Lublin and the Final Solution: Personal Reflections and History

Lublin Castle. Photo taken by the author. 

As I approached the countryside that surrounds Lublin, the largest city in Poland east of the Vistula, I suddenly felt like I was in “real” Poland. In the fields, I saw the controlled burning of fields and bucolic vistas of humble farmhouses, cattle, and horses. Periodically I would glance down at the book I was reading, about Poland’s interwar years, but I was unable to really concentrate. I distractedly read about the Polish-Soviet War, of battles leading up to Poland’s 1920 Miracle on the Vistula, when the forces of Józef Piłsudki routed Mikhail Tukhachevsky's troops on the approaches to Warsaw. The book’s narrative took me to the Battle of Dęblin – I looked out of the train window, and my head jerked back in a double-take: as the train crossed the Wieprz River, I saw a sign indicating that it was entering Dęblin. This was a strange coincidence that yanked the words from the page into real life – suddenly, Dęblin was no strange-looking, foreign word, but a real place that exists in space and time.

My stomach churned as I approached Lublin, arriving from Warsaw (which will be the subject of a future post). There is nothing ominous about the word "Lublin," or even about the place. Indeed, I was to find a charming, mid-sized city, with lovely cobble-stoned streets (I ate at the Cleopatra Restaurant that appears in the photograph in that hyperlink, which lies across the street from the building that housed the Jewish Council of the Lublin Ghetto, which one can see on the right of the photograph adorned with a plaque) and a bustling populace. But I had not yet arrived, and my mind was elsewhere. Namely, on the fate of the Jews of Poland.

The Holocaust (a word that, on further and further reflection, I find repugnant to use with regard to the extermination of the Jews of Europe, as its Greek origins literally mean a burnt sacrificial offering to God, which sacralizes the abominable event and gives the Nazis an honor they do not deserve) is my main historical interest and drove me to study history in the first place. I even considered majoring in Holocaust Studies at Clark University, before I pulled back, realizing that this would absurdly narrow my career options. What would I do with a degree in Holocaust Studies? (And then I opted for a history degree from the University of Connecticut!). It is so uniquely destructive and horrific, that, in my opinion, it represents a rupture in Western Civilization, if there ever was such a thing. The pit of Babi Yar, the crumbling crematoria of Birkenau, the 1.5 million dead children, and the tens of thousands of shoes standing silent testimony in the barracks of Majdanek all have made me question the worth of humanity, and whether or not there is a God – and if there is, if I should even worship Him. Of course, these were not the thoughts that initially drew me to the Holocaust – I do not know what forces did so. I remember my grandmother bought me a children’s book called Daniel’s Story at the New Haven Jewish Community Center when I was 11 or so. The book detailed the story of the Holocaust from the eyes of a young German boy, whose family experiences Kristallnacht, is deported to the Łódź Ghetto in German-annexed Poland, and ultimately survives Auschwitz-Birkenau. The book gripped me – I distinctly remember not being able to put it down – and then I began to read anything and everything I could about the Holocaust, reading the works of historians such as Raul Hilberg and Lucy Dawidowicz as a middle-schooler.

And here I was in Poland, ground zero for the Holocaust. Three million Polish Jews were murdered during the Second World War, at least half of the Nazis’ victims, and the ashes of Jews from nations throughout Europe now lie in the marshy fields of Birkenau, or were dumped into the Vistula, Poland’s mythical river. I had saved money, and had just experienced a brutal breakup, and I decided that the time was right to make a trip I had been anticipating my entire life. Though I was crushed by personal circumstances at the time, the nervous feeling coursing through my veins and the racing of my brain trying to come to grips with the place-names I was seeing and visiting ultimately dwarfed them into utter insignificance. In my more religious days (not that I was ever very religious), I made a promise to God that one day I would visit Auschwitz-Birkenau to mourn my family, Hungarian Jews of Subcarpathia, an area ravaged by Adolf Eichmann and his cronies. But the Holocaust is more than Auschwitz-Birkenau, and I have felt in the years since the compulsion to visit additional sites. I was unable to make it to Treblinka, Sobibór, and Bełżec, all lying in remote areas, a shortcoming about which I feel miserable, but I pledge now to do so in the future – not necessarily to God, but I firmly pledge nonetheless.

As an amateur student of the Holocaust, Lublin had and has horrific connotations. The murderous program code-named Aktion Reinhard (named after the assassinated Reinhard Heydrich, the chief architect of the Final Solution), which oversaw the operation of the Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka death camps, was administered from Lublin under the auspices of Odilo Globocnik, who has somehow escaped notoriety from casual students of the Holocaust, who can rattle off the names of Himmler, Heydrich, and Eichmann, but remain ignorant of Globocnik. Globocnik was responsible for the death of nearly two million Jews, the vast majority from Poland. In November 1939, he was handpicked by the leader of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, to serve as the SS and Police Leader of the Lublin District, after having been disgraced as the Nazi Party leader (Gauleiter) of Vienna for his corruption. Globocnik set up a so-called “self-defense” unit (Selbtschutz), mostly made up of ethnic Germans from the Lublin District, which he used to monopolize Jewish policy, butting heads with German civilian officials and SS officers, such as his superior Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger, alike. Himmler chose Globocnik for the latter’s utter commitment to Nazism and his fervent belief in its racist, violent principles – his anti-Semitism was ferocious and his drive relentless in pursuing Nazi goals in the East. Himmler could also count on Globocnik because Globocnik, having been sacked from his position in Vienna, was indebted to Himmler for giving him a second chance.

Odilo Globocnik

Nazi goals in the East were the cause of the Second World War in Europe. The Nazis sought to colonize those lands, including the most fertile soil in Europe (that of the Ukraine) and to wrest them from the “Judeo-Bolsheviks” they believed were running the show in Moscow. Tens of millions of Slavs would be starved, exterminated, or deported to make room for some 8-10 million German settlers, who would till the soil in their place. Any Slavs that remained would be reduced to undignified slaves of the Germans. These would be the “Germanizable” elements that the Nazis foresaw ultimately intermingling with the German settlers and thus, in the final analysis, erasing their very cultural, ethnic, and national existence. Nazi occupation policy envisaged the “necessary” death of “umpteen millions” of "useless eaters" so that German soldiers and civilians could obtain the food and land that the Nazis believed was rightfully theirs. A glimpse into the way the Nazis saw the Slavs can be seen in their utterly barbaric treatment of Soviet prisoners of war – some 3.3 million out of 5.7 million died, either murdered or starved to death, during the course of the war. Nothing experienced by British or American soldiers was remotely comparable, and the concept of a Hogan's Heroes taking place on the Eastern Front is so absurd as to be offensive.

Lublin was very important in these plans, and Globocnik was Himmler’s implementer on the ground. As Hitler’s Reichskommissar für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums (Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of Germandom), Himmler oversaw the policies of wrenching people from their homes and the settlement in their place by ethnic Germans from throughout Europe, particularly from the Baltic States, Ukraine, and the Czech lands. In November 1939, in addition to SS and Police Leader of the Lublin District, Himmler appointed Globocnik to spearhead a drive to construct dozens of “SS strong points” throughout the occupied east, theoretically (after the foreseen invasion of the Soviet Union) stretching all the way to the Ural Mountains. Globocnik believed that a prerequisite for these grandiose visions was the removal of the Jews and the Poles from his district. In 1940, he began to put them to work in forced labor camps for the German war effort, including militarily useless anti-tank ditches along the Bug River, which represented the demarcation line with the Soviet Union (the Soviets easily traversed these later). Labor camps were strung out along the length of this anti-tank ditch, and the node of these camps lay at Bełżec, a village lying near the demarcation line. Eventually, the military called for these projects to be called off. Globocnik, however, would not relinquish control over the Jewish “question.” He wanted to remove the Jews and create settlements of German warrior-farmers (Wehrbauern) stretching from the Baltic Sea all the way to ethnically German communities in Transylvania, while simultaneously, in the words of a contemporary, “gradually throttling [the Poles] both economically and biologically.”

The origin of when the Nazis decided to set out to obliterate the existence and the very memory of the Jews of Europe is difficult to pin down. When Jews could no longer be sent to the ethereal “East” (“across the Bug”, which later became a euphemism for their death) when the Soviets put up tougher-than-expected resistance after the German invasion, the Nazis needed to think of something else. The General Government, consisting of Poland roughly from the Vistula to the Bug Rivers (incorporating the Lublin District), was first envisaged as a dumping ground for the “refuse” of Jews and Poles, but the Nazis ultimately decided to make it Judenrein and an area of German settlement. The Nazis had toyed with the idea of sending Jews to Madagascar, which was rendered irrelevant by the German inability to defeat the British in 1940, as the British controlled the necessary sea lanes to get to Madagascar. The Nazis considered a Jewish reservation in the environs of Lublin for the very reason that the Jews were likely to be decimated due to the marshy nature of the area, as concluded by then-deputy General Governor Arthur Seyss-Inquart in November 1939. Ultimately, this did not work as the Nazis tangled themselves in a web of contradictory priorities and unrealistic timetables of deporting Jews, Gypsies, and Poles, while “repatriating” ethnic Germans. With the failure to quickly overrun the Soviet armies in the east, and with Jews sitting in ghettos throughout occupied Poland gathered for their imminent (and now indefinitely delayed) deportation, the Nazis needed to find another solution. Through fits and starts that lie outside the scope of this present piece, they stumbled upon the Final Solution – the mass murder of the Jews of Europe.

Globocnik met with Himmler five times in Lublin in October 1941 – at one of these meetings, likely on October 13, Himmler green-lit the construction of the Bełżec death camp, lying in the same village as the former central camp of the anti-tank ditch operation. Some historians, such as Bogdan Musial, posit that it was Globocnik who masterminded the concept of the extermination camp, fitted with stationary gas chambers, to destroy Poland’s Jews. Previously, Jews had been shot en masse or gassed in vans whose exhaust pipes were re-routed into the back of the vehicle, poisoning those on board. Chełmno, the first extermination camp, which began operations the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, was essentially a gas van station. It was Bełżec that introduced the gas chamber structure into the Final Solution. Historians still debate whether Bełżec was intended to murder “only” the Jews of the Lublin District, or all of the General Government. Construction of the camp began in November 1941 and staff laid off from the Nazis’ “euthanasia” program, which killed tens of thousands of physically and mentally handicapped Germans, many of them in gas chambers disguised as showers, began to arrive in Lublin in the autumn and winter of 1941. These were men experienced in mass murder who had become hardened to the sight and smell of dead bodies. They included Christian Wirth, who would become the inspector of the Aktion Reinhard camps, and Franz Stangl, the commandant of Sobibór and Treblinka.

Bełzec began operations in March 1942. Jews from western Galicia (Kraków) and eastern Galicia (Lwów) and everywhere in between, including Przemyśl, Lublin, and Zamość, were sent there. Sobibór opened in May 1942, consuming Jews from the Lublin District as well as farther afield, including the Netherlands. Treblinka, the most efficient of the three camps, opened its gates in July 1942 – it is the grave of Warsaw’s Jews predominantly, but also of other Jews throughout Poland and other European countries. Throughout, Globocnik was excited in his work and very proud of what he had done – in this, his feathers were ruffled by Himmler who wrote him a letter in autumn 1943 praising his, Globocnik’s, “great and unique services, which you have performed for the entire German people.” Indeed, Globocnik suggested to Himmler that rather than burn the bodies of the Jews murdered in the three camps to conceal what they had done, the Germans should bury bronze tablets in the mass graves to show the world that it was they who had had the toughness and the resolve to murder the Jews. (Ultimately, the bodies were exhumed with excavators and burned). In July 1942, Himmler decided that the Jews of the General Government had to be murdered by the end of the year – four days later, the Nazis launched Grossaktion Warschau, the deportation and extermination of the Jews of Warsaw, the largest Jewish community in Europe, made artificially larger when the Nazis also crammed Jews from the city’s hinterland into the tight quarters of the Warsaw Ghetto. Globocnik’s team ran point on this as well, assisted by Ukrainians and Latvians trained at the Trawniki camp southeast of Lublin. While Aktion Reinhard did not meet Himmer’s ambitious timetable, by autumn 1943, the Jews of Poland had been all but wiped off the map and the camps were shut down and methodically dismantled, such that there is basically nothing to be seen of them today.

Simultaneous with the destruction of the Polish Jews, Globocnik also committed horrific crimes against the Poles and Ukrainians of his district, kicking over 100,000 of them out of their homes and resettling them or deporting them to concentration camps such as Majdanek (which lies on the eastern outskirts of Lublin) or as forced laborers to Germany to make room for ethnic Germans. The area surrounding Zamość was particularly hard-hit, as it was designed to become the center of a Germanic settlement called Himmlerstadt (Himmler City). Ultimately, the barbarity of Globocnik’s men used in this crime backfired, as the Poles of the Zamość area rose up and the Germans had to shut down the operation.

The Old City of Zamość. Photo taken by the author.

By November 1943, the vast majority of Jews in the General Government had been murdered. Some 50,000 remained, toiling in forced labor camps for the Germans. After Jewish uprisings in the Warsaw Ghetto, Treblinka, and Sobibór, Himmler decided that enough was enough – the Jews had to die, they presented too much of a security risk. On November 3, 1943, in the cynically named Aktion Erntefest (Operation Harvest Festival), some 43,000 Jews were murdered in the Majdanek, Poniatowa, and Trawniki camps. (Globocnik had been removed to Trieste by this time, either to keep him silent or in punishment for the Zamość fiasco, and this crime was spearheaded by his successor, Jakob Sporrenberg). As I walked the grounds of the Majdanek concentration camp, perhaps the eeriest place I have ever visited, where the only sound was that of the cawing of crows, I saw the graves of 18,000 Jews murdered in the camp on that day in November 1943. The graves, which resemble a grassy moonscape, lie behind the crematorium building. I stood before the graves and tried to wrap my mind around their meaning, around what had happened on this very spot. It was a useless exercise. I wasn’t left feeling sad, only queasy and slightly anxious. The mass graves lie at the rear of the camp, and were the last site I visited there – after that disturbing sight, I booked it for the bus stop to take me back to my hostel, feeling decidedly filthy and disgusted. (As an aside, I should note that one of the more unsettling things about Majdanek is that the entire camp, including the building that housed the gas chamber, lies directly adjacent to apartment buildings and homes, some of whose porches are mere feet from the barbed wire. Some of those high-rise apartments must have a splendid view of the entire camp. Even during the war, there were Polish dwellings right by the camp, and Lublin residents witnessed the Harvest Festival massacre).

Majdanek concentration camp. Photo taken by the author.

I wound up leaving Lublin early for Kraków; I felt too smothered by the city’s history – at points, I felt like I literally couldn’t breathe. The city’s medieval castle, which is located atop a hill, looked ominous when I first looked upon it the night I arrived in Lublin – and sure enough, it was the gateway to Majdanek for many Polish prisoners, a place of execution in its own right, and then, as if that weren’t enough, a place where Polish political prisoners were tortured and murdered by the Soviet NKVD after 1944.

I do not want to take away from the city of Lublin. It is a lovely city, with a great university (the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin) and many cultural options to choose from, such as theaters and art galleries. It is a regular place where people go to work, raise children, go to nightclubs, have love affairs, and go for walks in the park. The people of the Teatr NN, located at the Jewish Gate (so-called because it once separated the Christian and Jewish parts of town) in Lublin’s Old Town, have done great work in, among other things, commemorating the Holocaust, including honoring Henio Żytomirski, a nine-year-old Jew and Lublin native who was gassed at Majdanek, to whom Polish schoolchildren write letters. Within the walls of the Old Town, I was given free shots of vodka at a pub, where I had delicious steak tartare and discussed everything from sports to the policies of Vladimir Putin with the regulars and bartenders. Lublin, while a provincial city that cannot rival Warsaw or Kraków, has much to offer and I would recommend that anyone and everyone go.

And yet, on the eastern outskirts lies that abomination, that monstrous monument to criminal insanity, Majdanek, where the belongings of the Jews murdered in Aktion Reinhard were stored and where an estimated 80,000 people were killed. In one of the buildings of the aforementioned university, the murder of Poland’s Jews was masterminded and administered by Globocnik and his staff. I know I am too history-minded for my own good, but I was unable to shake off those thoughts. The next time I go to Lublin, I hope to make up for it.