The fortunes of war and the fluctuations of anti-Jewish policy

At the turn of the year 1942–3, Jews across Europe hoped the Allied landings in North Africa and the German defeat at Stalingrad would precipitate a German collapse. Emil Dorian in Bucharest wondered, ‘Will this Christmas be the last Christmas of the war?’ When Victor Klemperer heard of the Soviet breakthrough around Stalingrad he speculated, ‘Perhaps it’s coming to an end after all.’ Four weeks later and he thought the Wehrmacht bulletins had ‘never sounded so pathetic … It can mean the beginning of the catastrophe.’ Hillel Seidman, in Warsaw, remarked that religious Jews interpreted the battle of El Alamein as ‘the beginning of the end’ – not in the sense of Winston Churchill’s rhetoric, but as heralding the final confrontation between Gog and Magog on the borders of the Holy Land. Herman Kruk, chronicler of the Vilna ghetto, noted that Jews started to wish each other ‘May it increase’, referring to the extent of the Red Army’s advance. Now living under German occupation in the south of France, Raymond-Raoul Lambert wrote of the Anglo-American successes in North Africa that ‘I really think the end will come in the autumn of ‘43.’ After observing the ramshackle equipment of the occupiers and the age of the German soldiers, ‘either very young or older,’ he mused: ‘Is this 1918 already …?’ But they all expressed a common dread: would the Germans turn on the Jews in rage at their defeats. Would they allow the Jews to survive? Lambert’s question was universally shared: ‘Can we hold on?’¹

In fact, Allied military and diplomatic miscalculations, mirrored by German resilience and ruthlessness, ensured that Jewish suffering was both deepened and fatally prolonged. A secret Allied mission to incite an insurrection against Vichy rule in Algeria was bungled. In several places the invaders faced stiff opposition and the French only agreed to a ceasefire at the price of leaving the existing colonial regimes in place. Even Vichy’s anti-Jewish laws remained in force. British and American vanguards then raced for Tunis, which was hundreds of miles from the beachheads. When the leading echelon reached the Tunisian frontier it ran into strong German defensive positions. To their surprise, Hitler airlifted thousands of troops to shield the rear of the Afrika Korps. In the interim, Rommel’s forces had retreated nearly 2,000 miles from the El Alamein position, evacuating Tripoli and abandoning Libya. At the start of February, what remained of the Afrika Korps crossed into Tunisia and occupied the Mareth Line, a chain of fortifications built by the French in the 1930s. But Rommel’s armoured and mobile elements continued westwards and inflicted a sharp defeat on the Americans. Although the Italian–German bridgehead in Tunisia was unsustainable and amounted to a strategic folly, it held up Allied progress until early May 1943. In those crucial months the German high command could relax about an invasion of north-west Europe: it was clear that for the moment the Allies had committed themselves to a Mediterranean strategy.²

On the eastern front, Soviet commanders were surprised by the numbers of the German and Axis forces encircled in the Stalingrad pocket when the northern and southern pincers of their attack closed on 22 November 1942. The simultaneous crises in Tunisia and southern Russia exposed just how hopelessly overstretched the German armed forces had become. To add to their misery, on 19 December the Soviets unleashed a second wave of concentric attacks, smashing through the Italian 8th Army and threatening to sweep all the way to Rostov, cutting off the two German armies in the Caucasus. Hitler was forced to call off a relief effort to break through to the pocket, but insisted on supplying 6th Army by air rather than allowing it to surrender. The air-bridge was a costly failure. The 250,000 men in the Stalingrad pocket were condemned to two months of hunger and disease similar to the privations that the Jews of Warsaw and Lodz had suffered for over two years. Between 10 January and 2 February 1943, the Red Army finally crushed the pocket. However, Erich von Manstein, appointed by Hitler to overall command in the theatre, was able to extricate the bulk of Army Group A from the Caucasus and counter-attack the now over-extended Red Army. By March, he had managed to stabilize the front. When the thaw came and operations halted, the German armies were more or less back where they had started in May 1942. They had lost over half a million men, 220,000–250,000 in the Stalingrad battles alone, but they had not collapsed and there was potential for another, albeit limited, counter-stroke to capitalize on Manstein’s earlier triumphs.³

While German reverses temporarily raised the spirits of beleaguered Jews, they had the opposite effect on the German public. The huge losses at Stalingrad and the end to any prospect that the war would soon be over caused morale to plunge. Hitler, shaken by the defeat, withdrew from the limelight, leaving Goebbels to fill the leadership vacuum with inspirational rhetoric and efforts to rationalize the war economy. Hatred and fear of the Jewish enemy were central to his approach. The start of the year saw not only a renewed propaganda drive against the Jews, but also a further wave of deportations from the Reich.⁴

The Jewish question always had a security dimension, but thanks to the Allied advances it acquired new geographical dimensions and a fresh urgency. Until the defeat of the Axis armies there, the 85,000 Jews of Tunisia were exposed to the attention of an Einsatzkommando that had originally been destined for Palestine. With Allied troops securely based in North Africa, the entire northern Mediterranean littoral beckoned as the location for the second front that Stalin demanded from the western allies. As a result, Jewish populations that had so far escaped the ministrations of the SS came into focus as a potential fifth column or a source of assistance for an Allied incursion. Hitler ordered the immediate occupation of southern France and strengthened German garrisons in the Balkans. Every Jewish community in these zones was now regarded as a potential resistance nest, a bridgehead for the Allies. Jews in port cities were particularly vulnerable to this fantastically exaggerated perception. Hence, Hitler decreed a major action against the alleged resistance in Marseilles in January 1943, while in February the RSHA turned its attention to Salonica, the great port city in north-east Greece. Paradoxically, further Allied successes in the Mediterranean – the invasion and surrender of Italy – would expose yet more Jews to persecution.⁵

The worsening military situation of the Reich also had an impact on anti-Jewish policy at the level of diplomatic relations. Having sought to enrol Europe in the anti-Bolshevik and anti-Jewish crusade in 1941–2, Hitler and the Nazi leadership now used the fear of Soviet conquest to strengthen the ties between Axis states. From Berlin’s point of view the reaffirmation of shared objectives had to embrace merciless treatment of the Jews. According to the historian Peter Longerich, ‘In the second half of the war … Judenpolitik was a main axis of Germany’s occupation and alliance policies. In the view of the National Socialist leadership the more the war advanced the greater the significance of the systematic murder of the Jews for the solidarity of the German power bloc.’ If so, this approach was a dismal failure. In every Axis capital the turn in the war enjoined a reconsideration of the alliance with Germany and a re-evaluation of anti-Jewish policy. Time and again, German diplomats met with a rebuff when they called for the deportation of Jewish populations. It was only when established governments foundered – usually due to military failure – and previously marginal, radical pro-Nazi groups seized power that the Reich again enjoyed full-hearted cooperation. As German manpower diminished precipitously, this cooperation acquired paramount importance. Indeed, it was the increasing precariousness of the Axis position that drove militants of various nationalities to serve the Germans. The first of these men were ideological warriors defending European civilization against the Asiatic hordes, but they were followed by desperados who had nothing to lose.⁶

Total war and the end of German Jewry

In a speech to a selected audience at the Sportpalast on 18 February 1943, two weeks after German radio announced the demise of 6th Army, Goebbels acknowledged the extent of the challenge facing Germany. There had been no choice but to take on the USSR, even though ‘we did not properly evaluate the Soviet Union’s war potential’. Now the people had to confront the danger of a Soviet victory. ‘The goal of Bolshevism is Jewish world revolution. They want to bring chaos to the Reich and Europe, using the resulting hopelessness and desperation to establish their international, Bolshevist-concealed capitalist tyranny.’ Goebbels then raised the spectre of atrocities that were the mirror image of those perpetrated by the Reich. ‘A Bolshevization of the Reich would mean the liquidation of our entire intelligentsia and leadership, and the descent of our workers into Bolshevist-Jewish slavery … Behind the oncoming Soviet divisions we see the Jewish liquidation commandos, and behind them terror, the specter of mass starvation and complete anarchy.’ Only National Socialist Germany was free of Jewish influence and, therefore, able to lead the fight against it. In an appeal to the millions listening on radio in Germany and beyond its borders he warned, ‘The only choice now is between living under Axis protection or in a Bolshevist Europe.’ He next linked the struggle against international Jewry with tough measures to improve Germany’s war effort. ‘Terrorist Jewry had 200 million people to serve it in Russia … The masses of tanks we have faced on the Eastern Front are the result of 25 years of social misfortune and misery of the Bolshevist people. We have to respond with similar measures if we do not want to give up the game as lost.’ Therefore he announced the closure of bars and nightclubs, the shutting down of luxury restaurants and shops, the cancellation of exemptions from military service, and initiatives to bring more women into the workforce. When Goebbels brought his peroration to its climax, asking the audience if they wanted total war, he was not just summoning them to the defence of Germany and Europe, or asking them to endorse cuts in living standards; he was exacting their sanction for total war against the Jews.⁷

In January 1943, there were approximately 50,000 Jews still living in the Reich. Most of the able-bodied men, like Victor Klemperer, were doing forced labour in war-related factories. But Hitler had long wanted to get rid of these last working Jews and Himmler now regarded them as a potential security threat. Moreover, with foreign labour pouring into the Reich there was no longer a reason to keep them. On 27 February, 7,000 Jews in Berlin who were employed in the armaments industry were arrested. Ruth Andreas-Friedrich described the events: ‘Since six o’clock this morning trucks have been driving through Berlin, escorted by armed SS men. They stop at factory gates, in front of private houses; they load human cargo …’ Amongst their number were thousands of men in mixed marriages who were supposed to be redeployed rather than removed entirely. Their Aryan wives did not know this, however, and started to congregate in the Rosenstrasse, where their men were being held, clamouring to give them food and clothing. Emboldened by their numbers and by the confusion of the police, who were taken aback by the demonstration and loath to disperse it by force, the women started calling for the release of their spouses. After a few days several thousand were reunited with their partners, but only after the sorting process was completed and 3,000 full Jews were deported. Andreas-Friedrich concluded, ‘At least a few have come back – the so-called privileged ones: the Jewish partners in racially mixed marriages.’ It was their previously established protected status, not their wives’ spontaneous protests, that saved them.⁸

A similar combing out occurred in Dresden. On 28 February, Klemperer heard that the Hellerberg labour camp had been sealed off and about 3,000 Jews deported. Like the privileged ones in Berlin, Klemperer was spared. In April, though, he was summoned for forced labour and assigned to a paper-packaging works. He knew that the Gestapo’s pursuit of Jews in mixed marriages was unrelenting, that his existence hung by a thread. In Höxter, at roughly the time of the factory action, the SD reported that a single Jew named Hartwig Stein was to be deported because his gentile spouse died. At the close of the year Klemperer learned of an eighty-eight-year-old man who was dispatched to Theresienstadt when his gentile spouse passed away. Between January and March 1943, the new anti-Jewish drive carried off 16,000 German Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau.⁹

Now divorced from her husband Ernst, Lilli Jahn was easy meat for the Gestapo. In July 1943, the mayor of Immenhausen forced her to leave the town and move to nearby Kassel with her children. Her eldest son, Gerhard, was now a Flakhelfer, a member of an anti-aircraft gun crew, but this did not shield her from the Gestapo. At the end of August she was arrested for using the title ‘Dr’ and omitting Sarah from the nameplate of her apartment. She was sentenced to the Breitenau corrective labour camp. Nearly half of the other prisoners there were Jewish, working as slave labour in a chemical plant. The conditions were severe. Lilli was able to stay in touch with her children through a monthly letter written on the reverse side of a bottle label. She told a friend, ‘Things are naturally far worse than I say in my letters to the children. Less than adequate food, insufficient clothing … You can’t imagine what it’s like.’ Lilli begged her children to persuade Ernst, who had been drafted into a military hospital, to intercede for her. None of these appeals had any effect. On 17 March 1944, Lilli Jahn was transferred to Auschwitz and admitted into the camp. She was registered dead a month later.¹⁰

By mid-1943, the number of Jews left in the Reich had fallen to 32,000, of whom 18,500 were in Berlin. They were almost entirely in mixed marriages or protected for other reasons. But several thousand were in institutions maintained by the Reichsvereinigung or working for it. Alois Brunner, a member of Eichmann’s team, began methodically emptying these facilities one after another. In May, he oversaw the dissolution of the former Jewish home for the aged on Grosse Hamburgerstrasse which had been converted into a Judenhaus. One of those deported was Lucie Adelsberger, a highly respected paediatrician and medical researcher, who had been incarcerated there for twelve months. In her post-war memoir she recalled that they were taken to an out-of-the-way freight station at Putlitzstrasse where the transport awaited. She was placed in the ‘medical-wagon’, which was slightly better than the others, but the thirty-six-hour journey was grim and debilitating. ‘The air in the tightly sealed box-car, which hadn’t been opened since the departure, is suffocating and pestilential … The pails of excrement are filled to overflowing and drip down their sides, and with every jolt of the train they spill over and splash on the people nearby who can’t get out of the way because of the crush. The perimeter of the car is a barricade of baby carriages, for we have many infants in our group. They scream in their dirty diapers and refuse to be comforted because there’s nothing to clean them up with and nothing to drink.’ In the middle of the night on 19 May, the train pulled into the station at Auschwitz.¹¹

On 10 June 1943 it was finally the turn of the Reichsvereinigung itself. Having maintained communal life for as long as possible and seen to the welfare of Jews up to the point of deportation, the leadership was sent to Theresienstadt. Several of its members were appointed to the Jewish council and continued in leading roles. The Gestapo appropriated the considerable assets of the Jewish community that they left behind. One Jewish organization remained in Berlin: the Jewish hospital on Iranischestrasse. It was occupied mainly by 800 privileged Jews and a few Jewish administrators. Several rooms housed Jews who worked directly for the Gestapo. These informers staved off deportation by cruising Berlin looking for so-called U-boats, Jews who had gone underground in response to the final deportation wave. Hundreds were in Berlin, living on false papers or hiding in places maintained by courageous people like Ruth Andreas-Friedrich. Both the hidden Jews and their helpers were perpetually at risk from Jews whose business was delivering them to the Gestapo.¹²

The military disasters and the slump in German morale were reflected in public attitudes towards anti-Jewish policy. The Allied declaration of 17 December 1942 on German war crimes was transmitted over the BBC German service, while a barrage of programmes during January and February alerted a significant portion of the German public to what was being done in their name or confirmed what they already suspected. ‘Throughout the whole world there is increasing activity against us’, Ulrich von Hassell responded in his diary. ‘Atrocities in Poland are exploited very dramatically in the House of Commons. There is increasing nervousness here at home arising out of the anxiety over the outcome of the war and the fear of domestic disturbances.’ He was strikingly well informed thanks to what he learned from an administrator in the General Government, a devoted member of the Nazi Party, who nevertheless deplored what was going on around him. ‘It was so terrible that he could not endure it … Continual, indescribable mass murder of Jews.’ The ex-diplomat was politically as well as temperamentally inclined to believe what he heard. Conversely, an SD informant in Schwabach, a town in northern Bavaria, reported that ‘At the beginning of the month of December, there was generally a depressed mood in the local area among the population, especially due to the stories being told by soldiers at the front … One of the most powerful sources of alarm in circles connected with the church and in the rural population are at the moment the tales from Russia which speak about the shooting and extermination of the Jews. This news leaves a sense of great anxiety, emotional distress, and worry … As broad circles of the rural population see the situation, it is not yet certain that we will win the war, and if we do not, when the Jews return some day, they will take a horrible revenge.’¹³

The fear of Jewish revenge, coupled with the fear of defeat, was deliberately fostered by Goebbels. But linking Jewish vengeance to the menace of a Soviet victory was a double-edged sword. The more the regime’s propaganda machine drew attention to actual Soviet atrocities or potential depredations, the more it caused Germans to reflect on the crimes committed by their own side. Many months after the surrender of the 6th Army, the district governor of Swabia reported that ‘The shock of Stalingrad has still not completely dissipated. In many circles there are fears that the men taken prisoner there by the Russians could be killed as revenge for the supposed mass executions of Jews by Germans in the East.’ This syndrome became particularly evident when Goebbels pounced on the discovery of mass graves containing the decomposed remains of some 4,500 Polish officers who had been massacred by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, at Katyn in Byelorussia in mid-1940. Goebbels believed he could use the atrocity as a counterweight to Allied claims about German war crimes, as well as driving a wedge between the western allies and the USSR. It was also splendid proof of what he warned would befall countries in the path of the Red Army, if the front buckled. However, the publicity blitz had unintended consequences.¹⁴

On the basis of what its agents were reporting, the Sicherheitsdienst head office at the RSHA confirmed that there was interest in the Katyn massacre and that it was generating ‘hatred and fear of Bolshevism’. But there was also a conviction that the propaganda was hypocritical. ‘We have no right to get upset about the measures of the Soviets because the Germans eliminated Poles and Jews in far greater numbers.’ The SD office in Friedberg detected that ‘Here and there, some say that our enemies would also find mass graves in the eastern territories we have conquered. These are not Poles, but Jews who have been systematically murdered by our troops. So one shouldn’t make so much ado about such matters …’ Hassell, briefed by his colleague in the General Government, was not fooled for a moment. He complained that while ‘the gang tries in vain to befuddle world opinion about the Katyn massacres, the SS in Poland carries on most shamefully. Countless Jews have been gassed in specially built chambers, at least 100,000.’ When the regime tried to pull off the same trick after uncovering more mass graves (in Vinnitsa, Ukraine), the SD in Berlin noted that the reports earned ‘scant attention’. ‘You can often hear the view expressed that we likewise were relentless in eradicating all elements of opposition in the East, especially the Jews. Stories from soldiers and other persons deployed in the East play a large role in this.’ Later in the year, the Katyn revelation blended with rumours about efforts to destroy traces of the extermination of the Jews in the east. The SD in Bad Neustadt relayed a locally circulating story that an enemy government had sent an inquiry about the fate of German Jews to Hitler via the Red Cross. ‘After that, the Führer had the Jews dug up and their remains burned, so that with a further retreat in the east, the Soviets do not get hold of any propaganda material like that discovered near Katyn.’ German efforts to hide their crime backfired because of the success Goebbels had in exposing a Soviet one.¹⁵

Pervasive, if not always precise, knowledge of the dreadful fate that overcame the Jews, especially in the east, also informed German reactions to the strategic bombing campaign of the Royal Air Force. Since early 1942, RAF Bomber Command had switched from efforts to hit specific targets, such as factories, to area bombing that aimed to ‘de-house’ and demoralize civilians as well as damaging industrial production. The scale and destructiveness of these raids escalated steadily from the first ‘thousand-bomber’ raid on Cologne in May 1942 to the firestorm that gutted central Hamburg in July 1943. As the hail of incendiaries and explosives intensified, Germans cast around for explanations or scapegoats. In a demonstration of awareness, in which prudence jostled with guilt, they connected the ‘terror bombing’ (as Goebbels called it) to the 1938 November pogrom, Aryanization, and the deportations.¹⁶

The NSDAP branch in the Maxfeld district of Nuremberg caught indications that people now regretted the ejection of the city’s Jews, although not out of any compassion for them: ‘if the Jews had been retained as hostages, then we would have had an effective bargaining chip against the air raids’. People apparently believed that the RAF were deterred from bombing Augsburg because the shell of its synagogue was still standing. Similarly, the SD office in Würzburg passed on the view that the city ‘will not be attacked by enemy planes since no synagogue was set on fire there. But others say that now the planes will be coming to Würzburg too, since the last Jew left the city a short time ago.’ Victims of the raids on Barmen-Wuppertal, in the Ruhr, intimated ‘that only the Jew, and no one else, is the cause behind such barbarism. They say that he is upset because his former property in Germany is now controlled by someone else.’ After Cologne cathedral was badly damaged, the SD recorded local opinion that ‘what is happening now is “punishment from God”.’ What Germans had done to synagogues was now being done to churches. Moving amongst the stunned populace of Schweinfurt after a major (and costly) daylight raid on the city’s ball-bearing factory by the US Army Air Forces in August 1943, SD informants could often ‘hear people say that this was retribution for what we did to the Jews in November 1938’.¹⁷

The linkage of bombing to Jewish revenge could be counterproductive in other ways. After Nazi propaganda tried to pin the destruction of the Eder and Möhne dams on the Jews, the SD in Halle commented on the press treatment: ‘There was strong interest in publications stating that the attacks on the dams were caused by Jews. This plan triggered a heightened anti-Jewish mood … On the other hand, some in the population held opposite views. Some persons speaking from Halle state that it was irresponsible for the NSDAP to engage in such measures towards the Jews. The Jews’ revenge now on its way will, they say, be terrible when it comes and only the government is to blame. If the German side had not attacked the Jews, we would already have peace.’ The Nazi Party Chancellery picked up a different strain of dissent. Seeing the dams as a valid military target that ought to have been better defended, other people concluded that ‘the emphasis on the role of the Jews is quite incomprehensible’.¹⁸

North Africa and southern France

In addition to the troops that were rushed to Tunisia in November 1943, the RSHA sent Walter Rauff. He had formerly served as an adjutant to Heydrich and ran the technical department of the SS Head Office that coordinated development of the gas van in 1941–2. Rauff led a twenty-five-man Einsatzkommando that had originally been put together at the high tide of Rommel’s advance into Egypt, with the intention of following the Afrika Korps into Palestine. Instead, it had languished in Athens and was redeployed on other duties until North Africa returned to the top of the exterminatory agenda.¹⁹

The Jews in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia had been included in the list of targets drawn up for the Wannsee meeting, but so far they had been spared direct German persecution. Vichy anti-Jewish laws had been applied in Morocco and Algeria, though. Jewish businesses in Algeria were liquidated in late 1941 and in every city in Morocco where substantial numbers of Jews lived they were compelled to move back into the mellah, the old and usually dilapidated Jewish quarter. At least 2,000 European Jews were deported from Vichy France to Algeria to work in forced labour camps servicing construction of the Trans-Sahara railway. The regimen in these camps was as harsh as the terrain and it is estimated that hundreds perished. Jews were not freed from official discrimination until August 1943 when General de Gaulle’s National Committee of French Liberation established its authority over the Maghreb.²⁰

In Tunisia the Jews had fared better thanks to a benign colonial governor (the French resident-general Admiral Estéva), the peculiar nature of the European population, and Italian intervention. The European element in Tunisia was divided almost equally between French and Italian settlers. Although the French had gained control of Tunisia in 1881, the Italians used their nationals as a vehicle for influence and, ultimately, they hoped, to justify a transfer of sovereignty. Hence, Estéva was happy to persecute Jews with Italian citizenship but to soft-pedal the treatment of French Jews. Conversely, the Italians doggedly defended their citizens. This curious stand-off was suddenly overturned by the imposition of Axis power.²¹

Soon after his arrival, Rauff picked the Chief Rabbi of Tunis plus several community leaders to form a Jewish council and required them to supply 2,000 Jewish men aged 20–50 years for forced labour on defence works and airfield construction. When fewer than 150 reported for work, he seized hostages. Over the next few weeks, Rauff organized the registration of Jews, levied a compulsory fine of 20 million francs, and extorted 43kg of gold from the ancient Jewish community of Djerba. In April, he extended labour service to all Jewish adults. Many of them ended up in labour camps attached to airfields and dozens were killed when the landing strips were repeatedly bombed by Allied warplanes. Rauff had ambitions to evacuate all the Jews to Germany, but he only managed to extract twenty before the Italian–German bridgehead was crushed. He and his team were flown out on one of the last transport planes on 9 May 1943.²²

The Allied success in Tunisia took so much longer than anticipated that it negated Anglo-American plans for a cross-Channel invasion in 1943. Instead, at the Casablanca conference in January 1943 the Americans reluctantly accepted British proposals for an assault on Sicily and then Italy. In anticipation of Allied designs on southern Europe, Hitler had sent the Wehrmacht into the Free Zone in southern France and ordered the arrest and deportation of Jews and communists whom he regarded as trail blazers for any Allied attack. Knochen required the Vichy police to evacuate Jews from all coastal areas and border strips as a further precautionary measure. The German security police considered the situation in the south to be particularly urgent because so many Jews had fled there in the wake of the great Paris round-ups. In Lyons the Jewish population had doubled while that of Marseilles had increased by 50 per cent. Fortunately for the overstretched Sipo, in mid-December 1942 the Vichy authorities required all Jews in the former Free Zone to have their ID cards stamped with the word ‘Juif’. Joseph Antignac, head of the Section d’Enquête et de Contrôle, SEC (the anti-Jewish police), in the south, instigated thousands of investigations into the identity, credentials, property and activities of Jews.²³

On 22 January 1943, the security police in collaboration with the French authorities launched Operation Tiger, to curb resistance activity in the port of Marseilles. Because the Germans regarded Jews as enemies per se, the security sweep turned into a major round-up of foreign and French Jews. Over seven days nearly 6,000 Jews were detained, of whom 3,000 were subsequently released. The rest were deported to Compiègne or Drancy, and from there to Majdanek or Sobibor. Lambert, who had been tipped off about the action, rushed to the city, which served as a hub for UGIF relief activity. Despite his remonstrations at the Prefecture and his protests to the chief of police, he was not even able to prevent the detention of certified UGIF employees. As a last resort, Lambert, along with the Chief Rabbi of Strasbourg, René Hirschler (the chief chaplain to Jewish members of the French armed forces), and Rabbi Israel Salzer, Chief Rabbi of Marseilles, addressed a telegram to Laval and Pétain: ‘Confidential STOP As a result of extensive police operations carried out by the French authorities many French citizens all perfectly in compliance with the laws of our country notably veterans from Alsace and Lorraine returned prisoners young girls and minors have been arrested because they are Jews and some have been sent to an unknown destination STOP We protest with the last bit of our energy any such measures STOP We request with all our hearts not to be denied the chance in circumstances of this nature to procure the assistance authorized by Paris for our religion and our organizations.’ They did not receive a reply. When it was all over, Lambert confessed to his diary, ‘We have been through a time of fear such as I shall never forget.’²⁴

The entire southern zone was now swept by raids. A young member of Eichmann’s team who had recently been assigned to France, Klaus Barbie, was the driving force behind these manhunts. Under his direction the security police paid little attention to nationality or UGIF permits. Sipo-SD men rounded up Jews in Nîmes, Avignon, Carpentiers, Aix-en-Provence, and shipped them north at the rate of 40 per week. They hauled Jews off trains and dragged them out of UGIF offices. In response, an estimated 30,000 Jewish residents and refugees migrated to the Italian zone of occupation where German units were not permitted to operate and where Jews lived unmolested. Hundreds crossed the Pyrenees into Spain, many along perilous mountain tracks guided by passeurs. Some of these guides were members of resistance networks while others demanded fees as steep as the paths they traversed. Hundreds more made their way into Switzerland, legally or illegally. Most simply scattered. In the south, the Germans and the anti-Jewish police of the SEC lacked the file cards and census data that had previously enabled them to pinpoint Jews. They were reduced to labour-intensive screening operations and random document checks on the street, in cafes or public transport. Nor were the Jews at all passive or compliant. In the wake of the Marseilles debacle, Lambert and the UGIF leaders proceeded to decentralize relief and welfare work. They also established contact with the Jewish underground. Charities affiliated to UGIF now led a double existence, publicly dispensing aid and covertly helping Jews to disappear. OSE, the children’s welfare agency, moved 6,000 children from homes and orphanages into hiding.²⁵

However, neither the established communal notables nor the UGIF leadership alerted the Jewish population to the real meaning of deportation or confirmed the rumours about Treblinka and Auschwitz. The survivor-historian Jacques Adler subsequently charged both with dereliction of duty: ‘At the Central Consistory, which had known since August 1942 that mass extermination was taking place in these camps, there was total silence. Not wanting to attract attention to itself, it neither denied nor confirmed the information. In Paris, the UGIF leadership remained silent, as if this issue was outside its concern.’ To Adler, the Germans had succeeded in lulling the French Jewish population by targeting foreign and stateless Jews first, exploiting pre-existing divisions. ‘The silence of French Judaism had helped deceive the Jewish population about the intended role of the imposed representation. French Judaism never really accepted the fact that French Jews were as exposed as the foreign Jews.’ Until too late, ‘there was no sense of solidarity’.²⁶

To many Jews in the south such a warning would have been superfluous. On their own initiative thousands moved into the relative safety of the Italian zone. In November 1942, the Italian 4th Army had taken control of ten départements in the south-east, including the cities of Nice, Toulon and Grenoble. When Vichy police attempted to arrest and intern foreign Jews and ‘undesirable aliens’, Italian garrisons forcefully prevented them. The local military commander even tolerated a Jewish relief committee led by Angelo Donati, an Italian Jewish businessman, that provided Jewish refugees with identification papers which enabled them to reside legally in Nice and rendered them immune to police raids. This cavalier attitude to enemies of the Reich so appalled Knochen that he complained to Berlin. In January 1943, Himmler protested to Ribbentrop that the Italians were protecting Jews who were the ‘origin of resistance activities and of communist propaganda in the region’. Ribbentrop took up the matter during an official visit to Mussolini the following month. The Duce reacted by appointing a senior policeman, Guido Lospinoso, as chief of the Royal Inspectorate of Racial Police in the Italian zone of France. His task, supposedly, was to evacuate Jews to the interior where they could not aid an Allied invasion. However, Lospinoso moved with exquisite tardiness. When he got around to removing the Jews he did so in collaboration with Donati’s aid committee. When SS officials, including Eichmann, demanded to see him to determine what on earth was happening he sidestepped meeting after meeting. Just when it appeared that he was about to authorize the handover of German and Austrian Jews, Mussolini was deposed and Italian assistance became academic in any case.²⁷

For a period, the Germans seemed to be frustrated at every turn. Heinz Röthke complained, ‘with or without promulgation of the denaturalization laws, we can no longer count on the collaboration of the French police in the arrest of Jews en masse. Unless the German military situation clearly improves within the coming days or weeks.’ Yet the French refused to expatriate their own citizens and the majority of foreign Jews had either already been deported or gone to ground. This placed the Germans in a double-bind. To fill the deportation trains they needed both French cooperation and non-French victims; but unless they could render French Jews stateless, they could not get the assistance they needed to round them up. Helmut Knochen pressed Laval to denaturalize Jews who had become citizens since 1927, which would have greatly increased the pool, but Laval dragged his feet. The French premier was increasingly anxious about the likely outcome of the war and knew that anti-Jewish policy was one of the few bargaining chips he had left. Although he actually signed the necessary legislation on 20 June 1943, he withheld its publication. A week later, Knochen requested reinforcements from Berlin, only to receive a dusty reply on account of the ‘extremely difficult situation as concerns manpower’. Nor could he expect reliable support from the anti-Jewish police of the CGQJ, the SEC. By late 1943, the CGQJ and the SEC, which were never competently staffed at the best of times, had degenerated into little more than self-serving bureaucracies and protection rackets. When officials received a denunciation against a Jew who was in hiding or making a living illicitly, they were as likely to seek a pay-off from the denounced person as to make an arrest. This did not mean that they were a negligible force. The relentless probing into documents and sporadic hunting expeditions always netted a few unfortunates. Each arrest and deportation generated a penumbra of terror.²⁸

In June, Knochen did get some reinforcements in the form of Alois Brunner and half a dozen Sipo-SD men who had worked with him deporting Jews from Vienna and Salonica. Since March there had been no transports from Drancy, but now the hunt for Jews in France was stepped up. A series of raids by Sipo-SD teams caught the leadership of the semi-clandestine Amelot relief organization and disrupted a new communist-led welfare initiative dubbed Solidarité. Soon after his arrival in Paris, Brunner met leaders of UGIF-north and told them that henceforth they would be accountable to him rather than the CGQJ. To underline the new dispensation he dismissed the French police from Drancy and placed the camp under Sipo-SD management. He then reorganized the internal administration and compelled UGIF to provide supplies and maintenance. In anticipation of the denaturalization decree, he also instructed Sipo-SD staff to plan the mass arrest of 20,000 Jews in Paris, 6,000 across the northern zone and up to 30,000 in the south. When the denaturalization law failed to materialize, Brunner made do with what he had.²⁹

He swept aside the remaining inhibitions about raiding UGIF-supported welfare facilities such as children’s homes and hospitals or seizing UGIF personnel. In July he arrested André Baur, the vice president of the organization who was responsible for overseeing its activities in the north, on the pretext that he was to serve as a hostage against the return of a relative who had escaped from Drancy. The real reason was that Baur, who was French-born and possessed impeccable social credentials, had recently protested to Laval and the CGQJ about Brunner’s tactics. As soon as he heard about Baur’s detention, Lambert intervened with the Vichy authorities. After his efforts proved fruitless he fumed, ‘The government, it seems to me, is nothing more than a fiction. Its executives shrink from taking responsibility.’ Lambert now felt the burden of UGIF fall ever more heavily on his shoulders. He had just celebrated his forty-ninth birthday and was dreaming of retirement and, no less enticingly, revenge. When he heard of a heavy RAF raid on Bonn he asked himself, ‘Shall I have the strength to preserve my humanity when the time comes to settle scores?’ He was also thinking of posterity. In his diary on 20 August 1943 he sketched out a pamphlet defending his actions as the director of UGIF. True, he had cooperated with the Germans, but at least he had done some good, whereas the Consistoire had achieved nothing by its policy of abstention. ‘They preferred their comfort to uncertainty and the heroism of struggle’, he asserted. ‘We chose the heroism of uncertainty and action, the reality of concrete effort.’ The next day Raymond-Raoul Lambert was arrested along with his wife, three sons, and daughter who had been born in February 1942. She was named Marie-France, ‘expressing affirmation and hope’. They were all held in Drancy until 7 December 1943 when they were transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and murdered. André Baur, his wife and four children followed ten days later.³⁰

Salonica and Sofia

Salonica, like Marseilles, was a strategically significant port on the northern shore of the Mediterranean. Knowing this, the Germans remained in occupation of the city and its environs after they completed the conquest of Greece in April 1940. The rest of the country was parcelled out between the Italians, who occupied the bulk, and the Bulgarians, who got Thrace and eastern Macedonia. A puppet government was installed in Athens led by Prime Minister Georgios Tsolakoglou, a general who used anti-Semitism to discredit his enemies and appease the Germans. Within a year of the occupation, German policies of extracting food, combined with the Allied blockade, produced famine conditions. Along with the rest of the population, the Jewish communities were badly hit by economic disruption and shortages.³¹

There were 70,000–80,000 Jews in Greece, divided into two communities. The Romaniot Jews, whose presence dated from Roman times, were found in relatively small communities spread across the Peloponnese and the Greek islands. They were highly acculturated, Greek-speaking, and well-integrated into local society. Salonica, by contrast, was home to a Jewish community of some 53,000 Ladino-speaking Sephardi Jews, dating from the exodus of Spanish Jews from the Iberian peninsula after 1492. It comprised an elite of wealthy merchants and professionals, a large middling class of small traders and shopkeepers, and, uniquely, a working class of stevedores and manual labourers. Jews were so important to the workings of the port that it all but closed on major Jewish religious festivals. However, the salience of Jews in business and commerce stoked ethnic tension. During the inter-war years small but persistent anti-Jewish movements contributed to edgy relations between Christians and Jews in a city packed with Greek refugees from Anatolia who believed they had a right to homes and jobs.³²

Nevertheless, under the German occupation the Jewish section was largely left alone – until the start of the war against the USSR. Then, in July 1941, the military government of Salonica, under Dr Max Merten, registered all Jewish males aged 18–45 for forced labour. On 11 July, 9,000 Jewish men were assembled in Plateia [Liberty] Square, where they were processed and made to perform humiliating exercises beneath a baking sun. Work columns were then assigned to airfield construction and road building. By December, most of the labourers had been released or ransomed back to the Jewish community.³³

That month, Himmler pointed to the major security risk that the Jews allegedly posed to the port, but nothing much happened until the Allied landings in North Africa prompted the SS Head Office to take action. In January 1943, Eichmann sent his number two man, Rolf Günther, to reconnoitre the Jewish community. He was soon followed by Dieter Wisliceny and Alois Brunner. At the start of February they were assigned a company of order police with which to enforce anti-Jewish measures. They could also rely upon the support of the city’s Greek governor, Vasilis Simonides, and the local police force. Just a few weeks earlier, the municipal authorities had sanctioned the destruction of the vast Jewish cemetery that lay close by the city centre and which many Salonicans had long considered an obstacle to urban development.³⁴

Wisliceny and Brunner began by establishing a Jewish council, then registered the Jews and compelled them to wear the yellow star. Jews were limited to residence in three demarcated areas roughly equivalent to the existing Jewish districts. The poorest, known as the Baron Hirsch quarter, was conveniently close to a railway station and was chosen as a ghetto-cum-transit camp. During February, Jews were also forced to mark their businesses and homes, then expelled from the city’s economic and social networks. The Chief Rabbi, Zvi Koretz, who led the Jewish council, proved to be a gullible and pliable instrument. The Germans could rely on an equally cooperative Jewish Order Service commanded by the German-speaking Jacques Albala and Vital Hasson, a former tailor. The Baron Hirsch quarter became Hasson’s personal fiefdom, where he used his new-found power to extort money from fellow Jews. To members of the Jewish community like Dr Albert Menasche, all that was good and familiar now began to unravel with horrible speed. Menasche was a proud citizen: he had practised medicine in Salonica for twenty years, had served in the Greek army, and was an accomplished amateur musician. Suddenly none of that mattered for him, his wife and daughter.³⁵

On 1 March, panic swept through the community when the Jews were forced to declare all their assets. Koretz offered reassurance, but a few days later the Germans commenced a blockade of the Jewish districts and informed the Jewish council that the inhabitants were no longer permitted to move outside. All three areas were surrounded by barbed-wire fences and became, in effect, ghettos. When the Jews were forced to hand over the keys to their shops and businesses the local authorities were deluged with requests to buy or run these enterprises. Two weeks later, the Germans started to empty the Baron Hirsch quarter. The first train carried away 2,800 of the approximately 16,000 Jews confined there; it took five days for them to reach Auschwitz-Birkenau where most were murdered on arrival. Over the next fortnight four more transports departed for Auschwitz plus one that ended up in Treblinka. As the Baron Hirsch quarter was emptied, Jews were driven into it from the other ghettos. The moment they left their homes, locals descended on the vacated properties and stripped them so thoroughly that many were rendered uninhabitable. Between early April and early May, eleven more transports departed for Auschwitz. At the start of June only about 2,000 Jews were left, plus about a thousand rounded-up from communities in the surrounding countryside. Among them was Marco Nahon, a young doctor from Dimoteka, near the Turkish border. He was seized by a Sipo-SD unit along with other men from his small Jewish community in early May 1943 and held in the town’s synagogue. The menfolk were forced to summon their wives and families until enough Jews had been assembled for a transport. The 740 unfortunates were then transferred to the Baron Hirsch ghetto. They were deported along with most of the Jewish council and administration on 1 June. Amongst them was Albert Menasche and his family. They had little idea where they were heading. ‘In Salonika, we had vaguely heard people speak of this city,’ he wrote in a post-war account, referring to their ignorance about Auschwitz.³⁶

Koretz, Albala and other members of the administration were deported, though not to Poland. Their destination was a new concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen, near Celle, in northern Germany, recently established to hold Jews who the Germans considered plausible candidates to be exchanged for German nationals in Allied captivity. The transport to Bergen-Belsen also included several hundred Jews who had acquired (or claimed) Spanish nationality thanks to their Sephardi descent. When the final train departed on 10 August, carrying Jews who had previously been taken to do forced labour, 48,500 Jews had been savagely excised from the city. There was barely a murmur of protest from the Greek residents and a mere handful helped Jews to evade the Germans. Out of an ingrained sense of loyalty most young Jews chose to stay with their families. Only a few opted to defy the curfew and seek refuge with friends in the city or strike out for the mountains in search of partisans. Several hundred fugitives reached Athens with the assistance of the Italian consul, but this was to prove a temporary and precarious sanctuary.³⁷

For months after the last Jews had vanished, Greek civilians and German soldiers looted the deserted districts. Wisliceny and Brunner had gone to some trouble to forestall such an eventuality by arranging for Governor Simonides to create a Service for the Disposal of Jewish Property, but the task was so enormous that the new body could not make progress quickly enough to satisfy local appetites. No fewer than twenty-seven warehouses bulged with household goods removed from Jewish homes. Only a fraction of the 2,000 businesses awaiting new management were properly evaluated and distributed. Instead, the disposal of Jewish property descended into chaos and corruption, doing little to relieve the city’s housing shortage or revive its battered economy.³⁸

Around the same time that Wisliceny and Brunner arrived in Salonica, Theo Dannecker was posted to Sofia in Bulgaria. He soon reached an agreement with Alexander Belev, head of the Commissariat for Jewish Affairs, for the deportation of 20,000 Jews from occupied Thrace and Macedonia. This was to be followed by the removal of 8,000 Jews from Bulgaria itself. Implementation of the plan commenced in early March, with Bulgarian troops and police rounding up 4,700 Jews in Thrace and over 7,000 in Macedonia, including 3,500 from the town of Skopje alone. The Thracian Jews were held in abysmal camps until 18–19 March when they were sent by train to Lom, on the Danube river, and loaded onto four barges that took them upstream to Vienna, where they were entrained for Treblinka. One barge sank en route, with the loss of most on board. The Macedonian Jews went overland to Treblinka in three transports.³⁹

These measures had been taken with the knowledge and approval of the Bulgarian government, but when Belev set in motion the arrest of Jewish citizens in a number of provincial towns there was uproar. Several dozen professionals and intellectuals travelled to Sofia and met with Dimitar Peshev, the vice chairman of the National Assembly, to protest against the threat to Jewish friends and colleagues. Peshev was moved by what he heard about the fate of old men, women and children in Thrace and composed a petition against taking such steps against Bulgarian citizens. He managed to persuade forty-two members of the parliament to sign it. Simultaneously, Bishop Kiril of Plovdiv condemned the threatened deportations. These gestures caused the prime minister, Bogdan Filov, to order a postponement. Coincidentally, King Boris, the Bulgarian head of state, made an official visit to Hitler in Berchtesgaden at the end of March. Boris explained to his host that while he was happy to get rid of Jewish communists, he wanted to retain his Jewish subjects for labour. In May 1943, Belev tried again. This time the king intervened personally and threw his weight behind an alternative plan to disperse the 25,000 Jews of Sofia into the provinces. Despite protests and even street demonstrations by Jews in the capital, the evictions were carried out forcibly and not without harm to the victims. However, they were spared deportation, and the Allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943 finally dissuaded the Bulgarian government from further collusion with German anti-Jewish policy.⁴⁰

The fate of the Jews remaining in Warsaw

In early January 1943, Himmler visited Warsaw. To his annoyance he discovered that despite his orders to clear the General Government of Jews and to incarcerate essential Jewish workers in SS-run camps, there were still at least 40,000 in the ghetto. He immediately issued orders that the working Jews were to be relocated to secure installations in the Lublin area. Himmler’s grand plan was to combine security measures with SS business interests by transferring the workers and plant to enterprises operating under Globocnik’s aegis. However, when Oswald Pohl, director of the WVHA, pointed out that this was impossible at such short notice, he accepted the principle of retaining a concentration camp in the city on condition that surplus Jews were removed. Amidst the welter of orders and counter-orders, the Jews of Warsaw took their fate into their own hands.⁴¹

The great deportation had left 36,000 Jews living in the ghetto legally with jobs and work certificates. The bulk of them inhabited a dozen blocks north of Gesia Street, between Bonifraska Street to the west and Smocza Street to the east. They included about 2,000 employed by the Jewish council, several hundred Order Service personnel and their families, outside workers, and no less than 4,000 employed in the Werterfassung (Centre for the Registration of Valuables), a compound consisting of storehouses where the property of the deported was stored and sorted. The Werterfassung was the biggest single employer in the ghetto. It was a vast recycling enterprise, with sections devoted to everything from mattresses, kitchenware and household furniture, to musical instruments. So many hands were needed that many illegals found work there. About 20,000 uncertified Jews lived wild in deserted apartments on streets long since cleared of their inhabitants. South of an officially uninhabited, sterilized strip, four large workshops and about half a dozen smaller German-run enterprises employed 20,000 Jews. The largest were the clothing factory on Lezno Street, originally established by Walther Többens in mid-1941, and Schultz’s fur-making shop which also produced German army uniforms. The workforce lived in fenced-off barracks consisting of houses and tenements that had been knocked together. Near the southern limit of the old ghetto boundary, 4,000 Jews worked in the Brushmakers’ Shop.⁴²

The demography of the ghetto had changed as radically as its geography and economic structure. Three-quarters of the survivors were aged 20–50. The ratio of men to women had been reversed, so that there were now 100 males for every 78 females. There were almost no children: the only minors belonged to the families of privileged and protected Jews, the remnants of the Jewish council and the Order Service. The nutritional situation was much improved. Employees in the workshops were given sufficient rations to render smuggling unnecessary. However, the relative abundance of food did not mean that everyone ate as much as they wanted. Jews now started stockpiling supplies, provisioning hideouts that they suspected would one day be required. In the meantime, they toiled from sunup to sundown.⁴³

‘The days pass in gloom,’ Abraham Lewin sighed in early October, ‘bleak, full of grief and sorrow.’ For Hillel Seidman everyday life had become an ‘unending routine search for food, refuge, and ultimate safety’. Everything in the workshops was strictly regimented. Each worker had a number and identification papers attaching him to a specific place. They lived in billets, without wives or children. Ringelblum remarked bitterly, ‘slaves don’t require families’. At dawn they marched to work in columns, and sweated all day under the lash of all-powerful masters. They had no personal possessions to speak of and could not risk illness since there were no longer clinics or hospitals in the ghetto. On second thoughts, Ringelblum concluded that they lived ‘worse than slaves, because the latter knew they would remain alive … The Jews are sentenced to death.’ The religious and sociological character of the ghetto had been so cruelly engineered that it didn’t need schools or cheders. One of the surviving rabbis remarked to Seidman that ‘there are very few children left to religious families … Most of these did not have any money or protexia [protection or patronage] and were therefore unable to save their children. Those children who have survived are mainly from the assimilationist ranks, who had both the means and the influence.’⁴⁴

Traumatized, hardly able to appreciate what was before their eyes, those who had survived the bloody turmoil used the period of calm to take stock as best they could. ‘The present tragedy is so overwhelming that none of us can accept or even evaluate its sheer enormity,’ Seidman wrote. ‘Neither the public nor the individual are capable of understanding the catastrophe.’ ‘Have they really murdered a community of 300,000 Jews in Treblinka?’ Lewin asked. ‘It is so hard to believe in this appalling and horrible truth; more than 300,000 Jews have been murdered in the course of eight weeks.’ Ringelblum questioned why there had been no resistance. How could fifty SS men and 200 accomplices destroy such an enormous, vibrant population? ‘Why did we allow ourselves to be led like sheep to the slaughter?’ He found the explanation in German tactics – the selections, the trick of making the workshops seem secure before turning them into traps, the repeated blockades, the hunger and feebleness of the victims. But he also excoriated the Jewish council and the Order Service. ‘They said not a single word of protest against this revolting assignment to lead their own brothers to the slaughter.’ They had not just been corrupted by the Germans: they exceeded them in malevolence. They had uncovered perfectly good hiding places and dragged evaders to the Umschlagplatz. ‘Where did Jews get such murderous violence? When in our history did we ever before raise so many hundreds of killers?’ To Seidman, the Order Service posed a ‘difficult and painful chapter’. He accounted for their behaviour in the light of his religious beliefs. The Order Service men were happy to carry out German commands because they were assimilated Jews who despised the Orthodox Jewish masses: converts, ‘golden youth’, an ‘alien element, enemies to their own people’. Ultimately, though, the Germans had contrived circumstances in which certain Jews ‘could live only at the expense of our fellow Jews’. ‘Polish Jewry is finished,’ Lewin grieved, ‘it exists no more. Hitler has put an end to it.’ Since Polish Jews were the demographic and cultural reservoir of world Jewry, the global Jewish population had suffered a fatal blow.⁴⁵

Yet, in a surprisingly short time, people recovered. On a sunny day in early November, Lewin found himself watching Jews strolling on Mila and Zamenhof streets. A new mood permeated the ghetto: a determination to resist and a desire for revenge. Meditating on the services for Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, that marked the end of the great action in 1942, Seidman shifted from speculation about the divine response to the ‘spirit of bitterness [that] holds sway everywhere … Revenge is all that can bring some comfort now.’ Stanislaw Adler sensed ‘For almost everyone, there was a desire to endure and, as time passed the desire for revenge grew stronger.’ ‘It seems to me’, Ringelblum declared, ‘that people will no longer go to the slaughter like lambs.’ When Eliyahu Rozanski, a member of the Jewish Fighting Organization, assassinated Jacob Lejkin, the deputy commander of the Order Service, there was widespread approval. The authority of the Jewish council had evaporated and the Order Service were perceived as little better than collaborators. Support was shifting to the youthful leaders of the resistance. By tilting the generational and the gender balance of the ghetto population as well as dissolving families, the Germans had inadvertently created the optimum conditions for a rebellion.⁴⁶

During the last two months of 1942, the Jewish underground parties finally achieved a unity of organization and purpose. Much of this success was due to Mordechai Anielewicz, a charismatic young member of the HaShomer HaTzair Zionist youth movement who had been involved in underground activity in other parts of Poland over the previous two years. Anielewicz entered the ghetto around November 1942 and quickly assumed command of the Jewish Fighting Organization. In order to convince the Polish underground that the Jews were viable partners, the various factions agreed to create a Jewish National Committee alongside a unified command structure. Tsukunft, the youth wing of the Bund, formally affiliated to the ZOB although its parent organization baulked at the idea of joining a ‘Jewish’ national committee. Conversely, the Revisionist Zionist militia, the Zydowski Zwiazek Wojskowy (ZZW, Jewish Military Union), declined to do more than loosely coordinate with the ZOB because the latter included the Bund and the Communists. This was a serious breach since the ZZW boasted many former Polish Jewish army officers and had established a good rapport with the Home Army. As a result it was able to equip its 250 fighters with an impressive armoury. On a visit to their headquarters at 7 Muranowska Street, Ringelblum saw ‘racks of different types of weapons, machine-guns, carbines, revolvers of different types, hand-grenades, bags of ammunition, and German uniforms …’⁴⁷

The ZOB renewed its efforts to get arms and assistance from the Polish Home Army. Aryeh Wilner for the ZOB, Adolf Berman representing the Jewish National Committee, and the Bundist Leon Feiner, undertook the perilous work of liaison with the Polish underground outside the ghetto. These negotiations were neither easy nor straightforward. Hillel Seidman recalled a disappointing meeting with the Polish resistance during which his interlocutors declared ‘we are not prepared to split the Polish underground arguing about the Jewish question’. When Seidman suggested they sabotage the railways carrying Jews to the death camps, he was met with silence. ‘Not one strand of Polish society bothers to reply to our frantic calls for help,’ he concluded angrily. In December, after repeated requests, the ZOB obtained a delivery of ten poor-quality pistols. It is estimated that by this time there were 600 activists ready to fight the Germans.⁴⁸

To raise cash to buy more weapons the ZOB appealed to the wealthy and embarked on a campaign of forced taxation from those unwilling to contribute voluntarily. They made ‘collections’ from factory managers at the point of a gun. The Jewish council handed over 5 million zlotys. Meanwhile, a craze for bunker-building gripped the population. ‘Everyone is making them’, Ringelblum noted. ‘Everywhere, in all the shops and elsewhere in the Ghetto, hiding places are being built. Their construction has actually become a flourishing specialized craft. Skilled workers, engineers etc., are making a living out of it.’ Bunkers were designed to be habitable in cold weather and stocked with enough provisions to last for weeks. Some were ‘equipped with gas, electricity, water, and toilets. Some of them cost thousands of zlotys.’ Seidman visited one that was home to an entire yeshiva. Of course, only the well-off and well-connected could afford such havens. The poor relied on ingenuity. No one was sure if they would work anyway. Ringelblum concluded, ‘the populace is afraid that at the crucial terrifying moment the Germans will discover some clever way of turning to naught all our efforts at self-rescue. Whether this is true or not, only the future will tell.’⁴⁹

On 10 January 1943, rumours of a forthcoming deportation reached the ghetto. In fact, the Germans were not planning to murder the population; rather, the commander of the security police in the city, Ferdinand von Sammern-Frankenegg, aimed to remove illegal Jews and transfer the workshops to the Lublin area as per Himmler’s orders. The ZOB did not know this. Anticipating a repeat of the 1942 deportations, its commanders gathered, but still could not agree whether it was time to show their hand. According to Seidman, the Polish underground signalled that it was not willing to offer assistance of any kind. He estimated the ZOB’s arsenal as 143 revolvers and 4 carbines.⁵⁰

The test came early in the morning of 18 January 1943 when German police, led by Order Service men, entered the ghetto and started hunting Jews without papers. As word of the incursion spread, streets and workshops emptied. In their frustration the Germans began to grab anyone they could find. The sortie took the Jewish fighting units by surprise and few were able to obtain weapons from the armouries or assemble in numbers. Instead, individual fighters acting largely on their own initiative engaged the Germans in gunfights on the streets. Up to a dozen Germans were killed in these chaotic encounters, but so were most of the Jewish combatants. Zuckerman and a comrade, Zacharia Artstein, found themselves at the top of a house on Zamenhof Street when four or five Germans barged in. ‘I was sitting in a room with my gun cocked. We heard them, we heard the shouts: “Raus!” (Get out!) Then we heard them climbing the stairs … After they entered our room, he [Artstein] shot them in the back. Then we shot too and the Germans began running away. After the first shot they didn’t even have time to take out their guns. They were so sure of themselves … I took the gun from the German who fell in the room. He was still alive, it was a pity to waste a bullet on him. But we did take their guns and grenades.’ During the first day of the action, the Germans nabbed about 3,000 Jews. For the fighters though, ‘a new period in our lives had begun’. Zuckerman later recalled, ‘never in my life had I been so happy’.⁵¹

Anielewicz, who had been in the thick of the fray, met with ZOB commanders the following day to review their tactics. Instead of confronting the Germans head-on, they decided to fight from prepared positions and draw them into alleys, courtyards, and buildings where the enemy’s superior firepower would be negated. There were a few more skirmishes over the next days, but the Germans avoided entering houses and the fighters stayed off the streets. Although they caught about 2,000 Jews alive, the raiders left about 1,000 ghetto dwellers dead. Their plans and their easy assumptions about Jewish behaviour had been disrupted for the first time. Zuckerman exalted, ‘in all the months before, all the German had to do was yell “Raus!” and the Jews would come out. And this time, no Jew came out. This time, the Germans came up to us and we killed them.’⁵²

The bunkers and malinas had worked, though survival in hiding for day after day was a chastening experience. The floor of Adler’s bunker was covered by excrement and urine. It was very cold. Some of the Jews had typhus. There were women and a handful of terrified children. To stop them whimpering while Germans were in the vicinity, the infants were drugged. Adler recalled, ‘a death-like silence pervades the shelter. Over three hundred people are listening, immobile and in suspense to the echo of resounding shots. The tension is extreme when the tramp of actual or imaginary SS men pass along the street close to the shelter, or when we hear sounds that indicate that the Germans are looking for something on the ground floor of the building just above. A concrete ceiling is all that separates us from them.’⁵³

Dr Edward Reicher, a physician who had come to Warsaw from Lwow in 1941, described conditions in a typical small-scale malina. ‘We slipped back beneath the floorboards into our rabbit hole,’ he wrote in a wartime account reconstructed from memory after 1945. ‘More and more people began to arrive. In the end, instead of thirty, there were seventy of us, counting friends and relatives of residents along with residents of adjoining buildings, including the elderly, the sick, and many children. How could we say no? It would have meant certain death. Seventy people in a space of 150 square feet, and only six and a half feet high. Standing one pressed against next, we could barely move. There wasn’t enough air, and after a few hours we were running out of oxygen. There was no electricity. Our candles flickered and began to die. The sick and the elderly were suffering from the lack of air, but we were helpless to do anything for them. Upstairs the Germans were combing the building, floor by floor.’ When a baby started to cry and its mother vainly attempted to soothe it, another woman attacked her and killed the infant. ‘Where was God?’ Reicher asked himself. ‘Didn’t he see what was happening here?’⁵⁴

The happenings on 18–22 January, though small-scale in themselves, had an immense impact on the ghetto dwellers, the Poles, and the Germans. Zuckerman remembered that ‘The January Uprising gave us wings, elevated us in the eyes of the Jews and enhanced our image as fighters, giving us a good name … The January events had extraordinary repercussions even in the Armia Krajowa [Home Army, AK], which had always eschewed us and now agreed to give us fifty pistols immediately. They also supplied us with grenades and the explosives we needed.’ As the reputation of the ZOB soared, its commanders became the de facto leaders of the community. Edward Reicher recalled, ‘Life in the ghetto changed. Now it was officially led by the young. The Jewish council was indeed the puppet of the German authorities. The lethargy of the older generation gave way to the energy of the young. They understood that the attitude of the previous generation had been a failure. If they didn’t take things into their own hands, no one would do anything.’ Bunker-building intensified still further, and architects designed underground shelters for civilians and as bases from which the combat units could operate. Support and money flowed to the ZOB and there was a tolerance for the ‘collections’ aimed at the ghetto elite. In the course of one such mission, Simha Rotem recalled, ‘One of us knocked on the door and when it opened we burst in, identified the man of the house, stood facing him in a “persuasive” movement, and announced, “We’ve come to get your contribution for the ZOB.” The Jew refused. I put the barrel of my revolver near him; he froze …’ Rotem and his youthful comrades departed with the money. It helped towards the purchase of handguns, grenades and ammunition.⁵⁵

Anielewicz and the military leadership learned hard lessons from the January engagement. They fashioned a more resilient command and control structure and resolved to keep fighting units permanently mobilized. Thanks to the cash and support in kind they were now getting, it was feasible for the activists to train all day or man look-out posts. They stationed 22 units, each consisting of 10–20 fighters from one political faction, at key points around the ghetto. In addition to around 200 handguns, they now had ten rifles, one submachine gun, hundreds of grenades, and explosives from which they manufactured bombs and mines. Zuckerman preferred handguns. Few Jews knew how to load or maintain rifles, and they were awkward to use in confined spaces; revolvers or pistols required less training and were easier to handle in small rooms, stairways and cellars. The fighters also manufactured Molotov cocktails, although getting gasoline for them was far from easy. Rather than simply remain on standby, Anielewicz sent groups of fighters on regular missions. To prevent the dismantling of workshops and the subsequent transfer of employees to labour camps, combat groups set fire to them. They also fire-bombed the warehouses of the Werterfassung, causing major damage. At least one of these raids resulted in a gunfight with workshop guards. Hit squads carried out several more assassinations, including Mieczyslaw Brzeznski, the commander of the Order Service at the Umschlagplatz, and Dr Alfred Nossig, an elderly German Jew suspected of working for the Gestapo.⁵⁶

While some Jews trained to fight and others built bunkers, thousands opted to hide on the Aryan side. They joined a ‘hidden city’ that had its origins when the ghetto was first established. At that point Jews married to Poles, converts, and highly assimilated individuals who had business or social contacts willing to help them defy the German edict either resolved not to move in or made a quick exit. Over the next year or so, Jews inside the ghetto comforted themselves that however bad things were they stood a better chance of surviving inside than outside. Endless tales filtered back of Jews who were shot trying to leave or betrayed once they crossed the boundary. Since it was almost impossible to leave as a family unit it was only after families were shredded in the great deportation that large numbers of Jews felt liberated as well as desperate enough to take their chance. Yitzhak Zuckerman noticed that ‘after September [1942], Jews started leaving in every possible way for the Aryan side of Warsaw; they looked for Polish friends and for apartments.’ The exodus gained momentum after the January clashes. There was little doubt that, despite the bloody nose administered to the Germans, they would soon be back. Whereas the ghetto had once seemed the safer option than life in hiding, the pendulum swung the other way.⁵⁷

Getting out was the easy part. Finding accommodation was much harder. To afford rent, often deliberately inflated if the landlord suspected the tenant was Jewish, it was necessary to have plenty of money. To buy food required a ration card and to move around meant getting identification papers. These were no less costly. But there was little point in getting documents if you looked and sounded like a Jew. Polonized Jews who spoke without a Yiddish accent, Jews who had fair hair, Jews with light-coloured eyes all stood a better chance of passing as Aryans. To survive in the Polish districts it was also essential to walk with a straight back and purposeful movements, to be cheerful and smile no matter what. Familiarity with Roman Catholicism and religious rituals was a big advantage since wrongly answering a question about either could give you away. Jews on the Aryan side were at permanent risk of exposure by anti-Semitic Poles or opportunists who saw Jews as the route to easy money. Zuckerman, who operated in Aryan Warsaw from April 1943 until the Home Army uprising of August 1944, recalled ‘the danger from Polish blackmailers lurking on the other side who were as familiar as we were with the comings and goings. The blackmailers [shmaltsovniks – from the Polish for blackmail, ‘szmalcownicy’] were one of the greatest dangers for a Jew seeking refuge on the Aryan side of Warsaw. Dozens of blackmailers were usually swarming around the exits and gates. They would rob the Jew by threatening to turn him over to the Germans; if they had a hope that this Jew had something left, they would follow him and extort something from him, down to his last cent. After they extorted everything from him, they would turn him over to the Polish police or the Germans.’⁵⁸

However, in late 1942, the Polish underground government established the Council to Aid Jews, codenamed Zegota, to assist those who had gone into hiding or were masquerading as Aryans. At its height it is estimated that Zegota, in cooperation with the Jewish National Council and the Bund, was channelling money to 8,900 Jews. In March 1943, the civil leadership of the Polish underground issued a warning against betraying Jews in hiding. Shmaltsovniks who operated in public places increasingly had to reckon with reproaches from ordinary Poles who regarded any action on behalf of the Germans as treachery. While the underground authorities took little judicial action against those committing extortion or betraying Jews, interventions by members of the resistance induced the blackmailers to exercise greater caution and restrict their nefarious practices. The historian Gunnar S. Paulsson estimates that on the eve of the Warsaw Home Army uprising 28,000 Jews were concealed under one guise or another on the Aryan side. Wladyslaw Szpilman made his move in January, slipping away from an outside work party to an artist’s studio secured for him by friends. So did Michael Zylberberg, joining his wife who had left the previous November. He dropped out of a labour column and made his way to the apartment where his wife was staying with a Polish woman. She was glad to keep his wife, he recalled, ‘as she felt it was her patriotic duty to hide someone from the Germans’. He was less welcome and soon moved on. Stanislaw Adler left the ghetto in February, concealed in a cart carrying out dead bodies.⁵⁹

On 13 April, shortly before the Passover festival, Yitzhak Zuckerman also left the ghetto. He was on a mission for the ZOB to make contact with the communist underground militia, the People’s Army (Armia Ludowa, AL), to obtain weapons and support. On the sixth morning of the assignment he was woken by the sound of explosions coming from the ghetto: the German assault had begun. Initially it was directed by Ferdinand von Sammern-Frankenegg. He had at his disposal 9 officers and 821 other ranks drawn from a Waffen-SS panzer-grenadier regiment, 6 officers and 228 men of an order police battalion, plus over 330 Ukrainian auxiliaries led by 2 German officers. For support he could call on army artillery, three armoured vehicles, and a dozen heavy machine guns. This time, however, the Jewish Fighting Organization had received advanced warning of German movements and its units were waiting. Simha Rotem, stationed at the Brushmakers’, recalled that ‘we saw German soldiers crossing the Nalewki intersection on their way to the Central Ghetto, walking in an endless procession. Behind them were tanks, armoured vehicles, light cannons, and hundreds of Waffen-SS units on motorcycles. “They look like they’re going to war”,’ he exclaimed to a comrade. Soon they could hear detonations and gunfire to the north. Marek Edelman commanded a Bundist unit in the path of the German advance. He watched the soldiers deploy as if on exercise. ‘But no, they did not scare us and we were not taken by surprise. We were only awaiting an opportune moment. Such a moment presently arrived. The Germans chose the intersection at Mila and Zamenhof Streets for their bivouac area, and battle-groups barricaded at the four corners of the street opened concentric fire on them. Strange projectiles began exploding everywhere … German dead soon littered the street. The remainder tried to find cover in the neighbouring stores and house entrances, but their shelter proved insufficient.’ The SS called up armoured vehicles, but the first one was hit by a Molotov cocktail and caught fire, causing the others to back away. After nearly an hour of combat the Germans pulled out. Another clash took place at the entrance to the ghetto at the junction of Nalewki and Gesia Streets, lasting for over six hours. Again, the Germans were repulsed. Meanwhile, the Revisionists beat off repeated assaults on their HQ at Muranowski Square. A Polish flag and a flag with a blue Star of David flew from the roof throughout the day, enraging the Germans and causing awe amongst Polish spectators who now crowded into vantage points to watch the astonishing spectacle of armed Jews throwing back attack after attack by Waffen-SS troops. The Germans managed to seize just 580 ghetto dwellers.⁶⁰

The next day, the Germans turned their attention to the Brushmakers’ quarter. Rotem’s commander, Hanoch Gutman, waited till they advanced into the compound, then detonated the mine that had consumed so much time and energy. There was ‘a tremendous explosion … crushed bodies of soldiers, limbs flying, cobblestones and fences crumbling, complete chaos. I saw and I didn’t believe: German soldiers screaming in panicky flight, leaving their wounded behind. I pulled out one grenade and then another and tossed them. My comrades were also shooting and firing at them. We weren’t marksmen but we did hit some. The Germans took off.’ They returned, with greater care, but were repulsed several times. Eventually, the Jewish combat units were forced to evacuate their stronghold because the building was on fire. The ZZW unit at Muranowska Square was finally dislodged too, and withdrew to the Aryan side. Beyond the ghetto, an Armia Ludowa contingent supported the Jewish fighters by shooting up a German field gun crew. When the Germans called off the day’s operation they were able to claim only 505 Jews for deportation.⁶¹

On 23 April 1943, Mordechai Anielewicz managed to scribble a letter to his comrade Yitzhak Zuckerman. ‘I don’t know what to write you,’ he began hastily. ‘Let’s dispense with personal details this time. I have only one expression to describe: my feelings and the feelings of my comrades: things have surpassed our boldest dreams: the Germans ran away from the ghetto twice. One of our units held out for forty minutes, and the other one for more than six hours. The mine planted in the Brushmakers’ area exploded. So far we have only had one casualty …’ Anielewicz revelled in the information that SWIT radio, the Polish underground station, had transmitted an admiring account of the Jewish resistance. He was thrilled that the AL had conducted a supporting attack. But he informed Zuckerman that ‘we are switching to a system of guerrilla action’. They needed better, heavier weapons: rifles and submachine guns. Then he added details about the fate of the civilians: ‘I can’t describe to you the conditions in which the Jews are living. Only a few individuals will hold out. All the rest will be killed sooner or later. The die is cast. In all the bunkers where our comrades are hiding, you can’t light a candle for the lack of oxygen …’ The workshops had ceased to function and large expanses of the ghetto were on fire. ‘Be well my friend. Perhaps we shall meet again. The main thing is the dream of my life has come true. I’ve lived to see a Jewish defence in the ghetto in all its greatness and glory.’⁶²

The Germans had nothing to crow about. Goebbels fretted in his diary, ‘From some of the occupied territories I am receiving signals about unpleasant matters. The fighting in the Warsaw ghetto is still continuing, using the military resources … The Jews are putting up a desperate resistance … The cause of this desperate resistance is, among other things, that the Jews are aware of what is in store for them when the resistance is broken. They cannot surrender.’ Thanks to the failure of the first assaults, Sammern-Frankenegg was replaced by Jürgen Stroop, an SS-brigadier general who had gained plenty of experience on the eastern front. He cancelled further large-scale assaults and sent in small combat teams with engineers to destroy buildings and bunkers, setting alight entire blocks. Appeals by factory managers for Jews to leave the workshops and go peacefully were abandoned in favour of wholesale destruction of the ghetto.⁶³

Over the following week, the fighting degenerated into isolated skirmishes with German patrols that ran into ZOB units. As they were driven from their fortified positions the fighters sought refuge in civilian bunkers. For the Jewish population, which had descended underground, conditions became hellish. ‘The situation in the shelters is desperate and hopeless,’ Simha Rotem wrote in an after-action report. ‘Most palpable is the lack of air, water and food. Day after day passes. On the tenth day of the aktsia [action], the Ghetto is burned. Everywhere – sooty bodies. In the streets, in the courtyards, and in the cellars, people are burned alive. Because of (1) a lack of equipment, (2) a lack of food and water, (3) the impossibility of engaging the enemy in battle – since he is not within the Ghetto but is destroying the Ghetto from outside – we are forced to accept the idea of getting our people out to the forest to continue with our war.’ On 29–30 April, Rotem went through the sewers to the Polish side in the hope of locating Home Army officers and arranging the evacuation of the Jewish fighters, most of whom were then still alive.⁶⁴

At this point, the ZOB commanders confronted a gigantic flaw in their planning. As Zuckerman later admitted, ‘We didn’t have a rescue plan because we didn’t figure that any of us would survive.’ While fighting continued at points around the flaming ghetto, both Rotem and Zuckerman cast around for means to extract the combat units and transport them either to safe houses or to the nearest forests where they could convert to partisan activity. But, as each day passed, the Germans uncovered more bunkers and forced more Jews to the Umschlagplatz. On 8 May a German force stumbled across the ZOB command bunker at 18 Mila Street. About 300 fighters were concentrated there. Some were killed in the exchange of gunfire and a few managed to tunnel through to adjacent basements and escape. Approximately 120, fearing that the Germans would pump in poison gas, took their own lives. Mordechai Anielewicz died, surrounded by the young men and women of the Jewish Fighting Organization.⁶⁵

Twenty-four hours later, Rotem returned with sewer workers as guides. At moments he had to use his gun to force them deeper into the bowels of the smouldering ghetto. Once above ground he found little but ruination. Buildings were ablaze, bunkers were blown in, and only a few dazed Jews wandered through the rubble. He managed to collect forty survivors of the combat groups and took them back to the sewers. When they reached the exit there was no transport, so the exhausted, hungry fighters had to remain in the putrid tunnels for another twenty-four hours. On the morning of 10 May, Rotem heard the rescue lorry approach and threw a screen around the manhole cover. ‘They begin coming out of the cistern. I don’t recognise anyone, even though I knew them all, for these weren’t people, but exhausted ghosts, barely tottering on their feet. A crowd of people gathers around, looked on, and said, “The cats are coming out.”’ The extraction team and the truck were provided by the Armia Ludowa. To Zuckerman’s fury, the AK showed no interest in the ZOB remnant. To the contrary, ‘they wanted to finish off not only the uprising but the rebels. As far as the AK was concerned, as fighters we weren’t wanted anywhere on Polish soil.’⁶⁶

During the confusion one group in the sewers was left behind. When they finally emerged they were wiped out. Only eighty fighters escaped the carnage in the ghetto to reach the Lomianki woods or safe houses in the city. Less than half of them survived subsequent encounters with German patrols, Polish nationalist partisans or shmaltsovniks. The Germans had suffered roughly sixteen dead and eighty-five wounded; the figures for the number of casualties amongst the Ukrainian auxiliaries is uncertain. By their reckoning, the Germans removed 53,667 Jews from the ghetto. At least 7,000 were killed in the fighting and 7,000 were sent directly to Treblinka. Over 8,000 endured on the Aryan side. The plan to transfer all the Jewish workers to camps in the Lublin area was never realized, but around 20,000 did end up as slave labour in Majdanek or other places where their lease on life was extended.⁶⁷

Polish reactions to the uprising and the liquidation of the ghetto varied from admiration through compassion to glee. The AK and the AL mounted at least eleven supporting attacks on German targets outside and at least one AK unit may even have penetrated the ghetto to fight alongside the ZZW. In a press bulletin the Home Army high command praised the ‘courageous, determined armed resistance … the fighters of the Warsaw ghetto should be accorded full respect and support’. Broadcasting from London on 4 May, General Sikorski called on his countrymen ‘to give all help and shelter to those being murdered’. He added that ‘before all humanity, which has for too long been silent, I condemn these crimes’. But a Catholic underground paper saw the tragedy as an opportunity for the Jews to convert: ‘Their souls will be cleansed and redeemed by the baptism of blood … they can be saved in the face of destruction by baptism and the true faith.’⁶⁸

In fact, resistance on the site of the ghetto continued for several more weeks as groups of armed Jews who were based in undiscovered bunkers harassed German patrols. One was led by Zacharia Artstein who had fought side by side with Yitzhak Zuckerman in the house on Zamenhof Street. A handful of shelters remained undetected and were inhabited until the city was liberated. In a remarkable display of parsimony, the SS erected a concentration camp along what had been Gesia Street and brought in 4,000 foreign Jews to comb through the debris and recover anything of use. They succeeded in retrieving 30 million bricks and 6,000 tons of scrap metal. Conditions in the camp, KL Lublin-Arbeitslager Warschau, were horrible and prisoners were regularly shot. Their bodies were burned on pyres atop the rubble and ashes of the ghetto.⁶⁹

The view from Washington, London and Bermuda

Jewish armed resistance in the Warsaw ghetto was reported in Britain and America within a short time and quite accurately. Information about the fighting in January 1943 was published in the London Daily Telegraph on 19 March headlined ‘Warsaw Ghetto Plea to the Allies’. It was based on reports the paper had received via Shmuel Zygielbojm, the Bund representative on the exile Polish National Council. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency gave a solid account of the uprising in its bulletin dated 24 April, although the first substantial reports were not published in British newspapers until 7 May 1943. Then the Manchester Guardian gave the story a major spread, remarking that although the battle had begun on 19 April, the Germans had still not succeeded in suppressing Jewish opposition. It stated that ‘This is the first instance of organised guerrilla resistance to the Germans by the Jews on any considerable scale.’ The revolt was the lead story on the front page of the Jewish Chronicle the same day. A JTA bulletin on 12 May stated that resistance had been crushed, but two days later, the Manchester Guardian claimed that Jews were still holding out. As late as 25 May, The Times printed a short item headed ‘Pogrom in Warsaw Ghetto. Jews’ Desperate Fight’. This article was based on messages from the ghetto dated 28 April and 11 May which had been released by Zygielbojm’s colleague Dr Ignacy Schwarzbart. Jewish resistance provided an inspiring story and the struggle was soon mythologized as ‘Ghettograd’, especially by left-wing journalists. However, this did little to affect the practical response of Allied government.70

In both Britain and America, the December 1942 declaration on Nazi war crimes had been followed by a great deal of agitation: letters were written to the press, public meetings were held, and committees were formed. Eleanor Rathbone was sceptical of its effect. She wrote to George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, ‘I rather fear that the results may be that people will feel that they have discharged their consciences and that nothing more is needed.’ She was especially dubious since the declaration made no reference to any concrete steps to help Jews. Determined to sustain the momentum generated by the government statement, in early January Rathbone and fellow independent MP Archibald Hill convened a meeting of Jewish and non-Jewish activists. Three weeks later they led an impressive deputation to see Anthony Eden. Rathbone followed this up with a pamphlet setting out a twelve-point plan to save the Jews in Europe entitled ‘The Nazi Massacres of Poles and Jews: what rescue measures are practically possible’. On 9 March she founded the National Committee for Rescue from Nazi Terror. It included amongst its vice-presidents the archbishops of both Canterbury and York, and Sir William Beveridge, feted for his recent proposal for the creation of a welfare state. The campaigners were buoyed up by a Gallup poll, commissioned by the Committee, which revealed that 78 per cent of the public favoured admitting Jews facing death, 68 per cent on a temporary basis and 10 per cent indefinitely.⁷¹

Rathbone and her fellow campaigners did not know that a committee of the war cabinet, including the foreign secretary, the home secretary, and the secretary of state for the colonies (responsible for overseeing Palestine), had already deliberated on the matter. It had resolved to take no action for the present on the grounds that aid for refugees would divert resources from the war effort and barely dent the problem. The best solution for their plight was an Allied victory. Archibald Randall, the civil servant who handled refugee issues at the Foreign Office, wrote in a minute on 22 February 1943 responding to Rathbone’s efforts that she was an ‘impatient idealist’ who ‘knows very little’. He elaborated that ‘The Jewish disaster is only part of the vast human problem of Europe under Nazi control; other parts are starving children, the deliberate extermination of Polish and Czech intelligentsia, forced labour and the spiritual perversion of youth.’ Randall further objected that Hitler would never release large numbers of Jews and even if he did there was no shipping to transport them, nowhere for them to go, and nothing to feed them on. Yet, in the face of pleas for action from such luminaries as E. M. Forster, George Bernard Shaw and Rebecca West, who were joint signatories of a heartfelt letter that appeared in The Times on 16 February, the government realized it had to do something. Hence the Foreign Office began to explore joint action with the Americans and together they announced that a conference would shortly be held to discuss the ‘refugee problem’.⁷²

A similar movement of opinion built up in the United States. On 1 March 1943, the American Jewish Congress in collaboration with the AFL-CIO trades union federation and church organizations packed New York’s Madison Square Gardens. Ten thousand people stood outside listening to the proceedings on the public address system. The speakers included Stephen Wise, Chaim Weizmann, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and Senator Robert Wagner. At its climax, the rally endorsed an eleven-point resolution that called on the administration to offer financial guarantees to states willing to accept Jewish refugees from German-controlled Europe and encourage neutrals to open their borders to those in flight. It also demanded the easing of immigration controls into the USA and Palestine. Finally, it asked the United Nations to set up an agency devoted to saving refugees. A Jewish Joint Emergency Committee on European Jewish Affairs emerged in the aftermath of the rally to press for the realization of its demands.⁷³

Eight days later, Madison Square Gardens played host to a very different kind of protest. A new body, styling itself the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, mounted a spectacular and moving pageant entitled ‘We Will Never Die’. It was the brainchild of two young Palestinian Jews who had arrived in the USA as envoys of the Revisionist Zionist underground army, the Irgun, in 1940. Hillel Kook (who used the nom de guerre Peter Bergson) and Samuel Merlin began their activity in the USA by covertly generating support for the Irgun and overtly campaigning for the creation of a Jewish army to contribute towards the liberation of the Jewish people under German rule. But when he read the New York Times report based on the Riegner telegram, Bergson abandoned this mission in favour of what he realized was the more urgent task of rescue. He collected a remarkable group of Jews and non-Jews from the worlds of politics, journalism and entertainment to publicize the Jewish catastrophe, raise money for rescue work, and prod the administration into taking definite steps to help. Unfortunately, the ‘Bergson Boys’ did not attempt to coordinate their activity with Stephen Wise or the established leadership of American Jewry. Instead, it appeared to Wise that they were dividing the Jewish community, diluting resources, and confusing the message it was trying to send to American politicians. Wise was particularly apprehensive that a noisy campaign would actually alienate the White House, so exerted himself to stifle Bergson’s imaginative crusade. This certainly created the impression that American Jews were at each other’s throats, but did little to stem the bandwagon that the Bergson Boys had set in motion. ‘We Will Never Die’ played to full houses in Washington, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles.⁷⁴

On 11 March, James McDonald, the chair of the President’s Advisory Committee on Political Refugees, added his weight to the campaign by issuing a statement echoing the programme of the Jewish Joint Emergency Committee. These Jewish and non-Jewish interventions had an effect on Congress, where the majority leader submitted a resolution to the Senate expressing support for rescue measures. Jewish lobbyists applied themselves to state legislatures across the country in pursuit of similar gestures. In April, Wise addressed a mass rally of 20,000 in the Chicago Stadium. Translating indignation into practical action, however, was proving immeasurably harder – not least because the British and American governments were determined to avoid being stampeded into inconvenient, costly or potentially embarrassing measures on behalf of the Jews. During a visit to Washington in March, Eden made it clear that the British government did not favour pressure on neutral countries to accept Jewish refugees or breaking the blockade to send food to starving ghettos. Breckinridge Long, the US assistant secretary of state who dealt with refugee matters, wrote candidly in his diary that ‘One Jewish faction under the leadership of Rabbi Stephen Wise has been so assiduous in pushing their particular cause … that they are apt to produce a reaction against their interest … One danger in it all is that their activities may lend color to the charges of Hitler that we are fighting the war on account of and at the instigation and direction of our Jewish citizens.’ He added that such activity ‘might easily be a definite detriment to our war effort’.⁷⁵

It was against this background that British and American officials came up with an international conference on the refugee question. The conference was held on Bermuda during 19–29 April 1943. The island location was deliberately selected because it was remote and immune to barracking by Jewish protesters. The only Jew who attended was Congressman Sol Bloom, a Roosevelt loyalist who chaired the House Foreign Affairs Committee. In any case, the delegates had precious little room for manoeuvre. The British only consented to attend if it was agreed in advance that the meeting would not recommend negotiations with the Germans, would not consider the exit of millions of people, and would rule out exchanging prisoners of war for civilians. Nor was there to be any question of violating the blockade. Every concrete proposal was shot down. For example, when the British suggested setting up camps in North Africa to accommodate Jewish refugees currently stuck in Spain, the Americans objected that importing Jews into the region would upset Arab feelings. The delegates were able to concur only on the desirability of encouraging neutral states to accept refugees and the usefulness of an Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees modelled on the defunct League of Nations High Commission. By contrast, there was no disagreement over the need for secrecy about the barren deliberations: the British delegation reported with satisfaction that they had been ‘able to achieve very little’.⁷⁶

The Bermuda conference served officials well on both sides of the Atlantic. Between January and April 1943 the promise of a high-level conclave deflected demands for further action and afterwards there was the inevitable period of waiting for the report, during which campaigners lost heart. The cynicism of officials was exemplified in remarks on the outcome of the talks made by Richard Law of the Foreign Office. ‘We are subjected to extreme pressure from an alliance of Jewish organisations and archbishops’, he began. ‘There is no counter-pressure as yet from the people who are afraid of an alien immigration into the country because it will put their livelihood in jeopardy after the war. I have no doubt in my mind that that feeling is widespread in England, but it is not organised so we do not feel it.’ The Americans were in a different, tougher position because they were caught between a potent Jewish lobby and widespread antipathy to refugees. They wanted to be seen to act but actually do nothing. ‘The Americans, therefore, while they must do their utmost to placate Jewish opinion, dare not offend “American” opinion.’77

Stephen Wise was not taken in so easily. Ten days after the State Department delegation returned home, with no sign of an imminent announcement of any results, he wrote to the president complaining about the ‘inexplicable absence of measures to save the Jews who can still be saved – without of course, in the slightest, impairing the war effort’. But Wise would not get to see the president until July 1943, when Roosevelt simply repeated to him the promise of retribution against German war criminals. Voices of concern were raised in the United Kingdom too. Even before the conference was over, the Jewish Chronicle wondered anxiously at the reason for the news blackout. The government promised a parliamentary debate on the outcome and then moved to pack the benches with its supporters. Osbert Peake, the foreign office minister, opened the debate on 19 May with an arid summary. Having recited the meagre list of concrete proposals, he declared that in any case ‘these people are for the present mostly beyond the possibility of rescue’. Furthermore, ‘the rate of extermination is such that no measures of rescue or relief, however large a scale, could be commensurate with the problem’. In addition to the lack of shipping, the blockade and the diversion of resources from winning a victory that alone could assure them deliverance, he argued that an influx of refugees might provoke an anti-Jewish reaction. This was rather more than Rathbone could swallow. She retorted that ‘It is an insult to the British people to suggest that even those who “don’t like Jews” would rather leave them to be massacred than find asylum for a few thousand more of them.’ Rathbone’s close ally, the Conservative MP Victor Cazalet, railed that ‘the Jews are being exterminated today’ and proclaimed it a Christian duty to save them. Their oratory bounced off the implacable government front bench. Rathbone was deflated. Cazalet died in an air crash a few weeks later. The momentum to rescue Jews that had been gained in the early spring was dissipated by summer 1943.⁷⁸

By coincidence, the Bermuda conference opened on the same day that the Jewish fighters of Warsaw commenced their final stand. The unfolding tragedy was monitored daily by Zygielbojm and Schwarzbart but the Polish government-in-exile did not refer to it in any official statement until 4 May. Then General Sikorski devoted twenty-eight lines to the uprising out of a 271-line broadcast to his homeland. Sikorski called for aid and succour to the fighters and condemned the silence of the world, but his attention was elsewhere. The death throes of the Warsaw ghetto coincided with the revelations from Katyn, which placed the London Poles in an awful position. On the one hand, they wanted to denounce the Soviet atrocity and use it to show the western allies the malignancy of their partner in Moscow. On the other hand, to do so would be to reinforce German propaganda and put the Allied coalition at risk. Zygielbojm’s frantic efforts to persuade the government-in-exile to do more came to nothing. On 11 May he told the Polish Jewish journalist Isaac Deutscher that he was contemplating a hunger strike to draw attention to the slaughter. The following day he committed suicide. In a last letter to the Polish president, Wladyslaw Raczkiewicz, Zygielbojm wrote, ‘The responsibility for the crime of the murder of the whole Jewish nationality in Poland rests first of all on those who are carrying it out, but indirectly it also falls upon the whole of humanity, the people of the Allies, and their governments, who to this day, have not taken any real steps to halt this crime.’ In a letter to the Bund representative in New York he explained that ‘I hope that upon my death I will achieve what I failed to achieve in my life – real action to rescue at least a few … of the 300,000 Jews who have survived …’ But in a personal note to his brother he suggested a different reason for taking his life: ‘Why am I not with them in their last struggle? … What right have I to survive?’⁷⁹

Ignacy Schwarzbart suggested to the foreign minister of the exile government, Count Raczyński, that they distribute Zygielbojm’s final letter to the Polish president to British members of parliament prior to the debate on the Bermuda conference, in the hope of stinging them into a positive response. Polish officials refused because the suicide note contained criticism of their own failure to do more. Instead, the government-in-exile ignored the debate and the only newspaper that published the letter was the Manchester Guardian. Over the next year the government-in-exile usually showed an interest in publicizing the fate of Jews in Poland only when it wanted to prevent the Soviet-backed Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee from seizing the high ground. Aside from using the Jewish catastrophe to draw attention to the fate of Poland in general, it declined to get involved in rescue activities. Zygielbojm’s gesture had been utterly futile.⁸⁰

Confirmation that the Jews of Europe faced violent extinction reached the Yishuv, the Jewish community of Palestine, in the weeks after Rommel was driven back from El Alamein. This coincidence was important because until then the Jews in Palestine had been deeply afraid of a German breakthrough and found it hard to think of much beyond defensive measures. Their relief was now clouded by the appalling news from Poland, news that touched almost every member of the community. Yet the Jewish Agency executive seemed unable to devise an appropriate response. David Ben-Gurion and the leadership did not want to promote strikes and demonstrations that would disrupt the war effort. Nor did they want to foster a mood of hysteria. The National Council of the Yishuv, in consultation with the Jewish Agency, launched a month of mourning during December 1942 and January 1943, but it proved impossible to sustain. Cinemas, restaurants and businesses objected to the disruption caused by days of fasting and prayer. The secular labour movement, which set the tone for Jewish society, derided the very idea. Instead, the Jewish Agency focused on raising funds for relief and rescue efforts. Its delegates in Spain, Switzerland and Turkey were authorized to find ways around the Allied blockade so as to send money, food parcels and documents into German-dominated Europe. Papers conferring Palestinian citizenship made the holder eligible for exchange for German nationals interned in Palestine, and 800 Jews were saved in this way, while the mere possession of an immigration certificate could be the gift of life. However, because Ben-Gurion did not want to establish a powerful new body, the work was conduced by a committee of the Jewish Agency executive chaired by Yitzhak Gruenbaum. He was an underwhelming figure and failed to galvanize the public. Ultimately, the Joint Rescue Committee raised a fraction of the amount spent on land purchases for future settlements in Palestine and the envoys never had enough funds even for what they were able to achieve. The Israeli historian Dina Porat found that by 1944 the ‘debate over the proper response faded away’.⁸¹

The end of the ghettos in the General Government and Wartheland

The Warsaw ghetto uprising confirmed the worst fears and fantasies that animated the Nazi leadership. On 1 May 1943, Goebbels considered the most noteworthy news from the occupied territories to be ‘the very stiff fighting between our police, including to some degree the army, and the insurgent Jews. The Jews have managed to fortify the ghetto for defence. The fighting there is very bitter … it is a perfect example of what can be expected of these Jews when they have weapons in their hands.’ In order to prevent further eruptions, on 19 June 1943, Hitler approved Himmler’s proposal to liquidate the remaining Jewish population in the occupied eastern territories except for those in SS-controlled camps. When Himmler declared the entire General Government a ‘Bandit Combat Zone’ he signalled the seriousness of the security problem and, not coincidentally, acquired even more sweeping powers. Once again, real security issues connected with the course of the war, organizational self-interest, and fantastic anxieties about the menace posed by the Jewish enemy conjoined to have immediate, disastrous consequences.⁸²

The decision to eradicate the Jews on the grounds of security, rather than ideology alone, put an end to months of prevarication, confusion, and bickering over the use of Jewish labour. At the start of the year there were still fifty-four ghettos and Jewish labour camps in the General Government servicing a range of enterprises. In pursuit of his earlier business plan Himmler had ordered Krüger, the Higher SS Police Leader for the General Government, to transfer Jews fit for work to premises controlled by the SS Business and Administration Head Office, the WVHA. The result was a wave of ghetto clearances and mass murder operations that dealt the final blow to the Radom ghetto, the Cracow ghetto and several others. Jewish workers were concentrated in a handful of camps, most notably Plaszow, outside Cracow. In March, Himmler’s ambition to make the SS into a corporate giant took another stride with the establishment of Ostindustrie. This company, a partnership between the WVHA and Globocnik, was intended to manage camps supplying labour to munitions plants under SS stewardship. To obtain the necessary manpower and machinery, Himmler intended to appropriate the production units in Warsaw, Bialystok and Lodz and relocate them to the Lublin district. However, the behaviour of the Jews in Warsaw indicated that the proposed labour force was more combustible than the munitions it was intended to produce. Himmler’s dream of becoming an industrial titan was superseded by the more familiar role of exterminator-in-chief. The Warsaw ghetto uprising thus accelerated the destruction of around 400,000 Jews still alive in German-occupied eastern Europe.⁸³

In the Lublin district every remaining ghetto and labour camp was liquidated except for ten large installations, mostly part of Globocnik’s business empire. He ran several that were devoted solely to sorting the property stolen from murdered Jews, with the largest at the old Lublin airfield. Nearly 5,500 worked in the Deutsche Ausrustungswerke (German Armaments Works, DAW), munitions plants adjacent to the Lipowa camp in Lublin. Despite the catastrophic failure to relocate their workshops from Warsaw, Többens set up anew in the Poniatowa camp and eventually employed 16,000 Jewish slave workers, while Schultz established production in the Trawniki camp using a workforce of about 6,300. Three thousand Jews were retained in Budzyn, serving a Heinkel plane factory. About 2,000 were utilized by the army in Deblin. Between March and November, 15,000 Jews were in eight factories run by Ostindustrie, manufacturing a range of products from glassware to pharmaceuticals. Ultimately, however, the utility and profitability of these enterprises would prove meaningless when weighed against the supposed threat the workers posed to German security.⁸⁴

Around 20,000 Jews from Warsaw ended up in Majdanek, a hybrid concentration, labour and extermination camp. Majdanek started life in July 1941 when Himmler ordered the establishment of a camp to house Soviet prisoners of war on an extensive site in the Lublin suburb of Majdan Tartarski, adjacent to the Lublin–Zamość highway. Construction was delayed until the autumn and most of the POWs and Jews deployed for the job perished in the process. When it eventually began functioning it held under 10,000 inmates, three-quarters of whom were Jews. Most of these were from the Lublin district or the Warsaw ghetto. By mid-1943 the camp population had doubled but the proportion of Jews fell to just over half. Majdanek was now designated a concentration camp under the SS Business and Administration Head Office. It supplied labour to warehouses where the booty from Operation Reinhard was sorted and to workshops run by the DAW, producing clothing and furniture for the German armed forces. Unusually, though, it was equipped with gas chambers using Zyklon-B and also carbon dioxide. Following the closure of Belzec, thousands of Jews from the Lublin district and from central and western Europe were murdered there. Between autumn 1942 and the end of 1943, about 8,500 Slovak Jews, 3,000 Czechs and 3,000 from other parts of Europe were directed to Majdanek to be killed or selected for the labour force. Life in the camp was dominated by the kapos, who were especially cruel. Thaddeus Stabholz, a physician who reached the camp from Warsaw after spending nearly two weeks in a bunker, recalled that they once roasted a prisoner over an open fire. His account of the time he spent there is a catalogue of ceaseless brutality. Majdanek was so horrific that when he was transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau to work as a camp doctor it marked a significant improvement in his living conditions. Stabholz was especially lucky to have left the camp before November 1943, when the entire Jewish population was wiped out in one day.⁸⁵

In Galicia and western Ukraine between 140,000 and 150,000 Jews were alive at the start of 1943. Belzec, which had been held in readiness for the arrival of Romanian Jews, was shut down in December 1942 once it was clear they would not be turning up. Since there was not enough rail capacity to send Jews to either Treblinka or Sobibor, in January Fritz Katzmann began the liquidation operations with a mass shooting of 10,000 Jews from the Lwow ghetto. The slaughter culminated in the execution of the Jewish council. The rump, containing about 25,000 Jews (over half of them living ‘wild’), was designated a ‘Jews’ camp’ run by the SS. In May, several thousand who had been employed in Wehrmacht enterprises were moved to the Janowska camp, where prisoners had been shot to make room for them. At the start of June, Katzmann proceeded to liquidate what was left of the Lwow ghetto. In the opening stages his policemen and auxiliaries encountered armed resistance and several were killed. After a few days the Jews were overwhelmed. Some 3,000 perished in the ghetto, but 7,000 were inducted into Janowska where hundreds were winnowed out in the course of selections. Katzmann’s killing units went on to murder the 6,000 Jews in Tarnopol, 4,000 in Drohobych, 3,000 in Buczacz and thousands more in smaller ghettos. In Tarnopol, the final action in July met an armed response and hundreds of Jews fled the ghetto for the surrounding forests. Few, however, survived the Jew-hunts over the following months. In Drohobych, several hundred essential workers in the petroleum industry were spared until they, too, were sent to a camp. About 800 Jews from Buczacz found refuge in the wooded hills around the town. Notwithstanding these exceptions and 21,000 left in SS camps, at the end of June 1943 Katzmann proclaimed Galicia Jew-free. His meticulous records indicate that 434,329 Jewish inhabitants had been killed.⁸⁶

Katzmann’s valedictory report to HSSPF Krüger, his superior, offers an insight into the mentality of the SS and this cadre of the security apparatus. It constructs anti-Jewish policy in a linear fashion, admitting to conflicts with other agencies, but implying a steady purpose in SS thinking throughout the period from June 1941 to June 1943. Katzmann describes the first measures for marking Jews, curbing the black market and forcing Jews to work. He brags about the creation of the camps to supply labour for Durchgangstrasse IV, of which 160 kilometres had been completed (in reality a derisory achievement). There is no mention of the wave of pogroms and mass killings in the summer of 1941, although he acknowledges the difficulty posed by the importance of Jews for all forms of manufacturing in the region. This required careful management of the labour question, for which the civil administration and Wehrmacht proved incompetent. Nor were the civilians able to accomplish the creation of Jewish residential districts, exposing troops passing through the region to the danger of typhus. Therefore the security police had to step in to take control of the housing situation and revalidate work permits. In the course of ghettoization and reorganization of the labour force, many Jews were sent for ‘special treatment’. Katzmann does not elaborate on the reasons for this bifurcation. In April 1942, the systematic evacuation of Jews from the district commenced. Thanks to the efforts of the security police, 255,000 Jews were ‘resettled’. Again, Katzmann omits the messier aspects of this operation. Instead, he explains how, in November 1942, he was forced to take all Jews into SS-run camps in order to accelerate the process of rationalization. The last stage of clearing out the Jewish population was especially hard: ‘They not only tried to escape, and concealed themselves in the most improbable places, drainage canals, chimneys, even in sewage pits, etc. They barricaded themselves in catacombs of passages, in cellars made into bunkers, in holes in the earth, in cunningly contrived hiding places, in attics and sheds, inside furniture, etc… . As the number of Jews still remaining decreased their resistance became the greater. They used weapons of all types for their defense, and in particular those of Italian origin. The Jews bought these Italian weapons from Italian soldiers … Subterranean bunkers were discovered which had cleverly concealed entrances … so well hidden that they could not be found if one did not know where to look.’ Katzmann concluded that ‘Despite the extraordinary burden heaped upon every single SS-Police Officer during these actions, [the] mood and spirit of the men were extraordinarily good and praiseworthy from the first to the last day. Only thanks to the sense of duty of every single leader and man have we succeeded in getting rid of this PLAGUE in so short a time …’⁸⁷

After this typically hyperbolic and self-pitying coda Katzmann offers a financial accounting that both undermines the notion of a fearsome enemy and reveals the Nazi money-grubbing obsession. ‘Apart from furniture and large quantities of textiles, etc., the following were confiscated and delivered to Special Staff “Reinhard”: … 97,581 kg. gold coins, 82,600 kg. silver chains, 6,640 kg. gold chains … 20,952 kg. gold wedding rings, 22,740 kg. pearls, 11,730 kg. gold teeth bridges, 28,200 kg. powder compacts silver or other metals … 343,100 kg. cigarette cases silver and other metal, 20,880 kg. gold rings with stones, 39,917 kg. brooches, earrings, etc., 6,166 kg. various pocket watches … 2,892 kg. pocket watches gold, 68 cameras, 98 binoculars, 7 stamp collections … 1 3.290 kg box corals … 1 suitcase of fountain pens and propelling pencils … 1 suitcase of cigarette lighters, 1 suitcase of pocket knives, 1 trunk of watch parts.’ Katzmann’s careful list was intended to allay any suspicion that the local SS had been lining their own pockets, yet by disavowing his venality he only highlighted the avarice of his employers. Katzmann evidently did not anticipate that his audience might raise an eyebrow at the juxtaposition of ‘brutal methods’ that were necessary to catch dangerous Jews with the fact that many of them were wearing brooches and pearl earrings or armed with nothing more lethal than fountain pens.⁸⁸

As a counterpoint to Katzmann’s point of view, the diary of Samuel Golfard captures the experience of Galician Jews in the first months of 1943. Golfard was living in Peremyshliany (Przemyslany), a small town with a Jewish population of about 3,000. Around 450 men of the community were shot in November 1942, but over the following year the rest were largely left alone. This was partly because many of the working population were engaged in shale oil production. Nevertheless, they were forced into a tiny ghetto and at the end of the year, some 3,000 were deported to Belzec. Essential workers, including Golfard, were transferred to Jaktorow labour camp on the outskirts of town. Golfard started his diary by recapitulating the day on which his sister was taken. The ‘Jewish militia’ who assisted in the round-up were ‘not better or worse than many Germans, who for a bottle of vodka or a can of sardines spared one’s life. They were just somewhat cheaper.’ Of the time he spent in Jaktorow, he wrote, ‘I became convinced that there is no and has never been any racial solidarity among the Jews. Instead, here in camp, a solidarity of the rich and a solidarity of the poor existed, a solidarity of the sated and a solidarity of the hungry.’ The only heroism he witnessed was ‘the heroism of people walking to the gallows without a word of complaint’. ⁸⁹

From early April 1943, Golfard heard rumours of previously protected Wehrmacht workers being deported from Lwow. Anticipating an onslaught on their town, young men in the ghetto discussed armed resistance, but rejected Goldfard’s militancy. ‘Every one of them still has some expectations of hiding in a peasant’s hovel or somewhere else, and they continue to reject any collective actions that might save their own lives.’ The fate of those who did try their luck in the woods was hardly encouraging. He learned that six Jews who had escaped were caught and tortured before being executed. Some time later, Golfard left the ghetto. He was helped by a Pole, Tadeusz Jankiewicz and his family, but eventually the Germans caught him. Only his words, preserved by Jankiewicz, survived the cataclysm.⁹⁰

The Jewish population in the district of Bialystok, which had remained relatively undisturbed during 1942, next faced destruction. The Bialystok ghetto, with a population of about 43,000, had been preserved thanks to the intervention of the German army and the East Prussian Nazi Party boss Erich Koch, who parried the murderous intentions of the RSHA by pointing to its value as a production centre. Grodno had not been so fortunate: about 6,000 Jews went from there to Auschwitz during November, leaving 17,000 work Jews and their families. Over 16,000 Jews from Volkovysk, which served as a place to concentrate Jews from around the region, were sent to Treblinka and 3,000 to Auschwitz by the end of the year. In January 1943, the SS Head Office renewed its calls to eliminate Jews from the Bialystok district. From 18–22 January, 11,500 were taken from Grodno to extermination camps. A few hundred workers were left until March, when the ghetto was finally dissolved. Some 10,000 Jews were also sent from the Pruzhany ghetto to Auschwitz. However, when the attention of the SS returned to Bialystok, Albert Speer, the minister for armaments, objected. Speer pointed out the difficulty of replacing skilled Jewish workers with Byelorussian peasants and argued for a stay of execution. Speer and Koch succeeded, partially. In early February, Eichmann’s office started drawing up railway schedules for the deportation of just 10,000 Jews.⁹¹

Word of an Aktion triggered anguished debate within the official and underground leadership. Thanks to the long period of stability in Bialystok, and the sympathetic attitude of the Jewish council chairman, Efraim Barash, the ghetto had become a centre for Jewish resistance activity. Barash actually discussed tactics with Mordechai Tenenbaum, a member of the HaShomer HaTzair Zionist youth movement who had emerged as the leading personality of the fractious Jewish underground. Rather than leave the ghetto to fight as partisans, as many of his comrades argued, Tenenbaum believed they had a duty to stay in the ghetto and defend its people. When Barash intimated that the deportation would be partial, and that he had succeeded in making the ghetto workforce indispensable, Tenenbaum agreed it was the wrong time to resist. Nevertheless, while the youthful fighters held back there was spontaneous mass disobedience: Jews hid inside the ghetto and thousands sought refuge in the factories. One man threw acid in the face of a German officer, provoking a vicious reaction but doing little to slow the Aktion. Between 1 and 12 February, the Germans removed 10,000 Jews from the ghetto and shot 900 in its streets and buildings. Three transports took the victims to Treblinka, two to Auschwitz-Birkenau.⁹²

With the collapse of his plans to ship men and machinery from Warsaw to Lublin in order to equip the Ostindustrie factories, in the summer Himmler again turned to Bialystok. His determination was fortified by increasing Soviet partisan activity in the area and uncertainty regarding the situation on the eastern front as a whole. But if the plant and equipment were removed, the ghetto would lose its raison d’être and the inhabitants knew what that entailed. So, to guard against any Warsaw-style debacle, Globocnik arranged for the factories to be protected before the population was tackled. On 15 August 1943, German forces surrounded the ghetto and Barash was given the bad news. Once more the underground leadership was caught on the hop and had little time to coordinate. Tenenbaum dispatched 200 fighters, with about 130 weapons and limited ammunition between them, to key defensive points but was unable to mobilize the entire ghetto population. At the eleventh hour the underground rushed out leaflets warning, ‘all transports lead to death … You have nothing to lose! Work can no longer save you.’ Instead, Jews were already assembling as instructed, with Barash taking the lead. At 9 a.m. the following day, when thousands of Jews were in the streets, packed and ready to depart, members of the resistance opened fire on German policemen. It was an uneven contest: by noon, most of the combat units were annihilated. Although isolated resistance continued, and increasing numbers of Jews preferred to hide than report for the transports, by 20 August the Germans had dispatched 12,000–13,000 Jewish workers to Lublin. As part of a proposed exchange scheme, nearly 2,000 children, mainly from orphanages, were removed from the assembly place and entrained for Theresienstadt. They were held there for six weeks until the scheme collapsed, at which point they were forwarded to Auschwitz-Birkenau and murdered. Fourteen transports carried the bulk of those deemed unfit for work to Treblinka; two took Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where a fraction entered the labour force. Seventy fighters who had been awaiting an opportunity to break out were caught in a single bunker and shot in batches. Mordechai Tenenbaum committed suicide rather than let a German firing squad end his life.⁹³

Himmler’s aversion to ghettos and his greed for labour condemned the ghettos in East Upper Silesia that had provided work and stability for thousands of Jews. Between late June and mid-August 1943, 35,000 were deported from Sosnowicz and Bedzin to Auschwitz-Birkenau. About 6,000 Jews were redeployed as labour elsewhere. Gerda Weissmann, who was deported from her native Bielsko to Sosnowicz in mid-1942, was fortunate to have become part of the skilled labour force. From July 1942 until August 1943 she worked in a weaving mill in Bolkenhain. The female workers were accommodated in barracks attached to the factory, which had the reputation as ‘one of the best labour camps for women in Germany’. After an unpleasant spell at a flax works in Märzdorf, she was transferred to a textile mill in Landshut, manufacturing parachutes. Again, the conditions in the camp were bearable. Gerda could not know that by this stage in the war employment in a German labour camp servicing a manufacturing enterprise offered the best terms of survival. The ghettos she left behind were all brutally dispersed.⁹⁴

The tension in German policy-making between ideology and pragmatism, fanaticism and opportunism was exemplified by the fate of Jews in the Wartheland and the Lodz ghetto during 1943. Himmler’s repugnance for any concentration of Jews outside SS supervision led to the dissolution of roughly one hundred small camps in the Posen area, dooming 11,000 Jewish workers. But when he turned to Lodz he faced a similar coalition to the one that arrayed against him over the future of Bialystok, except this time it met with greater success. Speer, Arthur Greiser and the Wehrmacht’s armaments department united in opposition to his demand to relocate the ghetto enterprises to Lublin. Ironically, their case was helped by the visit of an SS investigatory commission that concluded the ghetto was uneconomical. This pessimistic report quelled Himmler’s appetite for a while.⁹⁵

In fact, the period from January to June 1943 was the only time that the Lodz ghetto showed a profit. It boasted 117 factories and workshops, sorting facilities and warehouses. As bombing disrupted production in the Reich, more factories located to Lodz out of range of the RAF and US Army Air Forces. Nearly every one of the 85,804 Jews in the ghetto was working. Nevertheless, their output was pitiful. Production was mostly un-mechanized and the manual workers were enfeebled by lack of nutrition. From mid-1943 they were paid according to an hourly rate that gave them no incentive to speed up. In any case, the pay barely covered the cost of rations. The only way to boost productivity was to extend the working day. By May, the labour force was working twelve hours per shift, in two shifts. The combination of long hours and poor food merely served to further erode its health and efficiency.⁹⁶

Rumkowski, though, used economic success and the logic of total war to validate his strategy and salvage his authority. On 13 March 1943, he told the ghetto: ‘There is a war on and there is total mobilization in the Reich; new factories must be created, for which additional workers must be found. From where are those workers to come? The problem can only be solved by reorganisation, and it is better that we face this inevitable fact soberly and undertake the necessary steps ourselves in order to prevent chaos.’ Yet the counterproductive effects of malnutrition, sickness, and inequality were transparent to the ghetto chroniclers – who made less and less effort to conceal their disdain for his regime. Not long after the chairman’s pep talk, the chronicle quoted a medical report that listed amongst the most common ghetto ailments, ‘scurvy, pellagra, hunger oedema, and abscesses … bronchitis, pleurisy … softening of the bones …’ A month later the writers stated that ‘Except for a small elite that has everything and can obtain everything, ghetto dwellers are literally dragging their shoes behind them …’ Writing in the chronicle, Oskar Rosenfeld sardonically observed, ‘The question: How much longer can this go on? is gradually becoming irrelevant. Death is flourishing. There are practically no births. The ghetto is liquidating itself.’⁹⁷

Dawid Sierakowiak’s diary testifies to the debilitating effect of endless labour and undernourishment. A few days before Rumkowski’s oration he jotted, ‘My unfortunate once-powerful father died today …’ Dawid himself was suffering from tooth decay, frostbitten feet, scabies and an intermittent fever. From his vantage point as a clerk in the ghetto administration, he was able to monitor the gap between the rich and the poor as well as the chairman’s quirks. In March, Rumkowski visited his office with a commission to comb out those suitable for manual labour. The review included female employees, for whom the chairman had a certain weakness. ‘He nearly jumped up when young girls paraded in front of him. Lunatics, perverts, and criminals like Rumkowski rule over us and determine our food allocation, work and health. No wonder the Germans don’t want to interfere in ghetto matters; the Jews will kill one another perfectly well and, in the meantime, they will also squeeze maximum production out of one another.’ Realizing that the Jews were in a race against time, Dawid despaired over the Allies’ slow advances. He lost his race. On 15 April 1943 he wrote in his diary for the last time. Four months later he died from the combined effects of tuberculosis, malnutrition and exhaustion. He was nineteen years old.⁹⁸

Moral standards withered in step with physical decay. In his private journal Rosenfeld documented the corruption at every level of ghetto society. Under the heading ‘morality’, he noted in February, ‘Most personalities of “elevated social position” have official girlfriends, as they say here: love affairs. These girls and women have no shame and parade openly as the official mistresses of the respective candidates.’ In a brief discussion of prostitution he remarked that ‘one sees many pretty girls in the kitchens … appetising, well groomed, round and meaty.’ According to one of his informants, Rumkowski held orgies while he was in hospital for a spell. The Elder of the ghetto allegedly ‘looked out the window, called girls inside. At one time, the wife of a doctor. She refused. Whereupon her name was found out and the Jewish police were sent to her apartment and demolished the furnishings …’ At the end of April, Rosenfeld briefly noted the case of a man who murdered a thirteen-year-old girl for food. He reported that people adopted children in order to claim an extra ration, but ate the food themselves while their diminutive charges starved.⁹⁹

Even so, a religious and cultural life persisted amidst the degradation. Although Sabbath services and rest were impossible, pious Jews said the customary prayers when and where they could. Rosenfeld saw in the ‘slender candles that street sellers offer to passers-by for Friday evenings … a pitiful symbol of this life’. He celebrated Passover at the home of friends, ‘with all the trimmings, even eggs’. In October, Yom Kippur was officially observed in the ghetto for the first time. There were over a hundred services and at each one the traditional prayers for the dead were recited. The chronicle commented that ‘on Yom Kippur 1943, the ghetto has literally become a shtetl’. Ironically, the food supply improved in time for the fast. Rosenfeld sensed a ‘Holiday atmosphere in the streets. Potato deliveries – pumpkins are rolling. Eyes are gleaming …’ Chanukkah at the end of the year was marked with menorahs, candles, gatherings and presents. Everyone was cheered by the conviction that it would be the last time the festival would be celebrated in the ghetto.¹⁰⁰

It was indeed the last Chanukkah in the Lodz ghetto but it was not the last Chanukkah of the war and it was a near-miracle that the ghetto survived even this long. In September 1943, Himmler abandoned the notion of moving the machinery and key workers from Lodz to Lublin, but he reiterated his demand to Greiser that the ghetto should be reconfigured as a labour camp under SS control and merged into Ostindustrie. For several months, Greiser, backed by Albert Speer and the army, haggled with Himmler and Max Horn, the director of Ostindustrie. An SS commission of inquiry sent by Himmler to assess the ghetto concluded that it was woefully unproductive. But this may have been a part of the bargaining process, since Greiser’s administration was demanding an astronomical amount in return for surrendering control to the SS. Finally, Greiser reached a deal with Himmler whereby he continued to run it, but with a population cut back to core workers.¹⁰¹

Liquidating the ghettos in the Ostland

The tussle over Jewish lives and labour coloured the fate of the last ghettos in the Reichkommisariat Ostland. At the start of 1943 an estimated 310,000–320,000 Jews were alive in Hinrich Lohse’s domain, stretching from the Baltic into western Byelorussia. On 21 June, Himmler commanded his Higher SS Police Leader in the Ostland and the WVHA to collect them into concentration camps and end the practice of marching Jews from residential quarters to enterprises where they generated profits for private concerns. Instead, the machinery of production was to be moved into camps where it would operate under the direction of Oswald Pohl’s technical experts. The SS would derive the financial benefits. Jews who were unable to work would be eliminated. Since Himmler saw no need for the camps to accommodate the unproductive families of workers, this policy spelled disaster.¹⁰²

However, like Greiser and Biebow in Lodz, and Koch in Bialystok, Lohse was not going to part with such a lucrative asset without a struggle. Since 1942 he had been grappling with a severe manpower shortage. His labour managers were constantly shifting Jews from one urgent task to another, reconditioning Wehrmacht uniforms one moment and cutting peat the next. Joseph Katz, who had been deported from Lübeck in December 1941, initially worked for a market gardener supplying vegetables to the SS. He was switched to the Riga harbour workforce in July, followed by a spell toiling in the beet fields, and spent winter unloading coal or cement. This flexible workforce appreciated in value even as the SS tried to reduce it. With less and less financial support forthcoming from Berlin to sustain his administration, local sources of revenue bulked ever larger for Lohse. For nearly three months the two sides sparred, each making appeals to Berlin for backing. Eventually the security argument triumphed, Lohse backed down, and the fate of the Baltic Jews’ ghettos was sealed.¹⁰³

In June, Himmler assigned Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski to the Ostland to dissolve them and migrate the thinned-out Jewish workforce to concentration camps. The process took months. Eventually, nearly 8,000 inhabitants of the Riga ghetto were accommodated in a new concentration camp in the suburb known as Mezaparks. The camp, dubbed Kaiserwald, never contained all the Jews working in and around Riga, as Himmler intended. Instead, thousands employed by the army, Organisation Todt and on the docks were relocated to barracks erected close to where they toiled. Conditions in these barrack camps varied from one to another; few were as harsh as Kaiserwald, which was presided over by the SS and veteran prisoners transferred from Sachsenhausen. However, families that had survived intact in the ghetto were finally broken up by the process of ‘barracking’. Around 2,000 Jews deemed unfit for work were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau.¹⁰⁴

The 20,000 Jews in the Vilnius ghetto had enjoyed relative tranquillity after the horrific massacres at Ponary in 1941. Although the United Partisan Organization (FPO, Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye) had raised the standard of revolt in January 1942, the ghetto actually settled into a comfortable routine. In early March 1942, Herman Kruk noted, ‘In the Vilna ghetto, life begins to pulse again.’ Under the guidance of the ghetto Elder, Jacob Gens, welfare, education and cultural institutions flourished. Despite the shocking news from Warsaw the ghetto behaved as if it were invulnerable. Gens even agreed to allocate men from the Order Service to participate with the Germans in Aktionen against nearby ghettos, notably Oszmiana. At the time of the Jewish New Year celebrations, in September 1942, the synagogues in the ghetto were full. There was a ‘holiday mood’. It was only when news reached Vilnius about the liquidation of the Grodno ghetto that a chill ran through the inhabitants.¹⁰⁵

In April 1943 the population reacted with panic when Jews began to arrive from Oszmiana and other destroyed ghettos bordering on the Bialystok district. The SS man who ran the ghetto, Franz Murer, offered reassurance, but the Jews began preparing for evasion and resistance. In early April 1943, Kruk went on a nocturnal tour of the ghetto and heard the tell-tale sound of work on malinas. ‘In some houses, people don’t get undressed. All night long, they work with spades, digging malinas and underground passages. The FPO is fully prepared.’ Gens redoubled his efforts to increase the number of Jews in gainful employment, believing this would be the key to their survival. By June 1943 about 75 per cent of the entire population were working for German firms outside the ghetto and, increasingly, workshops within the perimeter.¹⁰⁶

Despite bulging order books for the factories, in August the security police began to transfer Jews to concentration camps in Estonia. The first wave of 1,000 were abducted from their workplaces on 6 August; many resisted and several were gunned down. More widespread resistance was thwarted due to a tragedy that had occurred a few weeks earlier. Thanks to the chance detention of a local communist who cracked under torture, the German security police learned about the activity of Yitzhak Wittenberg, the leader of the FPO in the ghetto. They demanded that Gens hand him over or face the consequences. Gens arranged to meet Wittenberg but Lithuanian security police interrupted the discussions and took Wittenberg prisoner. When members of the FPO heard that Gens had detained their leader they launched a rescue mission and hustled him to safety. During 16 July, Gens and the Order Service launched a hunt for Wittenberg, hoping to persuade him to surrender and thereby prevent a reprisal action. The ghetto dwellers, terrified of a German assault, clearly supported Gens. Wittenberg thus faced an appalling dilemma: he could launch an uprising at a time when the ghetto population was not ready, with incalculable consequences, or he could give himself up. Later that day he surrendered to Gens, who handed him over to the Germans; Wittenberg committed suicide in prison within hours of his detention. Disillusioned by the behaviour of the Jewish population, the FPO resolved not to resist in the ghetto and began a steady exodus to the forests.¹⁰⁷

The willingness of the ghetto to trade the life of one man for its survival did nothing to avert the Germans’ long-term plans. On 24 August and 1–4 September, a further 7,000 inhabitants were shipped out to newly constructed camps in Estonia, notably Vaivara and its subcamp Klooga. At Vaivara the Jews were employed mainly in the extraction of oil from shale, at Klooga in peat cutting. By mid-September about 12,000 were left in Vilnius. Even though Gens had consistently cooperated with the Germans, he was executed. On 23 September, the Germans commenced the final liquidation. About 2,000 able-bodied Jews were sent to Estonia and a similar number to Kaiserwald. Some 4,000 deemed unfit for work were shipped to Sobibor. Several hundred were killed at the Ponary mass murder site where the destruction of Vilnius’s Jewish community had begun in the wake of Operation Barbarossa. Herman Kruk was amongst those relocated to Estonia. He was murdered in the Klooga camp a day before it was overrun by the Red Army in September 1944.¹⁰⁸

For weeks after the last deportation, German police and Lithuanian collaborators combed the deserted district in search of Jews. Kazimierz Sakowicz clinically analysed the tactics they used: ‘the Lithuanians have proven good psychologists of the Jews sentenced to die … They separate 3–4 Jewish men and women and shoot the rest before their eyes. When it is the turn of the 3 or 4 they tell them “you will live”, but they must reveal the hiding places. When one of them reveals one, he goes to the city to the ghetto, but immediately returns and dies. At the same time, a new “troika” of Judases is chosen …’ In mid-October, the Germans were still shooting Jews in Ponary – 300 on one day. Only now they could not even be bothered to bury them.¹⁰⁹

Like Vilnius, Kaunus had experienced a long stretch of quiet during 1942. The Jewish administration under Elchanan Elkes was able to create a network of institutions serving the population of 16,000. The food supply was adequate and there were no epidemics. A large proportion of the inhabitants worked, producing military clothing, gloves, brushes, saddles and bandages for the German army; over 3,000 were employed at a nearby airfield. In March 1943, as news trickled in of ghetto clearances elsewhere, the mood darkened. Despite promises from workshop managers that the labour force was too valuable to squander, the diarist Abraham Golub noted that people started to prepare underground shelters. Others girded themselves for armed resistance. The prospects were daunting. When the middle-aged Golub heard of Jews from the FPO in Vilnius making their way to the forest, he lamented, ‘Not everyone can brave such conditions. Not everyone has a strong fist … Not everyone can be a hero.’ The strained calm persisted. In April the ghetto celebrated Passover ‘in full splendour’. News of German defeats in Russia and the invasion of Sicily in July cheered everyone, although Golub reckoned the Jews did not have time on their side.¹¹⁰

His pessimism was borne out when a German commission of inquiry visited the ghetto in late July. Although he did not know about the tug-of-war over Jewish labour that was going on between Lohse and Himmler, he was doubtful whether the busy workshops and ample orders would make any difference to their fate: ‘The question of manpower does not play a major role in this decision, which is motivated primarily by what the Germans see as political and security problems.’ In September a new SS captain arrived whose job was to break up the ghetto. During October, 2,700 Jews were removed and those designated fit for labour were sent to Estonia. Over the last months of the year, 5,000–6,000 Jews were redistributed amongst various barrack camps. About 8,000 remained in the ghetto, which was now arbitrarily redesignated a concentration camp in order to meet Himmler’s criteria. In March 1944, Abraham Golub left the ghetto and went into hiding.¹¹¹

There were some 21,000–23,000 Jews in the ghettos in Byelorussia at the start of 1943. The region was now infested with partisans and security weighed heavily on the mind of Wilhelm Kube, the Generalkommissar. In April, he told a conference in Minsk that ‘Last summer, when we undertook to solve the Jewish problem and began resettling them, the partisan movement was immediately weakened. Some of the Jews got away, escaped to the forests and reinforced the partisan movement.’ There was a tiny element of truth in this diagnosis, but it was mainly a fantasy. The destruction of communities had begun long before the partisan menace was a reality. It resumed early in 1943 when the 4,000–5,000 Jews of Slutsk were murdered. The killing swept through Baranovichi, Novogrudok, Lida and Glubokoie, although hundreds of Jews were able to reach the forests. In September 1943, the Minsk ghetto, with about 9,000 inhabitants, was liquidated. Around 2,000 workers were passed over to Globocnik in Lublin. After sequestering 500 artisans deemed essential, 4,000 Jews were taken to the Maly Trostinets concentration camp and shot. Hundreds hid in the deserted ghetto and were the object of continuing sweeps for weeks afterwards. Kube was right about one thing. On 22 September 1943 he was killed by a bomb planted in his bedroom by a Soviet partisan.¹¹²