The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (193 page)

The deportation of more than 300,000 Jews had enabled the Germans to reduce the size of the walled-in ghetto and as S.S. General Stroop turned his tanks, artillery, flame throwers and dynamite squads on it on the morning of April 19, 1943, it comprised an area measuring only 1,000 by 300 yards. It was honeycombed, though, with sewers, vaults and cellars which the desperate Jews had converted into fortified points. Their arms were few: some pistols and rifles, a dozen or two machine guns that had been smuggled in, and homemade grenades. But they were now on that April morning determined to use them—the first time and the last in the history of the Third Reich that the Jews resisted their Nazi oppressors with arms.

Stroop had 2,090 men, about half of them Regular Army or Waffen-S.S. troops, and the rest S.S. police reinforced by 335
Lithuania
n militia and some Polish police and firemen. They ran into unexpected resistance the first day.

The German attack was renewed but found heavy going.

And so it went for the first few days, the poorly armed defenders giving ground before the attacks of tanks, flame throwers and artillery but keeping up their resistance. General Stroop could not understand why “this trash and subhumanity,” as he referred to the besieged Jews, did not give up and submit to being liquidated.

The women belonged to the Chalutzim, Stroop noted, and had the habit, he said, of “firing pistols with both hands” and also of unlimbering hand grenades which they concealed in their bloomers.

On the fifth day of the battle, an impatient and furious Himmler ordered Stroop to “comb out” the ghetto “with the greatest severity and relentless tenacity.”

He then described what followed.

It was simply incomprehensible to a man of Stroop’s stripe that men and women preferred to die in the flames fighting rather than to die peacefully in the gas chambers. For he was shipping off the captured whom he did not slaughter to
Treblinka
. On April 25 he sent a teletype to S.S. headquarters reporting that 27,464 Jews had been captured.

Often it was, on the spot. The next day Stroop informed his superiors: “1,330 Jews pulled out of dugouts and immediately destroyed; 362 Jews killed in battle.” Only thirty prisoners were “evacuated.”

Toward the end of the rebellion the defenders took to the sewers. Stroop tried to flush them out by flooding the mains but the Jews managed to stop the flow of water. One day the Germans dropped smoke bombs into the sewers through 183 manholes but Stroop ruefully reported that they failed to “have the desired results.”

The final outcome could never be in doubt. For a whole month the cornered Jews fought with reckless courage though Stroop, in one daily report, put it differently, complaining about the “cunning fighting methods and tricks used by the Jews and bandits.” By April 26 he reported that many of the defenders were “going insane from the heat, the smoke and the explosions.”

The last day was May 16. That night Stroop got off his last daily battle report.

A week later he was asked to explain that figure, and he replied:

General Stroop’s arithmetic is not very clear since this report leaves some 36,000 Jews unaccounted for. But there can be little doubt that he was telling the truth when he wrote in his handsomely bound final report that he had caught “a total of 56,065 Jews whose extermination can be proved.” The gas chambers no doubt accounted for the 36,000.

German losses, according to Stroop, were sixteen killed and ninety wounded. Probably the true figures were much higher, given the nature of the savage house-to-house fighting which the general himself described in such lurid detail, but were kept low so as not to disturb Himmler’s fine sensibilities. The German troops and police, Stroop concluded, “fulfilled their duty indefatigably in faithful comradeship and stood together as exemplary models of soldiers.”

   The “final solution” went on to the very end of the war. How many Jews did it massacre? The figure has been debated. According to two S.S. witnesses at Nuremberg the total was put at between five and six millions by one of the great Nazi experts on the subject, Karl Eichmann, chief of the Jewish Office of the Gestapo, who carried out the “final solution” under the prodding hand of its originator, Heydrich.
^*
The figure given in the Nuremberg indictment was 5,700,000 and it tallied with the calculations of the
World Jewish Congress
. Reitlinger in his prodigious study of the Final Solution concluded that the figure was somewhat less—between 4,194,200 and 4,581,200.
⁷¹

There were some ten million Jews living in 1939 in the territories occupied by Hitler’s forces. By any estimate it is certain that nearly half of them were exterminated by the Germans. This was the final consequence
and the shattering cost of the aberration which came over the Nazi dictator in his youthful gutter days in Vienna and which he imparted to—or shared with—so many of his German followers.

There were some practices of the Germans during the short-lived New Order that resulted from sheer sadism rather than a lust for mass murder. Perhaps to a psychiatrist there is a difference between the two lusts though the end result of the first differed from the second only in the scale of deaths.

The Nazi medical experiments are an example of this sadism, for in the use of concentration camp inmates and
prisoners of war
as human guinea pigs very little, if any, benefit to science was achieved. It is a tale of horror of which the German medical profession cannot be proud. Although the “experiments” were conducted by fewer than two hundred murderous quacks—albeit some of them held eminent posts in the medical world—their criminal work was known to thousands of leading physicians of the Reich, not a single one of whom, so far as the record shows, ever uttered the slightest public protest.
^*

In the murders in this field the Jews were not the only victims. The Nazi doctors also used Russian prisoners of war, Polish concentration camp inmates, women as well as men, and even Germans. The “experiments” were quite varied. Prisoners were placed in pressure chambers and subjected to high-altitude tests until they ceased breathing. They were injected with lethal doses of typhus and jaundice. They were subjected to “freezing” experiments in icy water or exposed naked in the snow outdoors until they froze to death. Poison bullets were tried out on them as was mustard gas. At the
Ravensbrueck
concentration camp for women hundreds of Polish inmates—the “rabbit girls” they were called—were given gas gangrene wounds while others were subjected to “experiments” in bone grafting. At Dachau and
Buchenwald
gypsies were selected to see how long, and in what manner, they could live on salt water. Sterilization experiments were carried out on a large scale at several camps by a variety of means on both men and women; for, as an S.S. physician, Dr. Adolf Pokorny, wrote Himmler on one occasion, “the enemy must be not only conquered but exterminated.” If he could not be slaughtered—and the need for
slave labor
toward the end of the war made that practice questionable,
as we have seen—then he could be prevented from propagating. In fact Dr. Pokorny told Himmler he thought he had found just the right means, the plant
Caladium seguinum
, which, he said, induced lasting sterility.

Another German doctor who had “far-reaching perspectives” was Professor August
Hirt
, head of the Anatomical Institute of the University of Strasbourg. His special field was somewhat different from those of the others and he explained it in a letter at Christmas time of 1941 to S.S. Lieutenant General Rudolf
Brandt
, Himmler’s adjutant.

Professor Hirt did not want the skulls of “Jewish-Bolshevik commissars” already dead. He proposed that the heads of these persons first be measured while they were alive. Then—

Whereupon Dr. Hirt would go to work, he promised, on further scientific measurements.
⁷³
Himmler was delighted. He directed that Professor Hirt “be supplied with everything needed for his research work.”

He was well supplied. The actual supplier was an interesting Nazi individual by the name of Wolfram Sievers, who spent considerable time on the witness stand at the main Nuremberg trial and at the subsequent “Doctors’ Trial,” in the latter of which he was a defendant.
^*
Sievers, a former bookseller, had risen to be a colonel of the S.S. and executive secretary of the Ahnenerbe, the Institute for Research into Heredity, one of the ridiculous “cultural” organizations established by Himmler to pursue one of his many lunacies. It had, according to Sievers, fifty “research branches,” of which one was called the “
Institute for Military Scientific Research
,” which Sievers also headed. He was a shifty-eyed, Mephistophelean-looking fellow with a thick, ink-black beard and at
Nuremberg he was dubbed the “Nazi Bluebeard,” after the famous French killer. Like so many other characters in this history, he kept a meticulous diary, and this and his correspondence, both of which survived, contributed to his gallows end.

By June 1943 Sievers had collected at
Auschwitz
the men and women who were to furnish the skeletons for the “scientific measurements” of Professor Dr. Hirt at the University of Strasbourg. “A total of 115 persons, including 79 Jews, 30 Jewesses, 4 ‘Asiatics’ and 2 Poles were processed,” Sievers reported, requesting the S.S. main office in Berlin for transportation for them from Auschwitz to the
Natzweiler
concentration camp near Strasbourg. The British cross-examiner at Nuremberg inquired as to the meaning of “processing.”

“Anthropological measurements,” Sievers replied.

“Before they were murdered they were anthropologically measured? That was all there was to it, was it?”

“And casts were taken,” Sievers added.

What followed was narrated by S.S. Captain
Josef Kramer
, himself a veteran exterminator from Auschwitz,
Mauthausen
, Dachau and other camps and who achieved fleeting fame as the “Beast of
Belsen
” and was condemned to death by a British court at
Lueneburg
.