Aktion Reinhard and the Destruction of Polish Jewry

The monument at Bełżec.

This week marks the 75^th anniversary of the beginning of the campaign to annihilate Polish Jewry. After the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the second-in-command of the SS and primary  architect of the Holocaust, it was given the code-name of Aktion Reinhard in his honor. Aktion Reinhard consisted of the extermination camps of Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka, all located in what is today eastern Poland. Its purpose was to murder the Jews of Nazi-occupied Poland (called the General Government) and to steal their belongings and ship them back to Germany.

The Nazis always desired a Final Solution to the “Jewish Question,” but stumbled into systematic mass murder. The Holocaust as we know it began in the summer of 1941 with the mass shootings of the Jews of the Soviet Union. At first, “only” military-aged Jewish men were shot, being conflated with Bolsheviks and partisans, as was de rigeur in Nazi ideology. Beginning in July/August 1941, women and children were murdered as well. 90 Jewish children were murdered at Bila Tserkva in August after their parents had been killed. 23,600 Jews were murdered at Kamianets-Podolsky over two days that same month. 33,771 were shot in two days in September at Babi Yar, a ravine outside of Kiev, on the specious accusation of arson. 

When it became clear that the shootings were psychologically taxing on the killers, the Nazis began to consider other methods of mass murder. They used vans in which the exhaust was rerouted into the rear of the vehicle, killing Jews who had been forced aboard. In a trial run, SS General Arthur Nebe forced inmates of an insane asylum near Minsk into a room and gassed them, also with car exhaust. Nebe also tried dynamiting another group, which left body parts all over the place, including in the high branches of nearby trees.

Aktion Reinhard was administered from Lublin, Poland, which was to be the crux of Nazi eastern policy. The SS and Police Leader of Lublin was Odilo Globocnik, a toady of Heinrich Himmler’s and a fanatical anti-Semite. Globocnik’s writ ran far beyond the scope of the Lublin district – it was his intention, with Himmler’s support, to remove Poles and Ukrainians (except for those to remain in a servile capacity) and then to establish so-called “strongpoints” consisting of fortifications manned by German “warrior-farmers” stretching all the way from the Baltic Sea to Transylvania. This was not just rhetoric – beginning in August 1942, 110,000 Poles and Ukrainians were forcibly removed from their homes in the Zamość region. They were replaced by some 9,000 ethnic Germans from further east. It went horribly, led to an uprising on the part of the Poles, and may have contributed to Globocnik losing his job. But I digress.

Odilo Globocnik, the head of Aktion Reinhard

The Jews, needless to say, had no role to play in the National Socialist utopia. The Nazis first intended to ship the Jews to Siberia after defeating the Soviet Union, but then decided, at some unknown point, to kill them in lands already under their control during the war. The Jews were the Nazis’ world enemy and there was to be no compromise with them. They could not remain, not even in a crushed, subservient capacity, as was to be the fate of the Slavs.

Another piece of the National Socialist ideological puzzle is necessary to contextualize Aktion Reinhard. Nazi ideology posited that the disabled were “useless eaters” who were a burden on society. A society could not thrive with such people “wasting” food and housing and “polluting” the gene pool, especially not during wartime. Beginning in 1940, German doctors began to kill the mentally and physically disabled in gas chambers. They told the victims that they were only taking a shower. After word got out and there was protest from the churches and many German citizens, Hitler ordered it shut down (it was continued in a more clandestine way and ultimately claimed 200,000 victims). Many of the men who staffed the gas chambers and the crematoria of this “euthanasia” program began to arrive in Lublin in the winter of 1941 after they had been decommissioned – they constituted the German staff of the Aktion Reinhard camps. They had been hardened by the sight and smells of mass death. 

In October, Globocnik met with Himmler and one of the two suggested the idea of a complex with stationary gas chambers at Bełżec, located in the Lublin district near the former demarcation line between Germany and the Soviet Union. It is unknown if the intent was to murder “only” the Jews of the Lublin district or of the entire General Government, which consisted of, in addition to Lublin, the Warsaw, Kraków, Radom, and Lwów districts. Bełżec was situated very close to the Lwów district (eastern Galicia) and the construction of its death facilities began on November 1, 1941.

The Jews of the General Government constituted the center of gravity of European Jewry. Warsaw’s Jewish population was the largest urban agglomeration in Europe, and second-most in the world after New York City. The Nazis could not, ideologically, accept such a large Jewish population in their midst and close to their front lines. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were concentrated in ghettos, where they died in enormous numbers due to disease and starvation. The Nazis were faced with a decision: where should they go? 

Despite Nazi euphemisms, the Jews could not be sent eastward across the Bug River into the occupied Soviet Union – the army would not accept this for fear of partisans behind its lines. Because of the absurd Nazi logic, this left but one choice: the Jews had to be killed. After the experience of mass shootings had proven to be too stressful on the killers, as discussed above, and other methods proved unsatisfactory, the Nazis settled on the extermination camp with the gas chamber, which has become the very symbol of the Holocaust. It would provide psychological relief to the killers and distance them from the victims. Secondarily, it would be a more efficient method that could be undertaken away from prying eyes (unlike the semi-public shootings in the east, where German soldiers and local civilians alike would gather to watch Jews being laid down in pits and shot). Nonetheless, this second reason was not as important to Himmler as his men’s nerves and consciences. Himmler had a warped sense of decency and wanted his men to remain decent to their fellow Germans while being hard, ruthless, and even inhuman to anyone unfortunate to be outside of that special circle. This was especially the case for Jews and those he considered subhumans.

Deportations to Bełżec began in March 1942, targeting the Jews of the Lublin Ghetto and the Lublin district more broadly. Construction on Sobibór began around the same time as that of Bełżec – this camp also served to kill the Jews of the Lublin district and began operations in May 1942. On July 19, 1942, Himmler ordered that the General Government be made free of Jews by the end of the year. Three days later, the Nazis launched Großaktion Warschau – the decimation of the Warsaw Ghetto, in which some 400,000 Jews led a miserable existence. Globocnik’s deputy and deportation expert, Hermann Höfle, told the head of Warsaw’s Jewish council, Adam Czerniaków, that 6,000 Jews were to be “resettled” each day. Czerniaków, realizing the implication of the order, committed suicide. The Jews' destination was Treblinka, the deadliest camp of Aktion Reinhard, which lay some 60 miles northeast of Warsaw. Its purpose was the destruction of the Jews of Warsaw, Radom, Częstochowa, Białystok, and other districts.

According to a telegram sent by Höfle, tallying the total of the Jews deported to (and murdered in) the camps in the General Government as of December 31, 1942, the figures were: Treblinka, 713,555; Bełżec, 434,508; Sobibór, 101,370; and Majdanek (a brutal concentration camp on the eastern outskirts of Lublin outfitted with gas chambers), 24,733, coming to a grand total of 1,274,166. Globocnik had not been able to satisfy Himmler’s order to completely destroy the Jews of the General Government by the end of 1942, but it was not for want of trying and he came alarmingly close.

All the Aktion Reinhard camps operated along similar, if not identical, lines. All were rather primitive installations. There was no need for extensive housing, as in Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek, because all the arriving Jews were to be gassed. When the Jews arrived, they alighted from the trains. If they were Polish Jews, as the vast majority of them were, they were whipped, shot at, and set upon by dogs. Western Jews, on the other hand, arrived in normal passenger trains, not cattle cars, and were dealt with calmly and politely, as they had no inkling of what lay in store for them. 

The Jews were told they had arrived at a transit camp and would need to be deloused before being sent further east. Their belongings were taken from them and brought to “sorting squares” where valuables, currency, and clothing were sent to the Reich. Many of the old, sick, and very young died on the trains; others who could not make the trip to the gas chamber were taken to a ditch and shot. A handful of carpenters, electricians, cobblers, blacksmiths, etc, as well as strong young men (to work in the death houses themselves), were held back. The rest were separated, men on one side and women and children on the other. 

Men were sent to their deaths first, to minimize the risk of revolt. All the victims were chased down what was variously known as “The Tube” or “The Road to Heaven” – the path to the gas chambers. Women had their hair shorn for use in mattresses back in Germany (in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the hair was cut after the women were gassed, but not in the Aktion Reinhard camps). The gas chamber building at Treblinka was cynically designed with a Star of David over its entrance. The Jews were forced into the chambers by Ukrainians and Germans wielding whips, iron pipes, guns, and even swords. Gas poured into the rooms from a captured Russian submarine engine (carbon monoxide was used in these camps, not Zyklon B). After the gassing, the victims’ bodies were dragged out by unfortunate Jewish prisoners and buried – later, at Himmler’s insistence, these were exhumed and burned. Later transports were burned straightaway.

The camps each had 90-120 Ukrainian guards (former Soviet POWs who agreed to volunteer as a way out of their terrible predicament – for context, 3.3 million out of 5.7 million Soviet POWs died in German captivity) and a German staff of only 20-30 SS men. With their newfound wealth (taken from the dead), corruption was rife among the Germans and the Ukrainians. The Ukrainians spent money on vodka and sex in the surrounding villages (they could communicate using pidgin Polish); whores from as far away as Warsaw would come to service their needs. Local farmers would pimp out daughters as young as 12.

These grotesque scenes of death, looting, and orgies are impossible to imagine and painful to describe. The first commandant of Treblinka, Dr. Irmfried Eberl, was removed for “inefficiency." Corpses lined the road to Treblinka and thousands lay in the camp itself, putrefying in the summer heat – the transports were coming faster than he could dispose of them. Christian Wirth, the first commandant of Bełżec and later inspector of all three camps, was known as the “Savage Christian” – standing atop a hill and peering down at the rotting corpses of thousands of Jews, he asked Franz Stangl, who commanded Sobibór and later Treblinka, what should be done with this “garbage.” Wirth was a vulgar man who terrified his own men – he was known to whip even them in the event the gas chambers broke down, which was a frequent occurrence. The deputy commandant of Treblinka, Kurt Franz, who was known as Lalke (“the doll” in Yiddish) because of his handsome looks, would sic his giant dog Barry on prisoners with the command, “Man, get that dog!” Franz would also box prisoners and, halfway through a bout, shoot them in the face with a gun hidden inside his boxing glove. Gustav Wagner, a notorious officer at Sobibór, would rip infants from their mothers’ arms and tear them to pieces with his bare hands. Ukrainian guards would pull aside attractive girls and women and rape them beside the gas chambers, sometimes to death.

Christian Wirth, the inspector of the Aktion Reinhard camps, known as "The Savage Christian"

Unlike at camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek, Jews went to the camps of Aktion Reinhard (and Chełmno) strictly to die. This is why so much less is known about these camps. Auschwitz is (in)famous and weighs heavily on the Western consciousness because it was mostly Western and Central European Jews who were killed there and there were vastly more survivors (for context, while tens of thousands survived Auschwitz, only 70 people survived Treblinka and a mere two survived Bełżec). Furthermore, the Nazis had time to destroy the facilities at Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka, because the camps were relatively small in size, consisted of few structures, and the Russians were still far enough away when Aktion Reinhard was wrapped up in late 1943 after revolts in Treblinka and Sobibór in August and October of that year, respectively.

Nothing today remains of them. After the camps were demolished, the bricks of the gas chambers were used to build houses for Ukrainian guards, who were to stay there to ward off Poles digging for the murdered Jews’ treasure and to brush off any awkward questions about what had happened at these places (“Oh, there was no German death camp here – I lived here on my farm the whole time!”)

In the final analysis, the camps of Aktion Reinhard took the lives of at least 1.5 million Jews – they are the graveyards of Polish Jewry, which existed for a millennium and was the physical, though not spiritual, center of world Judaism (at the beginning of the 18^th century, three-quarters of the world’s Jews lived in Poland). There were world-renowned (among Jews, anyway) yeshivot in Lublin and Wilno (now Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania). Jewish art, journalism, and literature flourished, most particularly in Warsaw, which saw dozens of Jewish periodicals in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Polish as well as a thriving Yiddish theater. 

Now one walks the ancient streets of Kazimierz, once the Jewish neighborhood of Kraków, and sees preserved Jewish shopfronts, kosher-style restaurants serving gefilte fish and featuring klezmer bands, synagogues, a cemetery, and souvenir shops selling figurines of Hasidic Jews (whose very dress was influenced by that of the Polish aristocracy in the 17^th century). But there are only a pitiful handful of Jews. Instead, in Zgody Square in Podgórze, where Jews were once assembled to be shipped to their deaths, there stand 40 silent chairs, each one representing 1,000 Cracovian Jews murdered during the Holocaust. They have no grave: their ashes lie 150 miles to the east, dumped unceremoniously underneath the earth of Bełżec.

The memorial at Zgody Square, Kraków. Photo taken by the author, October 2014

The Crows of Majdanek

They perch on the wire
And only disturb their silence
With their caw, caw, caw,
Whose isolated sound
Renders the muted dead
That much louder.

I trudge through the grass,
Dewy, muddy, my shoes stained,
Anxious, nauseous; above all, lonely.

The cawing both reassures me
And deepens my angst.
The one sign of life
Is also an omen,
A scavenger seeming to feast
On the shards of memory.

Rows of accursed creatures
Doomed to stand sentinel
In a haunted landscape
Of zigzag mounds.

The stain of Majdanek
Remains on my shoe;
It wouldn't wash out.
Eternal, like the watch
Of those endless crows
Perched on their wire,
Their caws echoing into the fog,
And into the void.

Some Misconceptions about the Holocaust

Every American schoolchild knows about the Holocaust. He or she may not have an appreciation for Nazi policy or how it came to happen, but he or she knows that Nazi Germany killed six million Jews, many of them in gas chambers. There are, however, some frustrating misconceptions that plague the popular American understanding of the Holocaust. While the misconceptions are not necessarily cause for alarm (except to the extent to which they can be manipulated by Holocaust deniers), they allow for a false interpretation of the Holocaust to percolate into the American public and cause some serious misunderstandings about the Nazis’ war against the Jews.

Conflation of concentration and death camps

One of the first terms that comes to mind when the Holocaust is brought up is “concentration camp.” The Nazis, so it is said, threw all of the Jews into concentration camps and gassed many of them in those camps. While partially true, it mostly isn’t. Concentration camps, by literal definition, are meant to concentrate real and potential enemies of the state; they are hardly unique to National Socialism or to the Holocaust. Death camps, on the other hand, were specifically designed to murder people in an industrialized fashion; these were unique to Nazi Germany. The concentration camp and death camp are not remotely the same thing. The typical grouping of Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Auschwitz, and Treblinka obfuscates more than it illuminates. These were very different camps with very different purposes.

Bergen-Belsen was originally a transit camp that in the final months of the war was overwhelmed by Jews forcefully marched and trained from places farther east – the result of the influx was devastating epidemics and starvation, and the kinds of scenes witnessed by the British Army upon liberation, scenes that are practically unwatchable.

Dachau was a penal camp for political prisoners, and the first official concentration camp established by Nazi Germany, in 1933. It later became a terminus for Jews being pushed westward in 1945, and it too was the site of horrific scenes of human skeletons and piles of corpses upon its liberation by American troops.

Both of those camps were liberated by Western armies, and their liberation was widely publicized to American and British audiences, who were able to see with their own eyes evidence of Nazi abominations. The two, among others such as Buchenwald, became known as “death camps” in popular parlance, but this did not accord with their intention or function. Neither Jews nor anyone else was systematically murdered at these places; only later, on the eve of the war’s end, did large numbers of Jews die in them, mostly of starvation and disease.

Auschwitz was a special case. It opened its gates in 1940 to imprison Polish political opponents. Jews were sent to Auschwitz and gassed at the Birkenau camp beginning in spring 1942, but the camp maintained its original function as a brutal penal camp for political prisoners all the way up to its liberation in January 1945 by the Red Army. In addition to being an extermination camp, Birkenau served as a massive forced-labor camp. Because the main Auschwitz camp was a concentration camp, and Auschwitz sub-camps dotted the Upper Silesian countryside, there were many survivors of the Auschwitz camp complex. This is why, even though more Jews were murdered at Auschwitz than anywhere else, more Jews also survived Auschwitz than any other camp. This seeming contradiction – it is not, of course – has given fodder to Holocaust deniers. If Auschwitz was the worst and most murderous death camp, why do you have all of these elderly Jews in New York with tattoos claiming to have been in Auschwitz? This is where the misconceptions can actually become dangerous.

Treblinka, which lies some 50 miles northeast of the Polish capital Warsaw, was a death factory, plain and simple. Unlike at Auschwitz, there was no industry there except death. There was no “selection” as there was at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Treblinka, like its sister camps Bełżec and Sobibór, as well as Chełmno, was a death sentence. This is why very few survived, and why correspondingly there is less information on these camps. We know much less about them than Auschwitz-Birkenau, and there is no remnant of them – they were systematically destroyed by the SS in 1943.

Due to the foregoing, it is silly to categorize these camps under the same heading. Treblinka was not a concentration camp; Dachau was not a death camp. The term “camps”, therefore, which conflates all of these different sites, muddles our understanding of events and gives space for deniers to work their grotesque spin.

Auschwitz as a synonym and symbol for the Holocaust

The gate at Auschwitz's main camp

I admit that I am guilty of this as well. The need to differentiate between the Holocaust as a whole and Auschwitz has been made forcefully by Timothy Snyder, a scholar of Eastern Europe at Yale University. I agree with his analysis.

The experience of Auschwitz was actually an atypical experience for the vast majority of Jews. By the end of 1941, one million Jews in the Soviet Union and the Baltics had been shot into ditches. The Polish Jews had been largely extinguished by the end of 1942 in Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka, at which there was no selection, as explained above, and in mass shootings carried out by roving death squads. Auschwitz did not become a true factor in the Final Solution until 1943, when the other three camps had already shut down or were winding down operations, and when the vast majority of Holocaust victims were already dead.

I believe the reason for the fixation on Auschwitz is manifold. More Jews were murdered there than at any other single location. It is largely intact so we know what it looked and looks like: the Birkenau gatehouse, the ruins of the crematoria, the barracks, the vast expanse of it all. This is not the case with Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, or Treblinka, which are today just forests and fields. There were tens of thousands of survivors of Auschwitz because the prisoners were used for forced labor. Therefore, there are more eyewitness accounts and generally quite a lot (indeed, an exhaustive amount) of information on Auschwitz. Finally, while Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka consumed mainly the Jews of Poland, Jews were sent to Auschwitz from nearly every country in Europe, including and especially Western Europe. But it is important to remember that the center of European, and world, Jewry lay in the east – and these were the communities that were the most thoroughly destroyed, and destroyed immediately upon conveyance to the death pits and death camps.

This might be a side note, but there is an annoying conflation of the Auschwitz concentration camp and the Birkenau death camp. Jews and others flock from around the world to the main camp at Auschwitz to make a pilgrimage of sorts. This is the location of the Arbeit Macht Frei gate and the Death Wall, where thousands of prisoners were shot. It is also where you can see piles of suitcases, eyeglasses, other personal artifacts, and, most gruesomely, hair. The fact, however, is that the vast majority of Jews never saw the Arbeit Macht Frei gate. The main camp was mostly a center of Polish persecution, suffering, and death (about 80,000 Poles were murdered there). The Jews met their suffering and death down the road, in Birkenau. A lot of visitors do not know the distinction, or that Birkenau is even a thing – I have read accounts of people visiting the main camp and then getting on the return bus back to Kraków, never knowing that they were skipping the main site of death. There is little understanding of the distinction between the main camp, which was comparable to Dachau and Buchenwald (albeit much deadlier, because the Nazis viewed the majority of its prisoners, Poles, as a lesser species), and Birkenau, which was its own beast. This is why I don’t care about a Carmelite convent or a large cross at or near the main camp. The main camp’s story is mostly a Polish one, not Jewish. Misconceptions therefore have led to unnecessary tensions between Jews and Poles at the Auschwitz site.

The canard against Poland

“The Nazis built the extermination camps in Poland because the Poles are a viciously anti-Semitic people.” I’ve heard this voiced, with absolute conviction and certitude, a million times. It is an absurdity.

There were anti-Semites among the Poles, of course; it is depressingly clear in the Polish underground literature that, even if at times they were sympathetic, the vast majority of Poles did not view the Jews as their own kind. Poles carried out pogroms of Jews, most notoriously at Jedwabne and Radziłów (they also carried out post-war massacres, such as that in Kielce in July 1946). Polish blackmailers (szmalcowniks) would demand money from Jews in hiding; if the Jews could not provide it, the blackmailers would turn them in to the German authorities. Polish resistance units, including those of the Home Army, at times murdered Jews and then robbed them of their belongings. Most Poles watched the Warsaw Ghetto uprising with utter indifference; a minority watched in admiration as the Germans crushed the “Jewish problem.”

Yet other Poles were inspired by the uprising. Many risked their lives to save Jews. An organization was formed by the Polish government-in-exile to hide the Jews and assist them in any way possible. In other word, it’s a mixed picture, to say the least (it would take a book or books to reckon with this subject) – and Poland continues to this day to suffer from demons and a very serious complex for what its soil, and its people, witnessed. Poles infuriatingly insist that they were practically angels during the war, but that was obviously not true.

But it was also not true of the vast majority of the people of Europe. The Nazis were able to take advantage of a nearly complete societal and moral breakdown on the European continent that was largely effectuated by their conquests and subsequent policies. With a few noble exceptions, such as the people of Denmark’s heroic action in spiriting Jews by boat to neutral Sweden, all of Europe was passive, or gleeful, at the fate of the Jews. The nations and governments of Europe by and large did not see stopping the slaughter of the Jews as a priority (nor, for that matter, did the United States). That is why the Holocaust was possible. If all of Europe had resisted the Nazis to save the Jews, the death toll would not and could not have been so high. So singling out the Poles on this score is unfair, even if they do (and, believe me, they do) have a lot to answer for. 

So why were the death camps placed on Polish soil? The answer is easy – Poland was where the vast majority of Jews lived. 3.3 million Jews lived in Poland on the eve of the German invasion in 1939, representing 10% of the total country’s population. Over 90% of them were murdered – indeed, Polish Jews alone constituted at least half of the victims of the Holocaust. Chełmno was built to kill the Jews of the Łódź Ghetto to make room for Jews being deported from the Reich. Bełżec was designed to annihilate either the Jews of the Lublin district or of all of occupied Poland (this is not exactly clear – probably the former). Sobibór was built to assist Bełżec in its grisly task and Treblinka for the destruction of the Jews of Warsaw, Radom, and other Polish cities. Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek were built to accommodate huge numbers of Soviet POWs and only latterly were shoehorned into the Final Solution. The common denominator is that literally zero of this had to do with Polish anti-Semitism, whether it was ferocious or not – what it did have to do with was murdering Jews where most of them were and to where they could easily be deported. It also had to do with Nazi racial engineering – moving Jews and Poles around the map to make room for German settlers.

“Desk Killers”

Adolf Eichmann

The notion of the Nazi genocidaire as a “desk killer” who keeps his hands clean and just shuffles paper has been the most common understanding of the Nazi perpetrators since the trial of Adolf Eichmann in the early 1960s (Eichmann was the chief manager and logistician of the Final Solution). The philosopher Hannah Arendt attended Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem on assignment with The New Yorker and concluded after a couple of weeks that Eichmann was no murderous anti-Semite, but merely a cog in a totalitarian machine and a taker of orders. She thus shoehorned Eichmann into her extant theory of totalitarianism rather than appreciating him as an individual phenomenon. Funnily enough, Arendt’s perception of Eichmann was precisely how he wished to be perceived, as the crux of his defense strategy. Anyone reading the transcripts of his postwar conversations while a fugitive in Argentina knows he was a vicious anti-Semite who reveled in his role as chief executioner of the Jews. He literally bragged about it to his associates.

The fact is that Eichmann was not removed from his paperwork; on the contrary, he witnessed gassings of Jews at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bełżec, and Chełmno, and a mass shooting of Jews outside of Minsk. Throughout the murder campaign, but especially while in Budapest in 1944, Eichmann went above and beyond the call of duty, and even against express orders, in making sure that as many Jews as possible were sent to their deaths.  Young intellectuals of the Reich Main Security Office – including historians, sociologists, economists, and lawyers – volunteered (or did not protest about being sent) for killing operations behind the front lines in the east, where they could put their theorizing into practice. Odilo Globocnik, the destroyer of Polish Jewry, oversaw the operations of Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka with great gusto, and said golden plaques should be buried along with the corpses in these camps to explain that it had been the National Socialists who had had the fortitude to murder the Jews. These were people intellectually and emotionally invested in what they were doing. Certainly there were individuals who would fit the mold of the stereotypical “desk killer,” but not enough to make sweeping, declaratory statements about the perpetrators. It is not even true about the supposed archetype: Adolf Eichmann.

Ghettos designed as a waystation to slaughter

This is actually partially true, but not in the way one might think. Nazi policy was not originally to kill all of the Jews. Rather, it shifted and morphed until it crystallized into genocide. At first, it was Nazi policy for Jews to emigrate out of Germany and, after the annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia, out of German-controlled territory. 

The Nazis were faced with a conundrum when they conquered Poland due to the voluminous number of Jews now under their control. They considered deporting them to a conceptualized Jewish reservation in the Lublin district, which was the easternmost territory under their control at the time; they also seriously (yes, seriously) considered shipping all of the Jews to far-off Madagascar. Neither vision came to pass. In the meantime, however, Jews were concentrated in ghettos in major cities in Poland along railway lines – in Warsaw, Łódź, etc. 

The Nazis, as just explained, had certainly not conceived of extermination camps or even mass shootings at this point. The reason why it is partially true to suggest that the ghettos were a waystation to death is because the Lublin reservation plan and the Madagascar Plan were implicitly murderous and genocidal. And when those plans failed, so too was the plan to send the Jews somewhere to Siberia. While the ghettos were certainly designed as holding pens, they were not done so as part of an already-conceived extermination program in the way that the Final Solution is known to history. In fact, the Nazis argued bitterly among themselves as to what the point of the ghettos should be: productive labor or slow death? Different ghetto administrators had different answers to the question. 

Ghetto policy was not consistent – while Jews from surrounding towns were sent to the Warsaw Ghetto, in Kraków, it was literally the opposite – most Jews were driven from the city. Therefore, this misconception is due to reading history backward.

The Question of Uniqueness

The gatehouse at Auschwitz-Birkenau, taken from outside of the camp. Photo courtesy of the author. 

The Holocaust is, in the West, the best known of genocides and mass slaughters. We all know the images: Hitler ranting before a crowd of adoring worshipers; Nazi soldiers goose-stepping in perfect sync before their Führer; the destruction of Jewish shops, homes, and synagogues on Kristallnacht; the cutting of pious Jews’ beards and payot in front of laughing Germans; Jews forced to walk a bridge over the “Aryan” Chłodna Street in the Warsaw Ghetto; the mass shootings by the Einsatzgruppen in the East; the loading of trains; the frightened boy of the Warsaw Ghetto raising his hands with a Nazi pointing a gun at him; the Auschwitz-Birkenau gatehouse (pictured above); Hungarian Jews waiting to be gassed in the little wood of Birkenau; and the mountains of corpses in Dachau, Buchenwald, and Bergen-Belsen. Anne Frank is perhaps the most famous diarist of the 20^th century. We think of Hermann Göring alternately giggling and looking exasperated at the Nuremberg trials and Adolf Eichmann smirking in his glass booth in Jerusalem.

In other words, the Holocaust is incredibly well known: perhaps not in all of its details, and certainly not in the complexities of Nazi policies that brought it about, but definitely in a general sense as a nightmarish historical event that is well-nigh impossible to look at for too long. The footage of Belsen’s liberation is practically unwatchable, and images of the piled up hair at Auschwitz are disgusting beyond all reason. The Holocaust came to American living rooms in the late 1970s with the miniseries Holocaust and again in the early 1990s with the Academy Award-winning Schindler’s List. Holocaust films continue to be churned out: The Pianist, The Grey Zone, Son of Saul, and so on. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. is considered a must-see, and is swamped by visitors from every corner of the globe. The museum at Auschwitz-Birkenau is a destination for many travelers in Europe.

So, yes, most people know about the Holocaust in a general sense, and perhaps even more than that. But what is it about the Holocaust that grips us? Yes, it was horrible, but so were the Gulag camps under Stalinism, the killing fields of Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and the pits of Srebrenica; the deportation trains that took Armenians to the desert where they starved to death; the hacking of limbs with machetes in Rwanda. There is something about the Holocaust, though, that seems to particularly frighten us. Hitler’s name is thrown about willy-nilly, and in some sense he has almost become a comical figure: an absurdity whose name is a punchline to Internet jokes, a raving lunatic in a bunker who loses his mind when he discovers that Taylor Swift left Calvin Harris (I’m making this up, but you get the idea). And yet, there is a reason why it is his name that is thrown around, and not that of Joseph Stalin or Mao Zedong. He menaces us with his frightful gaze and his ferocious hatred that drove millions into a bloodthirsty frenzy. His single-minded determination to wage war on Europe, and the world, and to destroy every single Jew is haunting in a way that the policies of Stalin and Mao are not. Stalin and Mao were vicious, brutal murderers who left tens of millions dead, but neither embarked upon a mission to extinguish an entire people. Adolf Hitler did, and he did so while being the legitimately popular leader of his country. And I posit that it has been through laughter and mockery that many of us have tried to come to grips with the horror.

There is something singularly and uniquely disturbing about Hitler. The same is true of the Nazis. I think that many people recognize this singularity on some level, even if on a subconscious one. This short essay will explain why the Holocaust was indeed unique and delineate the reasons why. By “Holocaust” in this context, I am referring to the state-sponsored systematic extermination of the Jews of Europe by the National Socialists under the rule of Adolf Hitler from the years 1941-45. I am leaving out the Gypsies, Poles, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other groups that were also persecuted and murdered by the Nazis because the Nazis, at the end of the day, only desired to kill the Jews down to the last man, woman, and child. Gypsy policy, though extremely murderous, was wildly inconsistent; the Poles experienced an attempt at cultural genocide and were subject to ruthless ethnic cleansing and enslavement, but were mostly able to live their lives so long as they did not resist the Nazis; homosexuals and Jehovah’s Witnesses, among other groups, were persecuted in frightful ways but were ultimately not subject to systematic and total extermination. Only the Jews were. This is a fact.

It has been popular in recent years to conflate the fate of the Jews with the others, and to condemn the focus on the fate of the Jews as being somehow supremacist: the Jews are butting to the head of the victims’ queue and disregarding others who were brutalized by the Nazis. This has also become a trend in countries in Eastern Europe, such as Poland, where Nazi savagery against native populations is equated with that against the Jews. As horrifically as the Poles were treated (nearly three million non-Jewish Poles were killed), there was no policy to eradicate every Polish individual. Polish language, yes; Polish heritage and history, yes; the Polish intelligentsia and elite, yes; but not every Pole.

I would argue that what happened to the Poles was genocide. Indeed, what the Nazis planned for the Slavs to their east in general was genocidal on a mind-boggling scale. Some 31 million were to be deported, starved to death, or murdered; the balance, about 14 million "Germanizable" people, were to be used as helots for German settler-farmers. These slaves would not be taught the language or the heritage of their forefathers, but rather pidgin German so that they would be able to communicate with their German masters but know their place in society. Eventually, if the Nazis had succeeded, these nations and cultures, and the languages they spoke, would have been only a memory. Thankfully, this did not happen. The annihilation of the Jews, however, did. The only line the Jews were at the head of was the National Socialist chopping block. It was a priority of the Nazis' war to destroy the Jews, and while their destruction was originally to occur after the war, Hitler ultimately decided that he could not wait. The other peoples of the eastern lands could. The Nazis did not want the Jews to serve them and recognize them as masters; they wanted the Jews out of Germany, out of Europe, and, finally, extinguished from the face of the earth. Jews could not even exist in this capacity in a Nazi-dominated Europe. And, of course, there was no such thing as a "Germanizable" Jew, so there was no escape from the noose whatsoever. What happened to the Jews, therefore, was unique, not only in the context of the Second World War, but also compared to other genocides we have seen before or since.

Take, for instance, the National Socialist conception of the Jew. The Jews were not inferior beings who should serve as slaves or be thrown down to the bottom of some caste system. Yes, the Jews experienced a sort of apartheid in the period before their mass annihilation (1933-41) in the Reich, but that is not the time period in question which, as mentioned above, is 1941-45, the years of extermination. Jews were, rather, seen as the Weltfeind (world enemy): responsible for Germany’s defeat in the First World War; responsible for the alleged immoral liberalism and democracy of the Weimar Republic; responsible for the socialists who were seen as the standard bearers of Weimar; responsible for the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917, and the subsequent mass murder experienced under Soviet control; the puppeteers of the capitalists in London and Washington; the controllers of the global media and the international banking system; and a race obsessed with the destruction of the “Aryans” by any means whatsoever, whether it be capitalism or communism. Hitler’s obsessive hatred with the Jews consumed him until the day he died: his desire to murder them was a burning thirst that drove him insane with bloodlust until the very end. This was simply not the case with other groups, which were mostly viewed through the lens of dismissive contempt, not a pathological, all-encompassing hatred.

It is not an exaggeration to contend, as I do, that the Second World War was, for Hitler, a war against the Jews. His invasion of the Low Countries and France in 1940 was meant only to protect his rear before lashing out at the Soviet Union. Hitler’s war against the British was lackadaisical at best, and he was not particularly motivated to destroy the British or their Empire, which he admired. For him, the real war was in the East, against the Bolsheviks, because to his mind, Bolsheviks were Jews and Jews Bolsheviks, and they were spinning a web from their lair in Moscow to ensnare Germany and other countries of “good race” in Europe. They had to be destroyed. This, plus the desire for living space (Lebensraum), was Hitler’s motivation for launching his war in the East.

Upon the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler unleashed his Einsatzgruppen, mobile death squads that shot some two million Jews into pits. Further west, Jews were ghettoized and, beginning in spring 1942, sent to their deaths in gas chambers. The Weltfeind, this pernicious race that fed off the blood of the “Aryans” and sought to undermine the nations of “pure racial stock” in Europe, was finally being destroyed. To make sure that this "world enemy" knew the score, they were often ritually humiliated before they were murdered: the aforementioned beard-cutting, forced to sing the praises of Lenin, forced to rip their beloved Torah to pieces and spit on it, forced to dance in front of their tormentors, forced to urinate and defecate in each other's mouths. Men, women, and children were pursued in so-called "Jew hunts" in remote villages, in hidden bunkers, in attics, in farmsteads, and in forests: no one could escape. In Poland, helping a Jew meant death, for yourself and perhaps for your entire family. Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, flew to Finland to implore that country’s leader to send his 2,000 Jews to their deaths. To Finland. What possible dispute could Jews in such a far-flung place have with Germany?

This totality of the Holocaust, in which every single Jew was to be eradicated from the face of the earth (if perhaps after a short delay due to the need for his or her slave labor), is one of the factors that separates it from other genocides. While Srebrenica was reminiscent of the Einsatzgruppen murders in the Soviet Union and while the Armenians were drowned and left to die in the desert, there was no attempt to murder every last one of them. They were to be struck at in a ferocious way to “learn a lesson” or to “get out of the way,” or to be driven relentlessly away from border areas because they were seen as potential saboteurs and traitors (this was especially the case with the Armenians, who the Turks believed were in cahoots with the Russians during the First World War). But it was never in Slobodan Milosevic’s purview, for example, to murder all Bosniaks. On the other hand, the Nazis swept Europe from east to west, and north to south, combing urban environments and rural ones, forcing innocent children like Anne Frank to cower in hidden annexes like fugitive criminals on the lam. This was a continent-wide genocide, unlimited in time or space, against an “enemy” that had, literally, done nothing to Germany or the German people, except to serve it proudly during the First World War and to sing its praises before, during, and after it, and to enrich its culture with beautiful literature and music and earth-shattering scientific discoveries. It did not matter. Nothing could save them. Not baptism, not patriotism, not economic benefit, not the most fervent of Heil Hitlers: they were sentenced to die for the crime of having been born. And the children too, because what was a Jewish child but a Jew in inchoate form? They, too, had to be shot into the pits and shoved into the gas chambers. Many were thrown into the ovens alive: this was one of Josef Mengele’s favorite pastimes. 

The industrial nature of the Holocaust also separates it from other genocides. The assembly line of deportation, gassing, and cremation, and the economic exploitation of the dead: their money and valuables stolen, their hair shorn for upholstery, their clothes sent to citizens of Germany, their golden crowns ripped out of their mouths and melted down and deposited into special bank accounts, their ashes spread to fertilize flower gardens and crop fields; this is also unique. The Nazis used the train system, which was so essential in cultural and economic progression in European and other contexts, to ship millions to their deaths. They sent Jews from nearly every country of Europe to abattoirs that were awaiting them in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bełżec, Treblinka, Sobibór, Majdanek, and Chełmno, places that were specifically designed to murder them. Indeed, the death camp itself is a unique facet of the Holocaust: a site whose purpose was to kill the most amount of people in the most efficient way possible. As murderous as the Soviet Gulag was, they were not intended solely or primarily to kill their prisoners, but to exploit their labor and/or to "re-educate" them. 

Jews were not simply the victims of on-the-spur, localized brutalities such as looting or pogroms or even mass murders, although that happened too. On the other hand, in many instances they were shipped from remote places like Salonika, Greece; Oslo, Norway; and even the Channel Islands, only to be gassed in Nazi-occupied Poland. The measured and calculated way this was done, the logistics involved, is testament to the Nazi determination at total extermination of the Jews. The crematoria complexes in Auschwitz-Birkenau were in some (negative) sense an architectural marvel: gas chambers and crematoria all conveniently housed in one building. The efficiency and dehumanized manner of it all is chilling and borderline incomprehensible.

The Jews and Germans were not enemies, except in the Nazi imagination. They had no border disputes or historical enmity. These were not tribal groupings fighting over an oasis, a river, or a mountain fastness. While obviously not explaining away the genocides of any ethnic group anywhere, in instances such as the Armenian and Bosnian genocides, the mass murders had their roots in either ethnic strife or border disputes.  The Rwandan genocide occurred in the context of a civil war between a government led by Hutu and a rebel group largely composed of Tutsi. In the case of the Holocaust, the Nazis came down on the Jews like a bat out of hell for no fathomable reason whatsoever, outside of Hitlerian conspiracism and obsession. The Jews did not have a running dispute with the Germans; they had not fought any wars with them; and most of the Nazis’ victims were not even German or German-speaking Jews. The Jews were just going about their lives, in whatever they did, whether it be peddling wares in a shtetl in Eastern Poland, or mending boots in Kraków, or running a department store in Prague, when all of a sudden they were overwhelmed by the deluge.

The Nazis descended upon foreign Jewish villages and towns, and cities with high Jewish populations, and wantonly slaughtered them. There couldn’t even be the pretext of their having been disloyal citizens. Hitler was essentially making the Jews of the world pay for what he deemed the major crime of the Jews of Germany: the German defeat in the First World War. This, of course, was absurd and existed only in the feverish imaginations of radical anti-Semites. Regardless, the Jews of not just Germany, but of all of Europe, were to pay for this imaginary crime. And when the Germans came, it was like a tsunami. There was no historical precedent for the Nazi onslaught in Eastern Europe, not even during the darkest days of the tsars. Jews had always been able to appease their oppressors through the gifting of money or other concessions; this was not the case this time. There were instances where the Jews acted in such a traditional fashion, presenting gold to Nazi soldiers in the hopes and expectations that this would be their deliverance; instead, the Germans took the gold and shot them in the streets anyway. In the pithy words of Holocaust historian Raul HIlberg, “The missionaries of Christianity had said in effect to the Jews: 'You may not live among us as Jews.' The secular rulers who followed them from the late Middle Ages then decided: 'You may not live among us,' and the Nazis finally decreed: ‘You may not live.’”

The reason why more Jews were not murdered during the Holocaust and that “only” two-thirds of European Jews lost their lives was because the Nazis lost the war. If Hitler had won the war in Europe, and therefore had had the leisure to deal with the Jews as he pleased, it is hard to imagine that that percentage would not have shot up to virtually 100%. If Erwin Rommel had succeeded in North Africa and the German army was able to push into Palestine and beyond, the Jews of the Middle East would have likewise been extinguished. Hitler’s war against the Jews was infinite in both scope and conception because he believed that the German race, and indeed the human race, could not thrive so long as the Jews existed. There is simply no parallel to this level of ambition in any other genocide or campaign of mass murder. This “redemptive anti-Semitism,” as coined by historian Saul Friedländer, was the alpha and omega of Adolf Hitler’s worldview, until he put a gun to his temple under the streets of Berlin in April 1945. It was redemptive in that he felt the messianic need to eradicate the Jews so that the “Aryan” race could reach its potential. The communists in the East were seen as identical to the Jews. This, combined with sneering contempt for the Slavs, is why the German war in the Soviet Union was so remorselessly brutal. In Hitler’s last will and testament, he railed against the “world destroyer”: the Jew.

In sum: it was the totality, the continent-wide nature of the genocide, the obsessive determination to kill all Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, the conception of the Jew not just as the “Other” or inferior but rather as literally the world enemy who prevented other peoples from thriving, the industrial nature of the genocide, and the complete lack of any dispute whatsoever between the murderers and the murdered that makes the Holocaust an event unique in history. 

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.