The Holocaust (42 page)

Hungary was Germany’s ally. Jews living in five other countries which were allied to Germany were also listed: 342,000 in Rumania, 88,000 in Slovakia, 58,000 in Italy, including Sardinia, 40,000 in Croatia and 2,300 in Finland. The smallest number given was the 200 Jews of Italian-occupied Albania. Estonia was listed as ‘without Jews’. This was true. Of Estonia’s 2,000 Jews in June 1941, half had fled to safety inside the Soviet Union, while half had already been killed by the Einsatzkommando.

The senior officials present at the Wannsee Conference were from the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, the Ministry of the Interior, the Justice Ministry, the Foreign Office, the General Government of Poland, the Chancellery, and the Race and Resettlement Office. Also present was the Plenipotentiary for the Four Year Plan, responsible for disposing of Jewish property. All were asked by Heydrich to cooperate ‘in the implementation of the solution’. His remarks continued:

Heydrich then explained the European aspect of the plan:

It was intended, according to the statistics presented to the Wannsee Conference, that a total of eleven million European Jews should ‘fall away’, including those in the neutral and unconquered countries. The Conference discussed the various problems involved. ‘In Slovakia and Croatia’, they were told, ‘the situation is no longer all that difficult, since the essential key questions there have already been resolved.’ As for Hungary, ‘it will be necessary before long’, Heydrich told the Conference, ‘to impose upon the Hungarian government an adviser on Jewish questions’. Rumania posed a problem, as ‘even today a Jew in Rumania can buy for cash appropriate documents officially certifying him in a foreign nationality’. Speaking of the occupied and unoccupied zones of France, however, Heydrich commented that there ‘the seizure of the Jews for evacuation should in all probability proceed without major difficulty’.

The representative of the General Government, Dr Joseph Buhler, stated that his administration ‘would welcome the start of the final solution in its territory, since the transport problem was no overriding factor there and the course of the action would not be hindered by considerations of work utilization’. Buhler added:

Buhler had, he said, ‘only one favour to ask’, and that was ‘that the Jewish question in this territory be solved as rapidly as possible’.

The meeting was drawing to its end. ‘Finally,’ the official notes recorded, ‘there was a discussion of the various types of solution possibilities.’

What these ‘possibilities’ were, the notes of the Conference do not record.
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‘I remember’, Adolf Eichmann later recalled, ‘that at the end of this Wannsee Conference, Heydrich, Muller and myself sat very cosily near the stove and then I saw Heydrich smoke for the first time, and I thought to myself, “Heydrich smoking today”: I’d never seen him do that. “He is drinking brandy”: I hadn’t seen him do that for years.’ After the Conference, Eichmann recalled, ‘we all sat together like comrades. Not to talk shop, but to rest after long hours of effort.’
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The ‘long hours of effort’ were over. As Heydrich knew, the time was right for the deportation and destruction of millions of people. From many parts of Europe, there was evidence that only one more step had to be taken, and could be taken: the step already tried in the villages around Chelmno: the uprooting of whole communities, and their total disappearance. Few, if any, would care to enquire what had become of them. In hidden camps, a small band of sadists could then destroy them.

What had hitherto been tentative, fragmentary and spasmodic was to become formal, comprehensive and efficient. The technical services such as the railways, the bureaucracy and the diplomats would work in harmony, towards a single goal. Local populations would be cajoled or coerced into passivity. Some would even cooperate: that had been made clear already. On January 9 the Polish underground in Warsaw had warned the Polish Government
in Exile of ‘a blind and cruel anti-Semitism’ among the Polish population, itself the victim of Nazi terror.
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By the end of January 1942, the Germans needed only to establish the apparatus of total destruction: death camps in remote areas, rolling stock, timetables, confiscation patterns, deportation schedules, and camps; and then to rely upon the tacit, unspoken, unrecorded connivance of thousands of people: administrators and bureaucrats who would do their duty, organize round-ups, supervise detention centres, coordinate schedules, and send local Jews on their way to a distant ‘unknown destination’, to ‘work camps’ in ‘Poland’, to ‘resettlement’ in ‘the East’.

The officials present at the Wannsee Conference had agreed with Heydrich’s suggestion that the ‘final solution’ should be carried out in coordination with Heydrich’s own ‘department head’, Adolf Eichmann. The result of this decision was that Eichmann’s representatives now travelled to all the friendly European capitals. Although they were attached to the German Embassies, they received their instructions direct from Eichmann’s section in Berlin and reported back to Eichmann, by telegram, as each deportation was planned and carried out.

In addition to the technical arrangements involving thousands of trains and tens of thousands of miles, a complex system of subterfuge had to be created, whereby the idea of ‘resettlement’ could be made to appear a tolerable one.

All this was done by Eichmann’s section, whose representatives were soon active in France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Norway, Rumania, Greece, Bulgaria, Hungary and Slovakia. Regular meetings were held in Berlin to coordinate the complex yet essential aspect of the impending deportations: the despatch of full trains and the return of empty trains. In a document dated 13 January 1943, and signed by Dr Jacobi of the General Management, Railway Directorate East, in Berlin, one sees the amount of work, and the number of people, involved in these deportation plans. The document took the form of a ‘telegraphic letter’ addressed to the General Directorate of East Railways in Cracow; the Prague Group of Railways; the General Traffic Directorate, Warsaw; the Traffic Directorate, Minsk; and the Railway Directorates in fourteen cities, including Breslau, Dresden, Königsberg, Linz, Mainz and Vienna. Copies were also sent to the General Management, Directorate
South, in Munich, and to the General Management, Directorate West, in Essen: a total distribution of twenty copies. The subject was: ‘Special trains for resettlers’ during the thirty-nine days from 20 January to 28 February 1943.
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By the time of this railway telegram, sent a year after Wannsee, the transport aspects of the ‘final solution’ were well tested, and well arranged. For anyone whose cooperation was needed, but who might be reluctant to cooperate, the full rigours of Nazi terror were readily available: perfected even at the time of Wannsee by nine years of Nazi rule and practice.

On January 30, nine years after coming to power in Germany, and only ten days after the Conference on the shore of Wannsee, Hitler spoke at the Sports Palace in Berlin of his confidence in victory. He also spoke of the Jews, telling his listeners, as reported by the Allied monitoring service on the following day: ‘They are our old enemy as it is, they have experienced at our hands an upsetting of their ideas, and they rightfully hate us, just as much as we hate them.’ The Germans, Hitler added, were ‘well aware’ that the war could only end when the Jews had been ‘uprooted from Europe’, or when ‘they disappear’. Hitler then declared, as recorded by the Allied monitoring service:

Such was Hitler’s message, as received in London and Washington: the war would end with ‘the complete annihilation of the Jews’.
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Even as Hitler spoke, new death camps were being prepared. Three of the sites chosen were remote villages on the former German
—Polish border, just to the west of the River Bug. Although remote, each site was on a railway line linking it with hundreds of towns and villages whose Jewish communities were now trapped and starving. The first site, at Belzec, had been a labour camp in 1940: the railway there linked it with the whole of Galicia, from Cracow in the west to Lvov in the east, and beyond; and with the whole of the Lublin district. The second site, at Treblinka, also the site of an existing labour camp, was linked by rail, through both Malkinia junction and Siedlce, with Warsaw and the Warsaw region. The third site, at Sobibor, a woodland halt where Jewish prisoners-of-war had been murdered in 1940, linked by rail to many large Jewish communities, among them Wlodawa and Chelm.

Although a tiny handful of Jews, like Michael Podklebnik and Yakov Grojanowski, might be chosen in these camps as a small labour force to dispose of the corpses, or to sort out the clothes of the victims, most of the deportees were gassed within hours of their arrival, husbands with their wives, mothers with their children, the old, the sick, the infirm, pregnant women, babies; no exceptions were made and no mercy was shown.

Later, camps were to be set up at which as many as half of the deportees were ‘selected’ for forced labour, but at Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka no such ‘selections’ were made. In these four camps, between the early months of 1942 and the first months of 1943, many hundreds of Jewish communities were to be wiped out in their entirety: more than fifty communities at Chelmno alone. Yet within a few months Chelmno was to prove the second smallest of the four death camps; a camp at which, nevertheless, at least 360,000 Jews were killed within a year.

A fifth camp was also set up in the spring of 1942, an extension of an existing camp, Auschwitz. Situated across the railway line from Auschwitz Main Camp, where Polish prisoners suffered cruel torments, the new camp was in a birch wood, known in German as Birkenau.

At the railway yard near Auschwitz station, a selection was to be made of each incoming train, and as many as half those brought to the camp were to be ‘selected’, not for gassing, but for forced labour. The labour was, first, in the camp itself, and subsequently in the surrounding factories of East Upper Silesia: coal mines, synthetic coal and rubber factories, and other military and industrial
enterprises. From each train, however, of a thousand deportees, at least five hundred were to be gassed within a few hours of their arrival: all old people, all those who were sick, all cripples and all small children. The gassings took place, at first, in a gas-chamber in Auschwitz Main Camp, or in a specially constructed gas-chamber in the birch wood.

Auschwitz was not a remote village in eastern Poland, but a large town at a main railway junction, in a region annexed to the German Reich. The railway was part of a main line, with direct links to every capital of Europe: to the Old Reich, to Holland, France and Belgium, to Italy, and to the Polish railway network.

Fewer Jews were to be killed at Auschwitz—Birkenau than at the four death camps combined, but far more Jews were to survive Auschwitz—Birkenau, having been ‘selected’ for slave labour, than were to survive the four death camps.
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Indeed, from Belzec there were to be no more than two survivors, from Chelmno only three, from Treblinka less than forty, and from Sobibor a total of sixty-four; while from Auschwitz—Birkenau, several thousand Jews were to survive. But in February 1942 all this was in the future: the special gas-chambers in these camps were still under construction, except at Chelmno, whose gas-vans had been working without interruption since 8 December 1941. By the time of the Wannsee Conference, three special gas-vans were in operation at Chelmno. ‘At the beginning, Jews were brought to Chelmno daily,’ recalled Andrzej Miszczak, a resident of Chelmno village. ‘The gendarmes used to say, “Ein Tag—ein tausend,” “One day—one thousand.”’
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In the Eastern Territories, despite the frozen ground, the Einsatzkommando killings continued. On January 9, at Khmelnik in the Ukraine, all the Jews were assembled under the guns, not only of the Einsatzkommando, but also of all the regular German army officers in Khmelnik, of the local volunteer Ukrainian militia, and of volunteers from others towns. ‘On that day,’ the eighteen-year-old Maria Rubinstein recalled, ‘my mother was killed, one of my brothers, and three of my sisters.’
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