Reflections on Warsaw

Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, Warsaw. Photo taken by the author.

I did not know what to expect when I landed in Warsaw. I suppose I expected it to be an ugly, gray, post-Communist city with hideous, monolithic apartment blocks and office buildings. Indeed, there are such neighborhoods. In my mind’s eye, the city was always wreathed in fog and bitterly cold. But I was taken aback by the beauty of this rebuilt city – the Old Town, with its ornate architecture, painfully reconstructed after its complete destruction in 1944; Nowy Świat and Krakowskie Przedmieście, lined with adorable cafes and shops and magnificent palaces; and Łazienki Park, once the roaming grounds of Polish royalty, with its tree-lined paths, small lakes, and, again, stunning palaces. There are, of course, blatant reminders of the city’s experience with Communism, including the imposing Palace of Science and Culture, an unwanted gift from Joseph Stalin that dominates Warsaw’s skyline. But the city, on the whole, breathed life and exuberance. My ignorance was, and is, embarrassing.

I decided to go to Warsaw on a whim. A contract job had wound up and I was just coming off a devastating breakup. I have always wanted to go to this part of Europe, but had never had the opportunity – in fact, I had never been to Europe at all, with my international experience being solely in the Middle East. This was my opportunity: I found a decent price for a roundtrip flight and pulled the trigger without hesitation.

Why Warsaw? That is the question that everyone asked me when I revealed my travel plans. If I was going to Europe, why not go to Paris, London, Barcelona, or Rome? The answer is simple: my historical interests. I am interested in Warsaw in a way that I am not interested in Paris or Rome. I also can’t adequately explain my interests, and why they gravitate toward macabre 20^th century Varsovian history and not the intrigues at the Palace of Versailles or the drama of the House of Tudor. My interest in Poland is a byproduct of my study of the Holocaust, about which I have been reading intensely for as long as I can recall. Studying this massive crime, the extent of which is simply mind-boggling, shaped my worldview (with a bit of help from the 9/11 attacks), which is unapologetically hawkish and interventionist in foreign affairs.

Poland was the ground zero of the Holocaust: its territories, occupied by the Nazis, hosted all six extermination camps: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, Chełmno, and Majdanek. This was not an accident. When the Nazis invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, over three million Jews lived in Poland. This was by far the largest Jewish population in Europe, and Warsaw, Poland’s capital, was home to some 380,000 Jews, the most of any city in the world other than New York City. 

After the Second World War, a canard was circulated that the death camps were located in Poland because the Poles are somehow uniquely anti-Semitic. While interwar Poland was rife with anti-Semitism, particularly among the followers of Roman Dmowski’s National Democratic Party, I’m not sure what separated it in its intensity from anti-Semitism in France, Romania, Hungary, or, to state the obvious, Germany. And while Jews and Poles lived largely separate lives, and upwards of 80% of Polish Jews listed Yiddish, and not Polish, as their mother tongue, Poland’s Jews and Christians for the most part cooperated and tolerated one another. During the rule of Józef Piłsudski, who was revered by the Jews of Poland, and especially after his death, some anti-Semitic measures were enacted due to the influence of the National Democrats: “ghetto benches” were installed in lecture halls at universities and those same universities instituted quotas on the number of Jews that could permissibly attend. There were arguments about what it meant to be a Pole: was it solely an ethnic identity, or a label for anyone living within Poland, whether he or she be Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian, German, or Jewish? 

Anyway, I won’t belabor the point here – it’s a complex matter and will be discussed in a future post. The fact is, the Nazis instituted the death camps on Polish soil not because Poles were particularly anti-Semitic, but because most Jews lived in Poland – half of the Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust were Polish. It was easier to shunt the Jews of Warsaw, Lublin, Kraków, Łódź, and Lwów to gas chambers in Poland than to, say, the Czech lands. And Auschwitz wasn’t too far from Western Europe, or Hungary, either, which is why it was the primary destination for Jews from those places.

Because Poland was the center of gravity for the Holocaust, its place names have long haunted me. I had half-convinced myself that some of these places didn’t exist. I remember when I approached the Birkenau gatehouse, I was almost half-surprised that it was a real thing, as absurd as that sounds. The Warsaw Ghetto as well – the uprising, that epic saga of a relative handful of Jews choosing to die fighting against the Nazi war machine, against men who came to send them and their families to the gas chambers of Treblinka – this, too, seemed fantastical, almost like a medieval ballad. But of course, I knew it was factual, and so I went as a sort of half pilgrimage, half educational visit.

These thoughts were racing in mind when I visited Warsaw. I remember being struck by the number of pho restaurants as I approached my hostel, located on Nowy Świat in the city center. I shared my room with a French art student and a very friendly Russian, who kept asking me to slow down while speaking. I ran to a department store to pick up some toiletries and it dawned on me, to my horror, that I literally did not speak one word of Polish, beyond tak and nie ("yes" and "no"): I could not even say “hello” or “thank you”. I awkwardly smiled and nodded while being rung up. Upon returning to my room, I took a phrasebook that I had not yet consulted, went to a bar, and downed three beers while teaching myself a couple dozen words and phrases. Afterwards, I rambled through the city, as I am wont to do when I arrive in a new place, walking through the aforementioned Lazienki Park (which I cannot recommend enough) and then strolled along the Vistula, where I stumbled upon a memorial to the sappers of Warsaw, who helped to rebuild the city after the Nazis’ destruction. The memorial was…not aesthetically pleasing, and I didn’t even know what I was looking at at the time, because, again, I didn’t know one word of Polish, and there was no English translation. I wound up getting lost in the rain (because, naturally, it rained when I got lost), trying hopelessly to properly pronounce przepraszam (“excuse me”) so that I could ask for directions back to my hostel.

The next morning, I ambled up Krakowskie Przedmieście, an elegant boulevard lined by mansions, palaces, museums, and the University of Warsaw, to the Old Town. I was there during the commemoration of the 70^th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising, which broke out in August 1944 and lasted 63 days until the beginning of October. There was a commemorative barrier on which people had put up quotes and poetry, and photographs of Polish Armia Krajowa (AK) soldiers who had been killed fighting the Germans. There, too, was the chilling order given by Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler upon the breakout of the uprising: namely, that no prisoners of war be taken; that everyone within the city, men, women, and children, were to be killed without exception; and that the city was to be razed to the ground. I sat at a café across the street and sipped an espresso, trying to wrap my mind around the enormity of that event, and about the fact that where I was sitting, and everything I was seeing, was once rubble, and filled with the bodies and the blood of thousands of Varsovians.

Commemorative barrier on Krakowskie Przedmieście. Photo taken by the author. 

At the base of the Sigismund III column (this is the ruler who moved the Polish capital from Kraków to Warsaw in 1596), I unexpectedly saw a sign for a walking tour of the city, to be conducted in English. I immediately joined the small crowd. We were taken through the Old Town, which is incredibly beautiful with its main square, colorful buildings, and narrow lanes, out to the monument to the Warsaw Uprising and then we came across a strip that marked the entry to what had been the Warsaw Ghetto. Chills shot up my spine as I crossed over it – yes, this was real, and I was standing where it had once existed. After grabbing a beer at a bar adjacent to the Adam Mickiewicz Museum on the Old Town’s main market square, I joined a specifically Jewish tour of the city. We walked through Muranów, which was once where the majority of the Jews of Warsaw lived; it was later made the site of the ghetto. Now, it consists of working-class housing, and the apartment buildings were built with the rubble of the ghetto. There were graffitied images of Marek Edelman, a hero of both the ghetto uprising and the Warsaw Uprising a year later, adorned with quotes, as well as of L.L. Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto and a native of Warsaw, and, oddly, Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry. We were shown where the Grand Synagogue of Warsaw once stood on Tłomackie Street, before it was blown to smithereens personally by SS General Jürgen Stroop, who commanded the forces that put down the ghetto uprising.  

Strip marking the former boundary of the Warsaw Ghetto. Photo taken by the author.

We made our way to the Umschlagplatz, which is where the Nazis forced the Jews of Warsaw to board trains headed to Treblinka, the death camp at which some 870,000 Jews were murdered. Treblinka, which is located about 60 miles northeast of Poland’s capital, is the graveyard of the Jews of Warsaw. One of its victims was Janusz Korczak, an author of children’s books, an educator, and the director of an orphanage for Jewish children. When the Nazis made the children of the orphanage get on the trains, Korczak, who was initially spared, insisted that he go with them. He did, and they all were gassed upon arrival. He is the only individual who is individually commemorated on the grounds of the Treblinka death camp. About 300,000 Jews were sent from Warsaw to Treblinka during Grossaktion Warschau between July 22 and September 21, 1942.

Janusz Korczak

From there, we wound our way to the memorial to the ghetto fighters, which sits outside of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, whose permanent exhibit was not ready at the time and which I did not enter. It shows an idealized depiction of the fighters of the ghetto, most prominently Mordechai Anielewicz, the leader of the Jewish Fighting Organization who commanded the uprising and, when surrounded by the Nazis in early May 1943, committed suicide with his girlfriend and other fighters rather than surrender. Next to the memorial there was a statue of Jan Karski, the hero of the Polish underground who informed the Western powers about the Holocaust and even had a meeting with Franklin Roosevelt. A block down the street, there is the Anielewicz Mound, which contains rubble from the ghetto and the bodies of dozens of fighters.

Umschlagplatz Memorial. Photo taken by the author.

The Warsaw Ghetto uprising was not, unlike the general Warsaw Uprising a year later, done out of hope,  but rather out of the desire to die fighting. There were two options for the Jews of Warsaw: board the trains and be gassed at Treblinka, or die with a gun in their hands in the streets of Warsaw. For Anielewicz and hundreds of others, the choice was obvious. He wrote to his deputy Yitzhak Zuckerman (who later fought in the Warsaw Uprising) shortly before his death: “The dream of my life has come true. I’ve lived to see a Jewish defense in the ghetto in all its greatness and glory.”

One night, when I was walking through the streets aimlessly, savoring the city scenes, I approached Warsaw’s opera house and saw flags waving on its side. One of them was the Israeli flag. I immediately thought of how, on the first day of the ghetto uprising – April 19, 1943 – Jewish fighters raised two flags side by side: the red-and-white flag of Poland and the Star of David. Many Jewish fighters died with the word “Polska” on their lips in love and devotion for the only home they had ever known, as the Catholic Poles of Warsaw looked on, largely in indifference, never seeing the Jews as wholly their countrymen. (The Nobel Prize-winning poet Czesław Miłosz, who lived in Warsaw at the time, wrote a poem - "Campo dei Fiori" - excoriating his fellow Poles for their passivity in the face of the destruction of the ghetto). Reflecting on that devastating fact, and seeing the flag of the Jewish people waving in this place of their martyrdom, where Jews were once one-third of the city’s population, I cried, completely shattered. 

The Jews were able to hang on much longer than anyone had anticipated, resisting for nearly a month. Throughout the uprising, the Nazis continued, in their demented and incomprehensible hatred, to round up and deport Jews to Treblinka. When the uprising was finally put down, the ghetto was completely destroyed. The ghetto uprising, coupled with revolts at the Sobibór and Treblinka death camps later that year, made Heinrich Himmler afraid of further Jewish rebellion. He ordered that the Jews of the Lublin District be wiped out. On November 3, 1943, about 42,000 Jews were shot at the camps of Majdanek, Trawniki, and Poniatowa, in an operation that the Nazis cruelly called “Operation Harvest Festival.” I saw the zig-zag moonscape mass graves behind the crematorium when I went to Majdanek shortly after my time in Warsaw.

Mass graves at the Majdanek concentration camp in Lublin. Photo taken by the author. 

After the crushing German defeats at Stalingrad and Kursk, it became only a matter of time before they would lose the war. The Soviets pushed westward relentlessly. The Polish Home Army (the Armia Krajowa, or “AK”, to which I referred above), the largest underground resistance movement in Nazi-occupied Europe, prepared for what to do. They wanted to be seen to have liberated their own country so that they would not have to live under Soviet domination.

The two countries had strained relations, to say the least, since the advent of the Soviet Union. In 1920, the Polish army under Piłsudski halted the Soviet army on the outskirts of Warsaw in the “Miracle of the Vistula,” one of the most consequential battles in modern history (this is not an exaggeration). In August 1939, the Germans and Soviets signed a non-aggression pact; its secret annex, only revealed decades later, split Eastern Europe into their respective spheres of influence. Sixteen days after the German invasion of Poland, the Soviets invaded from the East. They deported hundreds of thousands of Poles to western Siberia and Kazakhstan, destroying the thread of eastern Polish society. They massacred 22,000 Polish officers in April 1940, most notoriously at Katyń. Stalin and his henchmen bobbed and weaved about the question of what had happened to these men, and when the Germans discovered the mass grave in 1943, Stalin blamed them for the massacre. The Poles knew it was not true, complained about it, and Stalin cut off the diplomatic ties between the two countries that had been tentatively reached in July 1941, shortly after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The Western allies also knew the Soviets were responsible, but forced the Poles to shut up about it because they didn’t want to rock the boat with Stalin.

On June 22, 1944, exactly three years after the German invasion, the Soviets launched Operation Bagration, a massive offensive that thrust through Belarus and toward Warsaw. When the Soviets crossed into Polish territory, AK units rose up and fought alongside them in cities like Lwów and Wilno. The Soviets gladly accepted their help, but then proceeded to disarm and detain the AK men (some were even placed in Majdanek after the Soviets liberated the camp from the Germans). Nonetheless, after a lot of back and forth, the AK command decided to rise up in Warsaw as the Germans retreated and the Soviets approached, so that they could take credit for liberating their own capital. This, they thought, would give them leverage in deciding Poland's postwar future.

The problem is that they miscalculated. In a panic, German troops, often barefoot and disheveled, ran from the Soviet juggernaut through the streets of Warsaw. German civilian administrators also left the city. The Poles thought the Germans were on the run. The Poles did not know this, but the Germans had finally conducted an effective counterattack on the east bank of the Vistula and halted the Soviet advance. Everyone in Warsaw could hear the sounds of battle and, due to the panicked scenes they had previously witnessed, assumed it was the Soviets on the brink of liberating their city. The AK command received intelligence that Soviet tanks had been seen in Praga, Warsaw’s easternmost district that lies on the other side of the Vistula from the rest of the city. They decided to launch the uprising in Warsaw on August 1 at 5 pm.

The Warsaw Uprising Museum in the Wola neighborhood (the location is significant, which will be explained below) is a very impressive museum with several moving exhibits, including the blood-stained shirt of a murdered child. Photographs and videos show smiling young men and women who took up arms to fight the Nazis. They did so, on August 1, cheerfully and confidently, believing the uprising would last a couple of days because, they thought, the Nazis had one foot outside of Warsaw. They were, sadly, dead wrong.

Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler were intent on the complete destruction of Warsaw and the annihilation of its citizens, as discussed above. Hitler entrusted the task with one of his most ruthless henchmen, SS General Erich von dem Bach, who had earned his laurels by murdering tens of thousands of Belarusians and destroying their villages. Under his overarching command were two other merciless men: Oskar Dirlewanger and Bronislav Kaminski. Dirlewanger was a drunk and a drug addict who was put in prison for two years in the 1930s for having sex with a 14-year-old girl. A unit of criminals, some of whom were Germans released from concentration camps, was put under his command, and were known for their murderousness in Belarus.

Erich von dem Bach

In Warsaw, Dirlewanger’s men rampaged through the Wola district, raping, looting, and murdering as they went. They shot up and burned down hospitals; stormed an orphanage, where they murdered 350 children, smashing their skulls with their rifles and boots, impaling infants with bayonets; and lined up and shot thousands of Warsaw’s citizens in mass graves. Some 40,000 Poles, regardless of age or sex, were slaughtered in a couple of days in Wola. Special commandos of Poles were formed to burn the bodies. Kaminski’s detachment, made up of anti-communist Russians, carried out the systematic rape of Polish women in the Ochota district. Young girls and old women were fair game – it did not matter. In one instance, one of Kaminski’s drunken troops killed a woman and then raped her 12-year-old daughter right next to her dead body. Kaminski, whose men were efficient at rape and looting but useless in actual battle, was later executed by the Germans. In addition to the devastation visited on Wola and Ochota, Warsaw’s lovely Old Town was completely destroyed on Hitler’s explicit orders.

Soldiers of the Dirlewanger Brigade in Warsaw.

After the horrific Wola massacres, despite their murderousness, the Germans did not continue with killing literally everyone. They realized that Germany was desperate for labor, and began to imprison AK fighters and other Poles. Throughout the uprising and after the Poles' eventual surrender, tens of thousands of Poles were sent to a transit camp at Pruszków, just west of Warsaw, and then onward, either to concentration camps, including Auschwitz, or to the Reich to serve as slaves in German factories, on farms, and on construction sites. All in all, 18,000 AK fighters and over 150,000 Warsaw civilians were killed during the uprising.

But Hitler was not done with Warsaw. He ordered that it be burned to its foundations. A special commando was established whose task was to systematically burn down every building of the city – house by house, office building by office building. Thirty percent of the city was destroyed after the uprising was put down, and was obviously done out of pure maliciousness and spite by the Germans, not for any military reason. The uprising was crushed as the Soviets watched from the other side of the Vistula, content that the Germans were doing the dirty work of destroying Polish independence for them. The Western allies, eager to placate Stalin, did airlift some supplies to the Polish insurgents, but most landed in territories that the Germans controlled. After all of this, the wanton slaughter by the Germans and their allies, the destruction of their lovely capital city, the Poles had to languish under nearly a half century of Soviet domination and to suffer in silence about the martyrdom of the heroes of the uprising, who Stalin and the Soviets referred to as criminals and fascists.

Warsaw is a city of ghosts. At the same time, it is a city full of exuberance, excited to be back on the world stage after a half century of communist oppression. I savored its hipster microbrew bars and had fun dancing to terrible house music in its nightclubs. I stuffed my face with delicious pierogis. I enjoyed smoking endless cigarettes and downing shots of vodka in the Old Town square while discussing the specter of Vladimir Putin with the locals. But at the end of the night, when I walked back to my hostel, it was the ghosts of the past – the massacres at Ochota and Wola, the German tanks firing shells down Jerusalem Avenue, the jagged stone tombstone at Treblinka dedicated to the murdered Jews of Warsaw – that lingered with me.  

Operation Barbarossa: An Ideological Imperative

German soldiers on the Eastern Front, summer 1941

The Second World War in Europe was won (and lost) on the Eastern Front. Out of the estimated 5.4 million German soldiers who were killed, three-quarters to four-fifths died while fighting on the Eastern Front. The Soviet Union (emphatically not just Russia – this is a lazy conflation) suffered some 27 million deaths. It was launched by Adolf Hitler as a war of extermination against the “Judeo-Bolshevik” regime in Moscow, to secure German hegemony in Europe, and to achieve Lebensraum (living space) – these were, essentially, the three planks of his foreign policy and all were attainable, in his mind, by the toppling of the Soviet government. The paranoid, delusional fantasies that drove Hitler to invade the Soviet Union are impossible to disentangle from the same phantasms that drove him to exterminate the Jews, and the Second World War in Europe is incomprehensible without confronting and understanding them. This analysis of the reasons behind Barbarossa and the policies that the Nazis enacted will center, therefore, on an examination of the Jewish question in Nazi ideology.

Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany and its allies, was the largest invasion in history. The invading force was made up of nearly four million men. This week marks the 75^th anniversary of this watershed moment. In the lead-up to the war, Hitler made clear that the Wehrmacht’s goal was not just to reach, in his mind, arbitrary lines – it was to utterly destroy the enemy. He gave instructions to army generals to cooperate with the SS, who were authorized to carry out “executive actions” (read: executions) against defined elements within the civilian population. Subsequent policies drawn up by the SS defined these as middle- and senior-ranking members of the Communist Party; middle- and senior-ranking Comintern officials; party commissars; Jews in party and state positions; extremists; saboteurs; bandits; and so on. Because of the purposeful and explicit conflation of Judaism with Bolshevism in Nazi ideology, a blanket death sentence for all Jews in party and state positions meant, in effect, the mass murder of the entire male Jewish population of the Soviet Union. The vagueness of the last three categories I’ve enumerated also contributed to such an effect, and were understood by the SS and the army to do so. In July and August 1941, these executions began to include women and children as well.

A German policeman murders a Jewish woman and child; Ivanhorod, Ukraine, 1942. 

In order to try to grapple with the pathologies that formed Adolf Hitler’s worldview, it is essential to go back in time to the end of the First World War. Hitler, recovering from a mustard gas attack at a military hospital in Pasewalk, learned of Germany’s surrender on November 11, 1918. This had a shattering effect on him. He insisted, like so many others, that the Germans had not been defeated by force of arms, but rather by a shadowy conspiracy of Marxists, traitors, and, above all, Jews. The Jews needed to pay for their “crime” of their alleged stab in the back. As Hitler’s bitterness and anger grew he began to identify the Jews as a vampiric, parasitic race that existed solely to destroy the integrity of other world races, in particular the Aryan, and collapse them from within. In order to redeem the Aryan race, and the world, the Jews needed to be destroyed. His hatred of the Jews was the alpha and omega of his worldview, and his hatred of them consumed him to the point where, at the end of the war, the achievement of having destroyed so many of them was more important than the victory, or even existence, of Germany and the German people.

Hitler’s obsessive fixation with the Jews built upon that of 19^th century writers such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Arthur de Gobineau, but was taken to a new murderous level that was attainable due to Hitler’s control not just of a pen, but of a mighty nation and army. His charisma was able to whip up large swathes of the German population, who were embittered and emasculated by the experience of their country’s defeat, hyperinflation, and depression. In their misery, they sought a messianic “great man” to lead them out of the abyss. They frantically gripped onto that man to provide some dignity and meaning to their lives, which had been shattered. And that man, Hitler, was able to either convince or to deepen the conviction in many Germans that it had been the Jews who were responsible for their defeat. It was much easier for them to accept this “explanation”; it was a soothing tonic for men who could not get work, which caused acute shame, and for women who had to watch their husbands drink themselves to sleep (or to death) and to frantically worry about where their next meal would come from. Much easier to bask in self-pity and to blame the Jews. This was not all, and perhaps not even most, of Hitler’s constituency, but it was its kernel. And although Hitler was certainly a masterful politician and rhetorician, his anti-Semitic beliefs were deeply ingrained and genuine; they were not just propaganda points.

All of this is important to understand why Hitler was intent on the destruction and conquest of the Soviet Union which he firmly believed to be in the grip of malevolent Jewish actors. The Slavs who made up the Soviet armies were mere pawns being controlled by Jewish forces. Lashing out and destroying this demonic octopus (which, obviously, existed only in the minds of paranoid anti-Semites) required a massive invasion that would dash out its brain and sever its tentacles. On the outset of the invasion, the Einsatzgruppen, mobile death squads, quietly encouraged local Latvians, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians to carry out pogroms against their Jewish neighbors on the explicit orders of their commander, Reinhard Heydrich. The myth of the "Judeo-Bolshevik" (Żydokomuna in Polish) was strong in Eastern Europe, where many identified the new, and unwelcome, Soviet power with the Jews. These locals perpetrated horrific massacres in cities such as L'viv and Kaunas. Later, the Germans took control and carried out mass executions (with local assistance in identifying, rounding up, and shooting Jewish victims) in a more systematic fashion, including the so-called Sardinenpackung (sardine-packing) method, perfected by SS general Friedrich Jeckeln, which involved laying the victims down head-to-toe at the bottom of the pit and then shooting them. This atrocious innovation on Jeckeln’s part allowed for more bodies to fit in each mass grave.

A bloodied Jewish woman being chased by a Ukrainian mob in L'viv, summer 1941.

This was all part and parcel of the National Socialist war on the Soviet Union: it cannot be emphasized enough that what we now know as the Holocaust was inextricably intertwined with the conquest of the Soviet Union. The Holocaust was not a sideshow, or a parallel atrocity that the Nazis committed while driving on Moscow, with the major intent of flying the swastika on the spires of the Kremlin. No: the destruction of the Jews was of central importance in German war aims. Historians disagree as to when (or even if) Adolf Hitler gave the discrete order to murder the Jews of Europe. Some suggest the summer of 1941, others autumn 1941, and yet others in December of that year upon the failure to capture Moscow. Others understand the Holocaust as local genocides that only coalesced into one centralized “production,” if you will, in the spring of 1942, when the camps of Aktion Reinhard and Auschwitz-Birkenau began to crank their death mills. Many argue about the centrality of Hitler in this process: was it local actors, like Odilo Globocnik in Lublin and Arthur Greiser in Posen, who were the initiators of genocide? Was it the sinister quadrumvirate of Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Müller, and Adolf Eichmann, operating in Berlin more or less independently? Or was Hitler the driving force behind the madness?

Based upon my analysis, I believe that Hitler was centrally involved, as he would have had to have been; the Jewish question was almost literally his raison d’etre. To think that he was centrally involved in legislation discriminating against German Jews in the 1930s and in the Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938, but somehow only tangentially and insignificantly involved in the launching of the genocide strikes me as absurd. This does not mean that he made every decision or was even consulted on every point, but it does mean that he was centrally important in its execution. I further believe that while the Nazis began the genocide of the Soviet Jews immediately upon the start of Barbarossa (in the summer of 1941), they did not settle on the mass murder of European Jewry until sometime later that year, perhaps in September or October 1941, when it became clear that the Blitzkrieg would not succeed. The Final Solution, hitherto, had meant the deportation of Jews somewhere to the “East, in western Siberia, for example, after the defeat of the Soviet Union and the end of the war. There they would, undoubtedly, have led a miserable existence before dying in the millions. But when the Blitzkrieg stalled, and Hitler realized that the war against the Soviet Union would be a long one, he decided in his frustration that the Jews of Poland, the Czech lands, and elsewhere needed to be killed immediately, rather than after the war, as had previously been envisaged. Because he viewed the Jews being shot in Belarusian forests and Ukrainian ditches as the same entity as the Allied governments in Moscow, Washington, and London, if he could not be successful in crushing these states militarily, at least he could destroy as much of the enemy as he could. This is a huge question that deserves its own piece: I will tackle it at length in a future post.

German soldiers surrendering to a Red Army unit on the outskirts of Moscow 

Another significant factor of the German drive to the East was the mass murder of tens of millions of Slavs to make room for 8-10 million German settlers who would take their place. Germans would till the soil and send the abundant produce of the Ukrainian black earth back home to the Reich, and Germany would never know hunger again, as it had during the First World War, when the Allied blockade of Germany starved over 400,000 people to death. Hitler believed that this was crucial in weakening the German will to fight and in creating the atmosphere that allowed for the “Jewish stab in the back” that caused the German defeat. This could not, and would not, happen again. If it meant that tens of millions of Slavic Untermenschen had to starve to death, then so be it. The remaining Slavs would be the “Germanizable” ones, who would be happy slaves for the master Aryan race until the end of time, knowing nothing of their own histories, their own languages, or their own cultures. This would have been cultural genocide on an unimaginable scale. Although the Germans did ultimately kill millions of Soviet civilians, thankfully this plan, known as Generalplan Ost, did not come to fruition.  

Ultimately, this was the German intention for what would happen to the Soviet Union. This was not to be a “civilized” war. The communist, Hitler told his generals before the invasion, is no comrade; he must be pitilessly slaughtered. This would be an ideological war of annihilation such as the world had never seen. When a few generals had questioned barbaric German methods in Poland in 1939, Hitler had angrily scoffed that war could not be won using “Salvation Army methods.” This was even more true in the case of Operation Barbarossa, which Hitler saw as being waged against the Jewish world enemy. The savagery of the war that ensued was sadly, therefore, foreseeable. The fact that Germany's opponent was an unbridled, barbaric totalitarian regime in its own right only added to the death toll, and when the German army was swept aside in 1944-45, the Red Army exacted revenge in devastating fashion, looting on an epic scale and raping German women in the hundreds of thousands.

To suggest, as some alternative historians and laymen do, that Hitler made a disastrous mistake in invading the Soviet Union, that he should have focused on defeating the British, is to miss the point. If Hitler had not done so, he would not have been Hitler. While capable of keen strategic insight, he was motivated by ideological imperatives. Hitler felt the burning need to invade the Soviet Union, always planned to do so, and everything else, including the war on the Western Front, was done to shore up this thrust to the East. While part of Hitler’s reasoning for Operation Barbarossa was to make the British realize that they stood alone against him, and therefore compel them to come to a separate peace, the overriding reason was his incalculably deep ideological pathologies, which were non-negotiable. The “Jewish Bolshevik” was the enemy of Hitler’s worldview, not the British, whom he greatly esteemed (although at times believed to be controlled by Jewish puppeteers). While true that Lebensraum in the East would, in his mind, create a bread basket for the Germans that would unite them into one happy family and make them the strongest race on the planet, his main reasons were not positive, but negative; not constructive, but destructive. Hitler, a deeply unhappy, pessimistic, and gloomy man, was driven to do what he did not out of love for his people, but out of the ferocious hatred of other peoples, the Jews above all others. It was this, and no strategic vision, that was the driving force behind his otherwise seemingly irrational decisions. The consequences – a world war that was marked by the unprecedented mass murder of civilian populations, particularly and most notoriously the Holocaust – are clear for all to see. 

Eichmann and the "Banality of Evil"

Adolf Eichmann at his trial in Jerusalem

I recently finished watching a film about Hannah Arendt, the prestigious German philosopher whose theories have shaped the framework in which we analyze not only National Socialism, but the nature of evil itself. A disciple of Martin Heidegger, Arendt made her mark beyond the world of philosophers in the early 1950s with the publication of her book The Origins of Totalitarianism. While a book of profound importance, this is not the space to grapple with its tenets. Rather, I want to take on Hannah Arendt’s famous theory of the banality of evil, which she concluded after observing a small portion of the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem while on assignment for The New Yorker. This was the focus of the aforementioned film. Most people who have heard of Arendt know her mostly for this theory. It gave us the notion of the “desk killer” who, without feeling (either hatred or joy), sent the Jews to their deaths. While perhaps true of some individuals, it was decidedly untrue of the focus of her work: Adolf Eichmann.

Hannah Arendt

A brief summary of his early life: Adolf Eichmann was born in Solingen, Germany in 1906. His family moved to Linz, Austria when he was a young boy. As a young man, Eichmann worked as a travelling salesman for an oil company. He was drawn to radical right wing politics while in his late teens and early 20s, like so many young men of his generation, who were left stripped from the moral values of their parents by the impact of the First World War. While perhaps not fervently anti-Semitic at this stage of his life, the circles in which he traveled, which extolled the martial virtues of Germandom; the evils of both Bolshevism and capitalism; and the stab-in-the-back legend that blamed the Novemberverbrecher (i.e., Jews and “Marxists”) for Germany’s capitulation in the First World War, were thoroughly immersed in an anti-Semitic worldview. True, not all of them were potentially genocidal anti-Semites like Adolf Hitler, but anti-Semitism was standard in these extreme right-wing circles. Many Austrian Nazis later distinguished themselves during the Holocaust as among the most murderous anti-Semites, including Odilo Globocnik, the destroyer of Polish Jewry who delighted in his work; Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the head of the Reich Main Security Office; Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Sobibór and Treblinka extermination camps; and Alois Brunner, Eichmann’s remorseless acolyte who said after the war, “All of them [the Jews] deserved to die because they were the Devil’s agents and human garbage. I have no regrets and would do it again.” There is little banality evident in this evil.

Eichmann was persuaded to join the SS by his family friend, the aforementioned Kaltenbrunner, later his superior (and the highest SS officer tried, and hanged, at Nuremberg after the war). After losing his job due to staff cuts, and after the SS was made illegal in Austria in 1934, Eichmann left for Bavaria, training at an SS unit stationed adjacent to the Dachau concentration camp and smuggling Nazi propaganda into Austria. Eichmann became bored with his assignment and applied to the SD, the SS counterintelligence service run by Reinhard Heydrich (the subject of my previous post). First set up working on gathering information on Freemasons, Eichmann eventually found his niche as the SS “Jewish expert”, compiling dossiers on various Jewish individuals and Jewish organizations in Germany, as well as learning bits and pieces of Yiddish and Hebrew. He had relationships and liaisons with the Jewish community, particularly with certain Zionists, and even met with Zionists in Haifa and Cairo in 1937 to discuss the facilitation of Jewish migration from Germany to Palestine. Eichmann seemed to be ahead of the curve in this regard, understanding that the Jews were the main focus of Hitler’s regime – this would allow him to make his mark as the point man regarding Germany’s most “dangerous” “enemy.” Throughout, Eichmann showed an affinity for hard work and administrative and organizational talent.

Adolf Eichmann in his SS uniform

In the late 1930s, and even into at least the summer/autumn of 1941, it was not Nazi policy to murder the Jews, but to forcibly remove them from German-controlled territory. Eichmann demonstrated his value on the “front lines” of this “fight” against the Jews, who the Nazis really did see as their world enemy. The Second World War in Europe is literally unfathomable without this fundamental understanding. (Arendt was frankly wrong in asserting, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, that the Nazis really just went after the Jews because they were an easy target and an easy way to unite the country around a common cause – namely, the demonization and ultimate extermination of a minority group. In other words, it could just as easily have been another minority group. This completely misreads and downplays the murderous obsessions of Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, Alfred Rosenberg, and other leading Nazis. It also makes obvious her attempts to shoehorn Eichmann into her theories after observing him for a couple of weeks in Jerusalem).

After the Anschluss, in which Germany incorporated Austria in March 1938, Eichmann was sent to Vienna, where it was his duty to register the Jews of Austria and to induce them to leave the country. While many Austrian Jews stayed, not wanting to leave their country and believing that this would all blow over, many did indeed leave after their people were made to clean Vienna’s streets with toothbrushes by jeering SS men and forced to sell their businesses to “Aryans” at outrageously low prices. If poorer Jews could not afford to pay for their transit, richer Jews were forced to pay for them. Due to his supremo performance in Vienna, which led to tens of thousands of Jews “migrating” from Austria, Heydrich announced Eichmann to be his “Jewish specialist.” Eichmann later used this Vienna blueprint in Prague (after Germany’s takeover of Czechoslovakia in March 1939) and Berlin.

After Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939, Eichmann embarked on implicitly genocidal plans to deport Jews either to marshy land outside of Lublin, Poland or to Madagascar, an island in the Indian Ocean. Both foresaw the extreme decimation of the Jewish population. Rather than being the mere taker of orders, Eichmann was entrepreneurial in his attempts to ethnically cleanse German-controlled territory of Jews. Heydrich gave the broad parameters, but it was Eichmann who acted with considerable initiative and resourcefulness in attempting to bring these plans into being (both failed under the crushing weight of reality). Eichmann himself went to the SS and Police Leader of Katowice to arrange deportations of Jews to the envisaged “Jewish reservation” outside of Lublin, and it was he who sent his deputy Rolf Günther to make similar arrangements to deport Jews from Vienna. So while Himmler and Heydrich were the policymakers, they gave Eichmann a wide berth in which to carry out the policy, as was typical Nazi practice (unlike the streamlined, highly structured hierarchy in which it is fashionable to think the Third Reich operated, the Nazis in fact demanded initiative from lower-ranking individuals and there was substantial cross-fertilization of ideas). The Himmler-Heydrich-Eichmann dynamic is perhaps the key exemplar of this fact. Later, Eichmann used his considerable talents to send Jews from throughout Europe to the gas chambers.

Arendt seems to have fallen for Eichmann’s act. His very defense strategy relied upon him to look “banal,” to appear as a taker of orders who had no say, no mind, no real authority. He wanted to appear meek and mild. How could such a meek and mild man be the murderer of millions? This unassuming man, who stood to attention and showed the utmost respect for the Israeli court: this was the monstrous logistician of the Holocaust? With this strategy, Eichmann was able to blame Himmler, Heydrich, and Müller and rinse his hands of the murder of the Jews. His act worked for Arendt and for many others who, to this day, remark on Eichmann’s “normal” appearance. How was he supposed to appear? Like a demon breathing hellfire, with scaly skin and talons? I do not think that Eichmann truly believed that he was somehow detached from and not culpable for the sufferings and deaths of Jews on the trains that he arranged, or for their gassing upon arrival. Eichmann knew where they were going, as the prosecution team in Jerusalem proved eminently clear: he visited a shooting site outside of Minsk, the Chełmno extermination camp outside of Łódź, and Auschwitz-Birkenau several times, including just before the summer 1944 deportations of Hungarian Jewry, when he visited to make sure the killing installations were ready for his “cargo.”

A Hungarian Jewish woman walks with small children to the gas chambers in Auschwitz-Birkenau, May 1944. They were deported to the camp, and to their deaths, by Adolf Eichmann. 

It was during these summer 1944 deportations that Eichmann truly revealed himself to be driven by an immense and incomprehensible hatred of the Jews. He barked orders at his Jewish liaisons, sneered at them, toyed with them, threatened them, and then ultimately sent them and their families to a destination at which he knew they were to be murdered. He continued to send the Jews to Auschwitz even after the Hungarian government, in July 1944, demanded that the deportations cease. Eichmann even went against the express orders of his superior Himmler who, seeing the writing on the wall, demanded that the transports be halted. After he finally gave in, Eichmann forced the Jews to march from Budapest to Vienna to build fortifications against the rapidly-advancing Soviet juggernaut. Many of these Jews were killed. Indeed, Eichmann refused to leave Budapest until the Soviets were just about to encircle the city, because he wanted to make sure that his murderous tasks had been completed as much as possible. Toward the end of the war, he bragged to his associates that he would leap gladly into his grave knowing that he had the death of five million Jews on his conscience. After the war, he boasted about his murderous accomplishments to the Dutch neo-Nazi Willem Sassen. It was only when he was captured by the Israeli Mossad, interrogated, and then put on trial for his life that Eichmann assumed his banal façade. It was an ultimately failed attempt to cheat the hangman.

Heydrich: The Hangman

Reinhard Heydrich was in many ways the personification of 20^th century totalitarianism. The security chief of the Third Reich, he was more responsible than anyone else for creating the police state that spread its tentacles throughout German society and into Nazi-occupied Europe. More than anyone other than his chief Heinrich Himmler and the Führer, he was the chief architect of the Holocaust. Contemporaries described him as “wolf-like” and “demonic”, a man of sinister intellect who overshadowed Himmler (Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich, they said – “Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich”). He appeared to many of those who worked with him as completely devoid of human warmth – the German historian Joachim Fest wrote in an important essay on Heydrich that the man radiated a“Luciferian coldness.” His biographer Robert Gerwarth makes the careful and important point in his book Hitler’s Hangman that many of these men had reason to paint him in as brutal colors as possible – some, though not all, of the descriptions came after the war, when these men of the SS and SD were trying to distance themselves desperately from the man who had become known to history  as The Butcher of Prague and The Hangman. Nonetheless, there must have been a core of truth to it. He was legitimately feared in his lifetime by other Nazis – he had dirt on them, and had shown throughout his loathsome career that he was not afraid to use this tactic to end careers, and lives. He had proven throughout the 1930s that he was willing to walk over anyone and everyone’s corpse to attain power.

Heydrich’s name is, of course, well known to anyone who is well-read (or not even that well-read) in the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. But at the same time, he is ultimately a shadowy figure. Center stage is taken by Hitler, Himmler, or Heydrich's subordinate Eichmann, who has become one of the major symbols of Nazi evil not due to any rank held, but to his responsibility for rounding up and dispatching millions of Jews to their deaths. Despite the importance and centrality of Heydrich’s role, he appears somehow always off screen, a mysterious phantom just tantalizingly out of reach of the reader. I can think of no other prominent Nazi leader save Bormann of whom this is true. But it was Heydrich who drew up the policies that Eichmann implemented. He ordered ghettoization, the Jewish Councils (Judenräte), deportations, the creation and operations of the mobile killing units (Einsatzgruppen), the marking of Germany’s Jews with the yellow star, and, the act for which he is perhaps most notorious, chaired the Wannsee Conference, where the Final Solution was streamlined (I covered this in my last post). But somehow he is always just off-stage.

He stares at us through narrow eyes in the official photographs, somehow blasting us with that “Luciferian coldness” through the page (or computer screen) and over the distance of seven decades. I remember watching a scene in an old History Channel documentary in which Heydrich is walking out of a building through a phalanx of onlookers. He walks right up to the camera and stares into it with such an intense and predatory look before turning away that I was jolted from my seat, my heart jumping up to my throat. I had recorded the program and rewound it back a couple of seconds. Sure enough, even though I knew what was coming, every time Heydrich fixed me with that glance (and I did feel that he was looking at me, and even through me), my body gave the same biological response. In watching this scene, my body was instinctively reacting not to a man, but to a wild animal. When I saw the same couple of seconds being played on another documentary that I was watching recently, the same thing happened – a fight or flight reflex kicked in.

Who was this man? He was born in Halle an der Saale, northwest of Leipzig in Saxony-Anhalt, on March 7, 1904. He was too young to fight in the First World War, but the reverberations from that war certainly shaped his outlook. His childhood was filled with revolutionary violence from the radical left, and their violent suppression by the radical right, which certainly shaped his later political views. His father, a composer, owned and operated a conservatory. As Heydrich’s biographer Gerwarth explains, Heydrich’s father has been unfairly untarnished as a third-rate composer in hindsight not because of his actual musical talents or lack thereof, but because of the nefarious reputation of his son. Heydrich himself was from a young child a talented musician, playing violin concerts well into adulthood, supposedly playing Haydn while sentimentally weeping. This from a man who ordered the deaths of millions with a heart of granite (or “of iron”, as Hitler said admiringly at Heydrich’s funeral in June 1942).

Heydrich’s father Bruno is not unimportant because a man who felt slighted by Bruno accused him of being Jewish. This was not true. But Bruno’s stepfather was named Süss, a common Jewish surname at the time. Süss was not Bruno’s biological father, nor was he Jewish, but nonetheless rumors of Jewish blood chased Bruno (and his son Reinhard) throughout the rest of his life. Some have ascribed Heydrich’s later murderous anti-Semitism to being in reaction to this false accusation of Jewish blood; perhaps he believed he was Jewish, and in seeking relentlessly to destroy the Jews of Europe, he was in fact really seeking to extinguish the Jew in himself. As in most psychoanalytical history, this does not hold much water.

Heydrich, always fascinated with all things military and grated by the fact that he had missed out on the Great War, joined the Navy at the age of 18. There he was apparently an efficient officer although disliked by his subordinates for his arrogant attitude. In a further sign of his arrogance, he impregnated a lover and then refused to wed her; the woman’s father brought him before a court of honor, which cashiered him, not so much for the offense as for the high-handed demeanor with which he carried himself in court.

Heydrich was, in fact, already engaged at that point, to his future wife Lina von Osten, a decidedly Lady Macbeth-type figure. While Heydrich at this point was fairly apolitical (although sympathetic to the parties of the radical right), his wife was a convinced Nazi and came from a family of others of like mind. After Heydrich was dismissed from his post as an officer, he locked himself in his apartment and wept for days; this was a man who had gloried in the uniform, and what would he do now for a career? He was finished, he thought. This was, after all, the time of the Great Depression. Through her connections, his fiancée was able to set up a meeting with the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, who was keen on setting up a counterintelligence unit of his organization. Wrongly believing that Heydrich had been an intelligence officer in the Navy (he had in fact been a communications officer), Himmler agreed to meet with Heydrich and told the young man to demonstrate how he would organize a spy agency. Heydrich drew up a plan based upon his knowledge of spy novels and Himmler was impressed. Heydrich was hired and, drawn by the quasi-military nature of the SS and happy to have a job again (and happy to please his rabid Nazi of a wife), he accepted the position. This, born of largely if not entirely opportunistic motives, was to be the watershed moment of what would become an almost unimaginably murderous career.

Heydrich worked around the clock, arriving at his desk very early and only leaving very late, on an exceedingly modest salary. Nonetheless, he seems to have found his passion. The SS intelligence service that he created from scratch became known as the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service, or SD). Heydrich set about drawing up index cards of anyone and everyone, enemies and even friends, gathering dirt on individuals to use later in the pursuit of power. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Heydrich deployed these index cards to round up leftist political opponents, who were thrown into concentration camps such as Dachau. In 1934, he was a crucial player during the Night of the Long Knives, when the SS murdered key leaders of the SA to rid Hitler of a potentially dangerous enemy to his right. Heydrich was instrumental in drawing up the death lists in this purge. Later, he and Himmler were able to take over the Bavarian police and, in April 1934, the Gestapo, which beforehand had only operated in Prussia (albeit the largest German state) under the auspices of Hitler’s deputy Hermann Göring. In 1936, Himmler became the chief of the police in every German state and with him came Heydrich, who took operational control. He used his power as Gestapo chief to pre-emptively arrest anyone who might be a threat to the Nazis, or anyone he might not like. He incarcerated such individuals in concentration camps or even had them killed. While Heydrich had almost complete sway over individuals outside of the concentration camp gates, that is where his authority stopped – this hindrance later led Heydrich to clash with Theodor Eicke, first commandant of Dachau and then head of the entire concentration camp system.

After the Anschluss of March 1938, in which Germany annexed Austria, Heydrich oversaw the forced emigration of Austrian Jews, executed through the office of the aforementioned Eichmann. At this point, Jews were not being forcibly deported to ghettos or camps, but rather abroad – anywhere, just out of the Nazis’ hair. This was to be Eichmann’s grooming before he deployed his considerable talents to transporting the Jews to the gas chambers. Heydrich was also instrumental in the notorious pogrom of Kristallnacht, which occurred throughout the Reich (including Austria) in November 1938. Heydrich ordered that any fires raging in synagogues or Jewish shops or homes should not be stopped unless if the flames endangered “Aryan” dwellings or places of business. Jewish homes and shops could be destroyed, but not looted (we don’t want to look like hooligans, after all!). As long as everything was “proper,” the police were not to interfere with the pogrom. In the end, nearly 100 Jews were murdered, hundreds of synagogues and thousands of Jewish-owned shops destroyed, and 30,000 Jews sent to concentration camps. In January 1939, Hermann Göring charged Heydrich with organizing a solution to the Jewish "question" within the Reich. 

In order to begin what became the Second World War, Hitler needed a pretext, even a flimsy one. Heydrich carried out a plan whereby Polish-speaking SS men “captured” a German radio station on the German-Polish border. The bodies of “Poles” were provided by dead concentration camp prisoners. Using this staged incident as well as the supposed depredations of Poles on ethnic Germans within Poland (some of which was factual), Hitler launched his armies on September 1, 1939, beginning the Second World War. Following the army into  Poland were SS and police units organized by Heydrich to fulfill the “cleansing” of Poland and the extermination of its intelligentsia, including priests, lawyers, academics, journalists, and others. The purpose was to destroy the Polish nation. Heydrich had delicately come to an arrangement with the army such that these Einsatzgruppen technically worked under military auspices but in reality took their orders directly from him, Heydrich. After the conquest of Poland and the handover of control from military to civilian authorities, Heydrich, acting on orders from Hitler and Himmler and operating through Adolf Eichmann, began the diabolical re-engineering of Poland. Poles and Jews were deported from western Polish territory annexed to Germany to make room for ethnic Germans from the Baltic States and Ukraine. German-looking Polish children were stolen from their families and taken to Germany. Hundreds of thousands of people were affected by this.

Four weeks after the invasion of Poland, the Criminal Police was merged with the Security Police (the Gestapo and the SD) to form the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main Office, or RSHA), which was placed under Heydrich’s control, effectively placing him at the center of the National Socialist spider web. In Poland, Heydrich and his underlings, especially Eichmann, set about trying to “solve” the “Jewish question.” Poland was the heart of European Jewry. Heydrich ordered that the Jews be concentrated in ghettos in major cities near rail lines: ghettos were duly set up in major cities such as Warsaw, Kraków, and Łódź. At first, he had Eichmann toy with various places to dump these Jews: first near Lublin, in the eastern part of Nazi-occupied Poland, and then Madagascar, the island off of Africa in the Indian Ocean. Both schemes came to naught. But in the meantime, the Jews had been ghettoized, isolated from the rest of society, and were forced to live on top of one another, with little food and much disease. No “Final Solution” was yet in the offing, and the Jews were forced to stay in these confined spaces. Later, accommodations were made for them in the yawning maws of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka.

In the run-up to the invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, Heydrich set about organizing new Einsatzgruppen, who would be much more murderous than their forebears who had operated in Poland. They were ordered to murder all Comintern members, medium- and senior-ranking Communist party and state officials, and Jews in party and government posts. Because of the deliberate conflation of “Jew” and “Communist” in Nazi propaganda, this meant that these mobile killing units were essentially given carte blanche to kill any adult Jewish male. The Einsatzgruppen also made it their business to prod local anti-Semites to murder Jews in frantic pogroms, such as seen in Kaunas and Lviv, but to keep German “fingerprints” unseen so as to make the pogroms seem purely local in origin. Later on, the Einsatzgruppen’s brief extended beyond adult Jewish males: beginning particularly in August 1941, Jewish women and children were killed as well. In late August, 23,600 were murdered in Kamenets Podolsky and, in September, 33,771 in the ravine of Babi Yar outside of Kiev. These were only the most notorious of the massacres. Heydrich was the primary author of all of this and when he visited his commanders in the field, he urged more radical measures and a higher body count.

Heydrich was in general one of the radical prods of the regime, particularly when it came to the Jews. In August 1941, both he and another fanatic, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, twisted Hitler’s arm to first mark the Jews of the Reich and then to deport them. Hitler was hesitant. He believed, as did so many Nazis, that Germany had never militarily lost the First World War; rather, it had only lost because of the disintegration of the home front, which the Nazis naturally blamed on Jews and socialists. Hitler was terrified of rocking the boat at this juncture and refused to either mark or deport the Jews. A month later, for whatever reason, he changed his mind – Heydrich was successful in introducing the yellow star to the Reich Jews (which he had first proposed at a meeting shortly after the Kristallnacht pogrom three years earlier). Furthermore, the Jews were deported out of the Reich. Jews in places like Minsk and Riga were shot to make room for the Reich Jews; beginning in December 1941, Jews from the Łódź Ghetto were sent to Chełmno to make room for them and, beginning in spring 1942, the Jews of the Lublin district to Bełżec and Sobibór.

In addition to his responsibilities as the head of the RSHA, Heydrich was named the Acting Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia (essentially the present-day Czech Republic) in September 1941 and was put up in Prague Castle.  This gave him direct access to Hitler, whereas previously he had to go through Himmler. He announced that his goal was to "Germanize this Czech garbage" and set about crushing the Czech resistance through the adept use of carrots and sticks. The Czechs became quiescent and Heydrich, as was his wont, became exceedingly arrogant and careless. This would cost him his life in June 1942.

In November 1941, Heydrich had Eichmann send out invitations to a conference in the affluent suburb of Berlin, Wannsee. After a delay, the meeting convened on January 20, 1942. Its purpose was, essentially, to concretize Heydrich and the SS’ role as the spearhead against the Jews. Other ministries were to grasp the importance of the project and get in line. In this, the meeting was largely successful. During the meeting, Heydrich said that Europe would be swept east to west of Jews, who would be forced to work in labor columns building roads for the German armies until they were dead. Anyone who survived this murderous work would be "dealt with accordingly": in other words, killed. Those incapable of working were implicitly to be murdered. According to Eichmann, the methods of killing Jews were intimately discussed at the meeting, scarcely 90 minutes long, at which the participants sipped brandy. It was determined that 11 million Jews – in countries under Nazi control, under the control of Germany’s allies, or in neutral/hostile countries – were to be subjected to the Final Solution. While none of the death camps (outside of the gas van station at Chełmno) were yet in operation, it was menacingly clear what was meant by this. After Heydrich was assassinated in Prague, Aktion Reinhard, comprising the camps of Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka and administered out of Lublin, was named in his “honor.” These camps consumed some 1.7 million victims, predominantly Polish Jews.

As Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, Heydrich had come to acquire a certain sense of international notoriety, appearing on the cover of TIME Magazine in caricature form surrounded by nooses (due to his nickname of The Hangman). In addition, the Czech government-in-exile was feeling desperate to prove its worth to the Allies so that, after the defeat of the Nazis, it would get a proper seat at the table and its country would be able to win its independence (alas, it was to fall under crushing Communist rule until 1989). A Czech and Slovak team was trained by British special forces with the specific purpose of assassinating the ghoul ruling from Prague Castle. The team was later parachuted into Bohemia. After observing Heydrich and discovering his patterns, they attacked on May 27, 1942, firing guns and throwing grenades at Heydrich’s vehicle as he commuted to work. Like a horror movie villain, Heydrich jumped out of the car and chased his assassins, firing his pistol until he collapsed in pain. After a week of agony, Heydrich expired in a Prague hospital on June 4.

Hitler and Himmler spoke at his funeral, singing his praises as the ideal National Socialist, the “man with the iron heart” who could hardly be replaced. Hitler fumed at Heydrich’s idiocy and arrogance, driving through the streets of Prague with his car’s top down. He threatened to unleash hell in response, and he did. The Nazis got (false) information that a village outside of Prague, called Lidice, had harbored Heydrich’s killers. The entire male population of Lidice above the age of 16 was lined up and shot; the women were sent to concentration camps; and children, if of “suitable” racial appearance, were sent to German families or, if not, gassed at Chełmno. The village itself was destroyed: its buildings were demolished, and then the ruins detonated; the Nazis even salted the earth. A similar fate met another village, Lezaky. Thousands of people were executed to sate the Nazi bloodlust which was, in fact, insatiable.

Heydrich’s name stands alongside those of Hitler and Himmler as the most dastardly of the Nazi regime. Given his buildup of the German security state and his engineering of the Holocaust, his name should stand in the ring of dishonor of the 20^th century, alongside not only Hitler and Himmler, but Stalin, Beria, and Mao Zedong. While students of the period are acquainted with his name, I have found all too often that he is not widely known by those with only a casual knowledge. His subordinate Eichmann, because of his sensational capture and trial in Jerusalem, is far better known. But the truth is that the Third Reich and its predatory policies are simply not understandable without looking at this man. He was, in a way, a microcosm of National Socialism itself: fanatical, utterly ruthless, and driven by a furious intensity toward power and domination. He loathed the Jews, and he murdered them in the millions. He despised the Catholic Church, in which he was baptized as a child, and hoped to one day bring about its ruin. He had supreme contempt for mankind, and so he terrorized, brutalized, and imprisoned hundreds of thousands, and brought misery to an entire continent. Indeed, for such a man, there is no more fitting epitaph than Aktion Reinhard, the program to exterminate Polish Jewry, and the destruction of Lidice. In the final analysis, Heydrich’s life’s work was a mountain of ashes and bones. His name and memory should send a chill down the spine of the entire civilized world.

The Significance of the Wannsee Conference

The house where the Wannsee Conference was held.

On January 20, 1942, 15 SS officers, Nazi party officials, and civil servants met at a villa at 56-58 Am Groβwannsee in a Berlin suburb. They were convened by Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA – Reich Main Security Office), which incorporated the SD (SS intelligence) and the Security Police, itself made up of the Gestapo and the Criminal Police.

Heydrich was Heinrich Himmler’s deputy who had been charged by Hitler and Hermann Göring to implement the Final Solution of the Jewish Question in the German sphere of influence. Heydrich was renowned for his ruthlessness even in the Nazi context: contemporaries called him the “blond beast,” a “young, evil god of death,” “wolf-like,” “predatory,” and “demonic.” He has gone down in history as "The Hangman" and "The Butcher of Prague." When one reads about Heydrich, the overriding theme is his singularly ferocious drive to “cleanse” Germany and then Europe of the Jews. While Nazi policy twisted and turned before settling on the comprehensive extermination of European Jewry, I highly doubt that Heydrich would have had qualms about such wanton murderousness from the very beginning.

Reinhard Heydrich

The purpose of the Wannsee Conference does not appear to have been to begin the extermination program – it did not represent the culminating decision to embark on mass annihilation. Jews were already being shot in the Soviet Union – a million were murdered between the onset of the invasion in June 1941 and the end of that year. Jews were also being gassed at Chełmno in Nazi-annexed Poland and the construction of the Bełżec death camp began the previous November. Plans for gas chambers and massive crematoria were drawn up for an extermination camp outside of Mogilev in October 1941 (when these plans were later scrapped, the crematorium ovens were rerouted to Auschwitz-Birkenau). Jewish men were being systematically shot as hostages in Nazi-occupied Serbia. Rather, the purpose of the meeting was to make clear to all relevant parties that the SS was responsible for the regime’s Jewish policy.

How did it come to this? Rather than always having been envisioned by Hitler from the time he wrote Mein Kampf, if not earlier, the extermination of the Jews was not always foretold in Nazi policy. There is no historical consensus as to when, or even if, there was a discrete order by Hitler to murder the Jews. The policy before the war was to persecute and isolate the Jews by forbidding them from certain professions, the forced “Aryanization” of their businesses, strict segregationist policies, and the prohibition of intermarriage. There was certainly violence, particularly during the Anschluss in March 1938 and, most ominously, during Kristallnacht in November 1938, during which Jewish homes, shops, and synagogues were attacked, nearly 100 Jews killed, and about 30,000 thrown into concentration camps. But at this stage of the Nazi dictatorship, concentration camps, while certainly no joke, were not death sentences and prisoners could be, and were, released. The purpose of this massive violence, whose flames were fanned by Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, was primarily intended not to kill the Jews, but to induce them to leave the country. At this point in time, it was Adolf Eichmann’s job, in Vienna, Prague, and then Berlin, to force the Jews out of German-controlled territory. 

When the Germans invaded Poland and took control of two million more Jews, the Nazis first planned a Jewish reservation near Lublin and then a colony in Madagascar. These would have been murderous and were clearly genocidal, but did not bear the hallmark of the later Final Solution that makes it so unique. For their inchoate Final Solution, the Nazis forced the Jews into major urban areas near rail lines, perhaps most infamously at Warsaw and Łódź. This was pursuant to a Heydrich directive from September 1939. But the back and forth among ghetto administrators and between the ghetto administrations and Berlin, and between other channels of communication, make it readily obvious that there was no master plan at this point. Hans Frank, the governor of occupied Poland, clashed repeatedly with the SS and with Nazis such as Arthur Greiser, who wanted to deport all the Jews under his control to Frank’s fiefdom, the General Government (the thrust of the Wannsee Conference was to sort out such clashes). When Frank learned of the Madagascar Plan, he was delighted and gloried in the possible deportation of Jews from his territory and ordered that ghetto construction cease. When the Madagascar Plan fell through due to the Nazis’ failure in the Battle of Britain, Frank glumly conceded to maintaining the ghettos. The Jews were shunted from towns and villages into major cities (or vice versa as in the Lublin and Kraków districts) to be deported somewhere: but where?

The Germans and their allies/co-belligerents invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. This was to be a “war of extermination” between competing worldviews; the gloves were off. As the Nazis, among others, conflated Judaism and Bolshevism, the war against the Soviet Union was also a war against the world Jewish conspiracy in which the Nazis genuinely, and fervently, believed. The invasion of the Soviet Union was therefore a watershed event in which the Nazis could gain Lebensraum, hegemony over continental Europe, and a reckoning with the Jews  (and also, as a desired strategic effect, cause a truce with the British). The East would be, in Hitler’s words, the German “Garden of Eden” – the wheat fields of Ukraine would feed the Germans, and the Slavs would either die or serve them. The Jews would be sent to some abstract “East” – there was obviously no room for them in this utopia. The Jews were to be dealt with after the war, which the Germans thought would be swift; they soon realized otherwise as their tanks sunk in the mud in the autumn and their soldiers froze on the outskirts of Moscow in the winter. 

Following the German armies into the Soviet Union were mobile killing squads created by and under the direct orders of Heydrich. As an aside, the image of the “desk killer”’ is a false one – the fanatical young intellectuals who made up the personnel of the RSHA were largely eager to put their ideology into practice by commanding these killing units. This was true of the head of RSHA Amt (Office) I, Bruno Streckenbach; the head of the Criminal Police, Arthur Nebe; and the head of Amt VII, Franz Six, a professor of sociology. Hannah Arendt’s misleading analysis of Adolf Eichmann as an unthinking desk killer, unmotivated by ideology, influenced later views of the “typical Nazi” who would send the Jews to their deaths because it was “their job.” Indeed, it was their job, but it was a job they did with relish, a job they sought to accomplish with proficiency. These mobile killing squads, and their accomplices among local populations, killed some two million Jews during the Second World War in the occupied Soviet Union in locations such as Riga, Vilnius, Kiev, Minsk, Mogilev, and Kamenets-Podolski.

After prodding from Heydrich and Goebbels, in September 1941 Hitler (who was hesitant on this point) agreed to marking German Jews with the now-infamous yellow star and deporting them to the east. In certain cases, German Jews were shot on arrival; in most cases, they were sent to the Łódź Ghetto, Lublin district, Riga, and Minsk, where they replaced the local Jews who had already been killed, either by gassing in Chełmno and Bełżec or shot. In October 1941, Heinrich Müller, the head of the Gestapo, ordered that Jews were no longer to be allowed out of German reach. Previously, that had been the aim of Nazi policy; now, the Germans wanted them close to hand. And given the convergence of circumstances that I have just outlined, at this point, the Rubicon had clearly been crossed. Due to the military circumstances alluded to above, the war was not going to end any time soon, which even Hitler realized. At some point, he came to the conclusion that it would be best to murder the Jews during the war and in areas already under Nazi control.

The Wannsee Conference was largely about bureaucratic infighting, of paramount importance in the Nazi universe. Heydrich, and by extension the SS, insisted on running point in the extermination of the Jews. Other agencies were brought to heel. The other agencies that participated in the conference included the Foreign Ministry, Ministry of the Interior, Ministry of Justice, the General Government, the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (Ostministerium), the Reich Chancellery, the Führer Chancellery, the Office of the Four-Year Plan (Göring’s economic empire), and the Race and Resettlement Main Office (tasked with reordering the racial makeup of Nazi Europe). It was essential for the SS to work with all of these agencies, and then some, to accomplish the Jews’ murder. Officials in the General Government, as discussed above, as well as the Ostministerium, had squabbled with the SS over jurisdiction of the Jews, and had jealously clung to their authority. Hermann Göring, in his capacity as overlord of Germany’s war economy, insisted that the priority should be for the Jews to work as slave laborers, and he got Frank’s back in disputes over Jewish labor in the General Government. After having proved itself over six months of having the most radical and, in their eyes, effective solution to the Jewish question, the SS had “earned” the “bona fides” to steer the ship. The rest of the agencies were reined in and, in the following months and years, followed suit.

After the conference, the Jews of Poland were obliterated in the camps of Aktion Reinhard (Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka), administered from Lublin and named in “honor” of Heydrich, who was assassinated in Prague in June 1942. Further sweeps by the mobile killing squads in the spring and summer of 1942 further decimated the Jews of eastern Poland and the Soviet Union. Jews from all over Europe from the Channel Islands to Poland were murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau, whose geographic location in the center of Nazi-occupied Europe made it perfectly suited for its task. After two years of frantic killing, the last large Jewish population was in Hungary: its members were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in a murderous frenzy from May to July 1944. The mass murder of the Hungarian Jews (some 400,000 were killed in the just-mentioned time frame) was Eichmann’s moment in the sun, his magnum opus.

While it is not clear when the Nazis finally had their “a-ha!” moment about murdering the Jews of Europe, the Wannsee Conference had the effect of clarifying who would be in charge, who would be murdered (the attendants argued about the merits or lack thereof of murdering German quarter- and half-Jews, a topic that was not decided and was dealt with at a subsequent, lower-level meeting), and the necessity of bureaucratic cooperation in the endeavor. It was decided that 11 million Jews, from areas under Nazi control or that of their allies, or in neutral countries, would be subject to the Final Solution. This was not parallel or subordinate to the Nazi war effort: the Jews’ destruction was a major war aim. Over a million had already been murdered by the time these men sat around the table at Wannsee – the conference simply cleared the path to a process already set in motion and already hurtling into the abyss with devastating speed.

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.