The Nazis, Poland, and the Jews

My time spent in Poland, specifically Warsaw, Krakow, and Lublin, got me thinking about Nazi policy in Poland during the Second World War. This is one of my main historical interests and is largely the reason for my having traveled to Poland in the first place.

Because of its Jewish population and location (in the way of the Nazis' desired expansion), present-day Poland was the location of all six extermination camps (Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Majdanek). Its non-Jewish population was also ravaged, as they were deported from their homes and requisitioned for forced labor. When the Warsaw Uprising broke out in August 1944, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler gave an order that the entire city was to be destroyed and its population slaughtered: indeed, 85% of the city was left in ruins and 200,000 people were killed.

German policy toward the Poles differed from their policies toward the nations it subsequently conquered in Western Europe, and in many ways presaged what was to come after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The Gestapo had drawn up the names of 60,000 prominent Polish intellectuals, professionals, priests, etc. - these were hunted down and put against the wall. In a particularly infamous event, some 180 professors of Krakow's prestigious Jagiellonian University were arrested in one swoop. They subsequently died in Sachsenhausen and other concentration camps in the German Reich.

Where did the Poles stand in Nazi theory? Hitler himself did not seem particularly interested in Poland or the Poles until the late 1930s, when he and his Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop tried unsuccessfully to extort the Poles into giving the Germans some of their newly-won lands. In the aftermath of the First World War, Germany had lost a swathe of its former territories, known as the Danzig Corridor, that sliced through Germany and gave the Poles access to the sea at Danzig (Gdansk in Polish), which was declared a Free City by the League of Nations. When the Poles did not agree to cede the lands to Hitler, the Nazi leader and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels vented their fury on the nation. They concentrated on Polish discrimination against ethnic Germans living in Poland (which was actually occurring, although Goebbels greatly exaggerated it). Further, Poland was necessary for Germanic settlement and as a launching pad for future aggression against the Soviet Union.

Hitler, with utter contempt for the Western Allies, who had not raised a finger as he renewed German conscription and rearmament, remilitarized the Rhineland, annexed Austria and the Sudetenland, and finally swallowed up all of Czechoslovakia, decided to invade Poland, assured (especially by Ribbentrop) that France and Britain would not intervene. When they declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939, Hitler was furious; his desire for a limited war to expand German Lebensraum had now become a war involving the great European powers. 

He did have an ace in the hole, however. On August 23, 1939, von Ribbentrop had signed a non-aggression pact with Stalin's Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov. The two nations agreed not to fight one another and also, in a secret protocol, split Poland and the Baltic countries (Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia) between them. Following this, on September 17, 1939 the Soviets invaded Poland from the east. The Polish army fought bravely but futilely against the two great powers. While Britain and France had declared war, they did nothing to help. 

The Nazis' administration was, in true Nazi fashion, fairly confusing, with various overlapping power centers. Two areas were annexed to the Reich: the Wartheland (today's Western Poland, centered in Posen) and Danzig-West Prussia. They were under the rule of, respectively, Arthur Greiser and Albert Forster, two Old Fighters of the Nazi Party who loathed each other. The area between the Vistula and the Bug Rivers became known as the General Government, with its capital at Krakow, and was put under the leadership of Hans Frank, who ruled like a medieval despot from Wawel Castle. He clashed repeatedly with the Higher SS and Police Leader (HSSPF) of the General Government, Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger, who reported directly to Himmler. 

The Germans began almost immediately to send in Germans from the Baltic States to the Wartheland; room was made for them by shoving out the Poles and the Jews, who wound up in the General Government, much to Frank's chagrin. It was not yet known what would be done with the Jews: major ghettoes were set up in Lodz and Warsaw, into which hundreds of thousands were crammed, first to be concentrated for deportation to somewhere near Lublin, then to Madagascar (an absurd idea that, nonetheless, prompted serious thought in top Nazi circles), and then, finally, somewhere to the "East" after an invasion of the Soviet Union. At this point, Jews were being shot out of hand, their synagogues were burned to the ground, and Jewish men were humiliated by German soldiers who grinned as they cut their beards and sidecurls. However, at this time, there was no plan for their systematic extermination. The Lodz ghetto actually became productive, but overpopulation led to disease and starvation, and the Jews, concentrated to eventually go somewhere, were stuck after the failures of the Lublin settlement plan, the Madagascar plan, and of the stalled invasion in the Soviet Union, which petered out before Moscow in December 1941. What was to be done? 

Arthur Greiser, the hardline Gauleiter (regional leader) of the Wartheland, in whose territory Lodz was located, thought it best to have them murdered. Jews were sent from the Lodz ghetto to Chelmno, not far from the city, where they were gathered into a manor house, made to undress, and loaded into vans. The back of the vans were hermetically sealed and the vehicles' exhaust was rerouted into them, killing the Jews via carbon monoxide poisoning. The van drove to a wooded location nearby and the dead Jews were buried in mass graves. This was the first of the death camps. It was established to "solve" a purely local "problem" in the Wartheland. This is a microcosm of the Nazi decision-making apparatus, which went as follows: Hitler gave the general parameters, but local leaders were given leeway in how to get it done. Hitler's role throughout the Second World War was always as a radical prod, as was the case with Heinrich Himmler and his deputy Reinhard Heydrich. When the latter two visited Einsatzgruppen killing sites in the East, invariably more radically murderous policies would follow.

Himmler appointed one of his most loyal and brutal henchmen, Odilo Globocnik, as the SS and Police Leader (SSPF) of the Lublin district. The Lublin district contained Zamosc, a lovely Renaissance city southeast of the city of Lublin, the countryside around which contains fertile soil. Zamosc was to be the centerpiece of the German "warrior farmers" and was originally to be named Himmlerstadt. ("Himmler City"). Globocnik needed to make room for these "warrior farmers". The Poles and the Jews needed to go. At first he set about putting the Jews to work in building roads and entirely useless defensive military fortifications. After a meeting with Himmler, construction began on the Belzec death camp in November 1941. Stationary gas chambers disguised as showers were put to work here, building on the system used in Germany's euthanasia program.

Belzec was located in a remote location on the Lvov-Lublin railway. Jews were packed into trains from regions throughout Poland, especially the Lublin district but also from Krakow and elsewhere. Upon arrival, they were told that they had arrived at a transit camp on the way to a destination further east, and that they had to shower and delouse before continuing their journey. They were made to undress and women's hair was shorn. Then, naked and terrified, they were chased down the Schlauch ("tube") to the awaiting gas chambers. 600,000 or so Jews were murdered at Belzec. Another camp, in Sobibor, opened its doors in May 1942 and yet another, Treblinka, the graveyard of the Jews of Warsaw, in July 1942. They operated largely on the initial blueprint of Belzec, with Treblinka the most advanced of the three camps, which together operated under the aegis "Operation Reinhard," commanded by Globocnik. Altogether, these three camps killed some 1.7 million Jews by October 1943.

Today, there are hardly any physical remnants of these camps, unlike Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek. There was not much to them. They were "primitive" relative to those much larger sites, and they had but one purpose: to murder the Jews. Some Jews were kept on hand to help deceive further victims, to cut their hair, to serve as tailors, shoemakers, maids, etc for the SS, and to remove the dead from the gas chambers, remove any valuables (including ripping gold teeth out of the corpses' mouths and searching vaginas for anything hidden), and at first bury, and later burn, them. Because these were pure murder factories, unlike Birkenau and Majdanek, which had slave labor purposes as well, no extensive infrastructure was needed and the camps' buildings were destroyed and trees were planted. In the case of Treblinka, the bricks of the gas chambers were used to build a house for a Ukrainian guard, who was told to inform any inquirers that he had lived there throughout the war and that nothing had happened in the area.

While all of this was happening to the Jews of Poland, and abroad, the Nazis continued to deport Poles from their homesteads and drafted them into forced labor in the Reich. Here, they were subject to the most draconian of punishments: nearly any step "out of line" (which was defined very, very generously) warranted the death penalty. For example, obsessed as the Nazis were with race, if a Polish forced laborer had any sexual relations with a German woman, he would be executed. The Poles were treated little better than animals, which is how they were regarded by the Nazis.

This brings us to the main difference between the persecutory policies vis-a-vis the Jews and the Poles that were pursued by the Nazis. The Poles, as Slavs, were held in contempt as an inferior race that had no further purpose than to serve their German masters. They were to be kept uneducated and employed in industries that did not require much technical skill, such as road-building. They were to be fed, if at all, well after their German "superiors." The Nazis did not hesitate to shoot or to hang them at the slightest provocation, which is attested to by the massive death toll of the Polish population during the Second World War. Nonetheless, the Jews suffered a very specific fate, which separated them from not only the Poles, but other persecuted groups, such as Gypsies and homosexuals.

The Nazis were obsessed with the Jews. Their hatred for them is astonishing for any reasoned, educated person. The frequency with which Hitler and Goebbels fulminated against the Jews in their private utterances is remarkable, and no other group of people came up nearly as much. In Hitler's political testament, dictated to Martin Bormann a mere days before the Führer's suicide, he rails against the "Jewish conspiracy" that he had tried his damnedest to fight. The Jews were the "poisoner" of all peoples. Their extermination is hinted at and justified for the defense of European civilization. Anti-Semitism was the linchpin of National Socialist ideological thought. The Slavs could be brushed aside as an inferior civilization but the Jews were seen as the only competing power structure that could compete with the Aryan race for global domination. While Hitler admired the English, he believed fervently that they were held in the grip of Jewish puppeteers, as were the U.S. (which Hitler held in contempt) and the Soviets (which Hitler loathed as the center of the "Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy.") The hatred of the Jews was the alpha and omega of Hitler's worldview, which drove him from the beginning of his political career in Munich in 1919 to the final, pathetic days in his bunker in April 1945. They needed to be exterminated because, otherwise, they would triumph over the Aryan race. Indeed, Hitler saw the German defeat in both world wars as Jewish victories.  The Nazis did not feel contemptuous of the Jews: they hated them with an inexplicable passion and feared them. While Hitler and Himmler thought very little of Poles, Gypsies, and homosexuals, they were not the target of a systematic, obsessive project, as the Jews were, to wipe them off the face of the earth.

Thoughts On Auschwitz

Auschwitz. The very name conjures dread and darkness. One imagines it on some godforsaken, windswept heath, in some sort of parallel universe that receives no light. Auschwitz has come to symbolize the Holocaust and the image of Birkenau's "gate of death" has come to represent the maw through which European Jewry was dragged in 1941-45. 

The majority of Jews were not killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, although it was the camp with the single most victims (around 1.1 million). More Jews were collectively killed in the camps of Operation Reinhard (Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and later Majdanek) or were shot in the territories of the Soviet Union. Also, we must differentiate between "Auschwitz" and "Birkenau". Auschwitz was the name of the overall complex, but more specifically refers to the main camp. This was mainly a camp for political prisoners and was also a place of murder, although not approaching Birkenau’s toll. This is the location of the Arbeit Macht Frei gate. Birkenau is where the vast majority of Jews, and Gypsies, were murdered when we say “Auschwitz”. Birkenau was the site of two provisional gas chambers, made from the abandoned homes of Polish peasants, and then four crematoria buildings that included their own gas chambers. 

Unlike Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, Birkenau still, for the most part, stands. Jews from all corners of Europe were killed there. The ruins of its crematoria are visible, as are many barracks (the bricks and wood that are missing from the crematoria and the barracks were used to rebuild the villages near the camp). It would be remiss of me not to mention that Majdanek also stands, and is in fact the most intact of all the Nazi concentration/death camps, but it is much less known and, for all its monstrosity, "only" 80,000 were killed there. Your average person has heard of Auschwitz (although perhaps not Birkenau); he or she has not heard of Majdanek. 

Upon arriving at Auschwitz, I was quite nervous. I have been reading about the place my entire life, but at times, the barbarity of what happened there is so intense that it is very difficult to accept that such a place actually existed. But my bus arrived, and there I was. Unfortunately, if you arrive at Auschwitz (the main camp - this is how I will refer to it, and I will use "Birkenau" to denote the much larger death camp) between the hours of 10-3, you have to go on a guided tour. 

There were tons of tourists, all clicking away with their cameras. High school kids stood around laughing. I went into the visitors' center to purchase my ticket; little do most tourists know, but today’s visitors' center was the reception center for Auschwitz during the war: prisoners were tattooed, given their prison uniforms and wooden clogs, and had their heads shaved, and came out the other end as an anonymous mass. Now the building holds a bookshop, a cinema, some guest rooms, a café, etc. I did not see a sign explaining the building's former purpose, although it's possible that I missed it. Much of what was actually the concentration camp is now parking lots and random buildings outside of the camp; later that night, in my hotel room, I was overtaken by a wave of horror when I realized that, for all I knew, where I was lying was once within the confines of the camp. 

We were ushered under the Arbeit Macht Frei gate and taken into various blocks, where we were greeted with the site of false limbs, mountains of human hair, spectacles, pots and pans, suitcases, etc. These piles were massive, and so incomprehensible that I was a bit numbed by the experience. It did not help that I had other tourists bumping into me to take pictures, or that the tour guide whisked us through the rooms rather quickly. This was also the case in Block 11, the punishment block, and the wall in between Blocks 10 and 11, where thousands of prisoners were shot. Even in the crematorium, where the first batches of Jews were killed, as well as others, there were just too many people clicking away and too much speeding us along. I simply did not have the time to register what I was seeing. My nausea and disgust came later, in my hotel room. (When I was in Majdanek, on the other hand, I was basically alone; being in the gas chamber building, the barracks, and the crematoria was so terrifying that I had to physically force myself to carry on). 

The guided tour also brought us to Birkenau. Seeing the "gate of death" in real life, as opposed to a book cover, was jarring. So is seeing Birkenau itself: it is vast. Our tour of it was shorter than that of Auschwitz. After the tour, I returned to my hotel, got a bite to eat, realized with utter horror what I had just seen, but then felt compelled to return. Admission to Birkenau is free, and one does not need a guide. I needed to be there by myself. I needed the space for my thoughts and feelings. 

So I returned to the camp; there it was again, the yawning gatehouse (which contains, by the way, a bookshop and bathrooms; one can climb to the top to get a full view of the camp). I walked from the gatehouse down the tracks, to the point where Jews once disembarked, were screamed at by SS guards, barked at and bitten by Alsatians, and separated from their families. Jews marked for death were marched straight ahead into the compounds of either Crematorium II or III (Crematorium I being the one in the main camp). To the right, on a path through the camp lined with barbed wires, was the path where Jews were marched to their deaths to either Crematorium IV or V.

To finally see this place was bizarre. I have been reading and studying about it so much, and I know the layout of Birkenau; it was like I knew what was around every corner, but this did not lessen the impact of the ruins of the crematoria, where hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children were murdered. I walked nearly the entire perimeter of the camp, trying, and failing miserably, to imagine what had happened here 70 years ago. Parts of the camp’s perimeter were serene: the camp was quite empty now. I saw a young man with a plastic bag and a soda bottle in his back pocket, walking down the road between the compounds of Crematoria II and III. He continued to walk through some woods and as I looked I saw that there was a small village, mere yards from the crematoria’s ruins. He must have been returning home and using the camp as a shortcut.

Along the camp’s back edge, there is a quiet wooded area. I saw a rabbit hopping along, and an area with picnic benches and bathrooms. For a moment I felt as though I were on a country walk, but then I turned around and saw the watchtowers and the barbed wire. I came upon the ruins of Bunker II, an abandoned cottage the Nazis had used as a provisional gas chamber. The fields beyond are filled with ashes, as are various ponds that are near the crematoria. So is the grassy area behind Crematorium V. In the summer of 1944, when more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered in Birkenau, the crematoria could not keep up with the task at hand, so the bodies were burned in the open field behind Crematorium V. A placard showed the only three photographs taken surreptitiously by Jews in Birkenau, and one of them shows Jewish prisoners standing in a pile of corpses as smoke billows. This had happened, 70 years before, more or less right where I stood. I felt a sensation in my gut, but my mind was rapidly trying to register what had happened there. It was a useless exercise, because these were crimes beyond human comprehension.

I returned to my hotel, located across the street from the visitors’ center, and was completely shaken. I felt sick to my stomach and completely horrified. Why had I not taken a day trip from Krakow? Why was I staying in this hotel right across the street from Auschwitz, and a five minute bus ride from Birkenau? I desperately wanted human companionship, or a drink to soothe my feelings, but I was alone, the sun had set, and Yom Kippur had begun. After speaking on the phone with my parents, I came to the conclusion that I could not return to the camp. I had meant to go on Yom Kippur but I decided that I couldn’t. I felt haunted, nauseated, dirty, and disturbed. I put a Polish basketball game on the TV for some background noise and somehow managed to fall asleep, and was surprised upon awakening that I hadn’t had any nightmares.

In the morning, I had changed my mind. Perhaps the fact that it was daytime, and that the sun was shining, had an impact on my thinking. Whatever the case, I decided to make a quick return trip to Birkenau. I walked again through the compounds of the crematoria; I am far from a religious person, but I did my best to pray for the lost, whose ashes lay all around my feet. I was startled to see a cat running in the compound of Crematorium III; it was just as startled to see me and ran and hid in the ruins of what had been the gas chambers. I envied the cat for its innocence and ignorance.

I visited the camp’s “sauna”, where prisoners in Birkenau were registered, bathed, and tattooed. There was a devastating exhibit focusing on the stories of individual families, with photographs from family albums. More than 1.1 million people were killed in this place, but here were some of the faces and individual stories. As I looked at the pictures of families on vacation, or at a dinner party, or ice-skating, I began to cry. The vastness of Birkenau, and of the crimes committed there, were too great for me to internalize but when faced with the photo albums of the victims, my emotions overtook me. The same occurred in the “little wood” near Crematorium V, where the Nazis made the Jews wait their turn for the gas chamber during the summer of 1944, when the chambers were working at full capacity. Photos exist of Jews sitting there among the trees, oblivious to the fate that awaited them in mere minutes. Today, placards show some of the photos at the grove. Seeing the photos of the innocent women and children waiting, and standing where they had, was overwhelming.

As I left the camp, I was glad to leave the area, which had profoundly disturbed me. I got on the bus to Krakow, put on my headphones, and felt my eyes grow misty and my tears silently fall. 

Thoughts from Poland

I sit here typing this in a cafe/bar/laundromat in Krakow feeling a swirl of emotions.

My first stop was Warsaw. My heart breaks for the city. Its history in the last century has been singularly devastating. In 1920, the Polish Army under the stewardship of Jozef Piłsudski was able to fend off the Soviets at the Battle of Warsaw. But then came the Nazi Blitzkrieg in September 1939, the occupation, and then, after all of that, the deadly, unwanted embrace of the Soviet Union.

Interwar Poland was a place of great hope, pride, but also disappointment. Poland, since the late 18th century, did not exist as a country. The people of the land continued to speak Polish and to hang onto their culture, which reached its apex (not counting today) in the late 16th century. In the 17th century came the Swedish Deluge, a series of invasions that devastated Poland and left it on its knees. Poland asserted itself again the next century, but was partitioned between the three powers it had the misfortune to be placed between: Prussia, Russia, and the Austrian Empire of the Habsburgs. Tadeusz Kosciusko, so famous for fighting alongside the Americans in the Revolutionary War, also fought for Polish independence in the 1790s: this was throttled by Russia, which crushed other rebellions in the 19th century. 

Poland finally had its chance in the aftermath of the First World War. It had the misfortune of being the battleground for much of the (all too forgotten) Eastern Front of that war, but politically its outcome worked in the Poles' favor. The Germans and the Austrians had suffered a crushing defeat. The Russians, who fought on the other side of the war, experienced the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, knocking that country out of the war. Russia, for the time being, relinquished its Polish territories (to the Germans), but the Allies took them back from the Germans after the latter's defeat. 

With intense diplomacy, Poland was able to grasp independence. It immediately fought several wars with its neighbors, most significantly against the Soviet Union, and it suffered economically. Its political life was fractured by incessant squabbling in the parliament, the Sejm. But it was a country nonetheless. And then came the Nazis. 

The Nazis swept into Poland and immediately made it clear that they were not be trifled with. They had prepared lists of tens of thousands of Polish elites and intellectuals; they located them, and they shot them. Poles were not to be educated beyond grammar school; they only needed to know enough to be willing servants of their German overlords. The actual policies that the Nazis followed in Poland, a patchwork of insanity, will be explored in a further post. Suffice it to say, Nazi rule was extremely brutal, the Poles were forced into labor and the Jews were concentrated, forced into slave labor, and ultimately, tragically, exterminated. There were 3.2 million Polish Jews on the onset of the Second World War, and nearly all of them were murdered. 

The Polish Home Army, a resistance movement in the Nazi-occupied country, rose in rebellion on August 1, 1944. After 60 some odd days of utter ferocity, the uprising was put down by the Waffen SS, the Wehrmacht, and groups of criminals led by the likes of Bronislav Kaminski and Oskar Dirlewanger, who was a child molester and a necrophiliac. The Nazis killed about 200,000 civilians and methodically destroyed about 85% of the city. You see a lot of ugly communist architecture in Warsaw. The rest of it was, 70 years ago, complete rubble. As I walked the streets of the city, I tried to grasp this fact. Where I was walking there were once smoldering ruins as far as the eye could see, and corpses choking the streets. And while this happened, the Soviets, who did not want an independent Poland and were completely content to see the Poles wiped out, sat on their hands on the east bank of the Vistula River. For this, and for many other reasons, Stalin will never be forgiven in Poland, nor should he. 

This is a massive subject of the utmost historical importance. I cannot possibly give it the respect it deserves in one post, without boring all readers. More soon.