The Holocaust: A New History Read online

  Laurence Rees

  * * *

  THE HOLOCAUST

  A New History

  Contents

  List of Maps and Illustrations

  Prologue

  1. Origins of Hate

  2. Birth of the Nazis (1919–1923)

  3. From Revolution to Ballot Box (1924––1933)

  4. Consolidating Power (1933–1934)

  5. The Nuremberg Laws (1934–1935)

  6. Education and Empire-Building (1935–1938)

  7. Radicalization (1938–1939)

  8. The Start of Racial War (1939–1940)

  9. Persecution in the West (1940–1941)

  10. War of Extermination (1941)

  11. The Road to Wannsee (1941–1942)

  12. Search and Kill (1942)

  13. Nazi Death Camps in Poland (1942)

  14. Killing, and Persuading Others to Help (1942–1943)

  15. Oppression and Revolt (1943)

  16. Auschwitz (1943–1944)

  17. Hungarian Catastrophe (1944)

  18. Murder to the End (1944–1945)

  Postscript

  Illustrations

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  To Camilla

  List of Maps and Illustrations

  Maps

  Deportations of Jews to Auschwitz

  Nazi extermination centres in Poland

  Illustrations

  SECTION ONE

  1. Adolf Hitler and a group of Nazi supporters in the 1920s (Ullsteinbild / TopFoto)

  2. Dietrich Eckart (Ullsteinbild / TopFoto)

  3. A young Joseph Goebbels (World History Archive / TopFoto)

  4. A Freikorps unit marches through Munich in 1919 (Ullsteinbild / TopFoto)

  5. President Paul von Hindenburg and Adolf Hitler in 1933 (akg-images)

  6. Otto Meissner and former Chancellor Franz von Papen (Ullsteinbild / TopFoto)

  7. Concentration camp prisoners in the 1930s (Ullsteinbild / TopFoto)

  8. Prisoners at Dachau before the war (akg-images)

  9. Adolf Hitler in 1936 (Ullsteinbild / TopFoto)

  10. Joseph Goebbels marries Magda Quandt in December 1931 (Topham Picturepoint)

  11. Theodor Eicke (Ullsteinbild / TopFoto)

  12. Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler (Topham / AP)

  13. Adolf Eichmann (Ullsteinbild / TopFoto)

  14. Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich (Ullsteinbild / TopFoto)

  15. Jews are made to scrub the streets in Austria in the wake of the Nazi occupation in 1938 (World History Archive / TopFoto)

  16. The aftermath of Kristallnacht in November 1938 (Ullsteinbild / TopFoto)

  17. A synagogue burns as a result of Kristallnacht (bpk / Abraham Pisarek)

  18. The main camp at Auschwitz (ITAR-TASS / TopFoto)

  SECTION TWO

  19. Hitler and his generals (Walter-Frentz-Collection, Berlin)

  20. A Legitimationskarte of a Jew in the Łόdź ghetto (©IMAGNO / TopFoto)

  21. Dr Robert Ritter assesses a Sinti woman (Ullsteinbild / TopFoto)

  22. One of Ritter’s assistants quizzes a Roma family (Roger-Viollet / TopFoto)

  23. Jews take a shower in the Łόdź ghetto (Ullsteinbild / TopFoto)

  24. Children in the Łόdź ghetto (Roger-Viollet / TopFoto)

  25. German soldiers march through Paris in 1940 (World History Archive / TopFoto)

  26. Dutch Jews prepare to board trains to take them to the east (©2003; Topham Picturepoint)

  27. Heinrich Himmler visits the Łόdź ghetto in June 1941 (Ullsteinbild / TopFoto)

  28. Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski seated in his private carriage (Ullsteinbild / TopFoto)

  29. Adolf Hitler with Jozef Tiso, the President of Slovakia (©2004 TopFoto)

  30. Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini (World History Archive / TopFoto)

  31. Dr Irmfried Eberl (Bundesarchiv, B162 Bildild-00636 / Photographer: Unknown)

  32. Christian Wirth (Yad Vashem)

  33. Pope Pius XII (Ullsteinbild / TopFoto)

  34. Adolf Hitler, making a rare public appearance later in the war (Walter-Frentz-Collection, Berlin)

  SECTION THREE

  35. German soldiers stealing pigs (Bibliotek für Zeitgeschichte in der Württembergischen Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart)

  36. German units advance against a village on the eastern front (Ullsteinbild / TopFoto)

  37. Jewish women wait to be murdered by Nazi security forces in the occupied Soviet Union (bpk / Karl Sturm)

  38. Nazi security forces in action in the occupied Soviet Union (akg-images)

  39. Soviet soldiers captured by the Germans (©2001;Topham / AP)

  40. Jewish civilians captured by the Germans (World History Archive / TopFoto)

  41. Hungarian Jews arrive at Auschwitz Birkenau in 1944 (World History Archive / TopFoto)

  42. An Allied reconnaissance flight photo of Auschwitz Birkenau (Roger-Viollet / TopFoto)

  43. Selection of new arrivals at Auschwitz Birkenau (Ullsteinbild / TopFoto)

  44. Staff at Auschwitz relax (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Anonymous Donor)

  45. Crematorium III at Auschwitz (Archival Collection of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim)

  46. Crematorium IV at Auschwitz (Archival Collection of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim)

  47. Fritz Klein at Bergen Belsen (Roger-Viollet / TopFoto)

  48. Oskar Groening

  49. Petras Zelionka

  (While every effort has been made to contact copyright holders, the publishers will be happy to correct any errors of omission or commission.)

  Prologue

  To the Nazis, Freda Wineman’s crime was simple. She was Jewish. In May 1944, at the age of twenty, she was arrested in Saint-Etienne in France by collaborators belonging to the paramilitary Milice. Together with her parents and her three brothers she was taken first to the notorious holding camp at Drancy in the suburbs of Paris and thence to Auschwitz Birkenau in Nazi-occupied Poland.

  In early June 1944, the train carrying Freda, her family and nearly a thousand other Jews from France passed under the red-brick guardhouse of Birkenau and down a railway line directly into the camp. As the doors of the freight wagon opened and they emerged into the light, Freda thought she had arrived in ‘Hell. The smell! The smell was awful!’1 But Freda was still unaware of the true purpose of Birkenau. The place was huge and teeming with prisoners. Perhaps the new arrivals would all be put to work?

  As she and her family stood on the area by the side of the railway track known as the ‘ramp’, events took an unexpected turn. Prisoners from a special unit called the Sonderkommando, dressed in pyjama-like uniforms, shouted out to the new arrivals, ‘Give the children to the older women.’ As a consequence, Freda’s mother was handed a baby by a young mother in her twenties.

  The Jews were told to form two lines on the ramp – men in one and women and small children in another. Bewildered by what was happening, Freda joined the line for women together with her mother who was still holding the baby. When her mother reached the head of the queue, an SS doctor – Freda believes it was Dr Mengele – told her to go with the baby to the right. Freda followed her mother, but then, she recalls, ‘Mengele called me back, and he said, “You go to the left.” And I said, “No, I won’t. I won’t be separated from my mother.” And he said, in a most natural way, “Your mother, she will be looking after the children, and you will go with the young ones [that is, the younger adults].” ’

  Freda ‘couldn’t understand why we were separated. I couldn’t understand why they had to give the babies to older women. My mo
ther was only forty-six years old. I couldn’t understand what was happening, it was too quick. It was all happening so fast.’

  As Freda’s mother walked away with the baby, her father and three brothers reached the head of their queue. All of them were told to stay together. But as they stood on the ramp, Freda’s eldest brother David saw their mother moving off in another direction and thought that their youngest sibling, thirteen-year-old Marcel, should go with her. He reasoned that ‘it might be easier’ for Marcel if his mother was able to look after him. So David told Marcel to accompany her and Marcel, listening to the words of his elder brother, ran off to join his mother. Unwittingly, David had helped send Marcel to his death.

  They did not know it at the time, but they had just participated in a selection process in which SS doctors, in a matter of seconds, decided which person should be allowed to live temporarily and which person should die at once. The great majority of people on this transport were selected to be murdered immediately in the gas chambers of Birkenau – including Freda’s mother, along with the baby that had been placed in her arms. The Nazis did not want children, the old or the sick to last more than a few hours in the camp.

  Freda, her father and her three brothers had been selected to work. Though the Nazis intended all Jews to die eventually, this was at least a postponement of execution. So by sending Marcel towards their mother, David had ensured that he joined the group that had been chosen to die at once. Marcel, as a thirteen-year-old, was borderline for selection and so the SS must not have cared if he went with his mother to be murdered. As Freda says, David’s actions ‘would have been the right thing [to do] in different circumstances’. But, amid the inhumanity of Auschwitz, ‘it was the wrong decision.’

  On the ramp, the Sonderkommandos had told the young mothers to hand over their babies because the only chance they had of surviving the initial selection was to appear in front of the SS doctor without their children. Even if a mother was young and fit, the SS would rarely try and separate her from her child during the final selection process for fear of causing panic among the new arrivals. Members of the Sonderkommando had taken a look at Freda’s mother as she waited by the train and decided that she was too old to survive selection. Since she was certain to die, and since the baby was also sure to perish, both had been placed together. That way the young mother had the possibility of living for longer than this one day.

  How could such a situation ever come to exist on this earth? How could standards of common decency and morality have been inverted so unspeakably that the compassionate gesture of a brother directing a sibling to be with his mother helped cause his death, and the only chance a young mother had of surviving more than one day was for her baby to be taken from her and murdered?

  More broadly, what were the reasons the Nazis decided to exterminate an entire group of people? Why did they take millions of men, women and children and gas them, shoot them, starve them, beat them to death – kill them by whatever means possible? What was the place of this genocide amid the catalogue of other horrors that the Nazis were responsible for?

  For twenty-five years I have thought about these questions as I wrote and produced a number of television documentary series about the Nazis and the Second World War. In the course of my work I travelled to many different countries and met hundreds of eyewitnesses from the period – including those who suffered at the hands of the Nazis like Freda Wineman, those who watched events as bystanders, and those who committed crimes as perpetrators. Only a fraction of the testimony gathered for my films has ever been published before.

  The Holocaust is the most infamous crime in the history of the world. We need to understand how this obscenity was possible. And this book, drawing not just on this fresh material but also on recent scholarship and documents of the time, is my attempt to do just that.

  1. Origins of Hate

  In September 1919 Adolf Hitler wrote a letter of immense historical importance. But at the time no one realized its significance. That’s because the Adolf Hitler who composed the letter was a nobody. He was thirty years old, and yet he possessed no home, no career, no wife, no girlfriend, no intimate friend of any kind. All he had to look back on was a life filled with crushed dreams. He had wanted to become a famous artist but had been rejected by the artistic establishment; he had longed to play a part in a German victory over the Allies during the First World War, only to witness the humiliating defeat of German forces in November 1918. He was bitter, angry and looking for someone to blame.

  In this letter, dated 16 September 1919, and addressed to a fellow soldier called Adolf Gemlich, Hitler stated unequivocally who was responsible not only for his personal predicament, but for the suffering of the whole German nation. ‘There is living amongst us’, wrote Hitler, ‘a non-German, foreign race, unwilling and unable to sacrifice its characteristics … and which nonetheless possesses all the political rights that we ourselves have … Everything which makes men strive for higher things, whether religion, socialism or democracy, is for him only a means to an end, to the satisfaction of a lust for money and domination. His activities produce a racial tuberculosis among nations.’1 The adversary Hitler had identified was ‘the Jew’. And he added that the ‘final aim’ of any German government had to be ‘the uncompromising removal of the Jews altogether’.

  It is a remarkable document. Not just because it allows us an insight into the thinking in 1919 of the man who would later instigate the Holocaust, but also because it is the first irrefutable evidence of Hitler’s own anti-Semitic beliefs. In his autobiography, Mein Kampf, which he wrote five years later, Hitler claimed that he had hated Jews even when he was a struggling artist in Vienna in the early years of the twentieth century. But some scholars have cast doubt on his simplistic version of his own past,2 and questioned whether he really held these strong anti-Semitic views during his time in Vienna and his service as a soldier in the First World War.3

  But that is not to say that Hitler’s anti-Semitism entered into his head from nowhere in September 1919. In writing this letter he drew on currents of anti-Semitic thought that had swirled around Germany before, during and immediately after the First World War. So much so that not one of the ideas that he wrote about in his September 1919 letter was original. While he would later become the most infamous proponent of anti-Semitism, Hitler built on a vivid history of persecution.

  Anti-Semitism, of course, was not new. Its origins can be traced back several thousand years. At the time of the emergence of Christianity, for instance, even though Jesus was born Jewish himself, passages in the Bible emphasize that ‘the Jews’ were antagonistic to him. The gospel of St John, in the King James version of the Bible, records that the Jews ‘sought to kill’4 Jesus. At one point they even pick up stones to throw at him.5 As for Jesus, he tells the Jews that they are children of the ‘devil’.6

  Harmful ideas about the Jews were thus built into the most holy Christian text; and generations of priests branded the Jews a ‘perfidious’ people who had ‘wanted to have Lord Jesus Christ killed’.7 So it’s not hard to understand why Jewish persecution was commonplace in a medieval Europe dominated by Christian culture. In many countries Jews were banned from owning land, from practising certain professions and from living wherever they chose. At various periods, in a number of cities across Europe, the Jews were forced to live in ghettos and wear a special mark of identification on their clothing – in Rome in the thirteenth century it was a yellow badge. One of the few jobs open to Jews was that of moneylender, since Christians were prohibited from practising ‘usury’. And as Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice illustrates, the Jewish moneylender subsequently became a hated figure. In Germany, in 1543, Martin Luther wrote On the Jews and Their Lies. The Jews, said Luther, ‘are nothing but thieves and robbers who daily eat no morsel and wear no thread of clothing which they have not stolen and pilfered from us by means of their accursed usury’. He called on the populace to ‘eject them forever from this country … away w
ith them!’8

  The Enlightenment brought a change in fortune for the European Jews. During this era of scientific and political advancement, many traditional beliefs were questioned. Did, for instance, the Jews ‘deserve’ the treatment they had suffered or were they merely the victims of prejudice? Christian Wilhelm von Dohm, a German historian, wrote in 1781 in favour of Jewish emancipation and pointed out that ‘Everything the Jews are blamed for is caused by the political conditions under which they now live.’9 In France, following the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’ in 1789, Jews were made ‘free and equal’ citizens under the law. During the nineteenth century, in Germany, many of the prohibitions that had been placed upon Jews were lifted, including those that restricted what professions Jews could enter.

  But all these freedoms came at a cost. For at the same time as the German Jews experienced these new opportunities, the country was undergoing enormous change. No country in Europe altered as quickly as Germany during the second half of the nineteenth century. Coal production increased from 1.5 million tons in 1850 to 100 million tons in 1906.10 The population grew from just over 40 million in 1871 to over 65 million by 1911. Germany also changed politically, with the unification of the country in 1871. In the wake of all this upheaval, many asked profound questions about the cultural and spiritual nature of this new nation. Not least, what did it mean to be ‘German’?

  Believers in the power of the Volk provided one answer. Although it is normally translated as ‘people’, the concept behind the Volk can’t properly be conveyed in English by just one word. For the völkisch theorists it meant the almost mystical connection a group of people, all speaking the same language and possessing a shared cultural heritage, had with the soil of their native land. In reaction to the sudden growth of cities and the pollution emanating from newly built factories, they preached the glories of the German countryside and in particular the power of the forest. In Land und Leute (Land and People), one of the most famous paeans to the Volk, Professor Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl wrote: ‘A people must die out if it can no longer understand the legacy of the forests from which it is strengthened and rejuvenated. We must preserve the forest, not just to keep the stove going in winter, but also to keep the pulse of the people warm and happy so that Germans can remain German.’11 Writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, Riehl warned against the dangers posed not only by the growth of cities, but also by that symbol of modernity, the railway: ‘in particular the farmer feels that he cannot remain the “traditional farmer” by the side of the new railway … everyone fears to become someone different, and those who want to rob us of our characteristic way of life appear to be more spectres from hell than good spirits.’12