When German forces crossed the Polish border early on the morning of September 1, 1939, World War II began. In six years the conflict killed more people than any previous conflict in the history of the world as the latest scientific and technological advances were placed in the service of war. In all, 61 countries with 1.7 billion people, three-fourths of the world’s population, took part. A total of 110 million persons were mobilized for military service and approximately 50 million people lost their lives.
The Second World War began with the German invasion of Poland less than ten days after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. After staging a border incident on the morning of September 1, 1939, Nazi troops crossed the Polish frontier without a declaration of war. At the same time, the Luftwaffe (German Air Force) began to bomb Polish cities. The Nazis unleashed a form of warfare never before seen. The Germans enjoyed a huge numerical superiority over the Poles. The German attack outnumbered Polish defenses 70 divisions to 30. In addition, Germany had 5,000 modern tanks to 600 outdated Polish models. The Germans had 6,000 modern planes while the Poles had less than a thousand, many of them outdated World War I style biplanes. More important than their numerical advantage was the German tactical superiority. Avoiding the long, stagnated fronts of the First World War, the Germans moved with lightning swiftness. Massed tanks punched holes in the Polish defenses, and motorized corps of infantry poured through the gaps and encircled the remaining Polish armies from the rear. Stuka divebombers created confusion behind the Polish lines and prevented reinforcements from reaching the front. This new form of warfare was called the Blitzkrieg or “lightning warfare:”
The battlefront disappeared, and with it the illusion that there had ever been a battlefront. For this was no war of occupation, but a war of quick penetration and obliteration--Blitzkrieg, lightning war. Swift columns of tanks and armored trucks had plunged through Poland while bombs raining from the sky heralded their coming. They had sawed off communications, destroyed stores, scattered civilians, spread terror. Working sometimes 30 miles ahead of infantry and artillery, they had broken down the Polish defenses before they had time to organize. Then, while the infantry mopped up, they had moved on, to strike again far behind what had been called the front. By week’s end it mattered very little whether Warsaw stood or fell. The Republic of Poland, aged 20, was lost.[1]
Poland’s flat terrain offered the ideal venue for this new type of attack as there were no natural obstacles to halt the German advance.
On the morning of September 3, British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, sent an ultimatum to Germany demanding that the invasion be halted. The time limit was given as 11 A.M. the same day. When no German reply was issued, at 11:15 Chamberlain announced in a radio broadcast that Britain was now at war. France also soon declared war. After 21 years, Europe was once again immersed in war. As Hitler knew, however, Britain and France could do little to aid Poland. Within two weeks the Polish capital of Warsaw was completely encircled and pounded daily by German bombers. On September 17, as secretly agreed to in the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the USSR invaded eastern Poland. Warsaw surrendered on September 27 and all Polish resistance ended by the first week of October. In the campaign, Germany suffered approximately 50,000 casualties (8,000 killed) and the Poles 200,000 (70,000 military deaths).
The Nazi conquest of Poland had a devastating effect on European Jewry. Hitler had told the Reichstag on January 30, 1939:
If international-finance Jewry inside and outside of Europe should succeed once more in plunging nations into another world war, the consequence will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.[2]
In 1914, when the German armies had swept through Poland, the German government issued proclamations that said: “Jews in Poland! We come to you as friends and deliverers. Our flag brings you justice and freedom, the full and equal rights of citizens, freedom of religion and person in all economic and cultural areas.” German soldiers had written sympathetically in regard to the poverty of the Jewish settlements. In 1939, they expressed only contempt. “I do not understand how this kind of people is biologically capable of remaining alive,” one German soldier wrote in his diary.[3] The beginning of the war had two major effects on Europe’s Jews. It virtually brought to a halt the efforts to remove Jews from German control through emigration. With the coming of the war, borders were sealed and most of Germany’s Jews were forever trapped in Nazi hands. In addition, the invasion of Poland had dramatically increased the number of Jews under German control. The Jewish population of Poland was one of the largest in the world (approximately two and a half million). In Warsaw alone there were 400,000 Jews, more than all the Jews left in Germany. As the German army stormed through Poland, special SS “operational groups” followed. These SS groups quickly singled out Jews and massacred them. In the frontier town of Wieruszow, on September 3, twenty prominent Jews were lined up by the SS and shot. The following day, 180 Jews were shot in the city of Czestochowa. In Budzin, two hundred were driven into the local synagogue, which was then locked and set on fire. In all, 5,000 Jewish civilians were murdered in the course of the German conquest. An additional 6,000 died in the Polish military. More than a quarter of a million Polish Jews were able to flee into the Soviet occupation zone. Although Jews were often singled out for slaughter, the German invasion also resulted in the murder of 7,000 non-Jewish Poles.[4]
On September 21, a meeting was held in Berlin to discuss the long-term fate of the Polish Jews. At this time it was determined that they were to be concentrated into ghettos in the country’s major cities. In addition to Polish Jews, Jews from Germany and the former Czechoslovakia were forcibly deported into the Polish ghettos. By the end of 1940, major ghettos had been established in the cities of Warsaw, Lodz, Lublin, Cracow, and Radom. The Warsaw ghetto occupied only 2.4% of the city’s land, yet housed 30% of the population. Overcrowding, disease, and starvation stalked the ghettos. In Lodz, 165,000 people lived in a space of 1.6 square miles. Food allocations in the ghettos seldom exceeded 1,100 calories per day. In Lodz, one Jewish woman wrote:
Slowly, slowly the Germans were achieving their goal. I think they let us suffer from hunger, not because there was not enough food, but because this was their method of demoralizing us, of degrading us, of torturing us. These were their methods, and they implemented these methods scrupulously.[5]
By 1941, more that one in ten inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto had died from starvation and disease.
The ghettos became totally isolated worlds. In one sense Jewish life went on and most families remained together. Hans Frank, the German governor of occupied Poland, ordered the creation of Jewish Councils in each of the ghettos. It was to be the function of these councils, or Judenrats, to administer the ghettos under German orders and to provide forced labor to the Germans. At one point 40,000 Jews worked in the industries of the Lodz ghetto. The ghettos were, however, only a temporary solution. Germany had no intention of permitting a permanent place for the Jews in their new Europe. Governor Frank wrote to his superiors in Berlin: “We have now approximately 2,500,000 of them…. We can not shoot 2,500,000 Jews, neither can we poison them. We shall take steps however, designed to expatriate (get rid of) them in some way—and this will be done.”[6]
Britain and France did not try to breach (break through) Germany’s western defensive line, the Siegfried Line, during the Nazi conquest of Poland. Convinced that a successful German offensive in the west was impossible, they hoped to defeat Hitler by attrition with their blockade and mastery of the seas. During the winter of 1939-1940 there was little fighting along the Franco-German frontier. The lull in action came to be referred to as the Phony War, or Sitzkrieg.
The only fighting during the winter occurred between the Soviet Union and Finland. Still distrustful of Hitler and seeking to enhance their defense against a possible German attack, the Soviets had demanded territorial concessions from the Finns that would enable them to better defend the city of Leningrad. When the Finns refused, the Soviets attacked in November. This Winter War revealed, to Moscow’s embarrassment, the Finns’ toughness and the Soviet Union’s military unpreparedness in the wake of the purges. Despite the advantage of having a million troops to their opponents 175,000, the Soviets struggled to defeat the Finns who put their crack troops on skis and outfitted them totally in white. Britain and France expressed support for the Finns, but could do nothing to help. After an unexpectedly difficult four-month-long campaign, the immense Soviet Union finally forced tiny Finland to cede substantial amounts of territory. Prior to the conflict with the Finns, the Soviets, acting in accord with their agreement with Germany, had already moved into Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
As winter turned to spring France prepared for the inevitable German assault which she was confident would be turned back. From 1929-1934 France had built the world’s most sophisticated line of fortifications on its border with Germany. Named the Maginot Line, after Minister of War Andre Maginot, the installations stretched 200 miles from the Swiss border to Belgium. In the most critical stretches of the line, the 87 miles between Luxembourg and the Rhine, the fortifications were almost exclusively underground. Called “The Shield of France,” the forts stopped 250 miles short of the English Channel. There were two main reasons for this. One was simply the cost of fortifying the entire border. More significantly, the construction of fortifications on France’s border with Belgium would have signaled an intent to abandon Belgium and the Netherlands in the event of a German invasion.
The Maginot Line dictated French strategy. During the invasion of Poland, France did no more than probe the weak German defenses in the west. Despite the absence of a single German armored division in the west, the French withdrew after a cautious five mile assault into German territory in September. The Maginot Line had trapped the French into a totally defensive strategy, incapable of attack. As a young French colonel, Charles De Gaulle, had written earlier, “Peering between the battlements of our fortifications, we shall watch the enslavement of Europe.”[7]
The French commander, General Maurice Gamelin, preferred to await the German attack that he was confident would come through Belgium just as it had in 1914. This was the original German plan, which was little more than a rehash of the Schlieffen Plan of World War I. Fate, however, intervened to Germany’s advantage. In January 1940, a German plane crashed in Belgium with the German invasion plans. Forced to reevaluate, the German high command reconfigured their conservative plans into a novel plan of attack. This new plan that took advantage of Gamelin’s plans to place his best forces in the north to enter Belgium and engage the German invasion there before it could reach French soil. General Heinz Guderian, whose book Achtung Panzer had outlined the basic tenants of Blitzkrieg, convinced the German General Staff to attack the French precisely where they were the weakest. Gamelin had placed his best soldiers on the border with Belgium. To the south stood the Maginot Line. But in between the two stood the Ardennes, a heavily wooded mountainous region that Gamelin believed was impassable to the heavy artillery necessary to support a major attack. Guderian was convinced that tanks and motorized infantry could maneuver through the twisting roads of the Ardennes. The use of divebombers could replace the need for heavy artillery. While forty of the strongest British and French divisions were deployed to the north, only ten weak French divisions guarded the Ardennes.
Prior to attacking France, Germany invaded Denmark and Norway in April. Attempting to protect their northern flank, German troops conquered Denmark in one day and conducted simultaneous landings at eight port cities from Narvik to Oslo in Norway. Eleven days later, the French and British landed an expeditionary force to aid the Norwegians. There was fierce fighting around the northern port of Narvik as 4,600 Germans faced 24,600 British, French, and Norwegians backed by the guns of the British navy. The fighting in the north lasted until early June when events in France forced Britain and France to withdraw from Norway.
The German invasion in the west began on May 10, as German forces crossed into Holland and Belgium. Half of all the available Allied Forces (Britain and France) moved north to engage the Germans. This is exactly what the Germans hoped would happen. Guderian’s armored divisions then smashed into the Ardennes. Fifty German divisions swept away the weak French resistance, and in three days the Germans had reached Sedan. In the north, the numerically superior Allied forces were also being defeated. After the bombing of Rotterdam, which killed 980 and wounded 29,000, the Dutch surrendered on May 15. The same day, Sedan fell and Guderian crossed the Meuse River. The successful German attack in the Ardennes had allowed German forces to move south and west of the main allied forces in Belgium. When Guderian turned north, the Allied forces were trapped in a pocket between the invading Germans in Belgium and Guderian’s forces who were advancing north toward Calais on the English Channel at the rate of forty miles a day.
Panic struck France. Less than a week after the German attack, Prime Minister Paul Reynaud declared the battle lost and civilians began to evacuate Paris. On May 20, Gamelin was replaced by General Weygand, but this only served to add to the French confusion.
The result was a scene of carnage and valor more concentrated in space & time than anything modern history ever saw: men by hundreds of thousands retreating in a desperation to live, other men by hundreds of thousands pressing forward in a desperation to surround, slaughter, annihilate.
Not less than 500,000 men were killed, wounded or captured in seven days on a patch of earth about the size of an average U.S. county (970 sq. mi.) Additional casualties among the millions of civilian refugees were incalculable.[8]
The German invasion of France finally toppled the Chamberlain government in Britain. Forced to resign on May 10, Chamberlain had been replaced by his harshest critic, Winston Churchill. Churchill made a hasty visit to Paris on May 16 and made the crucial decision that the French cause was hopeless. He refused to send ten additional fighter squadrons to France, reserving them to defend Britain at a later date.
After Guderian’s forces reached the Channel on May 20, the British engaged in a desperate effort to evacuate their forces before the Germans could close the trap in northern France. A half of a million British troops rushed for the Channel in a desperate effort to escape. With the British assembling at Dunkirk, the German tanks halted for 48 hours as the Luftwaffe pounded the British forces. Why the tanks were halted has been a major historical controversy. Did Hitler, hopeful that he could quickly achieve peace with Britain after the fall of France, deliberately allow the British troops to escape? Did the commander of the Luftwaffe, Herman Göring, persuade Hitler that he should be allowed the honor of destroying the British forces? It is also possible that after covering 400 miles in 11 days, the armored forces were incapable of finishing the kill (half of the German tanks were no longer operational).
Regardless of the reasons for the German pause, the British were able to rescue 215,000 of their own men and 125,000 French soldiers from Dunkirk, allowing only 40,000 to be captured.
At Dunkirk, the spectacle was prodigious, appalling. Inside the blazing line of warships lay transports of every description, from big merchantmen and passenger steamers to channel ferries, private yachts, fishing smacks, tug-drawn coal barges. Over these craft wheeled swarms of German high bombers, down at them plunged wedge after wedge of dive-bombers. Day and night the sear air was filled with screaming gulls and bats of death, including two whole German air corps….
Embarkation had to be carried out by shallow-draft ships at the mole or by whale boats, dories, rafts and wreckage bobbing in the surf along the flat shelf of seashore. A calm sea and bright sunshine made the rescue ships perfect bomb targets for two days, and dozens of them were smashed, burned, sunk. Britain admitted loss of 30 warships. Then a blessed fog rolled in for 48 hours, saving countless lives.
When the soldiers reached the sea they hid (one of them said later) “like rabbits among the dunes.” They were in smoke-grimed rags and tatters, many shoeless, some still lugging packs and rifles, others empty-handed in their underclothes after swimming canals. They were too din-deafened and inured to horror to be fully sensible of the incredible cataclysm that still raged over them. Some clutched souvenirs.
Ambulatory wounded joined the rest in staggering into the oil-scummed waves, floundering out to reach the rescue craft amid spuming bomb-geysers. Day & night overhead the restless roar of air battle continued as depleted advance units of the Royal Air Force were reinforced by squadrons of the Coastal Command. The R.A.F. covered itself with glory in those awful hours, but every survivor repeated the dirge: “If we had more planes...more planes...more planes....”
Crossing the water to Dover, Ramsgate, Sheerness was a prolongation of the stupefying nightmare. For besides the German armadas (ships) aloft, German motorboats raced alongside firing torpedoes. Each successive boatload that came in safely seemed so precious and triumphant that British morale soared out of the jaws of death. Millions of relatives at piers and stations, watching for their own men, joined in the pitiful paean of thanks for those who were restored.
Smothered under the converging German flood were the last brave thousands who died or were taken prisoner, and mountains of precious materiel.[9]
At first the British had hoped to save 30,000 of the trapped men; now they had eleven times that number. An army had been saved. To accomplish this “miracle,” the British had used every available ship over the course of nine days. Most of their equipment had been left behind, but at least Britain had been able to preserve a core of forces capable of resisting a German invasion across the Channel.
After the evacuation of Dunkirk was completed on June 4, the German forces mounted a drive on Paris. With the fate of France already decided, Italy, eager to seize a share of the spoils, declared war on June 10, and invaded southern France. Paris fell on June 14, as German troops marched through the Arc de Triomphe and down the Champs-Elyseés. Two days later, Prime Minister Reynaud resigned, turning power over to eighty-four year old Marshall Henri Philippe Pétain, the hero of the defense of Verdun in the First World War. There would be no similar victories in 1940. A day after assuming office, Petain asked the Germans for an armistice.
A warm June afternoon sun beat down on the clearing and cast purple shadows across the avenue leading through the forest from the clearing to a road. It was Friday, June 21, 1940. At exactly 3:15 o’clock, German summer time, from a touring car that had stopped at the far end of the avenue stepped a small man with a catlike tread and a supreme sense of the drama that is history.
This was Adolf Hitler’s first visit to the Forest of Compiegne, where 22 years ago a delegation of Germans signed an armistice dictated by France’s Marshal Ferdinand Foch.
For two minutes Hitler and his aids stood outside, chatting in the sunlight that sent a lengthening shadow of the old wagon restaurant slanting across the grass. Then Adolf Hitler stepped nimbly aboard the car. It was 3:25 p.m.
At 3:30 p.m. four Frenchmen alighted from a car before the Alsace-Lorraine memorial. As the French delegates entered the car, the German leaders rose, stiff with punctilio. Adolf Hitler gave the Nazi salute to each Frenchman in turn. The Frenchmen returned military salutes. Then Hitler sat down and nodded to General Keitel. In a deeply solemn voice the German commander began reading, in German, Adolf Hitler’s revision of history:
“On November 11, 1918, there began in this train the time of suffering of the German people.… Now the decision of weapons has required that the Reich Government make known the German conditions for an armistice.”
“If historic Compiegne
Forest has been chosen for the handing over of these conditions, then it was
done in order, once and for all, through this act of just retribution, to
eradicate the memory which was not a glorious page of French history and was
felt by the German people to be the deepest shame of all times....”[10]
In less than two months Hitler had accomplished what the Germans had failed to do in four years of World War I. France was now conquered. The Germans occupied all of northern France and the Atlantic coastline. Pétain, who established a capital in the spa town of Vichy, administered the rest of France. Despite the appearance of some independence, the Vichy government was merely a puppet of the Nazis.
Not all of France surrendered. Brigadier-General Charles De Gaulle fled to London and organized the Free French Government, which adopted as its symbol the red cross of Lorraine flown by Joan of Arc in her fight to liberate France five centuries earlier. De Gaulle, who had strongly criticized French defense preparations before the war, broadcast on the radio from London on June 18, urging Frenchmen to oppose the German occupation. De Gaulle’s defiance earned him a death sentence in absentia (in his absence) from the Vichy government, but throughout the war he worked to keep alive the idea of France as a great and independent power.
Britain now stood totally alone against the Nazis. Lost in the shock of the fall of France was the assumption of the prime ministership by Winston Churchill. Upon assuming his post Churchill told the House of Commons of the struggle ahead: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”
Churchill had experienced many triumphs and failures in his political career. Born the eldest son of Lord Randolph Churchill and the American heiress Jennie Jerome, he grew up in a privileged environment. After serving in the military, he resigned his commission in 1899 to become a newspaper correspondent during the Boer War. Captured by the Boers, his daring escape made him a national hero, and in 1900 he was elected to Parliament as a Conservative. Switching parties to become a Liberal, Churchill was named First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911. He was forced to resign in the midst of the First World War as his proposal to attack the Turks in the Dardanelles turned into the disaster of Gallipoli. Following the war, he rejoined the Conservative Party and served in several cabinet positions. After the Conservative defeat in 1929, Churchill was left without a cabinet position and when the Conservatives returned to power in 1935, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin denied Churchill a position in his government. For ten years Churchill stood in the political wilderness, excluded from power. During this time he championed several unpopular causes, including his loud criticism of Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policies and a strong advocacy of rearmament programs. Assaulted by many at the time as a warmonger, the coming of the war vindicated (proved correct) Churchill’s criticisms.
Within weeks of assuming the office of Prime Minister, Churchill faced a crisis almost unparalleled in British history. France had been defeated and only the narrow waters of the English Channel stood between the German army and Britain. Although most of the British troops in northern France had been successfully evacuated, most of their equipment had been lost. Undeterred by the danger Britain faced, Churchill rallied his nation:
What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. The Battle of Britain is about to begin…. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned upon us. Hitler knows he must break us in this island or lose the war….
If we fail, the whole world, including the United States, and all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister and perhaps more prolonged by the lights of a perverted science.
Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty and so bear ourselves that if the British Commonwealth and Empire last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”[11]
The odds against the British seemed overwhelming. The only fully equipped division in Britain was a newly arrived one from Canada. While the Nazis planned a cross-channel assault, in Buckingham Palace the Queen took pistol lessons saying, “I shall not go down like the others.” Despite the odds, Churchill dismissed suggestions that Britain negotiate with Hitler and pledged to fight to the end:
We shall go on to the end .... we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender[12]
Prior to a land invasion, Hitler had to knock out the Royal Air Force (RAF). This task fell to Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe. The Battle of Britain was the first major battle in the history of the world to be fought exclusively in the air. Working furiously, British industry was producing armaments at an unprecedented rate to oppose the coming Nazi onslaught. Most significantly, a hundred new fighter planes were being produced every week.
On August 8, 1940, German bombers began to blast British airfields, key industries, and shipping in the Channel. A week later one thousand German planes flew in a raid over England. Within two weeks, Britain had lost a quarter of its pilots and the situation was desperate. Then fate intervened. Churchill ordered a retaliatory bombing raid over Berlin on August 25. Furious that the German capital had been bombed, Göring shifted the German emphasis from bombing British airfields to bombing major cities. On September 7, nearly 400 bombers hit London during the day, followed by 200 in the evening. The city of London was virtually destroyed in the German “Blitz,” but it relieved the pressure on the airfields and gave the RAF a chance to regroup. Other cities also felt the brunt of the air attack:
It was a bright moonlight night. Wave after wave of heavy-laden bombers passed northwest to Coventry. All night they kept at it until they had dropped over 500 tons of high explosive, 30 tons of incendiaries on the old city where Lady Godiva once rode naked to protest against high taxes. Coventry, “Britain’s Detroit”--a city of 200,000 on the southern edge of the Midlands--became one solid, seething mass of fire. Not just the motor and airplane factories on the outskirts, but then entire heart of the city, square miles of workmen’s homes in long neat rows; block upon block of shops and banks and pubs and offices; lovely old St. Michael’s cathedral--all fell under the most concentrated rain of destruction yet loosed from the skies by mankind. In the morning, what had been a thriving city was a smoldering pile of rubble where dazed, stunned survivors wandered aimlessly, and rescue parties from other cities scrabbled in the ruins to dig out hundreds buried dead and alive.[13]
By mid September, the tide of the battle had turned and Germany’s invasion plans were postponed indefinitely. On September 16, the RAF downed 60 German planes in a single day (they originally claimed that the number was an astounding 185). Several factors contributed to the British success, the most important being the development of radar. The British had developed a chain of radar stations along the coast that could detect Luftwaffe formations long before they reached Britain. With radar, the British did not need to waste precious planes on search missions, but rather could mass their forces to meet the German attacks. In addition, British pilots had several other crucial advantages. Luftwaffe planes could only remain over Britain for ten minutes or risk not having enough fuel to return to their bases in France. German pilots who were shot down almost always ended up as prisoners, while many downed British pilots could be rescued and returned to their squadrons. British planes, most notably the Spitfire and Hurricane, proved to be vastly superior to the slower German fighters. Although the Germans had a three to one advantage over the RAF in planes, during the crucial part of the battle (July 10-October 31) the British lost only 788 planes to the Luftwaffe’s 1,294.
During the fall and winter of 1940-1941 Britain continued to be hit by terrible raids. Night bombing destroyed block after block of British cities. Throughout England one home in five was destroyed and 43,000 were killed. Evacuating their children and old people to rural areas, going to work by day and sleeping in air raid shelters and underground stations at night, Britain’s people stood firm--proof that bombing civilians would not break their will. The feared Nazi invasion never came. Unable to win superiority in the air, it was impossible for the Germans to mount a channel crossing. A few thousand British pilots had saved their country and won the Battle of Britain. As Churchill said “Never in human history have so many owed so much to so few.”
Failing to knock out Britain’s air defenses, the Nazis attempted to starve the island out of the war with a submarine blockade. In June 1940, they undertook the Battle of the Atlantic, using submarine warfare to cut the British overseas lifelines. At the onset of the war Germany had only 26 submarines. By late 1941, this had increased to over a hundred and the Germans were able to sink British ships faster than they could be replaced. With the advantage of submarine bases in Norway and France, the Germans were dangerously close to reaching their goal of denying Britain the supplies she needed to continue the fight.
By week’s end came a frightening announcement: over a period of 48 hours the exultant German High Command issued claims of having sunk 224,000 tons of British shipping, left the world to speculate on how long the job had taken. Moreover, Britain shipping losses were already running at a ruinous 350,000 tons a month, and rumor in London had reported that 600 new submarines would take to the sea lanes with spring.
There was no denying that against the destructive virtuosity of surface raiders, of Nazi airmen and of seamen lying in the chill, sweating bowels of the U-boats, the British convoy system was far from effective. The great danger was that, with better weather, it would become even less effective. In the tragic, high-hearted history of Britain’s first 18 months of war was the admitted record of at least 4,300,000 gross tons of shipping lost at sea. This as a net loss (after replacements) of some 2,650,000 tons. Less than 18,000,000 tons were left to haul the war-swollen traffic of an empire.
Against a probable loss of 3,500,000 to 5,500,000 tons in 1941, Britain could expect no more than 2,100,000 in replacements from U.S. and British yards.[14]
At this point in the Battle of the Atlantic, the only major British successes had come on the surface. Just as in the First World War, the German surface navy was no match for the British. After some early successes, the German battleship Bismarck was destroyed by a combined naval and air attack in May 1941. Submarines, however, continued to do their damage throughout the war.
While German armies had been triumphant in almost every battle, their Italian allies had not been as successful. Entering the war after the fate of France had already been decided, nevertheless the Italians had encountered unexpected casualties in their invasion of southern France. Although the Italians were rewarded with a small slice of France, Mussolini was unsatisfied with his gains. In September 1940, Italy launched an attack on British Egypt from their colony of Libya. A combination of the unexpected attack and numerical advantage allowed the Italians to advance sixty miles into Egypt. In December, the British, commanded by General Archibald Wavell, counterattacked and not only drove the Italians back into Libya, but seized the key Mediterranean port of Tobruk, advancing two hundred miles into Italian territory.
The Italians had also attacked Greece in October 1940 from their colony in Albania. Similar to their difficulties in North Africa, the Italians met stiff resistance. Although still under German air attack, the British dispatched five RAF squadrons to assist their Greek allies. With superior air cover, the Greeks drove the Italian invaders all the way back into Albania by December. Germany watched events in the Balkans with alarm. The British presence in Greece placed the RAF dangerously close to German’s only source of oil, the Ploesti oilfields in Romania. The actions of the Soviet Union also caused the Germans concern. Keeping with his efforts to restore the Soviet Union’s borders to those of Tsarist Russia, Stalin had seized the region of Bessarabia from Romania in June of 1940. In October, Germany occupied Romania “to protect it” against further dismemberment (being taken apart).
By March 1, 1941, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria had signed alliances with Germany. The Germans expected to forge a similar agreement with the government of Yugoslavia. On March 25, an agreement was signed in Vienna between the Nazis and the Yugoslavs but Serb army officers quickly renounced the treaty and overthrew the government. Hitler was furious and launched a massive invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece on April 6. The Yugoslavian government surrendered in twelve days and the Greeks signed an armistice six days later. Similar to Dunkirk, the British were forced to organize a hasty evacuation of their forces. 48,000 of the 60,000 British troops in Greece were safely evacuated. The Greek government fled to the British-held island of Crete sixty miles from the Greek mainland. Protected by the British navy, Crete seemed impervious (inaccessible) to further German attack. Once again it proved a mistake to underestimate the Nazi forces. Less than a month after conquering Greece, the Germans launched an unprecedented air attack on Crete utilizing paratroopers and gliders to capture the island. In a matter of weeks the German armies had stormed down the Balkan Peninsula and totally driven out the British forces.
The German conquest of the Balkans may have been positive for the Axis in the short run, but by going into the Balkans Hitler delayed his attack on the Soviet Union by six to eight weeks. This delay, plus inadequate intelligence and bad planning, may have cost him victory on the Russian front. In addition, the Germans and the Italians controlled only the major cities of Yugoslavia. Large bands of resistance fighters and partisans (bands of guerrillas), Chetniks under Draza Mihajloviç and communist forces led by Joseph Tito, roamed the area. Hitler had to leave behind German troops formerly committed to the Russian invasion and replace them with lesser Bulgarian and Hungarian forces.
The only bright spot for the British had been in their successes in North Africa. The victories achieved by General Wavell had provided a needed morale boost to a country desperate for any form of good news. In their 250-mile advance, the British had captured over 114,000 Italian troops and 400 tanks. Wavell’s advance was halted only because of the need to strip his forces of 60,000 troops in order to defend Greece during the spring of 1941. In addition to their success in North Africa, the British were able to drive the Italians out of Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Italian East Africa.
Forced to bail out his bumbling Italian allies, Hitler sent one of his ablest tank commanders, General Erwin Rommel, to prevent further Axis defeat in Libya. Arriving in February, Rommel forged the two division Afrika Corps into perhaps the most effective fighting force in the war. Originally ordered simply to block further British advances, Rommel launched a furious counterattack in late March. By May of 1941 Rommel had recaptured Tobruk and wiped out all of the British gains of the previous year.
By the spring of 1941, nearly all of Europe had come under German control. Only Portugal, Switzerland, Sweden, Ireland, and Turkey remained neutral. While officially neutral, Spain under Franco was pro-Nazi. Britain, though still dangerous, could do little to interfere on the continent and her armies in North Africa were in retreat. The United States became more disturbed over the Nazi successes, but not enough to take action. Now Hitler turned his eyes east, toward his oldest foe, the Soviet Union.
Hitler and Stalin had each signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact for their own specific, short-term advantages. Hitler desired a free hand in Poland and to avoid a two-front war as he dealt with Britain and France. Stalin hoped to divert Hitler’s expansion westward and to gain time to rebuild his military after the disruption of the Great Purges. From the beginning there was tension and mistrust between the two, and neither side had any illusions about a long-lasting friendship. Stalin had hoped for a much longer and more difficult war in the west and had not expected that Hitler would so quickly be the master of Europe.
As early as July 1940, Hitler resolved to attack Russia in an operation code named Barbarossa. In the fall of the year he decided not to invade Britain, but instead to pursue his original goal, written in Mein Kampf, of obtaining living space to the east. Hitler believed that the British were only refusing his peace overtures because they held out hope of a falling-out between Germany and the USSR. When the Soviets had been defeated and British positions in India and the Middle East were threatened, he reasoned that Britain would finally make peace. Hitler wanted to start in the fall of 1940, but his advisers persuaded him to avoid the risks of a winter campaign in the Soviet Union and wait until the spring. During 1941, British and American intelligence experts told Stalin of Hitler’s intentions to attack, but the Soviet dictator feared a western plot to provoke Hitler and clung to his obligations under the nonaggression pact. Even while the Nazis were invading Russia in June, shipments of Soviet grain were headed to Germany.
The Nazi assault, delayed by the fighting in the Balkans, began on June 22nd. Three million German troops, supplemented by Finns, Romanians, Italians, Hungarians, Slovakians, and Croats surged across the Soviet border in a surprise attack. The forces were divided into three army groups. Group North’s objective was the city of Leningrad, Group Center’s was Moscow, and Group South set out to capture the Caucasian oilfields. Immediately Britain offered the Soviets aid. Aware of the fact that some British conservatives had considered the Soviets a greater evil than the Nazis prior to the war, Churchill clearly articulated that the two countries now shared a common cause: “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”[15]
Operation Barbarossa required far more effort and resources any other effort in the war. Along a battlefront 1,800 miles long, nine million men became locked in a deadly struggle. At the outset the Nazi forces were unstoppable as they killed or captured enormous numbers of Soviet troops. The Luftwaffe destroyed 2,000 enemy planes (most of them on the ground) in the first two days of the battle. German troops advanced fifty miles a day. After one week the Nazis were halfway to Moscow, and within a month they had captured twice the area of Germany itself:
After seven days of fighting, the German High Command was convinced its armies had defeated Russia’s. The German High Command has, to most of the world’s misfortune, not yet been wrong.
The pathetic fallacy, which gave the Russians--and most of the world--continuing hope, was the Napoleonic parallel. After so many people had clung to the World War I parallel on the French Front, until the Maginot Line was flanked and it was clear that this would be no war of position, it was strange that so many more clung to the even more antique Napoleonic parallel--the belief that by drawing the Germans forward into huge Russia, the defenders could let weather and distance defeat Adolf Hitler just as it had Napoleon Bonaparte.
Adolf Hitler’s Army is as light on its feet as a ballerina. Its supply system and its communications move like clockwork. While trying to withdraw before this system, any Army, and especially the sluggish, massive Red Army, would be bound to lose more than it hurt and would probably be demolished before it retreated enough hundreds of miles to tire out the attacker.[16]
Throughout the summer the Nazi armies surged forward. Kiev was captured in September as 750,000 Soviet soldiers were taken prisoner. In the first four months the German army advanced over 1,000 miles (similar to the distance from New York City to Des Moines Iowa) and inflicted three million casualties. By October, Hitler’s army had reached the outskirts of Moscow. A month earlier, in the north, the Nazis had besieged Leningrad, beginning a two-year struggle in which over one million civilians died. The Soviet Union appeared to be on the verge of collapse.
The only force the Germans could not control finally stopped their advance. The winter of 1941 came earlier than expected and the German troops, confident of an early victory, were unprepared. The fall rains began in October and Russia’s unpaved roads turned into a quagmire stopping the German advance until they froze in mid November. For a short time the German began to move again, but the temperatures continued to drop. By the end of November, the temperatures outside of Moscow had dropped to minus ten Fahrenheit. Weapons froze, motor oil solidified, and heavy snows blocked the roads. More importantly, the inadequately clothed troops were incapable of fighting effectively (In early December, Army Group North reported that they had lost 63 men in the fighting and 325 to frostbite). A German officer described the conditions:
The snow blew almost horizontally in blizzards that sometimes lasted all day long, with the wind piercing our faces with a thousand needles. The cold numbed and deadened the human body from the feet up until the whole body was an aching mass of misery. To keep warm, we had to wear every piece of clothing we owned to achieve a layered effect. Each man fought the cold alone, pitting his determination and will against the bitter winter. We reduced sentry duty to one hour, then to thirty minutes, and finally to fifteen minutes. The cold was, simply, a killer; we were all in danger of freezing to death.[17]
In addition to the frigid temperatures, other factors delayed the German advance. In the fall the bulk of Army Group Center had been diverted south from their advance on Moscow to encircle Soviet armies in the Ukraine. Although successful, precious time was lost from the invasion already delayed by the Balkan campaign. Although the Germans were initially welcomed in many areas as liberators from Stalin’s brutality, Nazi racial policies soon turned the entire Soviet citizenry against the invaders. Viewed by the Germans as “sub-humans,” Soviet citizens were treated with unprecedented brutality. Only three percent of the Soviet troops captured by the Nazis during the war survived. Convinced that surrender meant death, the Soviets fought with ferocity:
Because of this catastrophe, Joseph Stalin rushed everything he could into the reach. On the Moscow approaches he was reported to have sent Russian cavalry against German tanks… in defense of one 300-yard stretch of railroad track 1,600 citizens, including women and boys as young as twelve, dashed suicidally into Nazi gunfire.[18]
Even in areas conquered by the Germans, partisans operated behind the German lines disrupting troop and supply movements. Stalin had foolishly ignored warnings of the German invasion, but a key bit of intelligence played a decisive role in saving Moscow. The Soviet Union had stationed troops in Eastern Siberia where they had frequently clashed with Japanese forces in Mongolia. Stalin was fearful of transferring these troops to the German front because he feared a Japanese invasion of Siberia. In the late fall, a Soviet spy in Tokyo, Richard Sorge, assured the Soviets that the Japanese had decided to move east against the United States rather than west against the USSR. Sorge, a secret German communist and newspaper correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung (his grandfather had been Karl Marx’s secretary), had tried to warn Stalin of the German attack in June and was ignored. This time Stalin believed him and moved the Siberian armies west. To the Siberians, the bitter Moscow winter seemed warm. Under the command of General Georgi Zhukov, and bolstered by the Siberian divisions, the Soviets began a counterattack in early December. The German armies, which had been as close as fifteen miles from the center of Moscow, never got any closer. At the conclusion of the Soviet offensive in late January, the German forces had been driven back two hundred miles.
The fighting on the Eastern Front was the most brutal of the war. By February 1, 1942, the Germans had suffered 918,000 casualties, or almost 30% of their invading force. More importantly, the myth of Nazi invincibility had been shattered at the gates of Moscow. Although the Nazis would resume their Russian offensive in the spring, the nature of the war had changed dramatically. On June 21, 1940 Britain had stood alone against the Nazis, their shipping in peril, cities under bombardment, and armies in North Africa in retreat. Six months later, although still devoid of military victories, Britain had obtained two powerful allies. With the German attack on the Soviet Union and the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, a Grand Alliance had been formed that would eventually doom the Axis dreams of world conquest.
The German invasion of the Soviet Union quickly brought five million additional Jews into the hands of the Nazis (including many who had fled the German invasion of Poland two years earlier). The German march east was not just a military conquest. The Nazi leaders saw it as a form of Armageddon (final battle between good and evil). In a meeting with his top officers two months prior to the invasion Hitler told them:
The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and it will be conducted with unprecedented, merciless and unrelenting harshness.[19]
A month later an order was issued listing categories of persons marked “for execution” in the Nazi invasion. Prominent on the list of categories were officials of the Communist Party, Gypsies, and “all Jews.” To carry out this order of genocide (the systematic and planned extermination of an entire national, racial, political, or ethnic group), four special SS battalions were set up. They were known as special action squads, or Einsatzgrüppen. Consisting of between 500 and 900 men, the Einsatzgrüppen advanced in the wake of the German army. The commanders of these squads were neither professional killers nor military men. One, Otto Ohlendorf, held a doctor’s degree in law and was a research economist. Another, Ernst Biberstein, was a former Protestant minister. The methods of the Einsatzgrüppen were simple and remarkably consistent. Ninety percent of the Jews in the western part of the Soviet Union lived in cities or towns. When they entered a town, the Einsatzgrüppen ordered all of the Jews to assemble in a central place. They were then stripped of their belongings, marched outside of town and then shot. Whenever possible, the Einsatzgrüppen enlisted the aid of the local population to assist in the killings. In areas where anti-Semitism was especially strong, such as Latvia, Lithuania, and the Ukraine, the results were particularly devastating. In some areas the local population did not even await the arrival of the SS. On the night of June 25, 1941, the Lithuanians killed more than 1,500 Jews in the town of Kovno. During the following nights, another 2,300 died.[20]
In Lvov, the Einsatzgrüppen killed 7,000 Jews in a week. But the most brutal of all the murders occurred outside of Kiev. There Jews were ordered to assemble at the Jewish Cemetery by 8:00 a.m. on September 29 “for resettlement” with all of their possessions, money, documents, valuables, and warm clothing. From the cemetery they were marched to a ravine only two miles out of town. Here, at Babi Yar, they were ordered to strip, fold their clothes neatly, and then line up in front of the ravine where they were cut down by machine gun fire. By the time most realized what was happening, they were either too stunned or hysterical to resist. In two days, 35,000 were killed. Those communities missed in the first wave of executions were not spared as the Einsatzgrüppen made sweep after sweep through occupied territory. A German soldier wrote to his wife in September 1942: “We are fighting this war today for the very existence of our people…. Because this war in our view is a Jewish war, the Jews are primarily bearing the brunt of it. In Russia, where there is a German soldier, the Jews are no more.”[21]
Hermann Graebe, a German engineer in charge of the branch office of a German construction firm working in the occupied Ukraine, was a witness to several executions. After the war, Graebe described a mass execution carried out at Dubno in the Ukraine:
On 5 October 1942, when I visited the building office at Dubno, my foreman Hubert Moennikes…told me that…Jews from Dubno had been shot in three large pits….About 1,5000 persons had been killed daily. All of the (remaining) 5,000 Jews…were to be liquidated.
Thereupon in the company of Moennikes I drove to the construction area and saw in its vicinity a heap of earth, about 30 meters long and 2 meters high. Several trucks stood in front of the heap. Armed Ukrainian militia chased the people off the trucks under the supervision of an SS man. The militiamen were guards on the trucks and drove them (the trucks) to and from the excavation. All these people had the prescribed yellow badges on the front and back of all their clothes, and thus were recognized as Jews. Moennikes and I went directly to the excavation. Nobody bothered us. Now we heard shots in quick succession from behind one of the earth mounds. The people who had gotten off the trucks--men, women and children of all ages--had to undress upon the orders of an SS man who carried a riding or dog whip. They had to put down their clothes in fixed places, sorted according to shoes, over and underclothing. I saw a pile of shoes of about 800 to 1,000 pairs, great piles of laundry and clothing. Without screaming or crying these people undressed, stood around by families, kissed each other, said farewells and waited for the nod of another SS man, who stood near the excavation, also with a whip in his hand. During the 15 minutes that I stood near the excavation I have heard no complaints and no requests for mercy. I watched a family of about 8 persons, a man and a woman, both about 50 with their children of about 1, 8 and 10, and two grownup daughters of about 20 to 24. An old woman with snow-white hair held the on year-old child in her arms and sang for it, and tickled it. The child was squeaking from joy. The couple looked on with tears in their eyes. The father pointed toward the sky, fondled his hand, and seemed to explain something to him. At that moment the SS man at the excavation called something to his comrades. The latter counted off about twenty persons and instructed them to walk behind the earth mound. Among them was the family that I had mentioned. I remember very well a girl, blackhaired and slender, passing near me; she pointed to herself and said, “23 years.” I walked around the mound, and stood in front of a tremendous grave. Closely pressed together the people were lying on top of each other so that only their heads were visible. Several of the people (who had been) shot still moved. Some moved their arms and turned their heads to show that they were still alive. The excavation was already two-thirds full. I estimated that it contained about 1,000 people. I looked for the man who did the shooting. I saw an SS man who sat at the rim of the narrow end of the excavation, his feet dangling into the excavation. On his knees he had a machine pistol and he was smoking a cigarette. The completely naked people descended a stairway, which was dug into the clay of the excavation and slipped over the heads of people lying there already to the place to which the SS man directed them. They laid themselves in front of the dead or wounded people, some touched tenderly those (beneath them) who were still alive and spoke to them in a low voice. Then I heard a number of shots. I looked into the excavation and saw how the bodies jerked or the heads rested already motionless on top of the bodies that lay before them. Blood was running from their necks. I was surprised that I was not chased away, but I saw there were two or three postal officers in uniform nearby. Now already the next group approached, descended into the excavation, lined themselves up against the previous victims and was shot. When I walked back, around the mound, I noticed again a transport, which had just arrived. This time it included sick and frail persons. An old, very thin woman with terribly thin legs was undressed by others who were already naked, while two persons held her up. Apparently the woman was paralyzed. The naked people carried the woman around the mound. I left with Moennikes and drove with my car back to Dubno.[22]
It is often asked why the Jews of Eastern Europe went “meekly to their deaths.” In part, the question is unfair. To most Jews, even those who had been constantly exposed to anti-Semitism, the barbarity of the Nazi actions was beyond belief. Few could believe, even up to the last minute, that they would be brutally machine-gunned in cold blood. In addition, there was seldom any true choice of escape:
The extreme closeness of living ties among eastern European Jews condemned many to await the fatal shot in the neck with resignation. To take flight meant abandoning parents, children, and wives, living like a hunted animal in the forests with no hiding place anywhere and haunted always by the guilt of flight. Those who did escape from the edge of the killing-pits were often denounced by local peasants and rejected or killed by anti-Semitic partisan units.[23]
Yet there were some isolated acts of resistance. At Kedainiai, in Lithuania, during the execution of 2,000, a Jewish butcher jumped at a German soldier, dragged him in to the ditch, and killed him by biting his throat. Acts of resistance, however, brought horrible reprisals. In Odessa several German and Romanian officers were killed by a bomb. The next day 1,900 Jews were pinned into a square, sprayed with gasoline, and burned alive.[24]
The Einsatzgrüppen killed approximately 1.2 million Jews between 1941-1943. Shooting, however, soon came to be seen as a less than perfect form of mass murder. It was almost impossible to keep the killings secret. Most were conducted near major population centers and, at first, there was little effort to hide the actions. Civilians often witnessed the executions and German troops even took pictures. The disposal of the bodies was also a problem. Most were buried in shallow pits that were easily uncovered. Late in 1942, a former architect and Einsatzgrüppen commander, Paul Blobel, was ordered by Himmler to remove all traces of the graves. A special unit of prisoners was forced to dig up the bodies and burn them on vast pyres made up of wood and iron rails. Among the sites exhumed was the ravine at Babi Yar. In addition, the strain of murdering thousands of men, women, and children took its toll on the German executioners. Even Himmler, the head of the SS, was affected by viewing an execution near Minsk in 1941. Himmler’s aide, Karl Wolff, later recalled:
Himmler had never seen dead people before and in his curiosity he stood right up to the edge of this open grave…. While he was looking in, Himmler had the deserved bad luck that from one or other of the people who had been shot in the head he got a splash of brains on his coat, and I think it also splashed into his face, and he went very green and pale; he wasn’t actually sick, but he was heaving and turned round and swayed and then I had to jump forward and hold him steady and then I led him away from the grave.[25]
Top Nazis had talked of a “final solution” to the Jewish problem as early June 1941. There was little doubt that “final solution” meant death. Despite the efficiency of the Einsatzgrüppen, the Nazis estimated that as many as 3,000 Jews remained in the Ukraine plus at least 2,000 more in Poland. Most of these Jews were concentrated in ghettos close to large population centers. In addition, the Jews of the occupied areas west of Germany had not been dealt with beyond the punitive measures employed in Germany before the war. In most areas of the west, anti-Semitism was not a significant force. The populations of France, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, and Norway could not be counted on to support open killings. Thus it was unrealistic to believe that mass shootings would rid-Nazi controlled Europe of its over than seven million remaining Jews.
·
Describe the Warsaw Ghetto Revolt.
On January 20, 1942, fifteen top German officials met in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to discuss the “final solution” of the Jewish question. The meeting was called by Reinhard Heydrich, second in command to Himmler in the SS. Assisting Heydrich was the head of the SS Race and Resettlement Office, Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann had previously been involved in attempts to forcibly emigrate Jews from the Reich. Over half of the fifteen men who attended the Wannsee Conference held doctorates. They represented the heads of many top government agencies. In addition, representatives of the governors of occupied Poland and the Eastern Territories were in attendance. Heydrich had called them together to put together an overall plan to deal with Europe’s remaining Jews. Sitting around a table as elegantly dressed waiters served food and drink, Heydrich told the assembled representatives that all of Europe’s Jews would be transferred to the east. Those who could be used for slave labor would temporarily be allowed to live, but the rest would be immediately killed. To accomplish this task a network of extermination camps would be established along the main rail lines in Poland. Here “factories of death” would be constructed, a process by which thousands could be killed and their bodies disposed of without a trace. The method of killing was to be by poison gas. Eichmann was entrusted with the task of organizing the deportations.
Murder by gassing was not new. The Nazis had used gas chambers as early as 1939 in their euthanasia (the practice of ending the life of an individual suffering from a terminal illness or an incurable condition) program to kill the physically and mentally handicapped. The victims had been placed in gas chambers disguised as showers. After death, their bodies had been burned in crematoriums. Technicians from the euthanasia program had also experimented with killing Jews in the east with gas. In December 1941, Jews from the Lodz ghetto had been deported to a country house at Chelmno where they had been loaded into vans. The vans had been hermetically sealed and the exhaust gas from the engines was cycled back into the vans. By the time of the Wannsee Conference, a thousand Jews a day were being gassed at Chelmno.
By the spring of 1942, six killing centers had been set up in Poland. Chelmno, Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor were exclusively death camps. Virtually everyone sent to these camps was immediately gassed in chambers filled with the exhaust of diesel engines.[26] Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau were both labor camps and extermination centers. It was Auschwitz-Birkenau that would be transformed into the main factory of death. Formerly a prison camp for Poles and Russian prisoners of war, Auschwitz-Birkenau sat at the junction of railways linking the major cities of Vienna, Riga, and Berlin. As early as September 1941, experiments with gassing prisoners had begun. An experiment was conducted on a group of 850 prisoners (mostly Soviet prisoners of war) who were gassed in one of the basements with a chemical pesticide, Zyklon B. Zyklon B eventually proved to be more effective than engine exhaust, killing in 3-15 minutes, and later in the fall camp commandant Rudolf Höess ordered the conversion of two isolated farm buildings into gas chambers. The first of these was completed and put into operation in March 1942.
All over occupied Europe Jews were notified that they would be transported to the east for “resettlement.” Most of the first transports came from the overloaded ghettos of the Eastern Europe, but soon Jews in the west were being rounded up, crowded into cattle cars, and shipped east. At Auschwitz-Birkenau there were 150,000 prisoners who were used as slave laborers, both to operate the camp and to work in the network of factories that had been built near the camp by German businesses. The wartime shortage of labor in Germany was alleviated by the use of slave labor. Many slave labor camps were established near factories in Germany, but companies, such as I.G. Farben and Krupp also established factories near Auschwitz-Birkenau where artificial rubber, cement, and armaments were manufactured. In addition, Auschwitz-Birkenau prisoners also mined coal.
In July 1942, Himmler visited Auschwitz-Birkenau and witnessed the gassing of a transport of Dutch Jews. Höess explained the problem that he had with the disposal of bodies, which were still being buried in pits. Himmler authorized the construction of additional gas chambers and crematoria capable of murdering up to 4,756 people per day. The process became an assembly line of death. Transports were met at the camp by prisoners who quickly emptied the train cars and lined the prisoners up. As the prisoners advanced toward the camp, a team of doctors made a quick selection of those who were capable of performing work. The rest, the old, sick, pregnant women, and all children (under sixteen), were immediately sent to the gas chambers. Rita Kesselman recalled her arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau:
For three days and three nights, we were taken. Destination unknown. Trains were stopping in villages and train stations, in cities. We were screaming through the windows, “Water, water.” We were hungry. The pail in the corner filled up very quickly. And then people went on the floor. The stink, the smell, in the cattle car was terrible. People were changing positions. One was standing up, and one was sitting down. I was alone. I didn’t have my parents to cuddle up with. I was sitting there by myself.
After three days and three nights, we arrived in a big field. And that was Auschwitz. Auschwitz was a city, and Birkenau was a suburb. In Birkenau went on all the killing, gassing, and burning the people. There were four crematoriums in Birkenau. When I came into Auschwitz, the trains didn’t go to Birkenau. They came into Auschwitz. And we were made, the people that were selected. . ., they made us come off the train. In front of us, SS men with guns and dogs. And on trucks, more SS men with guns, watching us.
And we saw people in striped clothes, helping the people coming off the train. At the time, we didn’t know who they were. They were like mutes. They didn’t talk. They weren’t allowed to talk. They were Jews, most of them, that helped the people come off the train. They were prisoners that had to help the Germans.
We were told to separate the men from the women. On the side were empty trucks waiting. The women and children were told to go on the trucks. And older people. And then, from the younger people were selected, people to go to the right and to the left. At the time, we did not know that the people who were selected to go to the right, would live and the rest would die. About one hundred people were picked from the women to go to work. And we envied the others, because we thought that they would go on the trucks. And after three nights being exhausted and hungry, we had to walk.
It was smoggy and raining. We walked for miles, and as we came closer, we saw like a camp with barbed wires. A band was playing at the gate. And the SS men were watching the camp from towers. A band of women played at the gate. They brought us inside. There were barracks---twenty-five barracks. They put us in an empty barrack on the floor. And we waited all night, not knowing what is going to happen to us.
In the morning, the SS came, women and men SS, and they took us to another barracks. It was a bathhouse. We were made to undress, leave the clothes on one side, and they took us to the other side. Every person was given a tattoo. My number was thirty thousand seven hundred seventy-five. . . .
Our hair was shaved and we were given striped clothes and wooden shoes. And that was our uniform for the two years I was in Auschwitz. I never bathed. I never saw water. I never had water to drink.[27]
For those who were not selected for forced labor, there was no shaving or tattooing. Most died within hours of their arrival. Commandant Höess describes:
The extermination procedure in Auschwitz took place as follows: Jews selected for gassing were taken as quietly as possible to the crematoriums, the men being separated from the women, in the undressing rooms, prisoners of the Special Detachment, detailed for this purpose, would tell them in their own language that they were going to be bathed and deloused, that they must leave their clothes neatly together and above all remember where they had put them, so that they would be able to find them again quickly after the delousing. The prisoners of the Special Detachment had the greatest interest in seeing that the operation proceeded smoothly and quickly. After undressing, the Jews went into the gas chambers, which were furnished with showers and water pipes and gave a realistic impression of a bathhouse.
The women went in first with their children, followed by the men who were always the fewer in number. This part of the operation nearly always went smoothly, for the prisoners of the Special Detachment would calm those who betrayed any anxiety or who perhaps had some inkling of their fate. As an additional precaution these prisoners of the Special Detachment and an SS man always remained in the chamber until the last moment.
The door would now be quickly screwed up and the gas immediately discharged by the waiting disinfectors through vents in the ceilings of the gas chambers, down a shaft that led to the floor. This insured the rapid distribution of the gas. It could be observed through the peephole in the door that those who were standing nearest to the induction vents were killed at once. It can be said that about one-third died straight away. The remainder staggered about and began to scream and struggle for air. The screaming, however, soon changed to the death rattle and in a few minutes all lay still. After twenty minutes at the latest, no movement could be discerned. The time required for the gas to have effect varied according to the weather, and depended on whether it was damp or dry, cold or warm. It also depended on the quality of the gas, which was never exactly the same, and on the composition of the transports, which might contain a high proportion of healthy Jews, or old and sick, or children. The victims became unconscious after a few minutes, according to their distance from the intake shaft. Those who screamed and those who were old or sick or weak, or the small children, died quicker than those who were healthy or young.
The door was opened half an hour after the induction of the gas, and the ventilation switched on. Work was immediately begun on removing the corpses. There was no noticeable change in the bodies and no sign of convulsions or discoloration. Only after the bodies had been left lying for some time, that is to say after several hours, did the usual death stains appear in the places where they had lain….
The special detachment now set about removing the gold teeth and cutting the hair from the women. After this, the bodies were taken up by the elevator and laid in front of the ovens, which had meanwhile been stoked up. Depending on the size of the bodies, up to three corpses could be put into one oven at the same time. The time required for cremation also depended on this, but on an average it took twenty minutes.
During the period when the fires were kept burning continuously, without a break, the ashes fell through the grates and were constantly removed and crushed to powder. The ashes were taken in trucks to the Vistula (River), where they immediately drifted away and dissolved.[28]
By June of 1943, the renovated Auschwitz-Birkenau was fully operational. By the end of the war 1,250,000 had died at Auschwitz, 90% of them Jews. All over occupied Europe the deportations accelerated. Between 1942 and 1944, the ghettos of the east were emptied as their inhabitants were sent to the death camps. In most cases the Judenrats themselves were forced to make the decision of who would go and who would stay.
How the Jewish leaders should have responded to this crisis is an almost unanswerable moral dilemma. In the Warsaw ghetto the chairman of the council, Adam Czerniakow, refused to issue an order for the deportation of 120,000 including children. Writing “the SS wants me to kill children with my own hands,” he committed suicide on July 23, 1942. Nevertheless the deportations went on. When the Nazis ordered the deportation of a Warsaw ghetto orphanage, the head of the orphanage, Janusz Korczak, accompanied his children although he had not been included in the deportation order. Korczak lined his children up in rows of four, marched them through the ghetto, and accompanied them, along with his staff of nine to Treblinka where all were immediately gassed.
In other cases Jews cooperated with the Nazis, at least in part. In the Vilna ghetto (in Lithuania) a group of resistance fighters, led by Yitzhak Wittenberg, used landmines to destroy German troop trains. When the Nazis discovered Wittenberg’s identity, they demanded that the ghetto leaders surrender him on the threat that the entire ghetto would be destroyed. The head of the Judenrat, Jacob Gens, ordered Wittenberg to surrender.[29] In the Lodz ghetto the Judenrat chairman, Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, attempted to work with the Germans on the deportations even though he knew of their fate. “I must cut off the limbs to save the body,” he argued. After Rumkowski signed an order for the deportation of 20,000 children and old people to their death at Chelmno, he was able to convince the Germans to stop all further deportations from September 1942-June 1944. During this time Lodz became a virtual slave labor camp itself with almost all of the ghetto’s Jews employed in armaments factories. When the deportations resumed, the ghetto was eliminated. Rumkowski himself died in Auschwitz. In 1944 Hitler ordered the destruction of Hungary’s Jewish community. Hungary, a military ally of Germany, had left its well-assimilated Jewish population virtually untouched prior to this time. Eichmann himself was dispatched to Budapest to oversee the deportation of the Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. Although the Judenrat was by now aware of the fate of Jews deported to “the East,” they cooperated with Eichmann in the hopes that part of the community could be saved. One of the Jewish leaders, Rudolf Kastner, was sentence to death by a people’s court in Budapest for his collaboration with the Nazis. After the war he was later assassinated in Israel by two Hungarian Jews. Tens of thousands of Budapest Jews were saved through the remarkable efforts of a Swedish diplomat, Raoul Wallenberg, who supplied them with Swedish passports and sheltered them from the Nazis.[30]
Jews also took up arms, at incredible odds, to oppose their killers. In the Warsaw ghetto, after Czerniakow’s suicide, an underground resistance movement began to form. Between July and November of 1942 approximately 300,000 Jews were deported from the ghetto to Treblinka. By 1943 less than 55,000 of the ghetto’s original population of 400,000 remained. In January 1943 the Nazis ordered the deportation of 8,000 additional ghetto residents. They refused to report. German troops entering the ghetto were fired upon and were forced to withdraw by the Z.O.B. (Jewish Fighting Organization). On April 19 the Germans invaded the ghetto again, this time with 2,000 troops, expecting resistance. Once again, on the first day, the Germans were routed. The next day the Germans returned. A ghetto resident wrote in his diary:
Our brave defenders are holding out at their posts. Germans--in spite of everything--have to fight for access to each house. Gates of houses are barricaded, each house in Ghetto is a defensive fortress, each flat is a citadel--Jewish defenders are showering missiles from flats’ windows and throwing shells at bandits.
The defenders are passing over from one street to another through garrets (attics) and recapturing streets, which are threatened by German bandits. The murderers have introduced flame-throwers into action. House in the ghetto are set on fire.[31]
The Germans had planned to liquidate the ghetto in three days. It took them over a month. They were forced to virtually burn the ghetto to the ground in the process. Gas had to be pumped into the sewers to drive out the resistance fighters. In the end almost all of the ghetto fighters died, many by their own hands, committing suicide.
Resistance also took place within the camps. In Treblinka, prisoners destroyed the camp in August 1943 by spraying gasoline on the buildings and igniting it. About 150 Jews escaped from the camp and it was not rebuilt. In October 1943, the prisoners at Sobibor, led by Soviet POWs, rebelled. Eleven guards were killed and 300 prisoners escaped. Most were hunted down and killed, but a few managed to join partisan units.[32] In Auschwitz prisoners revolted, killed several SS men, and burned one of the crematoria in October 1944.
Efforts to enlist Allied help to stop the extermination process proved fruitless. In 1942 two Czech Jews escaped from Auschwitz with information detailing the extermination process. Jan Karski, a member of the Polish underground, carried this information to Allied leaders, including Churchill and Roosevelt, imploring them to order bombings of the extermination facilities, but no action was taken. In 1943, Allied bombers dropped leaflets over Germany informing the German people of the extermination campaign, but the extermination facilities were not bombed.
In 1996, Harvard University professor Daniel J. Goldhagen published a book entitled Hitler’s Willing Executioners in which he alleged that the vast majority of ordinary Germans involved in the murder of the Jews did so enthusiastically due to the deep-seated anti-Semitism present in German society. Little coercion (force or threat) was required. As one German Jew noted in 1942:
It was, after all, no surprise. Because for ten years the inferiority and
harmfulness of the Jews has been emphasized in every newspaper morning and
evening, in every radio broadcast and on many posters, etc., without a voice in
favor of the Jews being permitted to be raised.[33]
Goldhagen’s work included numerous examples of ordinary Germans (as opposed to SS men or Nazi Party members) who participated willingly in executing Jews even when they were clearly told that they could decline to participate.
By the end of the war almost six million Jews had perished in the Holocaust. In addition many gypsies and resistance fighters also died in the death camps. In areas where anti-Semitism was high before the war, almost the entire Jewish population was destroyed. 88% of Poland’s 3,200,000 Jews died. A similar percentage perished in Latvia, Lithuania, and the Ukraine. In Romania 425,000 died, mostly at the hands of their own countrymen. Where the local population refused to participate in the killings and deportations, far fewer died. In Bulgaria, only 6% died. Losses were generally less in the west than in the east. In Belgium, France, Denmark, and Norway, more than two-thirds of the Jews survived. Only in Holland, where the Jewish population was very large and there was an aggressive attempt to round up the Jews despite the courageous acts of many non-Jews to protect them, did more than half perish.[34]
Jeffrey T. Stroebel, The
Sycamore School, 1996. Revised 1998.
[1] Time 25 September 1939.
[2] Michael Berenbaum, The World Must Know (Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1993), p. 61.
[3] Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Auschwitz: 1270 to the Present (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), pp. 113-114.
[4] Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust (New York: Henry Holt, 1985), pp. 84-108.
[5] Sara Grossman-Weil quoted in Debórah Dwork, Children With a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 197.
[6] Gilbert, The Holocaust, p. 106.
[7] Mark Arnold-Forster, The World at War (New York: Stein and Day, 1973), p. 46.
[8] Time 10 June 1940.
[9] Time 10 June 1940.
[10] Time 1 July 1940.
[11] Time 1 July 1940.
[12] Winston Churchill, Blood, Sweat, and Tears (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1941), p. 297.
[13] Time 25 November 1940.
[14] Time 31 March 1941.
[15] Winston Churchill, The Grand Alliance (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950), p. 370.
[16] Time 7 July 1941.
[17] Siegfried Knappe and Ted Brusaw, Soldat (New York: Orion Books, 1992), p. 202.
[18] Time 27 October 1941
[19] Nora Levin, The Holocaust (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1968), p. 238.
[20] Levin, The Holocaust, p. 247-248.
[21] Daniel J. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), p. 405.
[22] International Military Tribunal at Nürnberg Document #2992-PS Exhibit # USA 494.
[23] Levin, The Holocaust, p. 266.
[24] Gilbert, The Holocaust, p. 184, 217-218.
[25] Recollections of former SS General Karl Wolff, The World at War, Thames Television documentary, London, 27 March 1974.
[26] There were only a handful of survivors from any of these four camps.
[27] Facing History and Ourselves, Holocaust and Human Behavior (Boston: Facing History and Ourselves National Foundation, 1994), pp. 345-346.
[28] Rudolf Höess, Commandant of Auschwitz (Cleveland: World Publishers, 1959), pp. 222-223.
[29] Wittenberg refused his comrades urgings to ignore the order and fight the Germans which surely would have resulted in the extermination of the entire ghetto. He died in the Gestapo prison soon after his surrender.
[30] Wallenberg disappeared after the war and died, presumably, in Soviet captivity.
[31] Gilbert, The Holocaust, p. 560.
[32] One of the few Sobibor survivors, Semyon Rozenfeld, later joined the Soviet Army and was part of the forces that triumphantly entered Berlin in the spring of 1945.
[33] Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, pp. 448-449.
[34] Estimates of losses are from Jacob Lestchinsky, Balance Sheet of Extermination, American Jewish Conference, 1946.