The war economy and the expansion of Auschwitz

The concentration camp outside the Polish town of Oswieçim in Upper Silesia, renamed Auschwitz following the German conquest of Poland, became a nodal point for the exploitation of labour by the SS and a focus of Himmler’s ambitions to create an industrial empire. For all that, it did not impinge on the fate of the Jews until spring 1942. Then, for about six months, Jews from several countries were sent there for slave labour at the same time as it was used as a place to kill local Jews, mainly from East Upper Silesia, who were deemed surplus to the workforce. In July 1942 the much expanded camp was haphazardly integrated into the ‘final solution’. Throughout the second half of the year, the extension camp at Birkenau was employed as a site for improvised mass murder while purpose-built killing facilities were being constructed. However, as with so many of his grandiose plans, Himmler’s aspirations for Auschwitz took an inordinately long time to realize and when they reached maturity it looked as though the moment for them had passed.¹²²

Auschwitz was conceived as a concentration camp in which to detain and terrorize Poles. It was the brainchild of Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, when he was an SS police leader in occupied Poland in late 1939. One of his assistants located what seemed to be the ideal setting for a terror camp: a vacant Polish army barracks just outside the town, adjacent to a railway line and close to a junction with the main Katowice–Cracow railway. However, there were disadvantages: the buildings were in poor repair, the surrounding land was marshy, and both the sewage disposal system and fresh water supply were inadequate. In January 1940, Rudolf Höss, commandant of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, led the last of several SS commissions to survey the site. He approved it. Three months later, Himmler appointed Höss to command the new establishment and it took all his drive plus ingenuity to obtain the necessary materials to complete the job. Höss did not lack for labour, though: he used 300 Jews from the town to do much of the heavy manual work. After that was completed, the Jews were banished; not a single Jew set foot inside Auschwitz concentration camp for almost two years. Instead, it was soon packed with Polish political prisoners who endured the customary SS camp regimen of pettifogging rules enforced by extreme violence. Höss brought with him from Sachsenhausen thirty veteran prisoners, criminals, who served as the core of the internal prisoner administration, the kapos. They ensured that life in the camp was brutish and miserable.¹²³

At this stage, Auschwitz consisted of twenty two-storey brick barracks to hold the prisoners, plus wooden stables and a former tobacco warehouse. The barracks complex was enclosed by barbed wire and entered through a gate that was topped off with a curvaceous wrought-iron sign announcing ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’, ‘work is liberating’. As more prisoners arrived, the parade ground was partially built over and the enclosure became crowded with additional structures. An ammunition storage bunker located just outside was converted into a mortuary. From the start, mortality at Auschwitz was high and the Germans were keen to ensure that bodies were promptly disposed of. Corpses of deceased prisoners had to be transported to a municipal crematorium until the specialist firm Topf and Sons installed furnaces in the mortuary.¹²⁴

In September 1940, Oswald Pohl, who ran SS business activities, saw Auschwitz and recognized its potential for economic development. The following month Himmler designated Auschwitz as the cornerstone of far-reaching plans to Germanize what used to be south-east Poland, employing tens of thousands of slave labourers to build the infrastructure. To begin with, about 80,000 Poles, including the entire Jewish population, were evicted from the town and its surroundings to be replaced by a few thousand ethnic Germans. To fund this gigantic project Himmler did a deal with the industrial conglomerate I. G. Farben. In March 1941, he toured the area in the company of senior executives from the corporation and offered them a site in the SS ‘interest zone’ complete with slave labour for the construction of a plant to manufacture synthetic oil, called Buna. In return for Monowitz, I. G. Farben agreed to provide capital and construction material to enlarge Auschwitz and build sub-camps. Subsequently, Himmler ordered the expansion of the main camp from 10,000 to 30,000 prisoners and the creation of an entirely new one to hold 100,000 anticipated prisoners of war from the Red Army. However, the invasion of Russia temporarily slowed development. In October, Karl Bischoff arrived from the SS main business office to take matters in hand. He reorganized the budget and increased the projected labour force from 97,000 to 125,000, without planning for any extra accommodation or amenities. In the event, the flood of prisoner labour from the Eastern Front never materialized. The SS builders had to make do with a mere 10,000 Russians, who were assigned to the erection of a sprawling sub-camp on the site of a village called Brzezinka, about a mile away, renamed Birkenau by the Germans. The conditions for these men as they toiled through the winter were so abominable that only 2,000 were still alive the following February. The failure of Operation Barbarossa and the callous expenditure of human life in the course of building the second camp obliged Himmler to look elsewhere for slaves. Six days after the meeting at Wannsee to coordinate the ‘final solution’ across Europe, the Reichsführer of the SS gave instructions to Richard Glücks, director of the concentration camps, that 100,000 Jewish men and 50,000 Jewish women were to be sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau for use as labour. According to the historian of the concentration camps, Nikolaus Wachsmann, ‘The decision to substitute Jews for Soviet POWs was taken impulsively at the top of the Nazi state.’¹²⁵

Himmler’s brusquely formulated instructions to Glücks created a paradox. On the one hand, preparations were under way for the mass extermination of Jews in Poland and Adolf Eichmann was beginning to plan the deportation of increased numbers of Jews from Germany, the Protectorate and western Europe to ‘the east’. On the other hand, Himmler was diverting Jews capable of work into the concentration camp system, from which they had practically disappeared. In April, he specifically exempted Jews aged 16–35 from being sent to death camps. Instead, 17,000 Slovak Jews were sent to Auschwitz to enter the labour force there and another 40,000 went to camps in the Lublin district, although many would be murdered on arrival. Some 35,000 Polish Jews from Upper Silesian ghettos and labour camps were also shifted to Auschwitz and into work details. Jews arriving on transports from western Europe were inducted into the camp population for months before death became the routine fate of all but a few aboard the trains. This process turned Birkenau into a Jewish concentration camp and, eventually, reshaped the concentration camp population as a whole. To make matters even more puzzling, Birkenau was simultaneously being used as an improvised killing site where Jews who were capable of work were murdered.¹²⁶

The apparent contradiction is partially explained by the febrile mood of the Nazi leadership between the winter crisis on the Russian front and the stumbling progress of Operation Blau. During the first three months of the year Nazi bosses accepted that it was not going to be a short war and grasped that it was necessary both to improve the performance of the war economy and deal with the shortage of labour. Himmler jumped on the crisis to strengthen the position of the SS, turning the population of the concentration camps into a labour resource for the war industries. The first SS strategy, exemplified by the I. G. Farben plant at Monowitz, was to use prisoners to construct plants on green-field sites near to existing camps. However, this approach largely foundered. Albert Speer, minister for armaments, did not want to lose control of weapons production to Himmler, and industry was reluctant to place itself in thrall to the SS. After much argument the SS conceded that it made more sense to send prisoner labour to existing factories and house them in camps rather than start production units entirely from scratch. This marked a retreat from the triumphalist projects and overweening settlement schemes of the summer, when anything seemed possible, and reflected the awareness that a decisive victory had again eluded the Reich. On 25 September 1942, Hitler personally adjudicated a settlement under which the SS would in effect rent labour to industry. This agreement accelerated the development of SS-run labour camps servicing munitions factories in which the prisoners were predominantly Jewish. But the revaluation of Jewish workers did not mark a rupture with the previous months of unmitigated extermination.¹²⁷

Under the September 1942 agreement, the SS were paid for Jewish labour at a rate of 3–4 Reichsmarks per person per day. Therefore, as soon as a Jew became unable to work he or she became a liability. Moreover, the apparently endless supply of Jews made it rational to examine and cull the workforce repeatedly to remove those no longer fit for the tasks they were expected to perform – the so-called ‘selections’ – and replace them. Jews unable to work were then sent to killing facilities to be murdered or just left to expire. Productivity standards also proved lethal. Because they were under-fed and usually ill, they tended to be less productive than non-Jewish workers. In the absence of better nutrition and medical care, the only way to improve their productivity was to extend the working day, which increased their inanition. Furthermore, since Jews were engaged predominantly in unskilled manual labour, notably construction, there was no need to train substitutes and no cost to letting them go. In other words, the drive to employ Jews was perfectly compatible with mass murder. Exploiting them for labour before murdering them actually compensated for the cost of deporting them in the first place. This procedure became known colloquially as ‘annihilation through labour’, although there was no comprehensive programme as such. In fact, the phrase was coined by the minister for justice, Otto Thierack, in September 1942, with reference to a specific mission to comb out prisons in the Reich and transfer certain categories of inmate to the concentration camps where they would be worked to death. The notion was applied retrospectively and inaccurately to the fate of the Jews. In actuality, work offered a lifeline to them and more would survive in labour camps than as fugitives from ghettos.¹²⁸

The Jews enter Auschwitz

The first Jews to enter the Auschwitz concentration camp came from Slovakia. They were the victims of the Hlinka Slovak People’s Party, which had ruled the country since it declared unilateral independence from Czecho-Slovakia in March 1939. The Hlinka Party was led by Jozef Tiso, a Roman Catholic priest, who became prime minister and then president of the new country. For Tiso, the 89,000 Jews of Slovakia were Christ-killers who could not be equal citizens in a Christian state. He stripped them of their rights and reduced them to second-class status. Other leading figures in the Hlinka movement – notably Vojtech Tuka, the minister of the interior and later prime minister, Alexander Mach, his successor, and Alexander Durcanscky, foreign minister – saw Jews as an alien, racial entity that had acquired political and economic power over the Slovaks. This faction aspired to expropriate the fabled wealth of the Jews and expel them completely. In fact, the Slovak Jewish population was quite humble: about 12,300 made their living from commerce and 22,000 were employees of one kind or another. Nevertheless, in November 1939, the hardliners succeeded in driving 7,500 Jews from border areas into Hungary and seizing their property. A little over a year later, the national assembly voted for a comprehensive solution to the Jewish question in Slovakia. A central office was set up to confiscate Jewish-owned assets, businesses and property. The Jews, meanwhile, were required to create a unitary representative body, the Ustredny Zidov, as the transmission mechanism for these measures. Within a year, 85 per cent of Jewish-run enterprises had been taken over and thousands of unemployed Jews were forced into labour camps. In September 1941 the racial anti-Semites in the government gained the upper hand in making anti-Jewish policy and promulgated a Jewish Codex that systematized all previous anti-Jewish legislation, placing it on a basis similar to the Nuremberg Laws. Jews were forced to wear a yellow star. Around 6,000 were expelled from the capital and dumped in internment camps. At this point, domestic Slovak anti-Semitism intersected with the anti-Jewish policies of the Third Reich and the needs of its war economy.¹²⁹

For some time, the German government, desperate to get its hands on workers, had been requesting the Slovak authorities to send Slovak citizens to Germany as foreign labour. The Tiso government was not enthusiastic, but in early 1942 it came up with an alternative. Would the Reich be willing to accept Jews? There were now tens of thousands in labour camps at Novaky, Zilisna and Sered. By sending them to Germany the Slovaks could simultaneously appease the Nazi leaders and satisfy the desire to eject Jews from their country. The subsequent negotiations between the Slovak authorities and the Germans were conducted by Dieter Wisliceny. One of Eichmann’s oldest colleagues, he had been sent to Bratislava in early September 1940 as an envoy of the Jewish office of the Gestapo to assist Hans Ludin, the German Ambassador, deal with Jewish questions. Although the Foreign Office was apprised of the conversations and had some input, the Slovak Jews thereby came under the jurisdiction of the RSHA: their fate served as a model for later deportations from western Europe directed by Eichmann’s office within the remit of the ‘final solution’. Yet the first trainloads to head towards Auschwitz had nothing to do with the ‘final solution’ itself. The Germans accepted the Slovak offer of Jews for forced labour and only men and women who were fit to work were summoned. They were entitled to take 50kg of baggage and each transport was accompanied by a doctor. Even so, the trains always left at night and at the border with the Reich the Hlinka guards made way for German police. The first trainload of Slovak Jews arrived in Auschwitz on 26 March 1942, consisting of 999 Jewish women dispatched from Poprad. Since the camp extension at Birkenau was nowhere near completion they were packed into the main camp in a section of barracks fenced off to serve as a temporary women’s camp.¹³⁰

The radical anti-Semites in the Slovak regime now saw an opening to rid themselves of the entire Jewish population and asked Wisliceny if the Reich would take non-working Jews, too. Following discussion of the terms on which this trade would rest, the Germans agreed. On 10 April 1942, Heydrich personally signed the contract with Prime Minister Tuka. The Reich would relieve the Slovaks of their unwanted Jewish citizens, on condition that the Slovak government pay 500 Reichsmarks per person to cover the cost of transport and accommodation. The Slovaks kept the property the Jews left behind, but the Germans were allowed to keep anything they took with them. The first transport carrying Jewish men, women and children from Slovakia departed the very next day. By 20 October, 18,725 had been shipped to Auschwitz and 40,000 had ended up in the Lublin district. Most of the latter were murdered in Belzec and Sobibor. Around 8,000 evaded the transports by fleeing to Hungary. An effective lobbying campaign playing on a growing unease in Catholic and government circles in Bratislava persuaded the Slovaks to suspend the deportations 24,000 souls short of complete destruction of the community.¹³¹

Four days after the first transport from Slovakia pulled up to the Auschwitz station, a train chartered by the RSHA arrived from Compiègne in France carrying 1,112 Jewish prisoners. These were foreign Jews who had been arrested in the round-ups of 14 May and 12 December 1941. They were shipped eastwards not as part of the ‘final solution’ but at the initiative of the military administration in Paris as an alternative to the use of mass shootings in reprisal for resistance activity. The mass execution of French citizens was Hitler’s favoured response, but the army believed that such a policy would only stimulate French hostility. It was better, they argued, to make the punishment fall on Jews and to use the already interned foreigners as a reservoir for punitive deportations. The RSHA was willing to accede to this device since the removals made room in the camps for more foreign Jews and more hostages. Consequently, upon arrival, the first trainloads of Jewish deportees from France were processed into the main camp and entered the labour force. Further transports followed: on 5 June from Compiègne, on 22 June from Drancy, on 25 June from Pithiviers, on 28 June from Beaune-la-Rolande, and on 17 July from Pithiviers. In each case the prisoners went directly into the Auschwitz workforce. However, within four to six weeks, 70–80 per cent of them were dead. It is estimated that from the 1,000 Jews on each of these transports, the number of survivors ranged from 23 (on the first) to 59 (the convoy of 25 June).¹³²

They perished due to the unremitting hard labour, brutal treatment by kapos and SS guards, insufficient nourishment, and disease brought on and aggravated by the abysmal sanitary conditions. On arrival, the men and women were shaved in the reception building, a number was tattooed on their right forearm, and they were kitted out with prisoner uniforms made of coarse cloth with faded blue-grey and white vertical stripes. All prisoners wore wooden-soled shoes that were ill-fitting and usually caused blisters that quickly turned septic. They were initially held in a quarantine unit before they were released into the main camp. From then on they were billeted in the overcrowded barracks, assigned a bunk that had barely more space than would be available inside a coffin. Lice spread easily in such circumstances and typhus raged through the main camp in the early summer of 1942. All prisoners (except those who were certified as sick) had to attend a roll call in the morning, at 4.30 a.m. in summer and 5.30 a.m. in winter, as well as in the evening after they had returned from work. This assembly, the ‘Appell’, could last for hours regardless of the weather.¹³³

The work itself was arduous manual labour. Beginning in spring 1942, thousands of new arrivals were assigned to the Buna works, which involved a 4½-mile trek every morning and evening until late October when the Monowitz sub-camp (also known as Auschwitz-III) was opened. By the end of the year, I. G. Farben was employing 2,000 labourers, mostly Jewish, at the site alongside thousands of skilled foreign workers and German staff. Several thousand Jews were allotted to the Hermann Göring Works, which started production in 1942. Thousands more were distributed amongst sub-camps servicing the SS agricultural station at Rajsko, SS-run fishponds, poultry farms, and coalmines. A high proportion worked on the building site that was Birkenau. Prisoners manhandled wooden beams, steel joists, loads of bricks and mortar across boggy ground to the construction teams working on the prisoner accommodation and SS administration buildings; they dug drainage canals in an attempt to lower the water table and control flooding; they laid out roads and paths, hauling massive concrete rollers to smooth the surfaces. For sustenance they received ersatz coffee in the morning and a slice of adulterated bread with margarine and a smear of jam; for lunch they were given some sort of soup, usually concocted from root vegetables; and in the evening they had a hot drink and another piece of bread. Sunday was a day of rest during which prisoners tried to obtain additional food. A few, privileged members of the internal camp hierarchy had access to a commissary that sold barely edible items such as salted snails to those who earned small cash payments. Those who received food parcels (permitted from mid-1942) bartered, sold or shared their precious supplements. Jews were not allowed to receive parcels and few had anything at all with which to trade.¹³⁴

The poor diet caused diarrhoea and the bad water promoted dysentery. Due to the paucity of latrines, the long roll calls and the strict curfew at night, men and women regularly soiled themselves. The excrement contaminated sores on their lower body. Light injuries incurred in the course of labour or as a result of beatings usually went untreated and were easily infected by dirt or flies. Those who could no longer work were sent to the infirmary where the medical staff, drawn from the prison population but working under the supervision of SS doctors, struggled to provide treatment in the absence of basic medical supplies. Since July 1941, prisoners in Auschwitz too sick to work or suffering from contagious diseases had been murdered under the 14f13 programme at a facility in Lower Saxony. Individuals were also killed by SS doctors administering lethal injections. Following selections held in August, September and November 1942, hundreds of prisoners at a time, worn down by relentless toil and maltreatment in Monowitz and Birkenau, were killed in Auschwitz using Zyklon-B poison gas.¹³⁵

The first occupants of Auschwitz-II, Birkenau, were the surviving Soviet prisoners of war who were moved there in March 1942 to continue their sacrificial labour. In August, the 17,000 mostly Jewish women who had by then arrived at Auschwitz were transferred from the grossly overcrowded quarters in the main camp to the rows of brick huts in section BIa. This became the Birkenau women’s camp. A non-Jewish Polish prisoner, Seweryna Smaglewska, described the place in her post-war memoir: ‘There were no roads, no paths between the blocks. In the depths of these dark dens, in bunks like multi-storied cages, the feeble light of a candle burning here or there flickered over naked, emaciated figures curled up, blue from the cold, bent over a pile of filthy rags, holding their shaved heads in their hands, picking out an insect with their scraggly fingers and smashing it on the edge of the bunk – that is what the barracks looked like in 1942.’¹³⁶

In Block 30, two SS doctors, Carl Clauberg and Horst Schumann, began experiments in mass sterilization using X-rays and surgery. Clauberg was one of a number of Nazi medical experts invited by Himmler in mid-1942 to debate ways to sterilize large numbers of Jewish men and women quickly and cheaply. Himmler’s objective was to resolve one of the issues raised at the Wannsee Conference and eliminate conflict over the fate of Mischlinge. Clauberg asked to try out his patent techniques on prisoners at Auschwitz and was allowed to rent space in one of the infirmary blocks in the women’s camp. In late 1942 he was joined by Horst Schumann, who requested equipment and subjects with which to test his proposed methods. Having requisitioned male and female prisoners, Schumann subjected their genitals to X-rays of varying strength. Often this caused radiation burning and peritonitis which could, in turn, lead to fatal infections. The life expectancy of the human guinea pigs was further shortened when Schumann proceeded to extract the irradiated testicles and ovaries for examination.¹³⁷

On the same day that the sixth convoy steamed into Auschwitz from France, the commandant’s office was advised to expect another train from Drancy. When it was unloaded at Auschwitz on 19 July 1942, a selection took place on the platform and 375 Jews were immediately sent to the gas chambers. The Jews from four out of the next five transports were admitted to the camp without a selection and until early August a majority from the succeeding trains were sent for labour. But by then the scales had tipped in the direction of extermination. With a few exceptions, almost the entire trainload of Jews on each of convoys 15 to 43 from France was dead within a few hours of disembarking. They were the victims of a coordinated programme of deportations from western Europe intended to culminate in mass murder – the ultimate ‘final solution’.¹³⁸

Auschwitz and the ‘final solution’

Auschwitz, unlike the extermination camps, was not designed for mass murder on an industrial scale so it was necessary for the camp administration to devise killing methods and ways of disposing of bodies while they were on the job. Far from being a smooth-running, clinical operation, this led to a great deal of trial and error. The first transports of Jews that came from East Upper Silesia in the spring of 1942 were unloaded at the ramp serving the main camp and walked or trucked to a one-storey building outside the main fence, on its eastern periphery. This construction contained the mortuary and crematorium for disposing of prisoners who expired or were executed. It had six ovens and the capacity to incinerate 340 bodies per day. The mortuary, which was 17 metres by 4.6 metres, with a low, flat concrete roof, was made airtight and fitted with a strong, insulated door that could be screwed shut. The room could hold up to 1,000 people if they were squeezed in, but the SS discovered there was little point in killing that many at a time if there was no quick way to get rid of the corpses. Once the victims were in the room and the door was sealed, two or three SS men clambered up the steep earthen embankment that surrounded it on three sides, donned gas masks, removed the covering from vents that had been punched through the roof, and emptied cans of Zyklon-B onto the throng below. After they replaced the heavy lids the body heat of the people inside caused the Zyklon-B crystals to vaporize; once the fumes were inhaled people started to choke and death followed within minutes. The entire process lasted about 20 minutes. When the SS were satisfied that the victims were all dead the chore of removing the corpses and disposing of them was handed to a team of Jewish prisoners. They too had to improvise and find the best way to carry out their ghastly assignment.¹³⁹

The learning curve of the SS and the prisoner detail that worked in the crematoria, the Sonderkommando, was recorded by Filip Müller, a twenty-year-old Slovak Jew from Sered. Müller was one of 4,500 Jews deported to Auschwitz in April 1942. On arrival he entered the main camp, but he was assigned to the crematoria as punishment for a trivial offence. His first task was to go into the gas chamber, about which he knew nothing, and undress the corpses. ‘We were met by the appalling sight of the dead – bodies of men and women lying higgledy-piggledy among suit cases and rucksacks … I began to realize that there were some people lying at my feet who had been killed only a short while before.’ With his keen eye he noticed the traces of a substance that must have been toxic: ‘where the crystals were scattered on the floor there were no corpses, whereas in places further away, particularly around the door, they were piled high.’ Müller realized that as horrible as the work was, it offered rich pickings for a starving man. SS supervision was erratic and he was able to grab food from the baggage that lay everywhere. Unfortunately, when he was moved on to the cremation process things went badly wrong. There were about twenty men in the Sonderkommando, not enough to perform all the jobs. In addition to stripping the cadavers, they were commanded to cut off the women’s hair and package it, and extract gold teeth from the mouths of the dead. The ovens were manned by others in the team, several of whom were also greenhorns and completely ignorant about the technology. The carcasses were dragged to the crematorium room and loaded onto retractable iron stretchers that slid in and out of the ovens, but if the tongs that the prisoners used to hold the corpses in place scraped the walls of the oven they could damage the fire-proof lining. Within minutes of Müller and his comrades attempting this manoeuvre they had accidentally dislodged a few firebricks in one of the ovens. The debris blocked a flue, resulting in the emission of dense, obnoxious smoke and an uncontrolled blaze. Eventually, firemen had to be called and the SS abandoned the effort. While three prisoners thought to be the culprits were shot (in fact, they had stopped work and were begging to die because they could not stand it), Müller and the Sonderkommando were ordered to load the hundreds of remaining cadavers onto trucks. They were then driven to a meadow where the exhausted Jews dumped them into a pit. Müller and the team returned to the camp to spend the night, and many more after it, in the punishment block.¹⁴⁰

When the Sonderkommando was next summoned, Müller observed that the SS men had improved their technique. The transport consisted of 600 male and female Jews from Sosnowiec, mostly middle-aged, with some elderly and children. This time the SS required them to undress in the courtyard outside the crematoria building. Naturally, many were puzzled by this instruction and dawdled apprehensively while they tried to figure out what was going on. Their ruminations were cut short by shouts and beatings from the SS, who drove them inside. The Sonderkommando then swept up their clothing and belongings, making the place tidy for the next group. A different set of men handled the cremations so Müller’s group only had to sort the clothing and valuables, which was now much easier. Three days later another transport was delivered and he noticed a further refinement. Two SS officers, Hans Aumeier and Maximilian Grabner, made speeches from the roof of the crematoria to the Jews in the courtyard, assuring them that they were about to be settled in a work camp. Grabner asked Jews to indicate if they had specific trades, reinforcing their sense of relief. Then they were told they had to be disinfected and showered. ‘Cozened and deceived, hundreds of men, women and children … walked innocently and without a struggle into the large windowless chamber of the crematorium.’ Once the Zyklon-B crystals were tipped through the vent, Grabner ordered the trucks that had delivered the Jews to run their engines. ‘We could clearly hear the heart-rending weeping, cries for help, fervent prayers, violent banging and knocking and, drowning everything else, the noise of truck engines running at top speed.’ Even so, the SS officers realized that this was hardly satisfactory. The gas chamber was too close to the main camp and too exposed; the disposal facilities were too constricted. Despite the construction of a new chimney the ovens could not cope with the volume of cremations. So the bulk of the killing was subsequently shifted to Birkenau.¹⁴¹

The new gas chambers at Birkenau were equally makeshift. To begin, the SS adapted a peasant farmhouse surviving from the demolished village of Breszinska. Prisoner craftsmen plastered the walls and blocked up the windows, leaving only a small aperture with a heavy wooden flap through which Zyklon-B could be poured in. The camp workshops also fashioned a strong, airtight door that was locked using a screw mechanism. The gas chamber was 15 by 6 metres and could accommodate 800 people. Crude wooden barracks were hastily erected in which the victims could undress before walking over to the so-called shower room. The converted farmhouse, known as Bunker 1, was adorned with signs announcing that it was a disinfection centre and the whitewashed gas chamber was kitted out with false showerheads. In nearby meadows prisoners dug burial pits and surrounded them with fences. Tracks were laid for trolleys to convey the bodies to the pits. In July, the transformation of a second farmhouse was completed in time for the mass deportations from France, Belgium and the Netherlands. Around then the Sonderkommando from Crematorium I, including Müller, was transferred to Birkenau, where conditions for them were much improved. However, the new layout was not quite so convenient for the SS. It was a 1½-mile walk from the ramp to the bunker and along the way the SS had to reassure the Jews that no harm would come to them. The column was trailed by an ambulance that was intended to convey a sense of concern for their well-being, although it was actually loaded with canisters of Zyklon-B.¹⁴²

The SS soon discovered the same problem that was causing chaos at Treblinka at roughly the same time: as the hot summer wore on and the number of those murdered at Auschwitz and Birkenau climbed towards 200,000, fluids leaked from the decomposing corpses and the pits began to heave with noxious gases. ‘A black, evil-smelling mass oozed out and polluted the ground-water in the vicinity,’ Müller recalled. The Sonderkommando was called in to treat the bodies with lime and chlorine, but it was no use. During a visit to Birkenau in July 1942, during which he was treated to an exhibition of mass murder in the bunkers, Himmler ordained that the dead would have to be cremated from thereon. The remains of those already buried would have to be exhumed and incinerated, too.¹⁴³

Reich Jews and the ‘final solution’

The ‘final solution’ as a pan-European project had evolved slowly and erratically since the meeting at Wannsee, with repeated delays due both to the war and to second thoughts about the collaboration to be expected from Axis partners or subjugated countries. On 31 January 1942, Adolf Eichmann informed state police headquarters and the emigration offices that controlled Jewish affairs that ‘The evacuation of Jews to the east which has recently been carried out in some regions represents the beginning of the final solution of the Jewish question in the Old Reich, the Ostmark [Austria], and the Protectorate … At present new possibilities for reception are being worked out, with the aim of deporting further contingents …’ However, difficulties with transport and the crisis on the eastern front prevented any new deportations for the moment. A few weeks later, on 6 March, he briefed the men responsible for Jewish affairs at Gestapo offices across the Reich to prepare for the evacuation of up to 55,000 Jews to the east. He envisaged 20,000 coming from Vienna, 18,000 from Prague and the rest from Germany. Jews with foreign nationality, Jews employed in war-related industries, the old and the young were to be excluded. To avoid wrangling over special cases, Theresienstadt was being cleared of Czech Jews and recast as the ‘Reich ghetto’ to accommodate prominent Jewish personalities, Jews with the Iron Cross or severe war wounds, and the elderly in general. That month another wave of deportations began that carried about 35,000 German Jews to Theresienstadt and 10,000 to ghettos in the east including Minsk, Warsaw and several other destinations in the General Government.¹⁴⁴

The marking of German Jews and the first wave of deportations from the Reich had done little to appease the resentment that many Germans felt at the sight of Jews still in the country at a time when it was so hard pressed. It was not only true believers, who considered themselves members of the racial community, who vented their anger against this diminished, bedraggled remnant; those who were simply feeling the strain of wartime lashed out too. The SD in Höxter reported that citizens were furious when shopping hours for Jews were shifted to midday. This meant that good Germans either had to shop in the morning when it was cold or in the afternoon, after the Jews had allegedly snapped up the best produce. Citizens attending court were irritated to find officials still dealing with legal issues concerning Jewish people. Indeed, the greater visibility of Jews thanks to the yellow star, and the awareness that thousands had already been deported, acted as incitements. The RSHA Jewish department noted that a large part of the public saw the yellow badge as ‘only a prelude to further, more drastic ordinances, with the goal of a final resolution of the Jewish Question’.¹⁴⁵

The pressure on the remaining Jews was unrelenting. In June 1942, Victor Klemperer listed the indignities and impositions to which they were subjected. ‘1) To be home after 8 or 9 in the evening. Inspection! 2) Expelled from one’s house. 3) Ban on wireless … telephone. 4) Ban on theatres, cinemas, concerts, museums. 6) Ban on using public transport: three phases a) omnibus banned, only front platform of tram permitted, b) all use banned, except to work, c) to work on foot, unless one lives 2½ miles away or is sick (but it is a hard fight to get a doctor’s certificate). Also ban on taxi cabs, of course. 7) Ban on purchasing “food in short supply”. 8) Ban on purchasing cigars or any kind of smoking materials. 9) Ban on purchasing flowers. 10) Withdrawal of milk ration card. 11) Ban on going to the barber. 12) Any kind of tradesman can only be called after application to the Community. 13) Complete surrender of typewriters, 14) of furs and woollen blankets, 15) of bicycles … 16) of deckchairs, 17) of dogs, cats, birds. 18) Ban on leaving city of Dresden, 19) on entering the railway station, 20) on setting foot on the Ministry embankment, in parks, 21) on using … roads bordering the Great Garden … on entering market halls. 22) Since 19 September the Jews’ Star. 23) Ban on having reserves of foodstuffs at home … 24) Ban on lending libraries. 25) Because of the star, all restaurants are closed to us … 26) No clothing and 27) No fish card. 28) No special rations such as coffee, chocolate, condensed milk. 29) The special taxes. 30) The constantly contracting disposable allowance. Mine at first 600, then 320, now 185 RM. 31) Shopping restricted to one hour … But all together they are nothing as against the constant threat of house searches, of ill-treatment, of prison, concentration camp, and violent death.’ Since any infraction of the regulations could lead to arrest and imprisonment his greatest fear was all too realistic. His diary becomes a litany of Jews shot in camps, deported or dead by their own hand.¹⁴⁶

As fewer full Jews were left, more adverse attention fell on Mischlinge and those protected by mixed marriages. There were about 19,000 privileged Jews whose fate had been left unresolved at the Wannsee meeting, but the RSHA was accumulating evidence that backed its demand for their total eradication. Hence the Sicherheitsdienst in Minden informed the Berlin head office that people objected to the fact that privileged Jews could go about unmarked and unseen. It claimed that citizens with family members serving in Russia feared the danger posed by these invisible Jews. Such attitudes provided the rationale for pressurizing Aryan spouses to divorce their Jewish partners so that the latter could be dealt with summarily. Klemperer complained that his wife, Eva, was spat at and called a ‘Jew’s whore’. They were shoved from one Jew-house to another. Eva, however, remained true. By contrast, the marriage of Lilli and Ernst Jahn succumbed. The Nazi mayor of Immenhausen, where Lilli still lived, repeatedly issued threats against her. She was forced to transfer all her financial assets and her share of their house to her husband. Even though his friends warned him of the likely consequences, Ernst eventually decided to divorce Lilli and marry his mistress, mother of his love-child. Lilli subsequently wrote to a friend, ‘I feel infinitely lonely and forlorn.’ She was now acutely vulnerable to deportation.¹⁴⁷

With the cessation of emigration from the Reich and the increasing tempo of the evacuations, the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland became enmeshed in the destruction of the community. It managed the lists of Jews to be deported, established transit centres through which they would pass on their way eastward, and supplied them with food and medical staff. Marshals of the Reichsvereinigung informed Jews of their fate, collected them, and escorted them to the assembly points prior to their departure. These marshals were usually accompanied by a member of the Gestapo, which fostered the appearance of collaboration. Even more disconcerting, representatives of the Reichsvereinigung collected the payment deportees made to cover the cost of their journey and passed the money on to the Gestapo. Its clerks and accountants documented the property they left behind. And yet its leadership continued to negotiate with the Nazi authorities, trying to wring concessions. It argued for the value of Jews working in the armaments industries and succeeded in getting them deferred. It added to the ranks of its own staff, finally reaching a total of 1,500 personnel temporarily exempted from deportation. It asked SS officials to withhold Jews over sixty-five years old, aged invalids and decorated veterans of the Great War. Jews falling into these categories were indeed spared until June 1942, and then most were sent to Theresienstadt. Ultimately, the assassination of Heydrich and the resistance action by the Baum group undid the work of the Reichsvereinigung. By the summer, Klemperer observed, ‘Murder is everywhere, reaching out for everyone, in ever more of a hurry.’¹⁴⁸

Faced by the growing danger, more and more Jews remaining in Germany opted to go underground. Ruth Andreas-Friedrich became part of a network providing shelter for Jews on the run. Feeding them at a time of strict rationing was one of the challenges facing the helpers. In the midst of what she labelled the ‘third migration’, in June 1942, she noticed, ‘A great many people with guilty looks are lugging shopping nets full of vegetables through the streets of Berlin.’ Andreas-Friedrich also noted that Mischlinge were successfully petitioning the Reichssippenamt, the Race Kinship Office, to get their racial identity changed by proving that they had been born out of wedlock to two Aryan parents. ‘Never before have there been so many marital infidelities, and so many daughters and sons ready under oath to assert their mother’s vagaries.’ Indeed the experts of the SD expressed ‘astonishment’ at the readiness of the Reichssippenamt to grant so many self-denying Jews a change of status that relieved them from the fear of deportation. It was hardly the case that all German Jews passively accepted their fate: evasion, concealment, flight and resistance now became an option for a significant number. It is estimated that from late 1942, 10,000–12,000 Jews removed their star (if they had ever worn one) and attempted to pass as Aryans or hid. In Berlin alone, 5,000 Jews chose to live illegally in the hope of avoiding deportation.¹⁴⁹

Theresienstadt

Until the mass eviction of German Jews to Theresienstadt, the ghetto-camp had a predominantly Czech Jewish character. At the end of 1941 it accommodated 7,545 Jews from Prague and Brno. Over the next six months 26,524 Jews from all over Bohemia and Moravia were squeezed into the fortress. Between July and December 1942 the number of Czech Jewish arrivals doubled again, but during that time thousands were deported through what was in effect Theresienstadt’s revolving door. They were replaced by approximately 53,000 German and 13,000 Austrian Jews, although many of them, too, were removed to the east after only a few weeks or months. From mid-1942 the internal administration as well as the external appearance and ambience of Theresienstadt changed to reflect the demographic transformation.¹⁵⁰

Helga Weiss and her family were amongst the first Prague Jewish families to be forcibly replanted. Within weeks of their arrival they suffered two shocks. First, on 9 January 1942, nine young men were hanged for the apparently trivial crime of attempting to smuggle letters out of the ghetto. This atrocity was followed by news that 1,000 inhabitants were to be transported to Riga. Helga expressed the general disillusionment when she reflected, ‘We thought at least now we’re in Terezin we’d be spared any more of this.’ Instead, from then on every day was lived under the threat of deportation. The terror of removal was juxtaposed with the pleasure of meeting friends and family as transports flooded in. There were so many reunions that Weiss remarked, ‘Prague has come …’¹⁵¹

Until mid-1942, the deported Jews shared the fortress town with its indigenous inhabitants. But whereas the Czechs lived in family houses, the Jews were separated by gender and packed into the original barracks and living quarters adapted from other installations. In the Sudeten barracks fifty men lived in each room, stacked in bunks; the women in the Magdeburg barracks had slightly more space. Girls stayed with their mothers and boys with their fathers until they reached the age of twelve when youths moved into children’s homes that offered more space, better facilities, and rooms for schooling. All adults except the old and the infirm were expected to join working parties, many of which operated outside the fortress walls. The ghetto was guarded by a detail of 120–150 Czech gendarmes. The Jews rarely saw a German.¹⁵²

During the Czech period, Eichmann and his deputy Siegfried Seidl, who was responsible for running the ghetto on a day-to-day basis, appointed Jacob Edelstein as the Elder, with Otto Zucker as his deputy. Both men were Zionists with years of public service behind them. They presided over a council of thirteen elders who supervised several departments covering administration, building and maintenance, finance, labour and economic matters, and public heath. An ‘Ordnungswache’, or Order Watch, patrolled the streets and escorted Jews in and out of the ghetto confines. Crucially, the internal administration was responsible for maintaining a registry of all the residents and selected who would leave when the Germans ordained a deportation. The actual deportation lists were compiled by the Transport Committee. Since it was always the target of intense lobbying, during the days and hours before a deportation an Appeals Committee examined claims for exemption. On the surface, the categories were clearly set out by the Germans in guidelines issued to the council on 5 March 1942. Families with young children were not to be broken up. Men with decorations for military service or severe war wounds were exempted. Anyone who was sick, over the age of sixty-five years, or in a mixed marriage was not to be included. Anyone with foreign nationality (except Poles, Soviet citizens and people from Luxemburg) was held back. Finally, anyone on the first two transports from Prague was privileged; this included many who staffed the internal administration. Outside these formal categories there were many grounds for appealing and lobbying.¹⁵³

Norbert Troller, a forty-six-year-old architect from Brno and veteran of the Great War, was deported to Theresienstadt in March 1942 after a spell of forced labour in a factory. On arrival he was allocated a bunk in the Sudeten barracks and commenced three weeks of manual work, as was customary for newcomers. Then he was assigned to the technical department, where he designed living quarters for the inmates and also the SS. Troller quickly learned that Theresienstadt was nothing like the end of the line and that survival depended on obtaining ‘protection’ from someone in the administration who could keep your name off the transportation lists. ‘The concept of “protection”’, he wrote in a memoir, ‘was of such paramount importance for all of us that it overshadowed any other considerations.’ Nevertheless, during the interval between the transports that departed each week Theresienstadt pulsated with life. ‘There was work and leisure, concerns with sanitation, housing, health care, child care, record keeping, construction, theater, concerts, lectures, all functioning as well as possible under the circumstances.’ But as soon as word came that another 1,000 to 2,000 people had to go within a few days the population could think of nothing except ‘protection’.¹⁵⁴

Troller coolly analysed the demoralizing effect of the struggle not to be transported. ‘In fear of death one forgets, slowly at first, but then with considerable speed, the rules of ethics, of decency, of helpfulness … At any and all costs we try to prevent the execution of the death sentence on us and our loved ones … To escape that fate one had to do everything to be included in the privileged group of the “protected”.’ It was his good fortune to have skills that qualified him for the staff of the Jewish administration. His boss in the architectural office shielded him from over twenty-five comb-outs. Troller was then able to do favours for even more influential ghetto figures and, ultimately, to get work from the SS. But he was still unable to protect his sister and her daughter, who were transported some six months after they had all arrived. Troller bewailed the system of drawing up lists and the ‘psychological corruption’ that affected individuals as they fought one another to avoid deportation. ‘With devilish baseness and cunning they [the SS] … put the burden of selection on the Jews themselves; to select their own coreligionists, relatives, their friends. In the end this unbearable, desperate, cynical burden destroyed the community leaders who were forced to make the selections. The power of life and death forced on the Council of Elders was the main reason, the unavoidable force, behind the ever-increasing corruption in the ghetto …’ But he knew he was not innocent. ‘How can I forgive myself for having succumbed to egotistical, ruthless, incomprehensible actions towards my fellow sufferers whenever danger threatened …’¹⁵⁵

In their determination to maintain a semblance of normal life, especially for the children, and preserve their humanity, the Jews of Theresienstadt supported an array of educational and cultural initiatives. Helga Weiss started attending classes and moved into a children’s home where she studied Czech, geography, history and maths. The youths with whom she lived shared a plethora of books and went to shows performed in attics, the only free space available for such entertainments. ‘Yesterday I went to see The Kiss. It’s playing in Magdeburg, up in the loft. Even though it’s sung only to the accompaniment of a piano, with no curtains or costumes, the impression it makes couldn’t be greater even in the National Theatre.’ Adults enjoyed these distractions and found more earthy satisfactions. Troller wryly observed men sneaking into the coal cellar of the women’s barracks for prearranged liaisons with their wives, who emerged subsequently with ‘coal-blackened backsides’. Marital infidelity became commonplace as traditional moral standards wilted under the threat of random extinction. Despite hunger and unmitigated body odours men and women formed relationships, some for love and others for more functional purposes. ‘On the one hand, there was spontaneous, true, eternal love; on the other, we were faced with the continual threat of separation, sex, lust, a pressure cooker atmosphere, quick, quick, without fancy phrases, before the next transport to the east stops us …’ For unmarried men like Troller, especially those who were privileged, there was no shortage of girlfriends. He and a friend constructed a kumbal, a cubby-hole, in which they could have privacy and entertain. There was a strict etiquette, though. A privileged worker who possessed a kumbal was expected to offer a gift to a visiting lady friend, such as food or cigarettes. But sometimes it was just a case of satisfying an urge. One afternoon Norbert’s companion Lilly turned up at his place and announced, ‘Nori – I need a fuck, come on.’¹⁵⁶

The advent of thousands of elderly German Jews dampened the defiantly exuberant atmosphere in the ghetto cultivated by the younger Czechs, but enriched its cultural life. Amongst the newcomers in July 1942 were Philipp Manes and his wife. Manes was a sixty-seven-year-old veteran of the Great War and holder of the Iron Cross. He had run a fur agency in Berlin until he was put out of business by the Nazis and had spent the last few months working as a drill press operator in a factory. In his diary he detailed the last hours in the home where he had lived with his wife and where they had raised four children. ‘It seemed inconceivable that we had to give up our entire estate, leave behind everything that we had acquired over the 37 years of our marriage … All our possessions were to be appropriated by strangers. They would go through all the drawers and cupboards and throw out things that were worthless to them – our cherished possessions. Inconceivable.’ But at 9.30 a.m. on the appointed morning, two Gestapo officers and two Jewish marshals came to escort them to a removal van that served as transport. Hours later they were disgorged at the Jewish Old People’s Home on Grosse Hamburgerstrasse along with dozens of other deportees. The next day they were told their property had been expropriated because they were guilty of ‘communist activity’. Manes, a staunch conservative, ‘accepted this humiliation in silence’. Their passports were stamped ‘evacuated from Berlin on 23 July’ and ‘with that our life as citizens of Germany ended’. At three o’clock the next morning they were transported to the Anhalter Station. ‘We were cast out of the lives that we had made for ourselves, working for fifty years to see our business crowned with success … and now here we are with the few effects that we can carry with us in bags and backpacks.’¹⁵⁷

Along with their fellow, unwilling travellers they felt hopeful that Theresienstadt might live up to promise. What they actually found was shattering. First they were stripped of their valuables and their suitcases. For the rest of the summer Manes was condemned to wear the heavy winter clothes he had donned for the journey. They were led to a brick-walled stable and instructed to sleep on the ground. There was only a single water fountain and a disgusting communal latrine. Eventually they got their bedrolls and some personal items which they took with them to new quarters equipped with bunk beds. But this entailed the separation of men from women, and the planking for the bunks was riddled with bed bugs. Far from being a retirement home, Theresienstadt was a daily battle for life. ‘“Ghetto” signifies a renunciation of or a moratorium on morals’, Manes confided to his journal. ‘When hunger triumphed over civilized behaviour and tore down all inhibitions, everyone gave themselves to one feeling and one goal: satiation at any price. Justice, security, property, and order simply yielded to this natural instinct. Those who have not witnessed how, at the end of the distribution of food, old people plunged into empty vats, scraping them with their spoons, even scraping the tables where the food was served with knives, looking for leftovers, cannot understand how quickly human dignity can be lost.’¹⁵⁸

After a few weeks Manes was asked by the administration to form an auxiliary to the Order Watch to assist disorientated or demented elderly Jews whose wanderings and distress caused discomfort to the rest of the populace. He used this position to start giving lectures, and before long was addressing audiences of a hundred. Eventually his talks evolved into a cultural programme employing sixty-five men and women. The lectures, play readings and poetry recitals in German brought much comfort to the Berliners and Viennese Jews who were otherwise utterly adrift in the Czech-speaking environment. Manes admired the Czech Jews for their patriotism and their Jewish pride, but he noted that they did not reciprocate this warmth. The two groups vied for power, contesting the distribution of privileges, work and rations. ‘On the one side there was abundance and the good life, which was not shared; on the other, endless hunger.’ Manes particularly resented the fact that Czech Jews were entitled to receive food parcels and seemed to get better rations from the kitchens. ‘It has to be said’, he admitted with a measure of self-reproach, ‘the Jewish Czech does not love us. He sees us only as Germans.’¹⁵⁹

Even after the non-Jewish population was evicted from the town, the arrival of the German and Austrian Jews caused acute overcrowding. Combined with undernourishment due to the straitened food supply and bad sanitation, this sent the rate of mortality shooting upwards. In December 1941 just 48 Jews had died in the ghetto. The following March the number climbed to 259, but this was more or less in line with the increased population. In July 1942, there were on average 32 deaths per day, a total of 2,327 for August, and no fewer than 131 every day throughout September. According to Manes this was ‘the time of the great dying of the old and the very old who, with their broken, weak bodies, their worn, uprooted souls; and their unrealizable longing for their far-off children, could not resist even a mild illness.’¹⁶⁰

In September 1942 the Germans ordered the deportation of elderly Jews, to bring down the average age of the population and rebalance the number who were working. Helga Weiss was horrified at the sight of these transports. ‘Altertransports. 10,000 sick, lame, dying, everyone over 65 … Why send defenceless people away? … can’t they let them die here in peace? After all, that’s what awaits them. The ghetto guards are shouting and running about beneath our windows; they’re closing off the street. Another group is on its way … Suitcases, stretchers, corpses. That’s how it goes, all week long. Corpses on the two-wheeled carts and the living on the hearses …’ In two months, 17,780 aged prisoners exited the ghetto via the ‘Schleuse’ (sluice), the exit ramp that led down to Bohusovice Station. By the end of the year the proportion of ghetto residents aged over sixty-five years had fallen from 45 to 33 per cent .¹⁶¹

Seidl insisted that the council should be restructured to reflect the ratio of German, Austrian and Czech Jews. In October, Heinrich Stahl, one of the leaders of the Reichsvereinigung, was appointed deputy to Edelstein. At the start of 1943, by which time the population was equally divided between Czechs and Germans, Seidl ordered the formation of a triumvirate consisting of Edelstein, Paul Eppstein, a member of the Berlin Jewish leadership, and Josef Loewenherz, from Vienna. Not long afterwards Loewenherz dropped out of the picture and Seidl placed power in the hands of Eppstein, with the Viennese Benjamin Murmelstein as a deputy alongside Edelstein. For the next year and a half these men would determine who would live in Theresienstadt or depart on the transports.¹⁶²

The ‘final solution’ in France

In France the ‘final solution’ evolved messily. Notwithstanding the aura of decisiveness at Wannsee and the apparently linear development of anti-Jewish policy in the subsequent months, what eventuated bears the hallmarks of opportunism and a last-minute concoction. A shift in the balance of power in France between factions in the French government and within the occupation administration certainly favoured a more radical approach to the Jews, but this was happenstance.

In February 1942, Xavier Vallat got into a row with Theodor Dannecker over the persecution of the Jews. He boasted that Vichy was doing more than the Germans and remonstrated against unilateral anti-Jewish actions by the military administration in the north. Vallat did not particularly care about the round-ups there; the Jews were merely pawns in his efforts to defend the sovereignty of the Vichy regime over the whole of France. However, his obstreperous attitude led Werner Best to dub him sarcastically the ‘Commissioner for the Protection of Jews’. In April, Pierre Laval, who had been sacked as prime minister in December 1941, returned to office with a personal mission to wrest authority over French affairs from the Germans, even at the cost of intensified collaboration on certain matters. In May he removed the intransigent Germanophobe Vallat and appointed Louis Darquier de Pellepoix to run the Commissariat général aux questions juives. Darquier de Pellepoix was the founder of a veterans’ organization and at one time or another a leading light in almost every far-right and anti-Semitic movement in France between the wars. He was an utterly disreputable man, who filled the CGQJ with cronies and skimmed money from Aryanized businesses. But his deputy, Joseph Antignac, was a cold and efficient administrator who worked well with the Germans. At around the same time, Laval promoted a gifted young prefect, René Bousquet, to head the French police service. Bousquet’s representative in the occupied zone was Jean Leguay, an equally dynamic and effective civil servant.¹⁶³

The new French team found themselves dealing with fresh faces on the German side. In February 1942, Otto von Stülpnagel resigned as the head of the military administration rather than approve ever more draconian repression and the mass shooting of hostages. He was replaced by his cousin, General Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, who was more amenable to the high command’s predilection for hostage taking and executions in reprisal for resistance activity. The following month, Himmler used the deteriorating security situation to warrant the appointment of Carl Oberg as the first Higher SS Police Leader for France. This step marked a decisive subtraction of power from the military administration. Oberg was placed in overall command of all German security troops and aimed for the subordination of the French police too. The Sipo-SD was given executive power in the occupied zone and permitted to conduct arrests. This boded ill for the Jews since, as the SS Police Leader in the Radom district, Oberg had overseen the destruction of numerous Jewish communities. In May, Eichmann sent Herbert Hagen, one of his trusted lieutenants, to assist Helmut Knochen, chief of the security police. Hagen’s role largely entailed pressing the French to adopt more rigorous anti-Jewish policies. Two months later Eichmann added Heinz Röthke, a former theology student, to the team responsible for enacting anti-Jewish policy. With this shift of power to the security apparatus, Werner Best dropped into the background and eventually left to take up the post of Reich Plenipotentiary in Denmark.¹⁶⁴

Dannecker and Carl-Theo Zeitschel, who held the Jewish desk in the German Embassy, had long been pressing for the removal of Jews from France and had achieved a limited success with the transports from the internment camps. In early May, Heydrich visited Paris but at this time did not envisage mass deportations taking place for months. Shortly afterwards, though, Dannecker began negotiations with the railway authorities to obtain transports to take even larger numbers of Jews from France to the east. By chance, the senior German officer responsible for rail movements offered to make rolling stock available; suddenly the log jam was broken and developments accelerated. A week later, Abetz, the German Ambassador, informed Knochen that the embassy was awaiting a final decision from Berlin about the fate of Jews in France. On the same day, the military administration issued order No. 8, requiring that from 7 June all Jews in the occupied zone (except nationals of states allied to Germany) had to wear a yellow star with the word ‘Juif’ emblazoned on it. Objections by the Vichy government ensured that the star was not worn by Jews in the Free Zone. However, the Vichy authorities proved more tractable on other issues.¹⁶⁵

On 11 June, the Judenreferenten (experts on Jewish affairs) posted to France, Belgium and the Netherlands by office IVB4 of the Gestapo were recalled to Berlin for an urgent consultation. According to Dannecker’s notes, Eichmann told them that ‘For military reasons the deportation of Jews from Germany to the Eastern areas of operations can no longer take place during the summer. The Reichsführer-SS has therefore ordered the transfer of large numbers of Jews from the South East (Romania) or from the Occupied Western areas to Auschwitz concentration camp for labour.’ The deportees had to be aged between sixteen and forty and capable of hard labour, although 10 per cent of each transport could consist of Jews unfit for work. Jews in mixed marriages and citizens of neutral countries and states in the Axis were also excluded (as were Jews whom the Germans thought they could exchange for German citizens interned by the British and Americans). Eichmann set quotas of 15,000 Jews from the Netherlands, 15,000 from Belgium and 100,000 from France, encompassing both zones.¹⁶⁶

Once Dannecker returned to Paris he issued guidelines for the forthcoming action and engaged in a round of conversations with Vichy officials. It is characteristic of German decision-making and policy implementation that the proposals in Berlin were honoured more in the breach. Although the deportations were supposedly intended to send a stream of labour to Auschwitz, unlike the transports that were sent in March and June only a diminishing fraction of the French deportees entered the labour force. Instead, most were murdered in gas chambers. Yet as we have seen these installations had not been prepared well in advance of the deportation schedule and were hurried, primitive contraptions. And, once again, the war disrupted German planning. With only three police battalions at their disposal, a maximum of 3,000 men, the Sipo-SD contingent in Paris did not have nearly enough personnel to conduct such a massive operation. Nor could any be spared from other theatres. Even after Eichmann abruptly scaled back the quota for France to 40,000, the Sipo-SD would still need the assistance of the Vichy regime. Thanks to the census of Jews in the occupied zone, the Jewish section of the Paris police held a card index with details of 149,793 Jews registered in the city. The gendarmes, the municipal police and the gardes mobiles took their orders not from the Germans but from the intendant of police in each prefecture and they, in turn, took their orders from the head of the police, René Bousquet. This gave the French considerable bargaining power and enabled them to set terms that contradicted German aspirations.¹⁶⁷

While Laval and Pétain were happy to see the Germans remove foreign and stateless Jews from France and to empty the internment camps in both the north and the south – including children and families – they refused to let the Germans touch a Jew with French citizenship acquired by birth or by naturalization before 1927. Bousquet and Leguay would only agree to put the French police at the disposal of the Germans if they agreed to these conditions. When Dannecker demanded that they arrest 22,000 Jews in Paris and 10,000 in the unoccupied zone, including at least 40 per cent with French nationality, his French counterparts referred the matter to Laval. The result was a momentary crisis in German–French relations that threatened to derail Oberg’s patient efforts to secure the collaboration of the French police force. On 30 June, Eichmann travelled to Paris and spent two days sorting things out. A subsequent memorandum noted that cooperation in the north was good, but in the south ‘the French Government causes increasing difficulties’. A few days later, Oberg, Knochen and Hagen reached a compromise with Bousquet. The Germans would make do with foreign and stateless Jews, although they would come from both zones. French police would carry out the arrests in the north and the south, supplying the necessary manpower. As for taking children, Dannecker had to ask Berlin whether this was acceptable. The time it took to elicit a reply suggests that Eichmann had not reckoned on this part of the bargain.¹⁶⁸

At the cost of surrendering unwanted Jews, Bousquet had managed to defend France’s sovereignty over its citizens and extend the authority of the Vichy regime over a police operation in the occupied zone. The Germans had no choice but to agree to these terms, at least for the moment. Yet dependence on the Vichy regime actually left them dependent on French public opinion since their French partners could not ignore popular feeling. It was a risky deal.

The Jews were completely unaware of these machinations. In her diary entries for April and May 1942, Hélène Berr recorded her progress as a student at the Sorbonne, the merry round of parties and musical evenings, and weekends in the countryside with her boyfriend. Although Hélène worked as a volunteer for L’Entraide Temporaire, which provided assistance to Jewish children whose foreign-born parents were interned or deported, life continued normally for her family. The first measure to have an impact on them was the announcement that all Jews would be compelled to wear the yellow star. On 1 June she wrote, ‘Maman came to tell me the news about the yellow star, and I pushed her away, saying “I’ll talk about it later.”’ Hélène wrestled over whether or not to wear it and analysed what it meant for her identity as a French woman and a Jew. While it was undoubtedly degrading, it was ‘cowardly not to wear it vis-à-vis people who will’. She resolved that if she did, ‘I want to stay very elegant and dignified at all times so that people can see what that means. I want to do whatever is most courageous.’ For all her prognostications, when the day came to go out in public with the star on her coat it was an agonizing experience. She tried to keep her head high and maintain eye-contact with other pedestrians, but many looked away. She felt an odd sensation seeing other star-wearers, Jews who would formerly have been indistinguishable from anyone else. When some people smiled sympathetically, her eyes filled with tears. Taunted by children, however, she felt reduced to one identity: Jew. The next day on her way to the university she was forced to go to the last car of the tram. Once she reached the Sorbonne, ‘I suddenly felt I was no longer myself, that everybody had changed, that I had become a foreigner, as if I were in the grip of a nightmare.’¹⁶⁹

‘There are no words for such infamy,’ Raymond-Raoul Lambert growled in his journal, although as a resident of the Free Zone he was a spectator to events in the north. The star was the latest in a series of unpleasant twists since the return of Laval and the departure of Vallat. Until then, he believed he had made significant progress establishing UGIF and bringing succour to foreign and French Jews hit by the discriminatory policies of the Vichy regime or German repression. This was despite a wobbly beginning. At the end of 1941, Vallat had levied a punitive fine of 1 billion francs on the Jewish community and made UGIF responsible for collecting it. The fine dented the credibility of the new body and drew scathing criticism from the Consistoire. ‘I accepted only collaboration at the technical level,’ he averred defensively, depicting their opposition as purely selfish. ‘The very wealthy Jews who are the majority of the Consistoire are afraid the Union [UGIF] will make them pay too much for the poor.’ By March 1942, though, he sensed success and believed that UGIF was well established.¹⁷⁰

Hélène Berr discovered the importance of the UGIF when her father was arrested for failing to wear the yellow star correctly. A German officer took him to a police station where he was charged and sent to Drancy internment camp. As soon as his family was notified, Hélène rushed to the Jewish desk at the police station carrying things he might need. Later she was able to send letters to her father via a UGIF office. Two weeks later, she registered with UGIF herself, although she could not suppress her feeling that it was dangerous to organize the Jews on a racial basis. ‘I detest all those more or less Zionist movements that unwittingly play into the Germans’ hands.’ Nevertheless, before long she was working as a part-time volunteer in a UGIF office.¹⁷¹

Life went on. Hélène went into the country to pick raspberries, wandered in the Luxembourg Gardens, and visited favourite bookshops. Then, on 15 July, she noted, ‘Something is brewing, something that will be a tragedy, maybe the tragedy.’ She was warned that the Germans were planning a rafle, a round-up, of 20,000 Jews. ‘A wave of terror has been gripping everybody else as well these past few days. It appears that the SS have taken command in France and that terror must follow.’ Friends urged her to flee south.¹⁷²

The rumours of an impending rafle were correct. Following Eichmann’s two-day stay in the capital, the SS had settled the details of the first major action in France. Bousquet informed his lieutenants that the French police would have the lion’s share of the operation. Nine thousand uniformed officers, supplemented by 400 members of a right-wing paramilitary association, would descend on six arrondissements at 4 a.m. on 16 July. Their target consisted of 28,000 non-French Jews, each named on lists supplied by the Jewish section of the Paris police. The officers were instructed to give the Jews enough time to take clothing and food for two days. If they vacated an apartment they had to ensure that the gas and electricity were turned off. The contents of the property had to be carefully noted before the residence was sealed. Fifty buses with blackened windows stood ready to convey the captives to assembly centres prior to sorting and deportation. The sorting was necessary because there were numerous excluded categories: pregnant women, women with children under two, wives of POWs, war widows, anyone married to a person who was exempt, and anyone registered as a UGIF employee.¹⁷³

With military precision the arrest teams went to work, entering houses, apartment blocks, tenements, and hammering at doors with lists in hand. A contemporary publication by the resistance circulated a few months later gave an eyewitness account of what followed: ‘They took away women and children over the age of two, women in the seventh and eighth, and even ninth month of pregnancy; sick people who were pulled out of their beds and carried on chairs or stretchers … it was especially the round-up of the children that must be emphasized. From the age of two they were considered candidates for the concentration camps! In a number of cases mothers were forcibly torn away from their little ones. Screaming and weeping filled the streets.’ But the rumour mill had worked so effectively that thousands of men had taken care not to be at home. Foreign Jews who had grown used to police raids since the 1930s needed little warning and they knew what to do. Many had prepared hiding places. A significant number of the police officers were unhappy at the job and leaked information to people they knew. Others knocked at a door once or twice and then gave up. Some turned a blind eye when they saw a Jew slipping out of a back entrance or down an alleyway. At the last moment the communist underground issued a warning in Yiddish, although it had limited distribution. By the end of the day the police had netted 11,363, far short of their goal. Further raids on 17 July brought the total up to 12,884. But this tally included 3,031 men, 5,802 women, and no fewer than 4,051 children.¹⁷⁴

Nearly 5,000 were sent directly to Drancy, which now doubled as a transit camp. Over 8,000 Jews were bussed to the Vélodrome d’Hiver (popularly abbreviated to Vel’ d’Hiv), a cycledrome in the 15th arrondissement, and held there for up to five days. Conditions in Vel’ d’Hiv were terrible. It was very hot, but there was no water supply and only a few toilets. About a dozen nurses and doctors attempted to cope with a horde of distressed, dehydrated adults and children, many of whom were unwell when they were brought in. The scene was chaotic. A non-Jewish care worker who volunteered to help testified that ‘Nothing had been done in advance for them. There wasn’t even straw. The internees were “installed” on the bleachers or sitting on the ground. At night the children lay on the ground and the adults stayed seated … There was no food for the first two days. Those who had not brought provisions with them remained with empty stomachs. There was no water to drink or to wash with. The toilets, twelve in number, soon became blocked … The screams of the children were deafening. It drove you crazy.’ The saving grace of this disorganization was that it allowed numerous Jews to slip out and escape.¹⁷⁵

Between 19 and 22 July, the Jews in the Vel’ d’Hiv were removed in batches on foot to the Gare d’Austerlitz from whence they went by train to the transit camps at Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande. Here they made do in wooden barracks until the next stage of their grim odyssey. Prior to that, however, the Germans had to make a crucial decision: would the children be deported? The original plan excluded the very young and the very old. When French officials intimated that they were willing to include juveniles, Dannecker had asked Eichmann for instructions. It was not until 20 July that word came from Berlin: the children could be sent east too. As a result, between 31 July and 7 August, four trains carried adults with older children direct to Auschwitz. All of those on the first transport were registered in the camp; the others were subject to selections. The transport of 5 August was the first from which the majority were murdered on arrival.¹⁷⁶

The remaining children were sent to Drancy. At the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, Georges Wellers, a member of the Jewish camp staff, recalled the state they were in. ‘These children arrived at Drancy after already having been completely neglected for two or three weeks at Beaune-la-Rolande and Pithiviers – they arrived with dirty, torn clothes in a very bad condition, often without buttons, often with one of their shoes completely missing, with sores on their bodies. They nearly all had diarrhoea; they were incapable of going down into the courtyard where there were lavatories. So sanitary slop pails were put on the landings, but the small infants were incapable of even using these slop pails which were too big for them …’ The children were subsequently distributed amongst the transports that departed between 17 and 31 August. By then they had been sundered from their parents for weeks and were deeply distressed. Those with older siblings had someone to assist them; but many infants were entirely alone. Wellers described what it was like on the days children were deported. ‘They were woken up early, at five o’clock in the morning; they were given coffee. They had woken up badly, in a bad mood. At five o’clock in the morning, even in the month of August in Paris, it is still very dark; it is still almost night, and when they wanted them to come down into the courtyard, it was usually very difficult. So the women volunteers tried through persuasion to get the older ones to come down first, but several times it happened that the children began to cry and struggle. It was impossible to bring them down into the courtyard of the camp, and so policemen had to go up into the rooms and take in their arms the children who were struggling and screaming. They took them down into the courtyard.’¹⁷⁷

At Drancy the Germans confiscated whatever valuables the Jews had with them and filtered out anyone who had been detained inappropriately. Representatives of UGIF and Amelot, the immigrant welfare association, applied to the Germans to remove those who were French-born or protected under other headings. Nearly 1,000, including 192 French-born children, were plucked out. More controversially, UGIF supplied food and clothing to the detainees and equipped them for their journey to the east. Between 19 July and 31 August, sixteen transports departed from Le Bourget Station, near Drancy, with over 16,000 Jews on board.¹⁷⁸

The grand rafle of 16–17 July rocked the Jews in France, but it did not immediately change them. Hélène Berr remarked in her diary on the following Saturday, ‘On Thursday [16 July] I thought life might have ground to a halt. But it has gone on. It has resumed.’ She returned to her studies in the library at the Sorbonne and maundered over a young man she fancied. Hélène did not panic, go underground or flee – although her family considered moving to the Free Zone. The assertion of normality was not for lack of information about the horrors that had spilled onto the streets of Montmartre and the Fauberg Saint-Denis. Rather, she felt defiant and she was boosted by the ‘sympathy of the people in the street, on the metro. Men and women look at you with such goodness that it fills your heart with inexpressible feeling.’ The assault on the Jews actually made her feel more in common with other French people. ‘Superficial distinctions of race, religion and social class are no longer the issue … there is unity against evil, and communion in suffering.’ Hélène was also reassured to learn that army veterans and French citizens, like her father, who was still languishing in Drancy, were held back. A colleague at the UGIF office where she volunteered warned her that ‘it would soon be the turn of women who were French citizens’ but she seemed unable to grasp the implications for herself. Even as trains were rolling eastwards she lost herself in books and boys. ‘We spent a marvellous afternoon in the library’, she wrote on 26 July, ‘listening to records, with the windows open to an infinitely tranquil yet buzzing sun-drenched garden.’¹⁷⁹

It is estimated that 15,000 Jews, mainly men, successfully evaded the great round-up in Paris. The results were so poor that the Germans looked to the unoccupied zone to make up the numbers. Thousands of foreign-born Jews lived in the major cities there and thousands more, like Irène Némirovsky, had arrived from the north as refugees in 1940. The action on 16–17 July had triggered a further flight south, covertly assisted by UGIF and the Amelot committee. This influx had not gone unnoticed and there was considerable resentment against refugees. At a time of growing scarcity the newcomers were blamed for shortages and any with money were typically suspected of black market activity. Even so, identifying and locating Jews in the unoccupied zone was not straightforward. They were unmarked and, until December 1942, personal identification papers did not have to indicate if the bearer was Jewish. Unfortunately, though, Lambert had agreed to send the CGQJ the lists of Jews registered with UGIF in the south. The CGQJ immediately shared the information with the Sipo-SD. In any case, many of the foreign Jews were congregated in the internment camps and, hence, sitting ducks. Irène Némirovsky, who had found refuge at Issy-l’Évêque, was actually arrested on 13 July, before the main sweep, but was moved to Pithiviers and placed aboard a transport on 17 July packed with a thousand other foreign Jews. She died of ‘flu’ a month after her arrival in Auschwitz.¹⁸⁰

René Bousquet had agreed with Dannecker to supply 10,000 Jews from the unoccupied zone. On 5 August he sent instructions to his prefects specifying who was to be included or excluded. Potential deportees had to be foreign Jews aged 18–60 years. The police were to leave pregnant women and nursing mothers, invalids, veterans of the Great War and their families, anyone married to a French citizen or with a French-born child, and essential workers. Any Jew married to someone in one of these categories was also exempted. The removals began with the camps, starting at Gurs, which was the miserable home of the Jews expelled from Baden Württemburg in 1940. In Noé, Récébédou, Rivesaltes, Le Vernet and Les Milles screening commissions briskly sifted out those who were exempt. The Jewish relief organizations used this sorting process as an opportunity to argue vigorously for every plausible case. OSE, the Jewish children’s welfare organization, moved quickly to extract French-born youngsters. Agents of UGIF and rabbis who had served as military chaplains contested so many cases that even though 3,436 Jews were sent north to Drancy, the French authorities were still over 5,000 short of the target. Consequently, Bousquet relaxed the exemptions, ordered round-ups in the major cities, and sent police units to scour convents and remote villages. The results were still disappointing: in Marseilles, Nice and Lyons, Bousquet estimated that 40–75 per cent of the foreign Jews got away. Of 6,701 arrested Jews, 5,259 were eventually dispatched to Drancy. Further raids added another 1,113. By November, seventeen trains had carried 11,012 Jews from the Free Zone to Drancy and thence to Auschwitz.¹⁸¹

Raymond-Raoul Lambert anguished, ‘the persecutions in the Occupied Zone are being redoubled. They are now arresting women and children, and deporting men en masse … Where is France now if it is letting innocent citizens be tortured without protest?’ The deportations demanded a response, yet the leadership of the Jewish population found it hard to establish common ground. Lambert travelled to Vichy to meet Jacques Helbronner, president of the Consistoire, only to discover that ‘The fate of the foreigners doesn’t move him in the least.’ When UGIF joined forces with the Consistoire to send a deputation to Laval, Helbronner refused to interrupt his summer holiday to join them. He insisted on keeping his privileged access to Laval to himself. The deputation that saw the Vichy premier on 6 August returned empty-handed. Laval insisted that it was ‘legitimate for France to send foreigners to Germany; it can do anything it likes with them’. Lambert recorded that ‘Mr Laval did not respond to the humanitarian and legal arguments put forward by the representatives of the charities …’¹⁸²

Three days later, the head of UGIF was in the thick of efforts to save Jews in the Free Zone from deportation. It was symptomatic of the conflicted role played by UGIF that on the one hand he was supervising the provisioning of deportation trains, while on the other he was battling to get individuals deferred or released. On 10 August he went to the Marseilles prefecture with a list of French-born children in Les Milles and then to the camp itself, where he was forced to behold ‘a heartrending spectacle. Buses are taking away seventy children from their parents who are to depart that evening. I have arranged for the children to leave first so they will not see their parents subjected to the roll call … We have to hold the fathers and mothers back as the buses leave the courtyard. What wailing and tears, what gestures as each poor father, faced with the moment of deportation, caresses the face of a son or daughter as if to imprint it on his fingertips! Mothers are screaming in despair and the rest of us cannot hold back our own tears …’ The roll call was held under a blazing sun and many deportees collapsed. Some gendarmes showed their distaste for the mission, but the next day, ‘brutal policemen who do not speak their language’ loaded the Jews onto railroad cars. Forty were ‘delivered up because they are Jews, by my country which had promised them asylum, and handed them over to those who will be their executioners. There are children, old people, war veterans, women, disabled people, old men … I cannot watch … I hide where I can weep.’¹⁸³

Lambert returned to Vichy and demanded that police officials respect the privileges accorded to UGIF officials, war veterans and those holding emigration visas. On this trip he managed to see Darquier de Pellepoix, only to realize that the boss of the CGQJ was ‘sidelined with regard to the deportation measures’. He cannily observed that ‘This is a strange regime, whose victims are called upon to witness its administrative disorder.’ Back at Les Milles in early September he again fought to get people deferred, but found himself rescuing deportees whom he had pulled off the trains days earlier. To his dismay, on one occasion he saw the police commander, desperate to fill two empty wagons, abandon any pretence of selection and arrange for the inmates to draw lots to determine who would board. When Lambert spotted that one of the victims was a distinguished Viennese publisher, he lost his composure. In his diary he reconstructed the scene: ‘I can’t stand it anymore! I rush across the courtyard like a madman. “You can’t deport a Knight of the Legion d’Honneur,” I tell the commandant. “Go and get him!” I push the guards apart, grab Fischer by the arm, and put him behind me …’¹⁸⁴

By the beginning of September, the Germans had deported 32,130 Jews to Auschwitz on thirty-two transports. Yet they were still short of their target. The result was a further frenzy of round-ups in Paris aimed at Jews whose nationality had previously protected them. On 24 September, French police seized 1,594 Romanian Jews; five days later it was the turn of 1,700 Belgians; and on 5 November 1,060 Jews of Greek nationality. Eventually Knochen and Röthke were able to add 6,766 foreign Jews to the roster of the deported. However, they now faced a public opinion backlash and Vichy officials warned that massive actions were no longer desirable. The day after the Romanian Jews were grabbed, Knochen informed Himmler that ‘It will no longer be possible to evacuate larger contingents of Jews.’ The last transport departed from Drancy for Auschwitz on 11 November. By then, 42,500 Jews had been deported, most in just a five-week stretch from 26 July to 1 September. A handful stopped at Kosel, in Upper Silesia, where several hundred young men and women were taken off and assigned to slave labour, a faint trace of the original scheme to deport Jews to the east to replace the labour of Russian POWs.¹⁸⁵

Until the large-scale round-ups in the summer of 1942, the French public had been largely indifferent to the fate of the Jews. The arrests and punitive deportations earlier in the year had met with silence from intellectuals, resistance circles and the Churches. However, the spectacle of women and children being herded through the streets and driven towards cattle trucks heading towards an ‘unknown destination’ provoked a wave of repulsion. Churchmen from all the main denominations gave voice to this disquiet. Just a few days after the rafle in Paris, Cardinal Suhard, Archbishop of Paris, addressed a letter of protest to Pétain and circulated the contents amongst his priests. The following month, Cardinal Gerlier, Archbishop of Lyons and Primate of Gaul, made a public declaration of dismay. He was echoed by Pastor Boegner, president of the Protestant Federation of France. On 23 August, Cardinal Saliège of Toulouse issued a powerfully worded pastoral letter: ‘In our own diocese, the most disturbing scenes have taken place in the camps of Noé and Récébédou. Jews are human beings. Foreigners are human beings. All is not permitted against them, against these men, against these women, against these fathers and these mothers of families. They belong to humankind; they are our brothers as are so many others. A Christian may not forget this.’ The cardinal’s letter was subsequently used in a broadcast by the French service of the BBC. A month later, the National Council of the Reformed Church convened in emergency session to register the alarm of the Protestant population. Pastor Boegner reminded his community that Jesus was a Jew.¹⁸⁶

The deportations occasioned a flurry of articles in the underground press. Le Franc-Tireur called on its readers to ‘Expose the horrors of Paris; express your solidarity for all the victims – shelter them, hide them, refuse to allow France to be soiled.’ Libération (in the southern zone) distributed 70,000 copies of an issue featuring accounts of the Vel’ d’Hiv’ atrocity. Father Chaillet, writing in Cahiers du Témoignage Chrétien, exclaimed, ‘We must cry out to the unknowing and uncaring world our disgust and our indignation that such a manhunt could be conducted on our soil.’ In October 1942, Combat declared that ‘foreign Jews, the vanguard of French Jewry and all the French people, are suffering the Nazi persecution and enduring a painful martyrdom. Their martyrdom and persecution make them more precious. All those who suffer at the hands of the Germans, whether Jewish or not, whether Communists or not, are our brothers.’ A communist leaflet urged those who read it to ‘Shelter, protect, hide Jewish children and their families; save the honour of France.’ In mid-September, Jean Moulin, head of the Gaullist resistance in occupied France, reported to the movement’s London headquarters that ‘The arrests of foreign Jews and their handing over to the Germans and even more so the disgraceful measure adopted with regard to Jewish children, of which the general public was initially unaware, have begun to stir the popular conscience.’ It was the first time that Moulin had adverted explicitly to anti-Jewish measures. The Free French based in London amplified the clandestine press. There were seven references to the deportations in BBC French service transmissions between 1 August and 15 September 1942. André Labarthe, founder of the Gaullist journal in London La France libre, warned listeners, ‘Frenchmen! You will not let this happen. You will unite against the rising plague in which you can all perish: Jews, Bretons, Lorrainers, Basques …’ As Labarthe’s words suggest, the Gaullists, no less than the Communists, were careful to frame the fate of the Jews in universalistic terms and to depict it as the prelude to an assault on all French people. Their admonitions were not fantasy; soon the resistance was inveighing against Sauckel’s conscription of French workers for German industry, the Service du travail obligatoire (STO). Before the year was out, the focus of underground propaganda had shifted to the deportation of French workers. However, the enforcement of the STO gave a fillip to the resistance and stimulated support for men and women going into hiding to evade the taskmasters. Even if for the wrong reasons, it generated a sense of solidarity with Jews on the run, albeit in very different circumstances.¹⁸⁷

From autumn 1942, the regime and the public had a sharper sense of what deportation entailed, even if the details were confused. As the public recoiled, the Vichy politicians reconsidered the strategy of cooperation. Their caution was deepened by a decisive turn in the war. After two weeks of heavy fighting against far stronger forces, on 4 November Rommel ordered what remained of the Italian–German force to retreat from the El Alamein line. Four days later, British and American troops invaded French-controlled Morocco and Algeria, provoking the Germans to occupy the Free Zone. Then news came from the eastern front that German forces were in deep trouble as the result of a major Soviet counter-offensive around Stalingrad. The Germans would never again enjoy such extensive collaboration with their anti-Jewish policy in France; on the contrary, they would encounter more and more obstruction.¹⁸⁸

The ‘final solution’ in Belgium, the Netherlands and Norway

Although Eichmann issued uniform instructions to his Judenreferenten on 11 June, they had to operate under diverse conditions. In Belgium, Kurt Asche was hemmed in by the military administration and had few resources at his disposal. There was no Higher SS Police Leader in place and relatively few Sipo-SD personnel. However, he was able to obtain army support for certain measures. In November 1941 the army command agreed to establish a unitary Jewish representative body, the Association of Jews in Belgium (Association des Juifs en Belgique, AJB). The Germans appointed Chief Rabbi Solomon Ullmann as president, flanked by a number of equally respectable figures. Asche aspired to enrol all Jews in Belgium under the umbrella of the AJB, but they proved less than obliging. When the registration was carried out during March–April 1942, thousands ignored the threat of punishment for evasion. While the majority of Belgian Jews obeyed, the mass of foreign Jews steered clear. There was similar resistance to imposition of the yellow star. Even the AJB refused to assist the Germans distribute the hated badge. Anne Somerhausen, a left-wing parliamentarian who kept a diary during the occupation, marvelled that the stars appeared one day and then vanished the next.¹⁸⁹

Moshe Flinker, a sixteen-year-old Dutch boy, was amongst the foreign Jews who opted to go unmarked. His family had moved from The Hague to Brussels in mid-1942 and started living there without the star. At great cost his father purchased residence permits that offered the family a degree of security. Torn from school, in an alien environment, Moshe had time on his hands to reflect on their situation. Orthodox in his beliefs and outlook, he interpreted the fate of the Jews through Jewish history and scripture. ‘What other purpose could he [God] have in allowing such things to befall us?’ he wondered. ‘I feel certain that further troubles will not bring any Jews back to the paths of righteousness; on the contrary, I think that upon experiencing such great anguish they will think that there is no god at all in the universe …’ The only way Moshe could make sense of the disaster was that it presaged redemption, that God would save his people and thereby prove his sovereignty over all mankind and all of creation. According to Moshe’s philosophy, the Germans were tools of the Almighty.¹⁹⁰

According to Eichmann’s instructions the Sipo-SD was charged with deporting 10,000 Jews between 16 and 40 years of age, although 10 per cent of each projected transport could include non-working Jews. As in France, the Germans planned to begin with foreign and stateless Jews. Asche hoped to assemble them under the guise of a call-up for labour service, Arbeiteinsatz, issued by the AJB. In late July the notices went out over the name of Maurice Benedictus, a cigar manufacturer and member of the AJB council. However, the response was paltry. Asche was compelled to resort to razzias in the streets of districts in Antwerp, Brussels, Liège and Charleroi where the Jewish population was concentrated. For these to be effective he needed manpower, but the Belgian civil service and police authorities proved refractory. Apart from two large-scale operations in Antwerp in August, the local police played little part. Instead Asche relied on 1,800 Feldgendarmerie, military police, and paramilitary formations of the Belgian fascist parties, the Flemish Rexists and the Walloon Vlaams Nationaal Verbond, plus a unit of Flemish Waffen-SS volunteers. The Jews caught in the street raids followed those who had volunteered for labour service to Mechelen (Malines). Here the Sipo-SD had hurriedly established a transit camp in a former army barracks, the Dossin Casern, that was located conveniently close to major rail lines criss-crossing Belgium and also heading eastward.¹⁹¹

The Germans faced concerted resistance. Anne Somerhausen heard that mayors started quickly marrying Jewish women to Belgian men so that they would gain Belgian nationality. Soon after the labour call-up was announced, Jewish communists broke into the offices of the AJB and set fire to the files containing the names of registered Jews. On 29 August, a Jewish member of the communist Partisans Armés assassinated Robert Holzinger, the AJB official responsible for assembling Jews for deportation. Rabbi Ullmann, unwilling to give further legitimacy to the deportations, resigned from the AJB the following month. When the Sipo-SD reacted by arresting him and the rest of the Jewish leadership this only served further to undermine the appearance of an innocuous mobilization for labour service and thousands more Jews went underground. Meanwhile, Jewish communists and left-wing Zionists set up a Comité de Défense des Juifs, to help those going into hiding. The Comité was affiliated to the main Belgian underground, which was already well organized and strong.¹⁹²

Despite the initially unpropitious circumstances and furious reaction, in just one hundred days the security police managed to net and deport 50 per cent more Jews than their quota required. Seventeen trains carried 16,882 Jews from Belgium to Auschwitz between 4 August and 31 October, sometimes departing at the rate of two per day.¹⁹³

In the Netherlands, the Germans inaugurated the deportations by requiring Jewish refugees from the Reich to present themselves at the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, supposedly for labour service. When the responsibility for issuing the notices was handed down to the Jewish council there was unrest in its ranks and calls for non-cooperation. After an anguished session on 13 February 1942, the Joodse Raad, the Jewish council, agreed to comply. At this Heinz Hesdörffer remarked bitterly, ‘Dutch Jews rejoiced, glad to be rid of the German refugees and to be safe themselves. “We are Dutchmen, nothing can happen to us.” But the joy was short-lived.’ On 29 April, the Germans informed Abraham Asscher and David Cohen that from 2 May all Jews in the Netherlands would be obliged to wear the yellow star. Asscher and Cohen protested, but then referred the matter to an emergency meeting of the Jewish council. A majority agreed to accept the imposition and to distribute the badge. When Jews appeared on the streets bedecked with the star, they experienced a good deal of sympathy and there were countless gestures of solidarity. Locals joked that the Waterlooplein, heart of the Jewish quarter, should be renamed Place d’Étoile. But smiles did nothing to alleviate the relentless pressure from the German administration. Around the same time, Jews from the provinces were required to move into the Jewish district of Amsterdam, giving it more and more the character of a crowded ghetto. The council had to accommodate and support them.¹⁹⁴

In April, Eichmann inspected Westerbork and told Willi Zöpf, his representative in the Netherlands, that transportations of Jews to the east would commence in the summer. At the meeting of Judenrefernten on 11 June he specified that 25,000 Jews would be deported from the Netherlands, with the customary exclusions. However, ten days later the number jumped to 40,000 to compensate for the decrease in the total anticipated coming from France. On 26 June, aus der Fünten summoned Abraham Asscher and Edwin Sluzker, an Austrian Jewish refugee who acted as the liaison with the Zentralstelle, and told them that the Jewish council had to arrange for Jewish men and women aged 16–40, including Dutch citizens, to report at the Zentralstelle for labour duty in Germany, at the rate of 800 per day. Again, Asscher and Cohen remonstrated and, again, the Joodse Raad held hours of agonizing deliberations. On 4 July, the Jewish leadership agreed to comply, on condition that the Germans agreed to a raft of exemptions. This suited German thinking perfectly: they had discovered from experience that as long as one group of Jews thought they were immune they would be willing to help remove another, saving the occupiers a great deal of manpower and effort as well as preserving the appearance of order.¹⁹⁵

The very next day the call-up notices for the ‘Arbeitseinsatz im Osten’, labour service in the east, went out and ‘all hell broke out at the headquarters of the Jewish council’. Jacob Presser, later to chronicle these events as a historian, recalled that ‘People chased after papers, after exemptions, begged for a week’s delay, produced doctor’s certificates to the effect that they were dope addicts, mutilated or invalids … They lined up for specialists’ certificates, legal advice, testimonials from their religious leaders or from the “friend” of an important German who might use his influence. If only one could find recognition as an “indispensable” Jew!’ Corruption and favouritism proliferated. Heinz Hesdörffer, who had secured work with a refugee aid committee in Arnhem under the auspices of Gertrude van Tijn, witnessed the ‘Dreadful scenes [that] took place in the hallways of the Nieuwe Keizersgracht [the Jewish council building] … Old men, pregnant women, children from the Amsterdam Jewish quarters in their shredded raggedy clothing, cheek by jowl with gentlemen and ladies of the Zuid, the most elegant neighbourhood, who had their summons in their pockets and also tried to save themselves until the last moment. Day and night the howling cries could be heard of those sentenced to death, but not everyone could be employed.’¹⁹⁶

As in Belgium, thousands refused to obey the notices to report. Consequently, the Germans staged a massive raid on the Jewish quarter, grabbing 700 people whom they declared would be held hostage until 4,000 Jews heeded the summons. This tactic worked: for several weeks the Jewish council ensured that the quotas were filled. Jews poured into the courtyard of the Zentrallstelle building, where they were processed and shipped on to Westerbork via the Amsterdam central station. Nevertheless, by early August the numbers had fallen back again and the Germans staged further round-ups. They also adopted new tactics and began to raid the homes of Jews at night. A special battalion of the Amsterdam police carried out these nocturnal raids. The Schalkhaar unit, named after the police academy where it was trained, was formed in 1941 by the chief constable of the Amsterdam police, Sybren Tulp. It was recruited mainly from men with a military background and operated out of barracks, unlike the regular police. Tulp, a member of the Dutch Nazi Party, also set up a Jewish Bureau within the force. Led by a fanatical anti-Semite, Dahmen von Bucholz, the Bureau’s mission was to pursue Jews suspected of infringing anti-Jewish regulations. Even with these extra resources it proved difficult to fill the trains departing from the central station for Westerbork. To make up the numbers, Hanns Rauter, the Higher SS Police Leader, emptied the labour camps where Dutch and foreign Jews had been working since 1941. Instead of using the Zentralstelle as the assembly point, the Germans pressed into use a theatre, the Hollandse Schouwburg, that was close to the Jewish district. From October, Jews seized in raids were sorted there before the unlucky were escorted to waiting deportation trains.¹⁹⁷

On arrival at Westerbork, the Dutch Jews had an unwelcome surprise: the camp was run entirely by German Jews who had been incarcerated since late 1941, and who felt little sympathy for the newcomers. Spread over a 60-acre site surrounded by agricultural land, Westerbork had been established in 1939 to accommodate German Jewish refugees. It was equipped with a fine hospital, a quarantine unit and workshops. Inmates also laboured in farms and market gardens in the vicinity. During the first years of the occupation the camp was under the Dutch Ministry of Justice, but on 1 July 1942 the German security police took over and transformed it into a transit camp. The first commandant was Albert Gemmeker. He appointed Kurt Schlesinger, a German Jew, to head the internal camp administration. Schlesinger in turn appointed German Jews to most positions of power and took charge of the central registry which determined who would go east. Presser commented that ‘these paladins, nearly all of them German Jews, had control over life and death and were accordingly flattered, influenced, bribed, envied and hated, and, indeed, loathed.’ Schlesinger maintained order in the camp through the Ordedienst, Order Service, and the Fliegende Kolonne, flying column, many of whom were ex-soldiers. On Tuesdays, when the weekly transport was filled, these men ensured that the unfortunates selected for departure were boarded. Since the exterior of the camp was patrolled by Dutch police, the Germans were able to run it with the minimum of personnel.¹⁹⁸

The Joodse Raad tried desperately to protect as many Jews as possible. Cohen asked for 35,000 exemptions and managed to get the Germans to grant 17,500. Those exempted received a number and a stamp in their identification papers. The fortunate included 1,500 baptized Jews, 1,800 whose racial status was under investigation, 800 who were protected by certain Germans, 3,800 working in the armaments, fur making and diamond cutting industries, plus 1,800 employees of the Jewish council. Unfortunately, a system that was supposed to create order and offer protection actually ‘caused moral disruption on a vast scale’. In Presser’s scathing analysis, ‘by granting temporary privileges to a minority, they [the Germans] succeeded in liquidating the rest without too much fuss or bother’.¹⁹⁹

For a considerable while, the Dutch Jewish leadership was not sure about the meaning of ‘Arbeitseinsatz im Osten’. They knew that deportation to Mauthausen was almost certainly a death sentence, but Dutch and foreign Jews had been sent to forced labour on fortifications along the North Sea coast for many months. The Germans added to their confusion by compelling nearly one hundred Dutch Jews who arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau to send home postcards indicating that they were in good health. Rather than warn Jews or advise non-compliance, the Jewish council sought to ease their passage eastwards. Gertrude van Tijn’s refugee committee turned its energies towards providing backpacks, mess tins, clothing and food for deportees. Nor did Dutch civil servants raise their voice against the deportations; they kept up the practice of avoiding conflict with the occupiers in order to preserve authority over what they considered the core interests of the Dutch people.²⁰⁰

Although broadcasts by the BBC Dutch service in the summer of 1942 referred to the mass murder of Jews in Poland, only a minority of Dutchmen connected this with the deportations. Most continued to think that Jews were being sent to atrocious work camps. Nevertheless, Jews did not meekly obey their leaders, be they foreign-born or Dutch citizens. In December 1941, Lodewijk Visser, who had been removed from the supreme court because he was a Jew, set up a committee to defend Jewish rights and refused to accept an ID card stamped with a ‘J’. He died before his protest could have a wider impact, or before the Germans dealt with him. Walter Süsskind, a former businessman, organized the rescue of hundreds of children from the Hollandse Schouwburg until he was deported to Theresienstadt in 1943 (and from there to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he perished along with his family). Over 4,000 Jews used their Sephardi origins to get themselves classified as Portuguese nationals while several thousand more delayed deportation by contesting whether they were Jewish at all. The Zionist youth movement organized groups of a few dozen to head south, passing borders illegally or with fake papers in the hope of reaching the Pyrenees and crossing into Spain. By far the most common form of resistance lay in concealment. It is estimated that 25,000 Jews went underground, usually with the assistance of friendly Dutch citizens. The best-known case is that of the Frank family. But Anne Frank’s father was untypical in terms of the accommodation and resources at his disposal as well as the network of loyal helpers he enjoyed. Few Jews could find a place to hide, let alone people they could rely on to supply them with food and other necessaries, even if they had the money for all that. In any case, most feared discovery and a sentence to Mauthausen, about which they knew something, more than deportation to a destination about which there was still ambiguity. Those who were still at large at the end of the year began to hope for a German military collapse and thought that if they could hold on for a bit longer they would be saved.²⁰¹

Eichmann was greatly satisfied by the apparently smooth removal of Jews from the Netherlands. Between July and December 1942, forty-two transports carried 38,606 Jews eastwards, to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Eighteen trains stopped at Kosel in Upper Silesia, where 3,500 young men and women were disembarked to join the workforce in labour camps. The process was certainly less fraught with difficulty than France, where the Germans had to deal with an independent government that had its own mind and two distinct zones of operation, or Belgium, where their quarry proved both refractory and elusive. Yet the system of voluntary reporting failed in Holland, too, and the Germans were forced to resort to round-ups that required extensive manpower as well as causing sympathy for their quarry. The high number deported from the Netherlands was in part the result of the pre-existing reservoir of victims in Westerbork and workers in labour camps plus their families. This enabled the deportation of 12,000 Jews in October 1942 alone, which was over a third of the number deported that year and 10 per cent of the total extracted from the Netherlands.²⁰²

It was also an extremely profitable enterprise. By May 1943, the Germans had emptied 17,225 houses and apartments. Hundreds of barges and rail freight wagons took the loot back to Germany, where it was distributed to members of the racial community who had been bombed out of their homes. The Aryanization authorities took over 20,000 properties, 560 mortgages, and a vast haul of diamonds. The fictive Lippmann–Rosenthal Bank, Liro, absorbed stolen cash, bank accounts, life insurance policies and debts owed to Jewish financiers. Liro even had a ‘branch’ in Westerbork that served to pick the Jews clean before they were shunted to their deaths. The Germans prattled endlessly about the attachment of Jews to money and their legendary greed, but in the course of destroying the Dutch Jewish community they demonstrated venality and avarice on an epic scale.²⁰³

In November, the attention of the SS Head Office in Berlin suddenly turned to Norway, a country with a tiny Jewish population. The 2,173 Jews, including Jewish refugees like Ruth Maier, had been relatively untroubled until early 1942, when Vidkun Quisling assumed the leadership of a collaborationist government and proceeded to demonstrate his concordance with wider Nazi goals. But the operation against the Jews there was probably the last-minute substitute for a bigger action against the Jews of Denmark. Werner Best, who had arrived in Copenhagen from France in September, rapidly assessed the situation and worked out that a move against the Danish Jews would trigger unrest and jeopardize the smooth flow of vital foodstuffs to the Reich. Because Terboven and Quisling controlled the police and security forces in Norway, that country was a softer target. The order was transmitted to the Norwegian police on 23 October and Jewish men were arrested three days later. The operation ‘had plainly been prepared in a rush’, though. The security police made the arrests in commandeered taxis. In total, 770 Jews were caught and deported. Some 930 fled across the long border into Sweden, where they were offered a safe haven.²⁰⁴

In March 1942, Ruth Maier was living with the Strøm family in Lillestrøm when she was required to register with the police. Before then, the main restrictions she faced were the result of her refugee status. She was unable to get a work permit and had spent most of the previous year working as a volunteer for the national labour service scheme. She visited the American Embassy several times to inquire into the opportunities for emigration, but she was told the quota was full until early in the following year. In June 1941 she was forced to give up work on a farm near Stavanger after she was joined by her close friend Gunvor Hofmo. Gunvor had recently been jailed for political activities, but anti-Semitism aggravated their situation. ‘They made an issue of my “racial affiliations” and Gunvor’s political beliefs’, Ruth explained in her diary. In the autumn she returned to her adoptive family and took a course in stenography in Oslo. While she was training she met a group of Jewish men, the first Jews she had encountered for a while. The effect was startling: ‘they have this completely – how shall I put it? – erotic effect on me. They awaken a feeling of love within me. I feel myself drawn to them.’ Despite this affinity, she never felt that she completely belonged with the Jewish people. When she came across a detachment of Austrian mountain troops on leave from the north, she ‘wanted to talk to them. My people, I wanted to be able to say. And yet they’re not my people at all.’²⁰⁵

Unhappy in her adoptive home, Ruth decided to move to Oslo and found lodgings in a hostel. She worked for a small business that produced souvenirs, took a class in drawing, and enjoyed her independence. Her friendship with Gunvor had its ups and downs and she started flirting with a sculptor for whom she modelled. Then, on 27 September she wrote in her diary that Terboven, the Reichskommissar for Norway, ‘has written to our hostel requesting to know who lives here. I’m now just waiting to be thrown out any day. I will try to remain calm, I will not be seen crying, nor begging to stay here. In such moments I feel solidarity with all those others around me who are suffering in their country. It’s a shame it is the mere fact we are Jews that makes us martyrs.’ Two days later she reported, ‘They’re arresting Jews. All male Jews between the ages of 16 and 72. Jewish shops are closed … I just feel sick. I’m no longer proud to be a Jew … I’m tired of hearing that Jews are being arrested again. I think: why do they bother? … Oh! Just leave us in peace!’ Ruth refused to abandon her Jewish affiliations but insisted on locating her plight in the context of what other oppressed people were suffering. ‘They torture us because we’re Jews. I’d like to be able to destroy this boundary that makes Jews into Jews.’ Her entry ends, ‘Perhaps they’ll fetch me, too. Qui sait?’²⁰⁶

They did. On 26 November the Germans followed up the seizure of Jewish men by apprehending women and children. In the early hours, a pair of Norwegian policemen led Ruth and two other Jewish women from the hostel to a car and drove them to the harbour where they were embarked on the liner Donau along with 530 others. It set sail in the afternoon, but she had enough time to smuggle out a farewell note to her friend Gunvor. ‘I think it’s just as well that it has happened this way. Why shouldn’t we suffer when there’s so much suffering? Don’t worry about me. Perhaps I wouldn’t even change places with you.’ The Donau docked in Stettin and from there the prisoners were entrained for Auschwitz-Birkenau. On arrival, 186 were registered in the camp while the rest were murdered in the gas chambers. All trace of Ruth ends there; she was twenty-two years old.²⁰⁷

In Poland

Following the deportations of January to May 1942, stability returned to the Lodz ghetto. At the start of June the population stood at 104,469, including a fresh batch of Jews who had been relocated from liquidated ghettos elsewhere in the Wartheland. There was an abundance of work. Thousands of people were employed just sorting the baggage and goods that flowed into Hans Biebow’s storehouses from defunct Jewish communities – 20 tons of footwear alone. Enough sewing machines arrived to equip new workshops to take in more orders. And there was no shortage: in July a German purchasing commission toured the factories and left the inhabitants with enough work for months to come. The ghetto was now producing snow uniforms for the Wehrmacht, jump suits for parachutists, padded caps for panzer crews and straw boots for infantrymen in winter. The AEG corporation opened an electrical engineering plant in the ghetto. Dawid Sierakowiak exulted, ‘The ghetto keeps developing … All kinds of workshops are being created.’ He was made a clerk in one of the enterprises and celebrated the ‘colossal orders’ that were coming in. However, although 70,000–80,000 were employed, that was not enough to guarantee everyone’s safety. Rumkowski began a drive to train children to operate sewing machines and work as tailors.²⁰⁸

Even as the workforce grew, the rations shrank. The death rate rose, and productivity declined. On 2 August, the chronicle blandly quoted a report by the head of the health department that ‘The ghetto is plagued by starvation oedema.’ An essayist for the chronicle put things more graphically: ‘Pale shadows trudge through the ghetto, with oedemic swellings on their legs and faces, people deformed and disfigured, whose only dream is to endure, survive …’ The chronicle charted 13,000 deaths in the first seven months of the year; it was becoming impossible to bury the dead fast enough. Daily existence turned into a grinding routine, as described by Dawid Sierakowiak: ‘One buys rations, eats the little food there is in them, starves while eating it, and after that keeps waiting obstinately, cautiously, and unshakenly until the end of this cursed, devilish war; the workshops, home, meals, reading, night with bedbugs and cockroaches, and all over again without end, ultimately losing strength, with diminishing efficiency of body and mind.’²⁰⁹

What made their lot harder to bear was the awareness amongst the average ghetto dweller that not everyone was suffering equally. In May, Dawid attended a concert that should have been the occasion for celebrating what Oskar Rosenfeld saw as ‘proof positive of the indestructability of the Jewish spirit’. Instead it gave him a chance to survey, ‘The whole of select society gathered, bloated and dressed up. The gap between the various classes of people in the ghetto grows wider and wider. Some steal food themselves, others feed themselves officially, while the rest are swelling up and dying of hunger.’ Dawid discovered that his own father was stealing food from him. Nor was Rosenfeld oblivious to the corruption and grotesque inequality in the ghetto. He remarked that ‘while a hundred thousand people go hungry, a few gluttons have strawberry preserves, condensed milk, wine, liqueurs, fine cigarettes and so on.’²¹⁰

Morale was further sapped by the stories that the survivors of ghetto clearances, such as in Pabiance and Brzeziny, brought in with them. On the one hand it appeared that the Germans were prepared to break up families and just retain those who were capable of work, while on the other, the ability to work was itself no guarantee of survival. Dawid noted ominously that ‘there are no elderly, children, or sick among them. Those able to work and those unable to work were killed without distinction.’ The ghetto was plunged into depression by news of the deportations from Warsaw and the death of Czerniaków. These savagely implemented population movements bemused chronicle writers. ‘It is difficult to discern any guidelines in all of this,’ they exclaimed. At the end of August the writers despaired that ‘the decentralization of our ghetto by means of mass resettlement remains, to this day, unexplained, and the fact that Jews are being resettled here from small towns in the vicinity as well defies reason’.²¹¹

Then, on 1 September, the Germans struck Lodz again. In accordance with Himmler’s July diktat that only working Jews should be allowed to live in occupied Poland, Rumkowski was told that 25,000 Jews, including all those aged under ten and over sixty-five, had to go. The ghetto was stunned. Rumkowski triggered a lock-down and reinforced the Order Service with the firemen while the resettlement committee pored over the census data, block by block, to determine who would be deported. The men of the Order Service were told that if the target was achieved, their families would be spared. Within hours of the announcement the OS and German police were emptying the hospital and the old people’s homes. ‘Scenes from Dante took place when the sick were being loaded,’ Dawid reported. ‘People knew they were going to their deaths! They even fought the Germans and had to be thrown onto the trucks by force.’ The sick and lame hurled themselves out of windows and dragged themselves to safety, only to hear that the Order Service had taken their relatives instead of them. Rosenfeld, at the Jewish council building, was handed a scrap of paper from the old-age home on which was scrawled ‘Please save me, the home is surrounded. Rosa Steiner, writer, Vienna.’ All production ceased because ‘everyone’s running to secure work assignments for those in their family who are unemployed; parents of the unfortunate children are trying to save them by any means’. Rumkowski sealed the registry office to prevent the falsification of ages on birth certificates or the issuance of bogus death notices.²¹²

Young women in the ghetto were in multiple jeopardy, victims of Jewish men as much as the Germans. When Lucille Eichengreen went to a factory manager to plead with him to employ her sister, aged twelve, he asked what she would give in return. After she explained that she had no money, the man grinned and told her ‘that was not what he had in mind’. Lucille was stunned that such things could occur ‘even among our own’. Avraham Cytryn made a similar proposal to his sister Lucie after their mother was seized. ‘Everyone tells me I have a beautiful sister. What good does that do me? Why don’t you become the mistress of one of the privileged ones in the ghetto?’ He sent her to a certain man and she returned hours later, ‘literally torn to bits’. Her unspeakable sacrifice was pointless: their mother had already been released.²¹³

Four days after receiving the fatal order, Rumkowski addressed his people from a platform in Firefighters’ Square. ‘A grievous blow has befallen the ghetto,’ he intoned in a shaky voice. ‘They are asking from it the best that it possesses – the children and the old people.’ He had not been blessed with children, he told them, but he had devoted his best years to their welfare. ‘I never imagined that my own hands would have to deliver the sacrifice to the altar. In my old age, I must stretch out my hands and beg: Brothers and sisters give them over to me! Fathers and mothers: Give me your children!’ He thought they would be left in peace after the hospitals and the homes for the elderly were emptied but ‘it turned out that something different was predestined for us. The luck of the Jews is of course thus; always to suffer more and worse, particularly in wartime.’ The day before, the Germans had said to him: send 20,000 or ‘We will do it.’ His only thought was: how many could he save? He consulted his closest colleagues and together concluded that, ‘as difficult as this will be for us, we must take into our own hands the carrying out of the order. I have to carry out this difficult and bloody operation. I must cut off limbs in order to save the body! I must take children because, if not, others could also, God forbid, be taken.’ At this point a great wailing rose from the crowd of thousands in the square. Rumkowski did not even attempt to offer consolation. Instead he confessed that ‘I have come like a robber to take away from you the best from your own hearts!’ He had asked to keep those aged over nine, but the Germans refused. So, he pleaded, let him have the children sick with tuberculosis, the ones doomed by ill-health. Then he began to fall apart, stuttering and repeating himself. ‘A broken man is standing before you. Don’t envy me. It is the most difficult decree I have ever had to carry out. I extend to you my broken, trembling arms and beg: Give the victims into my hands, in order through them to avoid additional victims, in order to protect a kehillah [community] of 100,000 Jews. They promised me so: if we ourselves will deliver the victims, here will be calm.’ When adults shouted that they would go or urged Rumkowski to take children from large families he waved aside their protestations. ‘I don’t have any strength to conduct discussions with you,’ he concluded and reminded the upturned faces of the fate that overcame the small communities around them. There was no alternative than to accede.²¹⁴

In his diary of the great deportation, Josef Zelkowicz captured the last moments that mothers and fathers were able to spend with their ill-starred progeny. Fathers tried to remain calm; mothers fed and coddled their babies one last time. He reflected acridly that it was easy for the Beirat to call on the ordinary inhabitants to make the sacrifice when ‘they managed to secure from the Germans exemptions from the deportation for children of the workshop directors, firemen, police, doctors, instructors, the Beirat, and the devil knows who else.’ The Germans would get persons ‘who, though able to work, will nevertheless be sacrificed to make up for the “connected” children and elderly.’ At 7 a.m., he watched the Order Service ‘load the old men and women onto the wagons like pieces of scrap metal’. In some places there was fighting as parents refused to hand over their young. Zelkowicz wondered, ‘What happened to the Jewish police that prompted it to undertake this task? Were they driven out of their minds? Were their hearts excised and replaced with stones?’ Or were they ‘drugged’ by the promise of protection for their relatives and extra rations? It went on for days. Elderly women dyed their hair and applied rouge to make themselves appear younger. ‘People who are hiding their children in garrets, toilets, and other holes are losing their heads out of despair.’ It was all to no avail. Notwithstanding the best efforts of the OS and the Elder’s assurances, within days the Germans were in the ghetto. Hans Biebow himself took part in the round-ups, selecting those unfit for work from crowds of Jews herded into the courtyards of tenement blocks. In the course of the great action, 15,859 Jews were deported, 600 were shot in the ghetto and 20 were hanged for attempting to escape the maelstrom.²¹⁵

Afterwards the ghetto looked and felt completely different. Rumkowski was a shrunken figure, his authority further diminished when the Germans redesignated his domain a labour camp and took a more direct role in its internal management. The medical services had completely collapsed and disease spread unchecked. Rosenfeld had the odd sensation that he was no longer among Jews since there was no one left wearing traditional Jewish garb, beards or side-curls. During the high holy days, everyone worked. But with the population now standing at 89,325 there was a bit more food to go round. On Simchat Torah, the festival to celebrate the start of a new cycle of readings from the five books of Moses, he attended a service at which a meal was served complete with schnapps, cognac, cholent (stew), peas, potatoes, meat and honeycakes. In November the Germans permitted the delivery of 5 million cigarettes – a year’s supply. As the year drew to a close Dawid Sierakowiak was also cheered by the news of the Allied landings in North Africa, Rommel’s retreat and tidings of a spectacular Russian offensive. The ghetto-cum-labour camp felt joy mixed with fear of German revenge.²¹⁶

The Axis, the Allies and the ‘final solution’

At the high point of the Wehrmacht’s advance in the summer of 1942, when German spearheads were closing on Stalingrad and surging into the Caucasus, when it appeared that victory was just around the corner, the Jewish department of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt in Berlin in concert with the Foreign Office redoubled its efforts to persuade Axis partners and client states to settle the Jewish question in their respective countries by deporting their Jews to Germany. The results were mixed and the longer victory at the front was delayed, the harder the task became.

The Foreign Office began by politely asking the Bulgarians if it would be acceptable for the German authorities to deport Jews with Bulgarian citizenship who were resident in the Reich and other countries in western Europe. The Bulgarians agreed to this request, which removed at least one category of foreign Jews from the list of those excluded from round-ups. In August the Romanians gave their consent to a similar proposition. However, the Hungarian government flatly refused to allow the Germans to deport any of its nationals. Since March 1942, Miklós Kállay had been prime minister in Budapest and he was increasingly uneasy about every aspect of the alliance with Germany. In reply, the Wilhelmstrasse curtly advised the Hungarians to repatriate their Jewish nationals by the end of the year, after which they would be considered fair game. The Italians also rebuffed the German request, arguing that its Jewish citizens domiciled abroad fulfilled important functions for the domestic economy. Eichmann’s men in office IVB4 of the RSHA had more success with Germany’s lesser clients. In July, they triggered the deportation of Jews from Croatia. Most of the Jewish population there was already interned but at the end of the month those still at liberty were summoned for registration purposes. Two weeks later the first train steamed from Zagreb to Auschwitz bearing 1,200 Jews. Four transports followed, carrying 5,000 more to the gas chambers.²¹⁷

To begin with it looked as if Romania would be equally complaisant. Deportations to Transnistria had largely ended, but in February 1942 the government imposed a central body – the Centralna Evreilor din Romania – on the Romanian Jews which portended nothing but ill. The following month all Jews aged 20 to 57 were obliged to register for forced labour and in early June Emil Dorian noted rumours sweeping the community to the effect that another wave of deportations was about to begin. Actually it was not until July that Gustav Richter, Eichmann’s representative in Bucharest, met Deputy Prime Minister Mihai Antonescu to discuss the removal of Romanian Jews to camps in the Lublin area. Because he acted without consulting or going through the German Foreign Office there was a delay in the follow-up which was to prove critical. While on a visit to Hitler’s Ukrainian headquarters in September Mihai Antonescu reiterated his commitment to the eradication of the Romanian Jews, but the government was actually having second thoughts. When the deportation experts in Berlin held a planning meeting on 26–27 September no one from Bucharest showed up. The following month Marshal Ion Antonescu halted the preparations to expel Romania’s Jewish citizens and three days later suspended any further deportations to Transnistria. He informed Richter that ‘with regard to the treatment of the Jews, I am not backing down, but I am not escalating either’. In fact, the regime had performed a complete U-turn. Not only had it safeguarded its Jewish population, it was now permitting Jews in Bucharest to send aid to the 90,000–95,000 surviving exiles in Transnistria.²¹⁸

This change of direction was not prompted by any change of heart. Instead, Marshal Ion Antonescu had taken a long hard look at Romania’s strategic situation. Having committed himself wholeheartedly to the operations in Russia, Romania was no closer to recovering the lost territory of Transylvania. Why should Romania divest itself of its Jewish citizens, who had some uses after all, when Hungary did not? Nor was the Romanian Jewish leadership passive. Wilhelm Filderman, the leader of the Romanian Jews, cleverly played on all these reservations in a series of memoranda that he submitted to Marshal Antonescu and sought to mobilize friendly intellectuals to petition the government. Such initiatives probably counted for much less than the failure of the German advance into the Caucasus. The German army ground to a halt far short of Baku, while the oil fields it had occupied were so comprehensively wrecked that it would take months for them to be reactivated. For the foreseeable future, the Third Reich would remain dependent on oil from the Ploesti fields. Marshal Antonescu held all the cards even before the Soviet onslaught rolled over his troops north and south of Stalingrad, entombing the German 6th Army. From that point he knew that Germany was a liability rather than a valuable ally.²¹⁹

In July the Hungarians had proposed resettling Jews from the annexed area of Transylvania in Transnistria, but Himmler, at his most grandiose, had rejected this partial solution in favour of one that embraced the entire Hungarian Jewish population. Eichmann turned down a similar offer in late September, fearing that a round-up of foreign Jews in Hungary would alarm the country’s Jewish citizens and make it harder to apprehend them later. Both Himmler and Eichmann were blind to the closing window of opportunity. By early October, when the Foreign Office consulted the Hungarian Ambassador in Berlin, Döme Sztójay, about the deportation of its nationals in western Europe, the Hungarian position had hardened. Sztójay informed the Wilhelmstrasse that Hungarian Jews in the Reich and other countries were deportable, but there would be no deportations from Hungary itself. A few days later the German Ambassador in Budapest belatedly addressed the Hungarian Foreign Office with a demand for the expulsion of all Jews from Hungarian territory. When the reply arrived over six weeks later, it was a flat no.²²⁰

A similar pattern emerged in Bulgaria, home to 48,400 Jews of whom 10 per cent lived in Sofia. The Bulgarian government had passed anti-Jewish laws in December 1940, symbolizing its pro-German stance more than as an expression of deep-rooted indigenous anti-Semitism. Jews were excluded from public service and the professions. They were obliged to live in certain areas, education was segregated, and Jews were subjected to punishing levels of taxation. The anti-Jewish laws used a racial definition of the Jews and forbade intermarriage with Bulgarians; however, protests by politicians, intellectuals and, especially, the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, led to the exception of baptized Jews. In 1941, Bulgaria was awarded chunks of Yugoslavia and Greece in return for letting the German army operate from its territory. These regions brought with them a further 15,000 Jews. During 1942 the government’s anti-Jewish stance appeared to harden. A Commissariat for Jewish Affairs was established in August, headed by a notorious Jew-hater, Alexander Belev, and Jews aged 20 to 45 years were called up for labour service. The Bulgarians also cut adrift Jews with Bulgarian nationality in German-occupied countries. But they were less keen to see Jews deported from Bulgarian territory. In September and October the RSHA and then the Foreign Office engaged the Bulgarian authorities on the subject of deporting its Jewish citizens. However, the Bulgarians replied that they preferred to retain local Jews for compulsory labour.²²¹

When the Germans sought to tackle the Jewish population in Greece they had to deal with the Italians, who occupied the bulk of the country. Although the largest community, numbering 55,000, lived in Salonica, which was under German control, 13,000 Jews were under Italian rule. The RSHA hoped to achieve a uniform action across the country, but this necessitated Italian accord. In July 1942 the Italians rejected the introduction of the yellow star. When the Germans imposed a harsh regime of forced labour on the Jews in Salonica, hundreds fled to the Italian zone where they were unmolested. Even when Mussolini agreed to the removal of Jews from the Italian-occupied areas of Croatia in August, the authorities in Rome exerted little pressure to make this happen. After the German Foreign Office prodded them in October, the Italians replied that they would prefer to intern the Jews in their zones rather than remove them. Internment in Croatia actually turned into a form of protection. Jews were shepherded into camps along the Dalmatian coast run by the Italian military, who had no intention of cooperating with the Germans. A month later the Russians began to pound Italian forces on the Don river. The collapse of the Italian military position there and the reverses in North Africa would cast an even harsher light on subsequent German demands.²²²

The course of the war played as fundamental a role in shaping Allied responses to the fate of the Jews as it did in determining the posture that Germany’s Axis partners adopted towards anti-Jewish measures. During the first half of 1942, information reached London and Washington about the fate of the Jews in German-occupied Europe but there was little that the Allies could do about it. Indeed, for Churchill, Britain and the Empire, the period from February to June 1942 was probably the nadir of military fortune and domestic morale during the war. On 11 February, two German battleships, the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau, with the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, sailed undetected by the Royal Navy from Brest and passed through the supposedly impregnable English Channel to safe waters off the Netherlands. Four days later news arrived that Singapore had surrendered to the Japanese after a brief siege. Until August, a German innovation to the Enigma enciphering machine meant that the British code-breakers at Bletchley Park were unable to read transmissions to and from U-boats in the Atlantic. Shipping losses soared to levels that were all but unsustainable at just the time when the Americans were endeavouring to send men and supplies to Britain. On 20 June, while Churchill was at a summit meeting with President Roosevelt in Washington, he heard that Tobruk had fallen, leaving the road open for Rommel to dash for the Suez Canal. Until the end of July it looked as though the war was once again hanging in the balance.²²³

But what did the public know about the fate of the Jews? The London Jewish Chronicle was the only newspaper that regularly published reports of massacres of Jews in Poland and on the territory of the USSR, and even then its coverage was fragmentary. Few of these items received any kind of editorial comment. Some came from Soviet government spokesmen, but many were attributed to vague sources. It was not until June that the Polish government-in-exile and the Bund succeeded in drawing the media spotlight onto the mass murder of Jews in Poland using lethal gas at fixed-site extermination camps. On 25 June 1942, the eminently respectable Daily Telegraph published information that 700,000 Polish Jews had been murdered, naming Chelmno as one of the sites. The data came from Shmuel Zygielbojm, the Bund’s representative on the Polish National Council in London. It had been collated by the Bund in Poland and transmitted to London via the Polish underground. The World Jewish Congress (WJC) followed up with a press conference chaired by Sidney Silverman, a Jewish Labour MP and WJC activist, and addressed by Ignacy Schwarzbart, the other Jewish member of the Polish exile council. The next morning, the Daily Telegraph reported that 1 million Jews had perished in Poland. These officially sanctioned bulletins and credible news reports opened the gateway to increased publicity. Every major UK national and local newspaper carried the latest story. But the Jewish Chronicle on 3 July devoted an editorial to the revelations that exemplified the problem journalists and the public had in grasping what they were being told: ‘The hideous details now coming to hand of the wholesale butchery by the Germans of Jewish men, women, and children in Poland and Lithuania read like tales from the imagination of some drug-maddened creature seeking to portray a nightmare of hell. The average mind simply cannot believe the reality of such sickening revelations …’ On 9 July both Schwarzbart and Zygielbojm appeared before the press accompanied by Brendan Bracken, the minister for information. From then on the fate of Polish Jews was a staple news item: newspaper readers learned about the deportations from Warsaw and the death of Czerniaków on almost the same day they occurred. On 11 December the Jewish Chronicle appeared with a black border of mourning around the front page, which announced that 2 million Jews had been done to death in German-occupied Europe.²²⁴

A similar dynamic occurred in the United States. Since America’s entry into the war the persecution of the Jews had been awarded more coverage in the press, but it was never treated with the same urgency as reports of atrocities against Allied nationals. One reason was the informality of the sources and the absence of any official endorsement by government agencies. The president and the administration did not make any specific comment about the plight of Jews for fear of confirming German propaganda that Jewish interests were manipulating the White House. Hence the report from the Bund only made the front page in a few of the major US dailies; it was carried at the bottom of page 5 of the New York Times on 27 June. However, the New York Times on 22 July gave front-page treatment to a mass rally organized at Madison Square Gardens by the American Jewish Congress, B’nai Brith and the Jewish Labour Committee. The 20,000-strong audience heard messages from Roosevelt and Churchill pledging retribution against those guilty of war crimes.²²⁵

At the same time as the destruction of the Jews in Poland was becoming a news story, secret channels were conveying intelligence that the Germans had embarked upon a European-wide campaign of genocide. During July, a German industrialist named Eduard Schulte who had interests in the Auschwitz area learned of an order by Himmler to annihilate the Jews. At the end of the month, Schulte, who travelled regularly to Switzerland, conveyed this information to a Jewish business associate in Zurich, through whom it eventually reached Gerhard Riegner, a representative of the World Jewish Congress. Riegner distilled what he had learned into a brief summary and presented it to the British and American consulates in Geneva for transmission to, respectively, the Foreign Office and the State Department: ‘Received alarming report stating that, in the Fuehrer’s Headquarters, a plan has been discussed, and is under consideration, according to which all Jews in countries occupied or controlled by Germany numbering 3½ to 4 millions should, after deportation and concentration in the East, be at one blow exterminated, in order to resolve, once and for all the Jewish question in Europe. Action is reported to be planned for the autumn. Ways of execution are still being discussed including the use of prussic acid. We transmit this information with all the necessary reservation, as exactitude cannot be confirmed by us. Our informant is reported to have close connexions with the highest German authorities, and his reports are generally reliable. Please inform and consult New York.’ Riegner relied on the diplomats to ensure that Sidney Silverman in London and Dr Stephen Wise in New York also got copies. Silverman was invited to the Foreign Office and handed the cable by sceptical officials just two days later. The even more suspicious State Department did not inform Wise until two weeks had elapsed. Even then US officials prevailed upon him not to go public until they had verified the information. Wise waited until 24 November before holding a press conference to disclose the staggering evidence that the Germans planned to kill four million Jews.²²⁶

Another source that convinced officials in Whitehall and Washington that Riegner’s alarming cable was authentic came via the Polish government-in-exile. Since May 1942, the monthly bulletins of the Polish Home Army sent to London contained details about the mass murder of Jews in Belzec and Treblinka. In November, a courier for the underground, operating with the nom de guerre Jan Karski, reached London by a circuitous and dangerous route, bearing first-hand reports of conditions in the Warsaw ghetto in the wake of the deportations and in what he understood to be Belzec, but was probably a nearby labour camp. Karski, who was always escorted by a senior Polish diplomat who vouched for his bona fides, gave an account of what he had seen directly to the foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, in London, and later to President Roosevelt, telling them that nearly two million Jews had already been slaughtered. He also delivered a microfilm with crucial intelligence about the mass murders at Auschwitz, although the sensational nature of what he had to say about other crimes may inadvertently have obscured its significance.²²⁷

While officials were still weighing the validity of such reports about atrocities against the Jews, activists were organizing public protests and pressing for the government to react. In early September, the Labour Party in London convened a mass meeting addressed by the home secretary, Herbert Morrison. The American Jewish Congress summoned an emergency gathering of Jewish organizations to thrash out a programme for action that they could put to the administration, although there was little they could agree on that was in any way practical. On 3 December, representatives of the major organizations of the British Jewish community met with delegates of the governments-in-exile to formulate a response. Silverman declared that unless there was a major public protest soon the Jewish East End of London would explode with anger and frustration. As a result, a string of public events took place during December, commencing with a week of mourning and prayer, and culminating in a deputation to the foreign secretary two days before Christmas.²²⁸

On both sides of the Atlantic, civil servants and politicians pondered how best to meet the rising tide of indignation and demands for action. Neither country was prepared to admit Jewish refugees even if they were able to get out of Nazi-dominated Europe. During October, the US chargé d’affaires at Vichy, Somerville Pinkney Tuck, went out on a limb when he condemned the deportations during a face-to-face meeting with Laval. Not content with a verbal denunciation, Pinkney Tuck proposed to the State Department that the United States evacuate 4,000 of the most at-risk Jewish children in the internment camps. The secretary of state, Sumner Welles, was sympathetic to the idea, but Breckinridge Long, his assistant, vociferously objected to breaching the rules that restricted immigration. Despite a personal intervention by the president in favour of children’s visas, the rescue plan was still mired in argument when the Germans occupied the Free Zone and it fell by the wayside.²²⁹

The safest gesture was to promise retribution once the war was over. On 7 October, the British and American governments announced the formation of a United Nations War Crimes Commission charged with collecting evidence for use in the trials of those responsible for atrocities. However, the release of information about the scale of Jewish suffering and losses in Poland created a surge of public feeling. Letters poured into the press from churchmen, labour activists and politicians, expressing sympathy, proposing more or less sensible counter-measures, and expecting a lead from the government. Feeling the heat, Roosevelt finally conceded to pleas from Wise and met a Jewish delegation at the White House on 8 December. But the Jews had few concrete proposals and Roosevelt had little to offer beyond a stentorian warning to the Nazis that perpetrators of war crimes would be punished. It was the first and last meeting the president had with representatives of American Jewry to discuss the plight of the Jews in Europe.²³⁰

Ten days later the US administration and the British government issued a joint statement on German war crimes. Eden read it out in the House of Commons in response to a staged question from Sidney Silverman. He told the hushed assembly that ‘I regret to have to inform the House that reliable reports have recently reached His Majesty’s Government regarding the barbarous and inhuman treatment to which Jews are being subjected in German-occupied Europe.’ In particular he referred to the much publicized report from the Polish government-in-exile enumerating the Jewish dead at 1 million. He then recited from the joint statement being issued simultaneously in London, Washington and Moscow: ‘[T]he German authorities, not content with denying to persons of Jewish race in all the territories over which their barbarous rule has been extended the most elementary human rights, are now carrying into effect Hitler’s oft repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe. From all the occupied countries Jews are being transported, in conditions of appalling horror and brutality, to Eastern Europe. In Poland, which has been made the principal Nazi slaughterhouse, the ghettoes established by the German invaders are being systematically emptied of all Jews except a few highly skilled workers required for war industries. None of those taken away are ever heard of again. The able-bodied are slowly worked to death in labour camps. The infirm are left to die of exposure and starvation or are deliberately massacred in mass executions. The number of victims of these bloody cruelties is reckoned in many hundreds of thousands of entirely innocent men, women and children.’ The Allied governments ‘condemn in the strongest possible terms this bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination’. After Eden had responded to questions, several of which pointedly asked what action the government proposed to take, a backbencher asked the Speaker of the House if it would be appropriate for the members to stand in silence for one minute ‘in support of this protest against disgusting barbarism’. The Speaker said it was for the members to decide. As one they rose and stood, their heads bowed.²³¹