Resistance (30 page)

 

The action in January continued only for four days. The Germans intended to do away with the entire Jewish population of Warsaw this time, but when they were confronted with armed and unexpected opposition, they stopped the "action." Evidently it did not seem to them befitting for Germans to pay with their lives for the death of the Jews of the ghetto.

Now they decided to gain time to achieve this end by finding a new method of annihilation. They did not know that time was also working to our advantage, that in our second confrontation they would have to pay a heavier price.

 

The Jews assumed that the resistance had revealed the Achilles' heel of the German military machine. They also believed that the Germans had been forced to recruit considerable forces for this action. From the German point of view, an outburst of street fighting could incite the Poles, who were thought to be waiting to get into the fray, and news of the resistance in Warsaw could not be hidden from the rest of the world, and would attract attention to their plight.

The Germans determined that the mass slaughter would continue as long as it proceeded smoothly. But when confronted by Jewish resistance, the Germans were halted. Filled with renewed confidence, the fighters mistakenly thought that the Nazis might stop the annihilation of the remaining Jews altogether.

The Poles were amazed at this manifestation of Jewish resistance, and the Polish underground press contained considerable praise for the Jews, discussing the difference between the lack of opposition of July-September 1942 and the events of January 1943. The central publication of the AK wrote that

 

the brave stand of these people, at the saddest moments of the Jewish experience, who had not lost their sense of honor, merited appreciation of what was one of the most brilliant chapters in the annals of the Jews of Poland.

 

Moreover, it was not only the Polish underground press that had warm words of praise. In the eyes of the Poles, it was assumed that the killing of the Jews was carried out because the Jews did not display any opposition. The Poles did not fathom the significance of the "final solution" as a German plan to physically exterminate the Jews of Europe on the basis of allegedly ideological principles and political purposes.

A secret Polish periodical of Polish farmers,
Through Conflict to Victory,
claimed in its issue of February 28, 1943, that

 

after the campaign of punishment, contrary to expectations, there came a momentary calm. The blockades and transports ceased. There is the general assumption that the reason for this stems from the armed resistance shown by the Jews, which made a deep and widespread impression.

 

Waclaw Zagorski, a prominent activist in Polish socialist circles and a friend of the Jews, pointed out in his notes from January 1943:

 

Opinions are increasingly confirmed that this form of Jewish self-defense is likely to bring about results. This is retaliation and armed resistance. For the first time, the Jews responded to the attempt to renew the shipments to the gas chambers in Treblinka with shooting. After three days the Germans withdrew their forces from the ghetto.

 

At the beginning of the first action, the resistance had appeared to many—including the "reasonable" circles of the underground—as a dangerous game that might hasten the deaths of those who could be rescued. Now, ironically, after a few months the resistance was viewed as a means of saving the remainder of the Jews. Thus, those who resisted were no longer seen as adventurous fighters who endangered the rest of the public but as faithful pathfinders whose bravery was the only possible response to an insoluble and utterly lost situation.

Only in Warsaw did the Uprising enjoy widespread mass support. In other ghettos where Jewish underground organizations had been active, such as Vilna and Bialystok, the masses had not taken to the idea of fighting and did not join the fighters during their uprisings. Many were impressed by the young people who were prepared to enter the fray, knowing that this battle could be their last and could end in utter disaster and death. Naturally, this manner of fighting—in which all those who participate are prepared to die fighting—attracted only the remarkable few, mostly young people who were responsible for neither their parents nor their children. Parents with children consistently clung to any solution or glimmer of hope, and when in the end they were without hope, they accepted their fate. In Warsaw, in the time between the first mass expulsions and the final destruction of the ghetto, the resolve of the fighters and the distrust of other ghetto residents hardened. The Jewish masses saw no grounds for hope except through fighting. Even if their perceptions were misleading, many were provoked to strong-willed actions.

Why did the Germans withdraw? Were the assumptions of the ghetto fighters correct? The weight of historical evidence contradicts the conclusion arrived at by Jews and non-Jews during January 1943. Some days before January 18, Himmler was in Warsaw and visited the ghetto. He issued a series of orders relating to the Jews. The head of the SS surveyed the town from his armored car, angered that the eradication of the ghetto had not been carried out as he had ordered. On the eleventh of the month, he wrote to Wilhelm Krüger, who headed the SS and the police in Cracow, complaining that forty thousand Jews remained in Warsaw, and revealing his decision that within a few days some eight thousand Jews would be "erased."

The local authorities had evidently chosen not to inform their commander that more than fifty-five thousand Jews remained in Warsaw, in order to limit his anger. They had not executed his expulsion plan in full, leaving far more Jews than the 10 percent he had permitted to remain.

Himmler was also displeased with the many workshops privately owned by Germans, which he saw as attempts to profit under the guise of exploiting Jewish labor. He was especially vexed by the example of the large Többens workshop. In a letter Himmler wrote:

 

If I am not mistaken, this is a case of a person who had nothing, becoming tremendously wealthy, if not a millionaire, within three years and this was made possible simply because we, the state, placed cheap Jewish labor at his disposal.

 

Himmler recommended transferring the sixteen thousand Jews occupied in the production of munitions to the vicinity of Lublin.

Thus, from its inception the second expulsion was not planned as a campaign of total annihilation of the ghetto, as the Jews had assumed, but as a correction and completion of the first expulsion. The Germans prepared themselves for a partial evacuation, which was also not executed in its entirety. It is indeed possible that the Jewish resistance played a part in this failure to fulfill the German plan. It is not known whether Himmler was informed of the armed struggles during the second action, or whether the decision to wipe out Jewish existence in Warsaw completely was conceived during his visit without any connection to the January expulsion and the incidents of resistance.

But on February 16, Himmler sent an order to Krüger from his field headquarters which stated:

 

For reasons of security, I am ordering you to destroy the Warsaw ghetto after transferring the concentration camp from there. At the same time, all building parts and materials of any kind which can still be used are to be preserved.

The destruction of the ghetto and the transfer of the concentration camp is essential, otherwise we shall not succeed in getting Warsaw into a calm state and as long as the ghetto is standing, it will be impossible to wipe out the crime. A general plan for the destruction of the ghetto should be submitted to me, and in any case, we must arrive at the stage in which the residential area, which exists at present for 500,000 sub-humans [
Unter-mertschert],
and which had never been suitable for the Germans, will disappear from the face of the area, and the city of Warsaw, with its million inhabitants, which has always been a center of agitation and rebellion, should be reduced in size.

 

In the not quite three months between the January and April expulsions, when the remaining Jews of Warsaw were to be uprooted and the ghetto erased from the face of the earth, preparations were well under way for the approaching resistance and final struggle—the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

The German authorities faced a very complex task in the utter annihilation ordered by Himmler. Jews in the ghetto were completely unaware of the bureaucratic struggles among German authorities. The SS was intent on pursuing the war against the Jews. The Wehrmacht was interested in the task of conducting World War II. While the SS was intensely ideological, the army was far more pragmatic. There were sharp differences between the commanding forces of the Wehrmacht in the General Government and the heads of the SS. The Wehrmacht had been promised a substantial number of Jewish workers. In addition, Jewish workers were employed in the munitions factories and other enterprises supplying such necessities as clothing, shoes, beds, and other items to the German armies. As a result of the murder of the Jews, the Jewish work force was gradually reduced, which led the Wehrmacht to complain that more and more Jews were being taken and that the production lines were being halted.

At the outset of the annihilation process, the Wehrmacht command in the General Government was not aware of the extent and substance of this manufacturing process. Still, in May 1942 the branch of the Wehrmacht responsible for munitions planned to replace the skilled Polish and Ukrainian workers with one hundred thousand Jews. Moreover, the munitions department intended to expand the manufacture of clothing and shoes within the General Government and thus relieve the burden of production in the Third Reich. Jewish workers were essential to this reconfiguration of the labor force.

On July 17, 1942, some days before the mass expulsion from Warsaw, Krüger had informed the Wehrmacht of the policy regarding the annihilation of the ghettos, a situation that would not permit any Jewish work force. At the same time, the SS asked the railway management to arrange for a sufficient number of freight trains.

On July 28, Albert Ganzenmüller, who ran the German railways, confirmed that "from 22 of July, there is a daily train carrying some 5,000 Jews from Warsaw through Malkinia to Treblinka." From the width and breadth of the General Government, reports reached the munitions department that the Jews were being taken away from the production process without any prior warning, and as a result the factories could not fulfill their obligations. The munitions branch tried to make certain that the Jews most needed in the production lines would not be expelled, and in Warsaw the agreement of the SS was obtained to the effect that the Jews employed in production for the war effort would be concentrated in a workers' ghetto, separated from the rest of the Jews.

It was evidently on the basis of this obligation to provide materiel to the Wehrmacht that after the mass expulsion the Germans concentrated the workshops and large enterprises in smaller ghettos, but, nevertheless, the uprooting of the Jews, including those defined as necessary workers, continued. Some six thousand Jewish workers in Warsaw were considered essential and were employed under the aegis of the munitions branch. In September 1942 the general field marshal and chief of staff of the high command of the armed forces, Wilhelm Keitel, ordered that the Jews be replaced by Polish workers. But this order could not alleviate the labor shortage because the Poles who could be recruited for this purpose, either voluntarily or otherwise, had been sent to Germany as forced laborers to work on farms or in German industry.

During the second half of September, the commander of the Wehrmacht forces in the General Government, General Curt Ludwig von Gienanth, sent a sharply worded letter to the high command of the Wehrmacht in which he pointed out the repudiation of their promises about the Jewish workers. He stated that the evacuation of the Jews caused difficulties and delays in the orderly production of munitions, preventing the most urgent work from being executed in time. Gienanth also noted that it was particularly difficult to replace skilled workers, given problems and the loss of time in training new workers. According to information from reliable sources in the SS, the Jews constituted three hundred thousand of the one million skilled workers in the General Government, including one hundred thousand experienced workers. In fact, the workers making winter clothing in the textile factories were all Jews. Gienanth claimed that as a result of the expulsion of the Jews, "the heavy pressure on the military potential of the Reich would immediately reduce the supplies to the front and the forces in the General Government."

We have no information as to what happened after this letter was delivered to Himmler, but three weeks later General Gienanth was dismissed from his position. There were no protests or complaints from the Wehrmacht on humanistic, ideological, or political grounds. Complaints were purely pragmatic, centering on the Wehrmacht's needs and the difficulties that the expulsion of the Jews caused to the production process.

Friction on these issues was discussed at high levels. In December 1942 Hans Frank, head of the General Government, decided at a meeting of his "government" that "clearly the situation in the labor field was aggravated, if at the height of the war effort, an order is issued to prepare the annihilation." Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger, SS general and chief commander of the SS and the police in the General Government, and Himmler's confidant in the Frank government, went even further in expressing his opinion.

On May 31, 1943, after the rebellion and the destruction of the ghetto, a conference on matters of security took place in Cracow, attended by Frank, Krüger, and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the general in the SS who had replaced Heydrich in the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA). Krüger began by emphasizing the advantages and benefits derived from clearing the area of Jews. He then said: