jewish communities for 700 or 800 years are now judenrein.’ Before the war, Lewin, scion of a Hassidic family, worked as a teacher in the Yehudia girls’ school, where he met Emanuel Ringelblum. In 1940 he joined the directorate of Oneg Shabbat and started a detailed account of life in the ghetto. Falling back on his religious background, he wondered, ‘what if Satan and his devils have triumphed? What if we have become the scapegoat and sacrifice for the whole sinful world?’ Chaim Kaplan asked himself, what happened to the 40,000 Jews deported from Lublin? It was as though they had been ‘swallowed up by stormy waters. But there is no doubt that they are no longer alive.’ He was inclined to take Hitler at his word when, in a speech on 26 April 1942, he repeated his prophecy that the Jews would be exterminated because they started the war. ‘There is an instinctive feeling’, Kaplan reported, ‘that some terrible catastrophe is drawing near for the Warsaw ghetto.’⁶⁴

Jews monitored news of the war as anxiously as rumours about ghetto deportations, instinctively connecting the two and seeking portents of salvation. In early May they were cheered by the Russian offensive at Kharkov. Ringelblum explained that ‘we try our utmost to see the war’s end as imminent’. Within days such optimism became hard to sustain. Lewin was downcast when ‘the megaphone announced the sad news of the fall of Kerch. The news hit me very hard. For the truth is, nowadays our hearts beat with the events taking place on Russian territory … Every shift in the balance in Hitler’s favour fills us with boundless misery and despair.’ The fall of Sebastopol sent a shudder through the population while Rommel’s progress in North Africa heaped anxiety upon anxiety. The veteran Zionist Chaim Kaplan worried that ‘England has suffered a defeat and is fleeing to Egypt. And once the war is in Egypt who will wager that it will not spread from there into Palestine as well!’⁶⁵

They took consolation where they could and the image of the meek, forgiving Jew is contradicted by the glee with which they received tidings of German setbacks. Lewin wrote that the bombing of German cities ‘makes the pulse beat faster’. For Ringelblum the RAF’s thousand-bomber raid on Cologne ‘slaked our thirst for revenge somewhat. Cologne was an advance payment on the vengeance that must and shall be taken on Hitler’s Germany for the millions of Jews they have killed … After Cologne I walked around in a good mood … my death is prepaid.’ Kaplan breathed a sigh of relief when Rommel was halted at El Alamein and looked forward to the British counter-attack. By mid-July he shrewdly perceived that the recent German successes meant little: ‘Their victories on paper make no impression. A weakening is apparent in comparison with their power and might of last year.’ Lewin considered it ‘a certainty that the Anglo-American invasion of Europe, or the creation of a Second Front, must and will come to fruition in the near future’.⁶⁶

The yearning for good news and dreams of liberation reflected the abysmal conditions inside the ghetto. Ringelblum raged against the inequality from which so many other evils flowed. ‘During these days of hunger, the inhumanity of the Jewish upper class has clearly shown itself. The entire work of the Jewish Council is an evil perpetrated against the poor … The finance politics of the Council are one great scandal … In its name, indirect taxes are levied that fall heaviest on the poor.’ Chaim Kaplan referred to the council as a ‘leech’. Corruption was rampant at all levels of officialdom. ‘The entire ghetto is a huge dunghill’, he complained, not least because janitors refused to clean their buildings unless bribed by the residents they were supposed to be serving. He alleged that during a round-up for forced labour in May 1942, the Order Service seized 800 men when the original German requisition was only for 400, and took bribes to free half of them. Venality was the least of their crimes in the eyes of Jews, who increasingly viewed them as collaborators. Lewin bemoaned the ‘sad complicity of the Jewish police’ in this raid.⁶⁷

Czerniaków claimed to be doing his best to combat inequality and force the rich to share the burden of maintaining the ghetto. In early February 1942 he grumbled, ‘A policy, which I am preparing, of exacting contributions from the rich to support the poor came under a barrage of criticism. To top it all, I was visited today by a delegation from the welfare shelters stating that over twenty per cent of their charges died of starvation.’ The contradictions within ghetto society could not be more starkly highlighted than in Lewin’s account of Szulc’s restaurant. Here meals were served comparable to those before the war: ‘Only smugglers, racketeers, important activists, members of the police, and other rich people to whom the times have been good can afford to eat there.’ Smuggling remained a mainstay of the ghetto economy, for those who could afford to buy on the black market. He reported that ‘Flour, potatoes, milk, butter, meat and other produce are brought into the ghetto. And out of the ghetto still pours a continual stream of possessions to the Aryan side. Jews are selling up everything they own.’ Children formed the largest contingent involved in the illicit trade. ‘Whole hosts of them can be seen climbing over the walls, crawling through the gaps … and passing through the official entrances where gendarmes and Polish police stand guard.’ He noticed that some Germans ‘show a little mercy’ and turn a blind eye while others ‘hit the children with murderous blows’. Kaplan visited the cemetery, where he observed ‘small, petty smuggling. The poor come here to smuggle – the impoverished and pauperized youth whose occupation is to bring in a few kilos of potatoes or onions. A whole family sustains itself from this.’ Those without agile children, sufficient food, or money, begged. In May, Ringelblum noticed that ‘The beggars crowding the streets nowadays are different from last year’s crop. Most of the beggars from the provinces have died out. The newcomers are a better class of people … speak a good, sometimes excellent Polish … well-dressed …’⁶⁸

Moral standards wilted in the face of extreme inequality. Ringelblum maintained that ‘Demoralization is spreading rapidly through the ghetto. While the poor become ever poorer and dress in rags, the girls are dressing up as though the war were nonexistent. There have been many cases of girls stealing from their parents, taking things from home to sell or barter for ornaments, or a hair wave …’ Michel Mazor recalled that ‘The main boulevard of the ghetto, Leszno Street, could boast at least twenty restaurants; there were as many, however, on Zelazna Street, Sienna Street, and elsewhere. Given the general poverty, young girls and women from all sorts of backgrounds offered their services as waitresses … no city in the world had as many beautiful and elegant women serving in cafes as did the short lived ghetto, with its Café des Arts, Splendide, Negresco etc. But right in front of these display windows, hordes of wretched beggars would pass, often collapsing from inanition.’ The sight of such affluence and plenitude enraged Auerswald when he toured the ghetto and strengthened German prejudices against the ‘useless eaters’ who were allegedly stripping Poland of produce and forcing up prices for the rest of the population.⁶⁹

The German Jews were amongst the most pathetic of the ghetto dwellers. When they made their first appearance they were an impressive sight. Mazor remembered going to visit them in the Little Ghetto. Their quarters were crowded but well kept. ‘For me, having come straight out of the [main] ghetto, this was contact with the outside world. What struck me was the air of healthiness and optimism of the entire group, as well as the absence of any sign of fear for their fate.’ Mary Berg observed that women and children who came off a transport from Danzig ‘carried elegant luggage and were dressed far better than our own ghetto people’. Czerniaków, responsible for housing and feeding the deportees, paid less attention to their appearance. After nearly 2,000 had been deposited into his charge he wailed, ‘We have no housing and no money.’ To add insult to injury, the SS demanded gold from the Reich Jews, but ‘there was not much of it’. In late April, 1,000 Czech Jews were crammed into the refugee shelters, too. Because they were not able to get work and their ration was inadequate to support life they slowly starved. The plight of the deportees from central Europe was only marginally less awful than that of deportees from the General Government. Mary Berg described them as ‘ragged and barefoot, with the tragic eyes of those who are starving. Most of them are women and children. They become charges of the community, which sets them up in so-called hostels. There they die, sooner or later.’⁷⁰

As in Lodz the gender imbalance in Warsaw was acute. Thousands of women parted from fathers, sons and brothers were left to fend for themselves. Mothers with young children and daughters of elderly parents were particularly hard hit since their role as carers made it difficult for them to work but they still had mouths to feed. At their most desperate such women were driven to cannibalism. Czerniaków recorded one case of a woman who ate flesh from the buttocks of her dead son. At another extreme ‘a certain type of girl’ could be observed – with make-up, dressed impeccably, hair coiffeured – who sought out protectors in return for sexual favours. Czerniaków noted archly that thanks to the inventiveness of the ghetto it was possible to obtain ‘contraceptives made of baby pacifiers’.⁷¹

Italian troops passing through Warsaw central station en route to the Eastern Front in the spring of 1942 saw Jewish women employed as cleaners begging for scraps from the soldiers. One of them, Michaelangelo Pattoglio, recalled, ‘A Jewish woman who is picking up trash from the train station speaks good Italian; she’s a cultured person. She talks: we listen to her in astonishment … When they saw the Italian train, two or three hundred starving Polish Jews take off in a storm to talk to us, to ask for bread. They are starving.’ Some Jewish women were so deep in despair that they offered themselves to the Italian men, a prospect that speaks volumes about the horrors they were escaping. Bartolomeo Fruterro, a regular soldier in an Alpini regiment, remembered, ‘We put a woman doctor in our car, young, beautiful, and sharp. She speaks good Italian, says that the Germans are cremating all the Jews, that her life isn’t worth anything, either. We are wily; we hide her well so the officers won’t notice. The woman has a little white dress, all narrow pleats. We take it from her; she is left in her slip with a grey-green shirt over it. We give her food, take turns going to make love. A lot of other cars have their Jewish women, too; we travel that way for two days. But then the chaplain notices it, there’s trouble, the major intervenes, and we have to leave the Jewish women at the first stations.’⁷²

The inequalities in the ghetto provided the Germans with the material for a propaganda film that obscenely exaggerated them in order to confirm Nazi preconceptions about ‘the Jew’. In early May 1942, a German army film unit arrived and started filming Jews in the workshops. The next day the filmmakers ordered Czerniaków to stage a meeting in his office and placed a large menorah on his desk to accentuate the Jewishness of the scenario. When they shot footage inside one of the few smart apartments on Leszno Street, he wrote, ‘They are filming both extreme poverty and luxury … The positive achievements are of no interest to them.’ A few days later the movie unit commandeered the mikvah (ritual bath), and rounded up twenty orthodox men and an equal number of elegantly dressed young women. Lewin retold what followed: ‘They then forced the men and the women to strip completely naked. German officers divided them into pairs made of one from each sex from among the Jews. They matched young girls to old men, and conversely, young boys with old women. Then they forced the two sexes to commit a sexual act. These scenes, that is, the sexual scenes, were filmed.’ Later, the Germans packed Jews into Szulcz’s restaurant and filmed ‘plutocrats’ gorging. As a contrast, they staged a riot outside a bread shop.⁷³

Jews did not remain passive in the face of such provocations. During late 1941 and early 1942, the political underground expanded its membership and the range of its activities. Neither the Jewish council nor the Germans showed much interest in internal Jewish politics and the activists were able to operate relatively freely. However, for the most part they remained focused on the welfare of their own members and did more or less what they had been doing before the war. The Bund ran a soup kitchen for workers affiliated to the union, tried to defend their interests in the workplace, and sponsored educational programmes for its youth wing. The Zionist youth movements maintained kitchens in their headquarters, which had the character of clubhouses, and conducted lively meetings to sustain morale. About 170 Zionist youth were able to work on a training farm in the Czerniaków suburb until November 1942. The farm served as a base for clandestine operations and was a hub for couriers, mainly young women, who circulated between ghettos delivering and picking up news. In mid-1942 there were no fewer than forty-seven underground newspapers circulating reports from across Poland and debating such issues as the appropriate ideological stance towards the USSR. The Oneg Shabbat organization was a hive for a particular sort of resistance activity, chronicling German crimes in Warsaw and more widely. Ringelblum’s team of reporters and interviewers provided essential evidence for dispatches to the west. These updates were carried by couriers of the Polish underground, men like Jan Karski. Through them the Bund remained in contact with its delegates in London as well as with the Polish government-in-exile. The Zionist movements had their own lines of communication to envoys based in Switzerland and Turkey, and each one thereby stayed in touch with party headquarters as well as the Jewish Agency in Palestine.⁷⁴

During the first months of 1942 political activists in the ghetto started to receive information about the massacres of Jews in the German-occupied parts of the USSR and deportations from Jewish centres in Poland. The information was fragmentary and hard to assess, particularly since Warsaw Jews were enjoying a period of relative stability. The ghetto economy was functioning well and there were plenty of orders for the workshops. Nevertheless, it was impossible to ignore the testimony of Jews who had escaped the slaughters in Vilnius and the extermination centre at Chelmno. The call to arms addressed specifically to Jewish youth by the United Fighting Organization in Vilnius in January 1942 created a stir amongst the youth movements in Warsaw by claiming the Germans were intent on exterminating the Jews. Szlama Wiener, who escaped from Chelmno, was only the first of several fugitives to reach Warsaw with grim accounts of gas vans and ghetto clearances in the Wartheland. The problem facing activists in Warsaw was to work out whether these were local disasters or part of a general policy that would, sooner or later, extend to their ghetto. Those who credited the Germans with such outlandish ambitions ‘were at a loss to cope with the news’. Apart from struggling with the implications of what such a phenomenon posed to the very idea of humanity, there were endless practical questions concerning how best to respond.⁷⁵

In January, stirred by the Vilna declaration, Yitzhak Zuckerman, a leader of the Hechalutz-Dror left-wing Zionist youth group, approached the Bund with a proposition to cooperate in resistance work. The Bund was a larger organization and had more resources than the Zionist youth so their support was a necessary prerequisite. But Zuckerman was rebuffed. In March, the Poale Zion party made a similar overture but, again, the Bund rejected physical resistance. The party’s negativity was partly based on a realistic appraisal of the situation the Jews confronted, although it was also ideologically unwilling to work with Jewish nationalists whom it traditionally despised. On 15 April, a meeting of its main youth cadres and veteran leadership declared that ‘To call for active self-defence, as several, irresponsible organisations have done, is to call for mass suicide.’ The left-wing Zionist youth groups and the left Poale Zion faction next went outside the ghetto to contact the Polish Workers’ Party (Polska Partia Robotnicza, PPR), the reconstituted Polish Communist Party, to seek their cooperation. The PPR was more receptive, leading to the formation of the Anti-Fascist Bloc. It was the first broad-based resistance organization inside the ghetto, but the fact that it engaged with communists, hated enemies of the Bund, only further alienated Bundist sympathies. Months passed before Tsukunft, the Bund’s youth wing, saw the value of this coalition and edged closer to joining a united resistance movement. In the interim the Anti-Fascist Bloc established a joint leadership, began training fighters, and started thinking how to defend the ghetto against a German assault. Its arsenal fell woefully short of its aspirations: in May 1942 it had one pistol. Moreover, its efforts to win support from the ghetto inhabitants and to raise money for arms purchases fell on stony ground.⁷⁶

Just when the Jewish underground was beginning to coalesce, but before it had time to prepare itself for any engagement with the Germans or even to plan escape and evasion procedures, the Gestapo started taking an interest. This intelligence gathering was actually a prelude to the deportations but it led to discovery of the nascent resistance. On 17–18 April 1942, the Gestapo struck, killing fifty-two political activists. Raids in other ghettos led to the arrest or death of several leaders and couriers. The Bund and Tsukunft were shattered by this setback. The Zionist groups were no less disorientated. As the Germans intended, on the eve of the greatest action against the largest Jewish population in Poland, its political leadership was temporarily nonplussed and its ability to resist was severely degraded.⁷⁷

Yet, by their own lights, the Jewish underground in the Warsaw ghetto did score a major victory against the Germans. On 21 May 1942, the Bund was able to smuggle out of Poland a letter informing its representatives in London that 700,000 Polish Jews had been murdered to date, specifying the use of poison gas, and asserting that this massacre was part of a programme for the total annihilation of the Jewish community. Details about the death camp at Chelmno and the new one at Treblinka were also supplied to the Polish government-in-exile. The raw material for these dispatches came from interviews conducted by Oneg Shabbat with men who had escaped from the camps and from refugees who had evaded deportation from Lublin, Lwow and other places. The resulting intelligence formed the basis for a public relations offensive by the Bund in London and by the Polish exile leadership. It culminated in a broadcast on the BBC European service on 2 June 1942, breaking the silence about the systematic mass murder of Polish Jews. The Polish prime minister alluded to the catastrophe in a broadcast a week later. Afterwards, Ringelblum permitted himself a word of self-congratulation. It was ‘a great day for O.S. This morning the English radio broadcast about the fate of Polish Jewry. They told everything we know so well: about Slonim and Vilna, Lemberg and Chelmno, and so forth.’ After weeks when the ghetto felt utterly abandoned by an ignorant, uncaring world there was now a sign that they knew. Ringelblum rejoiced that ‘it seems that all our interventions have finally achieved their purpose. There have been regular broadcasts over the English radio in the last few weeks, treating the cruelties perpetrated on the Polish Jews: Belzec and the like. Today there was a broadcast summarizing the situation: 700,000, the number killed in Poland … At the same time, the broadcast vowed revenge, a final accounting for all these deeds of violence. The Oneg Shabbat group has in this way fulfilled a great historical mission and has alerted the world to our fate and may save hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews from extermination.’ Alas, the news reached the west too late and there was, in any case, little that could have been done to avert or mitigate the apocalypse that was about to engulf the Warsaw ghetto.⁷⁸

In early June, Czerniaków detected stronger omens. He was immediately suspicious when the Germans required the extraction of Jews with foreign nationality to a secure place under their supervision, ostensibly until they could be exchanged for German nationals in Allied custody. Mary Berg was one of those affected by this measure; she and her family were amongst those taken to the Pawiak prison for safe-keeping. Survivors of the massive deportations from other ghettos flooded into Warsaw accompanied by rumours that the Germans would soon remove 70,000 local Jews. Czerniaków confided to his diary that he felt like a man on a sinking ship. As if to reassure himself, he took stock: 79,000 Jews were employed (50,000 in enterprises inside the ghetto). In June exports were valued at 12 million zlotys. Yet the rumours persisted and on 18 July, ‘a day of foreboding’, he challenged Auerswald to confirm or deny plans to resettle all but 120,000 Warsaw Jews. Auerswald denied knowledge of any such proposals. Nonetheless, panic swept the streets and Czerniaków deliberately showed himself in public in order to calm people. On the same day, activists gathered to discuss how to respond should the rumours prove true. Hillel Seidman, a Jewish journalist who now worked for the Jewish council, recorded the discussions. Some participants maintained quite reasonably that it was impossible to deport half a million people. Optimists argued that the ghetto was serving the interest of the Germans anyway. Pessimists pointed to the destruction of other productive communities. In which case, what could they do? One rabbi recommended pleading with the Allies to make Jews citizens of Palestine and thereby Allied nationals. Another suggested warning the pope. ‘Slowly but surely,’ Seidman noted, ‘realization dawns on the gathering that all our plans are unrealistic, impossible to carry out. The knowledge of our total helplessness grows more tangible by the minute as we realize that we are condemned to our fate.’⁷⁹

That fate was now hurtling towards them. On 21 July, the security police detained Czerniaków, his wife, and other members of the Jewish council. He was subsequently released but his colleagues were held as hostages. During a journey into the city on Jewish council business, Seidman spotted reinforced guard units at the gates and heard people talking about an imminent ‘Aktion’. By the time he returned the ghetto was in turmoil. Jews were struggling to obtain jobs and certificates proving they were employed. Women were marrying men, any men, who had labour permits.⁸⁰

The following day, Czerniaków’s darkest premonitions came true. At 10 a.m. Hermann Höfle appeared in his office, accompanied by two members of the team that had emptied the Lublin ghetto. They ordered him to arrange for 6,000 people to be ready for evacuation to the east by four in the afternoon and presented him with the categories of who would be included or excluded. The edict was later printed on a poster and plastered on walls across the ghetto. All Jews were to be deported to the east except: those employed by the Germans or working in German-owned firms; those fit to work (who would be collected and held in barracks); the Order Service and public health or medical workers; plus their close family members. Anyone ill or in hospital was also exempted. Deportees were permitted 15kg of baggage and told to bring with them to the assembly points their valuables as well as food for three days. Seidman, who was at the Jewish council, witnessed how ‘with the speed of lightning, the news spreads: “Ausseidlung” [evacuation]. This terrible word sows the fear of death … I enter Czerniakow’s boardroom. One look at him was enough – the chalk white face, the shaking hand, and staring eyes that see nothing.’ Seidman left the building and found chaos outside, the streets filled with people dashing this way and that. He saw the Order Service already going to work to fill the quota. They started by seizing Jews in the refugee shelters and prisons, juveniles and beggars. By the end of the day, 6,250 Jews had been delivered to the Umschlagplatz, the goods yard and storage area (formerly the Transferstelle) that now functioned as a holding pen guarded by the Order Service and watched over by German security police.⁸¹

Early next morning, Hermann Worthoff, an SS lieutenant and a veteran of the Lublin clearances who served on Höfle’s staff, came to Czerniaków’s office with fresh instructions. Czerniaków haggled with him over categories to be exempted, focusing on the orphans in particular. Worthoff told him to take up their case with Höfle; he required 7,000 to be deported. In reply to Czerniaków’s question about how long this would go on, he answered, ‘seven days a week’. Czerniaków later wrote, ‘Throughout the town a great rush to start new workshops. A sewing machine can save a life.’ But a sewing machine could not save the life of an orphan child or anyone else unable to operate one. Some time after that morning meeting Marceli Reich, the head of the council’s translation department, found Czerniaków dead in his office. He had committed suicide. In a final note to his colleagues on the Jewish council he stated, ‘I am powerless, my heart trembles in sorrow and compassion. I can no longer bear all this. My act will show everyone the right thing to do.’ Unfortunately, few people gleaned the meaning of Czerniaków’s final act. Ringelblum, never his greatest admirer, jotted scathingly, ‘The suicide of Czerniaków – too late, a sign of weakness – should have called for resistance – a weak man.’ To Kaplan, ‘The first victim of the deportation decree was the president, Adam Czerniaków … He perpetuated his name by his death more than by his life.’ Czerniaków, ‘who had a spark of purity in his heart, found the only way out worthy of himself’. Seidman, too, understood what had driven the chairman over the edge: ‘he had suddenly realized the gaping chasm yawning in front of his kehillah. All his plans and hopes collapsed in front of cruel realities. Rather than become a mere tool of the enemy, he took his life and died with honour.’ Czerniaków was buried hurriedly and secretly the next afternoon. That day, the fast of Tisha B’Av, when devout Jews commemorate the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, 7,200 Jews were delivered to the Umschlagplatz.⁸²

A pattern was established that was repeated, with variations, for the next six weeks. Höfle established his headquarters on Leszno Street in the centre of the ghetto. He delegated the day-to-day routine to the two Sipo-SD men assigned to the Jewish office of the Warsaw Gestapo, Karl Brandt and Gerhard Mende. Each morning they delivered written instructions to the Jewish council, now led by Mark Lichtenbaum, and the Order Service, commanded by Jozef Szerynski and Jacob Lejkin (who was in sole command for the first few days while his boss was held in prison). The guidelines stipulated the number of deportees, any new categories to be included, and the streets, buildings or workshops that were to be targeted. Seidman observed sardonically that the Germans would appear with maps that divided Warsaw block-by-block: ‘the latest modern technology; after all, we are in the twentieth century’. The Order Service men would proceed to surround the designated location and herd the inhabitants into the courtyard or the street, where they checked their documents and picked out those exempt from deportation. SS men, German police or auxiliaries (Lithuanians, Latvians, Ukrainians) would then sweep the building or the whole block, shooting anyone they found still inside or in hiding. Finally, the deportees were escorted by the Order Service to the Umschlagplatz, where they were held until transport was available. Sometimes this could mean spending a day and a night in the open, in heat or rain, without food or sanitary facilities. The Umschlagplatz was strewn with debris and human excrement. However, this malodorous, crowded yard offered those slated for deportation the best chance of an escape. Here, Order Service men took hefty bribes to turn a blind eye while a deportee slipped away; workshop managers alerted to the fate of a valued employee would come looking for them to obtain their release; the family and protégés of Jewish councilmen were frequently rescued at this last moment, though usually at an extortionate cost.⁸³

The round-ups did not go quite as smoothly or uniformly as the huge number seized each day would suggest. From 24 to 31 July, the volume of deportees ranged from just above 5,000 to just under 7,000 per day. On 5 and 6 August, the total exceeded 10,000. There was a pause in transports leaving the Umschlagplatz from 19 to 21 August, while outlying ghettos were emptied. A change of tactics over 6–11 September netted more than 54,000 Jews. Daily round-ups ceased on 12 September, although there were three subsequent lesser actions – including one in which the bulk of the Order Service was deported. As they progressed, the daily actions required more manpower, incentives or enhanced violence to succeed. On 25 July, the Order Service was forced to enrol hundreds of other Jewish council employees into its ranks because it lacked the personnel to cope with the task. Some deserted; a few preferred suicide to cooperation. In any case, it did not perform to the satisfaction of its real master. Five days later, after the number of deportees deposited at the Umschlagplatz had steadily fallen, the Germans lost patience with the OS and deployed German police and auxiliaries to carry out the razzias with them. At the same time, the Order Service put up notices that anyone going voluntarily to the Umschlagplatz would be given 3kg of bread and 1kg of jam. Since imports of food had practically ceased on 22 July and hunger was ubiquitous, this had a considerable effect. On 30 July, 1,500 Jews volunteered for deportation, 750 the next day, and 3,000 on 3 August. When the time came for the German and Czech Jews to go, they assembled under their own volition and marched to the trains, many of the men proudly wearing the medals earned fighting for or alongside the Germans during the Great War.⁸⁴

The Order Service, which had once been lauded by the ghetto inhabitants, now turned into the most hated excrescence of German power. Chaim Kaplan railed that ‘The deed is being carried out by the Jewish slaughterers … The criminal police force is the child of the criminal Judenrat.’ Seidman was more careful in his remarks, stating that ‘The Germans force the Judenrat and the Jewish police to assist in the mass deportations.’ Lewin had no patience for such nuances: ‘The police are carrying out the round-ups, and officials of the Jewish community wearing white armbands are assisting them.’ He could find no justification for ‘The savagery of the police during the round-ups, the murderous brutality. They drag girls from the rickshaws, empty out flats, and leave the property strewn everywhere.’ Witnessing the extortion that customarily accompanied the blockades he condemned the ‘terrible corruption of our police and their assistants. An outrage, an outrage!’ After a month of constant round-ups he exploded: ‘they beat viciously, they steal, and they loot and pillage like bandits in the forests. What degeneracy! Who has raised these bitter fruits among us?’⁸⁵

Observers and diarists in the ghetto struggled to record the catastrophe. It defied comprehension and beggared the common vocabulary. Terror, hunger, exhaustion and frequent changes of residence made the task even harder. ‘I haven’t the strength to hold a pen in my hand,’ Chaim Kaplan wrote after he heard news of the deportation decree. ‘I’m broken, shattered. My thoughts are jumbled. I don’t know where to start or stop.’ Yet he continued to write. When friends asked why he bothered, he replied, ‘I feel that continuing this diary to the very end of my physical and spiritual strength is a historical mission which must not be abandoned.’ When Abraham Lewin’s wife was seized he wrote, ‘Eclipse of the sun, universal blackness. My Luba was taken away during a blockade … I have no words to describe my desolation.’ The next day he went on with his diary. Over succeeding weeks, he interviewed escapees from Treblinka and continued to record the evidence of German crimes.⁸⁶

‘The ghetto has turned into an inferno,’ Kaplan wrote on 27 July. ‘Men have become beasts.’ The Order Service ignored legitimate work papers and chased anyone to fill their quota. People caught in blockades tried to hide or fled over fences and roofs. Children and mothers fought against the OS men who beat them into submission with truncheons. ‘The world’, Lewin thought, ‘has never seen such scenes. People are thrown into wagons like dogs, old people and the sick are taken to the Jewish cemetery and murdered there … The tragedies cannot be captured in words.’ To Seidman, Warsaw became ‘a factory of death’. When rabbis and academics were hauled out of the workshops, including his friends and colleagues of many years, he wailed, ‘In our concern for our own survival, we were forced to be mere passive onlookers. How pitiful our lives now seem by comparison. Is this called living?’ Observers tormented by extreme hunger were still shocked at the sight of Jews going voluntarily to the trains. Lewin was appalled to see twenty Ukrainians, fifty Jewish police and four Germans ‘lead 3,000 Jews to the slaughter’. They went ‘like lambs’. Seidman watched starving columns lured by the promise of a hunk of bread and some jam shuffling towards ‘their final appointment with their slaughterers’.⁸⁷

Yet there was opposition, evasion and resistance. The same day that Czerniaków took his life, sixteen leaders of the main political factions (except the Revisionist Zionists) conferred hastily about how they should react. The veteran trade unionist Bernard Goldstein summarized the Bund’s line: ‘We knew that armed resistance would doom the whole ghetto instead of only 60,000. And who, no matter how convinced that the whole ghetto was doomed in any case, could take upon himself the responsibility for precipitating such a catastrophe.’ The historian, Zionist and former member of the Polish parliament Yitzhak Schipper also counselled against taking up arms. Zuckerman recalled him asking the young bloods at the gathering, ‘Can one endanger the lives of other Jews?’ The lesson of Jewish history was that they had ‘no choice but to accept the sentence’. A representative of the Orthodox party Agudas-Israel assured the meeting that God would not permit the destruction of his people: ‘the Lord gives and the Lord takes away’. The fact that the deportations seemed to affect only refugees and beggars encouraged the majority to defer any effort to obstruct the action. Zuckermen left the meeting depressed, but members of Hechalutz-Dror and the HaShomer HaTzair youth movement resolved to engage in passive resistance anyway. Next day they distributed leaflets warning Jews that the Umschlagplatz led only to death, and urged resistance. In a similar, though uncoordinated gesture, the Bund’s illegal bulletin admonished Jews that they faced a ‘campaign of extermination’ and advised those who were condemned to deportation to resist ‘tooth and nail’.⁸⁸

Four days later, leading figures in Dror and HaShomer HaTzair met and established the Jewish Fighting Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bejowa, ZOB). A delegation including Aryeh Wilner was sent to the Ayran side to establish contact with the Polish underground and secure weapons. Its mission accomplished, it returned, leaving Wilner to liaise with the Polish resistance. The Bund, meanwhile, sent people out of the ghetto to follow the deportation trains and ascertain the fate of the deportees. One of its agents, Zalman Friedrich, was able to meet men and women who had escaped from the Treblinka death camp. What he reported left the political leadership in no doubt of the stakes. Although the Bund did not join the ZOB for months, its younger activists were now on the path to militancy. However, the Jewish Fighting Organization was ineffectual and riven with arguments about tactics. Should it attempt to mount armed resistance in the ghetto or break out so its members could join partisan groups? Was its mission to frustrate the deportations or to strike back at the Germans for the sake of revenge? Indeed, who was the enemy? Should it fight the Jewish council and the Order Service? Partly because it lacked the wherewithal to do anything else, the ZOB started its campaign by attacking the most hated figures in the ghetto. On 20 August, a ZOB member, Israel Kanal, shot and wounded Szerynski; a leaflet announced that he was a victim of the Jewish Fighting Organization and denounced the entire Order Service for collaborating with the Germans. By this stage the ZOB’s arsenal had swollen to five pistols and eight grenades. Its fighters also began setting fire to German-owned or -run workshops. Tragically, on 3 September a German raid on the Landau workshop, where many of the underground were based, resulted in the discovery of the ZOB’s weapons cache. Leading members of the organization, who were working at Landau’s as a cover, were also arrested. The budding Jewish resistance was temporarily shattered. Amidst the daily pandemonium it was as much as the factions could do to preserve their own cadres. Organized opposition melted away.⁸⁹

During August, the focus of the deportations shifted to welfare institutions, community organizations, and enterprises that were previously off-limits. On 5 August it was the turn of the defenceless children whom Czerniaków had earlier tried to save. Lewin noted tersely, ‘They emptied Dr Korczak’s orphanage with the Doctor at the head of 200 orphans.’ His selflessness in accompanying the children to certain death immediately passed into legend, along with the display of courage by the infants who trooped in good order to the Umschlagplatz. Seidman grieved, ‘Who knows how much potential, skill, talents and Jewish treasures are contained within these precious young souls, now condemned to death. Yet they march so quietly, so purposefully towards their untimely end.’ Around the same time, Chaim Kaplan and his wife were taken. During his last days he was tormented equally by hunger, fear, and apprehension lest his testimony be swallowed up in the cataclysm: ‘My utmost concern is for hiding my diary so that it will be preserved for future generations.’ His final words in writing were a haunting question, ‘If my life ends – what will become of my diary?’⁹⁰

The Order Service, the Germans and their helpers, moved on to CENTOS, the other children’s homes, Jewish Self-Help, and eventually the Jewish council itself. On 9 August it was ordered to relocate to smaller premises and commanded to give up 7,000 people from its employees and their families. The identity cards of essential community workers were invalidated and only those whose papers were stamped by the Sipo-SD were protected. Helen Szereszewska was rescued from the Umschlagplatz thanks to her husband, who was director of the finance department. After her narrow escape she moved into the council building and sat by her husband’s desk from dawn to dusk. ‘It was the same with all the Council staff’, she recounted later, ‘unless the wives and children worked they sat by their husband’s desks … Everyone provided cover for their families.’ But the Germans were not done with the Jewish council. On 16 August the building was blockaded and a selection imposed, followed by another raid ten days later. ‘The Council staff and their families were allocated three thousand numbers – to stay alive’, Szereszewska recalled. She and her daughter, who was a clerk for the council, were amongst the super-privileged. ‘But it doesn’t mean that all the others had to perish,’ she added rather casually. ‘The others could hide in empty houses, could even hide in the cellars at the Council, or they could escape to the Aryan side. Many people leaped through the hole in the wall in the attic. You could jump out onto the heaps of rubble, into the empty spaces.’ She did not say how many less fortunate than her survived through such expedients.⁹¹

Having cleared the southern segment of the ghetto, the Germans began striking at the workshops. In line with Himmler’s order that the remaining Jewish employees in the General Government should be closely supervised, blocks of houses around each enterprise were cleared for use as barracks and then fenced off to create what were in effect labour camps. Jews had fought to get employment in these establishments and, thanks to sympathetic Jewish managers, several became a haven for members of the underground, Oneg Shabbat activists, rabbis and scholars. Now, the Germans purged the swollen workshops one by one, eliminating anyone who lacked a job. There were hideous scenes as women were parted from husbands, children from parents. In consternation Lewin exclaimed, ‘the families are being deported (killed) and they want to leave behind only the working slaves for the time being. What horror! They are preparing to destroy us utterly.’ Rabbi Huberband was one of 1,600 wrenched from the Brushmakers’ on 18 August. Michael Zylberberg was luckier. Along with several rabbis he found shelter in the Landau workshop until he was picked out in a selection. He escaped from the Umschlagplatz with his wife, gained refuge in the Hoffman workshop, and survived a second selection there. His experience was not untypical.⁹²

Wladyslaw Szpilman had stopped playing the piano in cafes once the deportations started and frantically tried to get work certificates for himself and his family. To add to his woes, they were evicted from their home in the small ghetto and scrambled to find new lodgings. For a while Szpilman, his sisters, brother-in-law and father were employed by a friend in one of the warehouses processing the belongings taken from deported Jews. It doubled up as barracks for the workforce, but offered limited protection. On 16 August there was a selection and Szpilman was ejected from the workforce along with his father and sister. In his post-war memoir he remembered how they finally succumbed to exhaustion and malnutrition: ‘It was no use struggling any more.’ The Order Service took them to the Umschlagplatz. ‘When we arrived it was quite empty. People were walking up and down, searching for water. It was a hot, fine day in late summer.’ He noticed that people avoided a certain section of the compound. ‘Bodies lay there: the bodies of those killed yesterday for some crime or other, perhaps even for attempting to escape. Among the bodies of men were the corpses of a young woman and two girls with their skulls smashed to pieces. The wall under which the corpses lay showed clear traces of bloodstains and brain tissue.’ The Szpilmans managed to settle down until more and more people began to pour in. All were oppressed by ‘the atmosphere of leaden apathy reigning over the compound’. He spotted a young girl: ‘Her dress was torn and her hair dishevelled, as if she had been fighting someone. She muttered to herself, “Why did I do it? Why did I do it?”’ Whatever it was, it had failed to save her or her husband. The heat was now intense and the plaza was packed. There was no water. Some men talked of resistance, others argued it was folly. Szpilman’s sister and brother-in-law turned up out of a sense of family solidarity. At around six o’clock, Germans arrived to select people fit for work. When the selection was completed, the train pulled in. Now the number of Order Service and SS men was reinforced, but Szpilman had lost the will to resist. ‘We got ready to leave. Why wait. The sooner we were in the trucks the better.’ Suddenly, an OS man who knew him pulled Szpilman back from the wagons and told him to scram. He was momentarily torn between flight and accompanying his mother, father, sisters and brother-in-law to what he instantly understood was death. ‘Driven by compulsive animal fear, I ran for the streets, slipped into a column of [Jewish] Council workers just leaving the place, and got away through the gate that way.’⁹³

In the final stages of the clearance, all forms of political, communal and family solidarity broke down. Lewin observed the survivors of selections ‘thieving and looting insatiably’. He heard stories of mothers returning from the Umschlagplatz after making the most terrible choice of all: ‘they were separated from their children aged 3 to 12 to 14, and if they had identity papers, they were freed’. Between 19 and 20 August the Order Service was redeployed to the ghetto of Otwock to assist the Germans deport the entire population of a town that was once a pretty resort favoured by the Jewish bourgeoisie. Towards the end, Lewin wrote, ‘The human hand and pen are weary of describing all that has happened to the handful of Jews who are for the time being still alive, myself among them.’⁹⁴

The action reached its horrendous climax on 6 September. The previous day the Germans ordered the entire Jewish population to assemble in the nine blocks above Gesia Street between Smocza and Zamenhofa Streets at the northern tip of the ghetto, on the pretext of being issued with new registration documents. It was a huge trap: the Germans distributed 32,000 fresh identity cards, sometimes in the form of a tin disc with a number stamped on it. Those employed by the Jewish council, Order Service men, labourers sorting the vast piles of belongings pouring in from Treblinka and the contents of empty apartments, plus workers in SS enterprises received numbers. Factory and workshop managers were obliged to list the workers they needed; they too received cards or discs. No dependants were allowed. Anyone without a number was hauled off to the adjacent Umschlagplatz. Huge sums changed hands as those without a number bargained for a place in a workshop while others who were lucky tried to buy sanctuary for a loved one. Armed with documents provided by the Jewish council, Seidman intervened to rescue Emanuel Ringelblum, Maurycy Orzech, a Bundist leader, and the poet Yitzhak Katzenelson. He saw money changing hands, people dodging past distracted guards, and SS officers ‘in a jolly mood, laughing among themselves and cracking their whips against their shiny boots’. The process stretched over six agonizing days, in broiling heat. The Jews could eat and drink only what they had brought with them. Over 300 died in the ‘cauldron’, as it became known. Amidst the bedlam 2,648 were shot. When the blockade was lifted, 54,269 Jews had been removed. The great deportation was all but over. Roughly 10,300 Jews had been murdered in the ghetto, and another 11,580 had been sent to labour camps. According to the Germans’ count, 253,742 Jews had departed via the Umschlagplatz.⁹⁵

Since early August, the ghetto had a good idea of where they had gone. At first the information was sketchy and confused. On 6 August, Lewin jotted down ‘Treblinka (the place of execution?)’. Three days later he wrote, ‘It is now clear that 95 per cent of those [deported] are being taken to their deaths.’ By 11 August the name Treblinka had more substance, although the details of what happened there were garbled. ‘15 kilometres before the station at Treblinka the Germans take over the train. When people get out of the train they are beaten viciously. Then they are driven into huge barracks. For five minutes heart rending screams are heard, then silence.’ Finally, on 28 August, Lewin was one of those who heard an escapee, David Nowodworski, describe exactly what was going on at the death camp. ‘From his words we put together a testimony of such stark anguish, so shattering, that it cannot be grasped and put into words. This is without doubt the greatest crime ever committed in the whole of history … God! Are we to be exterminated down to the last of us? Now it is certain that all those deported from Warsaw have been killed.’ When Seidman heard similar testimony from Yaakov Rabinowitz, he could only write ‘words fail; me … All I want to do is cry, cry, and cry.’⁹⁶

Treblinka

Treblinka was the last extermination camp to be constructed and should have benefited from the experience gained at Belzec and Sobibor. In terms of location and layout it was similar to its precursors. The Germans picked a site near to an old labour camp on a spur line that branched off the local Malkinia–Seidlce railway that, in turn, connected with the main Warsaw–Bialystok railroad. The single-track spur ran along the western edge of the new camp, with a siding that extended through a gateway into the camp itself and alongside a platform that could accommodate twenty wagons at a time. Adjacent to the platform the Germans built a warehouse disguised as a train station. People disembarking from the wagons were assembled in a square, where an SS man informed them that they had to hand over their clothes and valuables before they were disinfected in shower rooms. Men and women were separated and then led into an enclosed area with two large barracks on either side. Men went into the one on the left and undressed; women and children went into the one on the right where they removed their clothing and where their hair was shaved off. These long wooden structures led out to a barbed wire corridor, ‘the tube’, that ended at the entrance to the gas chamber building. When it first opened, Treblinka had three chambers, each 4 by 4 metres and nearly 3 metres high. However, after several weeks these proved too small and two more were added. Even with this enlarged capacity Treblinka could not cope with the inflow of victims. Months after its inception a new gas chamber was opened with eight or ten cells of larger dimensions but lower in height. They had outward-opening trapdoors built into the exterior wall to enable removal of the dead. Jewish labourers dragged the corpses to mechanically excavated trenches and deep pits. The workforce servicing the gas chambers and the pits numbered about one hundred and lived in a self-contained barracks in the area known as the upper camp. Aside from the gas chamber building and the barracks for the workers, the space in the south-east corner was taken up by mass graves.⁹⁷

The camp was shaped like a lopsided oblong, wider at the south and tapering towards the north. At the southern extremity, across the reception zone and the sorting yard, was the ‘lazarette’. This mock first-aid hut was adorned with a red cross; in fact, it opened onto a pit which was used to dispose of the sick and the lame who could not make it to the gas chambers. A fire burned almost permanently in the depths of this cavity. Work Jews who could no longer function were also shot there and tossed into the flames. The Jewish workers who serviced the camp and served the SS lived in the lower camp in a horseshoe of huts known as ‘the ghetto’, an enclosed area that included a ground for morning and evening roll call. These prisoners cleaned the wagons after Jews had been disembarked, tidied up the platform and assembly square, removed the piles of belongings left behind by the victims, and sorted the huge quantities of clothing, personal effects and possessions of all kinds that spilled out of the bundles, backpacks and suitcases that were all that remained of the deportees. In the northern sector there were wooden buildings housing the quarters of the camp commandant, Dr Irmfried Eberl, and his office, several barracks for the Trawniki-trained Ukrainian guards, accommodation for the SS contingent, storage sheds, a garage and an armoury. At its greatest extent the entire complex was only 600 by 400 metres. The camp installations were surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, camouflaged with fresh foliage, and overlooked by five watchtowers on the perimeter plus one inside. An outer ring of barbed-wire entanglements and tank traps protected the whole area. Like Belzec, Treblinka had a small zoo for the amusement of the guards.⁹⁸

When Treblinka opened for business on 23 July, Belzec and Sobibor had been operating for months and yet the builders and managers of Treblinka seemed to have ignored the lessons learned by the killers in those places. First of all, the gas chambers were too small and too few. This caused a backlog of victims who either stood around in the reception area or were held in the wagons. In either case, they had the chance to assess their situation and react defensively. It was no coincidence that there were more documented acts of resistance by arriving deportees here than at other camps. The unloading process was so chaotic and the security so lax that dozens of Jews managed to escape before they actually entered the camp, several by leaping into the wagons of trains returning to Warsaw. The complacent planning and incompetent management of the camp had ghoulish consequences that threatened to disrupt its smooth operation in other ways. So many Jews died in the box-cars en route or while they were held for hours in suffocating conditions that dozens of bodies had to be stacked on the platform. Many Jews broke out of the stationary wagons, were shot and lay where they fell. The corpses of those who expired on the tracks were chopped up by trains. Arms, legs and body parts were scattered beside the spur line. Due to lack of time or manpower or simply lack of concern, Eberl failed to clear away this mess, so each arriving trainload of Jews was alarmed at the sight that greeted them. Nor were the SS personnel able to arrange the disposal of corpses from the gas chambers fast enough. Rotting bodies began to accumulate in the upper camp. It turned out that little thought had been given to the implications of burying tens of thousands of dead in mass graves. So many were buried at the same time, hurriedly and under a thin layer of sand, that the gases forming in the decomposing cadavers caused eruptions. The smell and the sound of these gaseous blasts vied for repulsiveness. Far from being a sanitized death factory, Treblinka ‘had the qualities of a crazed massacre’.⁹⁹

The first transports made the sixty-mile journey from Warsaw on 23 July. Since they were travelling along a major supply route for the German armies in Russia, they were frequently obliged to make way for priority trains. The journey could therefore take hours and Jews in the freight cars that could not be accommodated immediately at the platform had to wait still longer in the hot, airless compartments. Whenever transports paused in populated areas, Poles would attempt to sell water to the Jews trapped inside. Yankiel Wiernik was seized in a round-up in Warsaw on 23 August. His transport was detained at Malkinia junction overnight and into the next day. Squinting out he saw ‘peasants peddling bottles of water at 100 zlotys a piece’. Eddie Weinstein, deported from Losice in late August, recalled that Poles ‘carried buckets of water over to the cars and filled the bottles that passengers pushed out at them. But they charged dearly for each bottle. Polish money was not good; they would only accept hard currency or valuables such as rings, earrings and brooches.’ Sometimes the Poles split the proceeds with the guards.¹⁰⁰

At four in the afternoon, Wiernik’s train made the brief passage from Malkinia to the camp. ‘Only on arriving there’, he wrote in a wartime memoir composed while in hiding, ‘did the horrible truth dawn on us. The camp yard was littered with corpses, some still in their clothes and some naked, their faces distorted with fright and awe, black and swollen, the eyes wide open, with protruding tongues, skulls crushed, bodies mangled. And, blood everywhere …’ Once the train halted Weinstein was able to peek through a knot hole in the wall of his wagon. ‘All along the platform, corpses were piled up.’ When the surviving Jews clambered out ‘we were struck by the sickening stench of burning’. His train had taken so long to reach Treblinka that many had died. ‘We were ordered to remove from the train those who suffocated or lay motionless. In every car there were corpses, lying in every conceivable posture.’ The bodies, including those showing signs of life, were carried over to pits and tossed in. After a few hours he was assigned to Treblinka Station, a short way down the track, where he and other Jews were commanded to clear up the detritus from previous trains. ‘In addition to the bodies there were severed legs, arms, hands and other body parts lying between the railroad tracks.’ Back at the camp a guard shot and wounded Weinstein. He survived the next week under piles of clothing in one of the sorting sheds. Fortunately the transports stopped over that period and there was relative calm. When the deportations resumed, he slipped into the work crew at the platform and toiled until he was able to sneak onto a wagon leaving the camp. Wiernik was not so nimble or lucky. He inserted himself into a group of workers shifting baggage from the reception area and survived his first night sleeping on open ground. At dawn he and the others with him were woken and forced to drag corpses to the pits. ‘The corpses had already been lying around for quite some time and decomposition was already setting in, making the air foul with the stench of putrefaction. It often happened that an arm or a leg fell off when we put straps on them in order to drag them away. Thus we worked from dawn to dusk, without food or water, on what would some day be our own graves.’¹⁰¹

After four days of hauling cadavers, Wiernik was inducted into the regular workforce, the specialists who the Germans needed for skilled tasks: dentists and barbers to work at the gas chambers; builders, carpenters and sign-painters, to improve the camp structures; tailors, shoe-makers and metal workers to attend to the sartorial whims of the SS men and service the Ukrainians. The artisans who lived and worked in the ‘ghetto’ making boots, apparel, rings and other articles for the guards were dubbed ‘Hofjuden’ or court Jews. Wiernik, who was a trained joiner, was employed on the construction of the new gas chambers and the embellishment of the camp. In this role he was able to see most of what went on and witnessed the stream of transports when the camp resumed operations on 3 September. His testimony is one of the few that span the first frenzied phase of the camp’s existence, the pause for reorganization, the second period of massive killing and the final months.¹⁰²

Just under 200,000 Jews were deported from Warsaw to Treblinka and murdered there between 23 July and 28 August, roughly 5,400 per day. To this must be added some 51,000 Jews from the Radom district, 16,000 from the northern parts of the Lublin district, and an additional 45,000 Jews from towns around Warsaw like Otwock. This raises the average daily tally of murder to over 8,400 souls. The torrent of doomed humanity overwhelmed Eberl and his small complement of Germans and Ukrainians, although there is also evidence that the commandant was not up to the job. He failed to warn the Gestapo in Warsaw to slow down the deportations, call for reinforcements, or devise ways to handle the mass of arrivals more efficiently. Eberl’s mismanagement came to light when Christian Wirth visited Treblinka in his capacity as the new inspector of the Operation Reinhard camps. He was accompanied by his boss, Odilo Globocnik. Even this pair, hardened to the business of mass atrocity as they were, could see there was a problem. Josef Oberhauser, Wirth’s deputy, later recounted that ‘In Treblinka everything was in a state of collapse. The camp was overstocked. Outside the camp, a train with deportees was unable to be unloaded as there was simply no more room. Many corpses of Jews were lying inside the camp. These corpses were already bloated.’ Wirth relieved Eberl of his authority and arranged for Franz Stangl, commandant of Sobibor, to take over. Sobibor was temporarily dormant while the rail line serving the camp was strengthened to take the unusually frequent and heavy traffic generated by the mass killing programme, so Stangl had time on his hands. In the end, he stayed to run Treblinka, assisted by Kurt Franz, who had worked at Belzec. Together they cleaned up the place, although it was necessary to halt the transports for several days to get the job done. The new management also set about expanding the number and size of the gas chambers. In mid-October, the improved facility came on stream. It boasted a brick building with ten gas chambers, each 4 by 8 metres, leading off a central passageway. A Star of David was placed over the entrance and pot plants graced the steps up to the doorway. Skilled Jewish tradesmen did the actual work of building and decoration. One of them was Yankiel Wiernik. Later he wrote, ‘The work on these gas-chambers lasted five weeks … We had to work from dawn to dusk under the ceaseless threat of beatings with whips and rifle-butts … [but] our spiritual sufferings were far worse. New transports of victims arrived each day. They were ordered to disrobe immediately and were led to the three gas chambers, going past us on the way. Many of us saw our children, wives and members of our families among the victims … We constructed death-chambers for ourselves and our brethren under such conditions.’¹⁰³

On 3 September, the trains started rolling through Malkinia junction again, past the little Treblinka Station, and up the spur line to the camp. Amongst the first to arrive were the 52,000 Jews caught in the Warsaw ghetto ‘cauldron’, followed a few days later by 2,200 members of the Order Service and their families. However, after that there were no more transports from Warsaw until early 1943. Instead, deportees converged on Treblinka from ghettos across the General Government, including 40,000 from Czestochowa between 21 September and 5 October, 10,000 from Zelechow on 2 October, 11,000 from Ostrowiec on 11–12 October, and 22,000 from Piotrokow on 15–25 October. In total, approximately 380,000 Jews from the region, apart from Warsaw, ended up in the Treblinka death pits. They were followed by trainloads from the Bialystok district, with 38,900 from the county of Kelbasin alone. According to a report sent to Berlin by Hermann Höfle at the close of 1942, in 155 days the Treblinka extermination camp accounted for 713,555 lives – an average of 4,600 a day or nearly 200 per hour. It was the most lethal place on earth.¹⁰⁴

Stangl made this astonishing throughput possible partly by reorganizing the camp so that experienced personnel attended to each stage of the murder process. Instead of relying on terrified groups of men plucked out of the crowd milling around the platform or the assembly square, he established permanent teams with specific tasks that they could master and perfect, carrying them out quickly and efficiently. There were Sonderkommandos to work on the platform, clean the wagons, remove the baggage and bundles, sort the stuff, process the valuables, and constantly ensure that the buildings looked bright and innocuous. In the extermination area, he mandated crews to clean the gas chambers, haul the dead, pull out the gold teeth, and man the pits. There were service and maintenance workers in both camps to ensure that the labourers were fed and that all the machinery ran smoothly. A sanitation team took care of the latrines. For the first time, women were brought into the camp to clean and cook for the Jews in the lower camp, the Hofjuden. Each team worked under a kapo who enforced discipline and acted as the eyes and ears of the SS.¹⁰⁵

Yankiel Wiernik recorded how the improved system worked. Each time a new transport arrived the Jews were reassured on the platform that they were going to be resettled. All they had to do for the moment was surrender their valuables, get undressed and shower. At this stage, hope was their greatest enemy; only Jews who knew they had nothing to lose rebelled. Then ‘the women and children were herded into the barracks at once, while the men were kept in the yard. The men were ordered to undress, while the women, naively anticipating a chance to take a shower, unpacked towels and soap. The brutal guards, however, shouted orders for quiet, and kicked and dealt out blows. The children cried, while the grownups moaned and screamed. This made things even worse; the whipping only became crueller. The women and girls were then taken to the “barber shop” to have their hair clipped. By now they felt sure that they would be taken to have a shower. Then they were escorted, through another exit, to Camp No. 2 where, in freezing weather, they had to stand in the nude, waiting their turn to enter the gas chamber, which had not yet been cleared of the last batch of victims. All through that winter, small children, stark naked and barefooted, had to stand out in the open for hours on end, awaiting their turn in the increasingly busy gas chambers. The soles of their feet froze and stuck to the icy ground. They stood and cried; some of them froze to death. In the meantime, Germans and Ukrainians walked up and down the ranks, beating and kicking the victims.’ Once Jews were naked, confined to the barracks, the courtyard or the tube they were easy prey. Rifle butts, bayonets, whips and vicious dogs kept them in line and moving forward. The sadism shown by the guards was not simply for personal gratification: it was deliberately terrifying. But despite all Stangl’s reforms, the process remained liable to disruption. In particular, the engine producing the fatal gas frequently malfunctioned, ‘so the helpless victims had to suffer for hours on end before they died. Satan himself could not have devised a more fiendish torture. When the chambers were opened again, many of the victims were only half dead and had to be finished off with rifle butts, bullets or powerful kicks. Often people were kept in the gas chambers overnight with the motor not turned on at all. Overcrowding and lack of air killed many of them in a very painful way. However, many survived the ordeal of such nights; particularly the children showed a remarkable degree of resistance. They were still alive when they were dragged out of the chambers in the morning, but revolvers used by the Germans made short work of them …’¹⁰⁶

The Ukrainian guards delighted in robbing the Jews and pilfering from their belongings when the eyes of the SS were turned the other way. In the surrounding villages they became well known for chucking around cash, jewellery and gold. Young women gravitated to the local taverns looking for a rich boyfriend or a guard willing to to pay for sex. Men selling trinkets hung around as near to the camp as they could get; it was a bonanza. In camp, the Ukrainians could freely indulge their appetites. Wiernik reported that ‘When they had eaten and drunk their fill, the Ukrainians looked around for other amusements. They frequently selected the best looking Jewish girls from the transports of nude women passing their quarters, dragged them into their barracks, raped them and then delivered them to the gas chambers. After being outraged by their executioners, the girls died in the gas chambers with all the rest. It was a martyr’s death.’¹⁰⁷

The immediate impact on the Jewish prisoners of witnessing such horrors was unbearable. Many selected for the Sonderkommandos committed suicide shortly after learning what the camp was for and the fate that had befallen their loved ones. Chil Rajchman was deported to Treblinka from Lubartow in October 1942. He was put to work carrying bundles, sorting clothes and cutting hair, almost without respite. One day he was assigned to the corpse-carrying Sonderkommando and saw the technique for filling the pits: standing atop the bodies ready to receive a fresh cadaver tipped in by the corpse-carriers was ‘a Jew, who lays the bodies out straight like herrings’. Some men were unable to stand this. ‘Every morning,’ Rajchman wrote in a memoir composed while hiding in Warsaw in 1944–5, ‘we notice that there are people hanging in the barracks.’ He recalled a father and his son who had ‘been in this hell for two days. They decided to commit suicide. Having only one strap between them, they agreed that the father would hang himself first and after that the son would take him down and use the same strap to hang himself. That is in fact how it happened.’ Sometimes one man would pull on the legs of another to speed his demise.¹⁰⁸

However, the longer the work Jews hung on, the stronger became their will to fight back. They were inspired by increasingly regular instances of resistance from Jews arriving from ghettos that had been alerted to the fate awaiting deportees. The struggle began on the trains, with more and more attempting to hack their way through the floorboards. On 10 or 11 September, a deportee on a transport from Warsaw attacked an SS man, Max Bialas, with a concealed knife and fatally wounded him. Thereafter the Germans ordered the Jews to proceed to the undressing sheds with their hands in the air. But that did not stop melees breaking out on the platform. Before the year was out, Jews from Siedlce had to be subdued by gunfire. In October, ten Jews from Ostrowiec Swietokrzyski in Kielce district started resisting in the gas chamber building, forcing the guards to open fire. Rajchman was picked to help clean up the next day and saw ‘The whole corridor of the structure with the three smaller gas chambers was filled with dead bodies. The floor was covered with ankle deep dried blood.’ Two months later hundreds of young men from Grodno, transported from the Kelbasin labour camp, rioted on the threshold of the chambers. Again the guards and SS men resorted to their rifles and submachine guns, turning the building into a bullet-spattered bloodbath requiring extensive repairs and redecoration. The permanent labour force made such renovations possible in a very short time, but it also meant that the prisoners were able to observe more of what was going on and to form a cohesive community capable of resistance. When the transports slowed over the winter of 1942–3 hunger and disease took a toll on the workforce, but the remission gave them time to reflect and begin planning. Out of the deepest despair, the will to resist was crystallizing.¹⁰⁹

The ghettos of the Ostland, Belarus and Ukraine

It was typical of the inconsistent and confused nature of Nazi anti-Jewish policy that while the Jews of the Wartheland and the General Government faced near-total extinction during 1942, the Jews penned inside the ghettos of the Baltic region and the district of Bialystok were left virtually undisturbed. There were equally sharp distinctions within the Ostland, between the northern part containing the ghettos of Vilnius and Kovno, and western Byelorussia, including the ghettos of Minsk, Novogrudok, Baranovichi, Slonim and Slutsk. In the southern portion of the Ostland, as across the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, the Germans engaged in a murderous ‘second sweep’ through Jewish population centres that had survived the first wave of mass shooting by the Einsatzgruppen, SS units, order police and auxiliaries between July and December 1942. In the far south, Einsatzgruppe D resumed its advance in the wake of Army Group South and began to perpetrate massacres on the model of the previous year. The second onslaught, like the first, was punctuated by arguments over the preservation of Jewish skilled labour. Hence the process appears erratic, with some towns being visited two or more times by killing units while, elsewhere, significant numbers were spared immediate execution. The ‘second sweep’ was generally associated with anti-partisan actions, and the resources devoted to wiping out Jewish communities cannot be disentangled easily from German efforts to suppress the escalating unrest in the occupied territories. Unlike 1941, this time the Germans and their collaborators encountered planned resistance, spontaneous opposition, carefully prepared evasion, and mass breakouts from ghettos. Sizeable groups of Jewish fugitives reached the forests and marshes in Volhynia, Polesie, Podolia and western Ukraine. Most roamed around individually or in small, disorganized clusters; few of them survived the subsequent Jew-hunts, the hostile attention of the local population, or the harsh environment. But some coalesced into partisan groups or found their way to existing guerrilla units. The Germans’ tendency to conflate Jews with partisans began to acquire a tenuous hold in reality.¹¹⁰

The killing began in March, once the ground had thawed sufficiently for the Germans to prepare mass graves. This was also the moment at which the Russian winter offensive petered out and the Germans were able to redeploy security troops to the rear areas. The Minsk ghetto was amongst the first communities to be struck. There were 49,000 Jews there, including deportees from the Reich. The head of the Jewish council, Ilya Mushkin, was a communist and had long presided over secret contacts between the underground in the ghetto and Soviet resistance networks in the city. In Minsk the Germans’ belief that Jews were associated with the partisans was certainly no fantasy. In February, the German civil authorities issued orders for the Jewish council to prepare the deportation of non-working inhabitants. The council refused to comply and was duly purged: Mushkin was arrested, tortured and executed. Due to this non-compliance, German security police with Latvian and Ukrainian auxiliaries had to comb through the ghetto, conducting round-ups that left hundreds dead. Einsatzgruppe A estimated that 3,412 Jews were shot in the operation on 2 March (timed to coincide with the Jewish festival of Purim), but the number was probably twice that. A tailor who worked in the October textile factory later told a war crimes investigator that Wilhelm Kube personally supervised the selection of skilled workers. The others were loaded onto trains that went in the direction of Molodechno, where they were shot. ‘Along the route by which they were being transported,’ he alleged, ‘the German guards would come into the cars packed with people and select young, beautiful girls, take them away and rape them.’ The Minsk Gestapo carried out a number of smaller massacres over the following months, often at night. These nocturnal raids were intended to strike at Jews identified as supporters of the partisans. ‘Every night except Saturdays and Sundays,’ recalled a survivor, ‘the mobile gas vans rolled up to the gates of the ghetto.’ However, the Sipo-SD men were unable to dislodge the underground. Instead, platoons of young men under the command of Hersh Smolar and Nahum Feldman were regularly smuggled out to join Soviet partisans in the nearby forests. The new chairman of the Jewish council, Moshe Yaffe, covertly supported their work until he was arrested and executed along with several colleagues. On 28–31 July, the Germans again separated those they declared useful from those deemed useless. Holders of work permits, now issued with a coloured patch for their garments, were held in a factory; the rest were corralled in Jubilee Square. About 25,000–30,000 Jews, including over 3,000 from Germany, were then removed from the ghetto, some in gas vans, others to killing sites such as the concentration camp at Maly Trostinets. By the end of the cull only 10,000–12,000 Jewish workers remained in Minsk.¹¹¹

Massacres associated with the selection of work Jews occurred in dozens of other places. In Baranovichi, where 18,000 Jews lived in the ghetto, 6,000 work certificates were issued. Over 2,000 inhabitants were shot in early March, after which there was a long pause until the killers returned in the autumn and slaughtered a further 6,000 people. The Slutsk ghetto was divided into two sections, with 1,000 Jews in ghetto ‘A’ and 5,000 workers in ghetto ‘B’. The non-employed Jews were shot. Slonim, where the population had long been divided between those with skills and those without, was the target of repeated round-ups between late April and late July. Here an anti-fascist committee had been in touch with local partisans for months and Jews started excavating bunkers as soon as the ghetto, containing 10,000–15,000 people (including Jews from surrounding villages), was sealed at the end of 1941. Gershon Kvint, second head of the Jewish council, provided cover for the resistance and encouraged Jews to defend themselves. Consequently, when the Germans attempted to eliminate those considered surplus to their needs they encountered fierce opposition. They had to burn the Jews out of their houses and faced gunfire from armed units of the underground. Eventually they threw in security police, Lithuanian auxiliaries, soldiers from the garrison and Organisation Todt construction workers; even Kube’s chauffeur lent a hand. After days of mayhem, 800 artisans and professionals were confined to a small ghetto while hundreds more were moved to labour camps. Most of the former were shot in August and the ghetto was finally liquidated at the end of the year. Over the intervening months large groups made their way to the forests and joined partisan units or entered ‘family camps’ – camouflaged encampments maintained and defended by Jewish fighters.¹¹²

At the end of July, Wilhelm Kube wrote to Reichskommissar Lohse that Jews in Byelorussia were the ‘main bearer of the partisan movement … Consequently, I and the SD would like it best if Jewry in the Generalbezirk Byelorussia was finally eliminated.’ He intended to reduce them to a few thousand in work camps. ‘Then there will be no further danger of partisans being able to rely to any great extent on Jewry … For the time being the essential requirements of the Wehrmacht, the main employer of the Jews, are being taken into consideration.’ The Jewish inhabitants of Glubkoye, Doksytse and Luzhki were wiped out on this pretext, but in each case some Jews managed to evade the killers or escape to the forests. Four hundred and fifty men in the Order Service in Baranovichi went over to the partisans en masse. Dozens of Jews from Novogrudok, the survivors of earlier massacres plus deportees from other towns, defied the Germans and their own Jewish council to seek refuge with the forest fighters led by Tuvia Bielski and his brothers. In September 1942, an underground leadership crystallized and began planning a mass breakout in cooperation with the Bielskis, although this ambitious scheme did not come to fruition for many months. Five hundred Jews of Lida ignored the admonitions of their Jewish council and left for the woods. Throughout western Byelorussia small but significant numbers of Jews benefited from a conjunction of benign circumstances: thinly spread German garrisons, extensive swamps and dense woodland, and the presence of organized Soviet partisan units. Several of these were all-Jewish groups: Kube’s apprehensions had been fulfilled, if not on anywhere near the scale that he imagined. Towards the end of the year, 8,350 Jews were killed in ‘Operation Swamp Fever’, an anti-partisan sweep. Most of them had fled from towns and villages, clinging on to life in marshes and timberland. When winter came only 15,000–16,000 working Jews were left alive in camps and ghettos in western Byelorussia; perhaps 6,000–7,000 were living precariously in the forests.¹¹³

The resumption of mass shootings in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine began a little later. The 8,000 Jews of Kobrin, in the north-west of the region, were visited first in July, when 3,000 were murdered, and finished off in October. The second assault met armed resistance and 500 Jews broke through the cordon around the town. Few, however, survived the ensuing manhunt. The ghetto in Brest-Litovsk (consisting of a small and a large section) had only been sealed in the previous December and until then young Jews had been able to establish ties with the communist resistance, accumulating a small arsenal. Conditions were miserable. An Italian soldier passing through Brest on a troop train recalled Jews begging for assistance at the station: ‘all women, still elegant, high-class people. They came to ask us for a loaf of bread – say “bread, kaput” and let us know with gestures that the Germans are going to kill them all.’ True to this prediction, most of the 18,000–20,000 Jews were murdered on 15–16 October 1942. Despite preparations to resist, a feint by the Germans lulled the Jewish underground into thinking they had deflected the blow. When the Germans returned they were caught off guard. Nevertheless, about 4,000 inhabitants were able to hide or resist and it was not until November that the ghetto was subdued. Pinsk, sitting astride a strategic artery of Army Group Centre repeatedly targeted by Soviet partisans, was identified by Himmler personally as a Jewish resistance nest. The ghetto, with 12,000–15,000 local Jews and deportees, was surrounded on 27 October and assaulted two days later. Hundreds of Jewish youngsters threw themselves at the lines of Germans and auxiliary police, but few got through. By early November the ghetto was emptied apart from 150 artisans and health workers. They too were shot before the end of the year. In Kamenets-Podolsk, in April 1942, the Germans entombed 2,500 Jews from the ghetto in a disused phosphate mine. The other half of the population were shot later in the autumn. And so it went on, in Staro Konstantinov, Sheptovska, Proskurov and dozens of other towns.¹¹⁴

At the start of 1942, there were approximately 270,000–290,000 Jews in Volhynia and Polesie, plus about 20,000 in Podolia. In late August, the Gebietskommissar met with Erich Koch and agreed that the area should be totally cleared of Jews. The subsequent operations followed a pattern with distinctive and revealing features. The mass shootings were carried out close to the doomed ghetto, in the open, and with no attempt at concealment. The Germans did not anticipate that the local Ukrainian population would protest or intervene. Although the Sipo-SD was in control of the process, the army and Organisation Todt assisted extensively when it came to excavating death pits and providing manpower for cordons or shooting parties. The bulk of the personnel came from order police and Ukrainian gendarmes or Schutzmannschaften, a high proportion of whom were ethnic Germans. Local collaboration was crucial for success. Once the forces for a clearance had been assembled they would proceed to the town and establish a cordon around the ghetto or Jewish residential district. The Jews would be ordered to assemble in a square or on a meadow or playing field where Sipo-SD men would inspect their papers, setting aside those with certificates indicating that they were employed by German-run enterprises. The unfortunates categorized as immediately expendable would be marched under a tight escort to pits dug on the outskirts, told to strip naked, and then shot by teams of riflemen. The property of the victims, in the ghetto and at the killing site, was then distributed or shipped to central storage facilities. Often local inhabitants descended on the deserted ghetto and stripped it bare even as the victims were being marched away.¹¹⁵

However, in distinction to the Einsatzgruppen operations in 1941, there was far more resistance and disruption. This was especially the case in ghettos assailed towards the end of the year. In Dubno, the ghetto was split in two and 5,000 Jews shot on 26–27 May. Deportees from the surrounding area took their place and were shot in October. In Kovel the ghetto was not established until May, but it was immediately used to separate working from non-working inhabitants. On 2 June, 6,000 were murdered in a nearby quarry. The rest were shot in mid-August, but about 1,000 fled before they could be executed. Most were caught over the following days and done to death. As the killing extended into the summer, more and more Jews were forewarned of what was coming. The Rovno ghetto, with 5,000 inhabitants, was cut down on 13 July, but many escaped to the forests. Hundreds amongst the 9,000 Jews in Kremenets evaded the two mass shootings on 15 July and 20 August. Around 2,000 Jews made their way out of Lutsk before the slaughterers arrived and dealt with the 15,000–16,000 who stayed. Tragically, most of the escapees found life in the wild impossible and drifted back to town, where they were rounded up and shot. When the Germans set about annihilating the Sarny ghetto in late August, 1,000 Jews, roughly one fifth of the population, rushed the fences and hundreds reached woodland. The 18,000 Jews in Ludmir were ghettoized in April and then divided the following month. In early September, 14,000 were shot, but large numbers managed to conceal themselves. The Germans paid a return visit two months later and massacred the 4,000–5,000 who thought they had survived the worst. Only a few hundred artisans were preserved. In just under seventy days, the Germans and their assistants had butchered 150,000 Jews.¹¹⁶

Jews who fled before an action or were able to escape during the chaos of a murder operation often fell victim to the Germans and their helpers in the days or weeks afterwards. In northern and eastern Volhynia their immediate survival was assisted by the swampy terrain and dense woods that lay within close reach of urban areas. The region was sparsely policed and the Germans tended to avoid the forests unless they were present in force on an anti-partisan mission. But it was a forbidding environment in the long-term. Without food, sturdy clothing, blankets or cooking utensils it was hard to endure for more than a short time – even in benign weather. Consequently it was common for starving Jews to drift back to their deserted ghetto thinking the coast was clear, only to face betrayal by the local collaborationist police. Sometimes the Germans would make a return sweep. Only the most wary and hardiest survived long enough to dig a bunker or form a group capable of extracting food from local peasants. In the western strip, bordering Galicia, there was less dense timberland and the population was far more hostile. To make matters worse the refugees were more likely to encounter Ukrainian guerrillas or Polish nationalist fighters who were murderously anti-Semitic, rather than the better-disciplined and marginally more welcoming Soviet partisans.¹¹⁷

In the western Ukraine, the slaughter was barely mitigated by the need for labour. The ghettos in Vinnitsa, Berdichev, Illintsy and Khmelnik were wiped out between March and June. A few hundred artisans clung to life here and there or eked out an existence in labour camps. But by the end of 1942 there were no ghettos left in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine and almost no working Jews.¹¹⁸

The German army continued to preside over massacres in the areas under its jurisdiction, such as Smolensk, where 2,000 Jews were executed in July, as well as the territories it overran during its heady advance between June and September 1942. The fall of Sebastopol enabled the Einsatzkommando in the Crimea to gun down 4,200 Jews trapped in the port. Einsatzgruppe D was able to carry out a much more formidable operation when the capture of Rostov delivered 16,000–18,000 Jews into its hands. All were murdered between August 1942 and February 1943. The Sipo-SD massacred unknown thousands of Jewish refugees from the western USSR who had been evacuated to the Caucasus or sought refuge there under their own steam. Einsatzkommando 10 carried out several well-practised exercises when it entered conquered cities behind the spearheads of the 17th Army and 4th Panzer Army. The victims included 13,000 in Krasnodar, 2,500 in Stavropol, 2,800 in Piatagorsk, and no less than 39,000–47,000 in the surrounding districts. The murderers were temporarily befuddled when they encountered the mountain Jews of the Caucasus and paused for long scholarly consultations with Berlin experts as to whether these Kalmyks and Nalchicks were Jews at all. The latter were declared non-racial Jews and left alone, but only a handful of the former survived. About 7,000 of these ancient Jewish tribesmen were exterminated. The Germans were assisted in their work in the Crimea and the Caucasus by a battalion of Muslims raised from captured Soviet prisoners of war.¹¹⁹

A thousand miles away, in the Galicia district, the army played a contrary role by protesting against the wanton destruction of valuable skilled workers. Between April and June 1942, while Belzec was undergoing reconstruction, the Sipo-SD and the SS police leaders resorted to mass shootings to maintain the momentum of ghetto clearances. On 26 June, 6,000–8,000 Lwow Jews were shot in the precincts of the Janowska camp as part of an effort by the security police to rationalize the number of legitimate workers and, not coincidentally, to deny the civil authorities any role in the labour supply. From that point only Jews with documents issued by the Sipo-SD would be spared execution. When the ‘second sweep’ erupted into Galicia, Jews with papers provided by the army were snatched up, deported or shot. In mid-July, the 27,000 Jews in the Przemysl ghetto were provided with 5,000 new work permits. Then the ghetto was encircled and 13,000 permitless, workless Jews dispatched to Belzec. A month later, the Jewish population of Lwow was purged again. However, so many Jews were now attempting to escape from the trains to Belzec that they were stripped naked before they were put aboard in the hope that this would render them less inclined to break out. The number that smashed their way through the wagon floors of one transport was so numerous that the guards firing at them ran out of ammunition and were reduced to throwing stones at the fleeing cargo. In September the security police staged a final round-up, during which the Jewish council was hanged and 5,000–6,000 sent to Belzec. Afterwards the Germans ordered a census and issued 12,000 permits to the remnant working in SS-run enterprises or armaments factories. Similar, massive purges occurred in Stanislav, Tarnopol, Drohobych and Buczacz. The Jewish population in Stanislav was reduced from about 17,000 to 4,000 by a mixture of shootings and deportations to Belzec. The Tarnopol ghetto was brutally shrunk from around 12,000 down to 3,000 working Jews.¹²⁰

With no end to these repeated decimations in sight, on 18 September, General Kurt von Gienanth, the senior army officer in the General Government, advised the army high command that ‘The immediate removal of the Jews would cause a considerable reduction in Germany’s war potential as well as supplies to the front …’ He was not objecting to the murder of Jews as such; he merely wanted time for the army to find and train east European workers to replace them. Fritz Katzmann, the Higher SS Police Leader for Galicia, replied with a compromise. Working Jews could be held back from deportation as long as they were confined to camps under the control of the security police, in barracks adjacent to the industries they were serving. The employers of this labour force would have to provide quarters for the Jews and pay for them, too, guaranteeing the SS a profit. As a result of the army’s self-interested intervention, 140,000–150,000 Jews remained alive. Towards the end of the year, Katzmann reported to the SS Head Office in Berlin that 254,989 Jews from the district had been ‘evacuated or moved elsewhere’. But Himmler’s aspiration to clear the General Government entirely of Jews had been thwarted.¹²¹