The Holocaust
Chapter 48
“Not far from us, flames, huge flames, were rising from a ditch. Something was being burned there. A truck drew close and unloaded its hold: small children.”
As the Third Reich hurtled toward utter collapse in the spring of 1945 the advancing Allied armies began to uncover evidence of the most heinous crimes of the National Socialist regime. The first of the German Konzentrationslager (Concentration Camps) had actually been located by the Soviets as they drove into Poland during Operation Bagration, overrunning Majandek near Lublin. Despite this and the subsequent liberation of an even larger camp at Aushwitz in January of 1945, it was not until the Western Allies began to liberate camps near Buchenwald that the full story was widely broken in the international press.
American troops enter Buchenwald Concentration Camp
The horror that was uncovered shocked the world, and filled exhausted soldiers of the Allied armies with a terrible resolve to push the tottering National Socialist state into oblivion. What they saw as they crashed through barbed wire gates was a field of corpses, many still living, that was the culmination of a buildup that had started with the early days of the Weimar Republic.
In the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the German Empire and the end of the Second World War the country had found itself in a state of near anarchy, as the fledgling Republic sought to establish itself while communists attempting to seize power were attacked by lose conglomerations of returning soldiers from the abruptly disbanded Imperial Army, leading to street battles and general chaos. This gave way to fighting between political movements, one of which was the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP), commonly abbreviated to Nazis. This one of many that propagated the idea that the cause of defeat in 1918 was a betrayal by German communists, as well as by a conspiracy of the Jewish population of the country (notwithstanding that a great many Jews had served in the Kaiser’s armies during the Great War).
Nazis during their attempt to seize power by force in 1923
Although the party declined after the stabilization of the German economy in the mid 1920s, it came back with vengeance after the start of the Great Depression at the end o of the decade. Finally, after numerous electoral contests the party held a significant share of the Reichstag’s seats, and in 1933 its leader, Adolf Hitler was named Chancellor as part of a last ditch effort by German conservatives to harness and control the rising movement. This failed utterly, with Chancellor Hitler using the burning of the Reichstag Building (allegedly by communists but very likely by Nazi agents) a month after taking office as a pretense to use his party’s majority to issue an emergency decree that suspended most civil rights and allowed a rapid purging of the Nazi’s political opposition. The subsequent Enabling Act empowered the Chancellor to rule by decree, bypassing the Reichstag entirely. The death of President Hindenburg in 1934 cleared the last obstacle, allowing Hitler to declare himself the Fuhrer and firmly establish a National Socialist dictatorship.
Hitler greets President Hindenburg early in his time as Chancellor
With all internal obstacles cleared, the Nazis began to pass laws at all levels of government targeting Jews, political dissidents, and others. Central to these were the Nuremburg laws of 1935, which formally stripped Jews of their citizenship, as well as legally defining that to be a Jew was not based on religion, but rather on racial heritage. Those thus designated as Jews or mixed-blood were barred from government jobs as well as several professions. Propaganda campaigns began to ostracize Jews from the general German population, and encouraged boycotts and even acts of violence against Jews and their property. Many smaller towns proudly announced that they had become “Jew-free” after forcing their Jewish neighbors to flee. In the fall of 1938 the government commenced a large scale deportation operation targeting Jews of Polish descent. Forced to move eastward, Poland refused to accept them, leaving them to live in sqalid camps along the border until they were finally allowed to enter the country on the eve of the Second World War in the late summer of 1939. The Anschluss of Austria served to expand the state-sponsored persecution to that country as well, SS units moving rapidly to secure Austrian records on Jewish citizens for persecution.
SA Brownshirts during a boycott of Jewish owned businesses
Polish National Archives
Things came to a head on the night of 9 November, 1938, as Nazi security forces (The SA “Brownshirts” and the SS) launched an orgy of violence across the county. In response to the assassination of a Nazi diplomat in Paris, the annual commemoration of the failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch served as a public vessel to announce the death of the official, with a fiery speech by Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels followed by clandestine orders to Nazi party offices around the country to prepare for violent demonstration. The secret police, the dread Gestapo, issued arrest orders for thousands of Jewish community leaders. Orders were further issued to police around the country to protect non-Jewish citizens and property, while aiding and abetting the attacks on the Jewish community.
SA men break windows during Kristallnacht
Mobs of SA and SS men were joined by Hitler Youth and general citizens across the country to burn and loot Jewish businesses, residences and places of worship. Even cemeteries were targeted for mass vandalization. Individuals were often forced to clean up the damage afterward, while onlookers watched the burning synagogues and the destruction of sacred articles, such as Torah scrolls. Some victims were even forced to perform exercises until they collapsed from exhaustion, or perform demeaning acts in front of Nazi party members. Many were physically and sexually assaulted, and many were outright murdered. The streets, littered with crystals of broken glass from shattered windows, gave rise to the name Kristallnacht to describe the event.
The gutted ruins of a synagogue in Berlin after Kristallnacht
Even more sinister was the fate of those who were arrested. Kristallnacht included the first large scale arrest of German Jews, and they soon found themselves being transferred to Concentration Camps located at Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. These camps had been opened shortly after Hitler had taken power, but until this point were primarily labor camps for political dissidents, overseen by the SS. Mass arrests of “asocial” (gypsies, the disabled, homeless and prostitutes, among others) individuals had begun earlier in 1938, and the influx of almost 30,000 Jews overloaded the system, with the new prisoners crowded into filthy conditions and subjected to near constant physical abuse. The wrought iron gates of the camp at Dachau included the slogan “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work Makes you Free), a phrase that would resonate through history.
Prisoners are assembled at a concentration camp in Oranienburg
Many of those arrested following Kristallnacht were quickly released, although many had to give up their property and declare their intention to move to another country. But not all were released, remaining in the camps for hard labor. New camps were opened at Flossenburg and Mauthausen, located near quarries so as to allow prisoners to be utilized as slave labor to extract building materials, with Jehovah’s Witnesses being added to the prisoners by the Nazi officials as well. At the end of August, 1939 a number of prisoners were killed by their guards as part of a false flag attack against Germany, supposedly by Polish troops. Thus justified, Poland was invaded on 1 September, starting the Second World War.
As the Wehrmacht drove into Poland, SS death squads, Einsatzgruppen, were on their heels, moving to arrest and execute Polish citizens designated on pre-arranged lists as well as targets of opportunity, such as Jews, Gypsies and others. Aided by regular military units, these groups terrorized the population of the newly occupied country, all while larger plans were set in motion. As the new “General Government” was set up the same racial laws instituted in Germany were placed into effect, with Jewish citizens stripped of all their rights. Orders soon came down from the highest levels of the SS Security Service (the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD) to begin deporting Jews to designated areas within urban centers such as Warsaw, where they were segregated into walled off ghettos.
The wall separating the Warsaw Ghetto from the rest of the city
Meanwhile, back in Germany another program had been launched under the orders of Hitler, directing the forced euthanasia of various mentally and physically disabled patients in German hospitals. Later known as Aktion T4, this originally targeted infants and toddlers, who were taken to what were supposedly specialty pediatric wards, but in reality simply holding areas until they could be killed via lethal injection. The deaths were officially logged as due to pneumonia. Later in 1939, the program expanded to include older patients living in mental institutions, hospitals and nursing homes.
German police load French Jews onto trains for deportation
The concentration camp system was also expanded as the war began, with new camps being established in Poland and other occupied territories, including a large facility at the former Polish Army barracks at Auschwitz. The expansion of the war in 1940 saw further expansion of Nazi repression across Europe, with Jews and other “subhuman” groups being registered and closely monitored in occupied Denmark, Norway, The Netherlands, Belgium and France. The invasion of the USSR in 1941 was again followed by Einsatzgruppen, and special orders were issued that any Jewish Soviet citizens were to be considered partisans and executed. The ensuing slaughter claimed the lives of almost one million Jews during Operation Barbarossa.
A member of an Einsatzgruppen moments before executing the last Jew in the city of Berdychiv in Soviet Ukraine, leaving him to fall into a mass grave below
January of 1942 saw a major conference convened at a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee. Chaired by SD Director SS Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich, this meeting saw the heads of numerous SS and government departments congregated to hear the outline for a planned “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem”. In short, the plan was to begin the mass deportation of Jews from all over the continent to specially designated extermination camps to be established at several existing concentration camps for murder on an industrial scale.
The main gate of Auschwitz, with the infamous slogan “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work Makes You Free”)
Six such camps were established, at Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor and Majdanek. Killing at these camps would be primarily accomplished through gassing, initially inside of vans pushing their exhaust into the prisoner compartments before purpose build gas chambers were ready. Disguised as showers, victims would be stripped naked before being herded inside and locked in. At this point, guards above would pour cans of Zyklon B, a fumigating compound that came in the form of crystals. Exposed to oxygen, they would release cyanide gas, leading to rapid lung failure and death of the victims. Subsequently guards would pick over the corpses to remove gold teeth, while others sorted the victims’ belongings. The bodies themselves would be removed to be burned in open air pits, or in the case of Auschwitz, large scale crematoriums that were operated around the clock by conscripted prisoners (Sonderkommando).
Inside the Auschwitz gas chambers
Under the guise of being resettled in the newly conquered eastern territories, Jews were removed from ghettos by police and SS men, loaded into cattle cars and transported by rail to concentration camps for processing, known as Selection. Here upon arrival at the camp the prisoners would be sorted by the guards based on their health, age, sex and physical condition. Those who were believed to be useful for slave labor would be sent to concentration camps, while the remainder, including the vast majority of the women, children and elderly would be taken directly to the gas chambers for extermination. Those who survived would face periodic rounds of additional selection, all the while forced to toil at tasks ranging from factory work to mining and quarrying. Others would be subjected to horrific medical experimentation or simply tortured for the amusement of sadistic SS guards.
Prisoners at Mauthausen Concentration Camp engaged in forced labor
As the ghettos were liquidated, some fought back. In Warsaw, the residents had been stockpiling smuggled arms and munitions, and in the spring of 1943 launched an armed revolt on Passover against the SS, assisted by Polish Home Army troops. Initial success lef to Himmler ordering the removal of the SS Police Commandant in Warsaw, and his replacement, Jurgen Stroop, led a counterattack into the Ghetto with reinforced SS troops. Despite this, it would still take almost a month to destroy every pocket of resistance in the Ghetto, during which most of the area was razed. The day after fighting ceased, Stroop personally oversaw the demolition of the Great Synagogue of Warsaw, marking the end of the Ghetto.
Prisoners are escorted through a burning street during the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto
1943 would also see revolts in the camps. Smuggled weapons allowed an uprising at Treblinka that allowed 70 inmates to escape and halted extermination there for most of August. Another in October took place at Sobibor that allowed a similar number to escape after assassinating several SS officers, and in early 1944 another at Auschwitz saw a crematorium captured before the SS were able to regain control. In all events, liberal use of gunfire by guards ensured heavy casualties among prisoners.
Jews are Selected for the gas chambers after their arrival at Auschwitz
As the war situation deteriorated the killings only accelerated. As Germany’s allies began to collapse in 1944, the Nazis moved to shore up their control, and with it came deportations. One of the largest took place in the late Spring of 1944, with the Hungarian government turned into a German vassal when their commitment to the war began to fade. SS units were allowed into the country, supported by Hungarian police and troops. Ghettos were set up briefly, but within two months almost the entire Jewish population of the country had been loaded onto cattle cars and shipped to extermination camps.
Jews selected for extermination are marched to the gas chambers
By late 1944, however, it was clear that soon the rapidly advancing Red Army would overrun the camps in Poland. The concentration camp at Majdanek had been captured by Soviet troops in July, and the first real accounts of what had been happening began to leak out. In response, Himmler ordered all prisoners evacuated back into the German interior. Gassing at Auschwitz was terminated in January of 1945, with the last prisoners sent on a death march through the frozen forests to camps in Germany. Death squads followed behind the shoot any who began to fall out of formation, and when the marches stopped it was for transport on open train cars in the frigid winter. Only about one in four prisoners survived the brutal march to reach camps like Dachau or Buchenwald, among others.
Emaciated inmated at Buchenwald in 1945
As the German war situation collapsed in the spring of 1945, some elements of its upper leadership could see the writing on the wall. Himmler himself was among them, and in his hope to save himself and potentially even become a palatable post-Hitler leader of the country in a war of the western powers against the Soviet Union began to negotiate with Swedish diplomats. Meeting with Count Folke Bernadotte, Himmler agreed to quietly begin sending Scandinavian prisoners to safety in Swedish Red Cross buses escorted by the Gestapo. This operation was to be kept secret from the Fuhrer, and would allow for the evacuation of over 15,000 prisoners. It would not be enough to save Himmler, however.
Danish Red Cross busses evacuating prisoners in 1945
As the Red Army continued to advance, they liberated more camps in Poland in early 1945. Auschwitz was captured by Soviet troops on 27 January, with approximately 7,000 inmates who had been left behind as the SS had evacuated. Efforts commenced immediately to provide aid to the survivors, and Soviet propaganda seized upon the camp as an example of the barbarity of the Germans. The first camp to be liberated in the west came on 4 April, as US troops from Patton’s Third Army liberated the Ohrdruf satellite camp of the Buchenwald complex.
An American soldier inspects crematorium at Buchenwald
The horrors found there were quickly relayed up the chain of command, and on 12 April Eisenhower personally toured the camp. The sights of mountains of bodies, starved prisoners, and the scenes of torture and suffering had a strong effect on everyone who entered, and Patton ordered local civilians from Weimar to be brought to the camp to witness the aftermath of the crimes perpetrated in their own community and nation. Subsequently Eisenhower arranged for various journalists and dignitaries to visit the camp, documenting the events that had occurred there so that they would not be forgotten or doubted by history.
Prisoners demonstrate torture techniques used at Buchenwald to Eisenhower, Patton and other American officers
By April of 1945 the end of the war in Europe was very near. US forces were by now positioned along the Elbe River, only sixty miles from Berlin. British forces were pushing toward Denmark, while more Americans drove into Austria to close off the feared Nazi redoubt in the Alps. The climax of the war was to come in the east, however, as the Soviets massed an enormous army along the Oder, poised to smash through the last defenses around the Reich’s capitol itself.
Piles of eyeglasses taken from murdered prisoners at a concentration camp
The Third Reich existed for just over a decade. During this period it was responsible for the murder of an estimated six million Jews, half a million Gypsies, 300,000 disabled people and tens of thousands of others, including political dissidents, homosexuals and others. These numbers are exclusive of those who were killed as a direct result of military action as opposed to targeted elements of the genocide.
A burial detail of German civilians under American guard interning the bodies of victims from a nearby camp
The Perpetrators
The above list is only a small sample of some of the major perpetrators. The total included large numbers of German and other Axis government officials, military officers, business owners, and others.