Poland, Hungary, and the Holocaust

In a speech last Wednesday at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., FBI Director James B. Comey made the following statement:

"“In their minds, the murderers and accomplices of Germany, and Poland and Hungary, and so many, many other places didn’t do something evil. They convinced themselves it was the right thing to do, the thing they had to do. That’s what people do. And that should truly frighten us.”

The Poles were furious and summoned the U.S. Ambassador in Warsaw to the Foreign Ministry for an official apology. The Hungarians also expressed anger and accused Comey of "astounding insensitivity."

I find it very difficult to sympathize with the Hungarians. There is a nasty, disturbing trend of historical revisionism in Hungary these days. A far-right party, the Jobbik, holds 20% of the seats in Hungary's parliament. There is a movement to reclaim the legacy of Miklos Horthy, the Hungarian regent who led the country during the Second World War; statues of Horthy have appeared in provincial towns throughout the country, though not (yet, anyway) in Budapest. Budapest itself contains a controversial memorial depicting a ferocious eagle swooping down upon an angelic being. The eagle represents Nazi Germany and the angel, of course, Hungary. The statue commemorates the German occupation of the country, beginning on March 19, 1944, and is dedicated to the "victims," who go nameless. Is it the Jews? Or is Hungary draping itself in the cloak of victim? What happened between 1939 and 1944, when the Germans came out of the clear blue sky? Or between 1941-44? (The same can be asked of some of Budapest's history museums, which awkwardly elide the years before 1944 as if nothing happened until March of that year.)

The uncomfortable truth, of course, is that Hungary was an ally of Nazi Germany, a member in good standing of the Axis Powers, if a minor one. Hungarian soldiers fought alongside Germans, Finns, Italians, Romanians, and others on the Eastern Front, and suffered over 100,000 casualties in the Battle of Stalingrad alone. Furthermore, and more relevant for our purposes, the Hungarians were deeply, and officially, complicit in the murder of the Jews. Jews in the Hungarian Army did not fight; they were confined to labor battalions and lived dank, miserable, exhausting lives before expiring. Tens of thousands died on the Eastern Front doing the most dangerous work imaginable. Hungary's misappropriation of the label victim, and the attempt to somehow bamboozle the world, or at least the naive tourist, that Hungary, too, was but a victim of the Nazi war machine is not only misleading: it's a crime against historical memory. 

After Stalingrad and particularly Kursk in July 1943, the Red Army was an invincible tide that swept all before it. The Germans were able to defeat the Soviets in local, limited, tactical actions but not strategically, and not long term. Their momentum was broken, the Red Air Force dominated the skies, and the exhausted Germans, and their allies, marched west. The Hungarians saw the writing on the wall and began to put out feelers for a separate peace with the Soviet Union. An enraged Hitler summoned Horthy to Schloss Klessheim, a palace near Salzburg, Austria, where he berated the Hungarian leader. Horthy agreed to send tens of thousands of Jews to work for German war production. The conference, actually, was a ruse. On March 19, 1944, while Horthy and other Hungarian officials were in Austria, the Germans marched into Budapest. With them came the sinister Adolf Eichmann, who temporarily put up his headquarters in Budapest's Grand Synagogue (where Theodor Herzl was bar mitzvah'd). He was not there for any nice reason. Dome Sztojay, who had no compunctions at all about murdering the Jews, was appointed Prime Minister. 

The Jews of Hungary were the last remaining substantial population of European Jewry that had not been murdered by the Nazis. It was the provincial Jews' turn first. Approximately 400,000 of them were sent to the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau in a matter of weeks in the summer of 1944. There were so many of them that Jews had to "wait their turn" for the gas chambers in a little wood outside of Crematorium V; in their turn, the crematoria could not keep up with the corpses, so many of the bodies were burned in a field behind Crematorium V. The photos of the famous Auschwitz Album, which depict the entire process of extermination in Auschwitz-Birkenau, from the selection on the ramp to the wait outside of the gas chamber, were taken by an SS man in the summer of 1944. The Jews that appear in the photographs are provincial Hungarians. Again, these deportations took place under the aegis of a Hungarian government, and Hungarian gendarmes rounded up the Jews to send them to their deaths.

Horthy, at this point confined to house arrest, ordered a halt to the deportations although several more trains traveled to Auschwitz-Birkenau under Eichmann's supervision. Eichmann was recalled to Berlin, and due to military issues outside of the scope of the present post, future deportations were canceled. 

The Jews of Budapest, while they were to survive in much greater proportions than their provincial brethren, were to suffer horribly. The brutal, fascist, native Arrow Cross party took power in Budapest in October 1944. Jews were confined to ghettos in the city and over 10,000 were forced on foot to Vienna, where they were to build fortifications against the Soviet onslaught. In the meantime, Arrow Cross members shot the Jews in the streets, or forced them to walk, shivering and naked, into the near-frozen Danube River, where they were shot. Their valuables, no need to mention, were taken. Today, not far from the Budapest Parliament building, there is a moving memorial to these dead: life-sized sculptures of shoes, in all sizes, stand silent testament on the banks of the Danube. I remember going to that memorial one evening, staring at the shoes in a kind of numbed disbelief, and at the moving letters that had been left near them by visitors. I walked down a nearby flight of stairs to rocks onto which the waters of the river lapped; a non-smoker, nonetheless I smoked several cigarettes as I contemplated the dark waters of the river. It was, frankly, a lovely sight; Buda Castle atop the hill across the river looked stunning. What this spot had witnessed 70 years earlier was simply not within my ability to imagine.

Suffice it to say, Hungary was no angel in all of this, despite what the ridiculous statue in Budapest would suggest; in fact, quite the opposite. What, however, of Poland?

Poland is a more complex case. First, let me say that the the FBI director erred in uttering the word "Poland" alongside "Germany" and "Hungary." Poland was the first true victim of Hitler's aggression. It was where the Nazis' gloves first really came off. The Poles were detested Slavs. They were to be made eternal slaves to the pure "Aryans" and Heinrich Himmler and Hans Frank, the General Governor with his seat at Wawel in Krakow, decreed that Poles would not be allowed an education beyond being able to write their name and count up to a few hundred. Nothing more was necessary, because they were to serve as no more than mules. Poland did not fight alongside the Nazis; its government fled and set up shop in exile in London. The government established an official underground body, the Home Army, to resist the Nazis. The Home Army was ultimately to lead the Warsaw Uprising of August-October 1944, the largest uprising the Nazis faced in the Second World War. 

Poles, Jew and Gentile, in the western part of the country (the Warthegau) were deported to the central part, the General Government (Hans Frank's domain), which was to become a dumping ground of the "unwanted." Their place was taken by ethnic Germans. Polish children who "looked" German were literally stolen from their parents. In heartrending scenes after the war, these children were sometimes taken from their German "parents": the children, very young, often did not even remember their original parents or how to speak Polish. There was no winning here: either the devastated Polish parents were never to see their precious children again, or the children were to be taken from the only parents they ever knew, to be shipped to a strange country with a strange language. Another horrific crime on the Nazi ledger.

Polish intellectual life was disrupted and the Polish intelligentsia was murdered in the tens of thousands in the initial invasion. 40,000 people were murdered in the initial bombardment of Warsaw. To anticipate events, six million Poles died during the Second World War: three million Gentiles and three million Jews. The Poles suffered very real pain, which has come to dominate that country's national ethos (on top of the rest of the country's anguished history - it has the terrible misfortune of being located between Germany and Russia). 

Polish behavior was often ugly, however - very ugly. Many Poles looked the other way when their Jewish neighbors were deported to Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka beginning in spring 1942. Many gladly took their erstwhile neighbors' possessions, including their homes. Indeed, when many surviving Jews returned to their homes, they discovered Polish occupants. Sometimes the Jews were even killed. Jews who tried to hide among Poles, including after revolting and/or escaping from the death camps, were sometimes killed outright or turned over to the Germans for a reward.The local economies around the death camps boomed. The Jews of Poland, but also of other European nations, arrived in their hundreds of thousands to the camps, bringing with them a range of valuables - currency, gold, jewelry, furs, etc. Many of these items found their way into the villages outside of the camps. Ukrainian guards in particular were known to pay for Polish whores, often brought all the way from Warsaw, with absurd amounts of jewelry, gold, or cash. Polish villagers at times sold their own daughters to these guards for the influx of goodies it provided them. After the Nazis destroyed and fled these camps, Polish villagers would descend upon the sites with shovels and pickaxes, digging through skeletons and ashes for valuables. This is not pleasant history, but it happened. Pogroms of Jews occurred after the war, most notoriously in Kielce, in central Poland. In the village of Jedwabne, particularly thuggish, monstrous, and opportunistic Polish villagers locked the Jewish inhabitants into a barn and burned them alive. The Home Army at times expressed savage anti-Semitism. It was skeptical to say the least when the Jews of Warsaw demanded weapons, and gave only a negligible amount, mainly revolvers, to the Jewish fighters. 

There were some extenuating circumstances, at least regarding Polish inaction. The Nazis treated the Poles with a savagery unseen and unknown to the countries of Western Europe. Discovery that you had helped a Jew meant immediate death for you and your family, even if it was just a sip of water or a roll of bread. Some have argued that the Home Army barely had enough weapons for itself to fight the Nazis, let alone to give some of them to the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto, and elsewhere. It is very easy to sit in a comfortable chair, in a warmed, or air-conditioned, room in the United States of the 21st century and to cast judgment. The Jews of the Judenräte of the ghettos and the Sonderkommandos of the death camps, who deceived the Jews who were to be killed, led them to the gas chambers, removed the bodies, and then burned/buried them have faced similar judgments. But nothing justifies the murder or despicable looting. And overwhelming silence in the face of genocide is very disturbing, to say the least. 

The Poles were no strangers to anti-Semitism, although theirs was of the traditional, Christian variety rather than the racialist, "scientific" anti-Semitism of the Nazis. For many Poles, anti-Semitism was a narrow bridge over which the Nazis could connect. Pre-war hatred of the Jews in Poland was not an isolated phenomenon. There were many Poles of great bravery, kindness, and conviction, such as Irena Sendler, who saved Jews from certain death, but the extent to which the Poles collaborated troubles me. More troubling, actually, is the deafening silence with which the vast majority of Poles greeted the Holocaust. It was not "their" problem; some on the far right of the political spectrum even expressed their approval. Some of the underground literature produced by the Home Army, the underground with the official seal of approval from the government-in-exile, seemed only to care about the Jews' murder insofar as they saw the Poles as next, not about the murder of the Jews in and of itself. 

The problem does not, I don't think, lie with the people of Poland. It lies with the people of Europe as a whole. Many countries, particularly and most importantly Germany, have taken major steps to address the crimes their countrymen committed during the Second World War. Others, especially Hungary, have not. Poland has taken many steps in commemorating the dead of the Holocaust, and many Poles have shown a remarkable admiration of and respect for the memory of the Jews of their country. Major sites of murder such as Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek have been preserved very well. The fact of the matter is that the initiators of the Final Solution were the Germans, but they had their helpers in every country of occupied or Axis Europe. The Holocaust was a continent-wide crime, and a stain on all of Europe. 

What frustrates me is that instead of looking at the broader picture, and at the mass suffering that the war and the Nazis' genocidal policies caused as a whole, there seems to be a contest over who suffered more. The extermination of the Jews is simply in another category: the methodical, thorough nature of the genocide; its continental scope; its factories built specifically and only for the most efficient way to murder the most people possible; the ferocious, unfathomable, and unstoppable nature of the ideology motivating the perpetrators: these are all unique. But the non-Jewish Poles suffered horrifically as well. Their capital of Warsaw was entirely, and purposely, ruined and millions of them were killed. In one particularly devastating instance, in Krakow in July 1943, Germans buried all of the men of a particular parish alive and forced the women to watch on as it happened. The Poles didn't even experience the joy of being liberated in 1944-45; the Soviets moved into the Nazis' place and brutally oppressed the Polish people and suppressed their yearning for independence for an additional 45 years. This is not a contest. Isn't it enough to note that both Jews and non-Jewish Poles were victims of the Nazis? 

This is a deeply concerning, and complex, topic that I hope to explore further. I understand what Comey was saying. There was indeed disturbing collaboration among Poles. I do believe, however, that it was a mistake to mention Poland in the same company as Germany and Hungary, two outright perpetrating nations and governments. Poland happens to be the site of the Nazi death camps and therefore is often thought of, in an overly simplistic fashion, as somehow a perpetrator via osmosis. The haunting image of the gatehouse at Auschwitz-Birkenau is seared into all of our consciences, and it happens to lie in Poland. Suffice to say that the picture of wartime Poland is a very complex one, with darkness and light - I'd argue mostly darkness. But where in continental Europe did darkness not rule the skies? 

Auschwitz: A Brief History and Reflection

Today marks the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Located in southern Poland, some 40 miles west of the cultural center of Krakow, 1.1 million people were murdered there. Birkenau, the death camp, is a haunting, vast space where you can smell vague wafts of burning (fittingly enough) and where, at least in the back, you can convince yourself that you're taking a stroll in some pleasant park. From the rear of the camp, the infamous gatehouse is barely visible - it nearly vanishes into the horizon. Rows upon rows of the ruins of barracks line your vision. If you go at dusk (or dawn, I presume), it's quiet and disturbing. If you go at more regular hours, expect hordes of tourists, at least at the ramp and the crematoria ruins.

The main camp, the Stammlager, also known as Auschwitz I, lies some 2 plus miles down the road. If one didn't know any better, it could almost be a college campus. There are neat, orderly rows of brick buildings. Today they house a variety of exhibits (including mountains of human hair, suitcases, children's clothing, shoes) as well as the administrative offices of the museum. This was the first concentration camp established by the Nazis in Poland, in 1940 (although, at the time, it was technically annexed to the Reich and not part of Nazi-occupied Poland, otherwise known as the General Government). This is the location of the Arbeit Macht Frei gate, which many inaccurately believe was one of the last sights many of the Jews of Europe saw before they were murdered. This is not so. The vast majority of the Jews were killed down the road, in Birkenau, and never saw the Arbeit Macht Frei gate. Unfortunately, I don't think the museum does the best job in the world of differentiating between the two camps.

What was the origin of the camp? The Stammlager, which was the site of an unused army base, was established to concentrate Polish labor. The Nazis, having annexed Upper Silesia (the region in which Auschwitz is located) wanted to simply deport all of the Poles and move ethnic Germans in. However, they soon realized that they would need the Poles for their skilled manual labor. In order to imprison these Poles should they become rowdy, a camp was necessary: this would be Auschwitz. Auschwitz was deadly for non-Jewish Poles: some 80,000 died there. It became a watchword of terror among the Poles. But it had not yet attained its fully notorious status.

I must briefly rewind and dive a bit into Nazi Lebensraumpolitik. I hinted at it in the previous paragraph. The Nazis wanted Poland and the Soviet territories of the time for Lebensraum (living space). In order to have the space, the Poles and the Jews were to be kicked out of their homes. It was the intention of Heinrich Himmler, in his capacity as head of the SS and Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of Germandom, to establish a series of fortress-cities in which SS warrior-farmers would reside to till the soil and, if need be, fight the "hordes" of the East. Auschwitz (Oswiecim in Polish) was to be one such site. An entire SS city was planned. This also combined with two other important factors: Himmler's agricultural obsessions and German war industry. Himmler wanted the land around Auschwitz as a "Zone of Interest", to be completely controlled by the SS for experimental agricultural purposes. German industry, specifically the chemicals firm I.G. Farben, also expressed interest in the site, and a deal was struck between industry and the SS. An I.G. Farben plant, which was to produce Buna (synthetic rubber) for the war effort, was established in nearby Monowice.

In the meantime, Himmler ordered that Soviet prisoners of war were to work the agricultural and industrial areas in and around Auschwitz. He ordered the creation of a huge POW camp at a Polish village called Brzezinka, known to history as Birkenau. However, while the POWs were indeed sent to Birkenau, there were not enough of them, as the German army was systematically starving them on the Eastern Front (over three million Soviet POWs were killed, either summarily or by starvation, during the war). Someone needed to man the new camp built at Birkenau. Himmler decided that they would be Jews. In addition to the industry and agriculture, they would be set to work on the ideal SS-town which Auschwitz was meant to become. When Hitler's Operation Typhoon stalled before Moscow, and the German offensive with it (at least for the winter of 1941-42), Himmler's dream of deporting the Jews somewhere to the East died with it. So did his dream of the SS-town of Auschwitz. He lost interest. Auschwitz-Birkenau was to become the dumping ground of Jews and, eventually (although Himmler could not have foreseen it himself), the graveyard of European Jewry.

Two peasant cottages at the back of Birkenau were converted into provisional gas chambers. Jews from Upper Silesia and Slovakia became its victims. As the brief for the camp widened, huge crematoria/gas chambers (Crematoria II-V) were constructed. The Jews of the Reich (including what is now Austria and the Czech Republic), Slovakia, Upper Silesia, and France were the first victims. Most Polish Jews were actually murdered further east, in the camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. When the Final Solution exploded into its final iteration, and was fed by a systematized operation of trains that covered the breadth of Europe, Auschwitz was ideally located. The Jews of Greece, Italy, and Yugoslavia were sent there. In 1944, there was only one last major population of Jews remaining: in Hungary. After the German occupation of Hungary, in March 1944, Adolf Eichmann swept into Budapest and orchestrated the mass deportation of the Jews of provincial Hungary. Some 400,000 were murdered in several weeks in the summer of 1944. It is Hungarian Jews that can be seen in the notorious Auschwitz Album, which shows Jews arriving in Birkenau, being unloaded from the trains, selected either for a brief, miserable life or death, and marched to the gas chambers, and finally awaiting their deaths right outside of the death houses themselves. (Also, conversely, one can see the Höcker Album, which shows SS officers, including Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and camp doctor Josef Mengele, at exactly the same historical moment, enjoying themselves at a resort not far from the camp). So many Jews were sent to Birkenau in the summer of 1944 that the crematoria could not keep up, and bodies had to be burned in an open field behind Crematorium V.

The Jews at Auschwitz-Birkenau were liberated by the Soviet Army on January 27, 1945, the date that later became Holocaust Memorial Day. As this 70th anniversary is commemorated, it behooves us to briefly reflect upon the context and sordid history of the place.

Assessing Adolf Hitler

I finally got around to reading Explaining Hitler by Ron Rosenbaum, a journalist, essayist, and novelist. I had ignorantly neglected it on the shelves for several years; I thought, wrongly, that it was a psychobabble assessment of Adolf Hitler that "explained" the anti-Semitic, war-making monster Hitler became later in life. In fact, the book is less an analysis of Hitler than an analysis of the various explanations that have been put forward to explain the Nazi dictator. The result is profoundly disturbing and important.

These analyses of Hitler range from the ridiculous to the plausible: his aggression can be explained by the overweening love of his mother and his lack of a testicle, or because of an abusive father; his anti-Semitism can be explained because he contracted syphilis from a Jewish whore, or because his grandmother had served as a maid in a Jewish household that paid for Hitler's father's upbringing - had his grandmother been impregnated by the 19-year-old son of the family? Hitler was extinguishing the Jew in himself by annihilating the Jews of Europe, this explanation suggests. Hitler's mother died of cancer in 1907 under the care of a Jewish physician, Dr. Eduard Bloch; perhaps Hitler wanted to kill all of the Jews for this reason? Some suggest that Hitler's abnormal presence in history and geopolitics can be explained due to sexual perversions, such as (undocumented except by hearsay) coprophilia and undinism. What of Geli Raubal, Hitler's half-niece upon whom he was fixated? Hermann Göring, the second-ranking man in Nazi Germany, said that after her death (ruled a suicide) in 1931, Hitler changed. Yes, he had never been a humanitarian, but after her death he shut off all human feeling. This is eerily similar to the mysterious suicide of Stalin's wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva, who died a year after Raubal; Stalin too was said to have shut off all remaining humanness he may have had after this incident. Did Raubal commit suicide because of Hitler's perversions, because of something abnormal about him? Did Hitler have her killed? These are interesting questions but the disproportionate emphasis placed on them by psychoanalysts and psychohistorians is absurd. The skeptical Rosenbaum, while wading in these theories and explaining them in detail, is similarly unconvinced.

Rosenbaum also dives into, in my opinion, more serious attempts to understand Hitler: was he convinced of his own rectitude, as per the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, or was he an actor who eventually became convinced of his own role, as per the historian Alan Bullock? Does Hitler represent an "eruption of demonism into history", as posited by theologian Emil Fackenheim, or was the Holocaust caused by German "eliminationist anti-Semitism" as per political scientist Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, whose thesis significantly minimizes Hitler's role in the Holocaust? Can we believe in a loving God, or God at all, in light of the Holocaust? When did Hitler decide to kill the Jews? Was it in November 1918, when he heard of the German capitulation while recovering from a gas attack at the military hospital in Pasewalk (as per historian Lucy Dawidowicz) or was it at some point in 1941, in reaction to either a) the initial victories in the Soviet Union or b) the setbacks in the Soviet Union that winter (there is no historical consensus, and this is a matter for enormous debate, but most historians place the decision to murder the Jews at some point in 1941, not decades beforehand). 

The inability to "diagnose" Hitler is disturbing. Few people have had more ink spilled about them. Much attention has been paid to Hitler not only by scholars, but by novelists, filmmakers, philosophers, theologians, and the public at large. Hitler sells. Yet it seems we cannot begin to understand him. The range of arguments about what made Hitler Hitler, what made him commit his monstrous deeds, is a very telling indicator of this fact. The ratio of words written about and the attention paid to Hitler to the actual understanding of what made Hitler tick is astronomical. Indeed, some, most prominently the filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, argue strenuously that even attempting to understand Hitler is to exculpate him from his crimes. 

Lanzmann, absurdly, suggests that to try to understand Hitler or the Nazis is akin to Holocaust denial. He credits this stance to Primo Levi. Levi, the author of many important books and a survivor of Auschwitz, wrote a passage in his book Survival in Auschwitz that, raving from thirst upon his arrival in the camp, he grabbed an icicle dangling from a barrack. Before he could put it in his mouth, it was ripped from him by an SS guard. Levi, distraught, pleaded, "Why?" and the SS man responded, "Hier ist kein warum" (here there is no why). Lanzmann takes this cynical statement by a brutal SS man and proceeds to make it his worldview on how to approach studying and analyzing the Holocaust and the Nazis. Perhaps there is no why in a grotesque place like Auschwitz, but to silence the attempt to even ask the question (as Lanzmann has done, publicly and aggressively) is, ironically, totalitarian.

I have been reading about Hitler, the Nazis, and the Holocaust for as long as I can remember. I can rattle off the hows, the whats, the wheres, the whens, and the who's. As disturbing as this all is, it is the whys that has kept me up nights. It is an eternal question that can never be answered, and for that reason is profoundly disturbing. Yes, we know that SS men clambered onto the short roofs of Birkenau's crematoria and poured in pellets of Zyklon B; we know the mechanisms of how Zyklon B entered the chamber and how the system of introduction was designed to make the killing more efficient; we know where this happened; we know when it happened; we know the identities of the men who poured the pellets, of the men who lied to the Jews and told them they were just being deloused, of the men who ran the camps and the entire extermination program. But why? The Jews represented no economic, political, or military danger to Germany. Yet they were hunted mercilessly in the cities, the villages, and the forests of Europe, so that every last one of them could be murdered. Heinrich Himmler made it a priority to visit Finland and ask that government to turn over the 200 Finnish Jews to be "resettled." This was, clearly, an ideological fear and hatred writ large. There was simply no economic, political, or military justification for demanding the deportation of these 200 Finnish Jews; they were to be murdered because they were Jews. This is chilling. This is something that I can never, and will never, understand. 

This differentiates the Nazis' genocidal onslaught from previous or subsequent genocides. The Nazis did, in a sense, believe the Jews to be a fifth column because they were obsessed with the (false) memories of the last days of the First World War: how the Jews had, in their eyes, stabbed the German Army in the back and thus forfeited German honor. This was not to happen again. However, the universalization of this notion, absurd to begin with, to include men, women, and children from the entire European continent and the relentless determination to murder them all, unless if they were temporarily useful for the German war effort: this is unique. Jewish men were considered a Bolshevik menace; they had to be killed. If their women were left alive, they would not be able to provide for themselves, and would be a headache to the Nazi state; they had to be killed. The children could not be separated from their mothers in a "tidy" fashion, and in the future they would represent the avengers of their parents; they, too, had to be killed. 

I have been ruminating over the nature of Hitler for the last several days, and I find myself not knowing what to believe. I do not know if he was a convinced anti-Semite from his bohemian days in Vienna, or if he became one once immersed in the postwar chaos of Munich. I do not know if he foresaw the extermination of the Jews from his younger days or not. I do not know why he thought what he thought, which remained remarkably consistent from 1919 Munich, through Mein Kampf (composed in 1924), through the Machtergreifung of 1933, the beginning of the Second World War in 1939, the beginning of the wholesale murder of Jews in the summer of 1941, all the way to his suicide in the otherworldly Führerbunker in April 1945. I do not know if Hitler was a raving lunatic in his private life, as he was in his harangues in the Nuremberg rallies, or if this was just an act, and he shed his skin upon returning to his private quarters (I lean toward a fusion of the two, which is cheating, I know). 

Even how one analyzes the Holocaust is inseparable from how one analyzes Hitler. Did Hitler always intend a Holocaust, although not necessarily the one that occurred? Or did he just want the Jews "out" but had to improvise due to wartime contingencies? Did the Holocaust come from top-down orders (i.e., Hitler to Himmler/Heydrich to Eichmann downward) or was it the culmination of organic, grassroots processes to "solve" the "Jewish question"? Historians argue vociferously about what time in 1941 the go-ahead for the extermination of the Jews was given, as mentioned above. This also reflects one's view of Hitler. Was it before the invasion of the Soviet Union and inseparable from that ideological conflict? To follow up from this: Did Hitler make the decision due to the euphoria that came with the victories in the early stages of the invasion? Did the decision come when the Nazis failed to take Moscow and Leningrad, and then did not know what else to do with the Jews that they had cooped up in the ghettos of Poland, other than murder them? This last theory makes Hitler and the Nazis much less ideological in their pursuit of exterminating the Jews and more "pragmatic": there was not enough food to go around, and there was the danger of disease, so the Jews needed to be killed. Or did the decision come in December 1941, after the Pearl Harbor attack, after the war truly became global in scope? Because in January 1939, Hitler had made a "prophecy" that in the event of a world war, the result would not be the victory of international Jewry ("and therefore the Bolshevization of  the earth") but the destruction of the European Jews. Was it time now to make this prophecy a reality? 

Again, I take the Goldilocks position. I believe that Hitler was necessary for the Holocaust to have happened, and that not just anyone in his position would have done the same(to take the title of the 1984 Milton Himmelfarb essay in Commentary, "No Hitler, No Holocaust"). Would a Nazi Germany headed by Hermann Göring have embarked on what became the Holocaust? Obviously, I don't know, but I don't think so. Hitler's ideology and hatred suffused the Nazi leadership as well as the middlemen in the bureaucracy and lower-ranking individuals of the SS, the army, and the police. It gave them the general parameters in which to work. However, unlike the popular conception of the Nazi regime as streamlined and centralized, it was rather decentralized and chaotic. Hitler, the Social Darwinist who was obsessed with "survival of the fittest", made his regime a jungle in which his ministers were constantly fighting for his favor. Rosenberg clashed with Goebbels, Himmler with Göring, Bormann with everyone; the SS was pitted against the civilian bureaucracy and the army; within the SS, the Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt (WVHA, or Economic and Administration Office) and the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA, or Reich Main Security Office) clashed for influence; and so on. In the words of historian and Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw, Nazi officials "worked toward the Führer": they had an idea of what he wanted and they took the initiative to act upon it. Those who put forward the idea closest to Hitler's heart (usually the most radical of initiatives) were successful: Himmler and Heydrich were particularly successful in this arena. So, the Holocaust was the fusion of a top-down, Hitler-driven, ideological approach and a bottom-up, proactive, sycophantic approach. While historians have been biting each others' heads off about these issues since the Historikerstreit ("historians' quarrel") of the 1970s, they are not, in my opinion, mutually exclusive. I am not persuaded by the arguments of the exclusively intentionalist ("Hitler always intended to exterminate the Jews") or the exclusively functionalist ("The Holocaust was the product of initiatives by middle-ranking bureaucrats largely driven by self-interest"). 

Where do I place Hitler? Was he dithering, hesitant in giving the green light to the Final Solution? Was he a laughing maniac who delighted in the annihilation of the Jews, as concluded by Rosenbaum? Somewhere in between? Somewhere else? I don't know. That is the insane thing about Hitler. As I wrote before, for as much as has been written about him, he is a mystery. The more I read about him, the less I know or understand about him. Should I even bother understanding him? The attempt is challenging and very, very disturbing. What does Hitler say about the capacity of humans to do evil? Or was he beyond the range of human capacity, off the charts, standards of deviations away from even the Jeffrey Dahmers and Ted Bundys of the world? The last is the view of the theologian Emil Fackenheim, and I have to disagree. As profoundly disturbing as it is to contemplate, Hitler was human, just as human as you and me. But that is not enlightening in and of itself. Okay, great, he was human. So what? The more interesting questions are: Why? Why did he embark on such destruction? And what was his motivation? He was anti-Semitic, sure, but there are lots of anti-Semites. There was only one Hitler. 

This post consisted of a lot of questions. But that is indicative of the matter at hand. For all that is written about Adolf Hitler, I still think there are more questions than answers.

The Nazis, Poland, and the Jews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts On Auschwitz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts from Poland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Central European Trip

The focus of this blog will radically shift direction for the duration of nearly a month (September 24 to October 18) while I travel throughout Central Europe. I fly into Warsaw on September 25 and I hope to visit not only Poland, but Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, and Hungary as well. It is a balance between trying not to spread myself too thin and trying to see a lot, because this is a part of the world whose history has always fascinated me.

I became interested in history through studying the Holocaust, primarily on my own. The systematic extermination of the Jews, unprecedented in history in terms of its scope and the determination and efficiency of the perpetrators, has always haunted me. My primary interest has been the perpetrators, including Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich, Eichmann, and Höss, to name some of the most notorious, as well as lower-ranking, anonymous individuals, chronicled so well in the work of the historian Christopher Browning. The question of how men could remorselessly kill countless women and children, and then return home and live normal family lives, has always appalled me, yet at the same time it has drawn me into the study of this dark period, and of other periods (such as the Soviet).

While my focus has been on the murderers, it is time to shift gears and honor the murdered. The colorful scenery of the Jews of Warsaw, Chelm, and the shtetls of Central/Eastern Europe is never to be seen again. It only exists now in sepia-toned photographs, the writings the Jews left, and in the memories of elderly Jews who will not be with us for much longer. For centuries, the Jews lived a (relatively) comfortable existence in Poland, whose king Casimir the Great, in the 14th century, welcomed them as they escaped persecution after the Black Death. It is therefore all too painfully ironic that that same place, Poland, is now the graveyard of the European Jews.

I did not choose these countries for the food, the beer, or the vistas, although I look forward to all three of these delights. It is my purpose to take a trip through the heart of darkness, and to ponder some of the heaviest thoughts that could trouble a mind; to visit those cemeteries of European Jewry: Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and Majdanek. This is a trip of the utmost important to me, something that I have felt compelled to do for several years. I look forward to completing it and to sharing it with you all.