Europe: A History (209 page)
Yet the Nazis’ self-styled ‘Crusade for Civilization’ was able to attract considerable support. Large contingents were sent to the Eastern Front by Romania, Hungary, and Italy. Romania took charge of Odessa and the district of ‘Transnistria’. General Franco’s crack ‘Blue Division’ was sent from Spain. In the
Baltic States, existing army and police units were transferred to German service. Recruits and volunteers flocked in from almost all the occupied countries. Some of these, especially among Soviet prisoners of war, were volunteers in name only, having been given a choice between service or starvation. But many others, especially from Western Europe, joined willingly. General Vlasov, a former Soviet officer, commanded the million-strong Russian Liberation Army. A Cossack Brigade attracted many pre-war exiles. Even the Waffen-SS recruited large numbers of foreigners, [
LETTLAND
]
Holocaust
. In conjunction with their occupation of the Eastern
Lebensraum
, the Nazis launched their largest and most systematic campaign of racial genocide. What they characteristically labelled ‘the Final Solution of the Jewish Question’ has since been called the ‘Holocaust’ or, in Hebrew, the Shoah. It was an attempt to exploit modern industrial technology to kill every Jewish man, woman, and child in Europe, simply for being Jews. Its starting-point is obscure. No direct order from the Führer has been unearthed, although his ultimate responsibility is incontestable. There is every reason to suppose that Hitler took precautions to conceal his involvement and to avoid the bad publicity which had arisen from leaks about the earlier Euthanasia Campaign.
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Europe’s Jews were to be the prime, though not the sole target for the Nazi programme of racial murders.
After several years of prudent restraint, Hitler had returned in 1938–9 to the extreme language of his early career. In a broadcast on 30 January 1939 he made a ‘prophesy’ that if the Jews precipitated another war, then the effect would be the
Vernichtung
, destruction, of all Jews. Yet prior to July 1941, despite high mortality in the Nazi-built ghettos of occupied Poland, there had been no move towards wholesale slaughter. Indeed, vague talk had continued about the dispatch of Jews to distant destinations and about the sensitivities of the neutral USA. Yet on 31 July 1941 Goring ordered the chief of the RSHA (Reich Security Main Office) to prepare ‘the Final Solution’.
78
Some time shortly beforehand, he must have received express instructions from the Führer. All hesitations were to be cast aside. The policy was annihilation. ‘Resettlement’ became an official euphemism for genocide. As the German armies advanced into the heart of the former tsarist Pale, the notorious
Einsatzgruppen
reappeared, rounding up Jews by the thousand, driving them to pits and gulleys and shooting them
en masse
. One such action, at the chasm of Babi Yar near Kiev, would involve the shooting of 70,000 victims.
In January 1942 SS chiefs, including Adolf Eichmann, the head of the RSHA’s IV-B-4 Jewish Section, held a one-day conference at a villa on the Wannsee near Berlin to co-ordinate technical and organizational arrangements. Decisions were taken to accelerate experiments with Zyklon-B gas; to create a number of dedicated death camps, at Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibór, and Treblinka; to expand the Nazi concentration camps in occupied Poland, notably KL Auschwitz II-Birkenau; to consult the best German firms regarding crematorium design and ‘surplus disposal’; to draw up the timetables and rolling-stock for international
railway transports; and to recruit auxiliary formations. If one did not know the object of the exercise, one could be forgiven for mistaking it for the AGM of German abattoirists: 7–8 million ‘units’ were designated for processing. The problem was to collect them, transport them, and dispose of them as quietly and as efficiently as possible, [
NOYADES
] From then on, the Final Solution proceeded without interruption for three years—town by town, ghetto by ghetto, district by district, country by country. In 1942–3 it concentrated on the largest single category—the 3 million Jews of occupied Poland. In 1943–5 it spread to the Balkans, to the Low Countries, to France, and to Hungary. In the end it achieved perhaps 65 per cent of its target. It was only brought to a halt when the facilities were overrun by the Allied armies.
LETTLAND
L
ATVIANS
had no special love for Germany. Germans had formed a ruling , caste in the Baltic States since medieval times, and had been loyal servants of tsarist Russia. Yet such was the effect of the massacres and deportations of Soviet rule in 1940–1 that the arrival of the Wehrmacht promised blessed relief.
The Germans encountered little opposition, therefore, when they started to raise Latvian military formations as soon as they entered Riga on 1 July 1941. At first, ex-Latvian army and police units and ex-Soviet Army deserters were reorganized under German command. ‘Auxiliary Security Police’, later renamed
Schutzmannschaft
or ‘Schuma’, were used for front-line service, for guard, labour, and fire-fighting duties, and for ‘special operations’. (The last euphemism turned out to include the murder of Jews under SS-guidance.) In 1942 a conscription decree greatly increased the numbers, whilst facilitating the formation both of low-grade
Hilfswillige
or ‘Hiwi’ units and of a regular ‘Latvian Legion’. From 1943, swelled by volunteers, the Legion was to feed the main recruitment drive for three Latvian divisions of the Waffen-SS (see Appendix III, pp. 1326–7). The men swore an oath ‘to struggle against Bolshevism’ and ‘to obey the commander-in-chief of the German armed forces, Adolf Hitler’. Their language of command was Latvian, and they wore arm-shields bearing the name Latvija, They fought at Leningrad, and in the German retreat all the way to Berlin.
1
At a meeting with the Reichsfuhrer-SS in 1944, the chief of staff of the Latvian Legion recorded Himmler’s updated vision of the Nazi Order:
The present demands that every SS-offlcer, regardless of nationality … must look to the whole living space of the family of German nations.
[He then singled out those nations which he regarded as belonging to the German family: the Germans, the Dutch, the Flemish, the Anglo-Saxons, the Scandinavians, and the Baltic peoples.]
To combine all those nations into one big family is the most important task at present. It is natural in this process that the German nation, as the largest and strongest, must assume the leading role. [But] this unification has to take place on the principle of equality… [Later] this family … has to take on the mission to include all Roman nations, and then the Slavic nations, because they, too, are of the white race. It is only through unification of the white race that Western culture could be saved from the danger of the yellow race.
At the present time, the Waffen-SS is leading in this respect because its organisation is based on equality. The Waffen-SS comprises not only German, Roman and Slavic but even Islamic units … fighting in close togetherness. Therefore it is of great importance that every Waffen-SS officer gets his training at the same military college… .
2
Nazi internationalism only came to the fore in the final phase of the war when Germany was standing on the brink of defeat. It does not feature prominently in accounts of Fascist ideology. Nor do the reasons why so many Europeans fought for it. One forgets that the Nazis published a journal called
Nation Europa
.
In due course the horrific dimensions of humanity
in extremis
have become well known through a mass of memoirs and documentary material. A bright young Jewish girl recorded her daily thoughts as she lay in hiding at 263 Prinsengracht in Amsterdam.
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The head of the
Judenrat
or Jewish Council in Warsaw recorded the agonizing dilemmas which he faced trying to serve both his own people and the Nazis.
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The death-cell autobiography of a former death-camp commandant revealed a conscientious and sentimental man completely impervious to moral reflection:
In Auschwitz, I truly had no reason to complain that I was bored… I had only one end in view, to drive everyone and everything forward so that I could accomplish the measures laid down.
I had to watch coldly as mothers with laughing or crying children went to the gas-chambers … I had to stand for hours on end in the ghastly stench… I had to look through the peep-holes … and watch the process of death itself.
My family, for sure, were well provided for at Auschwitz. When I saw my children playing happily, or observed my wife’s delight in our youngest, the thought would often come over me, how long will our happiness last?
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Some have used the imaginative insights of fictional literature to approach these lower realms.
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But the most moving testimony comes from those who simply sought to preserve their humanity, [
RESPONSA
]
Discussions about contemporary attitudes have centred on the alleged passivity of Jews and the alleged complacency of Gentiles. Both accusations are overstated. Mindful of the inspiring example of Janusz Korczak, a well-known Polish writer who calmly accompanied a group of orphans on their last journey from the Ghetto, a surviving combatant has said: ‘To go quiedy was also heroic.’
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Another recalls the inaction of his own Jewish family when neighbours were removed for the gas-chambers.
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Jews participated in the underground partisan movement, sometimes in separate units; and armed risings took place in several ghettos. In Warsaw, the heroic Ghetto Rising erupted on 19 April 1943 to oppose the final clearance. It lasted for three weeks, until all but eighty of the fighters were killed. Its leader, Mordecai Anielewicz, committed suicide with the last group of friends in the final redoubt on Mila Street.
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At Treblinka, a determined break-out led to the successful escape of 300 inmates, [
KATYŃ
]
RESPONSA
O
N
3 October 1943 a boy was saved from a
Kinderaktion
, which killed large numbers of Jewish children in the Nazi-built ghetto of Kaunas (Kowno) in Lithuania. The man who had saved the boy asked his rabbi whether the boy might be brought up as his own son. The rabbi offered words of comfort, but the answer was ‘No’. The boy must always be taught to honour his own father and mother.
1
In the vast literature of the Jewish Holocaust, few items can compare in their moral grandeur to the rabbinical responsa from the ghettos of Nazi-occupied Europe. Answering queries about the religious dilemmas of their flock was one of the rabbis’ central duties; and it was their custom to keep a register of the questions asked and the replies given. Several such registers exist, but none more moving than that of Rabbi Ephraim Oshry of Kaunas, a survivor, who pieced it together after the war. Even the briefest selection of contents reveals a community on the brink of extinction that was still intent on leading a principled existence:
• Can Jews try to save themselves by obtaining a forged certificate of (Christian) baptism?
It is absolutely forbidden
.
• Is it permissible for a pregnant woman to seek an abortion in the ghetto?
Yes, because without the abortion both mother and child will be killed
.
• Is a woman in the ghetto, whose husband has disappeared, entitled to be released from the usual rules governing remarriage?
No
.
• May a Jew in the ghetto commit suicide?
It is better to receive burial after suicide than to be cremated after extermination
.
• Can an apostate Jew wearing a cross be buried in holy ground?
Yes, but at a little distance from the other burials
.
• Can a child born from extramarital fornication receive
\hepidyan haben
ritual of the first-born?
Yes
.
• What should be done with the garments of murdered Jews?
According to religious law, blood-stained garments must be buried; but unstained garments may be given to the children of the victims.
2
It has been said that responsa issued under the duress of the Holocaust exhibit undue lenience. That is a matter for expert judgement. But anyone can recognize a desire to combine the rigour of the Jewish law with the duty of compassion. In August 1941, for example, German soldiers had filled the synagogue at Slobodka with dead cats and dogs, before ordering a group of Jews to tear up the Torah scrolls on top of the carcasses and to set fire to the building. When Rabbi Oshry was asked how atonement might be obtained, the persons concerned were starving. His response was clear but gentle: ‘they should fast in atonement, if they can.’
3
Much comment has been expended on the charge of the alleged ‘passivity’ of Europe’s condemned Jews. In some circles Jews driven to
collaborate have even been branded as ‘war criminals’.
4
The Hasidic view certainly was that ‘God’s face is covered’ during times of persecution, and that devout Jews should accept their fate.
5
Non-Hasidic rabbis did not follow such a firm rule, although there was a long tradition of respecting the law of the land. The Chief Rabbi of Athens destroyed the membership lists of his congregation, enabling many to survive. The Chief Rabbi of Salonika did not do so, and most of his flock were killed.
The real point is that decisions, whether to co-operate or to resist, were taken on the basis of positive moral principle. Even where no action was taken, the evidence does not lie on the side of moral passivity or indifference. It is impossible to deny that individuals could commit all manner of treachery. But the counter-examples are legion. A team of Jewish doctors in the Warsaw ghetto determined to turn their misery to good use and to conduct a scientific study of the symptoms and progress of their own starvation. Hidden in a buried milk churn, their study survived to be published in post-war Warsaw.
6
In the Nazi death-camp at Sachsenhausen, a Jewish member of a
Sonderkommando
, which was carrying out the physical work of extermination, recognized the rabbi of his own congregation on the ramp. The rabbi’s one request was that the
luz
, the top vertebra of his backbone, be salvaged. (In Jewish belief, the
luz
is the core round which the body will reform in the afterlife.) So the man cut the bone from the rabbi’s corpse, and was last seen vowing to bury it in holy ground in Jerusalem after the war.
7
