You are on page 1of 479

THE

DESTRUCTION
OF THE
EUROPEAN JEWS
THIRD EDITION

VOLUME

III

RAUL· HELBERG
Tale L 'nivcrsitv Tress \ rnv Haven and London
Publication of this volume was made possible in part by a generous donation from
Eric Marder.

Copyright © 1961, 1985, 2003 by Raul Hilberg.

All rights reserved.

First edition published 1961 by Quadrangle Books, Chicago.


Revised edition published 1985 by Holmes and Meier, New York and London.
Third edition published 2003 by Yale University Press, New Haven and London.

This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form
(beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and
except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

Designed by Mary Valencia.


Set in Galliard type by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data


Hilberg, Raul, 1926-
The destruction of the European Jews / Raul Hilberg. — 3rd ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-300-09557-9 (set: alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-300-09592-0 (vol. 3 : alk. paper)
1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945). 2. Germany—Politics and government—1933-
1945.
I. Title.
D804.3 .H548 2002
940.53'18 —dc21
2002066369

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Tiie paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of
the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on
Library Resources.

10 9 8 7 6
CONTENTS

VOLUME

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION ix

PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION xi

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION xv

1 PRECEDENTS 1

2 ANTECEDENTS 29

3 THE STRUCTURE OF DESTRUCTION 49

4 DEFINITION BY DECREE 61

5 EXPROPRIATION 79
Dismissals 81
Aryanizations 92
Property Taxes 132
Blocked Money 137
Forced Labor and Wage Regulations 143
Special Income Taxes 147
Starvation Measures 148

6 CONCENTRATION 155
The Reich-Protektorat Area 155
Poland 188
The Expulsions 206
G hetto Formation 216
Ghetto Maintenance 236
Confiscations 242
Labor Exploitation 251
Food Controls 263
Sickness and Death in the Ghettos 271

7 MOBILE KELLING OPERATIONS 275


Preparations 276
The First Sweep 295
Strategy 297
Cooperation with the Mobile Killing Units 305
The Killing Operations and Their Repercussions 327
The Killing of the Prisoners of War 346
The Intermediary Stage 353
The Second Sweep 382

CONTENTS
VOLUME

n
8 DEPORTATIONS 409
Central Agencies of Deportation 424
The Reich-Protektorat Area 433
The Uprooting Process 434
Special Problem 1 : Mischlinge and Jews in Mixed
Marriages 434
Special Problem 2 : The Theresienstadt Jews 447
Special Problem 3: The Deferred Jews 457
Special Problem 4: The Incarcerated Jews 467
Seizure and Transport 472
Confiscations 490
Poland 501
Preparations 503
The Conduct of the Deportations 509
Economic Consequences 550
The Semicircular Arc 571
The North 583
Norway 584
Denmark 589
The West 599
The Netherlands 600
Luxembourg 632
Belgium 635
France 645
Italy 703
The Balkans 723
Military Area “Southeast’' 724
Serbia 725
Greece 738
Satellites par Excellence 755
Croatia 756
Slovakia 766
The Opportunistic Satellites 792
Bulgaria 793
Romania 808
Hungary 853

CONTENTS
VOLUME

m
9 KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS 921
Origins of the Killing Centers 921
Organization, Personnel, and Maintenance 960
Labor Utilization 983
Medical Experiments 1002
Confiscations 1013
Killing Operations 1027
Concealment 1027
The “Conveyor Belt” 1033
Erasure 1042
Liquidation of the Killing Centers and the End of the
Destruction Process 1045

10 REFLECTIONS 1059
The Perpetrators 1059
The Destructive Expansion 1060
The Obstacles 1075
Administrative Problems 1075
Psychological Problems 1080
The Victims 1104
The Neighbors 1119

11 CONSEQUENCES 1127
The Trials 1142
Rescue 1194
Salvage 1241

12 IMPLICATIONS 1289

APPENDIX A GERMAN RANKS 1297

APPENDIX B STATISTICS OF JEWISH DEAD 1301

APPENDIX C NOTATION ON SOURCES 1323

INDEX 1333

CONTENTS
THE
DESTRUCTION
OF THE
EUROPEAN JEWS
X_
Kaunas

R ilC H S K O M M IS S A R IA T

..Minsk

✓I 0 Bialystok \
O S T LA N D

,s
PosenQ Kulmhof
(Poznan) (Cheimno) „
• z’ Warsaw \ ------------- --- ■-
Kalisch
w I
O Ot
Litzmannstadt
I
Sobibór i
(Lodz) * Radom · \ R ilC H S K O M M IS S A R IA T
Breslau 4
Lublin 9
\
(Majdanek)
G E N E R A LG O U V E R N E M E N T U K R A IN E
Katowice^
Betzec ·
Krakow
Auschwitz #
(Oswiçcim) Lvov

> ■-·—
K.
S L O V A K IA
\ ___ ;
*x.i
O vn Bratislava »
, mms
Vienna
I \/

• * v-· x
V.
HUNGARY v R O M A N IA
r» Budapest
>

I---------1--------1------------------ 1------------------1----------------- 1
0 50 100 200 300 400 Miles

Map 7 The Killing Centers


CHAPTER NINE

KILLING CENTER
OPERATIONS

ORIGINS OF THE KILLING CENTERS


he most secret operations of the destruction process were carried

T out in six camps located in Poland in an area stretching from the


incorporated areas to the Bug. These camps were the collecting
points tor thousands of transports converging from all directions. In
three years the incoming traffic reached a total of close to three million
Jews. As the transports turned hack empty, their passengers disappeared
inside.

921
The killing centers worked quickly and efficiently. A man would step
oft a train in the morning, and in the evening his corpse would be burned
and his clothes packed away for shipment to Germany. Such an operation
was the product of a great deal of planning, for the death camp was an
intricate mechanism in which a whole army of specialists played their
parts. Viewed superficially, this smoothly functioning apparatus is decep­
tively simple, but upon closer examination the operations of the killing
center resemble in several respects the complex mass-production methods
of a modern plant. It will therefore be necessary to explore, step by step,
what made possible the final result.
A salient fact about the killing center operations is that, unlike the
earlier phases of the destruction process, they were unprecedented. Never
before in history had people been killed on an assembly-line basis.1 The
killing center as such had no prototype, no administrative ancestor. This
is explained by the fact that it was a composite institution that consisted
of two parts: the camp proper and the killing installations in the camp.
Each of these two components had its own administrative history. Nei­
ther was entirely novel. As separate establishments, both the concentra­
tion camp and the gas chamber had been in existence for some time. The
great innovation was effected when the two devices were fused. An exam­
ination of the death camp should therefore begin with its two basic com­
ponents and how they were put together.
The German concentration camp wis born and grew amid violent
disputes and struggles between Nazi factions. Even in the earliest days of
the Nazi regime, the importance of the concentration camp was fully
recognized. Whoever gained possession of this weapon would wield a
great deal of power.
In Prussia, Interior Minister (and later Prime Minister) Goring made
his bid. He decided to round up the Communists. This was not an incar­
ceration of convicted criminals but an arrest of a potentially dangerous
group. “The prisons were not available for this purpose”;2 hence Goring
established concentration camps, which he put under the control of his
Gestapo (then, Ministerialrat Diels).
Almost simultaneously, rival camps appeared on the scene. One was set
up at Stettin by Gauleiter Karpenstein, another was established at Breslau
by SA leader Heines, a third was erected near Berlin by SA leader Ernst.
Goring moved with all his might against these “unauthorized camps.”
Karpenstein lost his post, Ernst lost his life.

1. The phrase was used by a camp doctor, Friedrich Entress, in his affidavit of
April 14,1947, NO-2368.
2. Testimony by Goring, International Military Tribunal, Trial of the Major Hi?;·
Criminals (Nuremberg, 1947), IX, 257.

922 KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


But a more powerful competitor emerged. In Munich the police presi­
dent, Himmler, organized his own Gestapo, and near the town of Dachau
he set up a concentration camp which he placed under the command
of SS-Obertuhrer Eicke.3 Soon Himmler’s Gestapo covered the non-
Prussian Lander, and in the spring of 1934 Himmler obtained through
Hitler’s graces the Prussian Gestapo (becoming its “deputy chief’).
Along with Goring’s Gestapo, Himmler captured the Prussian concentra­
tion camps. Henceforth all camps were under his control.4
Eicke, the first Dachau commander, now became the Inspector for
Concentration Camps. His Totcnkopfrerbdnde (Death Head Units) be­
came the guards. Thus the camps were severed from the Gestapo, which
retained in the administration of each camp only one foothold: the politi­
cal division, with jurisdiction over executions and releases. After the out­
break of war, Eicke and most of his Totenkopfverbande moved into the
field (he was killed in Russia), and his deputy', the later Brigadefiihrer
Glucks, took over the inspectorate.
Eicke’s departure marks the midpoint in the development of the con­
centration camps. Up to the outbreak of war the camps held three types of
prisoners:5

1. Political prisoners
a. Communists (systematic roundup)
b. Active Social Democrats
c. Jehovah’s Witnesses
d. Clergymen who made undesirable speeches or otherwise mani­
fested opposition
e. People who made remarks against the regime and were sent to
camps as an example to others
f. Purged Nazis, especially SA men
2. So-called asocials, consisting primarily of habitual criminals and sex
offenders
3. Jews sent to camps in Einzelaktionen

After 1939 the camps were flooded with millions of people, including
Jewish deportees, Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, members of the French
resistance movements, and so on.

3. See orders by Eicke, October 1, 1933, PS-778.


4. Camps for foreign laborers and prisoner-of-war camps were outside of Him­
mler’s sphere. However, in October 1944 Himmler t<x>k over the PW camps in the
rear.
5. By October 1943, 110,000 German prisoners, including 40,000 “political
criminals” and 70,000 “asocials,” had been sent to the concentration camps. Himmler
speech before Militarbcfehlshaber, October 14, 1943, E-70.

ORIGINS OF THE KILLING CENTERS


The inspectorate could not keep up with this influx. Therefore, from
1940 on the Higher SS and Police Leaders established camps of their
own, specifically the transit camps in the west and the labor camps in
Poland. During the last stage of the destruction process, the Higher SS
and Police Leaders also put up killing centers.
At this point an office stepped in to centralize and unify the concentra­
tion camp network: the SS Economic-Administrative Main Office, the
organization of Obergruppenführer Oswald Pohl. In a process that took
several years, Pohl finally emerged as the dominant power in the camp
apparatus. His organization incorporated the inspectorate and enveloped
almost completely the camps of the Higher SS and Police Leaders.
Pohl entered the concentration camp picture from an oblique angle.
He was not a camp commander, nor was he a Higher SS and Police
Leader. In World War I he had been a naval paymaster, and in the early
days of the SS he had served in the Verwaltungsamt (Administrative Of­
fice) of the SS-Main Office. (The Verwaltungsamt dealt with financial and
administrative questions for the SS.) On February 1, 1934, Pohl took
over the Verwaltungsamt, and by 1936 he had expanded its activities. It
was now concerned also with construction matters, including the con­
struction of SS installations in concentration camps. The Verwaltungsamt
was therefore reorganized to become the Amt Haushalt und Bauten (Bud­
get and Construction Office) — the first major step toward overall control.
In 1940 Pohl broke loose from the SS-Main Office and established his
own main office: the Hauptamt Haushalt und Bauten. At the same time he
set up a chain of SS enterprises in labor and concentration camps. This
business venture could not be placed under the Hauptamt Haushalt und
Bauten, which was nominally a state agency financed entirely with Reich
funds. Therefore, Pohl organized another main office, the Hauptamt Ver­
waltung und Wirtschaft (VWHA) or Main Office Administration and
Economy. This was Pohl’s second step. The double organization, which
was analogous to Heydrich’s apparatus before the merger of the Haupt­
amt Sicherheitspolizei (Gestapo and Kripo) and the Sicherheitshauptamt
(SD) into the RSHA, is shown in Table 9-1.
On February 1, 1942, Pohl followed Heydrich’s example and com­
bined his two main offices into a single organization: the SS Economic-
Administrative Main Office, or Wirtschafts- Verwaltungshauptamt (WVHA).
One month after this consolidation, Pohl took his third major step. To
ensure better labor utilization in the camps and to make possible the
unhampered growth of his SS enterprises, he swallowed the inspectorate.
The WVHA was now fully engaged in the concentration camp business.
From Table 9-2 it may be seen that Hauptamt Haushalt und Bauten (I
and II) became Amtsgruppen A, B, and C, that the inspectorate w as trans-

KXLLING CENTER OPERATIONS


TABLE 9-1
ORGANIZATION OF THE HAUSHALT UNO BAUTEN AND VWHA

VERWAL1TJNG UND
HAUSHALT UND BAUTEN WIRTSCHAFT

Office I Office II Office III


Budget Construction Administration and Economy
(SS enterprises)
Obfi I for nor Gruf. Pohl Gruf Pohl
1-1 II-A III-A
Salaries Waffen-SS
OStubaf. Prietzel HSrufi Sesemann Stafi Dr. Salpeter
III-A/1
German Earth and Stone Works
(Deutsche Erd- und
Steinwerke— DEST)
Stubafi Mummenthey
1-2 II-B III-B
Legal Special Tasks
HStuf. Fncke UStuf. Geber Obf Möckel
1-3 II-C III-C
Uniforms and Concentration
Clothes Camps and Police
Stubal. Weggel HSrufi List OStubaf Maurer
III-C/3
German Equipment Works
(Deutsche Ausrüstungs-
werke— DAW)
HStuf. Niemann
1-4 II-D III-D
Ix>dgings
OStubaf. Koberlein HStuf Dr. Flir Stubafi Vogel
1-5 II-E III-S
Allocation of Personnel Special Tasks
Inmate Labor Stubafi Klein
HStuf Burbock
1-6
Food
HStuf Fichtinger

(Continued)
TABLE 9-1
CONTINUED

VERWALTUNG UND
HAUSHALT UND BAUTEN WIRTSCHAFT

I-H
Personnel
UStuf. Lange

I-K
Transportation
UStuf. Leitner

Note: Organization charts of Hauptamt Haushalt und Bauten and Hauptamt Ver­
waltung und Wirtschaft, 1941, in NO-620. The early history of the Pohl organization is
based on his affidavit of March 18, 1947, NO-2574.

formed into Amtsgruppe D, and that the VWHA (III) emerged as Amts-
gnippe W.6
With the inspectorate’s incorporation into the Pohl machine, the ad­
ministration of the concentration camps acquired an economic accent.
The exploitation of the inmate labor supply, which had motivated Pohl to
undertake this consolidation, now became the very reason for the exis­
tence of concentration camps. This factor brought into the lulling center
operations the same dilemma that had already surfaced in the mobile
killing operations and the deportations, namely the need for labor versus
the “Final Solution.” This time the quandary was entirely an internal SS
affair. (The growth of the Pohl organization from 1929 to March 1942 is
summarized in Table 9-3.)
The consolidation process did not stop with the incorporation of the
inspectorate, for Pohl also bit into the camps of the Higher SS and Police
Leaders. He annexed some camps outright, controlled others by install­
ing regional officials responsible to the WVHA (the SS economists [SS-
Wirtschafter]),7 and invaded the killing centers in the Generalgouverne-
ment by acquiring control over the entire camp confiscation machinery in
the territory. Concentration camps had become the principal factor in the
power structure of Pohl. He in turn had emerged as the dominant figure
in the sea of concentration camps.8

6. See organization charts in documents NO-52 and NO-111.


7. Order by Pohl, July 23, 1942, NO-2128. Pohl to Himmler, July 27, 1942.
NO-2128. SS economists were installed in Riga, Mogilev, Kiev, Krakow, Belgrade,
and Oslo, later also in Hungary.
8. See the essay bv Martin Broszat, “The Concentration Camps 1933-45," in

926 KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


While Pohl tightened his hold over the camps, the camps absorbed
ever larger numbers of inmates. The following figures indicate the growth
of the increasingly important army of slaves in concentration camp
enclosures:

September 1939: 21,4009 10 11


April 19,1943: over 160,000"'
August 1, 1944: 524,286"

The compilations do not include the camps of the Higher SS and Police
Leaders, nor do they show the millions of deaths.
To keep up with the influx of victims, the camp network had to be
extended. In 1939 there were six relatively small camps.12 In 1944 Pohl
sent Himmler a map that showed 20 full-fledged concentration camps
(Konzentrationslajjer or KL) and 165 satellite labor camps grouped in
clusters around the big KLs. (Again the camps of the Higher SS and
Police Leaders were not included.)13 14 Himmler received the report with
great satisfaction, remarking that “just such examples show how our busi­
ness has grown [Gerade an solchen Beispielen kann man sehen, me unsere
Dinjjegewacbsen sind]''u Pohl’s empire was thus characterized by a three­
fold growth: the jurisdictional expansion, the increase in the number of
camp slaves, and the extension of the camp network.
The six killing centers appeared in 1941-42, at a time of the greatest
multiplication and expansion of concentration camp facilities. During
this burst of activity, the constoiction and operation of the killing centers
could proceed smoothly and unobtrusively.
The death camps operated with gas. There were three types of gassing
installations, for the administrative evolution of the gas method had pro­
ceeded in three different channels. One development took place in the
Technical Referat of the RSHA. This office produced the gas van. We
have already observed the use of the van in Russia and Serbia. In both
of these territories the vans were auxiliary devices used for the killing
of women and children only. But there was to be one more application.
In 1941 Gauleiter Greiser of the Wartheland obtained Himmler’s per-

Hclnuit Krausnick, Hans Ruchhcim, Martin Broszat, and Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, The
Anatomy of the SS State (New York, 1968), pp. 397-504.
9. Pohl to Himmler, April 30, 1942, R-129.
10. Pohl to OStubaf. Brandt, April 19, 1942, Himmler Files, Folder 67.
11. WVHA D-IV (signed Stubaf. Burger) to YVVHA-B (Gruf. Lörner), Au­
gust 15, 1944, NO-399.
12. Pohl to Himmler, April 30, 1942, R-129.
13. Pohl to Himmler, April 5, 1944, NO-20.
14. Himmler to Pohl, April 22, 1944, NO-20.

ORIGINS OF THE KILLING CENTERS 927


TABLE 9-2
ORGANIZATION OF THE WVHA

Chief, WVHA OGruf. Pohl


Deputy (Brif. Frank) Gruf. Georg
Lörner
Chief, Amtsgruppe A Troop administration (Frank) Brif. Fanslau
Amt A-I Budget Obf. Hans Lörner
Amt A-I I Finance (OStubaf. Eggert) HStuf.
Melmer
Amt A-III Law Obf. Salpeter
Amt A-I V Auditing Staf. Vogt
Amt A-V Personnel Brif. Fanslau
Chief, Amtsgruppe B Troop economy Gruf. Georg Lörner
Deputy (Staf. Prietzel) Obf.
Tschentscher
Food inspector,
Waften-SS Staf. Prof. Schenk
Amt B-I Food (not including
concentration camps) Obf. Tschentscher
Amt B-II Clothes (including
inmates) OStubaf. Lechler
Amt B-III Lodgings Staf. Köberlein
(Amt B-IV: trans­
ferred to B-II,
March 3,1942) Raw materials OStubaf. Weggel
Amt B-V Transport and weapons Staf. Scheide
Chief, Amtsgruppe C Construction Gruf. Dr. Ing. Kammler
Deputy (Stubaf. Basching)
OStubaf. Schleif
Amt C-I General construction
matters (including
concentration camps) OStubaf. Rail
AmtC-II Special construction OStubaf. Kiefer
AmtC-III Technical Stubaf. Floto
Amt C-IV Artistic Stubaf. Schneider
Amt C-V Central inspection (Lenzer) OStubaf. Noell
AmtC-VI Financial Staf. Eirenschmalz
Chief, Amtsgruppe D Concentration camps Brif. Glücks
Deputy OStubaf. I àebehcnschel
TABLE 9-2
CONTINUED

Amt D-I Central office (Liebehenschel)


OStubaf. Höss
Amt D-II Labor allocation Staf. Maurer
Amt D-III Sanitation Staf. Dr. Lolling
Amt D-IV Administration (Kaindl) Stubaf. Burger
Chief, Amtsgruppe W Economic enterprises OGruf. Pohl
German Economic
Enterprises, Inc.
First manager OGruf. Pohl
Second manager Gruf. Lörncr
Obf. Baier
Chief, W Staff
AmtVV-I German Eardi and
Stone Works
(DEST) - Reich OSrubaf. Mummen the y
AmtW-II DEST — East Stubaf. Dr. Bobermin
AmtW-IlI Food enterprises HStuf. Rabeneck
AmrW-IV Wood products (HSmf. Dr. May) HStuf.
(including DAW) Opperbeck
Amt YV-V Agricultural OStubaf. Vogel
Amt VV-VI Textiles and leather OStubaf. Lechler
Amt YV-V1I Books and pictures
(including Nordland
Publishing Company
and Deutscher
Bilderdienst) Stubaf. Mischke
Amt YV-V1II Special tasks
(monuments, etc.) Obf. Dr. Salpeter

mission to kill 100,000 Jews in his Gau.* 15 Three vans were thereupon
brought into the woods of Kulmhof (Chelmno), the area was closed off,
and the first killing center came into being.16
The construction of another type of gassing apparatus was pursued in
the Führer Chancellery, Hider’s personal office. For some time, thought
15. Greiser to Himmler, May 1, 1942, NO-246.
16. Judge Wladyslaw Bednarz (Lodz), “Extermination Camp at Chelmno,” Cen­
tral Commission tor Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, German Crimes in
Poland (Warsaw, 1946-47), vol. l,pp. 107-17.

ORIGINS OF THE KILLING CENTERS


TABLE 9-3
POHL ORGANIZATION, 1929-42

POHL

PARTY BUDGET,
YEAR REICH BUDGET PROFITS, LOANS, ETC.

1929 SS-Hauptamt
(Verwaltungsamt)

1936 SS-Hauptamt
(Amt Haushalt und
Bauten)

Hauptamt Haushalt
1940 Inspectorate und Bauten Hauptamt Verwaltung
und Wirtschaft

March
1942 WVHA (A, B, C, D, and W)

had been given in Germany to doctrines about the quality of life, from the
simple idea that a dying person may be helped to die (Sterbehilfe) to the
notion that life not worth living may be unworthy of life. This move from
concern for the individual to a preoccupation with society was accom­
plished by representing retarded or malfunctioning persons, especially
those with problems perceived to be congenital, as sick or harmful cells in
the healthy corpus of the nation. The title of one monograph, published
after the shock of World War I, could in fact be read as suggesting their
destruction. It was called The Release for Annihilation of Life without Value
[Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens].17 The last three
words of the German phrase were to grace official correspondence during
the Nazi years.
Not until after the outbreak of World War II, however, did Hitler sign
an order (predated September 1, 1939) empowering the chief of the
Führer Chancellery, Reichsleiter Bouhler, and his own personal physi­

17. The authors were Karl Binding, a lawyer, and Alfred Hoche, a psychiatrist.
(Sec 2d ed., Leipzig, 1922.) On further evolution of this thinking, sec Stephen L
Chorovcr, From Genesis to Genocide (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), p. 78 If.

KILLING CENTBR OPERATIONS


cian. Dr. Brandt, “to widen the authority of individual doctors with a
view to enabling them, after the most critical examination in the realm
of human knowledge, to administer to incurably sick persons a mercy
death.”18 The intention was to apply this directive only to Germans with
mental afflictions,19 but eventually the program encompassed the follow­
ing operations.20
1. Throughout the war, the killing, upon determination of physicians’
panels, of about 5,000 infants and children who were mongoloid, hy­
drocephalic, microcephalic, lame, spastic, or malformed. The children
were removed from unsuspecting parents and from custodial institutions
to specially organized pediatric units (Kinderfachabteilungen) in some
thirty asylums and hospitals, where doctors administered luminal tab­
lets, occasionally with added injections of morphine-scopolamine, to in­
duce pneumonia, coma, and death.
2. During 1940 and the first eight months of 1941, the annihilation of
70,000 adults in euthanasia stations equipped with gas chambers and
bottled, chemically pure carbon monoxide gas. The victims, selected
from lists screened by psychiatrists, were in the main institutionalized
— senile persons, feebleminded persons, epileptics, sufferers from Hun­
tington’s chorea and some other neurological disorders,
— individuals who had been treated at institutions tor at least five years,
— criminally insane persons, especially those involved in moral crimes.
The euthanasia stations, which did not have resident patients, were
Grafencck (after it was closed: Hadamar)
Brandenburg (after it was closed: Bernburg)

18. Order by Hicier, September 1, 1939, PS-630.


19. Affidavit bv Dr. Konrad Morgen, July 19, 1946, SS(A)-67. Morgen was an SS
officer whose assignment was the investigation of SS corruption. From this vantage
point he gained insight into the killing phase of the destruction process.
20. For detailed descriptions, see Klaus Dorner, “Nationalsozialismus und Ec-
bensvernichmng,” Vierteljahrshejte fur Zeitjjeschicbte 15 (1967): 121-52; Lothar
Gruchmann, “Eurhanasie und Justiz im Drittcn Reich,” ibid., 20 (1972): 235-79;
H. G. Adler, Der wrwaltetc Mensch (Tubingen, 1974), pp. 234-39; Florian Zehet-
hofer, “Das F.uthanasieproblem im Dritten Reich am Beispicl Schloss Hartheim
1938-1945,” Oberiisterreicbisches Heimatblatt 32 (1978): 46-62. Ernst Klee, “£«-
thanasie" ini NS-Staat (Frankfurt am Main, 1985); Klee, ed., Dokumente zur “Eu-
thanasie" (Frankfurt, 1985); and Robert Jav Lifton, The Nazi Doctors (New York,
1986), pp. 21-144. For the sh<x>ring of the Pomeranian patients and the gassing of
the East Prussian patients, see Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1995), pp. 136-40, and Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance
(Cambridge, England, 1994), pp. 130-32. In addition, 12,850 Polish psychiatric
patients were killed between 1939 and 1944. Burleigh, Death, pp. 132-33. An un­
dated, unsigned numerical summary of operations in the euthanasia stations to Sep­
tember 1, 1941, is in T 1021, Roll 18.

ORIGINS OF THE KILLING CENTERS 931


Sonnenstein
Hartheim
3. The shooting of more than 3,000 mental patients from Pomeranian
mental hospitals in a forest of the newly occupied Polish corridor.
4. From September 1941 to the end of the war, the practice of so-called
“wild euthanasia" in various asylums. Physicians and nurses weeded out
thousands of incapable or annoying patients by killing them with a hun­
ger diet and overdoses of luminal or related drugs.
5. From the middle of 1941 to the winter of 1944-45, the pruning of
concentration camp inmates too weak or bothersome to be kept alive
and the killing of these people, upon superficial psychiatric evaluation, in
euthanasia stations under code 14 f 13.
The administrative implementation of this psychiatric holocaust was in
the hands of Bouhlefs Führer Chancellery. The man actually in charge
of the program was a subordinate of Bouhler, Reichsamtsleiter Brack.21
For the technical aspects of the project, the Reichsamtsleiter obtained the
services of Kriminalkommissar Wirth, chief of the Criminal Police office
in Stuttgart and an expert in tracking down criminals.22
“Euthanasia” was a conceptual as well as technological and administra­
tive préfiguration of the “Final Solution” in the death camps. In the
summer of 1941, when the physical destruction of the Jews was in the
offing for the whole of the European continent, Himmler consulted with
the Chief Physician of the SS {Reichsarzt-SS und Polizei), Gruppenführer
Dr. Grawitz, on the best way to undertake the mass-killing operation.
Grawitz advised the use of gas chambers.23
On October 10, 1941, at a “final solution” conference of the RSHA,
Heydrich alluded to Hitler’s desire to free the Reich of Jews, if at all
possible, by the end of the year. In that connection, the RSHA chief
discussed the impending deportations to Lodz, and mentioned Riga and
Minsk. He even considered the possibility of shipping Jews to concentra­
tion camps set up for Communists by Einsatzgruppen B and C in opera­
tional areas.24 The Ostland, emerging as the center of gravity in this

21. For rhe organization and personnel of this office, sec Friedlandcr, The Origins
of Nazi Genocide.
22. Affidavit by Morgen, July 13, 1946, SS(A)-65. The chief psychiatric examiner
for asylums was an SS physician, Prof. Werner Hcydc. Each euthanasia station had its
own medical director. The term “psychiatric holocaust” was coined by Peter Roger
Brcggin, “The Psychiatric Holocaust," Penthouse, January 1979, pp. 81-84, 216. The
stations were called “killing centers” by Leo Alexander, “Medical Science under Dic­
tatorship,” Nap England Journal of Medicine 24 ( 1949): 39-47. Alexander's designa­
tion is used here to describe the camps in which the gassings of rhe Jews took place.
23. Affidavit by Morgen, July 13, 1946, SS(A)-65.
24. Israel Police 1193.

932 KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


scheme, served to crystallize the idea of what was to be done to Reich
deportees on their arrival.
By the end of the month the race expert (Sonderdezement fur Rassen­
politik) in Bräutigams office in the East Ministry', Amtsgerichrsrat Wetzel,
drafted a letter in which he stated that Brack was prepared to introduce his
gassing apparatus in the East. Brack had offered to send his chemical ex­
pert, Dr. Kallmeyer, to Riga, and Eichmann had referred to Riga and
Minsk in expressing agreement with the idea. “All things considered,”
wrote Wetzel, “one need have no reservation about doing away with those
Jews who are unable to work, with the Brackian devices [Nach Sachlage,
bestehen keine Bedenken wenn diejenigen Juden, die nicht arbeitsfähig sind, mit
den Brackschen Hilfsmitteln beseitigt werden ] ”25 There were, however, some
second thoughts about directing a continuing flow of transports to the icy
regions of the occupied USSR.26 Dr. Kallmeyer, told to wait in Berlin be­
cause of the cold in the east, spent Christmas at home.27 The scene of the
action had already been shifted to the Generalgouvernement.
Under primitive conditions, three camps were built by Amt Haushalt
und Bauten (after the reorganization of March 1942, the WVHA-C) and
its regional machinery at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. The sites were
chosen with a view to seclusion and access to railroad lines. In the plan­
ning there was some improvisation and much economizing; labor and
material w ere procured locally at minimum cost.
Belzec, in the district of Lublin, was the prototype. Its construction,
according to Polish w itnesses, w'as begun as early as November 1941. A
locksmith who worked in the camp while it was being built provides the
following chronology:28

25. Draft memorandum by Wetzel for Lohse and Rosenberg, October 25, 1941,
NO-365. In Jerusalem, Eichmann declared that he had not discussed gas chambers
with Werzel. Eichmann trial transcript, June 23, 1961, sess. 78, p. Rl; July 17, 1961,
sess. 98, p. Bbl.
26. When Generalgouverneur Frank was in Berlin (middle of December 1941), he
was told that “nothing could be done with the Jew's in the Ostland.” Frank in GG
conference, December 16, 1941, Frank Diary, PS-2233.
27. Helmut Kallmeyer (in Havana) to Dr. Stahnner (attorney), June 18, 1960,
Oberhäuser (Belzec) case, Landgericht München I, 1 Js 278/60, vol. 5, pp. 974-75.
All volume numbers pertaining to the Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka cases refer to the
collection in the Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverzwaltungen in Ludwigsburg, 8
AR-Z 252/59.
28. Statement by Stanislaw Kozak, October 14, 1945, Belzec case, vol. 6, pp.
1129-33. Hie November 1, 1941, date is mentioned also by Eustachy Ukrainski
(principal of grade school in the town of Belzec), October 11, 1945, Belzec case, vol.
6, pp. 1117-20. The presence of eastern collaborators at the end of 1941 is confirmed
by Ludw ig Obalek (mayor of Belzec) in his statement of October 10, 1945, Belzec
case, vol. 6, pp. 1112-14.

ORIGINS OF THE KILLING CENTERS 933


October 1941 SS men approach Polish administra­
tion in town of Belzec with demand for
twenty workers. The Germans select
the site.
November 1,1941 Polish workers begin construction of
three barracks:
a waiting hall leading tit rough a
walkway to an anteroom, leading to
a third building that had a corridor
with three doors to three compart­
ments, each of which had floor pip­
ing and an exit door. All six doors
(entry and exit) in these three com­
partments were encased in thick rub­
ber and opened to the outside.
November-December 1941 A contingent of about seventy black-
uniformed eastern collaborators (So­
viet prisoners of war released from cap­
tivity) lay narrow-gauge rail, dig pits,
and erect a fence.
December 22, 1941 Polish workers are discharged.
January-February 1942 Watchtowers are built.
The Germans at the Belzec site who had requisitioned the Polish work
force were members of an SS construction Kommando.29 The work was
supervised by a “master from Katowice” an unidentified German with
some knowledge of Polish who was in possession of building plans.
When one of the Poles asked about the purpose of the project, the Ger­
man only smiled.30 Sometime before Christmas, the construction chief
(.Bauleiter) showed the blueprints to an SS noncommissioned officer
(Oberhauser) who was stationed in the area and who was going to be a
functionary in the administration of the death camps. The drawings were
plans of gassing installations (Verjjasungsanlqgen). By that time the con­
struction of the buildings was substantially finished,31 and shordy thereaf­
ter the chemist Dr. Kallmeyer arrived from Berlin.32
Sobibor, also in the Lublin District, was built, evidently more quickly,
29. Statements by Josef Oberhauser, February 26 and September 15,1960, Belzec
case, vol. 4, pp. 656-60, and vol. 6, pp. 1036-40.
30. Statement by Kozak, and statement by Edward Ferens (also a locksmith),
March 20,1946, Belzec case, vol. 6, pp. 1222-23.
31. Statement by Oberhauser, December 12, 1960, Belzec case, vol. 9, pp. 1678-
93.
32. Kallmeyer to Stahmcr, June 18, 1960, Belzec case, vol. 5, pp. 974-75. In the
letter Kallmeyer asserts that he was not needed.

934 KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


in March and April of 1942. Superv ision of the construction was in the
hands of Obersturmführer (later Hauptsturmführer) Thomalla, a master
mason regularly assigned to the SS-Zentralbauleitung Lublin/Bauleitung
Zamosc.33 Thomalla had some professional help from Baurat Moser, em­
ployed by the Kreishauptmann of Chelm (Ansel), in whose territory So-
bibor was located.34 To speed the work, Jewish labor from the surround­
ing region was employed extensively during the construction phase.33
At Treblinka (within the Warsaw District), where euthanasia physician
Dr. Eberl was in charge, the Zentralbauleitung of the district, together
with two contractors, the firm Schönbrunn of Licgnitz and the Warsaw
concern Schmidt und Münstermann (builders of the Warsaw Ghetto
wall), were readying the camp.36 Labor for construction was drawn from
the Warsaw Ghetto.37 Dr. Eberl also availed himself of the resources of
the ghetto for supplies, including switches, nails, cables, and wallpaper.38
Again, the Jews were to be the unwitting contributors to their own
destruction.
33. Statement bv Georg Michalscn (Globocnik’s Aussiedlungsstab), September 4,
1961, Sobibor case, Hagen, 45 Js 27/61, vol. 4, pp. 723-25. See also Richard
Thomalla’s personnel record in the Berlin Document Center.
34. Statement bv Landrat Dr. Werner Ansel, June 15, 1960, Sobibor case, vol. 3,
p. 416. Moser is mentioned also by Sobibor commander Franz Stangl, June 26,
1967, Treblinka case, Düsseldorf, 8 Js 10904/59, vol. 13, pp. 3712-22.
35. Statement by Jan Stetaniuk (a non-Jcwish worker at Sobibor), February 26,
1966, Sobibor case, vol. 13, pp. 2694-95. The gassing apparatus was tried our in the
presence of an unnamed chemist. See Adalbert Rückcrl, NS-Vemichtuttgslapfer (Mu­
nich, 1977), pp. 165-66. RückerPs book contains texts of German Federal Republic
court judgments and selected testimony about all three of the Generalgouvernement
camps as well as Kulmhof. For entries about the three camps, see encyclopedia by
Glmvna Komisja Radania Zbrodni Hitlerowskich w Polsce, Obozy bitlerowskie na
ziemiacbpolskicb 1939-1945 (Warsaw, 1979), pp. 93-95, 459-61, 524-28. See also
I no Arndt and Wolfgang SchefHer, “Organisierter Massenmord an Juden in national­
sozialistischen Vernichtungslagern,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 24 (1976):
105-35.
36. Indictment of Kurt Franz, enclosed by prosecutor Hühnerschulte to Land­
gericht in Düsseldorf, January 29, 1963, through the courtesy of the Israel police.
37. See entries by Czerniakdw (chairman of Warsaw Ghetto Jewish Council) in his
diary (January 17; February 4 and 20; March 10,27, and 29; April 9 and 18; May 23;
and June 1, 1942), in Raul Hilberg, Stanislaw Staron, and Josef Kemiisz, eds., The
Warsaw Diary of Adam Czemiakow (New York, 1979), pp. 316, 322, 328, 333, 338,
339, 341, 344, 358, 361. A labor camp (Treblinka I) was already in existence not tar
trom the site. Jewish labor from the Warsaw Ghetto was sent to Treblinka I, and its
inmates, Poles as well as Jews, could be utilized for construction. Treblinka I, under
Hauptsturmführer van Eupen, was nor administratively joined to the death camp.
38. Eberl to Kommissar of Jewish district (Auerswald), June 26, 1942, facsimile
in Jüdisches Historisches Institut Warschau, Faschismus-Getto-Massenmord (Berlin,
1961), p. 304. Eberl to Kommissar, July 7, 1942, facsimile in Alexander Donat, ed.,
The Death Camp Treblinka (New York, 1979), p. 255.

ORIGINS OF THE KILLING CENTERS 935


Even while the three camps were being erected, transports with Jewish
deportees from the Krakow District, the Reich, and the Protektorat were
arriving in the Hrubieszow-Zamosc area. The director of the Population
and Welfare Subdivision of the Interior Division in the Gouverneur’s
office of Lublin (Turk) was instructed by the Generalgouvernement Inte­
rior Main Division (Siebert) to assist Globocnik in making room for the
Jews pouring into the district. Turk’s deputy (Reuter) thereupon had a
conversation with Globocnik’s expert in Jewish “resettlement” affairs,
Hauptsturmführer Höfte. The Hauptsturmfuhrer made a few remarkable
statements: A camp was being built at Belzec, near the Generalgou­
vernement border in subdistrict (Kreis) Zamosc. Where on the D^blin-
Trawniki line could 60,000 Jews be unloaded in the meantime? Höfte was
ready to receive four or five transports daily at Belzec. “These Jews would
cross the border and would never return to the Generalgouvernement
[Diese Juden kämen über die Grenze und würden nie mehr ins Generalgouver­
nement zurückkommen]?39 The discussion, on the afternoon of March 16,
1942, was held a few days before the opening of Belzec. During the
following month Sobibor was finished, and in July, Treblinka.
The terrain of each camp was only a few hundred yards in length and
width. The layout was similar in all three camps. There were barracks for
guard personnel, an area where the Jews were unloaded, an undressing
station, and an S-shaped walkway, called the Schlauch (hose), two or three
yards wide that was bordered by high barbed-wire fences covered with
ivy. The Schlauch was traversed by the naked victims on their way to the
gassing facilities. The entire arrangement was designed to convince the
Jews that they were in a transit camp, where they would be required to
clean themselves on the way to the “east.” The gas chambers, disguised as
showers, were not larger than medium-sized rooms, but during gassings
they were filled to capacity. At the beginning, no camp had more than
three of these chambers. The gas first used at Belzec was bottled, either
the same preparation of carbon monoxide that had been shipped to the
euthanasia stations or possibly hydrogen cyanide.40 Later, Belzec is re­
ported to have been equipped with a diesel motor; Treblinka is said to
have had one from the start; and Sobibor began with a heavy, eight-
cylinder, 200+ horsepower, water-cooled Russian gasoline engine that
released a mixture of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide into the gas

39. Memorandum by Reuter, March 17, 1942, in Jüdisches Historisches Institut,


Faschismus-Getto-Massenmord, pp. 269-70.
40. Bottled gas (Flaschengas) is mentioned by Oberhäuser (Obersturmführer at
Belzec). See text of his statement in Rückerl, NS-Vemichtungslager, pp. 136-37. The
court judgment in the Oberhäuser case identifies the gas as cyanide (Zyklon B). Ihid,
p. 133.

KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


chambers.41 No crematoria were installed; the bodies were burned in
mass graves.
The limited capacity of the camps troubled SS and Police Leader Glo-
bocnik; he did not wish to get “stuck.”42 During the summer of 1942 there
was congestion of railway traffic in the Generalgouvernement, and the line
to Sobibór was under repair. At Belzec operations were reduced and inter­
rupted, and at Sobibór the stoppage was prolonged. But Treblinka re­
ceived transports to the point of overflow, and mounds of unburned
bodies in various stages of decay confronted new arrivals of deportees.43
Between July and September an expansion was undertaken in the three
camps. Massive structures, of stone in Belzec and brick in Treblinka,
containing at least six gas chambers in each camp, replaced the old facili­
ties. In the new gas buildings the chambers were aligned on both sides of
a corridor, and at Treblinka the engine room was situated at its far end.
The front wall of the Treblinka gas house, underneath the gable, was
decorated with a Star of David. At the entrance hung a heavy, dark curtain
taken from a synagogue and still bearing the Hebrew words “This is the
gate through which the righteous pass.”44
The Generalgouvernement was the location also of a regular con­
centration camp of the WVHA, where Jewish transports were received
from time to time. In German correspondence the camp was referred to
as Lublin, whereas its common name after the war was Majdanek. Up to

41. Ibui., pp. 133, 203, 165-66. Eugcn Kogon or al., Nationalsozialistiscbe Massen-
totungen (lurch Giftgas (Frankfurt am Main, 1986), pp. 154, 163, 158-59. The So-
bibor engine is described by Untcrscharfuhrcr Erich Fuchs in Massentbtuttgen,
pp. 158-59. Fuchs helped install the engine and tried it out on a contingent of 30-40
Jewish women.
42. Brack to Himmler, June 23, 1942, NO-205.
43. Riickcrl, NS-Vemichtungslager, pp. 208-9.
44. Ibid., p. 204. Information about the number and size of gas chambers in each
camp rests not on documentation but on recollection of witnesses. There is agree­
ment that the new chambers were larger than the old (the capacity for simultaneous
gassing in Belzec during the summer of 1942 was estimated at 1,500). Counts of gas
chambers are given in the following ranges:
Belzec 3, then 6
Sobibor 3, then 4, 5, or 6
Treblinka 3, then 6 or 10
It is likely that each facility was designed from the same basic plan; hence three is
probably the initial capacity, and six the subsequent one. German defendants in
lreblinka trial of 1965 (Franz et al.) indicated six chambers there after expansion.
Ibid. A Jewish survivor, who was a carpenter at Treblinka, states that there were ten
gas chambers. Jankicl Wiernik, “A Year in Treblinka,” in Donat, Treblinka, pp. 147-
88, at p. 161. For a sketch drawn by Wiernik, see Filip Friedman, This Was Osmecim
(Guidon, 1946), pp. 81-84; and Glowna Komisja, Obozy, p. 526. Sec, however, two
different sketches, in Donat, Treblinka, pp. 318-19; and Stem, May 17, 1970, p. 170.

ORIGINS OF THE KILLING CENTERS 937


October 1942, the camp had facilities for men only. It had been built ■
to hold prisoners of war (among them Jewish soldiers of the Polish army,)
under SS jurisdiction. Even during these early days, however, several
thousand Jews, including men, women, and children, were brought into
the camp from nearby localities. In September-October 1942, three
small gas chambers, placed into a U-shaped building, were opened. Two
of them were constructed for the interchangeable use of bottled carbon
monoxide or hydrogen cyanide gas, the third for cyanide only. The area in
front of the building was called Rosengarten and Rosenfeld (rose garden
and rose field). No roses adorned the camp —rather, the SS managers
associated the facility with a typical name of Jewish victims. The gassing
phase, which resulted in about 500 to 600 deaths per week over a period
of a year, came to an end with the decision to wipe out the entire Jewish
inmate population in one blow.45 After the Lublin camp acquired admin­
istrative control of the Trawniki and Poniatowa labor camps, mass shoot­
ings took place at all three sites in the beginning of November 1943.46
While Kulmhof in the Wartheland was being set up with gas vans and a
network of gas-chamber camps was established in the Generalgouverne­
ment, a third development came to fruition in the incorporated territory
of Upper Silesia. There, in the corner below the convergence of the Vis­
tula and Sola rivers, the Polish army had maintained an artillery base
encircled by stagnant fish ponds which permeated the compound with
dampness, mist, and mud.47 After the Polish collapse, the German army

45. For a history of the Lublin camp, see Jozef Marszalek, Majdanek (Ham­
burg, 1982), particularly pp. 24-44, 135-52; judgment of Landgericht Düsseldorf,
April 27,1979, in the matter of Ernst Schmidt, 8 Ks 1/75; affidavit by Friedrich Wil­
helm Ruppcrt (Director, Technical Division, Lublin camp from September 1942),
August 6, 1945, NO-1903; and Glowna Komisja, Obozy, pp. 302-12. On deliveries
of Zyklon to the camp in 1943, see affidavit by Alfred Zaun (bookkeeper with Tesch
und Stabcnow, suppliers), October 18,1947, Nl-11937, and facsimiles of correspon­
dence between Lublin camp and Tesch und Stabcnow during June-July 1943, in
Glowna Komisja, Obozy, appendix, items 18, 140, and 141. The gas was routinely
used in camps also for fumigation.
46. According to Ruppcrt, about 17,000 Jews were shot in Lublin in November
1943. Franz Pantli, an SS man in the camp, estimates 12,000. Affidavit by Franz
Pantli, May 24,1945, NO-1903. Obersturmführer Offcrmann cited 15,000 killed in
Lublin, another 15,000 in Poniatowa, and 10,000 in Trawniki. Jüdisches Histo­
risches Institut, Faschismus-Getto-Massenmord, pp. 366-67n. Sec also Marszalek,
Majdanek, p. 138.
47. Jan Sehn, “Concentration and Extermination Camp at Oswiycim,” Central
Commission for Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, German Crimes in Polatui
(Warsaw, 1946-47), vol. 1, pp. 27-29. Certificate of the New Construction Directo­
rate (Neubauleitung) in Birkenau, October 21, 1941, noting heavy clay soil and
frequent rain, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives Record Group 11.001
(Center for the Preservation of Historical Documentary Collections, Moscow), Roll
21, Fond 502, Opis 1, Folder 4L

KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


quartered a company of construction troops in this facility. At the begin­
ning of 1940 the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps, making a surv ey
of the area, decided that with proper sanitary and structural improve­
ments the buildings might be used as a quarantine center.48 A few months
later the SS moved in.49 Another concentration camp was born. Its name
was Auschwitz. Its commander, a Nazi from the earliest days of the move­
ment who had come up in the concentration camp world with experience
in Dachau and Sachsenhausen, was Rudolf Höss.
The first inmates were Poles and the first distinct purpose of the camp
was their local exploitation for economic purposes of the SS, including
agriculture in the vicinity of the camp enclosure. To this end, the SS made a
considerable effort to extend its influence into the surrounding territory.
The land between the two rivers was consequently declared a “zone of
interest” (Interessengebiet), and all the Polish peasants in the local villages
were evicted. The aim was to establish a Gutsbezirk of the Waften-SS, a
district owned by the SS, and conferences to this end were held over a
period of two years. The complicated land-transfer process, comprising
land of the Polish state, municipal property', ecclesiastical property, as well
as property' belonging to Germans, could not be mastered, and on March 3,
1943, the Oberpräsident of Upper Silesia, Bracht, issued a decree estab­
lishing, in lieu of a Gutsbezirk, the administrative district (Amtsbezirk) of
Auschwitz.50 Höss also became the chief executive of this Amtsbezirk.51

48. Obf. Glücks to Himmler, copies to Pohl and Hevdrich, February 21, 1940,
NO-34.
49. Heeresamr Gleiwitz to IdS Breslau, April 27, 1940, and IdS to Höss, May 31,
1940, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives Record Group 11.001 (Center
tor Historical Collections, Moscow), Roll 21, Fond 502, Opis 1, Folder 55. No
payment was made by the SS to the army for the camp. The owner was simply the
Reich. Report by the Chief of the Zentralbauleitung in Auschwitz (Osruf. Jorhann),
June 22, 1944, ibid., Roll 20, Fond 502, Opis 1, Folder 38. The goal was 10,000
prisoners. Hauptamt Haushalt und Bauten II c 5 to Neubauleitung Auschwitz,
August 3, 1940, ibid., Roll 36, Fond 502, Opis 1, Folder 265.
50. Bodenamt Schlesien in Karrowirz (signed Kusche) to Director of Zentralbo-
denamt beim Reichsfiihrer-SS/RKfdFdV (Gruf. Freiherr von Holzschuher), May 22,
1940, PS-1352. Brif. Lörner to Finance Ministry, October 1, 1941, NG-5545. Pohl
to Finance Ministry, November 7, 1942, PS-1643. Records of conferences, Novem­
ber 3 and December 17-18, 1942, under the chairmanship of Oberfinanzpräsident
Dr. Casdorf of the Finance Ministry, PS-1643. Full power signed bv Casdorf in
agreement with the chief of the Main Trusteeship Office East (Winkler), January 12,
1943, PS-1643. Ministerialrat Hoffmann (Interior Ministry) to Regierungspräsident
in Kattowitz, January 22, 1943, PS-1643. Order by Bracht establishing the Amts­
bezirk of Auschwitz with derailed description of the area, Mav 31, 1943, PS-1643.
Map in U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives Record Group 11.001 (Center
for Historical Collections, Moscow), Roll 34, Fond 502, Opis 1, Folder 26.
51. Kommandantur Order (signed Höss), March 2, 1942, in which Höss refers to
himself as Amtskommissar, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives Record

ORIGINS OF THE KILLING CENTERS 939


This maneuvering for control was accompanied by plans for building
in the area. A decision of the I. G. Farben Company to build a plant at
Auschwitz led to an order by the SS construction chief Kammler to erect
barracks for 18,000 inmates by the end of 1941J52 A branch of Auschwitz
was founded outside the interest zone. It was called the Buna camp,
descriptive of the synthetic rubber (Buna) that was to be produced
there. Later it was also named Monowitz. Now there was a shortage of
labor, and when Hoss made an agreement with the local Landrat for the
seizure of Poles and Ethnic Germans who had refused work in the free
market, the civilian prosecutor protested against this encroachment of his
prerogatives.53
The invasion of the Soviet Union stirred Himmler into action. From
the overflow of prisoners of war he wanted his share. The army agreed,
and two sites were hurriedly styled SS prisoner-of-war camps: the Lublin
camp (Majdanek) and Birkenau. The latter was a virtually empty expanse,
about two miles from the main Auschwitz camp. Although Birkenau was
“partially swampy,” it was thought that 125,000 prisoners could be held
there.54 Such masses of men, however, did not materialize. Some 10,000
were marched from a nearby prisoner-of-war camp at Lamsdorf. Hoss
had been told that they were the cream of the crop for hard labor, but by
February 1942, almost all of them were already dead.55
In the midst of this ferment, a new development was introduced into
Auschwitz: the final solution of the Jewish question. Hoss recalled that in
the summer of 1941 he was summoned to Berlin by Heinrich Himmler
himself. In a few spare words, Himmler told him of Hitler’s decision to
annihilate the Jews. One of the factors in the choice of Auschwitz, said

Group 11.001 (Center for Historical Collections, Moscow), Roll 20, Fond 502, Opis
1, Folder 32.
52. Kammler to Zentralbaulcitung, June 27,1941, ibid., Roll 54, Fond 502, Opis
1, Folder 215.
53. Weekly report by I. G. Farben (Auschwitz) engineer Faust, covering Au­
gust 17-23,1941, NI-15254.
54. Bauleitung Explanatory' Report, October 30,1941, U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum Archives Record Group 11.001 (Center lor Historical Collections, Mos­
cow), Roll 35, Fond 502, Opis 1, Folder 233. Kammler to Bauleitung, November 1,
1941, ibid. HStuf. Bischof!' (Zentralbaulcitung) to Rüstungskommando Weimar,
November 12, 1941, ibid., Roll 41, Fond 502, Opis 1, Folder 314. Consrnrction
Certificate by Ncubauleirung, November 18, 1941, ibid., Roll 20, Fond 502, Opis 1,
Folder 41.
55. Rudolf Höss, Kommandant in Auschwitz (Munich, 1978), pp. 105-6. Danuta
Czech, Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Konzentrationslager Ausdmntz-Rukenau ¡959-
1945 (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1989), particularly pp. 160, 166, 170, 177. Most of
the prisoners had arrived in October.

940 KILLING CBNTBR OPERATIONS


Himmler, was its location near railways. The details of this assignment
would be brought to Hoss bv Eichmann. Having placed this burden on
the shoulders of Hoss, Himmler added: “We, the SS, must carry out this
order. If it is not carried out now, then the Jews will later on destroy
the German people.’'*6 During the following weeks, Eichmann came to
Auschwitz, and Hoss attended a conference in Eichmann’s office about
railroads and arrangements for trains.56 57
One of the details to be resolved was the mode of killing. The solution
to that problem was serendipitous. Auschwitz served as one of the con­
centration camps to which the Gestapo brought selected Soviet prisoners
of war and Communist functionaries for “liquidation.” One day, when
Hoss was away on business, his deputy, Fritzsch, locked some of the
prisoners into a cellar and killed them with hydrogen cyanide, a gas in
stock for fumigation. The experiment was repeated when Hoss returned.
The building (or “block” as it was called in Auschwitz), numbered 11,
had to be aired out for two days, and the next gassing was therefore
planned for a somewhat larger number of Russians in the cremator)'.
Holes were made in the earth and in the concrete roof over the crema­
tory's morgue. After the cyanide was introduced into the room, some of
the Russians shouted, “Gas!” and tried to break down the door, but the
bolts did not give way. Hoss observed the corpses and listened to the
explanations of the camp physician. The victims, he was assured, had not
suffered in agon)'. He concluded that death from the gas was bloodless
and that its use would spare his men a great psychological burden.58

56. Höss, Kommandant, pp. 157, 180-81. See also his testimony in International
Military Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals (Nuremberg, 1947-49), vol. 11,
p. 398. Hoss does not recall the precise date of the meeting with Himmler, although
in one of his statements, which is also his most confused, he mentions June. See his
affidavit of March 14, 1946, NO-1210. Given the development of the final solution,
June is unlikely. July may also be ruled out. Richard Breitman, reviewing Himmler’s
traveling, specifies July 13-15 as the only time that month when Himmler was in
Berlin. See his Architect ofCenocide (New York, 1991), p. 295. Danuta Czech suggests
that in July Hoss was absent from Auschwitz on the 29th. See her Kalendarium, entry
for July 29, 1941, pp. 106-7.
57. Hövs, Kommandant, pp. 157-59. Dating the meetings with Eichmann is
difficult. See Christopher Browning, FatefiilMonths (New York, 1985), pp. 22-28.
58. Höss, Kommandant, pp. 127, 159. Czech, Kalctidarium, pp. 115-18. On the
basis of witness testimony, Czech proposes September 3 as the date of the gassing in
Block 11. Franciszek Piper also ch<x>scs September 3-5. See his article, “Gas Cham­
bers and Crematoria,” in Yisracl Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, cds., Tlx Anatomy
of the Auschwitz Death Camp (Bloomington, Ind., 1994), pp. 158-59. Soviet pris­
oners sent to Auschwitz before October were communists and Jews selected, not for
labor, but killing. No precise date has been advanced for the second gassing in
Auschwitz.
The mortuary now became the first gas chamber. It was in operation,
with an interruption for repair of the smokestack, for a year. Since the size
of the chamber and the capacity of the two ovens were not sufficient for
the task at hand, Hoss looked for a new location to carry out additional
gassings. Accompanied by Eichmann, he found two small farmhouses in
Birkenau that seemed suitable. Work was begun to fill in their windows.
The interior walls were removed and special airtight doors installed. The
two gas buildings were placed in operation during 1942, the smaller one
in March, the larger in June. They were called Bunker I and II.59
Himmler visited the camp on July 17 and 18, 1942, with Gauleiter
Bracht and the Higher SS and Police Leader of Upper Silesia, Schmauser.
He watched a procedure from the unloading of the living to die removal
of the dead at Bunker II. At that time he made no comment. Later, he sat
in Hoss’s office and said that Eichmann’s transports would rise from
month to month, that Jews incapable of work were to be annihilated
ruthlessly and that the Gypsies too were to be killed.60
The bodies of the people gassed in the two bunkers were buried in
mass graves. A survivor reports that in the summer of 1942 the corpses
swelled, and a “black, evil-smelling mass oozed out and polluted the
ground water in the vicinity.”61 From the end of summer to November
1942, the accumulated decomposing bodies infested with maggots had
to be uncovered and burned.62
In the meantime the entire camp was in ferment. Auschwitz was con­
tinually under construction. Most of the work was planned and super­
vised by the SS-Zentralbauleitung Auschwitz, an organization of barely
one hundred, including engineers, architects, technicians, and other per­
sonnel.63 The Zentralbauleitung was responsible for erecting all the SS
installations and two plant halls that were to be used by the Krupp com­
pany. In addition, I. G. Farben had a construction commission for its

59. Jcan-Claudc Prcssac, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers
(Auschwitz, 1989), pp. 123-82, and (for information about the original Krema­
torium) his Les crématoires d’Auschwitz (Paris, 1993), pp. 16-20. On the bunkers see
also the affidavit by Friedrich Entrcss, April 14,1947, NO-2368. The gassing of Jews
in the Krematorium began on February 15, 1942, in Bunker I on March 20, 1942,
and in Bunker II on June 30,1942. Czech, Kalendarium, pp. 174-75,186-87,238-
39.
60. Höss, Kommandant, pp. 161,184.
61. Filip Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz (New York, 1979), pp. 50-51.
62. Höss, Kommandant, p. 161.
63. See the Zcntralbaulcitung’s figure of 98 for the second quarter of 1943,1’.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives Record Group 11.001 (Center for Historical
Collections, Moscow), Roll 21, Fond 502, Opis 1, Folder 46.

KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


buildings,64 and the construction office of the Auschwitz railway station
laid tracks and set up its equipment.6*
The Zentralbauleitung was not capable of carrying out its task by itself.
The SS company Deutsche Ausrustungswerke (DAW) could undertake
only simple carpentry. Consequently, about two hundred private firms
were engaged, many for construction in the camp, the others as suppliers
of materials to Auschwitz. Most of the companies were in Upper Silesia
and their volume of business was small, but several of them were in Diis-
seldorf, Cologne, or Vienna, and a few had branches in several cities.66
Almost all the firms had to wrestle with multiple problems caused by
wartime conditions: the allocation of material, which was a concern of
the Speer ministry; the availability of freight cars for shipment, which was
determined by the Reichsbahn; and the assignment of labor for Ausch­
witz projects, which was subject to the control of labor offices. In these
matters the Zentralbauleitung attempted to support applications in order
to expedite the process,67 but only the labor shortage could be alleviated
on the spot by drawing on the inmate population. As of December 22,
1942, for example, the construction firms employed 905 of their own
workers and 2,076 prisoners in the camp, while the Zentralbauleitung
used an additional 5,751 inmates.68 The search for professional and

64. See Tabic 9-15. In November 1941, the Zentralbauleitung was an amalgama­
tion of a Neubaulcitung in the main camp and a Sondcrbauleitung zur Errichtung
eines Kriegsgefangenenlagers (a "special construction directorate for the erection of a
prisoner of war camp”). Generally, a Neubauleitung was created in a new concentra­
tion camp. The Sonderbauleitung was formed October 1, 1941, for Birkenau.
65. See the partially reconstructed figures of Reichsbahndirektion Oppeln for
Auschwitz and other localities in the area of the Direktion. Verkehrsmuseum Nurem­
berg Archive, Folder mm.
66. For firms participating in the construction of the Auschwitz complex, see the
files of the Zentralbauleitung in the U.S. Flolocaust Memorial Museum Archives
Record Group 11.001 (Center for Historical Collections, Moscow),passim.
67. For allocations of material, see, for example, Himmler’s Personal Staff/Raw
Materials Office (Rohstoffamt) to Zentralbauleitung, May 11,1944, regarding Speer
Ministry’s authorization to AEG/Kattowitz for relay station, ibid., Roll 21, Fond
502, Opis 1, Folder 38, and correspondence affecting other firms in ibid., Roll 41,
Fond 502, Opis 1, Folder 307. For railroad freight embargo and priority problems,
see 1943 correspondence in Folder 307, and with specific reference to crematorv
construction, Eng. Prüfer (Topf firm) to Zentralbauleitung, January 29, 1943, ibid.,
Roll 41, Fond 502, Opis 1, Folder 313. For approval of the Labor Office in Kattowitz
(Katowice), see Wilhelm Kermel Kattowitz Elektrotechnisches Installationsgeschäft,
September 8, 1942, seeking the help of the Zentralbauleitung, ibid., Roll 41, Fond
502, Opis 1, Folder 307.
68. Compilation of the Zentralbauleitung for December 22, 1942, ibid., Roll 21,
Fond 502, Opis 1, Folder 57.

ORIGINS OF THE KILLING CENTERS 943


skilled labor was a special effort early on, when Auschwitz tried to find
qualified engineers and architects among German inmates of other con­
centration camps.69
The Auschwitz construction projects were begun with the laying of
streets, the importation of electricity, and the digging for water.70 Then
came hundreds of barracks, particularly in Birkenau. Most of these struc­
tures were prefabricated horse stables assembled on bare earth without
floors, and used for inmate housing and latrines.71 Temporary guard
towers (without hygienic amenities) were to be replaced in April 1943 by
16 large, 45 medium, and 42 small structures.72 Throughout these ac­
tivities, tons of barbed wire were strung and electrified.73
It was in the course of all this construction that a new kind of edifice
made its appearance. Four massive buildings containing gas chambers
and crematoria were erected in Birkenau. They were to be the answer to
Himmler’s admonition that more and more transports would arrive in
Auschwitz. While under construction they were designated Bauwerke
(Building Projects) 30, 30a, 30b, and 30c, and this numeration indicates
that they were planned, not all four at one time, but in sequence.74
Bauwerk 30, the first in the set, was to become Krematorium II: the
second Krematorium of Auschwitz. It was put on the drawing board in
late 1941 when there was still an expectation of the large-scale delivery of
Soviet prisoners of war.75 At that moment the Zentralbauleitung en­
visaged five ovens with three retorts each. After the flow of Soviet pris­
oners had stopped, the design was scaled back to two morgues in the
cellar and only two furnaces on ground level. By February 27, 1942,
however, the Jewish transports were in the offing. That day, Oberfiihrer

69. Baulcirung to Kommandantur Auschwitz, November 12,1941, ibid., Roll 21,


Fond 502, Opis 1, Folder 54.
70. See the proposed budget of the Zentralbauleitung, January 9, 1942, referring
to budget proposal of October 20,1941, ibid., Roll 20, Fond 502, Opis 1, Folder 24.
71. Bischoff to Kammlcr, January 27, 1943, and Zentralbauleitung audit report,
February' 2, 1943, ibid., Roll 20, Fond 502, Opis 1, Folder 28.
72. Notation by Untcrsturmfiihrcr Dejaco (Zentralbauleitung), December 4,
1942, ibid., Roll 20, Fond 502, Opis 1, Folder 26. Hoss to WVHA-D, April 12,
1943, ibid., Roll 36, Fond 502, Opis 1, Folder 260. Bischoff to Kammler, April 27,
1943, ibid., Roll 20, Fond 502, Opis 1, Folder 28.
73. Special Order (Sonderbefchl) by Hoss, November 10, 1940, ibid.. Roll 20,
Fond 502, Opis 1, Folder 32. Baulcitung to Fesrungspionierstab 12 (Fortification
Engineers Staff 12 of the army), November 28, 1941, asking for 7 metric tons of
barbed wire for Birkenau, ibid., Roll 21, Fond 502, Opis 1, Folder 55. Work card,
Zcntralbauleirung, July 10, 1943, ibid., Roll 41, Fond 502, Opis 1, Folder 316.
74. See construction correspondence in ibid.. Roll 41, Fond 502, Opis 1, Folders
306-14. Contractors were sometimes confused by these designations.
75. Bischoff to Riisrungskommando Weimar, referring to the Russians, Novem­
ber 12, 1941, ibid., Roll 41, Fond 502, Opis 1, Folder 314.

KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


Kammler visited the camp and decided that the five furnaces should be
installed/6 Some time later several changes were made in the plans for the
building. A chute for corpses was deleted and a staircase inserted. One of
the morgues in the basement was turned into an undressing room. For
the other the planners added a separate drainage system as well as ventila­
tion—the transformation into a gas chamber.77
While these modifications were projected in a succession of drawings, a
third Krematorium, identical to the final version of the second, was
planned. This structure, 30a, was to become Krematorium III.78 Finally,
two more Bauwerke, 30b and 30c, were added. These buildings, which
were Krematoria IV and V, did not have a cellar. Their gas chambers were
on the surface, and as an economy measure each Krematorium was to have
a double furnace with two smokestacks.79 The double ovens had been
ordered bv the SS Construction Inspectorate in the area of the Higher SS
and Police Leader Russia Center von dem Bach for Mogilev on the Dnepr
Riv er, but they were diverted from that destination to Auschwitz.80

76. As of October 22, 1941, the Krematorium was to have five ovens, each with
three retorts. See the letter of the Bauleitung to the Topf firm on that day, with
specification of time limits for delivery7 of plans and parts. Facsimile of an original copy
(Abschrift) without signature in Prcssac, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation, p. 187.
A brief letter outlining a plan for substituting 150,000 Jews for the missing Soviet
prisoners was sent bv Himmler to Glücks on January7 25, 1942, NO-500. Lacking
exact word, the Zentralbauleitung placed an order orally for only two ovens on
February7 12, 1942. Bischoffto Topf, March 2, 1942, facsimile in Prcssac, Ausdmntz:
Technique and Operation, p. 191. After Kammlcrs visit on February7 27, 1942, the oral
order was rescinded and the original one was reinstated. BischofPs letter of March 5,
1942, ibid. See also Bischoft'to WVHA-C III (Stubaf. Wirtz), March 30, 1942, U.S.
Hokxaust Memorial Museum Archives Record Group 11.001 (Center for Historical
Collections, Moscow), Roll 41, Fond 502, Opis 1, Folder 313. Prcssac assumes from
the blueprints that Krematorium II was at first intended for the main camp. See his
discussion and facsimiles of drawings in his two bex^ks.
77. See the blueprints in Prcssac with his analyses, Auschuntz^: Technique and Opera­
tion, pp. 183-84, 267-329 (particularly 284-303), 355-78, and his Les crématoires
dAuscbmtz, pp. 46-86 (passim), with blueprints and photographs on glossy pages.
See also his article (with Robcrt-Jan van Pelt), “Machinery of Mass Murder,1" in
Gutman and Berenbaum, eds., Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, pp. 199-201.
78. See photographs of Krematorium III under construction and completed in
Prcssac, Auschwttz: Technique afui Operation, pp. 333, 336-37, 339, and 342.
79. See facsimiles of drawings, ibid., pp. 392-403. The earliest of these drawings,
by a prisoner, is dated August 14, 1942.
80. Memorandum by UStuf. FLrtl (Zentralbauleitung), August 21, 1942, U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives Record Group 11.001 (Center for Historical
Collections, Moscow), Roll 41, Fond 502, Opis 1, Folder 313. Liquidation post (in
Poznan) of SS Construction Group Russia Center to Zentralbauleitung, August 11,
1944, and other correspondence in the same folder. Prüfer (Topf firm) to Zcnrral-
baulcitung, July 7, 1943, in Prcssac, Auschwitz: Technique and Operatioti, pp. 382-83.

ORIGINS OF THE KELLING CENTERS 945


The hydrogen cyanide, solidified in pellets, was to be shaken into the
cellars of Krematoria II and III through shafts, and into the surface cham­
bers of Krematoria IV and V through side walls. In the gas chambers, the
pellets would pass immediately into the gaseous stage. Thus an altogether
more efficient system, which guaranteed much more rapid processing
than in other camps, had been devised in Auschwitz.
There was one drawback. The construction of these elaborate build­
ings required much more time than the erection of their counterparts in
the Generalgouvernement killing centers of Sobibor and Treblinka. The
following are the time spans in Auschwitz from start to finish:81
Numeration Date of start of Date of transfer from
of completed construction Zentralbauleitung to camp
Krematoria administration (Standort-
verwaltung)
II July 2,1942 March 31,1943
III September 14,1942 June 26,1943
IV October 9,1942 March 22,1943
V November 20,1942 April 4,1943
More than a dozen firms were contractors on the sites of the four
Krematoria,82
for crematory-gas chamber design and the supply of ovens:
J. A. Topf und Söhne, Erfurt
for erection of the buildings:
HUTA Hoch- und Tiefbau, Breslau, branch Kattowitz
Hermann Hirt Nachf., Beuthen
W. Riedel und Sohn, Bielitz
VEDAG Vereinigte Dachpappen A. G., Breslau
for drainage:
Continentale Wasserwerksgesellschaft, Berlin
Tiefbauunternehmung “TRITON,” Kattowitz
for roofs:
Baugeschäft Konrad Segnitz, Beuthen
Industrie-Bau A. G., Bielitz

81. Start of construction dates in timetable of Zentralbauleitung, U.S. Holocaust


Memorial Museum Archives Record Group 11.001 (Center for Historical Collec­
tions, Moscow), Roll 34, Fond 502, Opis 1, Folder 210. Completion dates in Zcn-
tralbauleitung file, facsimile in Jadwiga Bczwinska, câ., Amidst a Nightmare of Crime
(Auschwitz, 1973), p. 55.
82. Prcssac, Les crématoires d’Auschwitz, pp. 140-42, and documents of the Zen-
tralbauleitung in U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives Record Group 11.001
(Center for Historical Collections, Moscow), Fond 502,passim.

KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


for smokestacks:
Robert Koehler, Myslowitz
for plumbing:
Karl Falck, Gleiwitz
for ventilation:
Josef Kluge, Alt Gleiwitz
for electrical current:
AEG (Allgemeine Elektrizitatsgesellschaft), branch Kattowitz
Much of the work was plagued by shortages of products, delays in the
completion of installations, and poor quality of workmanship. On Janu­
ary 29, 1943, for example, the AEG bluntly told the Zentralbauleitung
that the company was unable to obtain the best components for the
supply of electricity in time, that equipment would have to be canni­
balized from other projects, and that this compromise would curtail si­
multaneous incineration and “special treatment” in Krematorium II.83 A
stoppage in the allocation of freight cars, in turn, delayed the installation
of ventilation equipment through the concrete ceiling of the “special cel­
lar” (Sonderkcllcr) of the Krematorium.84 The Zentralbauleitung com­
plained to the SS company Deutsche Ausriistungswerke on January 13,
1943, that carpentry work had not been completed and that doors for one
of the units, “which was urgently needed for the implementation of spe­
cial measures [welches zur Dttrchfiihrung tier Sondermassnahmen dringend
bendttjjt wird]" were not finished.85 On March 31, another note was sent
about a door that was to have a peephole, with a reminder that this order
was specially urgent.86 After the Krematoria had been placed into opera­
tion, repairs were needed, particularly of the chimney in Krematorium II.
On this occasion there was an argument between Engineer Priifer of
Topf, who was responsible for the plans, and the firm Koehler, which
carried them out. In the fact-finding attempt, even the senior German
inmate supervisor had to be consulted.87 Finally, the two double ovens

83. Memorandum signed by engineer Tomitschck of AEG and Unterscharführer


Swoboda of the Zentralbauleitung, January 29, 1943, U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum Archives Record Group 11.001 (Center for Historical Collections, Mos­
cow), Roll 20, Fond 502, Opis 1, Folder 26.
84. Memorandum by UStuf. Wolter (Zentralbauleitung), November 27, 1942,
ibid., Roll 41, Fond 502, Opis 1, Folder 313.
85. Zentralbauleitung to DAW, January 13, 1943, NO-4466.
86. Zentralbauleitung to DAW, March 31, 1943, NO-4465.
87. Memorandum by UStuf. Kirschncck (Zentralbauleitung) on discussion with
Topf representative Priifer and Ing. Koehler, September 14, 1943, U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum Archives Record Group 11.001 (Center for Historical Collec­
tions, Moscow), Roll 20, Fond 501, Opis 1, Folder 26. The inmate, Obcrkapo
August Brück, had arrived from Buchenwald. Czech, Kalendarium, p. 43In.

ORIGINS OF THE KILLING CENTERS 947


diverted from Mogilev to Krematoria IV and V did not function very
well.88
There was a reason for the feverish attempts to ready the buildings and
to use them even with faulty parts. Throughout 1942, Auschwitz had
received barely 175,000 Jews. The Generalgouvernement camps had
swallowed more than eight times as many. The burial pits in Birkenau and
in the Generalgouvernement were filling up or they were already full. In
the first few months of 1943, more Jews were arriving in Auschwitz, but
additional tens of thousands, from Macedonia, Thrace, France, and the
Netherlands, were directed on longer routes to Treblinka and Sobibor,
where no industry was located and no selection of the fittest could be
conducted. Consequendy, Auschwitz was becoming the center of atten­
tion. Auschwitz had to come into its own.
The status of Auschwitz as a focal point was underscored in a report by
BischofF to Kammler on January 27, 1943. Referring specifically to die
“implementation of the special action [Durchführung der Sonderaktion]”
in Birkenau, BischofF noted an intervention by Hider himself: “Pursuant
to a Führer order the completion of construction in the camp is to be
carried out on a specially accelerated basis [Durch einen Führerbefehl ist der
Aufbau des Lagers besonders beschleunigt durchzuführen] .”89 Two days later
BischofF wrote encouragingly to Kammler that after die commitment of
all available manpower and in spite of tremendous difficulties (unsagbare
Schwierigkeiten), Krematorium II was now ready but for minor construc­
tion details {bauliche Kleinigkeiten).90 For an overview of the completed
installations, see Table 9-4.
If the construction of the gas chambers was a drawn-out affair, the
laying of railway tracks for transports coming to Birkenau took even
longer. The Auschwitz station, as part of the Upper Silesian network, was
under the jurisdiction of Reichsbahndirektion in Oppeln. This Direktion,
which had various offices also in Katowice and Sosnowiec, was headed
until October 14,1942, by Präsident Pirath, who retired on that day, and
then by Präsident Geitmann, an engineer. On frequent occasions, the SS
Zentralbauleitung had direct dealings not only with functionaries of the
Auschwitz station but with officials of the Reichsbahndirektion responsi­
ble for construction, operations, and traffic.
Trains arriving in Auschwitz carried building supplies and raw mate­
rials for production, as well as prisoners. As early as the spring of 1942,
when the prisoners were still unloaded at the railway station, the Zentral-
88. Prcssac, Auschwitz: Technique and Operation, pp. 386-90.
89. BischofF to Kammler, January 27, 1943, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
Archives, Record Group 11.001 (Center for Historical Collections, Moscow), Roll
20, Fond 502, Opis 1, Folder 28.
90. Zentralbauleitung to Kammler, January 29, 1943, NO-4473.

KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


TABLE 9-4
GASSING AND KREMATORIUM INSTALLATIONS AT
AUSCHWITZ (OLD NUMBERS IN PARENTHESES)

Auschwitz Main Camp


(Krematorium I) Converted gas chamber, with crematory,
used February-December 1942.
Birkenau
Bunker I Two small gas chambers, barracks for
undressing, adjacent grave, used March
1942 to spring 1943.
Bunker II Four small gas chambers, barracks for
undressing, adjacent grave; used June
1942 to spring 1943, and reconstituted
spring 1944 into Facility V for use on a
stand-by basis during the day, with
undressing in grove and pits for
cremation.
Krematorium (II) I Subterranean gas chamber divided
December 1943 into two chambers; five
furnaces, each with three retorts; used
March 1943 to November 1944.
Krematorium (III) II Subterranean gas chamber divided
December 1943 into two chambers; five
furnaces, each with three retorts; used
June 1943 to November 1944.
Krematorium (IV) III Surface gas chamber; double furnace with
eight retorts. From March 1943.
Repeated malfunctions. Destroyed by
inmates on October 7, 1944.
Krematorium (V) IV Surface gas chamber; double furnace with
eight retorts. Supplemental pits dug in
1944. April 1943 to November 1944.

Note: Franciszek Piper, “Gas Chambers and Crematoria” and Jean-Claude Pressac (with
Robcrt-Jan van Pelt), “The Machinery of Mass Murder at Auschwitz,” in Yisrael Gutman
and Michael Bercnb.ium, cd*.. Anatomy ofthcAuscbmtz Death Camp (Bloomington,
lnd., 1994), pp. 157-245.

ORIGINS OF THE KILLING CBNTBKS 949


bauleitung began to consider the laying of a spur to Birkenau.91 Already
then, Oppeln had warned the Zentralbauleitung of a possibility that
trains might be barred (Annahmesperre).91 The construction project,
however, was not so simple. Under a law of 1892, any tracks, including
those owned by official agencies, were defined as “private” if they were
not open to general traffic.93 The SS, therefore, had to have a budget,
allocations of rails and ties, agreements with the Reichsbahn, and permis­
sion of the Regierungspräsident before it could proceed.
By the beginning of 1943, the Zentralbauleitung unloaded thirty cars a
day for construction materials alone.94 Höss had negotiated with the
Reichsbahn for the use of an outside spur that had been put down by the
railways themselves tor their own construction projects.95 The SS, how­
ever, wanted arriving transports to halt before the new gas chambers
inside Birkenau. Tracks were to be laid through the guard building at the
entrance, with gates that could be locked.96 On March 19, 1943, Höss
explained to Oberreichsbahnrat Stabler that the tracks were needed “ur­
gently,” now that notification had been received of a heavier flow of
transports.97 The provisional ramp had to be moved when the Reichs­
bahn was expanding its construction, and the SS had some anxiety that
congestion might limit its unloading capacity to five transports a day.98
Nevertheless, there were more complications and interim solutions.99

91. Zentralbaulcitung to Rcichsbahndirektion (RBD) Oppeln/Dezemat 47,


July 30, 1942, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives Record Group 11.001
(Center for Historical Collections, Moscow), Roll 32, Fond 502, Opis 1, Folder 186.
92. Reichsbahn Operations Office (Betriebsamt) Kattowitz 4 (signed Reichs­
bahnrat Mannl) to Zentralbaulcitung, and RBD Oppeln to Zentralbaulcitung, Mav
1942, ibid.
93. See the correspondence of 1943, the approval of March 6,1944, by the office
of the Regierungspräsident in Kattowitz (signed Scholz), and RBD Oppeln to Stand-
ortvcrwaltung of Auschwitz, February' 5,1944, ibid.
94. Bischoff to Höss, April 7, 1943, ibid. A single prefabricated barracks was
carried by five cars. Army Construction Office/Barracks (Hecresbauamt/Barracken)
to Zentralbaulcitung, February' 18, 1943, ibid., Roll 35, Fond 502, Opis 1, Folder
236.
95. Memorandum by Zentralbaulcitung, January' 18, 1943, ibid., Roll 32, Fond
502, Opis 1, Folder 184. Bischoff to WVHA C-III, May 4, 1943, ibid.. Folder 186.
96. Bischoff to WVHA C-III, May 4, 1943, ibid., Folder 186.
97. Höss to Stabler, April 19,1943, and Bischoff repeating the call for urgency in a
letter to the Regierungspräsident, September 11, 1943, ibid.
98. Discussion between Oberrcichsbahnrat Stäblcr, Oberreichsbahnrat Doll (De­
zernat 32), Reichsbahnrat Sander, Amtmann Löw, and Bischoff Untersturmführer
Jänisch, and Unterscharführer Dr. Kuchendorf (Zentralbaulcitung), March 27, 1943,
ibid.
99. Sec the note of a meeting between Möckcl, Bischoff and Jänisch, with Ober-
reichsbahnrat Fehling and two of his assistants, July 12, 1943, ibid, Roll 20, Fond

KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


Finally, the construction of the spur was started in early 1944, when a
contractor, the firm Richard Reckmann of Cottbus, was engaged for the
undertaking.* 100 On April 19, 1944, the railway station of Auschwitz ap­
proved the use of the newlv built tracks for locomotives of the Reichs-
bahn.101 Barely one month later, the Hungarian transports began to roll
in, and for the next half-year the camp was to receive more Jews than had
arrived during the preceding two years.
Construction was one-half of the problem faced by the SS. The gas
supply was the other half. Hydrogen cyanide, or Zyklon, was a power­
ful lethal agent —a deadly dose was 1 milligram per kilogram of body
weight. Packed in containers, the Zyklon was put to use simply by open­
ing the canister and pouring the pellets into the chamber; the solid mate­
rial would then sublimate. The Zyklon had only one drawback: within
three months it deteriorated in the container and thus could not be stock­
piled.102 Since Auschwitz was a receiving station, always on call, it was
necessary to have a dependable gas supply.
The SS did not manufacture Zyklon, so die gas had to be procured
from private firms. The enterprises that furnished it were part of the
chemical industry. They specialized in the “combating of vermin” (Schdd-
linjisbekampfunji) by means of poison gases. Zyklon was one of eight
products manufactured by these firms,103 * which undertook large-scale
fumigations of buildings, barracks, and ships; disinfected clothes in spe­
cially constructed gas chambers (Entlausunjjsanlapjen); and deloused hu­
man beings, protected by gas masks.11)4 In short, this industry used very
powerful gases to exterminate rodents and inseas in enclosed spaces.
That it should now have become involved in an operation to kill oft'Jews
by the hundreds of thousands is no mere accident. In German propa­
ganda, Jews had frequently been portrayed as inseas. Frank and Himmler
had stated repeatedly that the Jews were parasites who had to be extermi­

501, Opis 1, Folder 26, and other correspondence in ibid., Roll 32, Fond 510, Opis 1,
Folder 186.
100. Zcntralbaulcitung to Standortvcrwaltung, February 10, 1944, ibid., Roll 32
Fond 501, Opis 1, Folder 186.
101. Railway station to Zcntralbauleitung, April 19, 1944, ibid. Road crossings,
heavily used, were a remaining problem, because warning signs and beams were still
missing. Memorandum by Bauleirung, May 30, 1944, ibid.
102. Characteristics of Zyklon described in undated report by Health Institute of
Protektorat: “Directive for Utilization of Zyklon for Extermination of Vermin” (Un-
lleziefmrrtilqunjj), NI-9912. For the toxic properties of the gas, sec also Steven I.
Raskin, “Zvklon B,” in Walter Laqueur, cd., The Holocaust Encyclopedia (New Haven,
2001), pp. 716-19.
103. Lectures bv Dr. Gerhard Peters and Heinrich Sossenheimcr (gas experts),
Fcbruarv 27, 1942, NI-9098.
104 .Ibid.

ORIGINS OF THE KILLING CENTERS 951


nated like vermin, and with the introduction of Zyklon into Auschwitz
that thought had been translated into reality.
The operations of the extermination industry' were determined by three
systems: the shareholding channels, the lines of production and sales, and
the mechanisms of allocations to users. The company that developed the
gas method of combating vermin was the Deutsche Gesellschaft für
Schädlingsbekämpfung mbH (German Vermin-combating Corpora­
tion), abbreviated DEG ESCH.105 The firm was owned by three corpora­
tions, and itself controlled two retailers (see Table 9-5).
The capital investment figures shown in the table are no indication of
the volume of business and profits. The DEGESCH profit in 1942 was
760,368 Reichsmark. From its HELI holdings alone, the DEGESCH re­
ceived 76,500 Reichsmark; from TESTA, 36,500 Reichsmark. In 1943,
after the TESTA shares were sold, the DEGESCH made 580,999 Reichs­
mark, of which 102,000 Reichsmark were netted from the HELI invest­
ment.106 Every year from 1938 through 1943, excepting only 1940 and
1941, I. G. Farben received a DEGESCH dividend of 85,000 Reichs­
mark (200 percent). In 1940 and 1941 the I. G. made a profit of 42,500
Reichsmark (100 percent).107 The reasons for these outsized profits were
threefold: a comparatively low overhead (DEGESCH had fewer than
fifty employees), ever increasing demands of the war economy,108 and,
most important, a monopoly.
The Zyklon was produced by two companies: the Dessauer Werke and
the Kaliwerke at Kolin. An I. G. Farben plant (at Uerdingen) produced
the stabilizer for the Zyklon.109 Distribution of the gas was controlled by
DEGESCH, which in 1929 divided the world market with an American
corporation, Cyanamid.110 However, DEGESCH did not sell Zyklon di­
rectly to users. Two other firms handled the retailing: HELI and TESTA.
The territory of these two corporations was divided by a line drawn from
Cuxhaven through Öbisfelde to Plauen. The area northeast of that line,
including Auschwitz, belonged to Tesch und Stabenow.111 (Schemat­
ically, the production and marketing of Zyklon is presented in Table 9-6.)

105. For the history' of that corporation, see lectures by Peters and Sossenheimer
(both DEGESCH officials), February 27,1942, NI-9098.
106. Affidavit by Paul H. Hacni, July 29,1947, NI-9150.
107. Hearings before subcommittee of Committee on Military Affairs, U.S. Sen­
ate, 79th Cong., 1st sess., Exhibits 31-40, NI-9774.
108. For statistics of sales and construction of gas chambers, see DEGESC H
business reports for 1942 and 1944, NI-9093.
109. Affidavit by Karl Amend (DEGESCH Prokurist), November 3, 1947,
NI-12217.
110. Lectures by Peters and Sossenheimer, February 27, 1942, NI-9098.
111. Contract between DEGESCH and TESTA, June 27, 1942, Nl-11393.
TESTA bought Zyklon from DEGESCH at RM 5.28 per kg.

KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


TABLE 9-5
SHAREHOLDINGS IN THE EXTERMINATION INDUSTRY

Deutsche Gold- und


Silber-Scheideanstalt
I. G. Farben (DEGUSSA) Goldschmidt
RM 42,500 RM 42,500 RM 15,000
(42.5 percent) (42.5 percent) (15 percent)

Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung mbH


(DEGESCH)
(Chairman of Verwaltungsausschuss:
Generalkonsul Wilhelm R. Mann of I. G. Farben)

RM 25,000
(51 percent)
(to 1942)
Heerdt und Lingler GmbH RM 1,375
(HELI) (27.5 percent)
/

(to 1942) /7
RM 1,375 /
(27.5 percent) /
"x /
\/
Tesch und Stabenow, Internationale
Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung mbH
(TESTA)
Dr. Bruno Tesch, sole owner from 1942 * 37

Note: Contract between DEGESCH, DEGUSSA, I. G. Farben, and Goldschmidt, 1936-


37, NI-6363. Affidavits by Paul H. Haeni (prosecution staff) based on analysis of docu­
ments, July 27,1947, and October 28,1947, NI-9150 and NI-12073. The Zyklon B
Case, Law Reports of Trials of War Criminals, vol. 1 (London, 1947), p. 94. The Ver­
waltungsausschuss (administrative committee) of the DEGESCH had the powers of an
Aufiichtsrat (board of directors).
TABLE 9-6
PRODUCTION AND MARKETING OF ZYKLON

Dessauer Werke fur Kaliwerke A. G. I. G. Farben,


Zucker und Kolin Uerdingen
Chemische Industrie (near Prague) (production of
Dessau stabilizer)

DEGESCH
Dr. Gerhard Friedrich Peters,
managing director

HEU TESTA
(southwest) (northeast)
Dr. Gerhard Peters, Dr. Bruno Tesch
managing director

The territorial division between HELI and TESTA gave to HELI mostly
private customers and to TESTA mainly the governmental sector, includ­
ing the Wehrmacht and the SS. On the whole, neither firm sought to
invade the territory of the other, but on occasion Dr. Tesch supplied
Dachau via Berlin.112
Allocation of the product to purchasers was the third factor in the
workings of the industry. In a war, one cannot simply buy and sell. Each
user has to show why he needs the supplies, and upon submission of such
evidence, certain quantities are allocated to him. In other words, the
territorial monopoly tells him where he has to buy, and the allocation
system determines how much he can get.
The central allocation authority was a committee in the Speer ministry.
The committee divided the supply among export, private firms, and the
armed forces. The Armed Forces Main Sanitation Park fixed the needs of
the Wehrmacht and the SS,113 and the Waffen-SS Central Sanitation De­
pot was in turn responsible for allocations to SS offices and concentration
camps.114 The working of this apparatus is illustrated in Table 9-7, which
indicates the distributions of Zyklon to various users.

112. Affidavit by Peters, October 16, 1947, NI-9113.


113. «
114. Testimony by Joachim Mrugowski, Case No. 1, tr. pp. 5403-4.

KILLING CBNTBR OPERATIONS


TESTA sold Zyklon in different concentrations. Invoices presented to
municipal or industrial clients for fumigations of buildings were printed
with columns headed C, D, E, and F, each denoting a category of potency
and price. As explained in a letter to the Ostland, strength E was required
for the eradication of specially resistant vermin, such as cockroaches, or
for gassings in wooden barracks. The “normal” preparation, D, was used
to exterminate lice, mice, or rats in large, well-built structures contain­
ing furniture.115 Human organisms in gas chambers were killed with Zy­
klon B.116
The amounts required by Auschwitz were not large, but they were
noticeable. At various times sizable portions of these deliveries were used
for gassing people.117 The camp administration itself did not buy the gas.
The purchaser was Obcrsturmftihrer Gerstein, Chief Disinfection Officer
in the Office of the Hygienic Chief of the Waffen-SS (Mrugowski).118 As
a rule, all orders passed through the hands of TESTA, DEGESCH, and
Dessau. From the Dessau Works, which produced the gas, shipments
were sent directly to the Auschwitz Extermination and Fumigation Divi­
sion (Abttilting Entmsung undEntseuchung).119
Notification generally came from Amtsgruppe D, which authorized
the Auschwitz administration to dispatch a truck to Dessau “to pick up
materials for the Jewish resettlement [Abholung von Materialien fur
die Judenumsiedlung].”120 Deliveries to SS installations for fumigation
purposes were made every six months or so, but Auschwitz required a

115. Reichskommissar Osrland/Hcalth Division to Rcichskommissar/Trustee-


ship, February 28, 1942, enclosing explanations of Zyklon prices from Wcinbacher
(TESTA) to Dr. Ferdinand (Health Division), February 21, 1942, and service order
for fumigation of empty ghetto buildings in Riga, March 2, 1942, T 459, Roll 3.
116. Hoss, Kommandant, p. 159. The same preparation was used for the dclous-
ing of clothes. Ibid. Most documents relating to shipments of the gas to camps simply
state Zyklon. See, however, 1944 correspondence with B designation in documents
NI-9909 and NI-9913.
117. Testimony of Dr. Charles Sigismund Bendcl (Jewish survivor) at trial of
Bruno Tesch, tr. pp. 28-31, Nl-11953. Heinrich Schuster, former Austrian intel­
ligence agent imprisoned in Auschwitz, estimated the annual consumption of Zyklon
for fumigations of barracks and freight cars at 1,700 kilograms (3,750 lbs.). Affidavit
by Schuster, October 13, 1947, NIT 1862. Hoss estimated that only 13 lbs. (in six
one-kilogram cans) were needed for the gassing of 1,500 people. See his affidavit of
May 20, 1946, NI-03.
118. Gerstein account of DEGESCH, Nl-7278. Affidavit by Hoss, May 17,
1946, NI-34.
119. Dessau to DEGESCH, April 11, 1944, NI-9913. The man in charge of gas
storage in Auschwitz was OSchaf. Klehr. Affidavit bv Perry Broad (SS man), Decem­
ber 14, 1945, Nl-11397.
120. Licbehenschel to Auschwitz, October 2, 1942, NO-2362.

ORIGINS OF THE KILLING CENTERS 955


TABLE 9-7
DISTRIBUTION OF ZYKLON

Reich Ministry for Armaments and War Production


Special Committee Chemical Products
Working Committee Space-Fumigation and Counter-Epidemics
Composition of working committee: Dr. Gerhard Peters (DEGESCH),
chairman; Generalarzt Prof. Dr. Rose (Robert Koch Institute); Ober-
medizinalrat Dr. Christiansen (Interior Ministry); a representative of
Generalarzt Dr. Schreiber (OKW) — generally Dr. Finger or Dr. Wieser

Armed Forces Main


Export Private firms Sanitation Park
1943 1944 1943 1944 1943 1944
1201. none 1201. 1501. 701. 901.

Central Sanitation Depot


of the Armed SS
1943 1944
501. 751.

Auschwitz
1942 1943
7.51. 121.

Note: Affidavit by Peters, October 16,1947, NI-9113. Figures given by Peters do not en­
tirely agree with sales figures in DEGESCH business report for 1944, April 23,1946,
NI-9093. The Auschwitz figures are for 1942 and 1943 (not 1943 and 1944) and refer
to actual deliveries. Affidavit by Alfred Zaun (TESTA bookkeeper), October 18,1947,
NI-11937. Tons are metric tons.

shipment every six weeks because Zyklon deteriorated easily and a supply
had to be on hand at all times. To discerning eyes that frequency was
noticeable too.121
The delivery system worked dependably until March 1944, when the
Dessau Zyklon plant was bombed and heavily damaged.122 The sudden
curtailment of the supply came at a time when the SS was making prepa­
rations to send 750,000 Jews to Auschwitz, the only killing center still in
existence. A crisis developed. On April 5,1944, a Mrugowski representa­
tive wrote to DEGESCH requesting immediate shipment of 5 metric

121. Interrogation of Hoss, May 14, 1946, NI-36.


122. DEGESCH business report for 1944, April 23, 1946, NI-9093.

KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


tons of Zyklon B without odor ingredient. The shipment had already
been approved by the Armed Forces Main Sanitation Park and was “ur­
gently needed” (dringendst benötigt) by the Waffen-SS.123 124 125 A week later,
Dr. Evers of Armed Forces Sanitation himself ordered about 6,000 lbs.
and had them shipped to Auschwitz. TESTA hurriedly inquired who was
to be billed.124 A DEGESCH official became worried that the production
of Zyklon without odor ingredients would endanger the firm’s monop­
oly.125 The High Command of the Navv protested that it urgently needed
Zyklon for the fumigation of ships.126
The SS in the meantime began to be concerned over the possibility that
it had received the Zyklon too early. On May 24, the disinfection officer,
Obersturmführer Gerstein, wrote a letter to Dr. Peters inquiring how
long the shipment would last. When would it deteriorate? So far, it had
not been used at all. “On the other hand, under certain circumstances
large quantities — that is to say, actually the entire quantity — might have
to be used all at once [Andereseits werden erhebliche Mengen — d.h. eigentlich
die ganzen vem>ahrtcn Mengen — unter Umständen plötzlich benötigt] ,”127
The SS did not have to wait too long. By end of May transports were
rolling into Auschwitz, and on August 6 the Referat für Schädlingsbe­
kämpfung der Waffen-SS und Polizei in Auschwitz (Anti-vermin Office of
the SS and Police in Auschwitz) asked for more Zyklon.128 The supply
was kept up to the very end. The SS did not run out of gas.
The gas-killing method had evolved through three separate channels,
each more advanced than the previous one: first the carbon monoxide gas
vans, then the carbon monoxide gas chambers, and finally the hydrogen
cyanide (or Zyklon) combination units. The advantages of Zyklon as a
lethal gas became known. Even while Höss was still building his gas
chambers in 1942, a distinguished visitor from Lublin, Brigadeführer
Globocnik, visited Auschwitz in order to learn of the new method.129 The
Höss discovery posed an immediate threat to his Generalgouvernement
rival, Kriminalkommissar Wirth.
This rivalry' came to a head one day in August 1942 when Eichmann’s
deputy', Günther, and the chief disinfection officer, Kurt Gerstein, arrived
in Belzec. They had about 200 pounds of Zyklon with them and were

123. Brcmcnburg to Peters, April 5,1944, NI-9909.


124. Dessau to DEGESCH, April 11, 1944, NI-9913. TESTA to DEGESCH,
April 11, 1944, NI-9096. DEGESCH to TESTA, April 13, 1944, NI-9096.
125. Dr. Heinrich to Amend, June 21, 1944, NJ-12110.
126. OKM (signed Dr. Klebe) to DEGESCH, August 16, 1944, NI-10185.
127. Gerstein to Peters, May 24, 1944, NI-9908.
128. Communication from Auschwitz to DEGESCH, enclosed in letter from
DEGESCH to TESTA for booking, August 14, 1944, N1-9095.
129. Interrogation of Höss, May 14, 1946, NI-36.

ORIGINS OF THE KILLING CENTERS 957


TABLE 9-8
THE “FINAL SOLUTION” IN THE DEATH CAMPS

PRINCIPAL TIME
SPANS OF
MAIN GEOGRAPHIC SYSTEMATIC NUMBER
CAMP ORIGINS OF VICTIMS KILLINGS KILLED

Kulmhof Warthcland December 1941 to over 150,000


Reich, via Lodz September 1942
and
Junc-July 1944
Belzec Galicia March-Dcccmbcr 1942 434,508
Krakow District
Lublin District
(including
Reich deportees)
Sobibór Lublin District April-June 1942 over 150,000
Netherlands and
Slovakia October 1942 to
Reich-Protektorat October 1943
Vilna and Minsk
France
Trcblinka Warsaw District July 1942 to up to 800,000
Radom District October 1943
Bialystok District
Lublin District
Maccdonia-Thracc
Reich
Theresienstadt
Lublin Lublin District September 1942 to over 50,000
Warsaw District September 1943
Slovakia and
Protektorat November 1943
Bialystok District
France
Auschwitz Hungary February 1942 to up to
Poland November 1944 1, 000,000
Incorporated areas
Bialystok District
Warthcland
Upper Silesia
East Prussia
TABLE 9-8
CONTINUED

PRINCIPAL TIME
SPANS OF
MAIN GEOGRAPHIC SYSTEMATIC NUMBER
CAMP ORIGINS OF VICTIMS KILLINGS KILLED

Generalgouvernement
Remnant ghettos
and labor camps
France
Netherlands
Greece
Theresienstadt
Slovakia
Belgium
Reich-Protektorat (direct)
Italy
Croatia
Norway

Note: The column on geographic breakdowns is arranged to indicate, for each camp, the
Jewish victims by place of origin from the largest number to the smallest in descending
order. For arrivals of transports in Auschwitz, see Danuta Czech, Kalendarium der Ereig­
nisse im Konzentrationslager Ausclmitz-Birkenau 1939-1945 (Reinbek bei Hamburg,
1989). For Auschwitz statistics, see Franciszek Piper, Die Zahl der Opfer von Auschwitz
(Oswi^cim, 1993). Piper, on p. 202 of his study, estimates the number of non-Jews who
died in Auschwitz at ca. 120,000, of which 60 percent were Poles. The precise final fig­
ure for Belzec is listed in a report by Stubaf. Höfle of Globocnik’s staff to Ostubaf. Heim
(Office of the BdS in Krakow), Januarv 11,1943. Facsimile of the message as intercepted
and decrypted by the Code and Cypher School in Britain, Public Records Office GPDD
355a, in Peter Wine and Stephen Tyas,uA New Document on the Deportation and
Murder of Jews during'Einsatz Reinhardt’ 1942 " Holocaust and Genocide Studies 15
(2001): 458-86. Also listed in die decrypt are figures of Einsatz Reinhardt, as of De­
cember 31, 1942, for the other Generalgouvernement camps, but additions in 1943
mast be estimated. In Table 9-8, the numbers of Jews killed are rounded, in the case of
Auschwitz to the nearest 100,000, and for Treblinka, Sobibör, Kulmhof, and Lublin to
the nearest 50,000.

about to convert the carbon monoxide chambers to the hydrogen cyanide


method. The unwelcome guests stayed to watch a gassing that took an
especially long time (over three hours) because the diesel engine had
failed. To Wirth’s great embarrassment and mortification, Gerstein timed
the operation with a stopwatch. Facing the greatest crisis of his career,
Wirth dropped his pride and asked Gerstein “not to propose any other
ORIGINS OF THE KILLING CENTERS
type ot gas chamber in Berlin.” Gerstein obliged, ordering the Zyklon to
be buried on the pretext that it had spoiled.130
Hoss and Wirth were henceforth enemies. The Auschwitz com­
mander, even after the war, spoke proudly of his “improvements.”131
Conversely, Wirth looked down on Hoss as a latecomer and called him
his “untalented pupil.”132 Thus there had arisen a class of “founders” and
“originators” in mass-death devices, and among these architects of the
killing centers there was fierce competition and rivalry.
A recapitulation of the “Final Solution” in the death camps is con­
tained in Table 9-8.

ORGANIZATION, PERSONNEL, AND MAINTENANCE


The administrative structure of the camps was shaped in large measure by
their evolution and functions. Kulmhof, a pure killing center, was the
most uncomplicated. Its gas vans had been furnished by the RSHA and
its personnel had been a Kommando of Higher SS and Police Leader
Koppe for special purposes, including euthanasia of East Prussian mental
patients, long before Kulmhof was established.1 The core of the Kom­
mando, ten to fifteen men, had been drawn from the Gestapo in Poznan
and Lodz, whose service in Kulmhof (at least at the beginning) was on
rotation.2 The Kommando was named for its first commander, Haupt-
sturmfuhrer Lange, and for a while it kept that designation, even after
another Hauptsturmfiihrer, Bothmann, was placed in charge in March or
April 1942. When the camp was broken up in 1943, the entire eighty-
five-man Sonderkommando was to be assigned as a group to SS Division
Prinz Eugen.3 The Kommando reappeared when the camp was reopened
in 1944.
Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka were run by Kriminalkommissar Wirth,
who had been employed in the euthanasia operations of the Führer Chan-

130. Statement by Gerstein, April 26,1945, PS-1553.


131. Affidavit by Höss, April 5, 1946, PS-3868.
132. Affidavit by Dr. Konrad Morgen, July 19,1946, SS(A)-67.
1. Indictment of Wilhelm Koppe in Bonn, 1964, 8 Js 52/60. In 1940 the Kom­
mando, using a van, killed 1,558 East Prussian and 250 to 300 Polish patients at
Soldau. Indictment, pp. 174-91, including correspondence of Koppe to Sporren-
berg, October 18, 1940, and Redicss to Wolff, November 7, 1940, on pp. 188-89.
See also T 175, Roll 60.
2. Indictment of Koppe, pp. 194-95; Adalbert Rückerl, NS -1 cm ichtu wslajicr
(Munich, 1977), pp. 262-64.
3. Brandt to Kaltenbrunncr, March 29, 1943, and later correspondence, T 1 ~5,
Roll 60.

KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


TABLE 9-9
LINES OF AUTHORITY TO WIRTH

Reichsleiter Philip Bouhler

Reichsamtsleiter Viktor Brack Brigadefiihrer Globocnik

Kriminalkommissar Wirth
(Deputy: Hauptsturmflihrer Hering)

cellerv. Brack sent him to Lublin around Christmas of 1941.4 In his new
position he was still tied by a strong thread to the Führer Chancellery, but
he reported also to Globocnik, as shown in Table 9-9.5 Almost all of
Wirth’s German personnel had euthanasia experience. In the Reich that
program had required a staff of about 400 to 500 people: SS doctors,
nurses, drivers, clerks, photographers, and others.6 By late summer of
1941, when gassings of mentally defective persons had been stopped by
an oral order of Hitler and only the more limited operation of thinning
out the inmate population of the concentration camps was being con­
tinued, many of these functionaries and attendants were no longer
needed. Soon, however, an opportunity arose for their continued em­
ployment in gassings. About one hundred men (no female nurses) were
assigned to Wirth in the Generalgouvernement.7 While they were in Po­
land, the majoriw of them remained on the payroll of the Führer Chancel­
lery.8 Their activities, however, were going to be altered not only in locale,
but also in scale. Himmler is quoted as having said that what he expected
of them now was “superhuman-inhuman” {er mute ihnen Übermenschlich-

4. Brack ro Himmler, June 23, 1942, NO-205. Statement by Josef Oberhäuser,


December 12, 1962, Belzec case, 1 Js 278/60, vol. 9, pp. 1678-93.
5. Interrogation of H. G. Wied (SS corruption expert), Julv 21, 1945, YIVO
G-215.
6. Dieter Alters (Führer Chancellery) lists 400 people. Gitta Sereny, Into That
Darktuss (New York, 1974), p. 84. Arnold Oels (Personnel Chief of Gemeinnützige
Stiftung für Anstaltspflege in Führer Chancellery) indicates a roster of 500. See his
statement of May 23, 1961, in Belzec case, vol. 7, pp. 1305-7.
7. Globocnik mentioned ninety-two men from the Führer Chancellery' on his staff
for the Aktion. Globocnik to von Herft, October 27, 1943, in Berlin Document
Center, reproduced by Rückert, NS-VtmicbtutujsLiffer, pp. 117-19.
8. Statement by Robert Lorenr (Payroll Chief, Gemeinnützige Stiftung), Mav 4,
1961, Belzec case, vol. 7, pp. 1258-61.

ORGANIZATION, PERSONNEL, AND MAINTENANCE


Unmenschliches zu).9 They came to their tasks, singly and in groups, bv
various routes.10 Thirty-five to forty were sent to Treblinka, thirty to
Belzec, and the remainder to Sobibor.11 The commanders (in succession)
were the following:12
Belzec
Sturmbannführer Wirth
Hauptsturmführer Hering
Sobibor
Obersturmführer Thomalla
Obersturmführer Stangl
Obersturmführer Reichleitner
Treblinka
Obersturmführer Eberl
Obersturmführer Schemmerl
Obersturmführer Stangl
Untersturmführer Franz
On August 1,1942, Wirth was appointed inspector of the three camps.13
Only Thomalla, who was in charge of Sobibor during the construction
stage, had been stationed in the Lublin District before 1941;14 the others
were members of the euthanasia group. Several (Eberl, Stangl, and
Reichleitner) were Austrians, a circumstance that may be explained by
Globocnik’s Austrian background.15 Eberl, a physician who had been in
9. Affidavit by Morgen, July 13, 1946, SS(A)-65. The remark, said to have been
made to the Kommando itself, has not been confirmed by any of its surviving mem­
bers. Wirth and most other original officers were dead or missing by 1945. One
euthanasia man, Franz Suchomcl, states that when he wavered, two Führer Chancel­
lery officials (Blankenburg and Ocls) told him that he could go cither to Poland or to a
hero’s death in a military unit. Statement by Franz Suchomcl, October 24-25,1960,
in Treblinka case, 8Js 10904/59, vol. 7, pp. 1403-26.
10. For most, there was a hiatus between euthanasia and die Generalgouverne­
ment assignment. Several of them were sent during that interval to the occupied
USSR to care for wounded or frostbitten German soldiers, but were soon recalled.
Sec details in numerous statements in the volumes of the Belzec, Sobibor, and
Treblinka cases at Ludwigsburg. See also Scrcny, Darkness, pp. 78-90, and Rückerl,
NS-Vemichtuttgslager, pp. 72-75, 121-22.
11. On Treblinka, sec Rückerl, ibid., p. 206. The Belzec figure is from the encyclo­
pedia by Glowna Komisja Badania Zbrodni Hitlerowskich w Polscc, Obozy bit-
lerowskie na ziemiacbpolskich 1939-1945 (Warsaw, 1979), pp. 93-95. Twenty-five to
thirty appears to have been the German strength at Sobibor. Sec statements in So-
bibor case, 45 Js 27/61, vol. 3, pp. 520-26,559-80.
12. Compiled mainly from Riickcrl, NS-Vemichtunpslager.
13. Ibid., p. 134.
14. Personnel record in Berlin Document Center. Sec also Rückerl, NS-Vemicbt-
unffslager, pp. 72-73.
15. Rückerl, ibid., pp. 179, 295.

KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


charge of the euthanasia stations at Brandenburg and Bernburg, was
probably the best educated.16 Quite a few of the officers and men had
been brought up in fairly stable homes. The fathers of these individuals
had been workers, clerks, or low-ranking functionaries, and they them­
selves had been trained for such modest occupations.17 Their wartime
status, on the other hand, was not so stable. When Globocnik attempted
to secure promotions for some of the commanders and subordinates, he
generated a good deal of correspondence in the SS Personnel Main Of­
fice, where notes were written to the effect that neither Reichleitner nor
Stangl had proper Order Police ranks, that Reichleitner, as a mere Kri-
minalsekretär, did not merit the rank of Obersturmführer, and that He­
ring was nor a member of the Waffen-SS.18
As practitioners, the members of the Treblinka-Belzec-Sobibor team
were hardened men by the time they arrived. Stangl, like several of his
colleagues a Catholic, relates that in his euthanasia days he had visited an
asylum for severely retarded children under the care of nuns. The Mother
Superior pointed to what looked like a five-year-old boy in a basket and
asked Stangl whether he had an idea of how old the child might be. Stangl
could not guess the age. He was then told that the boy was sixteen. The
psychiatrists, while screening candidates for gassings, had rejected the
patient, and now the nun asked Stangl: “How could they not accept
him?” A priest standing near her nodded in agreement. The incident
apparently made a strong impression on Stangl.19
In the death camps the dehumanization of die victims in the eyes of
their captors became manifest in a variety of ways. In essence the SS
thought of the arriving Jews as having forfeited their lives from the mo­
ment they stepped off' the train. They staged mock marriages and other
amusements with the expectation that in a very short time these objects of
their play would be gassed. At Trcblinka they organized an inmate or­
chestra that played a camp song composed by the Jewish conductor with
words by Untersturmführer Franz emphasizing work, fate, and obe­
dience.20 Their psychology' is epitomized in the story of a dog, Barry',
about whom a West German court wrote several pages. Barry was a very'

16. EbciTs personnel record at the Berlin Document Center contains only his
parts· pavb<x>k. He joined the parts· in 1931 at the age of tsvenry-onc.
17. Riickerl, NS-Vcmichtutufslatfcr, p. 296. The generalization is based on the
records of tsventy-seven men investigated by West German judicial authorities.
18. Correspondence in personnel record of Christian Wirth, Berlin Document
Center. Hering was placed before an SS and Police court in 1944, but svas exonerated
of irregularities. He had burned down two villages near Belzec and shot forty-six
people. See Hcring’s personnel record in the Berlin Document Center.
19. Screny, Darkness, pp. 57-58.
20. Riickerl, NS-Vcmtchtutipslaqer, p. 213.

ORGANIZATION, PERSONNEL·, AND MAINTENANCE 963


large Saint Bernard who appeared first in Sobibor and then in Treblinka.
He had been trained to maul inmates upon the command, “Man, grab
that dog! [Mensch, fasst den Hund!]''2'
The guards in the Generalgouvernement camps numbered several
hundred.22 They were Ukrainians in black uniforms equipped with rifles,
carbines, and leather whips. As graduates of Globocnik’s training camp at
Trawniki, they were drawn from the same pool that supplied guards for
ghettos and, in 1943, combatants for the Warsaw Ghetto battle.23
In contrast to Kulmhof, Betzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, the WVHA
camps in Lublin and Auschwitz were elaborate. Their basic administra­
tive organization was that of the standard prewar concentration camps in
Germany. The three most important officials in these camps were the
commander, who had overall responsibility in the compound, the Schutz-
haftlagerfuhrer, who was in charge of inmate control, and a chief of ad­
ministration, who attended to financial matters, procurement, and so on.
In Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen, the camp commander was a
Standartenführer (colonel), the Schutzhaftlagerflihrer an Obersturmbann­
führer (lieutenant colonel), and the administrative chief a Sturmbann­
führer (major). Besides these top officials, there was a deputy Schutzhaft-
lagerfiihrer, an adjutant, a camp engineer, a camp doctor, and so on.24
This hierarchy is revealed in the structure of Lublin as follows:25

21. Barry, like many of the human perpetrators, had a peaceful life after 1943.
When he became old and ill in 1947, he was subjected to euthanasia. Ibid., pp. 188,
234-39. The dog is mentioned also in a number of surv ivors’ accounts.
22. Estimates of strength per camp vary, but the average appears to have been
three platoons (a platoon consisted of thirty' men). Sec statements by former German
personnel in Belzcc case, vol. 7, pp. 1254-58, 1311-31, 1409-35; and in Sobibor
case, vol. 3, pp. 520-26. Sec also Rückerl, NS-Vernichtungslager, pp. 122-23,207.
23. Members of Ukrainian, White Russian, and Baltic nationalities were eligible
for automatic release from prisoner-of-war camps. See directive of OKW, Septem­
ber 8, 1941, in Herbert Michaelis and Ernst Schracplcr, cds., Ursachen und Folgen
(Berlin, 1958-1977), vol. 17, pp. 333-37. Released prisoners as well as local resi­
dents were recruited as auxiliary police. Sec Himmler order, July 25, 1941, T 454,
Roll 100, and Werner Brockdorff, Kollaboration oder Widerstand (Wels, 1968),
pp. 218-19. A Ukrainian Red Army truck driver, Feodor Fedorenko, captured in
1941 and kept in a prisoner-of-war camp at Chelm, where the death rare was extraor­
dinarily high, was then trained at Trawniki, posted to the Lublin Ghetto, and, in Sep­
tember 1942, detailed to Treblinka. U.S. v. Fedorenko, 455 F. Supp. 893 (1978). In
all, about 2,000 men were trained in Trawniki. Statement by Karl Streibcl (Com­
mander ofTrawniki Training Camp), September 4,1969, in Treblinka Case, vol. 19a,
p. 5030. Strcibel visited Treblinka at the end of 1942.
24. Budget for Waftcn-SS and concentration camps for fiscal vear 1939 (signed
Obcrfiihrer Frank), July 17, 1939, NG-4456.
25. Mainly from an affidavit by Friedrich Wilhelm Ruppcrt (chief of technical
division at Lublin), August 6, 1945, NO-1903.

KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


Commander (in succession):
Stat. Koch
OStubaf. Koegel
Stubaf. Florstedt
OStubaf. Weiss
OStubaf Liebehenschel
Schutzhaftlagerftihrer (in succession):
HStuf Hackmann
OStuf. Thumann
Administration:
HStuf. Worster
Commander of guard forces (in succession):
Stubaf. Langleist
HStuf. Melzer

Similarly, Auschwitz was organized in the following way:

Commander: OStubaf. Höss


Administration: (Burger) OStubaf. Möckel
Zentralbauleitung: Stubaf Bischoff
Guards: Stubaf Hartjenstein
Chief physician: HStuf Wirths
Political division: UStuf. Grabner
Rapportfiihrer (inmate count): OSchaf. Palitzsch
Crematoria: OSchaf. Moll

In November 1943 Höss was replaced by Obersturmbannführer Liebe­


henschel, and the camp was simultaneously broken into three parts (see
Table 9-10). Auschwitz I was the Stammlager (old camp); Auschwitz II,
in the Birkenau Woods, was the killing center; Auschwitz III, also called
Monowitz, was the industrial camp. Liebehenschel (with his headquar­
ters) remained in overall control and had to be consulted by the com­
manders of Auschwitz II and III in all important questions. But they in
turn had direct access to Amtsgruppe D, and the guard forces were placed
under their direct command.26 Höss returned to Auschwitz for a crucial
period in 1944 as the senior post commander (Standortältester).
As in the case of the Generalgouvernement camps, the administrative

26. Orders by Licbchcnschcl, November 11 and 22, 1943, in Ccntralna Zvdows-


ka Komisja Historyczna w Polsce, Dokumenty i materiah do dziejow okupaeji niemeckiej
ip Polsce, 3 vols. (Warsaw, Lodz, and Krakow, 1946), vol. 1, pp. 76-77. Unsigned
chart, undated, NO-1966.

ORGANIZATION, PERSONNEL·, AND MAINTENANCE


TABLE 9-10
THE ORGANIZATION OF AUSCHWITZ, NOVEMBER 1943

Liebehenschel
(Höss: May 8-July 29,1944, thereafter Baer)

Auschwitz I Auschwitz II Auschwitz III


Commander: Stubaf. Hartjenstein HStuf. Schwarz
OStubaf. Liebehenschel (HStuf. Kramer)
(HStuf. Baer) Men’s camp:
Schutzhaftlagerflihrer: UStuf. Schwarzhuber
OStuf. Hofmann Women’s camp :
UStuf. Hössler

core was much smaller than the guard force.27 At Lublin and Auschwitz,
commanders and administrators had served in concentration camps be­
fore the war, but men with such experience were relatively few.28 They
were the kind of people whose oudook on life was completely identified
with SS ideology and who were capable of carrying out any task assigned
to them by the Reichsfuhrer-SS. One of these men —to cite the most
prominent example—was Hoss.
Bom in 1900, Hoss had had a modestly good education (six Gym­
nasium classes). He was brought up in a very strict Catholic home, and
his father intended him to become a priest. “I had to pray and go to
church endlessly, do penance over the slightest misdeed,” Hoss recalled.
During the First World War he volunteered for service at the age of fifteen
and fought with the Turkish Sixth Army at Baghdad, at Kut-el-Amara,
and in Palestine. Wounded three times and a victim of malaria, he re­
ceived the Iron Cross First Class and the Iron Crescent. From 1919 to
1921 he fought in the Free Corps in the Baltic area, Silesia, and the Ruhr.
While French occupation forces were in the Ruhr, a German terrorist,
Leo Schlageter, was betrayed to the French by a schoolteacher, Walter
Kadow. Hoss murdered the schoolteacher. In consequence of this act, he
was sentenced to ten years in prison (serving five).
Already somewhat distinguished, he joined the SS in 1933 without

27. The ratio between administrators and guards in Auschwitz was approximately
1:6 (500 to 3,000). Affidavit by Hoss, March 20,1946, D-749-B.
28. The total administrative force listed in the budget of the Watfcn-SS and con­
centration camps for fiscal year 1939 was 953, including 62 officers, 791 enlisted
men, and 100 women. Budget, signed by Obf. Frank, July 17, 1939, NG-4456.

KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


any rank. From 1934 on he served in concentration camps, rising in the
hierarchy until he became commander of Auschwitz and an Obersturm­
bannführer. SS-Gruppenftihrer von Herff found him to be soldierly, a
good commander, a good farmer, quiet and simple, practical and sure of
himself. In HcrtFs words, “He does not push himself forward but lets his
actions speak for him.” Compared to the intellectuals in the Einsatzgrup­
pen and the paymasters in the WVHA, the man was almost made for his
job. In one respect he had become a bit more bourgeois. While com­
manding an enterrpise in which a million people were killed, Höss did
not personally commit another murder.29 30
Höss was the ideal SS man, perfectly suited for his work, and appar­
ently so was Sturmbannführer Richard Baer, who began his career at
Dachau in 1933, was wounded on the eastern front, and returned to
concentration camps, becoming commander of Auschwitz I in May
1944 ao After a while, however, the hard core of men like Höss and Baer
was supplemented by officials from the WVHA and its depots, and by
other personnel with administrative backgrounds. These reinforcements
were not exactly camp enthusiasts. Many took their assignments indiffer­
ently and even apathetically. When Möckel, an experienced WVHA offi­
cial, was ordered to take over the administration office in Auschwitz, he
declared that he did not like to go to a concentration camp and “especially
not to Auschwitz.” Nevertheless, Brigadefiihrer Fanslau, the WVHA per­
sonnel chief, sent him there.31 The administrative personnel of the con­
centration camps were consequendy a mixture of old-type SS men identi­
fied with the “movement” and a number of bureaucrats specialized in
finance and general administration.
The expansion of the camp network necessitated more guards. Up to
1939, guard forces w ere drawn from the Totenkopfstandarten (Death
Head Regiments). After the outbreak of war, most of these men went
to the front. The continuation of the war and the uninterrupted
grow th of the camps resulted in more turnovers and die need for even
more manpower.32 Ultimately, the numbers were in the tens of thou-

29. The account of Höss’s life is based on his personnel record, NO-2142, his
affidavit ot March 14, 1946, and his autobiography, Konimandant in Auschwitz (Mu­
nich, 1978). The quoted statement about his youth is from G. M. Gilbert, Nuremberg
Diary (New York, 1947), p. 269.
30. Werner Emenputsch, “Der Kommandant fehlt auf der Anklagebank,’’ Frank­
furter Allgemeine Zeitung, December 13, 1963, p. 8. Baerdicd in 1963.
31. Affidavit by Karl Möckel, July 21, 1947, NO-4514.
32. See a list of officers in the concentration camps, with biographies abbreviated
from SS personnel records, compiled by French L. MacLcan, 'Die Camp Men (Atglen,
Pa., 1999). For the numbers of these officers rotated from or to SS divisions, see
pp. 278-85.

ORGANIZATION, PERSONNEL, AND MAINTENANCE 967


sands.33 Auschwitz itself had four guard companies in April 194134 and
seven in November 1941.35 By November 1943, its complement was
divided as follows:36
Auschwitz I (Main Camp) 2d Staff Company, 1st, 2d, 3d, and 4th
Companies
Auschwitz II (Birkenau) 1st Staff Company, 6th, 7th, and 8th Com­
panies, plus Guard-Dog Company (Hundestaffel)
Auschwitz III (Monowitz) 5th Company and Guard Company uBuna”
The Zentralbauleitung in Auschwitz planned a kennel building in Bir­
kenau for 250 guard dogs,37 and a special kitchen, also for the dogs.38

33. The statistics indicating Waffen-SS men in the WVHA camps are as follows:
Number of Personnel in:
All WVHA Auschwitz
Camps alone
May 1940 ca 65"
March 1942 ca 15,000'' 1,800
1943 25-30,000“'
December 1943 ca 3,500
April 1945 30-35,000'
Cumulative, March 1942-April 1945 ca 45,000"
Cumulative, May 1940-January 1945 ca 7,000*

* Affidavit by Hoss, March 20,1946, D-749-B.


b Affidavit by August Harbaum (Stubaf., Chief of WVHA A-V-4), March 19,

1946, D-750.
1 Auschwitz administration (HStuf. Wagner) to WVHA D-IV, March 25, 1942,

NO-2146.
* Affidavit by Pohl, March 19,1947, NO-2571.
Affidavit by Hoss, March 20,1946, D-749-B.
7 Affidavit by Harbaum, March 19,1946, D-750.
-* Ibid. Cumulative figures include rotations.
h Affidavit by Hoss, March 20,1946. D-749-B.

34. File of the Fiihrungshauptamt (Jiittncr), containing composition of the Armed


SS, including the Totenkopfsturmbann companies in the camps, as of April 22,1941.
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives Record Group 48.004 (Military' Histor­
ical Institute, Prague), Roll 6. The Totenkopfsturmbann was the generic designation
of guard forces stationed in the concentration camps. It no longer had any connection
with Totenkopf personnel withdrawn from the camps and serving in the SS Totenkopf
Division.
35. Order by the Auschwitz Kommandantur (signed Hoss), November 19,1941,
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives Record Group 11.001 (Center for His­
torical Collections, Moscow), Roll 20, Fond 502, Opis 1, Folder 32.
36. Order (Standortbcfehl) by Liebehcnschel, November 22, 1943, iltid., Roll 21,
Fond 502, Opis 1, Folder 38.
37. Zentralbauleirung cost estimate, April 16, 1943, and recapitulation (with
drawing of kennel center, signed Bischoff), March 11,1943, ibid.. Roll 34, Fond 502,
Opis 1, Folder 227.
38. Zentralbauleirung (Bischoff) to WVHA-C I, March 20, 1943, ibtd.. Roll 20,
Fond 502, Opis 1, Folder 28.

968 KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


Replacements were not always Reich Germans. The Lublin camp em­
ployed a Lithuanian battalion.39 Ethnic Germans made up an increasing
percentage of the personnel in Auschwitz.40 One of the Auschwitz com­
pany commanders, Hauptsturmfiihrer Alfred Schemmel, was a former
clergyman and teacher from Transylvania.41 The physician Fritz Klein,
another Transylvanian, came to Auschwitz after three years in the Roma­
nian army.4-1 Auschwitz also had officers who were in no sense the fittest
SS leaders. Untersturmführer Hans Mehrbach owed his Auschwitz as­
signment to the fact that he was suffering from paralysis of the heart
muscles.43 Hauptsturmfiihrer Kurt Otto was at Auschwitz after having
stepped in a drunken state on a mine. His marital life was such that Glücks
thought him unstable {labil) and suffering from a mental defect {ßeistigen
Defekt). Early in 1943 Otto shot his mistress and killed himself.44
The concentration camps exerted a certain influence upon the guards
and administrators, an effect produced by the enormous distance be­
tween the SS men and inmates. Because of this distance, many members
of the camp personnel lost their perspective and fell into patterns of
behavior that could no longer be reconciled with conduct desired or
prescribed by Nazi policy. The immediate danger of such lapses in con­
duct was their threat to the overall efficiency of the concentration camp,
but beyond this narrow consideration there were fears far wider in scope,
which we shall presently consider.
The personnel problem arose in two different forms: sadism and cor­
ruption. The former was posed primarily by the guards, the latter chiefly
by the old officials of the camps. With regard to sadism, it must be kept in

39. The 2d Lithuanian Schutzmannschaft Battalion, consisting of 14 officers and


352 enlisted men, and equipped with 350 rifles, 13 submachine guns, and 27 light
machine guns, is listed as the guard force in the strength report (Stärkenaclnveisuntf) of
the Schurzmannschalten, July 1, 1942, German Federal Archives, R 19/266. The
battalion was dissolved in early 1943. Hans Joachim Neufeld, Jürgen Huck, and
Georg Tessin, Zur Geschichte der Ordnunßspoltzei (Koblenz, 1957), pt. 2, p. 101. The
252d Schurzmannschatt Battalion (Lithuanian) is mentioned as departing from the
camp in July 1943. Krüger to Himmler, copy to SS and Police Leader Krakow
(Oberführer Schemer), July 7, 1943, Himmler Files, Folder 94.
40. Frgänzungsamt der Waffen-SS/Dienststelle SS Oberabschnitt Donau (signed
OStuf. Hier/.) to SS-Haupramr/F.rgänzungsamt, October 22, 1941, NO-3372.
Auschwirz strength reports, December 1944, T 175, Roll 575, and T 580, Roll 321.
4L Personnel Record in Berlin Document Center. Schemmel served in Auschwitz
from July 1942 to August 1944 and was reduced in rank to Obersturmführer in
March 1944.
42. Testimony by Klein in Raymond Phillips, ed.. Trial of Josef Kramer and Forty-
Four Others (The Reisen Trial) (Ix>ndon, 1949), pp. 183-88.
43. Affidavit by Mehrbach, February' 24, 1947, NO-2192.
44. Glücks to Brandt, February 4 and 11, 1943, and OStubaf. Reich (Perso-
nalhaupramt) to RF Fcldkommandostcllc, February 4, 1943, T 175, Roll 33.

ORGANIZATION, PERSONNEL, AND MAINTENANCE


mind that the bureaucracy was concerned not so much with the suffering
ot the victims as with the contamination of the perpetrators. Thus the SS
paid no attention whatsoever to the host of indirect tortures that it had
built into the camp routine: hunger, exposure to freezing weather, over­
work, filth, and utter lack of privacy. All this suffering was a consequence
of the very nature of SS camp maintenance and operations. It was simply
no problem.
Beyond these built-in tortures there was a category of pain which was
administered for the achievement of specific aims: punishment for infrac­
tions of discipline; medical experiments on live human beings; and above
all the gassing of the Jewish victims. These operations and the suffering
they caused were considered necessary. They were therefore subjected
only to an overall control mechanism which consisted of directives and
procedures designed to hold to a minimum the possibilities of individual
action by participating SS personnel. In short, the perpetration of that
suffering had to be impersonal.
A third category of torture was more problematic. Many times, for
instance, inmates had to perform exhausting calisthenics for a guard or
had to pick up a cap or some other object while an SS man playfully shot
them with a bullet from his rifle. This kind of exercise was called Sport
machen (“to make sport”). Essentially it was regarded as a way in which
the guards relieved their boredom, and while not exacdy encouraged in
official directives, little was done to stop this practice.
The whole problem of sadism was therefore narrowed to a special kind
of activity: the so-called excesses. In general, an “excess” involved a mas­
sive orgy or a sexual aberration. Among survivors, certain persons ac­
quired a reputation for such sadistic behavior. An example might be Irma
Grese, a woman guard in Auschwitz who sought out well-formed Jewish
women and cut their breasts open with a whip. Her victims were then
brought to a woman inmate doctor who performed a painful operation
on them while Irma Grese watched, cheeks flushed, swaying rhythmically
and foaming at the mouth.45 So far as we know, the camp administration
never interfered with Grese’s doings.
Another Auschwitz personality, Oberscharfuhrer Moll, who was in
charge of the crematoria, is mentioned quite often in surv ivors’ literature.
Moll was a recent widower when he arrived from Oranienburg in 1941.
The clothes of his deceased wife were still in Germany and now he was all
alone.46 He did not lack diversions, however. Among other things, Moll

45. Gisclla Perl, I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz (New York, 1948), pp. 61-62.
46. OSchaf. Moll to Kommandannir Auschwitz, Iune 16, 1941, U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum Archives, Record Group 11.001 (Center tor Documentary His­
torical Collections, Moscow), Roll 35, Fond 502, Opis 1, Folder 243.

970 KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


is said to have selected from a newly arrived transport twenty of the most
beautiful women. He stood them up in a row, stark naked, and practiced
shooting at them. Some of the women were hit in several places before
they died.47
Although Auschwitz was to become the subject of a special Nazi inves­
tigation, these particular incidents appear to have been overlooked. There
was no concerted effort to curb sadism. Such an effort would have been
difficult in any case. The only prescribed remedy would have rendered the
offending guards into “asociáis” (sex criminals). However, the problem
was recognized. For one thing, the camp administration established a
number of brothels.48 Another measure was to charge inmates instead of
guards with the performance of disciplinary action, including the beating
of prisoners. That substitution (to be discussed in connection with the
inmate hierarchy) had far-reaching effects on the inmates. As a last resort,
there w as the possibility of getting rid of personnel who were overdoing
things, but that remedy seems to have been applied only very rarely. On
one occasion, when SS men and German political prisoners tossed ninety
Jewish women from a third-floor window into a courtyard below', the SS
men were transferred to another post.49
Sadism, then, wfas regarded — insofar as it was conceived of at all — as a
menace to the health of the 50,000 guards who circulated through the
camps. The other problem, corruption, was seen as a threat to the entire
Nazi system. This practice was taken much more seriously and called for
much stronger and concerted countermeasures. As early as 1941, Nebe’s
corruption specialists (RSHA-V) and an SS and Police court began to pay
attention to this vital issue.
The corruption investigations were an extremely touchy matter be­
cause they came to the core of a dilemma that w as very' acute, particularly
among the old Nazis. A man could not be an idealist and at the same time
stuff' his pockets, make love to Jewish women, or engage in drunken
orgies. That wras why’ Himmler, who regarded the SS as an organization
sanctified by its mission to safeguard die future of the German nation for
hundreds of years, could not tolerate such “lapses” by his SS men. The
corruption officers therefore had a very' firm basis upon which to proceed,
but they had to be careful lest someone be implicated w’ho had too much
power.

47. Filip Friedman, This WasOsuHecim (London, 1946), p. 69.


48. Ukrainian guards could secure the services of Polish women for two Reichs­
mark (one mark to be paid to the prostitute, the other to be deposited into a special
account). Glücks to camp commanders, December 15,1943, NO-1545. The brothel
did not, ot course, close off the outlets for sadistic behavior.
49. F.lla Lingcns-Reiner, Prisoners of hear (London, 1948), p. 40. The author was a
German prisoner in Auschwitz.

ORGANIZATION, PERSONNEL, AND MAINTENANCE 971


In 1941, SS and Police Court XXII in Kassel started an investigation
directed against Koch, the Buchenwald commander. The proceedings
failed, and Pohl congratulated Koch in writing. In this letter, which was
to become notorious in SS circles, Pohl said in effect that he would step in
shieldingly '■'whenever an unemployed lawyer should stretch out his
hangman’s hands again to grasp the white body of Koch [wenn wieder
einmal ein arbeitsloser Jurist seine Henkershände nach dem weissen Körper
Koch’s ausstrecken wolle].”50 But the court did not let loose. After Koch had
taken over the killing center of Lublin, two corruption officers from the
RSHA (Hauptsturmflihrer Dr. Morgen and Kriminalkommissar Haupt­
sturmführer Wied) trailed him to the Generalgouvernement.51 On Au­
gust 20,1942, he was toppled from his post.52
While Koch was being held for trial, the investigation started in ear­
nest. In Buchenwald a Hauptscharfuhrer, Koehler, was arrested as a mate­
rial witness. A few days after his arrest, he was found dead in his cell,
apparently poisoned. The investigating official, Dr. Morgen, was furious.
Suspecting the camp doctor (Dr. Hoven) of the murder, Morgen ordered
that samples of the chemical found in the dead man’s stomach be admin­
istered to four Soviet prisoners of war. The four men died in the presence
of several witnesses, including Morgen, corruption officer Wehner, and
Hoven’s colleague Dr. Schuler (alias Ding). Armed with this proof, Mor­
gen arrested Hoven.53
Koch himself could not escape from the net. He was tried, sentenced to
death, and executed.54 The vise also closed upon Koch’s immediate subor­
dinate, the Lublin Schutzhaftlagerfuhrer Hackmann. Condemned to
death, Hackmann was later put into a punishment unit.55
Having bitten into the Lublin camp, the corruption officers suffered a
reverse. They discovered that all potential Jewish witnesses there had
been killed. Deciding to investigate this matter also, the SS and Police
court was confronted with the mass murder of all the remaining Jewish

50. Affidavit by Dr. Werner Paulmann, July 11, 1946, SS-64. Paulmann was
Second Judge and later chief of the SS and Police court in Kassel.
51. Affidavit by Paulmann, July 11,1946, SS-64. Interrogation of Wied, Julv 21,
1945, G-215.
52. Pohl to chief of SS Personnel Main Office (OGruf. Schmitt), July 28, 1942,
NO-1994. OStubaf. Brandt to Pohl, August 23, 1942, NO-1994. Transfer order by
Fanslau, sending Kocgcl to take Koch’s place as commander of Lublin, August 24,
1942, NO-4334. At the same time the commander of Flosscnbiirg, OStubaf. Künst­
ler, was removed from his post because offcasts and drunkenness,” and the com­
mander of Dachau, OStubaf. Piorkowski, was removed for more serious offenses to
stand trial. Brandt to Pohl, August 23,1942, NO-1994.
53. Testimony by Eugen Kogon, Case No. 1, tr. pp. 1183-84.
54. Affidavit by Paulmann, July 11,1946, SS-64.
55. Affidavit by Dr. Erwin Schuler, July 20,1945, NO-258.

972 KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


inmates at Lublin.56 Resistance increased in other camps, too, as the old
guard fought for its life. Thus in Sachsenhausen the corruption commis­
sion was “thrown out bodily” (jjewaltsam heransgesetzt).57
SS and Police Court XXII in Kassel now constituted itself into the “SS
and Police Court for Special Purposes.” Preparations were made to cap­
ture the greatest prize of all: Obersturmbannfulirer Hoss of Auschwitz. A
special commission (chief, Hauptsturmfiihrer Drescher) was installed in
the camp, and an informer in the person of Hauptscharfiihrer Gerhard
Palitzsch gave information about Hoss. The commander, he said, was
responsible for the pregnancy of an inmate, Eleonore Hodys, born in
1903 in Vienna. After considerable difficulties, corruption officers inter­
rogated Hodvs.58 But the Auschwitz campaign was doomed to failure.
The suction mechanism of the camp began to work. Open threats were
sent to the SS and Police court.59 In the camp itself, Hauptscharfiihrer
Palitzsch was discovered with a Jewish woman and thrown into a coal
bunker.60 Hoss had won.
The savage attack by the SS and Police court had claimed its victims,
but the camp structure as a whole withstood the attack, protected by the
almighty hand of Pohl, who stood ready to shield and defend his com­
manders in their hour of crisis.
The personnel in camps were heavily outnumbered by inmates. This
disparity invites the question why a killing center should have had Jewish
prisoners at all, why any of them should have been left alive. The answer is
that they had to be retained at least for camp maintenance and operations,
including the reception of deportees and burning of corpses. In Kulmhof
and the Generalgouvernement camps, where the processing of victims
was the main activity, work parties were relatively few. Auschwitz, how­
ever, needed additional labor for construction and private industry. For
that reason, the Auschwitz administrators had to make some provision in
their planning for rudimentary shelter, subsistence food, and minimal
medical care.
Not required was adequate space and sustenance to guarantee the
survival of every inmate who was given a task. It is significant that “ac­
counting for the life of an inmate” (even a German inmate) was defined as

56. Affidavit bv Paulmann, Julv 11, 1946, SS-64.


57. Und.
58. Affidavit by Gerhard Wicbcck, February 28, 1947, NO-2330. Wiebcck, a
subordinate of Morgen, questioned the woman in October 1944.
59. "Von Auschwitz wurde dem Gericht ganz offen gedroht." Affidavit bv Paulmann,
July 11, 1946, SS-64.
60. Jan Sehn (judge, Krakow), “Concentration and Extermination Camp at Os-
wiycim,” Central Commission for Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, Ger­
man Crimes in Poland (Warsaw, 1946-47), vol. 1, p. 82.

ORGANIZATION, PERSONNEL, AND MAINTENANCE 973


a complete and accurate report of his death (name, birth date, nationality,
etc.).61 When a Jew died, no special report had to be made; a death list
sufficed.62 Whether an individual Jew lived or died did not matter.
There only had to be a sufficient number of inmates to take care of
work requirements, and if the supply was more than sufficient, the SS
could weed out the Jewish inmate population by sending the excess num­
ber to the gas chamber. The inmate count was therefore subject to great
fluctuation. Depending on the arrival of new transports or a selection of
victims to be put to death, the camp population could be doubled or
halved within a short time.63
Obviously, expenditures of money for the upkeep of inmates were
extremely low. Living quarters were about as primitive as could be imag­
ined. Lublin, for example, in the fall of 1942 had five blocks with a total of
twenty-two barracks. The barracks were partially unfinished. Some had
no windows. Others had cardboard roofs. None had water. Provisional
latrines (fill-in type) spread odors throughout the habitat.64 During an
Auschwitz construction conference on June 16, 1944 (Pohl, Maurer,
Hoss, Bischoff, Baer, and Wirths participating, among others), the '■‘com­
pletion” (Ausbau) of barracks in Camp II was still a subject of discussion.
In this connection, it was pointed out that the installation of washing and
toilet facilities was necessary only in every third or fourth barrack.65
The overcrowding in the barracks was a constant plague for the in­
mates; there was simply no limit to the number of people who could be
put into a hut. Inmates slept without blankets or pillows on so-called
Pritschen, wooden planks joined together. On October 4, 1944, the ad­
ministrative division of Auschwitz II wrote to the central administration

61. Glucks to camp commanders, November 21, 1942, NO-1543.


62. Ibid. WVHA D 1-1 (signed Licbchcnschcl) to camp commanders, July 15,
1943, NO-1246. Memorandum by Hoss (WVHA D-I), undated, NO-1553.
63. KL Auschwitz/administration (HSruf. Wagner) reported to WVHA D-IV on
March 25, 1942, that it expected an inmate increase from 11,000 to 27,000 in the
next few days; NO-2146. On October 17,1944, the women’s camp in Auschwitz II
had 29,925 inmates. On November 25,1944, the number was 14,271. Frauen-Lager
LK Au II/Abt. Ilia (Birkcnau) strength reports, October 18 and November 26,
1944, Dokumenty i materialy, vol. 1, p. 118.
Auschwitz as a whole had 11,000 inmates in March 1942. Wagner to WVHA
D-IV, March 25, 1942, NO-2146. The number was 87,000 in December 1943,
67,000 in April 1944, and (counting possibly 30,000 unregistered inmates) 135,000
in August 1944, before falling again. Danuta Czech, Kakndarium der Ereuinissc mi
Konzentrationslaqer Auschwitz-Birkenau 1939-1945 (Reinbck, 1989), pp. 688, 750,
860. Lublin dropped from 20,000-25,000 in September 1942, to 6,000 in Decem­
ber 1943. Affidavit by Ruppert, August 6, 1945, NO-1903. Interrogation ofW’ied,
July 21, 1945, G-215.
64. Affidavit by Ruppert, August 6, 1945, NO-1903.
65. Summary of Auschwitz conference, June 17, 1944, NO-2359.

KILLING CBNTER OPERATIONS


tor 230 new Pritschen. Instead of having been used by five inmates, as
regulations prescribed, each of the Pritschen had held up to fifteen in­
mates. Because of this weight, the upper layer of the Pritschen had broken
apart, and all the inmates had fallen on top of the people lying on the
middle layer. The second layer had thereupon collapsed, and everybody
had crashed through the lowest layer.66 The result was a twisted mass of
bodies and splinters.
In the matter of clothes the situation was even worse. Jews arriving in
camps were deprived of all their belongings, including their clothes. Up
to the beginning of 1943, prisoners’ clothing was issued to all inmates.
Estimates of requirements were sent by Amtsgruppe D to Amt B-II,
which had to bargain with the civilian sector (Speer and the Economy
Ministry) for allocations.67 No thought in this planning was given to
shoes or boots. One company, the Schuh- und Lederfabrik A. G. Chel-
mek, received an order for the production of 250,000 pairs of galoshes
for inmates.68 As shortages increased, the supply of prisoners’ clothing
was choked oft'. On February 26, 1943, it was therefore ordered that
laborers were to get ordinary clothes (properly marked), with remaining
supplies of the striped variety to be given only to work parties moving
about outside the camp compounds.69 Since any clothes that could be
dignified by the word were generally picked out for distribution to needy
Germans (a complicated confiscation process to be described later), the
Jewish inmates usually received only rags. Such things as toilet articles,
handkerchiefs, and paper (including toilet paper) were not issued at all.
During 1944, conditions were such that thousands of people had to go
around without any clothes whatsoever.70
The third plague was the lack of food. The administrative basis for
food allocation in the camps was the ration system worked out by the
Food and Agriculture Ministry, complete with discriminatory rations for
Jews.71 Each camp administration obtained the supplies from the food
depots of the Waften-SS (Standartenfiihrer Tschentscher) and in the open

66. Komni.ind.inrur KJ. Au II/Verw. ro Zcntralvcnv. Au, Ocrot>cr4, 1944, Doku-


metity i materiahy vol. 1, pp. 95-96.
67. Affidavit by Georg Lorner, December 1, 1945, NO-54.
68. Trustee tor the Schuh- und Lederfabrik Chelmek to Zentralbauleirung Ausch­
witz, February 18, 1943, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives Record Group
11.001 (Center tor Documentary Collections, Moscow), Roll 35, Fond 502, Opis 1,
Folder 236.
69. Liebehenschel to camp commanders, WVHA D-II, and VWHA D-III, Febru­
ary 26, 1943, NO-1530.
70. Hungarian Jewish women in Auschwitz were particularly affected. Friedman,
Oswiecim, pp. 67-68.
71. Inspectorate to camp commanders, October 13, 1941, NO-1536. Decree by
Food Ministry (signed Dr. Moritz), August 6, 1944, NG-455.

ORGANIZATION, PERSONNEL·, AND MAINTENANCE 975


market.72 What happened to the food after it was sent to the camp was the
administration’s own business. The basic diet of Jewish inmates was wa­
tery turnip soup drunk from pots,73 supplemented by an evening meal of
sawdust bread with some margarine, “smelly marmalade,” or “putrid sau­
sage.”74 Between the two meals inmates attempted to lap a few drops of
polluted water from a faucet in a wash barrack.75
The living conditions in the killing centers produced sickness and epi­
demics including dysentery, typhus, and skin diseases of all kinds. Sanita­
tion measures were almost nil. The Auschwitz grounds were not suitable
for canalization; hence fill-in latrines were the only facilities available.
Water was not purified. Soap and articles for cleansing were very scarce.
Rats ran loose in the barracks. Only occasionally was a block fumigated
with Zyklon. Hospitals were barracks, and inmate doctors worked with
few medicines and few instruments. When the sickrooms became over­
crowded, the SS doctor made an inspection and dispatched the worst
cases to the gas chamber.76
The prisoners tried to survive, and they worked out a few compensa­
tory mechanisms. Food was stolen and traded in the black market.77
Inmate doctors worked frantically and tirelessly, but the tide of death was
too great. Up to the end of 1942, Lublin had received 26,258 registered

72. Affidavit by Wilhelm Max Burger, May 14, 1947, NO-3255. Burger was
administrative chief of Auschwitz before Mockcl.
73. The soup was the midday meal. “There were pieces of wood, potato peeling
and unrecognizable substances swimming in it.” Perl, I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz,
pp. 38-41. The soup meal was issued in cans that weighed about 120 pounds. They
had only two handles and no cover. Before it was distributed into the pots, the
scalding brew had to be carried under the blows of SS men from the kitchen to the
block. Report by a Dc Gaullist, August 20,1946, NO-1960.
74. Perl, I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz, p. 36.
75. Ibid., p. 32. For an expert discussion of the medical aspects of nutrition in the
camps, sec Dr. Elic A. Cohen, Human Behavior in the Concentration Camp (New York,
1953), pp. 51-58. The author was a survivor of Auschwitz.
76. On diseases and sick treatment, sec Cohen, Human Behavior in the Concentra­
tion Camp, pp. 58-81.
77. A few Auschwitz black market prices (in Reichsmark) were as follow
One cigarette 6-7
1 lb bread 150
1 lb margarine 100
1 lb butter 200
1 lb fat 280-320
1 lb meat 400-480
Report by a De Gaullist, August 20, 1946, NO-1960. Most often there was only
barter trade. An old man in Auschwitz traded a sack of diamonds he had smuggled in
for three raw potatoes, which he ate at once. Perl, I Was a Doctor in Ausclnvitz.,
pp. 114-15. Women sometimes lent their bodies to German or Polish political pris­
oners in order to eat. Ibid., pp. 76, 78-79.

976 KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


Jewish inmates. A total of 4,568 had been transferred; 14,348 had died.
Auschwitz had obtained 5,849 registered Jewish inmates up to the same
date; 4,436 had died.78 In July 1943 Auschwitz was short of inmates for
its industrial requirements, and a commission was sent to Lublin to take
some prisoners from there. Of 3,800 people set aside for Auschwitz, a
preliminar)' check revealed only 30 percent fit for work. The Auschwitz
commission was so indignant that the Lublin administration scraped up
everyone whom it could call fit for work “with a good conscience.” After a
second examination, a Lublin doctor, Untersturmflihrer Dr. Rindflcisch,
admitted that Lublin inmates could not really be classified as employ­
able.'9 Fifteen hundred inmates were finally chosen. When they arrived,
five women were already dead, forty-nine were dying, and most others had
skin eruptions or were suffering from “exhaustion” (Km~persclnvachc).80
Whatever other talents the camp officials may have had, keeping prisoners
alive was not one of them, even if on rare occasions that became necessary.
Thev did provide orchestral music professionally played by inmates in
the yard.81
To the SS, maintaining the inmates was not as essential as keeping
them in check. On occasion there was overconfidence and laxity in mat­
ters of securin', but in SS circles the requirement of keeping an iron grip
on the inmate population did not have to be spelled out. It was clearly
understood. A rigid system of restraints was instituted, which took the
form of internal controls, physical obstacles, and the use of guards.
Basic in the idea of an internal control mechanism was the assumption
that the individual prisoner would not resist. He would obey an order
even if it were against his interests. When confronted with a choice be­
tween action and inertia, he would be paralyzed. He would reason that
nothing is ever certain, not even death in Auschwitz.82 The primar)' threat
of resistance was consequently not the reasoning of the individual, for he
was helpless in spite of it and because of it, but the establishment of an
organization that would pit itself against the concentration camp. Inter­
nal controls sought to prevent the formation of any such resistance move­
ment. Camp commanders were ordered to be vigilant at all times, lest one

78. Report by Korherr, March 27, 1943, NO-5194.


79. Report bv an Auschwitz USruf., Julv 6, 1943, Dokumenty i materiab, vol. 1,
pp. 138-40.
80. Statidortarzt (camp doctor) Auschwitz to Kommandantur Auschwitz, July 8,
1943, ibid.
81. Fania Fcnclon, Playing for Time (New York, 1977), p. 46. The author was an
inmate in the women’s orchestra, conducted by violinist Alma Rosé. A larger, men’s
orchestra is mentioned only rarely in survivor literature. Ibid., p. 209; Filip Miillcr,
Eyewitness Auschwitz (New York, 1979), pp. 47, 58, 100.
82. See Cohen, Human Behavior in the Concentration Camp, pp. 115-210.

ORGANIZATION, PERSONNEL, AND MAINTENANCE


day they be surprised by “major unpleasant events.”83 The commanders
were to keep track of things by making use of inmate spies,84 and re­
sistance was frustrated further by the institution of an inmate bureaucracy
and inmate privileges.
The distribution of power and privilege among the inmates was deter­
mined in the first instance by the racial hierarchy. Even in a concentration
camp a German was still a German; a Pole was a Pole; a Jew, a Jew. This
stratification could not be broken by the inmates; the racial hierarchy was
as rigid as any bureaucratic hierarchy had ever been. No combining, no
delegation of power, no mutiny was possible here.
The inmate bureaucracy was divided into two parts: one in charge of
quarters, the other in charge of work parties. In quarters, the hierarchy
was Lageraltester (highest in camp), Blockdltester (in charge of block), and
Stubendienst (in charge of barracks). In work parties, it was Oberkapo,
Kapo, and Vorarbeiter. In Auschwitz and Lublin the top echelons of the
inmate bureaucracy were filled by German prisoners.85 Thus there was an
inmate leadership, but it was responsible, and often responsive, to camp
command.
German prisoners were not only in the most important positions of
the inmate bureaucracy but they also enjoyed the most extensive priv­
ileges within the framework of concentration camp life, such as the right
to receive packages, supplementary food rations, less overcrowding in
barracks, and bed linen in camp hospitals.86 Far less privileged and much
worse off were Poles, Czechs, and other Slavs.87 On the bottom were the
Jews. Between the Jewish and the German inmates there was an un­
bridgeable gulf. The Germans were entitled to live; they had at least a
minimum of privileges to make a fight for life. The Jews were doomed.
It is characteristic that the Jews in Auschwitz were hoping that an air
raid might destroy the killing installations,88 while the Germans were
consoled by the thought “that the Allied airmen knew and avoided the
camp.”89
Perhaps the extreme example of the crushing force that separated Ger­
mans from Jews is an incident told by Dr. Ella Lingens-Reiner, who had

83. Glücks to camp commanders, March 31,1944, NO-1554.


84. Ibid.
85. Schn, “Oswiycim,” German Crimes in Poland, vol. 1, pp. 38-39. Irene Schw arz,
in Leo W. Schwarz, cd., The Root and the Bough (New York and Toronto, 1949),
pp. 193-96. Affidavit by Ruppcrt, August 6, 1945, NO-1903.
86. Lingens-Reiner, Prisoners of Fear, pp. 52,56, 100.
87. Ibid., pp. 44,49.
88. Olga Lcngycl, Five Chimneys (Chicago and New York, 1947), pp. 123, 155-
56. The author was a Jewish inmate.
89. Lingens-Reiner, Prisoners of Fear, p. 36.

KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


been sent to Auschwitz because she had hidden some Jews in her apart­
ment in Vienna (Judcnbegiinstigung). In Auschwitz she took under her
protection a young Jewish woman from Prague, Gretl Stutz. One day
Stutz was brought into the hospital hut with typhus, one patient among
700. As Dr. Lingens-Rciner gave her an injection, a voice protested from
the German corner: “Of course, you give something to the Jewess, and let
us Germans die like dogs. You’re a nice example of a German prisoner!”
Thereupon she did not visit her friend again. Gretl Stutz was transferred
to another ward and after a few days she succumbed, deserted, to her
sickness.90
Another internal control measure was marking. In the concentration
camp too, the Jewish inmate had to wear the six-pointed Star of David. In
Auschwitz, his registration number was tattooed on his arm.91 Still an­
other precaution was taken in the form of daily roll calls, which some­
times lasted for hours. The roll calls kept track of all prisoners and pre­
vented hiding within the camp. The prisoners were not dismissed until
everyone was accounted for, dead or alive.92 As a last means the Germans
also resorted to reprisal, usually a public hanging. They thus sought to
frustrate the formation of an internal resistance movement by a system of
spies, inmate bureaucracies, inmate privileges, marking, roll calls, and
reprisals. However, preventive measures did not stop with these devices.
In February 1943 Himmler became worried that air raids on the con­
centration camps might occasion mass breaks. To prevent any such occur­
rence he ordered that each camp be divided into blocks, 4,000 inmates
per block, each block to be fenced in with barbed wire. Every camp was to
be surrounded by a high wall, and barbed wire was to be strung on both
sides of the wall. The interior passageway between wire and wall was to
be patrolled by dogs; the outer passageway was to be mined, just in case a
bomb tore a hole in the wall. In the vicinity of the camp, dogs trained to
tear a man apart (zerreissen) were to roam at night.93 Searchlights were
mounted on poles of the wire fence, and the interior wire was electrically
charged. Inmates who tired of life had only to lean on this wire to end
their misery.
The third element of inmate control was die guard force. In spite of all
internal measures and the construction of contraptions, diere had to be an
armed body of men to deal with the eventuality of “major unpleasant
events.” Yet, the death camps, in which almost three million people were
killed, were rather thinly guarded. All in all, about 4,000 men may have
90. Ibid., pp. 83-84.
91. Lcngycl, Five Chimneys, p. 106. Cohen, Human Behavior in the Concentration
Camp, pp. 26-28.
92. Lcngycl, Five Chimneys, pp. 37-40.
93. Himmler to Pohl and Glucks, February 8, 1943, Himmler Files, Folder 67.

ORGANIZATION, PERSONNEL·, AND MAINTENANCE


manned the killing centers at any one time. In Auschwitz there were up to
3,000 guards; Lublin had a Schutzmannschaft battalion. A small com­
pany of German Order Police was stationed in Kulmhof. Treblinka,
Belzec and Sobibor had one company each of Ukrainians. In the WVHA
camps the guards were equipped with small arms, including machine
guns mounted on observation towers.94 At night they trained searchlights
on the camp grounds. Obtaining these guards, even though their number
was small for the size of the task, was no easy problem, and the acquisition
of their armament proved to be an even greater difficulty.
Since the guard forces were not first-rate units, the SS men in charge of
weapons supply did not consider it necessary to furnish them with first-
class arms. The distribution of weapons and munitions in the entire
Waffen-SS was handled by the SS-Fiihrungshauptamt, the main office
concerned with purely military matters. In the WVHA, Amt B-V, un­
der Standartenführer Scheide, handled weapons and munitions for the
WVHA camps. Whenever the WVHA had requests for weapons, Scheide
submitted the requests to the Führungshauptamt. Very often, however,
he was turned down, was offered Italian rifles without ammunition, and
so on.
Amtsgruppe D obtained only about 15,000 rifles and 30 machine
guns for all its camps. This, of course, was not enough, so it made use of
its business connections to procure weapons independently. Companies
making use of camp labor, particularly the Steyr armaments firm, were
approachable in such matters. Scheide protested to Glücks against this
gunrunning (Waffenschieberei), whereupon Glücks replied that he would
take his weapons wherever he could get them. In the matter of trucks the
situation was the same. The trucks were usually obtained when firms
made available the necessary transport to get laborers, then somehow
forgot to ask for the return of the vehicles.95
Thus, by hook and crook, the guards, the weapons, and the transport
were assembled. But Pohl was still worried. There were many doomed
people in the camps. In a report to Himmler dated April 5, 1944, Pohl
outlined the preparations he had made for die eventuality of a mass break
from Auschwitz. The count of Auschwitz inmates was then 67,000. From
this number, Pohl deducted 18,000 sick inmates and 15,000 in work
parties who could be “done away with” (abgesetzt), “so that practically
one has to count 34,000 inmates.” At that time he had 2,950 guards.
From the Higher SS and Police Leader in the area, Obergruppenführer
Schmauser, he procured another police company of 130 men as a standby
force. At the start of a mass break, a defense line in the interior of the camp

94. Pohl to Himmler, April 5, 1944, NO-21.


95. Affidavit by Rudolf Hermann Karl Scheide, January 16, 1947, NO-1568.

KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


would be manned by all the guards. In addition, Schmauser had made an
agreement with the Deputy Commander, VIII Corps (functionally com­
mander of the former Wehrkreis VIII in Silesia), General der Kavallerie
von Koch-Erpach, in pursuance of which the Wehrmacht was to man an
outer defense line. Furthermore, the air force had promised to furnish
1,000 men if the breakout did not coincide with an air raid. Finally, the
Kripo-Leitstelle in Katowice was prepared to undertake a major search
(Grosffhhndunjj) to capture anyone who got through.96 97
There was no mass break from Auschwitz. Only a few inmates man­
aged to run the triple gauntlet of informers, wires, and guards, and most
of them were brought back. Sometimes the corpse of an escaped prisoner
was propped up on a chair with a sign reading, “I am here again [Ich bin
mcdtr da]'*r Only a handful made good their escape.
In two of the smaller camps, Trcblinka and Sobibor, the unexpected
happened. Unlike Auschwitz, which had a very large inmate population,
Treblinka kept only a few work parties (all Jews) for maintenance and
other purposes. The inmate-guard ratio in Auschwitz during 1943-44
ranged from about 20:1 to 35:1. In Treblinka, for about 700 inmates
within the square-mile enclosure, there was no possibility of hiding, no
opportunity to elude eventual death. In 1943, when the frequency of
transports was declining, every prisoner had to ask himself when his time
would come.
The breakout plan at Treblinka was simple. A locksmith made a dupli­
cate kev to the arsenal, and a former captain of the Polish army. Dr. Julian
Chorazvcki, worked out the escape plan. He was killed just before the
coup was to have taken place, but several others, two of diem former
officers of the Czechoslovak army, continued die preparations. On Au­
gust 2, 1943, a very warm dav when a part of the guard force had left to
bathe in the Bug River, twenty' hand grenades, twenty' rifles, and several
revolvers were secretly removed from the arsenal. The revolt was to begin
just before sundown to give those who could reach the countryside the
cover of darkness. It was launched at 3:45 p.m. The guards were rushed,
the barracks, garages, and warehouses were set on fire. Shots were ex­
changed for about half an hour, as large areas of the camp, but not the gas
chambers, were burning. About 150 to 200 men got out, to be hunted
down one by one. Perhaps sixty' or seventy survived.98 Among the guards,

96. Pohl to Himmler, April 5, 1944, NO-21.


97. RudolfVbra and Alan Bcsric, /Cannot Forgive (New York, 1964), p. 204. Irina
Bundzewicz, “Kostck,” Hcffe von Auschwitz 11 (1970): 149-82, on p. 182. The
practice originated at Dachau. Hoss, Kommandant, p. 87.
98. Samuel Rajzman, “Uprising in Treblinka,” Hearings before the House Committee
mi Foreign Affairs, 79th Cong., 1st sess., on H. J. Res. 93 (punishment of war crimi­
nals), March 25-26,1945, pp. 120-25. Yankcl Wiemik in Schwarz, The Root and the

ORGANIZATION, PERSONNEL, AND MAINTENANCE


two Ukrainians were killed, but there were no German casualties.'^ The I
camp continued to operate, and in the course of that very month more
transports arrived from Bialvstok.99 100
The Sobibor revolt, by some 300 inmates, was an almost exact duplica­
tion of the Treblinka break. The battle took place in the late afternoon of
October 14, 1943. It was organized by a young Soviet officer, Alexander
Pechersky, who had been incarcerated in the Minsk Ghetto and who had
arrived in Sobibor with a transport from that ghetto in September. Ob­
serving the terrain and the manner in which the camp was guarded,
Pechersky noted such details as the passing of five rounds of ammunition
to each guard. On the day of the break some of the Germans were lured
into barracks and assaulted with axes and clubs. One German sounded
the alarm. Seizing weapons, the Jews rushed to the barbed wire and,
under fire from elevated guard posts, broke through, creating a path
through exploding mines. Two hundred were killed. In the compound,
nine SS men, including deputy commander Untersturmführer Niemann,
and two Ethnic Germans lay dead. That night, reinforcements from the
army and the Schutzpolizei were stationed at the perimeter, and a Kom­
mando, dispatched by the KdS from Chelm, combed through the bar­
racks even while Jews trapped inside were still shooting. Of those who
broke out, more than fifty were shot by the pursuers and fort)' or fifty
were still alive at the end of the war.101

Bough, pp. 119-21. Both Rajzman and Wiernik were in this break. Sec also other
accounts in Alexander Donat, cd., The Death Camp Treblinka (New York, 1979), and
recollections recorded by Scrcny, Into That Darkness, pp. 210-50. Donat published a
list of survivors on pp. 284-91. For an analysis of the Treblinka revolt, see Yitzhak
Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka (Bloomington, Ind., 1987), pp. 270-98.
99. Statements by Franz Rum, October 12-13, 1960, and Franz Suchomcl,
October 24-25,1960. Treblinka case, pp. 1311-33 and 1403-6.
100. Scrcny, Into That Darkness, p. 249. Reichsbahndircktion Königsbcrg/33 to
stations from Bialvstok to Treblinka, August 17, 1943, Zentrale Stelle der Landes-
justizvcrwaltungen in Ludwigsburg, Polen 162, film 6, frame 194.
101. KdO Lublin/Ia to BdO Generalgouvernement, October 15,16,20, 25, and
31, 1943. U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives Record Group 11.001 (Cen­
ter of Documentary Historical Collections, Moscow), Roll 82, Fond 1323, Opis 2,
Folder 339. Situation report, Wehrkreiskommando Gencralgouvcmemcnt/Ia, for
October 11-20, 1943, dated October 23, 1943, facsimile in Stanislaw Wronski and
Maria Zwolakowa, cds., Polacy Zydzi 1939-1945 (Warsaw, 1971), p. 214. Grenz­
polizeikommissariat Cholm of KdS Lublin (signed Ustuf. Benda), March 17, 1944,
recommending badges for himself and six others, facsimile in Miriam Novirch, ed.,
Sobibor (New York, 1980), pp. 166-67. Account by Pechersky, ibtd., pp. 89-99.
Statement by Franz Wolf (German cadre at Sobibor), June 14, 1962, Sobibor trial
before a Hagen court, 45 Js 27/61, vol. 7, pp. 1326-71. Statement by Hans Wagner
(Commander of army’s Sichcrungsbattailon 689 stationed at Chelm, October 21,
1960, Sobibor case, vol. 3, pp. 559-80. From the statements of Wolf and Wagner, it

KILLING CBNTBR OPERATIONS


LABOR UTILIZATION
The primary reason for keeping up an inmate population was labor utili­
zation, although the use of Jews for construction projects, maintenance,
or industry was merely an intermediär}' step to be followed by killing. As
in the case of the mobile killing operations in the East, the Jews were to be
granted only a respite, or, in the ponderous words of Pohl, “Employable
Jews who are migrating to the East will have to interrupt their journey
and work in war industry [Die fiir die Ostwandemng bestimmten arbeits­
fähigen Juden werden also ihre Reise unterbrechen und Rüstungsarbeiten
leisten müssen]'''
Unlike the respite granted to the Jews in the occupied eastern territo­
ries, the postponement of killings in the camps was occasioned and de­
sired entirely by the SS. Those among the doomed Jews who were strong
enough to do some work were to donate their remaining lives to the end
that the SS might develop an industrial base and exercise economic
power. “Major economic tasks will be faced by the concentration camps
in the next few weeks,” wrote Himmler to Glücks on January 25,1942, as
he requested him to prepare for the reception of“ 100,000 male Jews and
up to 50,000 Jewesses.”2
The one circumstance that enabled die SS to undertake any major tasks
at all was its supply of labor at a time when that supply began to grow
short in Europe. It is one of the ironies of the destruction process that the
labor gap that the SS now proposed to till had been created in the first
place by the removal of a sizable working force in the name of the “final
solution of the Jewish question in Europe.” In fact, the SS had a little
trouble fulfilling its promise, for the camp officials were poor caretakers of
the manpower in their custody. The newly arrived transports were han­
dled in an extremely careless manner. At times of labor shortages in
Auschwitz, the camp doctor would often send almost an entire transport
to the gas chamber. Such happenings infuriated the authorities in charge
of camp labor allocation, WVHA D-II Chief Standartenführer Maurer
and his assistant, Sommer. Two instances may be cited.
On January' 27, 1943, Sommer informed Höss that 5,000 Jews from
Theresienstadt were being sent to Auschwitz. He requested that the

appears that of twenty-nine Germans posted at Sobibor in October 1943, twelve were
on furlough. Wagner asserts that troops were committed to the perimeter upon ex­
plicit telephonic orders ot General Moser (Oberfeldkommandant) and Wchrkrcis-
befehlshabcr Haenickc. See also descriptions of the revolt in the Sobibor trial judg­
ment at Hagen ( 1966), 11 Ks 1/64, repnxluced by Riickerl in NS-Vcmichtutufslaqer,
pp. 194-97, and by Arad, Relzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, pp. 299-348.
1. Pohl to Himmler, September 16, 1942, NI-15392.
2. Himmler to Glücks, January 25, 1942, NO-500.

LABOR UTILIZATION
prospective workers among them be selected “carefully” {sorgfältig zu er­
fassen) because they were needed by the construction department at
Auschwitz and by the I. G. Farben Works there. After some delay, Schwarz
sent the following statistical reply. Out of 5,022 Theresienstadt Jews,
4,092 had been gassed {gesondert untergebracht). The men had been t(x>
“frail” {gebrechlich); the women were mostly children.3
On March 3,1943, Maurer announced that transports of skilled Jewish
workers were beginning to roll from Berlin. He reminded Höss that these
workers had been employed in war industry; they were consequentl)'
employable in the camp. The I. G. Farben Company was to fill its needs
from these transports. To make sure that the selections would be made
more carefully this time, Maurer suggested that the trains be unloaded
“not in the usual place” (at the crematorium) but, more suitably (:zweck­
mässigerweise), near the I. G. Farben plant.4 Two days later, Obersturm­
führer Schwarz made his reply, adopting a gruff tone. A total of 1,750 Jews
had arrived from Berlin; 632 were men, the rest women and children. The
average age of men selected for work was between fifty and sixty. Of the
1,118 women and children, 918 had to be subjected to “special treatment”
(SB). “If the transports from Berlin continue to have so many women and
children as well as old Jews,” he wrote, “I don’t promise myself much in the
matter of labor allocation.” The following four transports did not fare
much better (2,398 killed, 1,689 saved for industry).5
While the camp administration was woefully inefficient in making selec­
tions, it was, as already noted, even more lethargic and incapable in its task
of keeping prisoners alive. The camp labor supply was like water in a barrel
with a big hole in the bottom. Transports had to come continuously. If the
flow stopped for any reason, the camp labor supply would run dan­
gerously low, as it did in July 1943, when the Auschwitz administration
scurried to Lublin in order to borrow some inmates. But in spite of this
system, a labor supply was gradually built up.6

3. Sommer to Kommandant Auschwitz, January 27,1943, Dokumenty i materiah,


vol. 1, pp. 115-17. Schwarz to WVHA D-II, February 20,1943, ibid.
4. Maurer to Höss, March 3,1943, ibid., p. 108.
5. Schwarz to WVHA D-II, March 5, 1943, ibid., pp. 108-10, 117. Schwarz to
WVHA D-II, March 8,1943, ibid. Schwarz to WVHA-D, March 15,1943, ibid.
6. The following statistics are a compilation of WVHA camp reports showing
registered arrivals and departures during the period of Junc-Novembcr 1942. Since
the totals were calculated by adding the figures furnished by the individual camps,
intercamp transfers show up in the arrivals and departures:
Arrivals totaled 136,780, including 109,861 new arrivals (“deliveries”) and 26,919
transfers.
“Departures” were 112,434, broken down inro4,711 discharges, 27,846 transfers,
70,610 deaths, and 9,267 executions.
These figures show a net gain of 24,346 in six months. Alarmed, (.¡lucks sent the

984 KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


Not all inmates were available for industrial purposes. In the spring
of 1943 the 160,000 prisoners of the WVHA camps were allocated as
follows:7
Camp maintenance: 15 percent
Industry': 63 percent
Unable to work: 22 percent
As a matter of fact, the percentages are misleading. They were given by
Himmler to Speer. More accurately, the breakdown would look like this:
Camp maintenance: 15 percent
WVHA-C (construction)
YWHA-W (SS enterprises) ’ 63 percent
Private employers
Unable to work: 22 percent
In this column the first three were SS employers, and only the fourth
represented war industry', strictly speaking.
Economically' and administratively the four employer groups were not
in identical positions. The camp administration did not have to apply for
allocation and did not have to pay tor labor. Kammler, the SS industries,
and the private plants obtained labor by applying for it in Maurers office
(D-II). The camp administrators and Kammler did not have to pay for
their workers. The SS industries and private firms made payments to the
Reich (see Table 9-11).
All employed inmates were organized in work parties (Kommandos)
and were placed under the supervision of inmates (Oberkapos, Kapos,
and Vorarbeiter). There were two types of maintenance Kommandos,
reflecting the dual purpose of the killing center: those engaged in ordi­
nary' maintenance tasks (kitchen personnel, sick-bay attendants, latrine
cleaners, electricians, plumbers, etc.) and those involved in the killing
operations (the Tmnsportkommandos, which cleaned up the freight cars
after unloading; the Kommandos in the Effektenkammn; which sorted
valuables; and, most important, the SoncUrkotnmandos, which worked in
the crematoria).8 Besides the camp itself, there were two other SS em­
ployers: Amtsgruppe C and the SS industries.

statistics ro the camp dextors, pointing our that “with such a large death rate the
number of inmates can never be brought up ro the figure ordered by the Reichs-
fiihrer-SSr and directing the doctors to pay closer attention to food distribution and
working conditions. WVHA D-III (signed Glucks) to camp commanders, Decem­
ber 28, 1942, PS-2171.
7. Himmler to Speer, June 1943, Himmler Files, Folder 67. The percentages refer
ro March 31, 1943. In the beginning of 1945 (470,000 inmates), the percentages
were approximately 9, 74, and 17. Affidavit by Pohl, May 21, 1947, NO-2570.
8. For breakdowns with statistics, sec report by KL Auschwitz II on labor alloca-

LABOR UTILIZATION 985


The chief of Amtsgruppe C, Kammler, was the builder of concentration t
camps and concentration camp installations. In Auschwitz alone, during ;
1942 and 1943, he used an average of about 8,000 inmates per day.9
In the labor camps set up by Himmler during the deportation of the
Polish Jews, the SS industries produced such items as brushes, baskets,
and wooden shoes. Their contribution to the war effort in the concentra­
tion camps was of the same order. Because of its limited financial re­
sources (capital investment, RM 32,000,000), the SS combine had to
confine itself to production that did not require great capital outlays and
that was suited to exploitation of slave labor. Table 9-12 is a brief outline
of the SS industry network in the killing centers.
The SS industries enjoyed excellent relations with the camp admin­
istrators and the SS and Police Leaders. In an atmosphere of cooperation
and good will, they grew to a respectable size. For example, Sturmbann­
führer Mummenthey (DEST) reported that the gravel works in Treblinka
were doing well. The fact that Treblinka was not under the jurisdiction of
Amtsgruppe D was no disadvantage.10 The DAW in Lublin obtained a
loan of 71,000 zloty from Brigadefuhrer Globocnik, and the camp com­
mander (Koch) agreed to feed the DAW employees for the sum total of
0.30 Reichsmark per person per day.11 In Auschwitz the DAW received
the patronizing attention of Höss. From the Bauleitung it acquired two
workshops and orders for doors and windows to be fitted into the gas
chambers.12 In such ways the SS enterprises were soon able to take on
several thousand inmate laborers.
A special enterprise was ordered by Himmler for Sobibor. This camp
was set aside for the disassembly of captured ammunition in order to
salvage the metals and explosives. The enterprise was not going to be
incorporated into the WVHA industry network, inasmuch as it was des­
ignated to work for the SS-Fiihrungshauptamt exclusively.13 In the end,
the projected plant was dropped altogether.

tion, May 11, 1944, Dokumenty i materiaiy, vol. 1, pp. 100-105. Sec also Samuel
Rajzman, “Uprising in Treblinka,” Hearings before the House Committee on Foreign
Affairs, 79rh Cong., 1st scss., on H. J. Res. 93 (punishment of war criminals),
March 25-26, 1945, pp. 120-25. Kommandos had different names in different
camps. They were also organized somewhat differently in every camp.
9. Jan Schn, “Concentration and Extermination Camp at Oswiycim,” Central
Commission for Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, German Crimes in Polatui
(Warsaw, 1946-1947), vol. l,pp. 30-31.
10. Mummenthey to Pohl, June 28, 1943, NO-1031. He referred to Treblinka I.
11. Report by HStuf. May (W-IV), June 11, 1942, NO-1216.
12. Ibid.
13. Himmler to WVHA, Fiihrungshauptamt, Higher SS and Police I cadets GG,
Osrland, Ukraine, Russia Center, SS and Police leader Lublin, and Chief of Anti-
Partisan Units, July 5, 1943, NO-482.

986 KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


TABLE 9-11
CAMP LABOR ADMINISTRATION

ALLOCATION PAYMENT FOR


BY MAURER INMATES

Camp Administration
Amtsgruppe C X
Amtsgruppe D X X
Private Industry X X

TABLE 9-12
SS INDUSTRY IN THE KILLING CENTERS

OFFICE ENTERPRISE MANAGER ESTABLISHMENTS

WVHAW-I Earth and stones OStubaf. Gravel works in


(DEST) Mummen the}' Auschwitz and
Treblinka I (also granite
works in Mauthausen,
diamond cutting in
Herzogenbusch )
VVVHA W-II Cement OStubaf. Cement works in
Bobermin Lublin
WVHA W-III Food products HSruf. Auschwitz,
Rabeneck Lublin
WVHA YV-IV Wood products HStuf. Auschwitz,
(DAW) Opperbeck Lublin

Note: Organization chart of SS industries, September 30, 1944, NO-2116. Wage chart
of SS industries, April 1,1944, NO-653. The granite works in Mauthausen utilized the
1,000 Dutch lew s w ho w ere deported there in 1941, and Dutch Jews w ere also em­
ployed at Herzogenbusch. Most of the SS plants w ere in ordinary labor and concentra­
tion camps, not show n above. Treblinka 1 w as the labor camp.

The Jewish inmates working for their SS employers did not last long.
The SS insisted on great tempo. Potatoes had to be unloaded at a run,14
and wheelbarrows filled with gravel had to be pushed up steep slopes at a
trot.IS For those who could not keep up, there was only quick death.

14. Schn, “Oswiycim” German Crimes in Poland, vol. 1, p. 53.


15. War Refugee Board, “Auschwitz-Birkenau,” Polish major's report, p. 12.

LABOR UTILIZATION 987


Unlike the SS, private firms moved into the concentration camps with
large capital and made them a factor in war production. For a long time
the SS attempted to lure industry' into the camps. As early as 1935,1. G.
Farben officials visited Dachau,16 but the invitation did not turn out to be
successful. While camp labor was certainly cheap (in the beginning the
price was one Reichsmark per inmate per day), its employment was cou­
pled with drawbacks. To begin with, a plant had to be built within a
camp, or the camp had to be extended to cover the plant. There had to be
enough labor in the camp to justify the construction of a work hall or
building. Key labor and, to some extent, skilled labor had to be brought
in by the firm. Even if all these requirements were met, the concentration
camp routine was not attuned to promote labor efficiency, and for a long
time Himmler was unable to find any clients. The SS obtained its first
major customer only after the disadvantages of camp operation were
outweighed by a few special inducements. The first company to move in
on a big scale was I. G. Farben.17
The I. G. was not merely a leading industrial company but a large
bureaucratic apparatus and a noticeable element of the destructive ma­
chine. At first it participated in the dismissals of Jewish employees and the
spread of Aryanizations. Now it was to play a major role in the expansion
and operation of Auschwitz. Its decision making in the course of this
fateful involvement was embedded in an elaborate managerial structure.
In the conventional scheme, stockholders elected the Aufsichtsrat,
which in turn elected the Vorstand, and these elective offices were the
focal points of power. In the I. G., the Aufsichtsrat and Vorstand were
mere outer trappings. Membership in these bodies without a position in a
committee, a plant combination, or the central administration meant
little. The nominal head of the company, Vorstand chairman Hermann
Schmitz, held no bureaucratic position. He appears to have been a virtual
rubber stamp. The Vorstand (eighty-four members to 1937, twenty-
seven after 1937) was an unwieldy body with perfunctory' activities. It
accepted all policy recommendations presented for its approval. The still
larger and even more perfunctory Aufsichtsrat met three or four times a
year to receive reports from the Vorstand.18 There is no need to discuss
the stockholders.
The organization of I. G. Farben was bewilderingly complex. In a

16. Affidavit by Hbss, May 17,1946, NI-34.


17. For the role of I. G. Farben, sec Peter Haves, Industry and Ideology (Cam­
bridge, England, 1987), and Bemd C. Wagner, I Cl Auschwitz (Munich, 2000).
18. Affidavit by Dr. Fritz Ter Mecr, April 29, 1947, NI-5184. Affidavit bv Dr.
August von Knierim, April 15, 1947, NI-6173. Ter Meer's position w ill lx* show n
below ; von Knierim was legal chief.

KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


simplified and abbreviated picture, the hierarchy can be divided into three
parts: the top echelon, the plants, and the central services.
The top echelon, or policy-making part of the organization, was not one
office with one man at its head. In a Führer state, the I. G. had no Führer.
Instead, it had three separate centers of direction: the Krauch office, the
TEA, and the KA. Krauch was not even a part of the I. G. He was a high
I. G. Farben official until 1940 only. Then he became General Plenipoten­
tiary' tor Special Questions of Chemical Production in the Office of the
Four-Year Plan without relinquishing his I. G. Farben salary'.19 From his
new office, Krauch guided the expansion of the entire chemical industry.
The TEA (Technischer Ausschuss, or Technical Committee), headed by
Dr. Fritz Ter Meer, concerned itself with production: scientific questions,
raw material, production methods, plant expansion, and so on. The TEA
was at the apex of a large number of commissions that dealt with individ­
ual problems:20

TEA-------------- — TEKO
Dr. Fritz Ter Meer, chairman (Technical
Dr. Ernst A. Struss, secretary Commission)

Several dozen commissions Five


dealing with specialized engineering
production questions commissions
The KA {Kanfrncinniscber Aussebuss, or Commercial Committee), un­
der Dr. Georg von Schnitzler, dealt with commercial problems: market­
ing, sales, prices, taxes, and so on. It was placed over the sales combines
(see Table 9-13).
The top policy-making echelon thus consisted of a triumvirate: Krauch
(expansion), Ter Meer (production), and Schnitzler (marketing and fi­
nancial aspects).
The second part of the I. G. Farben machinery' was its plant organiza­
tion. We have said that the I. G. was a true industrial empire. It had more
plants (fitty'-six) than Pohl had concentration camps, and its production
spanned the entire chemical field. The plants were arranged into three
divisions (Sparten), according to production specialization, and into
work combines (Bctriebsjjemeinschaften), grouped territorially'. Table 9-14
shows the divisions, work combines, main plants, and a few of the other
plants to which we shall have to refer.
The third component ol the I. G. consisted of the central service
departments, divided into the Berlin and Frankfurt offices. “I. G. Berlin,”

19. Interrogation of Dr. Ernst A. Struss, April 26, 1947, Nl-11109.


20. Affidavit by 1er Meer, April 29, 1947, NI-5184.

LABOR UTILIZATION 989


TABLE 9-13
KA MACHINERY

KA PROKO
Dr. Georg von Schnitzler (Propaganda
Commission)

Sales combines Sales combines Sales combines


Division I Division II Division III
(nitrogen and (chemicals, (films and
gasoline) dyes, nylon)
light metals,
pharmaceuticals)

Stickstoff Syndicate Bayer

Note: Affidavit by Dr. Günther Frank-Fahle, June 10,1947, NI-5169. Affiant was a
member of the KA.

headed by Dr. Max Ilgner, took care of such diverse but important mat­
ters as personnel, protocol, legal problems, press, export, and political
economy.21 Frankfurt was the headquarters of commercial services, in­
cluding the central bookkeeping and central insurance departments, the
customer index, and so on.22
The I. G. hierarchy—committees, plants, and central administration —
was a headless colossus, running like an autonomous machine that some­
one had once set into motion and that drove on relendessly to keep pro­
ducing and expanding. In this context, the I. G.’s presence in Auschwitz
can be traced not to a desire to kill Jews or to work them to death but to a
complicated manufacturing problem: the production of synthetic rubber
(Buna).
Before the war the I. G. built two Buna plants: Buna I at Schkopau in
1936 and Buna II at Hüls in 1938.23 On November 2,1940,1. G. Farben
officials met with Unterstaatssekretär von Hanneken of the Economy
Ministry and decided to step up the production of synthetic rubber.24
Accordingly, it was decided to build Buna III at Ludwigshafen. The

21. For chart, see affidavit by Ilgner, April 30,1947, NI-6544.


22. Affidavit by Frank-Fahle, June 10,1947, NI-5169.
23. Affidavit by Struss, July 6, 1947, NI-10029.
24. The goal was 150,000 metric tons. Memorandum by Ter Meer, February 10,
1941, NI-11112.

KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


Ludwigshafen plant did not suffice to bring production to the required
level, and the planners consequently considered two alternatives: enlarg­
ing the Hiils plant from 40,000 metric tons to 60,000 metric tons or
construction of another plant with a capacity of 25,000 metric tons. The
new plant could be constructed in Norway or at Auschwitz.
From the beginning, the Economy Ministry pushed the Auschwitz
sire. There was at that time a great interest in making the incorporated
territories a part of Germany, not only administratively but also econom-
icallv and demographically. On December 11, 1940, an inducement was
ottered to that end in the form of a decree which tendered tax exemptions
to companies building plants in the incorporated areas.25 On February 6,
1941, the final decisions were made. Three conferences were held on that
day. In one meeting Ministerialdirigent Mulert of the Economy Ministry
vetoed Norway. In another Ministerialrat Romer promised, subject to
the approval of the price commissar, that the saving of 60,000,000
Reichsmark which could be made by expanding Buna II in preference to
the construction of the new plant was partially going to be covered by
maintaining rubber prices at their current high level. In the third con­
ference Ter Mecr and the deputy chief of the main plant at Ludwigshafen,
Dr. Otto Ambros, candidly talked over with Krauch the advantages and
disadvantages of Auschwitz.
Ambros brought out the facts that Auschwitz had good water, coal,
and lime supplies. Communications were also adequate. Disadvantages
were the lack of skilled labor in the area and the disinclination of German
workers to live there.26 These remaining difficulties were soon removed.
Krauch suggested to Goring that Himmler give a helping hand, and on
February 26, 1941, Himmler ordered that the town of Auschwitz be
cleared entirely of the civilian population to make room for the I. G.
construction workers. Poles could remain if employable by the I. G. In
addition, all available skilled labor in the Auschwitz camp was at the
disposal of the new enterprise.27
On March 19 and April 24,1941, the TEA decided upon the details of
Auschwitz production. There were to be two plants: a synthetic rubber
plant (Buna IV) and an acetic acid plant. The TEA suggestions were
accepted by the Vorstand on April 25, 1941.281. G. Auschwitz was on the
map (see Table 9-15).

25. RGBII, 1505.


26. Memoranda by Ter Meer, summarizing all rhree conferences, February 10,
1941, NI-1 111 1-3.
27. Goring to I^ibor Ministry, February 18, 1941, NG-1587. Krauch office
(signed Wirth) to 1. G. Farben, March 4, 1941, enclosing Himmler order of Febru­
ary 16, 1941, NI-11086.
28. Summary of 25th Vorstand meeting, April 25, 1941, NI-8078.

LABOR UTILIZATION
Division I Division II Division III
Dr. Christian Schneider Dr. Fritz Ter Meer Dr. Fritz Gajewski
Nitrogen and gasoline Chemicals, dyes, light metals, pharmaceuticals Films and nylon
Dr. Biitefisch Work Combine Work Combine Work Combine Work Combine
Upper Rhine Main Lower Rhine Central Germany
Dr. Wurster Dr. Lautenschläger Dr. Kühne Dr. Bürgin
LEUNA" OPPAU1 LUDWIGSHAFEN1 HÖCHST LEVERKUSEN BITTEREELD1 WOLFEN FILM"
Dr. von Staden Dr. Müller- Dr. Wurster Dr. Lautenschläger Dr. Haberland Dr. Bürgin Dr. Gajewski
Cunradi Deputy, Deputy, Jähne Deputy, Dr. Deputy,
Dr. Ambros Brüggemann Dr. Kleine
AUSCHWITZ HEYDEBRECK BUNA I UERDINGEN
Dr. Dürrfcld Dr. Sönsken (SCHKOPAU) Dr. Haberland
Division 1, Dr. Wulff
Dr. Braus
BUNA II
(HÜLS)
Dr. Hoffmann
BUNA III
(LUDWIGSHAFEN)
Niemann
BUNA IV
(AUSCHWITZ)
Dr. Dürrfeld
Division II,
Dr. Eisfeld
DYHERNFURTH
Palm
TABLE 9-15
THE I. G. AUSCHWITZ ADMINISTRATION

Chief, construction
commission:
Ing. Max Faust
Chief, I. G. Auschwitz: Personnel chief:
Dr. Walter Dürrfeld Dr. Martin Rossbach

Housing:
Paul Reinhold

Chief, Chief,
Division I Division II
(acetic acid) (synthetic rubber)
Dr. Karl Braus Dr. Kurt Eisfeld

The investment in Auschwitz was initially over RM 500,000,000,


ultimately over RM 700,000,000.29 The central I. G. construction de­
partment at Ludwigshafen (Ing. Camill Santo) established a branch at
Auschwitz (under Ing. Max Faust) analogous to the SS setup (Kammler-
Bischoff).30 About 170 contractors were put to work.31 The plant was set
up, roads were built, barracks were constructed for the inmates, barbed
wire was strung for “factory pacification” (Fabrikeinfriedunjj) ,32 and, after
the town of Auschwitz was flooded with I. G. personnel, two company
villages were built.33 To make sure that I. G. Auschwitz would have all the
necessary building materials, Krauch patronizingly ordered that Buna
enjoy first priority (Dringlichkeitsstufe I) until completion.34 Spreading

29. Interrogation of Struss, April 16, 1947, NI-11109.


30. Affidavit by Santo, November 21, 1947, Diirrfcld-882. Affidavit by Gustav
Murr (Deputy of Faust), November 3,1947, Diirrfcld-853. In 1942 the Speer minis­
try formed an Amt fur Riistungsausbau (Office for Expansion of War Plants), which
henceforth supervised a good part of the construction work. Affidavit by Murr,
November 3, 1947, Diirrfcld-853.
31. Affidavit by Murr, November 3, 1947, Diirrfcld-853. Affidavit by Faust,
December 11, 1947, Diirrfcld-961.
32. I. G. Auschwitz to Technical Commission (TEKO) requesting credits, No­
vember 28, 1942, and November 13,1944, NI-9110.
33. On housing shortage, see report by Faust for August 17-23, 1941, NI-15254.
The two company villages were at Dwoiy. Affidavit by Murr, November 3, 194“,
Diirrfeld-853.
34. Korncr and SrefHcr to Speer and Milch, June 27, 1943, NOKW-307.

KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


out, I. G. Auschwitz acquired its coal base, the Fiirstengrube and Janina-
grube. Both mines were filled with Jewish inmates.35
From the start there was complete cooperation between the I. G. and
the SS. The two organizations complemented each other in Auschwitz.
While the I. G. built the barracks, the SS supplied the “furnishings”
(bunks).36 The SS provided the guards, and the I. G. added its Wcrkschutz
(“factory police”).37 The I. G. requested punishments for inmates who
violated its rules, and the SS administered the punishments.38 The SS fed
the inmates with a standard Auschwitz diet, and the I. G. added some
“Buna soup” to ensure work output.39 Social relations were also friendly.
Even’ once in a while Hoss would invite Dr. and Mrs. Diirrfeld or Dr. and
Mrs. Eisfeld to his home near the camp.40 But the I. G. involvement went
even further than administrative cooperation and friendly social relations.
The I. G. adopted in its factory the methods and the mentality of the SS.
Far from enjoying any protection because of their employment in
Buna, the inmates were worked to death. Even during the construction
stage the I. G. foremen adopted the SS “work tempo,” as in trotting with
cement.41 One day in 1944 a large group of arriving inmates were greeted
with a speech in which they were told that they were now in the con­
centration camp of the I. G. Farbenindustrie. They had come not in order
to live there but to “perish in concrete.” This welcoming speech referred,
according to a survivor, to an I. G. Farben practice of throwing the
corpses of inmates into ditches that had been dug for cables. Like the
ancient children of Israel, these corpses were then covered as concrete was
poured over them.42
How completely the SS mentality had taken hold even of I. G. Farben
directors is illustrated by the following story. One day, two Buna inmates.
Dr. Raymond van den Straaten and Dr. Fritz Lohner-Beda, were going

35. Affidavit by Giinther Falkenhahn (Fiirstengrube), September 30, 1947,


Nl-12010. Memorandum by Braus, February 2, 1942, NI-12014. Report bv I. G.
Frankfurt/Bookkeeping, September 28, 1944, NI-12015.1. G. Auschwitz to Falken­
hahn, Diirrfeld, Sobel (Fiirstengrube), and Kroger (Janinagrube), July 28, 1943,
NI-12019.
36. 1. G. Auschwitz/Hauptgruppe 2 to Technical Commission (TEKO) request­
ing credits for barracks expansion, November 28, 1942, NI-9110. Affidavit bv
Rudolf Damming (I. G. architect), June 17, 1948, Diirrfeld-102.
37. Interrogation of Diirrfeld, February 24, 1947, NI-11046, pp. 30-33.
38. For typical punishment reports, see documents NI-11000 to NI-11038 and
NI-11040 to NI-11045.
39. Affidavit by Faust, January 16, 1948, Diirrfeld-478.
40. Affidavit by Hoss, May 17, 1946, NI-34.
41. Affidavit by Ervin Schulhof (ex-inmate), June 21, 1947, NI-7967.
42. Affidavit by Dr. Nikolae Nyiszli, October 8, 1947, NI-11710. Affiant, a physi­
cian, was a survivor of Auschwitz III.

LABOR UTILIZATION
about their work when a party of visiting I. G. Farben dignitaries passed
by. One of the directors pointed to Dr. Löhner-Beda and said to his SS
companion, ‘‘This Jewish swine could work a little faster [Diese Judensau
könnte auch rascherarbeiten].” Another director then chanced the remark,
“If they can't work, let them perish in the gas chamber [ Wenn die nicht
mehr arbeiten können, sollen sie in der Gaskammer verrecken].” After the
inspection was over, Dr. Löhner-Beda was pulled out of the work parts'
and was beaten and kicked until, a dying man, he was left in the arms of
his inmate friend, to end his life in I. G. Auschwitz.43
About 35,000 inmates passed through Buna. At least 25,000 died.44
The life expectancy of a Jewish inmate at I. G. Auschwitz was three
or tour months,45 while in the outlying coal mines it was about one
month.46 The I. G., like the SS, had forgotten how to keep its inmates
alive.
The SS was in turn peculiarly influenced by its first customer. In the
WVHA, imaginations were aroused, ambitions were fired, plans were
made. Specifically, the WVHA had two goals in mind. First the I. G.
Farben camp (Auschwitz III) was to be expanded to accommodate more
industry. Next the SS began to think in terms of taking over whole sec­
tions of German industry and turning these plants into a giant network of
concentration camps. On September 15, 1942, a major move was made
toward the realization of these plans. Reichsminister Speer and four of his
top men —Staatsrat Dr. Schieber (honorary SS-Brigadefiihrer), Dipl.
Ing. Saur, Ministerialrat Steffen, and Ministerialrat Dr. Briese —met in
conference with Pohl and Kammler. Two items were on the agenda:

43. Affidavit by van den Straatcn, July 18, 1947, NI-9109. Affiant docs not
identify the I. G. Farben officials who made the remarks but mentions that he saw five
visitors: Dürrfcld, Ambros, Bütefisch, Krauch, and Ter Meer.
44. The 35,000 figure is given in an affidavit by Schulhof, June 21, 1947,
NI-7967. The average number of inmates utilized by the I. G. was about 10,000,
according to Höss. Sec his affidavit of May 17, 1946, NI-34. Ten thousand is the
maximum figure according to Schulhof. In January 1944, the number of inmates
working in I. G. Auschwitz was 5,300. Pohl to Krancfuss (deputy of Krauch),
January 15, 1944, NO-1905. The records of the “hospital” in Auschwitz III show
15,684 entries between June 7, 1943, and June 19, 1944 (not counting 23 illegible
entries). The entries cover 8,244 persons, some having been delivered to the hut
more than once. Eighty-three percent of the sick inmates (about 6,800) were Jews;
632 Jews died in the hospital hut; 1,336 were sent to Birkenau (Auschwitz II) to be
gassed. Affidavit by Karl Hacsclcr (analyst for the defense), April 7, 1948, Diirr-
fcld-1441.
45. Affidavit by Prof. Bcrthold Epstein, March 3, 1947, Nl-5847. Affiant was a
hospital orderly at Buna.
46. Affidavit by Dr. Erich Orlik, June 18, 1947, NI-7966. Affiant w as an inmate
doctor in the Janina mine.

KILLING CBNTBR OPERATIONS


enlargement of the Auschwitz camp in consequence of the “eastern mi­
gration" and “taking over complete armament tasks of major proportions
bv the concentration camps."
There was no difficulty on the first point. Speer approved the acquisi­
tion of building materials (in the amount of RM 13,700,000) to con­
struct 300 barracks with room for 132,000 inmates at Auschwitz. With
regard to the second item, Polil announced that henceforth the SS would
not be concerned with “small stuff” (Klcckerkram) anymore. They were
going to take over a plant only if they could fill it with 5,000 or 10,000 or
even 15,000 inmates. They agreed with Speer that such a plant could not
be built in a concentration camp. As Speer had correctly pointed out, the
plant had to lie on the “green grass." The SS men would therefore propose
that certain establishments not working at full capacity because of the
labor shortage be emptied out. The labor force in these plants would fill
out other plants. The empty factories, however, would be surrounded
with electric wire and filled with inmates, to be run as SS armament plants
(SS-Rüstungsbetriebe).
Of course, the WVHA did not have so many inmates at its disposal.
The RSHA would therefore lend a helping hand by taking Jews out of the
free economy and sending them into concentration camps. Speer agreed
that one could use 50,000 Jews in short order. Saur could name the
plants. Pohl did not trust Saur very much, and to make sure that the
program would really get under way, he ordered his manpower expert,
Obersturmbannführer Maurer (WVHA D-II), to move into the office of
Speer’s manpower expert, Staatsrat Schieber. That, thought Pohl, would
do the trick.47
These dreams did not quite materialize. No plants were handed over. In
December 1942, Himmler wrote to Müller that only Auschwitz needed
labor, and Müller was therefore instructed to send 15,000 Jews to Ausch­
witz during the next month.48 In April of the following year came a blow
from which the SS never recovered. It meant that Himmler could never
establish the industrial empire that he had hoped to achieve with the use of
doomed Jewry.
Speer had made an inspection trip to Mauthausen and had come to the
conclusion that the SS was undertaking constructions which were “ex­
travagant" {grosszügig). In a sharply written letter to Himmler —of the
kind that the Reichsführer very seldom received — he pointed out that he
needed tanks, mineral oil, and submarines very quickly. “Dear Comrade
Himmler, as I see this development, you will not be able to get done with

47. Report on conference by Pohl to Himmler, September 16, 1942, NI-15392.


48. Himmler to Müller, December 17, 1942, Himmler Files, Folder 67.

LABOR UTILIZATION
your plans this year, simply because you will never get the necessary'
building materials.” Therefore, advised Speer, it would be necessary to
proceed along totally different lines. From now on one would have to
apply the principle of Primitivbauweise (“primitive construction”); that is,
the inmates working with practically no tools and no expensive materials
would have to accomplish the greatest possible results by labor alone. All
allocations of materials for construction would have to be reviewed.49
This letter meant that Speer was backing out of point one of the agree­
ment, with all that that implied for point two. Pohl was incensed. Writ­
ing to Himmler’s personal Referent, Obersturmbannführer Brandt, he
voiced the opinion that Speer’s letter was “actually a pretty strong piece
[eigentlich ein recht starkes Stück]” but since he had forgotten the art of
being astonished, he merely wished to point out that Speer had already
given preliminary approval for the construction in the camps and cer­
tainly could have consulted Schieber about labor utilization. Finally, Pohl
came to the most vexing point. He had been accused by implication of
treating inmates too mildly, of not driving out of them their last ounce of
strength. Did Speer realize, he asked, how many deaths there were in the
concentration camps? Did he realize the tremendous rise in mortality' that
“primitive methods” would occasion?50 While Pohl was deeply mortified,
Himmler was on the defensive too. Painstakingly he counted up the 2,200
metric tons of steel that had been made available for Auschwitz, broke
down the inmate labor supply in percentages to show that 67 percent were
working in armaments, and pointed out that the type of construction work
going on now fully satisfied the label Primitivbauweise.51
Appeased, Speer replied in a more friendly tone that his ideas about
primitive construction had already been recognized (Verständnis ent­
gegengebracht), but in the next sentence confounded Himmler by point­
ing out a remaining difficulty. The inmates were dropping dead too fast,
particularly in Auschwitz. Something would have to be done to remove
at least the worst conditions.52
The SS was now pretty much restricted to Auschwitz. In this killing cen­
ter, however, several big firms joined I. G. Farben. On March 5,1943, the
Krupp fuse plant in Essen was bombed out,53 and by March 17 plans were
laid to move the remaining machinery to Auschwitz. At the same time, an
enterprising Krupp official, Hölkeskamp, grabbed 500 Jew ish workers
from two Berlin firms, Krone-Presswerk and Graetz. These Jews were
promptly deported to Auschwitz and made available to Krupp through
49. Speer to Himmler, April 5, 1943, Himmler Files, Folder 67.
50. Pohl to Brandt, April 19, 1943, Himmler Files, Folder 67.
51. Himmler to Speer, June, 1943, Himmler Files, Folder 67.
52. Speer to Himmler, June 10, 1943, Himmler Files, Folder 67.
53. Affidavit bv Finch Luthal (Krupp employee), September 24, 194", NI-116~4.

KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


the courtesy of Obersturmführer Sommer of WVHA D-II.54 But then the
industrialists had concerns about the retention of their labor. Thus a
representative of the Special Committee Munitions asked the following
question during a Krupp conference in Auschwitz: What if political or
police necessities resulted in a ‘■‘withdrawal” of trained inmates or, for that
matter, all inmates? Hauptsturmführer Schwarz immediately assured him
that such an outcome was unlikely.55 By the time fuse production was to
get under way,56 another firm, the “Union” Metallindustrie, which had
had to retreat from Ukraine, took over the plant.57 Besides Krupp, the
ubiquitous Hermann Goring Works (coal mines), Siemens-Schuckert,
and a number of other firms drew upon the inmate resources of Auschwitz
III, setting up satellite camps for miles around.58 The average number of
inmates used by these firms was about 40,000.59
With so many new patrons competing for Auschwitz labor, the SS did
not forget its original customer. In 1943 Pohl, Glücks, Frank, and Maurer
came to visit the Buna works and promised the I. G. Farben representa­
tives that I. G. Auschwitz would enjoy priority over other firms in the
allocation of inmates.60 But early in 1944 the situation became tight. Pohl
wrote to Krauch's deputy Kranefuss that he could not furnish any more
laborers. After all, the chemical industry had already gotten more than its
fair share.61 Though the price of a skilled inmate had risen from about 1.5
Reichsmark in 1941 to 5 Reichsmark in 1944,62 labor had become so
scarce that a stria and complicated system of allocation had to be worked
out. Each firm had to make its request in triplicate forms to the Speer
Ministry (Major von den Osten). The forms were checked with labor
offices to present double requests for inmates and free labor, and, if
everything was found to be in order, Sauckel would be consulted to
54. Memorandum by Hölkeskamp, March 17, 1943, NI-2911.
55. Memorandum by USruf. Kirschncck of the Xcnrralbaulcitung, August 23,
1943, about a meeting attended by Weinhold (Krupp plant director). Colonel War-
tenberg and Captain Schwartz of Armament Inspectorate Vlllb, and Director Wielan
of Special Committee Munitions, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives, Rec­
ord Group 11.001 (Center for Historical Collections, Moscow), Roll 20, Fond 502,
Opis 1, Folder 26. In various documents Kirschneck is spelled also Kirschnek.
56. For specifications, see OKH/Chicf of the Replacement Armv/Wa Chef Ing
Stab IVa to Friedrich Krupp A. G./Auschwitz Works, attention Dr. Janssen, Sep­
tember 22, 1943, Nl-10650.
57. Krupp memorandum (signed Müller), September 20, 1943, NI-12329. Ar­
mament Inspectorate Vlllb Katowice (signed Oberst Hüter), report for Julv-
Scptcmber, 1943, Wi/ID 1.224.
58. Affidavit by Höss, May 17, 1946, NI-34.
59. Ibid. The figure includes manv non-Jews.
60. Ibid.
61. Pohl to Kranefuss, January 15, 1944, NO-1905.
62. Affidavit by Höss, March 12, 1947, NI-4434.

LABOR UTILIZATION
determine whether the allocation was justified. Only after this test had ’
been passed could the requests be sent on to Maurer.6*
In the summer of 1944, when about 425,000 Jews arrived in Ausch­
witz from Hungary, the SS once again had hopes for big business. On
March 1, Speer and Milch had formed the Jagerstab (Pursuit Planes Staff),
a coordinating committee that had the job of building aircraft factories in
huge bunkers. The following were some of the chief personalities:63 64
Speer, chairman
Milch, cochairman
Saur, Speer’s deputy
Dorsch (Organisation Todt), in charge of construction
Schlempp, deputy of Dorsch
Kammler, special construction
Schmelter (Ministerialdirigent, Central Division Labor Allocation,
Speer ministry), labor procurement
For its building projects the Jagerstab needed about a quarter of a
million construction workers.65 The experts took one look at the labor
supply and decided that Jews would have to be employed. On April 6 and
7, 1944, Saur talked about the problem to Hitler personally, with the
result that Hitler consented as a last resort to die utilization of 100,000
Hungarian Jews who were shordy expected in Auschwitz.66
Before long, however, an old and familiar obstacle emerged. The Hun­
garian transports had relatively few young men, for the Hungarian army
had been drafting Jews into labor battalions that were being retained in
Hungary. On May 24, 1944, Pohl wrote to Himmler that the first trans­
ports seemed to indicate that about half of the physically capable arrivals
were women. Could these women, asked Pohl, be employed in the con­
struction program of the Organisation Todt?67 The reply came quickly:

63. Ministry for Armaments and War Production (Speer) to chairmen of ar­
mament commissions, directors of main committees, industrial rings and pnxluc-
tion committees, Rcichsvcreinigung Eiscn, Sauckcl, and WVHA, October 9, 1944,
NI-638.
64. Affidavit by Fritz Schmelter, December 9,1946, NOKW-372. Interrogation of
Schmelter, November 15, 1946, NOKW-319. Affidavit bv Xaver Dorsch, Decem­
ber 28, 1946, NOKW-447. Interrogation of Milch, October 14, 1946, NOKW-420.
Interrogation of Milch, November 8, 1946, NOKW-421. Summary of Air Ministry
conference, March 31,1944, NOKW-417. Summary'of Jagerstab meeting, March 24,
1944, NOKW-162.
65. Minutes of Jagerstab meeting, May 25,1944, NOKW-349.
66. Summary by Saur of discussions with Hitler, April 9, 1944, R-124. Speer
Ministry' to Jagerstab, April 17, 1944, PS-1584-III. Interrogation of Albert Speer,
October 18, 1945, PS-3720.
67. Pohl to Himmler, May 24, 1944, NO-30.

KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


“My dear Pohl! Of course, the Jewish women are to be employed. One
will have to worry only about good nourishment. Here the important
thing is a supply of raw vegetables. So don’t forget to import plenty of
garlic from Hungary.”68
Speer's labor expert, Schmelter, did not find the situation so funny.
“Until now,” he said in the Jägerstab meeting of May 26, “two transports
have arrived in the SS camp Auschwitz. What was offered for the pursuit
plane constructions were children, women, and old men with whom very
little can be done. If the next transports do not contain some men in the
proper age group,” he warned, “the whole Aktion will fall through.”69
On June 9, Schmelter announced that he could get 10,000 to 20,000
“Hungarian Jewesses.” Was anyone interested? “Excellent!” replied Saur,
“what I experienced at Siemens once with the Jewesses doing electro­
mechanical installations was unique.”70 There were, however, very few
takers, even for the reduced figure of 20,000, since the problems of
guarding and quartering were almost insurmountable. The I. G., Himm­
ler’s most loyal customer, now turned him down.71 Krupp picked out 520
Jewish women to perform heavy labor in its Essen plant, although a
personnel expert had voiced the opinion that the victims were “fine, soft-
boned creatures” who were not suitable for the work.72
In August 1944, the construction company Polcnsky & Zöllner, which
had a project at a Dachau satellite, Waldlager V at Ampfing, to build
secure installations for aircraft production, received more than a thou­
sand Jewish men to perform such tasks as carrying sacks of cement to the
machines mixing concrete. In October, however, the company decided
that the pace of the work was too slow and that the Jewish Kapos did not
push the inmates hard enough. It asked for Aryan Kapos and the SS took
care of the matter.73

68. Himmler ro Pohl, May 27, 1944, NO-30.


69. Minurcs of Jagerstab meeting. May 26, 1944, NOKW-336.
70. Minutes of Jägerstab meeting, June 9, 1944, NG-1593.
71. YVarnecke (I. G. Farben/Leverkusen) to Guenrer (Reich office for economic
construction), June 2, 1944, NI-8969. Summary of I. G. Leverkusen technical con­
ference (Haberland presiding), July 10, 1944, NI-5765.
72. On Krupp employment, see: Affidavit by AdolfTrockel, September 24, 1947,
NI-11676. Affidavit by Johannes Maria Dolhaine, September 18, 1947, NI-11675.
Affidavit by Walter Holkeskamp, September 15, 1947, NI-11679. Affidavit by
Günther Hoppe, October 8, 1945, NI-5787. Affidavit by Hans Kupkc, Septem­
ber 19, 1945, NI-6811. Interrogation of Dr. Wilhelm Jäger, June 6, 1946, NI-5823.
Memorandum by Wilshaus (Krupp Essen Werkschur/), August 28,1944, NI-15364.
Air raid report by Hoppe (camp commander, Jewish women’s compound), Decem­
ber 12, 1944, NI-5785. Affidavit by Anneliese Trockcl, Mav 28, 1947, NI-8947.
73. Organisation T«xlt, Einsatzgruppe Deutschland VI/Oberbauleirung Wein­
gut I to various firms, August 16, 1944; Obcrbauleitung (signed Griesinger) to

LABOS. UTILIZATION 1001


At the end of the war, an entirely different problem arose. Some of the
firms that had no compunction about the use of slave labor in 1944 did
not want to be caught by Allied armies with this work, force on company
premises. Such was the case of the Württembergische Metallwarenfabrik,
which had asked Obergruppenführer Hofmann, Higher SS and Police
Leader in the area of Armeekommando V, to intercede with Pohl for an
allocation of Jewish inmates. Seven hundred Jewish women were sent to
the plant. In March 1945, the director of the company telephoned Hof­
mann with the urgent plea to take the women off his hands because
American troops were closing in. This time Hofmann replied that it was
none of his business and that he could do nothing.74 The Jews were not
returnable.

MEDICAL· EXPERIMENTS
There was another and more sinister utilization of doomed Jews, namely
the medical experiments. Numerically, the use of inmates for experiments
did not approach the dimensions of industrial exploitation, but psycho­
logically the experiments pose a significant problem.
The experiments may be divided into two broad categories. The first
comprised medical research that would be considered usual and normal,
except for the utilization of unwilling subjects, Versuchspersonen, as they
were called. The second was more complex and far-reaching, because it
was conducted neither with ordinary methods nor with ordinary aims.
Both classes of experiments were the product of a single administra­
tive machine, the structure of which is shown in abbreviated form in
Table 9-16.
An experiment was initiated when someone conceived of the possibil­
ity of using inmates to try out a serum, to test a hypothesis, or to solve
some other problem. For instance, the chief of the Air Force Medical
Service was interested in altitude experiments and the revival of half-
frozen pilots shot down over the Atlantic.* 1 Stabsarzt Dr. Dohmen of the
Army Medical Service wanted to do research on jaundice. So far he had
injected healthy animals with virus from jaundiced humans, but now he
wanted to reverse the process and inject humans with virus from diseased
animals.2 The “Bayer” research laboratories of I. G. Farben wanted to test

Concentration Camps I and II of the Mühldorf complex, September 27, 1944; and
Polcnsky & Zöllner to Hauptscharfiihrer Ebcrl, October 20, 1944, with Fberl's
handwritten notation, T 580, Roll 321. Concentration Camp II was Waldlager V.
74. Affidavit by Otto Hofmann, November 30, 1945, NO-2412.
1. Hippkc to Wolff', March 6,1943, NO-262.
2. Grawitz to Himmler, June 1,1943, NO-10.

1002 KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


TABLE 9-16
THE MEDICAL MACHINE OF DESTRUCTION

Plenipotentiary (later Reichskommissar)


for Hygiene and Health:
Dr. Karl Brandt

Chief, Armed Forces Medical Sendee Reichsärzteführer Staatssekretär for Health


Generaloberstabsarzt (party sector) (Interior Ministry)
Dr. Siegfried Handloscr Dr. Leonardo Conti Dr. Leonardo Conti

Deputy
Dr. Kurt Blome
Bsicbsarzt
Chief, Armv Chief, Air Force SS und Polizei: President, Reich Plenipotentiary Division IV
Medical Service Medical Service Gruppenführer Robert Koch Institute for Insane Asylums Health
Generaloberstabsarzt Generaloberstabsarzt Dr. Grawitz for Contagious Diseases (Heil- und Ministerialdirektor
Dr. Handloser Dr. Erich Hippke Dr. Gildemeister Pflegeanstalten): Dr. Cropp
M inisterialdirigent
Dr. Linden IV C
Heredity and Race
Generalarzt Chief, Waffen-SS Chief, Chief, Ministerialdirigent
Dr. Schreiber Medical Semce: Hygienic Institute: hospitals: Dr. Linden
Gruppenführer Oberführer Brigadeflihrer
Dr. Genzken Mrugowsky Dr. Gebhardt
a preparation against typhus. The product existed in two forms, tablet
and granulated, and it seemed that some patients were throwing up the
tablets. The I. G. researchers approached a “friendly insane asylum” to
make experiments, then found themselves in an embarrassing position
because the inmates were unable to tell whether the preparation was less
obnoxious in granulated than in tablet form. The 1. G. thereupon remem­
bered that one of its researchers was now an Obersturmführer in Ausch­
witz and asked him to help out.3 Most interested parties did not adopt the
informal route that I. G. Farben had chosen in this case, but submitted
their requests to Reichsarzt SS and Polizei Grawitz, or to Himmler di­
rectly.
From the beginning Himmler personally took a great interest in these
matters. Experiments fascinated him, and if he became convinced that
the research was of “tremendous importance,” he would go out of his way
to facilitate the administrative arrangements. This patronizing interest
prompted Himmler to order in 1943 that no experiments were to be
started without his express approval.4 In 1944 die procedure became
more elaborate. Henceforth proposals were to be submitted to Grawitz,
who was to transmit them to Himmler with attached advisory opinions
to Gebhardt, Glücks, and Nebe.5 Gebhardt’s opinion was medical, while
Glücks and Nebe advised on the important question of choosing the
victims.
As a rule, doctors asked for permission to use “habitual criminals”6 or
inmates who had been “condemned to death.”7 This formulation was the
result of the doctor’s attempt to make a compromise with his conscience.
A criminal or a man condemned to death, it was reasoned, was certainly
not entitled to more favorable treatment than German soldiers risking
their lives and dying of wounds. However, in the consideration of the
request the SS often added its own notion of criminality, with the conse­
quence that the final choice fell upon “race-defiling Jewish habitual crimi­
nals” (rassenschänderische Beruftverbrecher-Juden) or perhaps “Jewish crim­
inals of the Polish resistance movement who have been condemned to
death.”8
On one occasion the selection of victims became a subject of discussion
from a “racial viewpoint.” The experiment under consideration was the
3. “Bayer” Research Division II (signed König) to Dr. Mertens in the division,
January 19, 1943, NI-12242. Dr. Weber and Dr. König to OSruf. Dr. Vetter in
Auschwitz, January 27, 1943, NI-11417.
4. Pohl to OStubaf. Brandt, August 16, 1943, NO-1610.
5. Order by Himmler, May 15, 1944, NO-919.
6. Rascher to Himmler, May 15, 1941, PS-1602.
7. For instance, Dohmcn. See Grawitz to Himmler, June 1, 1943, NO-10.
8. See Himmler’s authorization for the Dohmen experiments in his letter to
Grawitz, with copy to Pohl, June 16, 1943, NO-11.

KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


conversion of seawater to make it potable. Glucks proposed the utiliza­
tion of Jews, and Nebc countered with “'asocial Gypsy Mischlinge”
(Gypsy affairs were under Nebe’s jurisdiction), while Grawitz suggested
that for racial reasons Gypsies were not suitable for seawater experi­
ments.9
Himmler was interested not only in the initiation of the experiments.
He followed their progress, studied the findings, and occasionally sug­
gested some improvements. Above all, he was the guardian angel of the
doctors, always ready to assume “full responsibility” for their doings and
to deal severely with their critics.
The SS and the participating doctors were ever watchful for undercur­
rents of disapproval in the medical profession. In May 1943, Professor
Handloser, chief medical officer of the Wehrmacht, called the fourth con­
ference of consulting physicians to the armed forces. During the con­
ference Gebhardt rose to introduce the featured speaker. The lecture was
to deal with the transplantation of human bones, and the findings were
based on actual experimentation (removal of bones from Polish women
in Ravensbriick). “I carry,” said Gebhardt, “the full human, surgical, and
political responsibility for these experiments.” The introduction finished,
Dr. Fritz Ernst Fischer mounted the rostrum and with the help of charts
explained the operations he had performed. His lecture was followed by a
discussion. No criticism was raised.10 11
Once, during the Rascher experiments for the air force, an eruption
did take place. Rascher, an air force Stabsarzt (captain), was a man who
enjoyed Himmler’s friendship and patronage. (On being informed that
Rascher’s mistress was pregnant for the second time, Himmler sent her
fresh fruit to make sure that mother and child would be well.) Rascher’s
involvement began one day when he w as attending an air force course
that dealt with altitude problems and pilots’ stamina. Upon the instruc­
tor’s chance remark that no experiments had ever been carried out with
human beings, Rascher conceived of the idea of using some “habitual
criminals” for this purpose. He communicated his proposal to Himm­
ler1 1 and received the permission of Generaloberstabsarzt Hippke to per­
form the experiments.
After a while, insinuations and criticisms bv other air force doc­
tors began to make the rounds. One man, Professor Holzlohner, even
made remarks about Himmler’s person w'hile visiting the experimental
site at Dachau. Rascher made a strong complaint to Himmler, and the
9. Grawitz to Himmler, June 28, 1944, NO-179.
10. Affidavit bv Fischer, November 21, 1945, Conspiracy and Aiyircsswu, VIII,
635-42.
11. Rascher to Himmler, May 15, 1941, PS-1602. In this letter Rascher thanked
Himmler for the fruit.

MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS 1005


Reichsfuhrer-SS replied that he too would classify people who rejected 1
the use of human beings for experiments, at a time when German soldiers 1
were dying, as traitors of the second and first degree (Hoch- und Ijindcs-
rerrdter).12 To Generalfeldmarschall Milch, Himmler wrote in the same-
vein, omitting references to treason but emphasizing that he would not be
deterred by these “Christian” circles. Rascher, said Himmler, could be
transferred to the SS, and the problem of conscience would be solved.
The air force would still have the benefit of all findings by Dr. Rascher.1 *
A few months later, Hippke wrote a letter to Wolff accepting the ar­
rangement but taking the opportunity of correcting a few false impres­
sions. First of all, nobody had objected to these experiments. Hippke had
“immediately agreed” to them. The difficulty lay in another sphere: it was
all a question of vanity. Everyone wanted to be the one to come out with
new research discoveries. But if Rascher wished to create his own research
institute in the Waffen-SS, Hippke would have no objection and would
bid him good riddance.14
These were all physicians who made use of human guinea pigs. But
some went one step further, carrying out experiments that were no longer
characterized by any desire to help patients. These experiments had an
altogether different direction, for they were identified with Nazi aims. In
these activities one may glimpse an attempt to widen the destruction
process. The medical technicians who became involved in this research
were not merely engaged in tinkering with inmates; they were trying to
discover a means by which Germany could rule Europe forever.
One day in October 1941, a retired army doctor, Adolf Pokorny, sat
down to write a letter to Himmler. To avoid the possibility that a subordi­
nate might open the letter and read its contents, it was sent to Himmler
by a messenger, Professor Hohn. In his letter Pokorny pointed out that he
had read an article in a medical journal by a certain Dr. Madaus of the
biological institute at Radebeul-Dresden. The article dealt with the effect
of injecting the extract of a South American plant, Caladium sejjuinum,
into mice and rats: the animals were sterilized. While reading this article,
Pokorny had thought of the ‘Tremendous importance” of this drug “in
the present struggle of our people.” It should be possible, continued
Pokorny, to produce in short order a preparation that would lead to the
sterilization of people without their knowledge. In this connection he
dropped a hint that Germany had three million Soviet prisoners of war,
and in conclusion he made a few urgent suggestions: Madaus to publish
no more articles, the plant to be produced in hothouses, chemical analysis

12. Himmler to Rascher, October 24, 1942, PS-1609.


13. Himmler ro Milch, November 13, 1942, PS-1617.
14. Hippke ro Wollf, March 6, 1943, NO-262.

KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


to determine whether an extract could be synthesized, and “immediate
experiments on human beings.”15
A few months later, Himmler ordered Pohl to öfter Dr. Madaus possi­
bilities of doing research.16 Himmler was actually quite impatient, and
in September 1942, Pohl, Lolling (medical chief, WVHA D-III), and
Madaus agreed to transfer the work to the concentration camps.17
While these preparations were being made, someone else took note of
the Madaus article. On August 24, 1942, the Deputy Gauleiter of Lower
Austria, SS-Obertlihrer Gerland, also addressed a letter to Himmler. Im­
pressing upon Himmler the “tremendous importance” of the Madaus
discovery, he requested that the Gau expert on racial questions, Dr.
Fehringer, be permitted to conduct experiments — in collaboration with
the Pharmacological Institute of the Medical Faculty of Vienna Univer­
sity— in a Gypsy camp at Lackenbach.18 Himmlers reply (through Ober­
sturmbannführer Brandt) was friendly. The matter was already under
investigation, but there were difficulties because the plant was not avail­
able in sufficient quantity; if Dr. Fehringer had a supply on hand, the
Reichsfiihrer-SS would be very glad to hear about it.19
The obstacles proved insurmountable, and scientific reinforcements
were called up. In November 1942, Dr. Miiller-Cunradi, director of the
I. G. Farben laboratory at Ludwigshafen, sent one of his biochemists, Dr.
Tauboeck, to the Madaus Institute. Tauboeck and Madaus had a discus­
sion about the matter. The whole investigation had started when Madaus
had read in the literature that a Brazilian tribe was using Caladium
seguinum to sterilize its enemies. The natives accomplished the steriliza­
tion by shooting arrows at the enemy (that is, by intramuscular injec­
tion), and the victim was usually unaware of his fate. But Germany did
not have the climate for growing this plant, and the feat could not be
repeated.20

15. Pokorny to Himmler, October 1941, NO-35.


16. Himmler to Pohl, March 10, 1942, NO-36. Adjutant of Himmler (signed
OStuf. Fischer) to RSHA 1V-B-4, attention Srubaf. Günther, July 4, 1942, NO-50.
17. Pohl to Rudolf Brandt, September 7, 1942, NO-41. Affidav it by Rudolf
Brandt, October 19, 1946, NO-440.
18. Gerland to Himmler, August 24, 1942, NO-39.
19. Brandt to Gerland, August 29, 1942, NO-40.
20. Affidavit by Dr. Karl Tauboeck, June 18, 1947, NO-3963. Apart from this
difficulty, there were others. 'Hie efleet oiCaladtum seguinum upon reproduction is
the same as overdoses ol nicotine, morphine, or just plain hunger. Apparently no one
had informed Himmler that many of Madaus’s rats had died from poisoning. Affi­
davit by Dr. Friedrich Jung, undated, Pokornv-30. On Madaus (who died in February'
1942) and the ramifications of his experiment, see also Andrea Kamphuis, “Son-
nenhut in Buchenwald: Alternativ-medizinische Forschungsprojekte und Menschen­
versuche im ‘Dritten Reich,”’ Skeptiker 14 (2001): 52-64.

MEDICAL· EXPERIMENTS 1007


The Madaus method was not the only attempt to reconcile the short-
range needs of the war with the long-range policy of destruction. The idea
that after intensive labor utilization during the emergency subject peoples
would be allowed to die a natural death, without a chance to replenish
themselves, was a recurring thought in Nazi medical circles. Thus in May
1941, Himmler became interested in "nonsurgical sterilization of inferior
women.” The author of this idea was Professor Carl Clauberg, chief phy­
sician of the women’s clinic in Knappschaft Hospital and St. Hedwig
Hospital at Königshütte, Upper Silesia. Clauberg proposed that an irri­
tant be introduced into the uterus by means of a syringe. This procedure
became known as the "Clauberg method.”
Three doctors were lined up to assist Clauberg in making experi­
ments (Standartenführer Prof, von Wolff, Berlin; Sturmbannführer Prof.
Erhardt, Graz, University Women’s Clinic; and Hauptsturmführer Dr.
Günther F. K. Schultze, Greifswald University Women’s Clinic).21 But
there was one administrative obstacle. Himmler wanted Clauberg to
work in the large women’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück, but
Clauberg did not wish to move there with his cumbersome equipment,
and in spite of Grawitz’s urgings that, because of the "tremendous sig­
nificance” of these experiments, inmates should be made available at
Königshütte,22 all plans collapsed at this point.
One year later, Clauberg had a “scientific discussion” with a Himmler
assistant, Obersturmbannführer Arlt. In the course of the conversation
Clauberg brought up his now vastly expanded plans for experiments. Arlt
pointed out that in such matters Himmler was the right man. Clauberg
thereupon wrote to Himmler requesting permission to set up his appara­
tus in Auschwitz and to perform experiments there with a view to perfect­
ing mass sterilization methods for "unworthy women” (fortpflanzungsun­
würdige Frauen) as well as producing fertility in “worthy women.”23 His
letter produced results.
On July 7, 1942, Himmler, Gebhardt, Glücks, and Clauberg met in
conference and decided to start experiments in Auschwitz. The aim of the
experiments was, first of all, the discovery of means by which a victim
could be sterilized without becoming aware of what was being done to
her. The experiments were to be performed in “major dimensions” upon
Jewish women in the camp. Second, it was agreed to call upon a foremost
X-ray specialist, Professor Holfelder, to find out whether X-ray castration
of men was feasible. In conclusion, Himmler warned all those present

21. Grawitz to Himmler, May 30, 1941, NO-214.


22. Grawitz to Himmler, May 29, 1941, NO-1639.
23. Clauberg to Himmler, May 30, 1942, NO-211.

KILLING CBNTBR OPERATIONS


that these were most secret matters and that anyone drawn into the work
had to be pledged to secrecy'.24
Three days later Himmler’s Secretary Brandt sent a letter to Clauberg
with a few additional requirements and suggestions. Himmler wanted to
know how fast 1,000 Jewish women could be sterilized. “The Jewesses
themselves should know nothing.” The results of the experiments were to
be checked bv taking X-ray pictures and studying them for any changes.
Clauberg could also make a “practical test,” such as locking a “Jewess and a
Jew” into a room for a certain period of time and waiting for the effects.25
One more vear passed while Clauberg worked busily in Block 10 of
Auschwitz I, the experimental block. To fool the victims, he told the
women before injecting the irritant fluid that they were undergoing artifi­
cial insemination.26 Clauberg liked his work and wanted to show off.
When Pohl visited Auschwitz one day, Clauberg approached the Ober-
gruppenflihrer at dinner and invited him to witness a few experiments.
Pohl declined.27
In June 1943, Clauberg sent his first report to Himmler. The method
was “almost perfected” {sogut me fertig ausgearbeitet), although he still had
to devise a few “improvements” (Verfeinerungen). At the moment it was
effective in “usual” cases. Furthermore, he could assure the Reichsfiihrer-
SS that the sterilization could be performed imperceptibly in the course of
a normal gynecological examination. With ten assistants, a doctor could
sterilize 1,000 women in one day.28 Clauberg did not specify how secrecy'
could be maintained in the mass sterilization procedure. He plodded on,
and on July 5,1944, the camp command sent an urgent message to the SS
Construction Inspectorate Silesia for barbed wire to be strung on 47
concrete piles, to enclose the space set aside for 2,000-3,000 female
prisoners behind Clauberg’s building.29
While Clauberg went on to “perfect” his method, there was still a third
attempt to work out such a program: the X-ray experiments. As early as

24. Memorandum bv Brandt, July 1942, NO-216. See also his memorandum
dated July 11, 1942, NO-215.
25. Brandt to Clauberg, copies to Pohl, OStubaf. Koegel (Ravensbriick), and
Srubaf. Gunther (RSHA IV-B-4), July 10, 1942, NO-213. Koegel and Giinther
received copies because Himmler was still attempting to persuade Clauberg to steril­
ize the "Jewesses” in Ravensbriick.
26. Affidavit by Jeanne lngred Salomon, October 9, 1946, NO-810. Affiant, a
survivor, was a victim of experimentation.
27. Affidavit by Pohl, July 14, 1946, NO-65.
28. Clauberg to Himmler, June 7, 1943, NO-212.
29. The Standortalreste of Auschwitz to SS Construction Inspectorate Silesia
(Bischoff ), July 5, 1944, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives Record Group
11.001 (Center for Historical Collections, Moscow), Roll 21, Fond 502, Opis 1,
Folder 38.

MEDICAL· EXPERIMENTS
March 1941, Himmler and the Führer Chancellery (Bouhler and Brack) |
had discussed sterilization problems, and in the course of these discus­
sions Brack wrote a letter to Himmler in which he gave his expert opinion
on the subject. This letter bordered on fantasy. It started as a sober ac­
count of the possibilities of X rays in the field of sterilization and castra­
tion. Preliminary investigations by medical experts of the chancellery',
wrote Brack, had indicated that small doses of X rays achieved only tem­
porary sterilization; large doses caused burns. Having come to this con­
clusion, Brack ignored it completely and continued with the following
scheme. The persons to be “processed” (die abzufertigen Personen) would
step up to a counter to be asked some questions or to fill out forms. Thus
occupied, the unsuspecting candidate for sterilization would face the win­
dow for two or three minutes while the official sitting behind the counter
would throw a switch that would release X rays through two tubes point­
ing at the victim. With twenty such counters (costing 20,000 to 30,000
Reichsmark apiece), 3,000 to 4,000 persons could be sterilized daily.30
The proposal was not immediately followed up, but Brack brought it
up again in June 1942 in connection with the installation of the gassing
apparatus in the Generalgouvernement camps. It seemed to Brack that
among the ten million Jews who were doomed to die, there were at least
two or three million who were needed desperately in the war effort. Of
course they could be utilized only if they were sterilized. Since the usual
surgical sterilization was too slow and expensive, he wished to remind
Himmler that already a year before he had pointed out the advantages of
X rays. The fact that the victims would become aware of their sterilization
after a few months was a trifling consideration at this stage of the game.
In conclusion, Brack stated that his chief, Reichsleiter Bouhler, was ready
to furnish all the necessary doctors and other personnel to carry out the
program.31 This time Himmler replied that he should like to have the
X-ray method tried out in an experimental series in at least one camp.32
The experiments were carried out in Auschwitz by Dr. Horst Schu­
mann, on women and men. As Schumann moved into Auschwitz, com­
petition in the experimental blocks was shifted into high gear.33 The chief

30. Brack to Himmler, March 28,1941, NO-203. Brack testified after the war that
this letter was deliberate nonsense. See his testimony in Case No. 1, tr. pp. 7484-93.
31. Brack to Himmler, June 23, 1942, NO-205.
32. Himmler to Brack, copies to Pohl and Grawitz, August 11, 1942, NO-206.
Also, acceptance of Himmler’s offer by Brack’s deputy' Blankenburg, August 14,
1942, NO-207.
33. See Clauberg letter to OStubaf. Brandt, August 6, 1943, NO-210, in w hich
Clauberg complained that in his absence one of his X-ray machines had been used bv
other gentlemen. Though he did not mind this procedure, he did need the second
machine to perform his “positive” experiments (increase of fertility), etc.

KILLING CBNTBR OPERATIONS


camp doctor, Wirths, who was primarily interested in precancerous con­
ditions of the cervix, started his own experimental series involving opera­
tions on teenage w omen and mothers in their thirties.34 A Jewish inmate
gynecologist, Dr. Samuel, was impressed into these experiments.35 36 An­
other camp doctor, Mengele, confined his studies to twins, for it was his
ambition to multiply the German nation.30 All these experiments, which
consumed many hundreds of victims, led to nothing. Not one of the rivals
succeeded. One day Brack’s deputy, Blankenburg, admitted failure of the
experiments conducted on men. The X rays were less reliable and less
speedy than operative castration.37 In other words, it had taken three
years to find out what was known at the beginning.
Although the sterilization experiments were infused with dilettantism
and plain deception, they were a significant episode in European history.
The sheer conception of these explorations was a threat to anyone who
might have been branded as “inferior.” Already the fate of Mischlinge of
the first degree hung in the balance w hile the Interior Ministry w aited for
the perfection of mass sterilization techniques. In consequence of the
failure of these experiments, a development was arrested that had spelled
in dim outlines the doom of large sections of the population of Europe.
This, then, marks the difference betw een the ordinary experiments and
the mass sterilization attempts. If an inmate died in the course of a pro­
cedure that was designed for a conventional result, the experimenter had
killed a human being. The physician w ho tampered w ith sterilization,
how ever, w as potentially an architect of mass destruction. And that was
not the end. The Nazi hierarchy also promoted a few researchers who
wanted to fortify their destructive aim with an unassailable scientific rea­
son. In the search for such a rationale, these doctors regressed from medi­
cal discovery and, redirecting their steps to a dead end, destroyed their
science.
How' did this research emerge? The extreme Nazis view'ed the destruc­

34. Trial of Hbss, Ijiw Reports ofWar Criminals (London, 1947), VII, 14-16, 25-
26. Jan Selin, “Concentration and Extermination Camp at Oswiycim,” Central Com­
mission tor Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, Genua» Crimes in Poland
(Warsaw, 1946-47), vol. I, p. 23. Affidavit by Dr. Jan KJempfner, Julv 27, 1946,
NI-311. Klemptner was an inmate physician. Affidavit bv Jeanne Salomon, Octo­
ber 9, 1946, NO-810. Salomon stated that her uterus was “dismembered.”
35. Affidavit by Klemptner, July 27, 1946, NI-311. Deposition bv Adelaide de
Jong (undated), in Raymond Phillips, cd.. Trial of Josef Kramer and Forty-Four Others
(The Belsen Trial) (London, 1949), p. 668. De Jong was sterilized bv Dr. Samuel.
36. Gisella Perl, I Was a Doctor in Ausclmntz (New York, 1948), pp. 125-27.
37. Rlankenburg to Himmler, April 29, 1944, NO-208. Schumann actually pro­
duced X-ray cancer. Affidavit by Dr. Robert Levy (survivor), November 19, 1946,
NO-884. For descriptions of Clauberg, Schumann, Wirths, and Mengele, see Robert
Jay Litton, 7be Nazi Doctors (New York, 1986).

MEDICAL· EXPERIMENTS 1011


tion process as a race struggle. To them the anti-Jewish measures were a
defensive battle of the “Nordic racial substance” against the creeping
onslaught of an “inferior racial mixture.” This rationalization had its diffi­
culties. Many officials failed to see any intrinsic connection between phys­
ical characteristics and Weltanschauung. Ideologists in the party and the
SS were therefore hard put to prove their theory. It is not surprising that
in their quest for substantiation they resorted to experiments. Here are
two of them.
In the spring of 1942 an attempt was made to show that Gypsies had
different blood from Germans. Two doctors, Professor Werner Fischer
and Stabsarzt (Captain) Dr. Horneck, both of whom had acquired expe­
rience while working on black prisoners of war, received permission to
perform experiments on Gypsies in Sachsenhausen. Horneck dropped
out because he was sent to the eastern front, and Fischer started out on
forty Gypsies. At Himmler’s request he promised to widen his research by
exploring Jewish blood also.38
Another approach was tried by Ahnenerbe, an organization formed by
the SS in 1939 to investigate “the sphere, spirit, deed, and heritage of the
Nordic Indo-Germanic race.”39 The president of the organization was
Himmler; its business manager was Standartenführer Sievers; and one of
its researchers was Hauptsturmführer Prof. Hirt, director of anatomy in
the Reich University at Strasbourg.
At the beginning of 1942, Hirt lay in the clinic, his lungs bleeding and
his blood circulation gravely impaired. From his sickbed he sent die fol­
lowing report to Himmler: All nations and races had been studied by
examination of skull collections; only in the case of the Jews were there
too few skulls to permit scientific conclusions. The war in the east offered
an opportunity to correct this situation. “In the Jewish-Bolshevist com­
missars, who embody a repulsive but characteristic subhumanity, we have
the possibility of obtaining a plastic source for study [ein greifbar wissen­
schaftliches Dokument] if we secure their skulls.” The commissars, pro­
posed Hirt, had best be handed over to the Field Police alive. A doctor
would then take down vital statistics, kill the Jews, carefully remove the
head, and so on.40 Brandt replied that Himmler was very interested in this
project but that first Hirt’s health had to be restored. Perhaps a little fresh
fruit would help.41

38. OSrubaf. Brandt to Grawitz, June 9, 1942, NO-410. Grawitz to Himmler,


July 20, 1942, NO-411.
39. See charter of the institute, signed by Himmler, January 1, 1939, NO-659.
40. Sievers to Srubaf. Dr. Brandt, February 9, 1942, enclosing report by Hut,
NO-85.
41. Brandt to Sievers, February’ 27, 1942, NO-90.

1012 KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


After a few months, Hirt recovered sufficiently to do his work. In view
of the scarcity of “Jewish-Bolshevist commissars,” Ahnenerbe declared
itself ready to accept 150 Jews from Auschwitz.42 An Ahnenerbe official,
Hauptsturmffihrer Dr. Bruno Beger, was sent to the camp; 115 per­
sons—including 79 Jewish men, 30 Jewish women, 4 Central Asians,
and 2 Poles — were quarantined, and arrangements were made with Eich-
mann to have them transferred to Natzweiler, where they were gassed.43
The bodies were brought to Strasbourg and preserved for race studies.44
There, in the anatomical laboratory of the university, the utmost that
German doctors were capable of ran its course.

CONFISCATIONS
The remaining two killing center operations comprised the confiscation
of property and the killings themselves. The utilization of inmates for
labor and experiments was an interruption of the process, an introduction
of intermediary7 procedures for economic and other extrinsic purposes.
Only the expropriations and killings were organic in an administrative
sense. They' were the only two operations that were implemented in all six
death camps and that embraced all but a few Jewish deportees.
The confiscation of personal belongings was a catchall affair. Every­
thing the Jew s had managed to keep, everything they had succeeded in
hiding, was collected in the killing centers. Property that the satellite
states had been forced to relinquish in order that the deportees could start
life anew in the “East” now also fell into the bag. Everything was collected
and turned into profit. But the salvage of that property' w'as a precise, well-
planned operation.
A preliminary' step toward systematic salvage w'as taken in the spring of
1941. In April of that year the RSHA informed the inspectorate that
returning to relatives and dependents the personal belongings taken from
Jew's in concentration camps w'as “out of the question.” The property' w'as
subject to confiscation through the normal channels (that is, the Re­
gierungspräsidenten).1 Tliis procedure, it must be remembered, applied

42. Sicvcrs ro Brandr, November 2, 1942, NO-86.


43. OStubaf Brandt ro Fachmann, November 6, 1942, NO-116. Staf. Sievers to
F.iehmann, copies to HSrut. Beger, Prof. Hirt, and OStubaf. Brandr, June 21, 1943,
NO-87. Affidavit by Dr. l.con Felix Boutbien, October 30, 1946, NO-532. Affidavit
by Ferdinand Holl, November 3,1946, NO-590. Boutbien and Holl were inmates of
Nar/.weiler.
44. Staf. Sievers to Staf. Brandt, September 5, 1944, NO-88.
1. I.icbehcnschcl to camp commanders. May 5, 1941, enclosing letter by RSHA
ll-A-5 (signed Dr. Nockcmann) to inspectorate, dated April 3, 1941, NO-1235.

CONFISCATIONS 1013
to all camps before the start of mass deportations. After the establishment
of the killing centers the collection, sorting, and distribution of the vast
number of personal belongings became a major problem that could no
longer be handled on an ad hoc basis. Accordingly, special administrative
machinery was set up for the purpose of carrying out these expropria­
tions. Under the new arrangements, collection was handled by the indi­
vidual camps, but the inventory and disposal of the items became much
more complicated.
Jurisdiction over sorting and distribution of the Kulmhof haul was
centralized under an organization that was outside SS and Police control:
the Ghetto Administration of Lodz. Kulmhof was strictly a local enter­
prise, set up by Gauleiter Greiser for the Jews in his Gau. As previously
pointed out, Greiser conferred on the Gettoverwaltung of Litzmannstadt
(Lodz) the plenary power to confiscate the belongings of all Jews de­
ported in the Warthegau.2 This power extended not only to abandoned
property in the ghettos but also to the belongings that the deportees took
along to the Kulmhof camp. Amtsleiter Biebow of the Gettoverwaltung
therefore established a central inventory station at Pabianice (eight miles
southeast of Lodz), which he placed under the direction of one of his
Abteilungsleiter, Seifert, and which sorted all the belongings hauled from
the abandoned Warthegau ghettos and the Kulmhof camp by a fleet of
sixteen trucks.3 The Kulmhof confiscations were consequendy “receipts”
flowing to the Gettoverwaltung. With one exception (furs), the inventory
and ultimate realization of the property was entirely in Biebow’s domain.
In Auschwitz the administrative chief (Burger, later Möckel) took care
not only of collection but also of sorting, inventory, and packing. For die
distribution of the items, however, he was dependent on the directives of
WVHA Amtsgruppe A (Gruppenführer Frank).
In the Generalgouvernement the SS and Police Leader of Lublin,
Globocnik, ever mindful of new opportunities to stretch out his jurisdic­
tion in Jewish matters, instructed his men to draw up a Zentralkartei
(central register) of all the properties collected in his camps. Sturmbann­
führer Wippern was put in charge of all the hardware (jewelry', foreign
currency, etc.), and Hauptsturmführer Höfle, who had played an active
role in the commencement of deportations to newly established Belzec,
took over the sorting of clothes, shoes, and so on.4 From all four camps,

2. Memorandum by Biebow, April 20, 1942, Dokument)/ i material·/, vol. 2,


pp. 118-19.
3. Seifert to Biebow, May 7, 1942, ibid., vol. 1, pp. 25-26. Oberbürgermeister
Litzmannstadt (signed Luchtcrhandt) to Landeswirtschaftsamt Posen, attention Re-
gicrungsrat Gerlich, May 27, 1942, ibid., vol. 3, pp. 233-34. Gerlieh to Gettover­
waltung, August 28, 1942, ibid., p. 235.
4. Globocnik to Wippern and Höfle, July 15, 1942, ibid., vol. 2, p. 183.

KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


including Trcblinka, properties were sent to the stockrooms in Lublin.5
This whole operation became the last phase of Aktion Reinhardt.
Globocnik had hardly established his organization when pressure was
put on the SS and Police Leader in Warsaw and on Globocnik himself to
distribute some of the accumulating goods. On April 25, 1942, Grup­
penführer Grawitz, the Reichsarzt SS und Polizei, sent a letter of inquiry
to Oberführer Wigand, then SS and Police Leader in Warsaw. “It has
come to my attention,” wrote Grawitz, “that deposits of old gold of
Jewish origin are kept by the SS and Police Leaders Warsaw and Lublin.”
He could use the gold for dental work.6 Wigand replied by requesting
Grawitz to obtain a Himmler directive, and a long correspondence en­
sued.7 On August 12, 1942, Brandt informed Krüger that Himmler had
vested Pohl with responsibility for the distribution (Weiterleitung) of all
Jewish valuables to the “competent agencies” of the Reich.8 In notifying
Pohl of the order, Brandt pointed out that Himmler expected the Econ­
omy Ministry' to accord to the SS “magnanimous treatment” (grosszügige
Behandlung) of any requests for gold and silver.9
About this time (on August 11,1942) Globocnik asked for permission
to “pinch off” (ahzweigen) 2,000,000 zloty from the “Jewish evacuation”
(Judenumsiedlung) to finance schools for German resettlers in the district.
This procedure, Globocnik explained, had already been applied in the
matter of clothes.10 Brandt wrote directly to Gruppenführer Greifelt,
Start'Director of the Reichskommissar for the Strengthening of German-
dom, telling him that Himmler wished Greifelt to finance the project
himself. The money collected in the Judenumsiedlung would be delivered
to the Reichsbank without deduction of even one penny. “In this manner,
it will be much easier to get the required funds through normal channels
from the Finance Ministry'” concluded Brandt.11

5. Affidavit by Georg Lbmer, February 4, 1947, NO-1911. Von Sammcm-


Frankenegg ro Himmler’s Personal Start, July 9, 1942, NO-3163.
6. Grawitz to Wigand, April 25, 1942, NO-3166.
7. Wigand to Grawitz, May 8, 1942, NO-3166. Grawitz to OSrubat. Brandt,
May 16, 1942, NO-3166. OSrubat. Brandt ro Wigand, May 23, 1942, NO-3165.
Himmler’s Personal Start to SS and Police Leader Warsaw, Julv 3, 1942, NO-3164.
Von Sammem-Frankenegg to Personal Start, July 7,1942, NO-3163. Von Sammern-
Frankenegg to Personal Start’, July 9, 1942, informing Himmler that the gold had
already been transferred to Globocnik, NO-3163.
8. Brandt to Higher SS and Police Ixaders in eastern territories, August 12, 1942,
NO-3192.
9. Brandt ro Pohl, August 12, 1942, NO-3192. Also Brandt to Grawitz, Au­
gust 14, 1942, NO-3191.
10. Brit’. Globocnik to Himmler, August 11, 1942, Himmler Files, Folder 94.
11. OSrubat’. Brandt ro Grut’. Greifelt, August 14, 1942, Himmler Files, Folder
94.

CONFISCATIONS 1015
Jurisdiction to dispose of valuables as well as currency in all the Gcne-
ralgouvernement camps was vested in Pohl. This power was to manifest
itself in directives from Amtsgruppe A of the WVHA to the Auschwitz
administration and to Lublin.12
WVHA-A

Mockel Globocnik
(Special Staff G
of the WVHA)

Ausc hwitz Lublin


Belzec
Sobibor
Treblinka

Kulmhof alone remained outside the apparatus:


Gettoverwaltunjy Litzmannstadt

Camp Pabianice

Kulmhof
One should note how the system actually worked. In essence, the
confiscations were a catchall operation, but they were also a model of
conservation. Everything was collected, and nothing was wasted. How
was it possible to be so thorough? The answer lies in the assembly line, a
method that was foolproof. Inmate work parties picked up the luggage
left in the freight cars of the transports and on the platform. Other inmate
Kommandos collected clothes and valuables in the dressing rooms. Wom­
en’s hair was cut off in the barber shops near the gas chambers. Gold teeth
were extracted from the mouths of the corpses, and the human fat escap­
ing from the burning bodies was poured back into the flames to speed the
cremations. Thus the two organic processes of the death camp, confisca­
tions and killings, were fused and synchronized into a single procedure
that guaranteed the absolute success of both operations.

12. In spite of the centralization, requests for special distributions continued to be


sent to Lublin. On September 19, 1942, the Gestapo chief in Vienna requested, on
behalf of Kaltcnbrunncr, clothes for Germanized Poles and prisoners. Huber to SS
and Police Leader Lublin — “Reinhardt,” September 19,1942, Dokumenty i matcriah,
vol. 2, p. 190. In November SS and Police Court VI in Krakow asked for a gilt
(Uberlassutiq) of carpets, glasses, civilian clothes, etc., from the “Jewish estate” (Juden-
nachlass). SS and Police Court VI to SS Srandortvcrwaltung Lublin, November 10,
1942, ibid., pp. 192-93.

KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


A corollary' to the thoroughness of the collections was the care with
which the inventory was conducted. Every item of foreign currency was
counted. Watches were sorted, and valuable ones repaired. Unusable
clothes and rags were weighed. Receipts were passed back and forth, and
everything was accounted for. All this was done in accordance with
Himmler’s wish for “painstaking exactness” (die¿¡rosste Genauigkeit). “We
cannot be accurate enough.”13
However, there was one problem that threatened to defeat the thor­
oughness of the confiscations and the “painstaking accuracy” of the in­
ventory. German personnel were tempted to help themselves to some of
the property. Something had to be done about diat. Seifert, the Gettover-
waltung’s chief in Pabianice, requested that his men receive the same
bonus (15 Reichsmark per day) for “hazardous” duty' that personnel in
Kulmhof were receiving. Like the Kulmhof personnel, Seifert reasoned,
his men were exposed to dangers of “infection” (lnfektionsgef&hren).14
The police company in Pabianice was also given the opportunity' to buy
items they desired.15 Globocnik reported to Himmler at the conclusion of
Aktion Rcinhard that only' “the decency and honesty” of his men had
guaranteed a complete delivery' of the assets to the Reich,16 but in Tre-
blinka SS men as well as Ukrainian guards had helped themselves to
jewelry' and money, and some of the Polish inhabitants in the vicinity' of
the camp had shared in the bounty', buying coins, watches, and clothes for
irresistible prices from the Ukrainians.17
The Auschwitz commander, Liebehenschel, tried to stem the thefts.
On November 16, 1943, he issued an order in which he said that all the
belongings of the inmates, whether clothes, valuables, food, or other
objects, were state property' and that the state alone could decide about
their utilization. “Whoever touches state property',” the order continued,
“brands himself a criminal and excludes himself automatically from the
ranks of the SS.”18
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the confiscations was the dis-

13. Himmler to Kruger and Pohl, January IS, 1943, NO-1257.


14. Seilert to Ribbe, May 29, 1942, Dokumenty i material, vol. 1, p. 27. Flic
Gcttovcrwalrung granted only 6 Reichsmark. Bicbow to Gcttovcrvvalrung personnel
otficc, June 20, 1942, ibid., vol. 2, p. 75.
15. Second Police Company (ghetto) to Gcttovenvalrung, July 27, 1942, ibid.,
pp. 140-42.
16. Undated reports by Globocnik to Himmler, PS-4024.
17. On lrcblinka corruption, see Arad, Relzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, pp. 161-64.
18. Jan Selin, "Concentration and Extermination Camp at Oswiycim,” Central
Commission tor Investigation ot German Crimes in Poland, German Grimes in Polatid
(Warsaw, 1946-1947) vol. 1, p. 43. According to ex-inmates, large quantities ot
jewelry, watches, and money were stolen bv guards. Affidavit by Werner Krumpe,
September 23, 1945, NO-1933.

CONFISCATIONS 1017
tribution of the property. In the case of the Gettoverwaltung, the problem
was to sell, since the Gettoverwaltung did not give anything away. Only
furs were an exception; by order of Himmler they were sent to the SS
clothing plant in Ravensbrück for ultimate wear by his Waffen-SS.19 For
the rest, the Gettoverwaltung could rely upon the Greiser directive and
upon the fact that it was a Reich agency, attached to the Oberbürgermei­
ster of Lodz for ordinary administrative purposes and responsible to the
Main Trusteeship Office East in confiscation matters. This did not mean
that anv funds were passed upward. The Gettoverwaltung ran a close
balance sheet and could use all the money it received.
For Biebow’s customers, the purchase of such items posed a few di­
lemmas. For example, in August 1942 a relief organization in Poznan (the
NSV) asked for 3,000 suits, 1,000 items of women’s apparel, and some
underwear and bedsheets. The stuff was urgently needed for resettlers.
The NSV requested a low price offer.20 A couple of months later the items
were delivered, and the bill was sent to the NSV.21 The deal was closed.
But on January 16,1943, the Gettoverwaltung received a complaint. The
first shipment of 1,500 suits had been sent in unopened crates to local
offices of the relief organization. Upon opening the cases, relief officials
discovered with dismay that the shipment in no way compared with
samples viewed at Kulmhof. Many of the suits were not suits at all but
unmatched coats and pants. Worse, a large part of the clothes were badly
spotted with dirt and bloodstains (“Eingrosser Teil der Bekleidungsstücke ist
stark befleckt und teilweise auch mit Schmutz und Blu flecken durchsetzt”). In
Poznan, several dozen items still had the Jewish star attached to them.
Since most of the workers unpacking the crates were Poles, there was
danger that the resettlers would find out about the origin of the things,
thereby plunging the Winter Relief into “discredit.”22
The Getto Verwaltung replied laconically six weeks later, acknowledg­
ing return of2,750 suits and 1,000 dresses. The stains were not blood but
rust; they could not be removed. Therefore a bill would be made out only

19. Koppe to OSrubaf. Brandt, August 28, 1942, NO-3190. The SS reserve
hospital in Sicradz asked for a few items because the makeshift furnishings of the new
hospital were a “catastrophe.” Biebow to Meyer (division for administration of
goods), September 7, 1942, Dokumenty i matenaty, vol. 2, p. 138.
20. Gauleitung Wartheland/Amt für Volkswohlfahrt Posen/Organisation to
Oberbürgermeister Litzmannstadt, August 12, 1942, Dokumenty i materiah, vol. 2,
pp. 156-57.
21. Gcttoverwalrung to Gaulcitung Wartheland/NSV—Kreis Lir/mannstadr-
land, November 28, 1942, ibid., p. 166.
22. Winterhilfswerk des Deutschen Volkes/Der Gaubeauftragre Wartheland to
Gettoverwaltung, January 16, 1943, ibid., pp. 168-70.

KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


for 250 suits and the underwear.-3 This reply brought forth another letter
from Winter Relief stating that the welfare organization could not resign
itself to the loss of the suits. If the rust spots could not be removed, then at
least the Jewish stars should have been severed from the clothes.23 24
So much for the Gettoverwaltung’s business deals. The WVHA strat­
egy was more complex. Himmler insisted that the property belonged to
die Reich and that straight business deals with customers were out of the
question. But this did not mean that the Jewish belongings could not be
used in a wav to further SS interests. First, the WVHA gave away large
quantities of “state property” to groups of people who regularly enjoyed
SS generosity, namely SS men (particularly wounded or decorated sol­
diers), families of SS men, and Ethnic Germans. Second, and more im­
portant, was the use of deliveries to state agencies as levers to obtain
“magnanimous treatment” from them. These WVHA tactics deserve to
be described in more detail.
On September 7, 1942, Pohl wrote to Himmler that he intended to
give a large number of women’s coats, children’s clothes, gloves, rain­
coats, stockings, and so on, to the Race and Resettlement Main Office
(RuSHA) for presentation as Christmas gifts to families of SS men. The
items derived from the Dutch Sonderaktion.25
Barely tw o weeks later, Brigadefuhrer August Frank, chief of WVHA-
A, issued a basic allocation directive to Auschwitz and Lublin which
turned the SS into a veritable Salvation Army and at the same time pro­
vided for considerable leverage against Economy Minister Funk. To make
sure that everything was properly camouflaged, Frank ordered at the
outset that the Jew'ish property be referred to henceforth as “goods orig­
inating from theft, receipt of stolen goods, and hoarded goods.” The
disposal was as follow's:
a. Cash money in Reichsbank notes was to be delivered to the WVHA
account in the Reichsbank.
b. Foreign currency, rare metals, jewelry, precious and semiprecious

stones, pearls, gold from teeth, and scrap gold were to be delivered to
the WVHA for transmission to the Reichsbank.
c. Watches, clocks, fountain pens, mechanical pencils, razors,
pocketknives, scissors, flashlights, wallets, and purses were to be sent to
WVHA repair shops to be delivered from there to post exchanges for
sale to troops.

23. Getrovenvalrung to Gau Plenipotentiary Wintcrhillswerk, April 3, 1943, ibid.,


p. 177.
24. Gau Plenipotentiary to Gettoverwalrung, April 22, 1943, ibid., pp. 179-80.
25. Pohl to Himmler, September 7, 1942, NO-1258.

CONFISCATIONS 1019
d. Men’s underwear and clothing were to be handed over to the Volks­
deutsche Mittelstelle (VOMI), the welfare organization for Ethnic Ger­
mans.
e. Women’s underwear and clothing were to be sold to the VOMI, ex­
cept for pure silk underwear (men’s or women’s), which was to be sent
directly to the Economy Ministry.
f. Featherbeds, quilts, blankets, umbrellas, baby carriages, handbags,

leather belts, shopping bags, pipes, sunglasses, mirrors, suitcases, and


cloth were to be delivered to the VOMI, the question of payment to be
decided later.
g. Linen (bedsheets, pillows, towels, tablecloths, etc.) was to be sold to
the VOMI.
h. Spectacles and glasses without frames were to be delivered to the
medical Referat (D-III).
i. Valuable furs were to be sent to the WVHA; ordinary furs were to be
reported to Referat B-II and delivered to the SS clothing plant at
Ravensbrück.
k. Low-value and useless items were to be delivered to the Economy

Ministry for sale by weight.26


One item not mentioned in the directive was human hair. The collec­
tion of hair had already been ordered on August 6,1942. It was to be put
to use in manufacturing felt footwear for U-boat personnel and Reichs­
bahn employees.27
Very briefly, the directives from the WVHA may be reduced to the
following:
Gifts through Deliveries to state
Economy
Textiles VOMI
Ministry

Hardware WVHA Reichsbank

26. Frank to Chief, Standortverwaltung Lublin and Chief, Administration Ausch­


witz (6 copies), September 26,1942, NO-724.
27. Glücks to camp commanders, August 6, 1942, USSR-511. Inmates recall the
use of blood. Dr. Perl states that she witnessed the bleeding of 700 young Jewish
women in Auschwitz. Race theory had evidendy been ignored in order to pnxure the
plasma. The extraction of the blood was not carried out in modest quantities or with
elementary safeguards. The women were lying on the ground, faint, “and deep rivers
of blood were flowing around their bodies.” Gisclla Perl, I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz-
(New York, 1948), pp. 73-75. Blood extractions from women are mentioned also
by an inmate nurse. Deposition by Renee Erman (undated), in Raymond Phillips,
cd., Trial of Josef Kramer and Forty-Four Others (The Belsen Thai) (London, 1949),
pp. 661-62.

KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


The gifts were distributions that did not flow through state agencies. The
deliveries to the Economy Ministry and to the Reichsbank were used for
the purpose of obtaining special benefits tor the SS. Let us see how both
aims were accomplished. First we shall look at the distribution of the soft
items, then at the hardware.
Before distribution, clothes had to be searched for sewn-in valuables
and contrary to Kulmhof practice, the Jewish star had to be removed.
This was a strict order from Frank.28 The best textile items were reserved
for distribution to Volksdeutsche. According to a Himmler order of
October 14, 1942, over 200,000 Ethnic Germans in Transnistria, the
Ukraine, and the Generalgouvernement were to be supplied with suits,
dresses, coats, hats, blankets, underwear, and utensils. The items had to
be delivered by Christmas.29
On February 6, 1943, Polil reported on the textile Aktion. Apologet­
ically he pointed out that a very large percentage of the clothes in the
Auschwitz and Lublin depots consisted of rags. The transportation of the
gifts to the East was meeting with difficulties because the Reichsbahn had
closed traffic to the Ukraine (Tmnsportsperre). However, the Economy
Ministry was negotiating with the Transport Ministry for allocation of
freight cars, since it was in the greatest interest of the economy to make
maximum utilization of old clothes. Up to the time of the report, the
following quantities had been delivered:30
VOMI Freight Cars
Men's clothes
Women’s clothes
211
Children’s clothes
Underwear, etc.
Economy Ministry
Men’s clothes
Women’s clothes 34
Women's silk underwear
Rags 400

28. Frank directive, September 26, 1942, NO-724.


29. Himmler to Pohl and VOMI Chief OGruf. Lorenz, copies to OGruf. Priitz-
mann and Obf. Hoftmeyer, October 14, 1942, NO-5395.
30. Pohl to Himmler, February 6, 1943, NO-1257. The figures represented a
mere beginning. See later report by Globocnik stating that he alone had sent out
2,900 freight cars with textile materials, while enough clothes to fill still another
1,000 cars were still in stock. Glotxxnik to Himmler, undated, probably autumn
1943, PS-4024. The huge quantities of suits and dresses in the killing centers were
supplemented by clothes and utensils accumulating in the transit camps. These camps
were integrated in the distribution system. Affidavit bv Dr. Konrad Morgen, October
5, 1947, NO-5440. Morgen saw clothing stores in Herzogenbusch (Vught), Hol­
land. From this camp alone several freight cars w ere sent to the VOMI.

CONFISCATIONS 1021
Bed feathers 130
Women’s hair (3 metric tons) 1
Other salvage 5
Total 781
In general, then, what was not good enough for the Volksdeutsche was
sent to the Economy Ministry. (Silk was of course an exception; the war
effort had a priority on silk material.) Shipments set aside for the ministry
went to private firms to be worked over for one purpose or another.31 For
the contribution that the WVHA made to the conservation program by
delivering the rags and old clothes, Pohl naturally demanded certain
favors. Accordingly, he had a “nice conversation” (freundliches Gespräch)
with Economy Minister Funk, in the course of which he requested pri­
orities for textiles to be made into SS uniforms, “on account of the deliv­
ery of the old clothes of the dead Jews.”32
While the great bulk of the textiles went to the VOMI and to the
Economy Ministry, some of the clothes were distributed in the concentra­
tion camps for inmates. (Prisoners’ uniforms, it may be recalled, had
become scarce.) In the summer of 1943, shipments of clothes from
Auschwitz and Lublin arrived at Dachau. Before handing them out to
inmates, SS officers waded through the “mountains of clothes” looking
for valuables and picking out the more attractive pieces of apparel.33
The clothes given to the inmates were “state property.” A former in­
mate, Dr. Perl, tells of an incident in Auschwitz which affected a Jewish
singer who, in conformity with common practice, had torn strips from
her slip to use in lieu of unavailable handkerchiefs and tissues. One day, a
guard accosted her, jerked up her dress, and discovered that only the
shoulder straps remained. “You revolutionary swine! You thief! Where is
the camp chemise!1”34 he shouted at the woman, beating her unmercifully.
The biggest gift item in the durable-goods category consisted of
watches. On May 13,1943, Frank could already make a report about die
“realization of Jewish stolen goods” (Verwertung des jüdischen Hehler- und
Diebesgutes) in which he mentioned receipt of 94,000 men’s watches,
33,000 women’s watches, 25,000 fountain pens, and other items. He had

31. Affidavit by Georg Lorner (WVHA-B), Februar)’ 4, 1947, NO-1911. A


Strasbourg firm, Strassburg GmbH, applied to the Berlin officer of the Dresdner
Bank for 200,000-300,000 Reichsmark in credits. Upon investigation, it was dis­
covered that the firm was handling bloodstained clothes (blutdurchtrixnkt) with holes
in them. The credit was refused. Affidavit bv Werner von Richter (Dresdner Bank,
Berlin), May 3, 1948, NI-15646.
32. Affidavit by Pohl, July 15, 1946, PS-4045.
33. Affidavit by Karl Adam Roeder, February' 20, 1947, NO-2122. Affiant was an
inmate of Dachau.
34. Perl,/ Was a Doctor in Ausclmitz, pp. 101-2.

KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


already sent 1,500 watches to three SS divisions (Leibstandarte Adolf Hit­
ler, Das Reich, and Totenkopfdivision) and proposed sending 1,000 watches
to each division in the Waffen-SS, plus 6,000 watches to the U-boat
command (a favored service arm). In addition, he was distributing scis­
sors to the DAW, Lebensborn, camp doctors, and camp barbershops.35
Four months later, Hildebrandt of the RuSHA put in a claim for
“larger quantities” (grossere Mengen) of watches and fountain pens. He
wanted to distribute gifts to wounded SS men during Christmas of 1943.
“Many a wounded man,” he said, “who does not own a watch or fountain
pen will enjoy such a gift.”36 We need not go into the subsequent corre­
spondence, in the course of which such weighty decisions were made as
to whether the SS and Police Division should get 500 or 700 watches, the
delivery of 15,000 women’s watches to Ethnic Germans, the distribution
of 3,000 clocks (500 to concentration camps, 2,500 to bombed-out
Berliners), and the allocation of especially valuable watches for excep­
tionally brave soldiers of new divisions.37
Most of the valuables, including money, jewelry', gold watches, and
dental gold, were duly delivered at the Reichsbank. The Reichsbank was
Germany’s central bank; its president was Economy Minister Funk. There
were two vice-presidents: Emil Puhl, a long-time employee of the bank,
and Kurt Lange, who hailed from the Economy Ministry and was the
ministry’s expert in monetary', stock, exchange, and insurance matters.38
Below the vice-presidents were thc Reichsbankdirektoren, each in charge of
some aspect of the bank’s operation (i.e., securities, foreign exchange).
Connected with or operating in conjunction with the Reichsbank were
several other organizations: 39

35. Gruf. Frank to Himmler, Mav 13, 1943, NO-2003.


36. OGruf. Hildebrandt to Himmler, August 18, 1943, NO-2752.
37. Sec the following correspondence: Gruf. Frank to OSnibaf. Brandt, Septem­
ber 2, 1943, NO-275 L Polil to Brandt, November 6, 1943, NO-2753. Brandt to
Pohl, December 3, 1943, NO-2754. WVHA D-II to WVHA-A and Auschwirz ad­
ministration, January 24,1944, NO-4468. Pohl to Himmler, Julv4,1944, NO-2755.
Pohl to Himmler, July 29, 1944, NO-2756. Himmler to Pohl, August 13, 1944,
NO-2749.
38. Die two vice-presidents had the rank of Staatssekretär. Funk to Lammers,
March 11, 1941, NI-14457.
39. 'Die following were members of the Autsichrsrat of the Golddiskonrbank:
Vizepräsident Puhl, Reichsbankdirckror Wilhelm, Reichsbankdirektor Krcr/.sch-
mann, Ministerialdirigent Bavrhoffcr (Finance Ministry ), Staatssekretär Dr. Land-
fried (Economy Ministry). Affidavit by Karl Friedrich Wilhelm, January 23, 1948,
Nl-14462. The Rcichshauptkasse (“Main Treasury”) was attached to the Reichsbank:
the Auditing Office and the Mint were agencies of the Finance Ministry. Chart by
Frick, PS-2905. The Municipal Pawnshop of Berlin was under the citv treasurer.
Memorandum by Kropp (Hauptkasse), March 31, 1944, PS-3947.

CONFISCATIONS 1023
The Golddiskontbank
The Reichshauptkasse (Main Treasury')
The Rzichsrechn u tiqshof (Auditing Office)
The Preussische Staatsmunze (Mint)
The Berlin Pfandleihanstalt (Pawnshop)

The disposal of the items to the Reichsbank rested on an agreement be­


tween Funk and Himmler that was concluded in the summer of 1942.40
The matter was then discussed by Funk, Puhl, Pohl, and a number of
other officials at lunch in the Reichsbank building.41 The arrangement for
the actual receipt of the items was worked out by Reichsbankrat Thoms
of the Reichsbank Precious Metals Division and Brigadefuhrer Frank.42
The deliveries were made by the chief of WVHA A-II (finance and pay­
roll), Hauptsturmflihrer Melmer.43 There were a total of seventy-six or
seventy-seven shipments, each filling a truck.44 Although Melmer wore
civilian clothes by arrangement, he was accompanied by a few uniformed
SS guards; hence the deliveries did not remain a secret for very' long.45
In the storerooms the articles were emptied onto tables and sorted.
About twenty-five to thirty people passed through these rooms every'
day.46 The objects themselves were sometimes stamped ‘Auschwitz” and
“Lublin,” and the large quantity of dental gold was noticed.47 When Pohl
visited the Reichsbank, he was conducted to the premises by Puhl, who
remarked, “Your things are here too [Ihre Sacben sind auch darunter].”48
The problem of what to do with the accumulating deliveries was
brought up by Puhl one day in a Reichsbankdinktoren meeting. The vice-
president announced that the Reichsbank was going to realize the gold
and jewelry of the SS. Reichsbankdirektor Wilhelm, chief of foreign cur­
rency and currency control, protested that “die Reichsbank is not a dealer
in second-hand goods.”49 Wilhelm, no friend of the SS, was consequently
left out of the picture.50
The channeling of the property from the storerooms was finally' as

40. Affidavit by Puhl, May 3,1946, PS-3944.


41. Affidavit by Pohl, July 15, 1946, PS-4045. Affidavit by Wilhelm, Januarv 23,
1948, NI-14462.'
42. Statement by Thoms, May 8,1946, PS-3951.
43. Ibid.
44. Testimony by Thoms, Trial of the Major War Criminals, XIII, 604-5,615.
45. Statement by Thoms, May 8, 1946, PS-3951.
46. Testimony by Thoms, Trial of the Major War Criminals, XIII, 603.
47. Statement by Thoms, May 8, 1946, PS-3951.
48. Draft affidavit by Pohl, undated, NI-15307.
49. Affidavit by Wilhelm, January 23, 1948, NI-14462.
50. He speaks of his “generally known aversion for these people " Ibui.

KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


follows. Coin was retained by the Precious Metals Division (Thoms).51
Stocks, bonds, and bankbooks were transferred to the Securities Divi­
sion.52 The gold teeth were sent to the Prussian State Mint for melting.53
Jewelry was delivered to the Berlin Pawnshop, where it was handled by
Amtsrat Wieser.54 The proceeds from the disposal of the metals and pa­
pers were deposited in the Treasury'. There they were credited to the
Finance Ministry' on a special account designated “Max Heiliger.”55 From
time to time the account was drawn upon by the Finance Ministry'’s old
expert in Jew ish matters, Dr. Maedel, w'ho booked the withdrawals in the
budget (Chapter XVIII, title 7, paragraph 3).56
The realization of the Jewish valuables did not proceed as efficiently as
the procedure described above might seem to indicate. Principally, three
obstacles had to be faced. In the first place, it was difficult to get rid of cer­
tain items. For example, the Securities Division was stuck with unen­
dorsed papers that had been made payable to holders,57 and the pawnshop
complained that most of the jew'elry and watches it had received were of
low value because they were old-fashioned or damaged in transit.58
Another difficulty was the lack of time. In the course of the processing,
a number of bottlenecks developed. Just before the German collapse, 207
containers filled with gold, currency, and other valuables were sent to salt
mines, where the entire shipment remained until discovered by American
troops.59
The third limitation was the price the SS asked for its deliveries. Al­
though not “one penny'” was to be deducted, Wippern and Mockel were
authorized to w ithhold sufficient amounts to defray expenses connected
with the Aktion itself.60 Gold was handed over subject to the condition
that three kilograms be made available if needed by the SS for bribery' or

51. Statement by Thoms, May 8, 1946, PS-3951.


52. Ibid.
53. Main Treasury (signed Thoms) to Prussian State Mint, December 24, 1944,
NI-15534. Testimony by Thoms, Inal of the Major War Criminals, XIII, 612.
54. Pohl to Finance Ministry, July 24, 1944, NG-4096.
55. Ibid; Ministerialdirektor Gossel (Finance Ministry) to Reichrechnungsdirek-
tor (Chief Auditor) Patzer, September 7, 1944, NG-4U94.
56. Patzer to Gossel, November 16, 1944, NG-4097.
57. Affidavit by Thoms, May 8, 1946, PS-3951.
58. Pfandleihanstalt to Hauptkasse, September 14, 1943, NT 13818.
59. Affidavit by Albert Thoms, May 26, 1948, NI-15533. For an itemized account
of the valuables found in salt mine at Merkers, see report by F. J. Roberts, chief, claims
section, foreign exchange depository of Office of American Military Government,
Januaiy 30, 1947, NI-15647.
60. Pohl to main offices, Higher SS and Police Leaders, SS economists, WVH A-B,
YWHA-D, WVH A A-IV, Gruf. Sporrenbcrg (Globocnik's successor), Stubaf. Wip­
pern, and OStubaf. Mockel, December 9, 1943, NO-4566.

CONFISCATIONS 1025
Allocation Gcttovcrwaltung L6dz

Camps Kulmhof Auschwitz

Collection
I
Gettoverwaltung Camp Administration
Camp Pabianicc (Burger) Möckel
Sorting Seifert

Distribution

,// i
/ /„___ —/ Economy Auschwitz
Wartheland Ravensbrück RuSHA VOMI Camps Ministry Camp
s

Clothes Clothes Clothes Clothes Clothes Adm.


-----------

1 Linen
1 Blankets 1
1 | 1I I
1 1
1 1
Intermediary
channels
I
1
1 I
1
1 1
1 1
1 1
1 1
I1 I
1
|
1 1
1 1 1 1
1
1 1 1 Ethnic 1
Germans
1 1 1 in 1
Ethnic Families GG
Final German 1I of and
I
1
utilization resettle™ Waffen SS SS men Russia Inmates

Hard items Soft items


WVHA-A

Generalgouvernement Camps

Special Staff G (Aktion Rrinhardt)


Globocnik
intelligence.61 Most important of all, the Reichsbank and the Golddiskont-
bank had to establish a fund from which the SS could borrow money to fi­
nance its various activities. This loan, known as the Reinhardt fund, infused
the SS industries with new life. The SS combine owed RM 6,831,279.54 to
the SS Savings Bank Association and RM 1,000,000 to the German Red
Cross. These debts could now be repaid. In addition, some money was
plowed into capital expansion.62 After the conclusion of these arrange­
ments, the disapproving Reichsbankdirektor, Wilhelm, took the occasion to
“warn” Puhl against visiting the concentration camps in connection with the
credits.63
The last belongings of the victims were not the riches of which Himm­
ler spoke, but they were collected assiduously and channeled with much
deliberation to a large number of ultimate users. The organization of this
scheme appears in Table 9-17.

KILLING OPERATIONS
The camps entrusted with the implementation of the Final Solution had
three concerns. One was maintaining secrecy. Another was efficiency. The
third was erasing the traces of the killing. All three of these efforts were
integral components of the operation, built into the administrative pro­
cedures followed in the camps day by day.

CONCEALMENT
Hiding the operation from all outsiders was a continuous problem. Pre­
cautions had to be taken before the victims arrived, while they went
through the processing, and after they were dead. At no point could any
disclosure be permitted and at no time could the camp management
afford to be caught off guard. From the moment gassing installations
were planned, SS officers with responsibilities for the undertaking in
Berlin and in the camps themselves were living in a constant state of
nervousness over the possibility of untoward discoveries by unauthorized
persons. That is why speed itself became important. As Viktor Brack of
the Führer Chancellery noted in a letter to Himmler: “You yourself,
Rcichsfuhrcr, said to me some time ago that for reasons of concealment
alone we have to work as quicklv as possible.”1

61. Himmler to Sraf. Baumert, June 25, 1944, NO-2208.


62. Memorandum by WVHA-YV, May 26, 1943, NO-2190. DWB (SS industry
network) to (Sruf. Frank and HStuf. Melmer, June 7, 1943, NO-554.
63. Affidavit by Wilhelm, January 23, 1948, Nl-14462.
1. Obf. Braek to Himmler, June 23, 1942, NO-205.

KILLING OPERATIONS 1027


A standard concealment measure was verbal camouflage. The most
important and possibly the most misleading term used for the killing
centers collectively was the “East.” This phrase was employed again and
again during the deportations. For camps, there were a variety of head­
ings. When Soviet prisoners of war were awaited in the Lublin camp and
in newly established Birkenau at the end of 1941, the two sites were
named Kriegsgefangenenlager (PW camps), but later both received the
generic label Konzentrationslager (concentration camps), Birkenau as part
of Auschwitz, and by November 1943, nominally independent, as KL Au
II.2 Sobibor was appropriately called a Durchgangslager (transit camp).
Since it was located near the Bug, on the border of the occupied eastern
territories, the designation fitted the myth of the “eastern migration.”
When Himmler proposed one day that the camp be designated a Konzen­
trationslager, Pohl opposed the change.3 4
In Auschwitz, the architect Erd of the Zentralbauleitung referred to
a project of constructing barracks that were to hold the belongings of
gassed Jews as “Effects Barracks for Special Treatment 3 Pieces” (Effekten-
barocke für Sonderbehandlung 3 Stück).4 He called the underground gas
chambers “special cellars” (Sonderkeller) and the surface chambers “bath
houses for special actions” (Badeanstalten fur Sonderaktionen) .5 Inasmuch
as blueprints of a gas building could be revealing even without explicit
labeling of its purpose, the chief of the Zentralbauleitung, Bischoff, or­
dered such plans to be kept under special surveillance.6 In addition, pho­
tographing inside the Auschwitz camp was prohibited.7
In the much smaller camp of Belzec the diesel engine was located in a
shack called the “Hackenholt Foundation.” (Unterscharführer Hacken­
holt was the operator of the diesel.)8 The primary term for the killing
operation itself was the same that had been employed for the killings in
Russia — Sonderbehandlung (special treatment). In addition, there was
some terminology more appropriate to the killing center operations, such

2. Norbert Frei et al., cds., Standort- und Kommandaturbefehle des Konzentrations­


lagers Auschwitz 1940-1945 (Munich, 2000), pp. 76n, 366-68.
3. Himmler to Pohl, July 5, 1943, NO-482. Pohl to Himmler, Julv 15, 1943,
NO-482.
4. Memorandum by Erd, June 30, 1942, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
Archives Record Group 11.001 (Center for Historical Collections, Moscow), Roll
35, Fond 502, Opis 1, Folder 236.
5. Memoranda by Ertl, November 27 and August 21, 1942, ibid., Roll 41, Fond
502, Opis 1, Folder 313.
6. Order by Bischoff, May 5, 1943, ibid., Roll 21, Fond 502, Opis 1, Folder 39.
7. Kommandantur order (signed Höss), February 2, 1943, ibid.. Roll 20, Fond
502, Opis 1, Folder 32.
8. Affidavit by Gcrsrein, April 26,1945, PS-1553.

KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


as durchgeschleusst (dragged through) or gesondert untergebracht (sepa­
rately quartered).
Next to verbal camouflage it was most important to close the mouths
of die inner circle; hence all camp personnel, especially top personnel,
were sworn to silence. Höss made such a promise to Himmler before he
started his task. He observed complete secrecy, not speaking to any out­
sider about his work. Only once did he break his word: “At the end of
1942,” relates Höss, “my wife’s curiosity was aroused by remarks made by
the Gauleiter of Upper Silesia, Bracht, regarding happenings in the camp.
She asked me whether this was die truth, and I admitted that it was. That
was the only breach of the promise I had given to the Reichsführer.”9
A Treblinka guard, Unterscharführer Hirtreiter, once spent a furlough
with his girlfriend, Frieda Jörg, in Germany. The woman knew of Hirt-
reiter’s past experiences with “euthanasia” operations at the asylum of
Hadamar. Full of curiosity, she asked him, “What are you doing in Poland
now? Bumping people off, eh? [ Was macht ihr denn in Polen? Gelt, ihr legt
da Menschen um?]" Hirtreiter did not reply.10 11
Not all the participants could keep the burden of their knowledge to
themselves. In 1943 the Auschwitz administration asked the Security and
Order Police in the west not to confront Jews with “disturbing remarks
about the place and nature of their future utilization” or “resistance-
provoking indications or speculations about their intended quarters”
(“irgend welche beunruhigende Eröffnungen über den Ort und die Art ihrer
bevorstehenden Verwendung” or “irgend welche besonderen Widerstand aus­
lösende Andeutungen bezw. Vermutungen über die Art ihrer Unterbring­
ung”)." Instances are also recorded indicating that guards sometimes
trumpeted out the news to newly arrived victims even in the killing cen­
ters.12 When Obersturmführer Gerstein, the gas expert, completed his

9. Testimony by Hbss, Trial of the Major War Criminals, XI, 396-411. Auschwitz
guards had to sign statements that they would not talk about the "Jewish evacuation"
even to SS comrades. U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives Record Group 04
(Records ot Nazi Concentration Camps 1939-1945/Auschwitz), Rolls 1 and 2.
10. "Ein Wachmann von Treblinka” Frankfurter Zeittmg, November 11, 1950,
P-3.
11. RvSHA IV-B-4 (signed Giinrhcr) to Knochen, Zoepf, and Ehlers in France, the
Netherlands, and Belgium, with copy to BdS in Metz, April 29, 1943, Israel Police
1208. Noteworthy is the fact that Auschwirz-Rirkcnau was not kept secret as a desti­
nation. The UGIF’s Israclowicz wrote to a woman on September 2, 1942, that her
husband had been deported to Auschwitz in Upper Silesia and that it was a work
camp. On February 12, 1943, the Bulletin de l'Union Générale des Israélites en France
stared that it had on hand correspondence from Jews deported to the "'w ork camp"
Birkenau. Cynthia J. Haft, Fbe Bargain and the Bridle (Chicago, 1983), pp. 38, 61-
62 .
12. Julius Ganszer, a survivor, tells of his reception in Auschwitz after he had been

KILLING OPERATIONS 1029


tour of the Generalgouvernement camps in the late summer of 1942, he
spilled the whole secret on the Warsavv-Berlin express to a fellow pas­
senger, Swedish diplomat Baron von Otter.13 The baron reported the
existence of the killing centers to Stockholm, but the Swedish govern­
ment did not disseminate the information to the world.14
Closely related to the oath of silence was the control of visitors. Occa­
sionally high officials of the Reich or of the party would arrive for “inspec­
tions.” The concentration camp administration was especially touchy
about these visits. On November 3,1943, Gliicks ordered that the guests
were not to be shown the brothels and the crematoria; neither was there
to be any talk about these installations.15 In case anyone did happen to
notice the smoking chimneys, he was given the standard explanation that
the crematorium was burning corpses that resulted from epidemics.16
There were welcome and unwelcome visitors. Following a visit bv
Justice Minister Thierack to Auschwitz on January 8, 1943, Hóss sent
him an album of photographs with a little note in which he expressed the
hope that the Reichsminister would “enjoy them” (“w der Hoffnung,
Ihnen damit£fUichzeiti£j eine Freude bereitetzu haberi”).17 Unwelcome were
primarily unannounced visitors. Frank, the Generalgouverneur of Po­
land, was extremely anxious to get details about killing centers. Once, he
got a report “that there was something going on near Belzec”; he went
there the next day. Globocnik showed him how Jews were working on an
enormous ditch. When Frank asked what would happen to the Jews, he
got the standard answer: they would be sent farther east. Frank made
another attempt. He expressed to Himmler the wish to pay a visit to
Lublin, and Himmler urged him not to go there. Finally, Frank tried to
spring a surprise visit to Auschwitz. His car was stopped and diverted

given prison clothes and after a number was tattooed on his arm. A guard said: “You
are only numbers. A shot, and the number is gone. Don’t try to escape; the only way
to get out of here is by the chimney.” Filip Friedman, This Was Osmecim (London,
1946), p. 26. For an identical experience by Dr. Bernard Lauber, see Case No. 4, tr.
pp. 282-97.
13. Statement bv Gcrstein, May 4, 1945, in Vierteljahrshejte fur ZeitjjcschichteX
(1953): 192.
14. Comment bv Hans Rothfels, citing letter from Swedish Foreign Ministry to
Centre dc Documentation Juive Contemporainc, November 10, 1949. Ibui., p. 181.
15. Glucks to camp commanders, November 10, 1943, NO-1541. See also corre­
spondence about hiding “special buildings” in NO-1242 and NO-4463.
16. Affidavit by Wilhelm StefHcr, January' 28,1948, NI-13953. Srctfiei w as Minis-
terialrat in charge of raw materials in the Office of the Four-Year Plan. He visited
Auschwitz with a part)' that included Krauch and Korner. Affidavit bv Dr. Karl
Riihmer, February 7, 1947, NO-1931. Riihmcr, a Snrbaf. in WHYA W-Y, was a
fishery expert.
17. Hoss to Thierack, March 4, 1943, NG-645.

KELLING CENTER OPERATIONS


with the explanation that there was an epidemic in the camp. Later Frank
complained to Hitler about his frustrated visit. Hitler is said to have
replied: “'You can very well imagine that there are executions going on of
insurgents. Apart from that I do not know anything. Why don’t you
speak to Heinrich Himmler about it?” And so, Frank was back where he
started.18
Although the entrances to the camps could be watched, the back door
was frequently open, even in the secluded killing centers of the Genc-
ralgouvernement. A German noncommissioned officer heard a great deal
about Belzec in the Deutsches Haus of Rawa Ruska and in the Ratskeller
of neighboring Chelm. On his way to Chelm one day, at the Rawa Ruska
railway station, he saw a deportation train. He asked a railway policeman
where the Jews had come from. They were probably the last ones from
Lvov, the policeman explained. And how far were they going? To Belzec.
And then? Poison {Gift). When his own train came, he shared a compart­
ment with the wife of a railway policeman. Her husband, on duty on the
train, joined them. The woman was going to point out Belzec on the way.
“Now it comes \Jetzt kommt cs schon].” A strong sweetish smell greeted
them. “They are stinking already [Die stinkenja schon],” said the woman.
“Oh nonsense, that is the gas [Ach Quatsch, das istja das G«y] ” her hus­
band explained.19
Auschwitz, with its great industrial activity, had a constant stream of
incoming and outgoing corporate officials, engineers, construction men,
and other personnel, all excellent carriers of gossip to die farthest corners
of the Reich.20 There were also a large number of Germans living in the
Auschwitz area who were perpetually aware of the killing center. One
railroad man, observing the fences and guard posts of Auschwitz I on one
side of the tracks and of Auschwitz II on the other, concluded that he was
in the midst of it all {mitten drin).21 Another railroad functionary noticed
that his apartment was filled with a sweetish odor, and the windows were
covered with a bluish film.22 Even those at more distant points could see

18. Testimony by Frank, Trial of tbc Major War Criminals, XII, 17-19.
19. Diary of Wilhelm Comities, August 31, 1942, Vicrteljabrsbefteflir '/xitctcscbicbte
7 (1959): 333-36. See also report of a Belgian deportee at Rawa Ruska, October 18,
1942, Yad Vashcm, M 7/2-2.
20. Affidavit by Ernst A. Struss (I. G. Farben), April 17, 1947, NI-6645. Struss
visited Auschwitz in January 1942 and again in May 1943.
21. Testimony by Willy Hilsc, December 9, 1964, Case Novak, 1416/61, Landes-
gericht Vienna, vol. 13, pp. 248-57. See also statement by Ulrich Brand, June 23,
1967, Staatsanwaltschaft Diisseldort, Case Ganzenmiiller, vol. XVI, p. 161 insert
(Hiille) at pp. 7-10.
22. Testimony by Adolf Johann Barthelmass, December 2,1964, Case Novak, vol.
13, pp. 281-89. Barthlmass lived in Babiee. In the cits’ of Auschwitz itself there was a
count on December 17, 1939, of 12,545 inhabitants, almost cquallv divided between

KILLING OPERATIONS
physical indications of killing operations. From the Katowice direction
the fires of Auschwitz were visible from a distance of twelve miles.·23 24 25
Inevitably, these German residents talked about annihilation and crema­
tion,24 and some of them became regular sources of news for colleagues in
the Reich.25
The powerful rumor network did not reach German listeners alone.
The news of the killing centers was carried to the populations of several
countries in the form of a story that out of the fat of corpses the Germans
were making soap. To this day the origin of the soap-making rumor has
not been traced, but one clue is probably the postwar testimony of the SS
investigator Dr. Konrad Morgen, who at one time was quite active in
Poland. One of Morgen’s subjects of special interest was Brigadefiihrer
Dirlewanger. It must be stressed that Dirlewanger had nothing to do with
the killing centers. He was the commander of a notorious unit of SS
unreliables, which in 1941 was stationed in the Generalgouvernement.
What did this man do? According to Morgen,
Dirlewanger had arrested people illegally and arbitrarily, and as for
his female prisoners — young Jewesses —he did the following against
them: He called together a small circle of friends consisting of mem­
bers of a Wehrmacht supply unit. Then he made so-called scientific
experiments, which involved stripping the victims of their clothes.
Then they [the victims] were given an injection of strychnine. Dirle­
wanger looked on, smoking a cigarette, as did his friends, and they saw
how these girls were dying. Immediately after that the corpses were cut
into small pieces, mixed with horsemeat, and boiled into soap.
I would like to state here, emphatically, that here we were only
concerned with a suspicion, although a very urgent one. We had wit­
nesses’ testimony concerning these incidents, and the Security Police in
Lublin had made certain investigations. . . .26
On July 29, 1942, the chief of the Ethnic Germans in Slovakia, Kar-
masin, had written a letter to Himmler in which he described the “reset-

Jews and Poles. By October 10,1943, the count was 27,813, comprising the remain­
ing Poles, some 6,000 Reich Germans, as well as Polish and foreign newcomers.
Sybille Steinbachcr, “Musterstadt”Auschwitz (Munich, 2000), pp. 159,244-45.
23. Testimony by Bartclmäss, December 2, 1964, Case Novak, vol. 13, pp. 281-
89. Affidavit by Heinrich Schuster (Austrian inmate), October 13,1947, NI-11862.
24. Statement by Wilhelm Fehling, June 8, 1967. Case Ganzenmüller, vol. XVI,
p. 161, insert, pp. 18-23. A Christian member of the Belgian resistance, Victor
Martin, entrusted with a mission to find out what was happening to the Jews, trawled
to Upper Silesia and was able to obtain detailed information in conversations with
German workers. Sec Martin’s undated report at Yad Vashcm, document 02/300.
25. Affidavit by Dr. Gustav Küpper (I. G. Farben), June 10, 1947, Nl-8919.
26. Testimony by Morgen, Case No. 11, tr. pp. 4075-76.

KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


dement” of 700 “asocial” Ethnic Germans. One ot the difficulties, wrote
Karmasin, was the spreading of the rumor (furthered by the clergy) that
the “resettlers” would be “boiled into soap” (class die Aussiedler “zur Seife
verkoebt werden").17 In October 1942 the Propaganda Division in the
Lublin District reported the rumor circulating in the city that now it was
the turn of the Poles to be used, like the Jews, for “soap production” (Die
Polen komrnen jetzt jjenau me die Juden zur Seifenproduktion dran).2H In
the Genereddircktion der Ostbahn, railroad officials talking about gassings
would say jokingly (itvnisch) that another distribution of soap was in the
offing.27 28 29
The SS and Police could not arrest the spread of rumors, which per­
sisted long after die war.30 Still less could German agencies deal with
reasoned deductions and predictions. Killing centers could be hidden,
but the disappearance of major communities was noticed in Brussels and
Vienna, Warsaw and Budapest. How, then, did the few thousand guards
in the death camps handle the millions of arrivals? How did the Germans
kill their victims?

THE “CONVEYOR BELT”


The killing operation was a combination of physical layout and psycho­
logical technique. Camp officials covered every step from the train plat­
form to the gas chambers with a series of precise orders. A show of force
impressed upon the victims the seriousness of unruliness or recalcitrance,
even as misleading explanations reassured them in their new, ominous

27. Karmasin to Himmler, July 29, 1942, NO-1660.


28. GG Main Division Propaganda, consolidated weekly reports from district
propaganda divisions, report by Lublin division, October 3, 1942, Occ E 2-2.
29. Statement by Christian Johann Liebhduser, August 28, 1961, Case Ganzen-
miiller, vol. V, pp. 154-59.
30. The soap rumor appears to have been the most persistent. According to
Friedman (Oswiecim, p. 64), the Polish population actually bovcotted soap because of
the belief that human ingredients had been used in its manufacture. A document by
Prof. R. Spanner, director, Anatomical Institute of the Medical Academy, Danzig,
February 15, 1944, USSR-196, contains a recipe for soap-making from fat remains
(Seifenherstellunji aus Fettresten) with recommendations for the removal of odors. The
document does not specify human fat. However, on May 5, 1945, the new (Polish)
mayor of Danzig, Kotus-Jankowski, testified before a session of the National Council:
“In the Danzig Institute of Hygiene we discovered a soap factor)' in which human
bodies from the Stutthof Camp near Danzig were used. VVe found 350 bodies there,
Poles and Soviet prisoners. We found a cauldron with the remains of boiled human
flesh, a box of prepared human bones, and baskets of hands and feet and human skin,
with the fat removed.” Quoted bv Friedman, Oswiecim, p. 64. The soap rumor w as
perpetuated even after the w ar. Cakes of soap, allegedly made w ith the fat of dead
Jew s, have been preserved in Israel and by the YIVO Institute in New' York.

KILLING OPERATIONS
surroundings. Although there were breakdowns and mishaps in this sys­
tem, it was perfected to a degree that justified its characterization by an SS
doctor as a conveyor belt {am laufenden Band).31
The initial action in the predetermined sequence was notification of
the camp that a transport was arriving.32 Notice was followed by a mobili­
zation of guards and inmates who were going to be involved in the
processing.33 Everyone knew what would happen and what he had to do.
From the moment the doors of a train were opened, all but a few of the
deportees had only two hours to live.34
The arriving Jews, on the other hand, were unprepared for a death
camp. Rumors and intimations that had reached them were simply not
absorbed. These forewarnings were rejected because they were not suffi­
ciently complete, or precise, or convincing. When, in May 1942, a group
of deportees was being marched from Zolkiewka to the Krasnystaw sta­
tion (where a train was to take them to Sobibor), Polish inhabitants called
out to the column: “Hey, Zydzi, idziecie na spalenie! [Hey Jews, you are
going to burn!].”35 A survivor of that transport recalls: ‘The meaning of
these words escaped us. We had heard of the death camp of Belzec, but we
didn’t believe it.”36 A sophisticated Viennese physician who was in a cattle
car remembers that another deportee noticed a sign in a railway station
and called out “Auschwitz!” The physician saw the outlines of an “im­
mense camp” stretched out in the dawn and he heard the shouts and
whistles of command. “We did not know their meaning,” he says. In the
evening, he inquired where a friend had been sent and was told by one of
the old prisoners that he could see him “there.” A hand pointed to the
chimney, but the new inmate could not understand the gesture until the
truth was explained to him in “plain words.”37 Another physician, from
Holland, reports:

I refused to . . . leave any room for the thought of the gassing of the
Jews, of which I could surely not have pretended ignorance. As early as
1942 I had heard rumors about the gassing of the Polish Jews. . . .
Nobody had ever heard, however, when these gassings took place, and

31. Affidavit by Friedrich Entrcss, April 14,1947, NO-2368.


32. See Novak to Höss, copy to Liebchcnschcl, January' 23, 1943, on arrival of
three Da trains from Theresienstadt, Case Novak, vol. 17, p. 295.
33. Adalbert Rückcrl, NS - Vem ichtu tujslaqer (Munich, 1977), pp. 135, 138 (Rel­
iée), p. 181 (Sobibor), p. 217 (Trcblinka).
34. Ibid., p. 226.
35. Itzhak Lichtman, “From Zolkiewka to Sobibor,” in Miriam Novitch, Sobibor
(New York, 1980), pp. 80-85.
36. Ibid.
37. Victor Frankl, From Death Camp to Existentialism (Boston, 1949), pp. 6-12.

KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


it was definitely not known that people were gassed immediately upon
arrival.38
The great majority of the deportees could not grasp the situation so
long as they did not know the details of the killing operation, the when
and the how. Those who came with premonitions and forebodings were
usually unable to think of a way out. On a Warsaw transport to Treblinka
in August 1942, a young deportee heard the words, “Jews, we’re done
for!” The old men in the car began to say the prayer for the dead.39
Another young man, stepping off a train in Treblinka, saw mounds of
clothing and said to his wife that this was the end (Das ist das Ende).40
Cognition was thus converted to fatalism more readily than to escape or
resistance.
The German administrators, however, were determined not to take
chances, lest some impetuous resister in the crowd create a dangerous
confrontation. They were going to move swiftly while reinforcing Jewish
illusions to the last possible moment. To this end they set a pattern of
procedures that was virtually the same in every camp, save only for those
variations that stemmed from the different layouts and installations in
each enclosure.
The ramps at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka were too short to accom­
modate lengthy trains. At each of these camps, transports were backed
into the compound to be unloaded a few cars at a time.41 On the Belzec
ramp the arriving Jews were received with the music and singing of a ten-
man inmate orchestra.42
Kulmhof was reachable only by road or narrow-gauge railway. Ini­
tially, deportees were brought from the immediate vicinity on trucks.
Trains from the Lodz Ghetto halted at Warthbrücken (Kolo),43 where the

38. F.lie Cohen, Human Behavior in the Concentration Camp (New York, 1953),
p. 119.
39. Abraham Krzcpicki, “Eighteen Days in Treblinka,” in Alexander Donat, ed.
'Ihe Death Camp Treblinka (New York, 1979), pp. 77-145, at p. 79. Krzcpicki es­
caped to the Warsaw Ghetto, where he recorded his experiences from December
1942 to January 1943. During the Warsaw Ghetto battle, he was wounded and
abandoned in a burning building. His account was found after the war.
40. Ruckerl, NS-Vcrmchtiinpslaqcr, p. 218.
41. Ibid., pp. 138, 166-67, 217. On Treblinka, see derailed statement bv David
Milgrom in Bratislava, August 30, 1943, enclosed by U.S. Vice-Consul Melbourne
(Istanbul) to Secretary of State, January 13, 1944, National Archives Record Group
226/OSS 58603. Milgrom had escaped.
42. Statement by Stefan Kirsz (Polish locomotive helper), October 15, 1945,
Belzec case, 1 Js 278/60, vol. 6, pp. 1147-49.
43. Deutsche Reichsbahn/Verkehrsamr in Lodz to Gestapo in Lodz, Mav 19,
1942, Jüdisches Historisches Institut Warschau, Faschismus-Getto-Massenmord (Ber­
lin, 1961), pp. 280-81.

KILLING OPERATIONS 1035


victims were sometimes kept overnight in the local synagogue and from
which they were taken by truck to Kulmhof. Later a more complicated
logistic procedure was instituted to avoid public display of the deported
Jews in Warthbriicken. The victims were loaded on a narrow-gauge train
and kept overnight in a mill at Zawacki. They were then driven to Kulm­
hof in trucks.44
At Auschwitz the ramp was first located between the old camp and
Birkenau. Those who were directed to the Auschwitz I gas chamber
“streamed” through the gate. When Birkenau was opened, long columns
ran through a gauntlet several hundred yards long to one of the cre­
matoria.45 Not until the spring of 1944 was the spur built in Birkenau.
On the new ramp, trains were unloaded a short distance from the gas
chambers.46 The cars, emptied of the living and the dead, were moved to a
fumigation installation. One hot day, a loadmaster opened up a car and
was jolted when a blackened corpse tumbled out. The car was filled with
bodies that camp personnel had neglected to remove.47
Following the unloading of the trains, there was a twofold selection
procedure. The old, infirm, and sometimes small children were separated
on the platform. At Belzec sick people were placed face down near a pit to
be shot.48 At Sobibór, where trucks picked up the aged and the infants,
guards would occasionally try to toss the babies from a considerable
distance into the vehicle.49 At Treblinka those unable to walk were taken
to a pit near the infirmary for shooting.50 From the first Auschwitz ramp,
trucks would remove the old and the infirm to the gas chambers.51
The camps also selected strong persons for labor. In the General-
gouvernement camps or Kulmhof, very few individuals were needed as
work crews, and among those chosen women were but a handful.52
Asked about the children, a former member of the SS establishment in

44. Rückerl, NS-Vemichtungslager, pp. 268-69, 277, 285. A photograph of what


appears to be a two-tiered narrow-gauge train being loaded with Jews is on page 284
of Faschismus-Getto-Massenmord.
45. Filip Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz (New York, 1979), pp. 173 (map), 31,69.
46. Danuta Czech, Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Ksmzentratumslager Auschwitz-
Birkenau 1939-1945 (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1989), map on p. 27.
47. Testimony by Adolf Johann Bartclmäss, December 2, 1964, Case Nov ak,
Landesgericht Vienna 1416/61, vol. 13, pp. 281-89, and his statement of April 11,
1967, Case Novak, vol. 16, p. 338. Interrogation of Willy Hilse, ca. 1964, Case
Novak, vol. 12, p. 605, and his testimony, Case Novak, vol. 13, pp. 248-57. Roth
were railroad men at Auschwitz.
48. Rückerl, NS-Vemichtungslager, pp. 14-41.
49. Ibid., pp. 171, 191-92!"
50. Ibid., p. 219.
51. Affidavit by Enrress, April 14, 1947, NO-2368.
52. Kr/epicki, “Eighteen Days,” in Donat, Treblinka, p. 117.

KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


Treblinka declared at his trial that “saving children in Treblinka was im­
possible [Kinder in Treblinka zu retten war unmößlich\?Si Labor require­
ments at Auschwitz were greater, and at the Birkenau platform SS doctors
(Mengele, König, Thilo, or Klein) would choose employable Jews for the
industrial machine. Selections were not very thorough, however. The
victims were paraded in front of the physician, who would then make
spot decisions by pointing to the right for work or to the left for the gas
chamber.53 54
Men and women were separated for undressing in barracks. An im­
pression was being created that clothes were to be reclaimed after show­
ers.55 At Sobibor, one of the SS men, dressed in a white coat, would issue
elaborate instructions about folding the garments, sometimes adding re­
marks about a Jewish state that the deportees were going to build in the
Ukraine.56 At Kulmhof the victims were told that they would be sent for
labor to Germany, and in Belzec a specially chosen SS man made similar
quieting speeches.57 In all three of the Generalgouvernement camps,
there were special counters for the deposit of valuables.58 The hair of the
women was shorn,59 and the procession was formed, men first. In So-
bibor, groups of fifty to one hundred were marched through the “hose”
by an SS man walking in front and four or five Ukrainians following at the
rear of the column.60 At Belzec, screaming women were prodded with
whips and bayonets.61 The Jews arriving in Treblinka, states Höss, almost
always knew that they were going to die.62 Sometimes they could see

53. Ruckerl, A\S-Vcrmchtunfislaqcr, p. 223.


54. Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys (Chicago and New York, 1947), p. 10. Testimony
by Auerbach (Jewish survivor), Case No. 11, tr. pp. 2512-14. Sehn, "Oswiycim,"
Herman Crimes in Poland, vol. 1, pp. 41, 77-78. See also photographs, taken by SS
photographers at Auschwitz, of arrival procedure in Peter Heilman, The Ausclnvitz
Album (New York, 1981).
55. Ruckerl, NS-Vemichtunqslaqer, pp. 135, 167, 202, 218-19.
56. Ibid., p. 167.
57. Ibid., p. 269. Statement by Karl Schluch (Belzec cadre), November 10, 1961,
Belzec case, vol. 8, pp. 1503-25.
58. Ruckerl, NS-Vemichtungslager, pp. 135, 139, 167,219.
59. Ibid., pp. 135, 222-23. At Belzec the naked women who had their hair cut
were beaten on the head and in the face. Statement by Rudolf Reder made shortly
after the war in Poland, Belzec case, vol. 1, pp. 28-31. Reder was one of only two
survivors of Belzec known to have been alive in 1945. The other, Chaim Hirszman,
w'as killed in March 1946 before he could complete his testimony before the Jewish
Historical Commission in Lublin. See Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust (New York,
1985), pp. 302, 304-5, 817.
60. Ruckerl, NS-Vemichtutipslaffer, pp. 182, 135.
61. Postwar statement by Reder, Belzec case, vol. 2, pp. 258-87.
62. Affidavit by Hdss, April 5, 1946, PS-3868.

KILLING OPERATIONS 1037


mountains of corpses, partially decomposed.63 Some suffered nervous
shock, laughing and crying alternately.64 To rush the procedure, the
women at Treblinka were told that the water in the showers was c<x>ling
down.65 The victims would then be forced to walk or run naked though
the “hose” with their hands raised.66 During the winter of 1942-43,
however, the undressed people might have had to stand outdoors for
hours to wait their turn.67 There they could hear the cries of those who
had preceded them into the gas chambers.68
The Auschwitz procedure evolved in stages. In April 1942, Slovak
Jews were gassed in Krematorium I, apparently with their clothes on.69
Later, deportees from nearby Sosnowiec were told to undress in the yard.
The victims, faced by the peremptory order to remove their clothes, men
in front of women and women in front of men, became apprehensive.
The SS men, shouting at them, then drove the naked men, women, and
children into the gas chamber.70 During the third stage, in 1942, the
abuse was replaced by politeness, and the speechmaking by Aumeier,
Grabner, and Hössler began. The victims were now told to undress for
their showers, before the soup that would be served afterward became
cold.71 For added security, gassings would be scheduled for a time before
daybreak, when the camp inmates were still sleeping, or for the night
hours, after the curfew had gone into effect.72
At Birkenau, illusion was the rule. It was not always simple or possible,
inasmuch as at least some of the deportees had observed the sign Ausch­
witz as the train passed through the railway yards,73 or had seen flames
belching from the chimneys, or had smelled the strange, sickening odor
of crematoria.74 Most of them, however, like a group from Salonika, were
fimneled through the undressing rooms, were told to hang their clothes
on hooks and remember the number, and promised food after the shower
63. Rückerl, NS-Vemichtungslager, pp. 208-9.
64. Samuel Rajzman in Hearings, House Foreign Affairs Committee, 79th Cong.,
1st scss., on H.R. 93, March 22-26,1945, pp. 121-25.
65. Rückerl, NS-Vernichtungslager, p. 223.
66. Ibid., pp. 224-25. Jankcl Wiernik, “One Year in Treblinka,” in Donat, Tre­
blinka, pp. 147-88, atp. 163.
67. Wiernik, Ibid., p. 163.
68. Rückerl, NS-Vernichtungslager, p. 226. Statement by Milgrom, August 30,
1943, in National Archives Record Group 226/OSS 58603.
69. Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz, pp. 11-13.
70. Ibid., pp. 31-35.
71. Ibid., pp. 35-39.
72. Ibid., p. 39.
73. Elie Wiesel, Night (New York, 1969), p. 36. Interrogation of Hilse, Case
Novak, vol. 12, p. 605. According to Hilse, transports passed through the station.
The freight yards, consisting of forty-four parallel tracks, were two miles long.
74. Lcngyel, Five Chimneys, p. 22.

KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


and work after the food. The unsuspecting Greek Jews, clutching soap
and towels, rushed into the gas chambers.75 Nothing was allowed to
disturb this precarious synchronization. When a Jewish inmate revealed
to newly arrived people what was in store for them, he was cremated
alive.76 Only in the case of victims who were brought in from nearby
ghettos in Upper Silesia (Sosnowiec and Bydzin) and who had had inti­
mations of Auschwitz was speed alone essential. These people were told
to undress quickly in their “own best interest.”77
Once there was a major incident in front of an Auschwitz gas chamber.
A transport that had come in from Belsen revolted. The incident occurred
when two-thirds of the arrivals had already been shoved into the gas
chamber. The remainder of the transport, still in the dressing room, had
become suspicious. When three or four SS men entered to hasten the
undressing, fighting broke out. The light cables were torn down, the SS
men were overpowered, one of them was stabbed, and all of them were
deprived of their weapons. As the room was plunged into complete dark­
ness, wild shooting started between die guard at the exit door and the
prisoners inside. When Hoss arrived at the scene, he ordered the doors to
be shut. Half an hour passed. Then, accompanied by a guard, Hoss
stepped into the dressing room, carrying a flashlight and pushing the
prisoners into one corner. From there they were taken out singly into
another room and shot.78
Selections were carried out not only on die platform, in order to pick
out deportees who would be able to work, but also within the camp, to
eliminate inmates too sick or too weak to work any longer. The usual
occasion for the choosing of victims was the roll call, where everybody
was present;79 another place was the hospital;80 and sometimes selections

75. Müller, Eyewitness AuscImHtz, pp. 80-81.


76. Ibid., p. 80.
77. Ibid., pp. 69-71.
78. Affidavit by Höss, March 14, 1946, NO-1210. The incident is described in
greater detail by Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz, pp. 83-89. Müller credits a seductive,
strikingly good-looking Jewish woman with riveting the attention of two SS men.
She struck one with a shoe, drew his pistol, and shot the other (Schillinger). Other
details, including the date (October 23, 1943), are in Czech, Kalendarium der Ereig­
nisse, pp. 636-38. Tadeusz Borowski, a Polish inmate, describes the incident in a
story, “The Death of Schillinger,“ This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (New
York, 1976), pp. 143-46. In this version, the SS man, mortally wounded, was carried
to a car and, groaning, was heard to say: “O Gott, mein Gott, was bob' ich getan, dass ich
so leiden muss? |God, oh God, what have I done that I have to sutler like this? ].”
79. Ijengvel, Fiw Chimneys, p. 4Ü. Gisella Perl, I Was a Doctor in Auschmtz. (New
York, 1948gp. 103.
80. F.lla Lingens-Reiner, Prisoners of Fear (London, 1948), pp. 64-65,82-83, 85.
Perl, / Was a Doctor in Auschwitz, pp. 55,94, 108-9.

KILLING OPERATIONS
were carried out block by block.81 One former inmate, recalling such
targeting, says: “I tried to make myself as inconspicuous as possible, not
too erect, yet not slouching; not too smart, yet not sloppy; not too proud,
yet not too servile, for I knew that those who were different died in
Auschwitz, while the anonymous, the faceless ones, survived.”82 A young
intellectual from Italy, who was in an Auschwitz hospital because of a
swollen foot, was told by a gentile Polish inmate: “Dm Jude, kaputt. Du
schnell Krematorium fertig [You Jew, finished. You soon ready for cre­
matorium].”83 In Treblinka, to have been bruised in the face was consid­
ered a calamity. The wounded man, “stamped” (gestempelt), was a candi­
date for selection at the next roll call.84
In Auschwitz the victims would try every subterfuge to escape. They
tried to hide. Occasionally they tried to argue. A nineteen-year-old girl
asked the Auschwitz women’s camp commander, Hössler, to excuse her.
He replied, “You have lived long enough. Come, my child, come.”85
Driven with whips between cordons of Kapos and guards, the naked
people who had been picked out were loaded on trucks and driven to the
gas chamber or to a condemned block. In the fall of 1944, 2,000 Jewish
women were packed into Block 25, which had room for 500. They were
kept there for ten days. Soup cauldrons were pushed through a gap in the
door by the fire guard. At the end of ten days, 700 were dead. The rest
were gassed.86
Gassing would begin with a command. At Treblinka a German would
shout to a Ukrainian guard: “Ivan, water!” This was a signal to start the
motor.87 The procedure was not necessarily fast. With no room to move
in the small chambers, the victims stood for thirty or forty minutes before
they died. According to one Treblinka survivor, people were sometimes
kept in the chambers all night without the motor being turned on.88 At
Belzec, where Oberscharführer Hackenholt was in charge of the motor, a
German visitor, Professor Pfannenstiel, wanted to know what was going

81. Perl, Ibid., pp. 128-30.


82. Rudolf Vrba and Alan Bestie, I Cannot Forgive (New York, 1964), p. 140.
Vrba, anonymous but not average, escaped from the camp.
83. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (New York, 1961), p. 44.
84. Rückerl, NS-Vernichtungslager, p. 230.
85. Testimony by Helene Klein in Raymond Phillips, cd., Trial of Josef Kramer and
Forty-Four Others (the Belsen Trial), (London, 1949), pp. 127-30. The witness herself
was given this answer by Hössler, but she managed to hide. A survivor. Dr. Bertold
Epstein, once witnessed a selection of children in which the decisive criterion w as
height. The children marched up to a pole at the height of 130 centimeters (ca. 4 feet,
3 inches). Those who did not make it were gassed. Friedman, Oswiecim, p. 72.
86. Lingcns-Reincr, Prisoners of Fear, pp. 85-86.
87. Rückerl, NS-Vemicbtungslager, p. 224.
88. Wicmik, “One Year,” in Donat, Treblinka, p. 164.

KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


on inside. He is said to have put his ear to the wall and, listening, to have
remarked: “Just like in a synagogue.”89 At Kulmhof, the doors to the van
were closed by Polish workers. One was inadvertently locked in with the
Jews and raged in despair to get out. The Germans decided that it would
not be prudent to open the door for him.90
When the Auschwitz victims filed into the gas chamber, they dis­
covered that the imitation showers did not work.91 Outside, a central
switch was pulled to turn off the lights,92 and a Red Cross car drove up
with the Zyklon.93 An SS man, wearing a gas mask fitted with a special
filter, lifted the glass shutter over the lattice and emptied one can after
another into the gas chamber. Although the lethal dose was one miligram
per kilogram of body weight and the effect was supposed to be rapid,
dampness could retard the speed with which the gas was spreading.94
Untersturmführer Grabner, political officer of the camp, stood ready with
stopwatch in hand.95 As the first pellets sublimated on the floor of the
chamber, the victims began to scream. To escape from the rising gas, the
stronger knocked down the weaker, stepping on prostrate victims in
order to prolong their own lives by reaching gas-free layers of air. The
agony lasted for about two minutes, and as the shrieking subsided, the
dying people slumped over. Within fifteen minutes (sometimes five),
everyone in the gas chamber was dead.
The gas was now allowed to escape, and after about half an hour, die
door was opened. The bodies were found in tower-like heaps, some in sit­
ting or half-sitting positions, children and older people at the bottom.
Where the gas had been introduced, there was an empty area from which
the victims had backed awav, and pressed against the door were the bodies
of men who in terror had tried to break out. The corpses were pink in
color, with green spots. Some had foam on the lips, others bled through

89. Statement by Gersrein, April 26, 1945, PS-1553. Pfanncnsriel confirms that
he was in Befzec with Gersrein, bur denies having made the remark. Statements by Dr.
Wilhelm Ptannensriel, June 6, 1950, and November 9, 1952, Befzec case, vol. 1,
pp. 41-44, 135-41. German personnel stationed at Befzec would sometimes look
through the peephole. Statement by Schluch, November 10, 1961, Befzec case, vol.
8, pp. 1503-25. Ptannensriel points out in his statement of November 9, 1952, that
when he tried to look he could nor see much, because the Jews had beaten on the
glass.
90. Rucked, NS-Vemichtun^slatfer, pp. 270-71.
91. Schn, “Oswiycim,” German Crimes in Poland, vol. 1, p. 85.
92. Affidavit bv Dr. Nikolae Nviszli (survivor), October 8, 1947, Nl-11710.
93. Ibid. Affidavit bv Dr. Charles Sigismund Bendel (survivor). October 21, 1945,
NI-11390.
94. Hbss, ¡Commandant, p. 171. Muller, EycuntnessAuschwitz, p. 116.
95. Affidavit bv Perrv Broad (SS man working under Grabner), December 14,
1945, Nl-11397.

KILLING OPERATIONS
the nose. Excrement and urine covered some of the bodies, and in some
pregnant women the birth process had started. The Jewish work parties
(Sonderkomrnandos), wearing gas masks, dragged out the bodies near the
door to clear a path and hosed down the dead, at the same time soaking
the pockets of poison gas remaining between the bodies. Then the Son-
derkommandos had to pry the corpses apart.96
In all the camps bodily cavities were searched for hidden valuables, and
gold teeth were extracted from the mouths of the dead. In Krematorium
II (new number) at Birkenau, the fillings and gold teeth, sometimes
attached to jaws, were cleaned in hydrochloric acid, to be melted into bars
in the main camp.97 At Auschwitz the hair of die women was cut off after
they were dead. It was washed in ammonium chloride before being
packed.98 The bodies could then be cremated.

ERASURE
There were three methods of body disposal: burial, cremation in ovens,
and burning in the open. In 1942 corpses were buried in mass graves in
Kulmhof, the Generalgouvernement camps, and Birkenau. Before long
this mode of dealing with the dead gave rise to second thoughts. In
Birkenau, near the huts that constituted the first gas chambers on the site,
the summer sun took its effect. The earth’s crust broke open, and at first
the bodies were covered with gasoline and later on with methanol, to be
burned day and night over a period of two months.99 At Sobibor during
the same summer, the graves heaved in the heat, the fluid from die
corpses attracted insects, and foul odors filled the camp.100 Moreover, the
many hundreds of thousands already buried posed a psychological prob­
lem. Ministerialrat Dr. Linden, sterilization expert in the Interior Minis­
try, is quoted by an SS man as having remarked on a visit to the Lublin
District that a future generation might not understand these matters.101
The same consideration had prompted the Gestapo chief Müller to order
Standartenführer Blobel, commander of Einsatzkommando 4a, to de­
stroy the mass graves in the eastern occupied territories.102 Blobel and his

96. Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz, pp. 116-18. Affidavit by Nyiszli, October 8,


1947, NI-11710. Affidavit by Broad, December 14, 1945, NI-11397. Affidavit by
Höss, April 5, 1946, PS-3868. Schn, “Oswiycim,” German Crimes in Poland, vol. 1,
pp. 85-87.
97. Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz, pp. 68,95, 100,176.
98. Ibid., pp. 65,95,100.
99. Ibid., p. 49. Rudolf Höss, Kommandant in Auschwitz (Munich, 1963), p. 161.
100. Rückcrl, ΛΓΛ-Vernichtungslager, p. 173.
101. Statement by Gerstcin, May 4, 1945, Vierteljahrshefic fur Zeitgeschichte 1
(1953): 189. Also affidavit by Gerstcin, April 25, 1945, PS-1553.
102. Affidavit by Blobel, June 18, 1947, NO-3947.

KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


“Kommando 1005” also moved into Kulmhof to investigate what could
be done with the graves there. He constructed funeral pyres and primitive
ovens, and even tried explosives.
In addition to these devices, Kulmhof had a bone-crushing machine
(Knochenmuhk). On July 16, 1942, the deputy chief of the Gettover-
waltung, Ribbe, sent a letter to “Eldest of the Jews” Rumkowski request­
ing a canvass of the Lodz Ghetto for a bone crusher, “whether manually
operated or motor driven.” He added openly, “The Sondcrkommando
Kulmhof is interested in this crusher.”103 104 The ghetto apparently had no
such machine, for a few months later Biebow sent to the Lodz Gestapo
the papers concerning the purchase of a mill from the firm Schriever and
Company in Hamburg. Biebow asked the Gestapo to keep the sales rec­
ord. “For certain reasons” he himself did not wish to keep it.105 When
Hoss visited Kulmhof, Blobel promised the Auschwitz commander that
he would send him a mill “for solid substances.”106 Hoss, however, pre­
ferred to destroy his bone material with hammers.107
By 1942-43 exhumations were in progress at all of the killing centers.
In Kulmhof Jewish work parties opened the mass graves and dragged the
corpses into newly dug pits and into a primitive oven.108 In Belzec the
process was begun in the late fall of 1942 within a firing area of the camp
capable of destroying 2,000 bodies per day. A second, somewhat smaller
firing position was started a month later, and the two were used concur­
rently, day and night, until March 1943.109 Excavators appeared in So-
bibor and Treblinka, where the corpses (moved by narrow-gauge railway
in Sobibor, and dragged in Treblinka) were stacked and burned on firing
grids built with old railway tracks.110
Kulmhof, the Warthegau camp, stopped gassings after the deporta­
tions of 1942, though it reopened briefly in 1944. Belzec, with 434,508
dead, shut down its chambers at the end of 1942. Treblinka, overflowing
with bodies, went on through the summer of 1943, and Sobibor con­
tinued with interruptions until the tall of 1943. Thereafter, the full bur­
den of the “final solution” was assumed by Birkenau and its crematoria.
Until the arriv al of the transports from Hungary, beginning in mid-Mav

103. Affidavit by Hoss, January 11, 1947, NO-4498-B.


104. Riblx· to Rumkowski, July 26, 1942, Dokumenty i materinh, vol. 3, p. 279.
105. Biebow to Fuchs, March 1, 1943, ibid.
106. Report by USrut. lXjaco (Auschwitz administration) on trip to Kulmhof,
September 17, 1942, NO-4467.
107. Artidavit by Hoss, March 14, 1946, NO-1210.
108. Ruckcrl, ,\'.S 1 'n~nulituiu)slnqrr, pp. 273-74.
109. Ibid., pp. 142-43.
110. Ibid., pp. 173,205-6. See also statement bv Kurt Becker (Ostbahn, Warsaw),
October 15, 1968, Case Ganzcnmiiller, vol. XVII, pp. 119-24.

KILLING OPERATIONS
1944, the task was not a special problem. The prospective inflow, how­
ever, brought major changes. As of May 11, 1944, the crematoria crews
(Sonderkommandos) numbered 217.m On August 29, 1944, 874 men
were employed in two shifts, labeled simply “day” and “night.”111 112 The
theoretical daily capacity of the four Birkenau crematoria was somewhat
over 4,400,113 but with breakdowns and slowdowns the practical limit
was almost always lower. During May and June the Hungarian Jews
alone were gassed at a rate of almost 10,000 a day, and sometimes equal
numbers may have been reached when the Lódz transports arrived in the
second half of August. Anticipating these developments, the Auschwitz
specialist in charge of body disposal, HauptscharfLihrcr Moll — a man
described as a sadist with indefatigable energy114 —directed the digging
of eight or nine pits more than forty yards in length, eight yards wide, and
six feet deep.115 On the bottom of the pits the human fat was collected
and poured back into the fire with buckets to hasten the cremations.116
Survivors report that children were sometimes tossed alive into the in­
ferno.117 The rotten remains were cleaned up once in a while with flame
throwers.118 Although the corpses burned slowly during rain or misty
weather,119 the pits were found to be the cheapest and most efficient
method of body disposal. In August 1944, when an overflow of corpses
had to be burned on some days, the open pits broke the bottleneck.120
Thus the capacity for destruction was approaching the point of being
unlimited. Simple as this system was, it took years to work out in constant
application of administrative techniques. It took millennia in the develop­
ment of Western culture.

111. Auschwitz II inmate labor allocation for May 11, 1944, Dokumenty i mate-
rtaly, vol. 1, pp. 100-105.
112. Statistics in Czech, Kalendarium, p. 865.
113. Bischofl' to Kammler, June 28, 1943, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
Archives Record Group 11.001 (Center for Historical Collections, Moscow), Roll
41, Fond 502, Opis 1, Folder 314. The capacities of the individual Krematoria were
given as: I 340, II and III 1,440 each, and IV and V 768 each.
114. Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz, p. 125.
115. Ibid., pp. 125-33.
116. Affidavit by Höss, March 14,1946, NO-1210.
117. Friedman, Oswiecim, p. 72. Perl, I Was a Doctor in Auschuntz, pp. 50, 91.
Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz, p. 142.
118. Affidavit by Werner Krumme (political prisoner), September 23, 1945,
NO-1933.
119. Five to six hours. Affidavit by Höss, March 14,1946, NO-1210.
120. Sehn, “Oswiçcim,” German Crimes in Poland, vol. 1, p. 89.

KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


LIQUIDATION OF THE KILLING CENTERS AND THE
END OF THE DESTRUCTION PROCESS
Although the killing centers were employed almost constantly, their exis­
tence was comparatively short. The first camp to be liquidated was Kulm-
hof. The Sonderkommando of Higher SS and Police Leader Koppe
(Kommando Hauptsturmftihrer Bothmann) ceased its work there at the
end of March 1943* and went to Croatia.1 2 In February 1944, Greiser
proposed Bothmann s recall in order to “reduce” the Lodz Ghetto,3 but
Kulmhof had only a brief revival during June-July of that year.4 The camp
was finally liquidated on January 17-18, 1945. The Jewish burial Kom­
mando was shot, and the buildings were set afire.5
In the Generalgouvernement the Bug camps (Treblinka, Sobibor, and
Belzec) were evacuated in the fall of 1943. The Wirth Kommando, which
had constructed these camps, was ordered to destroy them without leav­
ing a trace.6 At Treblinka a farm was built, and a Ukrainian was invited to
run it for income.7 Pine trees were planted at Belzec, but a Polish postwar
investigator found the terrain dug up, with hands, bones, and flesh ex­
posed where the local population had been searching lor valuables.8
Wirth and his men were transferred as a unit to the Istrian peninsula in
Italy to defend roads against partisans. There Wirth met his death in the
spring of 1944 from a bullet in his back,9 and Reichleitner (of Sobibor)
was killed on patrol.10
Lublin was evacuated more hurriedly. At the end of July 1944, a Red
Army salient overtook the camp, and with it huge stores of Aktion Rein­
hardt. 11 The discoveries made by the Soviets in Lublin were immediately

1. Gettoverwaltung Litzmannstadr ro Gesrapo Lirzmannsradr, August 4, 1943,


Dokumenty i materiah, vol. 3, pp. 281-82. Gestapo Lirzmannstadt to Oberbürger­
meister there, August 14, 1943, ibid.
2. Brandt to Jiittncr, March 29, 1943, T 175, Roll 60.
3. Greiser to Pohl, February 14, 1944, NO-519.
4. Adalbert Rückerl, NS-Vemichtunfjslaffer (Munich, 1977), pp. 292-93.
5. Judge Wladyslaw Bednarz (Lodz), “Extermination Camp at ('helmno,” Com­
mission for Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, German Crimes in Poland, vol.
1, p. 121. Two Jews survived.
6. Affidavit by Dr. Konrad Morgen, July 19, 1946, SS(A)-67.
7. Girta Serenv, Into That Darkness (New York, 1974), pp. 249-50.
8. Rückerl, NS-Vemichtnn/jslaejer, pp. 143-45, citing text of Polish report.
9. Affidavit by Morgen, July 19, 1946, SS(A)-67. Whether partisans or some of
Wirth’s ow n men killed him is not clear. See Serenv, Darkness, p. 262, and Rückerl,
NS-Vemichtunffslajfer, p. 46.
10. Serenv, Darkness, p. 261.
11. Eyewitness report by Christian Science Monitor correspondent Alexander
Werth, September 1, 1944, reproduced in Jewish Black Book Committee, The Black
Rook (New York, 1946), pp. 379-81. The Aktion Reinhardt pileup in Lublin had
already been reported by Globocnik to Himmler at the end of 1943, PS-4024.

LIQUIDATION OF THE KILLING CENTERS 1045


publicized in the world press, to the great consternation of Gencral-
gouvemeur Frank. The frightened Frank immediately accused Koppe,
the former Higher SS and Police Leader in the Wartheland, who had
replaced Krüger in the Generalgouvernement. “Now we know” Frank
said, “you cannot deny that.” Koppe replied that he knew absolutely
nothing about these things and that apparently it was a matter between
Heinrich Himmler and the camp authorities. “But already in 1941” said
Frank, “I heard of such plans, and I spoke about them.” Well then, the
Higher SS and Police Leader replied, that was Frank’s business, and he,
Koppe, could not be expected to worry about it.12
In 1944, only one camp was still operating at full capacity—Ausch­
witz. From May through October the reduction of most of the remaining
Jewish population clusters was in progress. During this period nearly
600,000 Jews were brought into the killing center. With Romania and
Bulgaria already out of reach, transport breaking down, Jewish laborers
desperately needed in war industry, and the Jews in mixed marriages
exempt, the destruction process was nearing its conclusion. By Novem­
ber 1944, Himmler decided that for practical purposes the Jewish ques­
tion had been solved. On the twenty-fifth of that month he ordered the
dismantling of the killing installations.13 That day, Auschwitz I and II
were merged into the concentration camp Auschwitz, and Auschwitz III
became the concentration camp Monowitz.14
I. G. Farben had already made preparations for a departure. From
April 4, 1944, the industrial area was repeatedly photographed by the
Allied Mediterranean Air Force, and on August 20, September 13, De­
cember 18, and again on December 26, Monowitz was systematically
bombed.15 During the summer the front was stabilized at the Vistula.

12. Testimony by Frank, Trial of the Major War Criminals, XII, 198. See also
summary of discussion between Frank, Biihlcr, and Koppc, September 15, 1944,
Frank Diary, PS-2233. According to this conference summary, Frank remarked that
the world press was defaming Germany on account of Majdanck (Lublin). Biihlcr put
in that nothing was known about this matter in the administration of the Gene-
ralgouvcrnemcnt, that these camps had been established by the Higher SS and Police
Leader, had been under his jurisdiction, etc. Biihlcr regarded a discussion of this topic
in a meeting of main division chiefs as “inopportune.” Frank agreed and repeated that
the responsibility for these camps belonged entirely to the Higher SS and Police-
Leader, etc. It is not quite clear whether Frank’s testimony refers to this very discus­
sion or whether the subject was brought up twice.
13. Affidavit by Kurt Bcchcr, March 8,1946, PS-3762.
14. Czech, Kalendarium, p. 933.
15. See reports of Mediterranean Allied Photo Reconnaissance Wing, National
Archives Record Group 18 (15th Air Force) and Target Intelligence Information,
Oswiycim, Poland, National Archives Record Group 243, U.S. Strategic Bombing
Survey. Bombing flights consisted of 49 to 127 aircraft.

KI1/LING CENTER OPERATIONS


However, the Red Army was across the river at two points, Opa tow and
Baranów, and this was enough ground for Dr. Diirrteld, the I. G. Ausch­
witz chief, to make his evacuation plans.16
Among the inmates there was restlessness. A resistance organization
had finally been set up in Auschwitz. It had links with the resistance
movement outside the camp, including the London-oriented Poles and
Communists. Once, in March 1944, the idea of burning down the cre­
matoria had surfaced among the Jewish crews assigned to the removal
and burning of bodies. The occasion was the imminent gassing of a large
number of Czech Jews from Theresienstadt, who had been kept for six
months in the so-called family camp inside Birkenau. The Jewish Son-
derkommando wanted the Jews in the family camp to set fire to their
barracks, while a revolt would take place in the crematoria, but the fam­
ilies could not be convinced that their lives were about to be extinguished
until they were in the changing room, confronted by armed SS men and
dogs. There, dropping all pretense, an Oberscharfiihrer told them to step
into the gas chamber. The Sonderkommando, which watched it all hap­
pen, renewed its plans several months later, but now the resistance orga­
nization in the camp urged a postponement. Finally, by October there
was no doubt in the minds of the cremation workers that they themselves
were going to be killed, but the resistance organization insisted that re­
bellion be avoided at all costs. At this point, it became clear that the needs
of the Jewish inmates diverged sharply from the interests of the non-Jews.
The Jewish victims saw little chance for survival in continued acquies­
cence, whereas the Gentiles, fearing the effect of German reprisals and
looking toward deliverance through the Red Army, had too much to lose
in an uprising. On the afternoon of October 7, 1944, a desperate Son-
derkommando, armed with explosives, three stolen hand grenades, and
insulated pliers for cutting the barbed wire, made their attempt alone.
Four hundred and fifty inmates and three SS men died in the battle, and
Krematorium III was set on fire.17 The SS quickly discovered that four
women in the “Union” plant had furnished the Sonderkommando with

16. Report by Dürrfeld, February 7, 1945, NI-11956.


17. Filip Müller, Eyenntncss Ausdnvitz (New York, 1979), pp. 101-15, 124-25,
128-29, 144-48, 152-60. See also account by Salmcn Lewental, written in Ausch­
witz on October 10, 1944, in Jadwiga Bezwinska, ed.. Amidst a Nightmare of Crime
(Auschwitz Museum, 1973), pp. 125-78, particularly p. 154 ft'. Lewental, a Jewish
inmate of Auschwitz from December 1942, was a member of the Jewish Sonderkom­
mando. Facsimile of first part of Standortbefehl, October 12, 1944, listing three dead
SS men by name, in Be/wmska, A midst a Niqhtniare of'C 'n»u\ p. 66. As of October 3,
1944, the Sonderkommandos contained 661 men. Facsimile of German figures of
inmate allocations in Bezwinska, A midst a Nightmare of Crime, p. 165.

LIQUIDATION OF THE KILLING CENTERS 1047


explosives to do the job. The women were publicly hanged by Camp
Commander Hössler.18
What the Jews could not accomplish with their meager resources the
camp administration was to undertake itself. The remaining crematoria
were cleaned out by Jewish work details. A young woman recalled that
while cleaning the ovens, she got bones and ashes in her hair, her mouth,
and her nostrils. Another party had to clean out eighteen-inch deposits of
fat in the chimneys.19 The Zentralbauleitung, which had supervised the
construction of the crematories, was to be in charge of their demolition.20
But Auschwitz still existed, still held on to tens of thousands of in­
mates, and for two months the camp awaited the Soviet offensive. During
November, Soviet reinforcements were observed moving into the Bar-
anöw bridgehead. On January 12,1945, Soviet armored columns moved
out of Baranöw. The general offensive had begun. By January' 16 the
Soviets had reached the I. G. Farben calcium mines at Kressendorf, and
on the evening of the same day Soviet planes attacked the camp. During
the next day, German officials scurried out of the city of Katowice. That
same night the rumble of artillery fire was heard in Auschwitz itself.
On the evening of January 17, the last roll call was taken. The count
was 31,894 in Auschwitz (including Birkenau) and 35,118 in Monowitz,
including outlying satellite camps.21 That day the evacuation of the in­
mates was decided upon. As orders, changed every few hours, were re­
ceived, those capable of walking thirty miles were separated from those
who could walk only to the Auschwitz railroad station and those who
could not walk at all.22 Hospitalized inmates tried to decide whether to
leave as ordered or to remain, taking the chance of being killed by the SS
at the last moment.23 For the next two days, 58,000 prisoners were
moved out, all but a few on foot, in freezing weather. On January' 20,
Obergruppenführer Schmauser issued instructions to liquidate the in­
mates who were left behind. An SS detachment shot 200 Jewish women
and then blew up the buildings that had housed Krematoria I and II.24

18. Affidavit by Israel Mayer Mandelbaum (survivor), October 26,1945, NI-8187.


19. Irene Schwarz (survivor) in Leo W. Schwarz, ed., The Root and the Rough (New
York and Toronto, 1949), pp. 193-96.
20. Summary' of discussion by Baer, Bischoff, Jothann, and Oberscharführer
Hatzinger, December 4, 1944, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives Record
Group 11.001 (Center for Historical Collections, Moscow), Roll 20, Fond 502, Opis
I, Folder 29.
21. Czech, Kalendarium, pp. 966-68. Of 15,317 men in Auschwitz and Birkenau,
II, 102 were Jews. There is no breakdown of women and of Monowirz prisoners in
the Kalendarium.
22. Ibid., p. 968.
23. Elic Wiesel, Night (New York, 1969), pp. 90-93.
24. Czech, Kalendarium, 979,981.

KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


The Germans themselves now prepared to leave. As records were de­
stroyed in the SS medical block on January 17, Dr. Mengele seized his
research notes on twins to carry them personally to Berlin.2S Two days
later, the German self-defense units (the Volkssturm) melted away, and
Soviet planes appeared again, this time starting large fires. By the 20th,
I. G. Farbcn destroyed its records. The next day, as Soviet artillery was
shelling Auschwitz, the camp officials were on their way.26 Three Soviet
divisions, spearheaded by the 100th of the 60th Army of the First Ukrai­
nian Front, were advancing on Auschwitz.27 The killing center was now
on the front line. From the Wehrmacht it had originally been acquired,
and to the Wehrmacht it was now returned. A cordon of German troops
still ringed the camp, and Security Police detachments roamed in the
compound, still killing prisoners. On January 23 the SS set fire to bar­
racks full of clothing in the “Canada” section. At 1 a. m. of the 27th, the
SS blew up the last crematorium (new number IV), which had been kept
for the disposal of bodies until the last moment. In midafternoon of that
dav, in the course of half an hour, Soviet troops took Auschwitz and
Birkenau.28
When the Soviets moved in, twenty-nine of thirty-five storerooms had
been burned down. In six of the remaining ones, the liberators found part
of the camp’s legacy: 368,820 men’s suits, 836,255 women’s coats and
dresses, 5,525 pairs of women’s shoes, 13,964 carpets, large quantities of
children’s clothes, toothbrushes, false teeth, pots and pans. In abandoned
railway cars hundreds of thousands of additional items of apparel were
discovered, and in the tannery the Soviet investigation commission found
seven tons of hair.29 More than 7,000 inmates, still alive, greeted their
liberators, while hundreds lay dead where they had dropped.30
With the killing centers gone, ex-Auschwitz inmates, Hungarian de­
portees, and prisoners from disbanded labor camps were dumped into
concentration camps in the Reich. (See Table 9-18.) From Auschwitz and
its outlying satellites they were loaded on trains and dispersed to Gross
Rosen, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbriick, Buchenwald, Dora Mittelbau,
25. Ibid., p. 97.
26. Report by Diirrteld, February 7, 1945, NIT 1956.
27. Czech, Kalendarium, pp. 993-94. The divisions listed bv Czech were the
100th, 148th (60th Army), and 322nd (28rh Armv) of the First Ukrainian Front
(Army Group). See also the remarks bv General Vassily Petrenko, who was an officer
in the 100th Division at the rime, in Brewster Chamberlin and Marcia Feldman, eds.,
Tbe Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps (Washington, D.C., 1987), pp. 181 —
83, 188, 189.
28. Czech, Kalendarium, pp. 994-95.
29. Undated report by Soviet F.xtraordinarv State Commission on Auschwitz
(Shvernik, Trainin, the Metropolitan Nikolai, Lvssenko, and Burdenko), USSR-8.
30. Czech, Kalendarium, pp. 972-78.

LIQUIDATION OF THE KILLING CENTERS


TABLE 9-18
THE PRINCIPAL LAST CAMPS

PRINCIPAL ORIGINS OF LIBERATION OF


JEWISH INMATES MAIN CAMP

Plaszow Krakow remnant ghetto January 15,1945


Generalgouvernement by Red Army
labor camps
G ross-Rosen Inmates retained in labor camps Februar\r 13,1945
of Organisation Schmelt (some subcamps on
Auschwitz May 8-9,1945)
Plaszow by Red Army
Sachsenhausen Slovakia April 22,1945
Auschwitz by Red Army
Ravensbrück Auschwitz April 30,1945
by Red Army
Stutthof Baltic camps (Estonian, May 9,1945
Salaspils, and Kaunas, by Red Army
comprising also Vilna
remnant)
Auschwitz
Buchenwald Generalgouvernement April 11,1945
labor camps by U.S. Army
Auschwitz
Gross-Rosen
Dachau Auschwitz April 29,1945
Warsaw Ghetto ruins camp by U.S. Army
Stutthof
Hungarian labor men
Mauthausen Auschwitz May 5,1945
G ross-Rosen by U.S. Army
Hungarian labor men
Bergen-Belsen Netherlands April 15,1945
Hungary by British army
Auschwitz
Sachsenhausen
Ravensbrück
Flossenbiirg, Mauthausen, and Bergen-Bclsen. For many Gross Rosen
was a hub From which they were sent on to the other camps, and the trips
could last From a Few days to as long as two weeks.31 On some of the trains
the prisoners were jammed into roofless, low-sided railroad cars, in which
they ate snow’ and From which they threw out corpses.32 Buchenwald had
been a major receiving point For some time: between May 1944 and
March 1945, over 20,000 Jews poured into the camp.33 The influx re­
sulted in a new labor supply For war industry.34
As Soviet Forces pushed through western Hungary, the commander of'
Mauthausen, near Linz (Austria), received orders to take in thousands oF
Jews who had been building the Sud-Ostwall (Southeast Defense Line).
These laborers, guarded by the Volkssturm, w ere moved on Foot From the
Hungarian border through the Alps, where the Gendarmerie took over
for the remaining segment to Mauthausen. A survivor recalls that in the
Alpine town of' Eisenerz a crowd emerging From a movie threw stones at
the marchers and that deportees were shot in die town. Others, moving
over the Prebichl, a nearby mountain, on April 7 and 8, were commanded
by guards to run downhill. As they ran, fire was opened on them From
behind bushes and trees. Many finally arrived at Mauthausen without
shoes, clad in rags, and Full office.35
Attempts were made to distribute a maximum number of the new
Jewish arrivals to outlying subcamps. Under Sachsenhausen, such satel­
lites were Lieberose and Schwarzheide.36 In the Dachau network, the

31 .Ibid.
32. Elmer Luchterhand, “The Gondola-Car Transports,” International Journal of
Social Psychiatry 13 (1966-67): 28-32.
33. Compiled from Allied report, “The Numerical Expansion of the Concentra­
tion Camp Buchenwald During the Years 1937-1945,” PS-2171.
34. Buchenwald labor statistics (apparently incomplete chart), February 24, 1945,
NO-1974. For a statistical recapitulation of the Jew s in Bucheiwvald during 1944 and
1945, w hich is somewhat incomplete as well, see Harr)' Stein, Judcn in Buchenwald
(Buchenwald, 1992), pp. 133-35. Jewish deaths in 1944 were about 2,000. In
February 1945, they were 3,009 men and 7 women, and in March 2,673 men. Stein
estimates the toll for 1945 at 7,000, not counting those who died in evacuations at
the end.
35. Statement by Benedykt Friedman in Haifa, June 19, 1962, w'ith enclosure
containing survivors’ reports, Yad Vashcm Oral History, document 1243/120. Affi­
davit by Hans Marsalek (political prisoner), April 8, 1946, PS-3870. Marsalek inter­
rogated the Mauthausen commander, Franz Ziereis, before the latter’s death from
wounds, during the night of May 22-23, 1945. The number of Jew s arriving in the
Mauthausen complex from the Siidostw'all is estimated to have been more than
20,000. Gisela Rabirsch, “Das KL Mauthausen,” in Institur fur Zcitgeschichte, Stu-
dien zur Geschichtcder Konzentrationslager (Stuttgart, 1970), pp. 50-92, at pp. 80-82,
87-89.
36. See statements by former inmates in U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Ar-

LIQUIDATION OF THE KILLING CENTERS


main offshoots for Jews were the Kaufering and Mühldorf complexes.37
In Mauthausen a tent camp was erected and from there Jews were tun­
neled to Gunskirchen, which was newly established, and to Ebensce. The
tent camp and Gunskirchen, which did not make use of labor, offered
only starvation, disease, and death.38
From the remnant ghettos and camps in the Baltic area, evacuated in
1944, Jews arrived at the Stutthof concentration camp, a mile from the
Baltic coast east of the Vistula River. Like Auschwitz, Stutthof was di­
vided into men’s and women’s compounds. Most of the inmates were
women, and most of the women were Jewish. When the Soviet offensive
of January 1945 came to a halt a few miles south of Stutthof, the majority
of the prisoners were moved to the interior. About 3,000 women were
shot on the shore or thrown from ice into the water. Not until the re­
sumption of the Soviet advance in April did the remaining inmates face
evacuation. On April 27, three barges were loaded at Hela under Soviet

chives Record Group 11.001 (Center for Historical Documentary Collections, Mos­
cow), Roll 94, Fond 1525, Opis 1, Folder 340, vol. 1.
37. Edith Raim, Die Dachauer KZ-Aussenlgger Käufering und Mühldorf (Lands­
berg, 1992). On Kaufering, see also data of the International Tracing Service in
Martin Weinmann, ed., Das Nationalsozialistische Lagersystem (Frankfurt am Main,
1990), pp. 195,554-58. Mühldorf documents arc in T 580, Roll 321. As of April 24,
1945, the total number of Jews in Dachau was 22,938. Facsimile of camp count
showing net decrease of 838 to April 25, in Barbara Distel and Ruth Jakusch, cds.,
Concentration Camp Dachau 1933-1945 (Dachau, 1978), pp. 214-15.
38. The Mauthausen statistics of registered Jewish prisoners from May 1944
through May 4, 1945, but excluding Gunskirchen from April 27 (the day it became
independent), arc as follows:
Jewish inmates on December 31,1943 2
Transferred to Mauthausen (most from Auschwitz), 1944 13,826
Died in Mauthausen, 1944 3,437
Transferred, mainly to Auschwitz, 1944 858
Transferred to Mauthausen (most from Auschwitz), 1945 9,116
Died in Mauthausen, 1945 8,168
In Mauthausen, March 11,1945 15,529
Unregistered footmarchcrs ca. 20,000
In Gunskirchen, April 26, 1945 17,560
Transferred to Gunskirchen, April 28, 1945 3,108
In Mauthausen (including Ebensce), April 30,1945 8,800
Hans Marsalck, Die Geschichte des Konzentrationslagers Mauthausen (Vienna, 1980),
pp. 146, 282-84. Gunskirchen was established on March 12, 1945. The Guns­
kirchen figure for April 26 is in Weinmann, Das Nationalsozialistische Iggersystem,
p. 378. Ebensce, established in 1944 and remaining a satellite of Mauthausen to the
end, received 8,078 Jewish inmates, of whom 3,110 died by May 4, 1945. Florian
Freund, Arbeitslager Zement (Vienna, 1989), pp. 161-64. The Ebensce figures are
included in the Mauthausen totals. The Gunskirchen dead from April 27 and those of
the postliberation period for Mauthausen arc in the thousands.

1052 KELLING CENTER OPERATIONS


bombers. One, with sick inmates, was directed to Kiel, and two arrived in
the early morning hours of May 3 at Neustadt, twenty miles north of
Lübeck. As the victims waded ashore during the day, they were shot at by
SS men and naval personnel, while German officers photographed the
scene from gardens in their homes.39
The old, established camps did not have enough room lor the influx of
new inmates, and hence one camp was greatly expanded to take in the
overflow. This was Bergen-Belsen, at Celle, near Hannover in the north­
western part of Germany. Bergen-Belsen was originally a Wehrmacht
camp for wounded prisoners of war. In the fall of 1943, Pohl acquired
half the grounds in order to set up an internment camp there. He needed
a place from which foreign nationals could be repatriated — in the words
of a Foreign Office official, a camp that would not give rise to “atrocity
propaganda” (Greuelpropaffanda) .40 While Bergen-Belsen thus started out
as a model camp, it could not afford an inspection by a foreign govern­
ment even in its early days. Instead of calling the camp an Intemierutigs-
la/jt'r, a legal brain had therefore designated it as anAufentbaltslager, which
means a camp where people stay.41
Toward the end of 1944, Pohl took over the second half of the camp.
This transfer was simple, because the Wehrmacht prisoner-of-war chief by
that time was Obergruppenführer Berger of the SS Main Office.42 Some
of the old Auschwitz officials now moved into Bergen-Belsen. Haupt-
sturmfiihrer Kramer, former Birkenau (Auschwitz II) commander, got
the top post. Dr. Fritz Klein, an Auschwitz camp doctor, became chief
camp doctor of Bergen-Belsen.43 Kramer immediately introduced the
Auschwitz routine, including the lengthy roll calls.44
In Theresienstadt, Obersturmführer Rahm was involved in a last at­
tempt to resume the destruction process. At the end of February 1945,
several inmate engineers and eighty working inmates were sent to a

39. Report by Olga M. Pickholz-Barnitsch, 1963, based on survivors’ accounts


and recollections of a German ship captain, Rudolf Striicker, Yad Vashem Oral His­
tory, document 736/54 B. The Stutthof victims were on the Adler and Russard. There
were other concentration camp ships with Neuengamme evacuees in Neustadt har­
bor. See also detailed account by Liuba Daniel, November 1956, Yad Vashem Oral
History 2568/74. Mrs. Daniel had been transported to Stutthof front Kaunas.
40. Von Thadden to Eichntann, July 24,1943, NG-5050. The letter dealt with the
Spanish Jews in Salonika who were later sent to Bergen-Belsen.
41. 'file term Aufenthaltslaqer Renjcn-Rdsen appears in the distribution list of a
Liebehenschel order dated November 10, 1943, NO-1541.
42. The history of Bergen-Belsen is described in an affidavit by former Oberst Fritz
Mauer, February 13, 1947, NO-1980.
43. Testimony by Kramer and Klein, United Nations War Crimes Commission,
Ijtw Reports oflrtals of War Criminals (London, 1947), vol. 2, pp. 39-41.
44. Testimony by Anita Lasker (survivor), ibid., pp. 21 -22.

LIQUIDATION OF THE KILLING CENTERS


nearby eighteenth-century fortress with instructions to seal off apertures ·
and tear down cells for the purpose of making up a hermetically scaled >
“vegetable warehouse.” As rumors and unrest spread through the camp,
Rahm, shouting at the Jewish technical department to keep everyone <
quiet, suddenly broke off the project.45
By February and March the front lines began to disintegrate. More and
more soldiers surrendered, major cities were given up, labor camps and .
concentration camps had to be evacuated. From east and west, transports ;
with forced laborers and camp inmates were rolling inward. Some of
the railway cars were shunted to side rails and abandoned to Allied >
bombers.46
In Bergen-Belsen the camp administration broke down. As tens of
thousands of new inmates were dumped into the camp (in the single 1
week of April 4-13, 1945, the number was 28,000),47 the food supply l
was shut off, roll calls were stopped, and the starving inmates were left to ·
their own devices. Typhus and diarrhea raged unchecked, corpses rotted *
in barracks and on dung heaps. Rats attacked living inmates, and bodies ",
of the dead were eaten by starving prisoners.48
In the meantime Himmler, who had long despaired of victory, made
some of the biggest concessions of his life. He permitted several thousand i
inmates to go to Switzerland and Sweden. He allowed Red Cross trucks i
to distribute food to some of the camps.49 Finally, he ordered that the
evacuation of threatened concentration camps be stopped and that they !
be handed over to the Allies intact.50 During a conversation with an i

45. Testimony by AdolfEngclstcin,Eichmann trial transcript, May 18,1961,scss. 1


45, pp. Qq 1, Vv 1, Ww 1. The witness, an engineer, was one of the inmates assigned to
the project. On the plan to poison Dachau inmates who were not nationals of the I
Western Powers, see interrogation of Bcrtus Gcrdes (Gaustabsamtsleiter in Upper *
Bavaria), November 20,1945, PS-3462.
46. Gisclla Perl, I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz (New York, 1948), p. 166.
47. Testimony by Kramer, Law Reports of Trials of War Criminals, vol. 2, p. 40.
48. Perl, I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz, pp. 166-67. The author was also in Bcrgcn-
Bclscn. For an overview of the testimony see Raymond Phillips, ed., Trial of Josef
Kramer and Forty-Four Others (The Belsen Trial) (London, 1949). Statistics pertaining
to the camp are recapitulated by Ebcrhard Kolb, Bergen-Belsen (Hannover, 1962). ‘.
Kolb cites the following counts of Bergen-Belsen dead:
1944 2,048
March 1-April 6,1945 22,081
April 19-June 20, 1945 13,944
The overall toll was probably around 53,000 people, a majorin' of them Jews. At the
end of June, the surviving Jews may have numbered about 25,000. See Jon Bridg­
man, The End of the Holocaust (Portland, Ore., 1990), pp. 33-60.
49. Executive Director, War Refugee Board, Final Report, September 15, 1945,
pp. 34,40,43,45, 59.
50. Testimony by Hoss, Trial of the Major War Criminals, vol. XI, p. 40'.

KILLING CBNTER OPERATIONS


International Red Cross representative in Prague on April 6, 1945,
Eichmann stated that he did not “entirely agree” with the “humane
methods” favored at that moment by Himmler, but that naturally he
would follow Himmler’s orders blindly.Rl After Buchenwald was cap­
tured bv the American army, Hitler heard that its liberated prisoners were
plundering Weimar. Incensed, he overruled Himmler’s order for surren­
dering concentration camps.51 52 On April 24, 1945, the General Secretary
of the International Red Cross, Dr. Hans Bachmann, visited Kaltenbrun-
ner in Innsbruck. The chief of the RSHA invited him to send foodstuff's
to Jews and offered to liberate a few Jews who w ere Allied nationals. After
the conference, at dinner, Kaltenbrunner directed the conversation to
politics and attempted to give a lengthy explanation of the character of
Nationalist Socialist Weltanschauung,53
Bv the end of April the front was dissolving. Prospective war criminals
looked east and west and saw Allied armies coming from both directions.
The end was staring them in the face. Some committed suicide. Some
gave up. Some went into hiding. In Munich on April 30,1945, as Ameri­
can troops were moving into the city, the former chief of Amtsgruppe A
of the WVHA, August Frank, walked into the office of the police presi­
dent and obtained a false identification card. He was caught anyway.54 In
Austria, Globocnik was arrested and killed himself.55
From Oranienburg, the WVFLA headquarters, a motorcade of SS offi­
cials and their families set out for Ravensbrück and from there to Flens­
burg. Obersturmbannführer Höss was among them. In Flensburg he
sought out Himmler, who advised him to cross into Denmark as a Wehr­
macht officer. Höss managed to obtain false papers from Kapitän zur See
Luth — he was now Franz Lang, Bootsmaat (Sailor). But not for long. He
too was caught.56
Himmler himself wandered about Germany, a lone, hunted figure. He
was recognized and arrested, whereupon he swallowed poison.
Even as the armies were fighting their final battle, Eichmann called his

51. Icxt ot the summary ot the conversation, prepared on April 24, 1945, in Jean-
Claude Favez, Das Internationale Rote Kreuz und das Drittc Reich (Zurich, 1989),
pp. 499-500.1 he International Red Cross representative was Otto Ix'liner.
52. Testimony by Hbss, Trial of the Major War C.riminals, XI, p. 407.
53. Affidavit by Rachmann, April 11, 1946, Kaltenbrunner-5. For other discus­
sions between International Red Cross officials and Kaltcnbrunner, see: Affidavit bv
International Red Cross President Carl Burcldiardr, April 17, 1946, Kaltenbrun-
ner-3; and affidavit by International Red Cross delegate Dr. Hans F. A. Mever,
April 11, 1946, Kaltenbrunner-4.
54. Affidavit by Frank, March 19, 1946, NO-1211.
55. Interrogation of VVicd, July 21, 1945,0-215.
56. Affidavit by Hbss, March 14, 1946, NO-1210.

LIQUIDATION OF THE KILLING CENTERS 1055


men together to tell them that the end was near. While Zoepf was “whim­
pering like a child ” Eichmann said that the feeling of having killed five
million enemies of the state had given him so much satisfaction that he
would jump laughingly into the grave.57 But Eichmann did not jump,
and after spending months in American captivity, unrecognized, he fled
and disappeared without a trace. He was seized fifteen years later by
Israeli agents in Argentina.58
On the Italian-Swiss frontier, just before the collapse, the German
Ambassador to Italy, Rudolf Rahn, was unable to cross into Switzerland.
As he stood in the snow, he thought about the Jews: “Are we now going
to share the fate of this unfortunate nation? Will we be dispersed in all
directions, to give of our tenacity and ability to the welfare of other
nations, only to provoke their resistance? Shall Germans too be fated to
be at home in every place and welcome in none?”59
In the Protektorat, still held by German troops, the last commander
of Theresienstadt, Rahm, received the last report from the chief of the
Jewish “Self-administration” (Selbstverwaltung), Rabbi Murmelstein, on
May 5, 1945. In his memorandum on that report, which dealt with a
variety of topics including statistics of typhus, Murmelstein noted that the
Obersturmführer had promised him 300 kilograms (660 pounds) of
Zyklon.60 On the same day, the rabbi, drawing the “right political conse­
quences at the right moment [im richtigen Moment die richtigen Konse­
quenzen]I,” tendered his resignation to a representative of the International
Red Cross.61 Rahm himself quit that evening.62
Meanwhile, as Soviet spearheads closed in on Berlin, the director of
the Generalbetriebsleitung Ost (Präsident Ernst Emrich) called his staff
together in a bunker on April 23 to advise everyone to go home.63 When

57. Testimony by Eichmann, Eichmann trial transcript, July 7, 1961, sess. 88,
p. HI. Affidavit by Wisliceny, November 29, 1945, Conspiracy and Aggression, VIII,
610. Wisliceny places the incident in February, Eichmann in April. Wisliceny quotes
Eichmann as having said “Jews” whereas Eichmann states that he said “enemies of the
State.” Five million was, however, Eichmann’s best recollection of total Jewish dead.
Sec his testimony, Eichmann trial transcript, July 20,1961, sess. 105, p. LI 1.
58. “Israelis Confirm Kidnapping Nazi,” The New York Times, June 7,1960, pp. 1 -
2.
59. Rudolf Rahn, Ruheloses Leben (Düsseldorf, 1949), pp. 292-93.
60. Text of Murmclstcin memorandum in H. G. Adler, Die verheimlichte IValtrheit
(Tübingen, 1958), pp. 140-41.
61. Murmclstcin to Dunant, May 5,1945, ibid., pp. 142-44.
62. H. G. Adler, Theresienstadt (Tübingen, 1961), pp. 216-18. The Soviets arrived
on May 9.
63. Statement by Philipp Mangold, Sartcr Collection, Nuremberg Verkchrs-
archiv, Folder aa.

KILLING CENTER OPERATIONS


the offices of the Generalbetriebsleitung were overrun by the Soviets,
Reichsbahnoberinspektor Bruno Klemm, who had presided over many a
conference on Jewish transports, was captured. Last seen by a colleague
interned with him in Poznan, he has since been missing.64
In his own bunker, the supreme architect of the destruction of the
Jews, Adolf Hitler, dictated a political testament during the early morn­
ing hours of April 29,1945. In this legacy he said:65
It is untrue that I or anyone else in Germany wanted the war in 1939.
It was desired and instigated exclusively by those international states­
men who were either of Jewish descent or worked for Jewish interests.
I have made too many offers for the control and limitation of arma­
ments, which posterity' will not for all time be able to disregard, for the
responsibility' for the outbreak of this war to be laid on me. I have
further never wished that after the first fatal world war a second against
England, or even America, should break out. Centuries will pass away,
but out of die ruins of our towns and monuments the hatred against
those finally responsible, whom we have to thank for everything, inter­
national Jewry' and its helpers, will grow. . . .
I also made it quite plain that if the nations of Europe were once
more to be regarded as mere chattel to be bought and sold by these
international conspirators in money and finance, then that race, Jewry',
which is the real criminal of this murderous struggle, will be saddled
with the responsibility'. Furthermore, I left no one in doubt that this
time not only would millions of children of Europe’s Aryan peoples die
of hunger, not only would millions of grown men suffer death, and not
only would hundreds of thousands of women and children be burned
and bombed to death in the cities, but that the real criminal would also
have to atone for his guilt, even if by more humane means.
After six y’ears of war, which in spite of all setbacks will go down one
day in history' as the most glorious and valiant demonstration of a
nation’s life purpose, I cannot forsake the city' which is the capital of
this Reich. As the forces are too small to make any further stand against
the enemy attack at this place and our resistance is gradually being
weakened by men who are as deluded as they are lacking in initiative, I
should like, by remaining in this town, to share my fate with those, the
millions of others, who have also taken it upon themselves to do so.
Moreover, I do not wish to fall into die hands of an enemy who

64. Statement by Gerhard Reelirz, April 26, 1967. I judge rich t in Düsseldorf,
Case Ganzenmiiller, 8 Js 430/67, vol. XIV, pp. 84-90. Statement bv Fritz Tier,
April 21, 1967, Case Ganzenmiiller, vol. XIV, pp. 77-83.
65. Political testament by Hitler, April 29, 1945, PS-3569.

LIQUIDATION OF THE KILLING CENTERS 1057


I
requires a new spectacle organized by the Jews for the amusement of
their hysterical masses.
I have decided therefore to remain in Berlin and there of my own
free will to choose death at the moment when I believe the position of
the Führer and Chancellor itself can no longer be held.
REFLECTIONS

THE PERPETRATORS
he Germans killed five million Jews. The onslaught did nor come
from the void; it was brought into being because it had meaning
to its perpetrators. It was not a narrow strategy tor the attain­
ment of some ulterior goal, but an undertaking for its own sake, an event
experienced as Erlcbnis, lived and lived through by its participants.
The German bureaucrats who contributed their skills to the destruc­
tion of the Jews all shared in this experience, some in the technical work of
drafting a decree or dispatching a train, others starkly at the door of a gas
chamber. Thev could sense the enormity of the operation from its smallest
1059
fragments. At every stage they displayed a striking pathfinding ability in
the absence of directives, a congruity of activities without jurisdictional
guidelines, a fundamental comprehension of the task even when there
were no explicit communications. One has the feeling that when Rein­
hard Heydrich and the ministerial Staatssekretäre met on the morning of
January' 20, 1942, to discuss the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question
in Europe,” they understood each other.1
In retrospect it may be possible to view the entire design as a mosaic of
small pieces, each commonplace and lusterless by itself. Yet this progres­
sion of everyday activities, these file notes, memoranda, and telegrams,
embedded in habit, routine, and tradition, were fashioned into a massive
destruction process. Ordinary men were to perform extraordinary tasks.
A phalanx of functionaries in public offices and private enterprises was
reaching for the ultimate.
With every escalation there were also barriers. Economic problems
exacted their cost. Contemplative thought troubled the mind. Yet the
destruction of the Jews was not disrupted. Continuity is one of its crucial
characteristics. At the threshold of the killing phase, the flow of admin­
istrative measures was unchecked. Technological and moral obstacles
were overcome. The unprecedented march of men, women, and children
into the gas chambers was begun. How was the deed accomplished?

THE DESTRUCTIVE EXPANSION


The German destructive effort evolved on several planes. One develop­
ment was the alignment of organizations in a destructive machine. An­
other was the evolution of procedures for the accomplishment of destruc­
tive acts. A third was the crystallization of the process of destruction. And
fourth, multiple processes were set in motion against other victims in the
German power sphere.
Basic was the immersion in destructive activity of the bureaucratic
apparatus as such. As the process unfolded, its requirements became
more complex and its fulfillment involved an ever larger number of agen­
cies, party offices, business enterprises, and military commands. The de­
struction of the Jews was a total process, comparable in its diversity to a
modern war, a mobilization, or a national reconstruction.
An administrative process of such range cannot be carried out by a
single agency, even if it is a trained and specialized body like the Gestapo

1. Summary of “Final Solution” conference, January 20, 1942, NG-2568. Testi­


mony bv Adolf Eichmann, Eichmann trial, English transcript, sess. 78, June 23,
1961, pp. ZI, Aal, Bbl; sess. 79, June 26, 1961, pp. Aal, Bl, Cl; sess. 106, July 24,
1961, p. II; sess. 107, July 24, 1961, pp. El, FI.
or a commissariat for Jewish affairs, for when a process cuts into every
phase of human life, it must ultimately feed upon the resources of the
entire organized community. That is why one finds among the perpetra­
tors the highly diff erentiated technicians of the armament inspectorates,
the remote officials of the Postal Ministry', and —in the all-important
operation of furnishing records for determination of descent —the mem­
bership of an aloof and withdrawn Christian clergy. The machinery of
destruction, then, was structurally no different from organized German
society as a whole; the difference was only one of function. The machin­
ery of destruction was the organized community in one of its special roles.
Established agencies rely on existing procedures. In his daily work the
bureaucrat made use of tried techniques and tested formulas with which
he was familiar and which he knew to be acceptable to his superiors,
colleagues, and subordinates. The usual practices were applied also in
unusual situations. The Finance Ministry' went through condemnation
proceedings to set up the Auschwitz complex,2 and the German railroads
billed the Security' Police for the transport of the Jews, calculating the
one-way fare for each deportee by the track kilometer.3 Swiff operations
precipitated greater complications and necessitated more elaborate ad­
justments. In the course of the roundup of the Warsaw Jews during the
summer of 1942, the ghetto inhabitants left behind their unpaid gas and
electricity bills, and as a consequence the German offices responsible for
public utilities and finance in the city had to marshal all their expertise to
restore an administrative equilibrium.4
Although the apparatus strove to maintain the customary mode of
operation to deal with a variety of problems, there was a tendency within
the bureaucratic structure to erase old established boundaries of admin­
istrative freedom when they inhibited an acceptance of new challenges or
an exploitation of new opportunities. The process of destruction w as in
its very nature limitless. That is why power became more open-ended,
why latitudes were widened and capabilities increased. Over time it be­
2. Records of conferences of November 3 and December 17-18 under the chair­
manship of Obcrfinanzprasidcnt Dr. Casdorf of the Finance Ministry, PS-1643, and
other correspondence in the same document.
3. Fachmann to Transport Ministry, February 20, 1941, Landgericht in Düssel­
dorf, Case Ganzcnmiillcr, 8 Js 430/67, special vol. 4, pt. 4, p. 105. Transport Ministry
K 1/16 to Rcichsbahndirekrioncn in Karlsruhe, Cologne, Münster, Saarbrücken,
copies to Haupts erkehrsdirektionen in Brussels and Paris, Plenipotentiary in Utrecht,
and Amtsrar Stange, July 14, 1942, Case Ganzenmüller, special vol. 4, part 3, p. 56.
4. Dürrfeld (Dezernat 3 of German city administration in Warsaw) to SS and
Police lx'ad er von Sammcm, August 10, 1942, and memorandum bv Kunze (Dezer­
nat 4), August 13, 1942, Zentrale Stelle der Landesjusrizverwalningcn, Ludwigs­
burg, Akten Auerswald, Polen 365d, pp. 275-77.
came easier to write an ordinance regulating the conduct of victims or to
take action against them direcdy.
In the realm of public regulation, fewer basic laws were being promul­
gated, and “implementary decrees” were less and less germane to the laws
to which they referred.5 An ordinance did not even have to appear in a
legal gazette. In December 1938, Heinrich Himmler, omitting the cus­
tomary submission of rules to an official register, “provisionally” placed
directly in the newspapers a regulation withdrawing driver’s licenses from
Jews. When the legality of Himmler’s action was challenged in court, the
Reichsgericht upheld his method on the ground that a proclamation
issued “under the eyes of the Highest Reich Authorities” without gener­
ating their protest was law.6
The rise of government by announcement was accompanied by a
greater permissiveness in the making of internal decisions. Orders were
specific commands, but at the same time they could contain broad autho­
rizations. What was mandatory was also a mandate. When Goring per­
mitted Heydrich to inaugurate the “Final Solution,” the “charge” was a
vast delegation of power.7 Not surprisingly, written directives would give
way to oral ones. Hitler himself may never have signed an order to kill the
Jews. On the other hand, there are records of his utterances in the form of
comments, questions, or “wishes.” What he actually meant, or whether he
really meant it, might have been a matter of tone as well as of language.
When he spoke “coldly” and in a “low voice” about “horrifying” decisions
“also at the dinner table,” then his audience knew that he was “serious.”8
Oral orders were given at every level. Hoss was told to build his death
camp at Auschwitz in a conversation with Himmler.9 Stangl received
instructions about Sobibor from Globocnik on a park bench in Lublin.10

5. See in particular the discussion by Uwe Dietrich Adam, Judenpolitik im Dritten


Reich (Düsseldorf, 1972), pp. 110-11,241-46.
6. The episode is related by Adam „Judenpolitik, pp. 213, 224. See also correspon­
dence in T 459, rolls 21 and 22, on an announcement by the Gebietskommissar in
Riga prohibiting contacts between Jews and non-Jews on penalty of imprisonment.
Landrat Sommerlattc in the office of the Gcncralkommissar contended that the
Gebietskommissar lacked all power to make such threats and that courts could not
enforce them. Sec Sommcrlattc’s letter of April 30,1942, T 459, Roll 21.
7. Goring to Heydrich, July 31, 1941, PS-710. The order was solicited by Hey­
drich and its text was drafted by Eichmann. Adolf Eichmann, Ich, Adolf Eichmann
(Leoni am Starnberger Sec, 1980), p. 479.
8. Affidavit by Albert Speer, June 15,1977, facsimile in Arthur Suzman and Denis
Diamond, Six Million Did Die (Johannesburg, 1977), pp. 109-12.
9. Testimony by Höss, International Military Tribunal, Trial of the Major War
Criminals (Nuremberg, 1947), XI, 398.
10. Gitta Screny, Into That Darkness (New York, 1974), pp. 101-4.
A railroad man in Krakow, responsible for scheduling death trains, recalls
that he was told by his immediate superior to run the transports whenever
they were requested by the SS.11
In essence, then, there was an atrophy of laws and a corresponding
multiplication of measures for which the sources of authority were more
and more ethereal. Valves were being opened for a decision flow. The
experienced functionary was coming into his own. A middle-ranking bu­
reaucrat, no less than his highest superior, was aware of currents and
possibilities. In small ways as well as large, he recognized what was ripe
lor the time. Most often it was he who initiated action.
Thousands of proposals were introduced in memoranda, presented at
conferences, and discussed in letters. The subject matter ranged from dis­
solution of mixed marriages12 13 to the deportation of the Jews of Liechten­
stein12 or the construction of some “quick-working” device for the anni­
hilation of Jewish women and children at Lodz and the surrounding
tow ns of the Warthegau.14 At times it was assumed that the moment had
come, even if there was no definite word from above. Hans Globke wrote
anti-Jewish provisions in a decree on personal names in December 1932,
before there was a Nazi regime or a Führer.15 The Trusteeship Office
in Warsaw' began to seize Jewish real property “in expectation” of a “law­
ful regulation,” meanwhile performing the “indispensable” preparatory
work.16 Not always, however, was such spontaneity welcome at central
offices in Berlin. When the Security Police in die Netherlands sought to
induce sterilizations by holding out the prospect of immunity from de­
portation to couples in mixed marriage who could prove their inability to
have children, Eichmann’s deputy, Günther, expressed his disapproval
because no such scheme had been worked out for the Jews in Germany
itself. The Reich, said Günther, had to be a model in such matters.17

11. Statement by Erich Richter, June 11, 1969, Case Ganzenmüller, vol. 19,
pp. 5-12.
12. Summary of conference of March 6, 1942, NG-2586-H.
13. Suhr (RSHA) to Rademachcr (Foreign Office), Februar)’ 17, 1942, Israel
Police 1188.
14. Hoppncr (Office of Higher SS and Police Leader in Warthegau) to Fachmann,
Julv 16, 1941, in Biuletyti Glowttej Komisji Radania Zbrodni Hitlerowskicb u> Police 12
(1960): 27P-29F.
15. Globke (Prussian Interior Ministry) to Regierungspräsidenten and other re­
gional officials, December 23, 1932, Central Archives of the German Democratic
Republic, through the courtesy of Ambassador Stefan Heymann.
16. Trusteeship Office in Warsaw, monthly report for October 1940, November 8,
1940, Yad Vashem microfilm JM 814.
17. Werner (Office of Security Police Commander in Netherlands) to Harster
(Commander) and Zocpf (Jewish Affairs in same office), Mav 6, 1943, Israel Police
1356.

THE PERPETRATORS
Eichmann himself once exceeded a guideline, seizing Hungarian Jews in
the Reich by mistake. Commenting about his act in an Israel court, he
said: “Humanly, this is possible and understandable.”18
In the final analysis, laws or decrees were not regarded as ultimate
sources of power but only as an expression of will. In this view a particular
decree might not have provided for all that had to be done; on occasion it
might even have interfered with the task at hand. If an ordinance was
regarded as not limiting, if it was thought to be only an example of the
kind of actions that might be taken, an official might proceed outside its
boundaries, legislating on a parallel plane. The Law for the Restoration of
the Professional Civil Service provided that Jewish civil servants were to
be dismissed. Analogously, or “sinngemäss,” Jewish fellowship holders at
the University of Freiburg were deprived of their stipends.19 If instruc­
tions frustrated action, they could even be disregarded altogether. An
example is a directive, issued in the Generalgouvernement, to pay Jewish
workers in the “free” market 80 percent of the wages received by Poles.
The problem in several localities was that Jewish laborers had not been
paid by their employers in the first place, inasmuch as the Jewish coun­
cils were expected to provide compensation out of their own funds. In
the Pulawy District the German army, not wishing to start payments,
prompdy dismissed its Jews,20 but in Czestochowa the German City
Kommissar wrote the following in his official report: “I assume that also
these instructions may be lost locally and I have acted accordingly.”21
The machinery of destruction, moving on a track of self-assertion,
engaged in its multipronged operation in an ever more complicated net­
work of interlocking decisions. One might well ask: What determined the
basic order of this process? What accounted for the sequence of involve­
ment? What explains the succession of steps? The bureaucracy had no
master plan, no fundamental blueprint, no clear-cut view of its actions.
How then was the process steered? How did it take on Gestalt?
A destruction process has an inherent pattern. There is only one way in
which a scattered group can effectively be destroyed. Three steps are
organic to the operation:

18. Eichmann trial, scss. 97, July 14,1961, p. PI.


19. Decree by rector (Martin Heidegger), Freiburger Studentenzettutui, Novem­
ber 3, 1933, p. 6, as reprinted in Guido Schncebcrgcr, Nachlese zu Heidegger (Bern,
1962), p. 137.
20. Monthly report for August 1940 by Kreishauptmann in Pulawy (signed
Brandt), September 10,1940, Yad Vashcm microfilm JM 814.
21. Monthly report by Stadthauptmann in Czystochowa, September 14, 1940,
Yad Vashem microfilm JM 814.
Definition

Concentration (or seizure)


I
Annihilation
This is the invariant structure of the basic process, for no group can be
killed without a concentration or seizure of the victims, and no victims can
be segregated before the perpetrator knows who belongs to the group.
There are additional steps in a modern destructive undertaking. These
measures are required not for the annihilation of the victim but for the
preserv ation of the economy. Basically, they are all expropriations. In the
destruction of the Jews, expropriator)' decrees were introduced after
every' organic step. Dismissals and Aryanizations came after the defini­
tion, exploitation and starvation measures followed concentration, and
the confiscation of personal belongings was incidental to the killing oper­
ation. In its completed form a destruction process in a modern society
will thus be structured as shown in this chart:
Definition
1
Dismissals of employees and expropriations of business firms
I
Concentration
1

Exploitation of labor and starvation measures


I
Annihilation
i
Confiscation of personal eff ects
The sequence of steps in a destruction process is thus determined. If there
is an attempt to inflict maximum injury upon a group of people, it is
therefore inevitable that a bureaucracy', no matter how decentralized
its apparatus or how unplanned its activities, should push its victims
through these stages.
The destruction of the Jews was not an isolated event. It was em­
bedded in an environment of actions against a variety of groups. Just like
the anti-Jcwish measures, these operations were not designed for the
obliteration of scx'ial practices, traditions, or institutions, but for depriva­
tions of property1 or space and, in some cases, for the infliction of death. In
this wider destruction, one can spot numerous decrees that were charac­
teristic of the anti-Jcwish process, such as definition-writing, special taxes,
marking, or movement restrictions. Insofar as killing was directed at non-

THB PERPETRATORS 1065


Jews, die deed was carried out before and during the annihilation of the
Jews, by the same means and often by the same personnel.
Three broad categories of individuals were embraced in these destruc­
tive activities: (1) persons who were afflicted with diseases or disabilities,
(2) those who were deemed threatening or dangerous by reason of their
behavior, and (3) those who were members of targeted nationalities.
The majority of the health-impaired victims were living in mental
asylums. The euthanasia program, which claimed the lives of approx­
imately 100,000 German adults and children, is the most conspicuous of
the actions against institutionalized people. Essentially the wards were
thinned out, and the decisive criterion for selection was the degree of the
inmate’s impairment. It is in this operation that the gas chamber was first
employed.22 In eastern regions, mainly on occupied Polish soil, German
and Polish patients were gassed in prototype vans.23 Later, the Ein-
satzgruppen emptied out mental hospitals in the occupied USSR, shoot­
ing many thousands of Russians and Ukrainians.24 Some of these facilities
were subsequendy used for German wounded.
To be sure, there were problems, since the euthanasia victims were
relatives of ordinary families. In addition, the operation caused fears
about the possible inclusion of old people. In the Reich, these anxieties
manifested themselves in private queries and, on one occasion, in a public
sermon by Catholic Bishop Graf von Galen.25 In Poltava, Ukraine, Son-
derkommando 4b displayed its sensitivity in these matters by making an
“agreement” with the chief physician at the local showcase asylum to
remove 565 incurable inmates for “liquidation” under the pretext of
transferring them to an even better institution in Kharkov, and to release
the 300 least disabled to their families.26
Mentally deficient children in Germany were starved to death in hun­
ger wards. In Shumachi, Russia, a German army doctor decided that
sixteen retarded Russian and Jewish children with eczema should be shot
by the Security Police.27 Gauleiter Greiser of the Warthegau wanted to
use the experienced (eingearbeiteten) members of the Sonderkommando

22. See Ernst Klee, “Euthanasie”tm NS-Staat (Frankfurt am Main, 1983).


23. Götz Aly, “Endlösung” (Frankfurt am Main, 1995), pp. 114-26.
24. Angelikc Ebbinghaus and Gerd Prcisslcr, “Die Ermordung psychisch kranker
Menschen in der Sowjetunion,” in Götz AJy et al., edsAussonderung und Tod (Berlin,
1985), pp. 75-107.
25. Text of the sermon in large extract, August 3, 1941, in Herbert Michaelis and
Emst Schraeplcr, eds.. Das Dritte Reich, 26 vols. (Berlin, 1958), vol. 19, pp. 516-18.
26. RSHAIV-A-1, Operational and Situation Report USSR No. 135 (60 copies),
November 19, 1941, NO-2832.
27. RSHA IV-A-1, Operational and Situation Report USSR No. 148 (65 copies),
December 19, 1941, NO-2824. Shumachi, southwest of Roslavl, is a small town.

REFLECTIONS
at Rulmhof to liberate his Gau from 35,000 tubercular Poles. The sugges­
tion was passed on to Hitler. After months had passed without a decision,
Greiser was deeply disappointed. Alter all, Hitler had told him that he
could deal with the Jews as he pleased.28
The tubercular Poles were spared, but thoughts about widening the
circle of victims did not pass. As late as November 16, 1944, officials of
the Justice Ministry turned their attention to the subject of ugliness. The
summary of that conference states:29
During various visits to the penitentiaries, prisoners have always been
observed who —because of their bodily characteristics — hardly de­
serve the designation human; they look like miscarriages of hell. Such
prisoners should be photographed. It is planned that they too shall be
eliminated. Crime and punishment are irrelevant. Only such photo­
graphs should be submitted that clearly show the deformity.
Unlike the passive institutionalized victims, who were killed quietly or
in secret, those whose conduct was deemed to pose a threat to German
society were dealt with publicly. Dangerous persons in this sense could be
Communists or other political opponents, Jehovah’s Witnesses, habitual
criminals, “asociáis” or “work-shy” individuals, and German homosexual
men. It is primarily for this agglomerate of people that die concentration
camp was created.
Actions based on national or ethnic criteria were a much larger under­
taking. Here the problem was not one of making a sharp distinction
between a population as a whole and a specific group to be singled out for
death or incarceration. Rather it was a task of setting up a veritable hier­
archy of nations within Germany and its occupied territories, involving
not tens or hundreds of thousands of individuals but millions and tens of
millions. Many distinctions were made among these peoples and many
consequences flowed from these distinctions.
The most favored group were the Ethnic Germans, that is to say,
people outside of Germany who were culturally German. After the out­
break of war, Ethnic Germans were invited to “return” to Germany from
Baltic and other areas not occupied by German troops. Later, they were
privileged in German-occupied territories. More than a few of divided
ancestry and a bare knowledge of German were offered revocable Ger­
man citizenship.30 The next highest category was called “Germanic”:

28. Greiser to Himmler, May 1, 1942, NO-246, and Greiser to Himmler, No­
vember 21, 1942, NO-249.
29. Generalstaatsanwalt (chief prosecutor) in Bamberg to Generalstaatsamvalt
Helm in Munich, November 29, 1944, enclosing summary of conference held under
the chairmanship of Minisrerialdirektor Engerton November 16, 1944, NG-1546.
30. See Diemut Majer, “Fremdvolkische” itn Dritten Reich (Boppard am Rhein,

THE PERPETRATORS 1067


Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, and Flemish people.* 31 For those nationali­
ties, ultimate Germanization was a distant objective.
A larger group, which was neither publicly complimented nor openlv
derided, occupied a broad middle ranging from Czechs, Frenchmen, and
Walloons to Greeks and Serbs. The lower status of this aggregate of
nations, which included the Italians after September 1943, is revealed in
such German practices as hostage taking and reprisals. In the concentra­
tion camps, French and Italian inmates could barely hold their own above
the bottom layer.32
The bottom included most eastern Europeans. Yet even in that region
there were gradations: Estonians above Latvians, Latvians above Lithua­
nians, and all three above Ukrainians. Soviet prisoners of war of Baltic
and Ukrainian nationalities were eligible for release,33 and both Balts and
Ukrainians were recruited in the police battalions with pay in Reichs­
mark.34 Ukrainians, however, were exposed to the same privations as
Byelorussians, Russians, and Poles in other respects, notably seizures of
their harvests and forced labor in Germany.35 The population of Ukrai­
nian cities in particular suffered from starvation.36

1993), pp. 215-22. Revocable citizenship was granted to some three million people.
Report by Himmler’s Stabshauptamt with data as of December 1942, in Rolf-Dictcr
Midler, Hitlers Ostkneg und die deutsche Siedlungspolitik (Frankfurt am Main, 1991),
pp. 200-204.
31. A telling indication of the high status of men belonging to these nationalities
was access to German women. They were the only ones to have the privilege. Czech
workers in Germany had to have permission to marry Germans. The Polish, Russian,
Byelorussian, Ukrainian, and Baltic laborers were prohibited from having sexual
intercourse w'ith Germans. Instructions of the Gestapo (Staatspolizcilcitstclle) in
Dresden, November 16, 1942, in Jochen August et al., Herrenmensch und Arbeits­
völker (Berlin, 1986), pp. 136-38. Later, such relations were explicitly forbidden also
to Armenian, Georgian, North-Caucasian, Kalmyk, Cossack, Turkcstani, and Tatar
holders of “stateless passports.” RSHAIV-B circular to Security Police offices, July 25,
1944, Staatsarchiv Leipzig, Collection Polizeipräsident Leipzig V 4000.
32. Wolfgang Sofsky, Die Ordnung des Terrors (Frankfurt am Main, 1993), p. 150.
33. OKW directive of September 8, 1941, in Michaelis and Schraepler, cds., Das
Dritte Reich, vol. 17, pp. 333-37.
34. Order by Dalucge, November 6, 1941, T 454, Roll 100. Balts also received
supplemental pay (the Baltenzulage). Order by KdS/Ia in Lithuania, Lithuanian State
Archives, Fond 659, Opis 1, Folder 1.
35. On forced labor in the Reich and differentiations among these laborers by
nationality, see Ulrich Herbert, Fremdarbeiter (Berlin, 1986). For a single revealing
document, note the instructions of the Staatspolizcilcitstclle Dresden, November 16,
1942, in August, Herrenmensch, pp. 136-38. Polish laborers were marked w ith a P.
Decree of March 8, 1940, RGBl 1,555. Workers from the occupied USSR (including
the Galician and Bialystok districts) wore a patch with the inscription Ost. Herbert,
Fremdarbeiter, pp. 154-56.
36. See the mayor of Kiev to the German Stadrkommissar, December 1941, in J. I.

REFLECTIONS
The Poles were singled out in special ways. From the incorporated
territories, which included lands that had belonged to Imperial Germany
before 1919, a portion of the Polish inhabitants were expelled to the
Generalgouvernement and much of their property was confiscated.37 Af­
ter the expulsions were discontinued, the Poles who were left in the
region remained in Nazi consciousness. An interministerial conference
under the chairmanship of Staatssekretrar Conti of the Interior Ministry'
entertained the following proposals: (1) no Pole to be allowed to marry'
before the age of twenty-five, (2) no permission to be granted unless the
marriage was financially sound, (3) a tax on illegitimate births, (4) steril­
ization following an illegitimate birth, (5) no tax exemptions for depen­
dents, and (6) permission to submit to abortion to be granted upon
application of the expectant mother.38
German plans for the Generalgouvernement were somewhat more
vacuous, but in May 1943 an official of the Warsaw District administra­
tion, Gollert, permitted himself some thoughts about the future. He
rejected plenary solutions, such as the Germanization of all fifteen million
Poles in his area, or their total expulsion, or the “radical cure” of their
“eradication,” a measure that he regarded as “unworthy” of a civilized
nation. Instead he proposed in a “magnanimous” manner the Germaniza-
tion of seven or eight million, plus the employment in manual labor of
several million more, and the “unavoidable” application of radical mea­
sures against a remainder of two or three million Polish fanatics, asocials,
and ailing or worthless people.39
At various times Ukrainians, Poles, Byelorussians, and Russians be­
lieved they would be killed. In the case of the Roma and Sinti, who are
commonly referred to as Gypsies, that engulfment became a reality'. A
small scattered people, the Gypsies had a language and customs but no
religion of their own.40 They had been viewed with suspicion in Germany

Kondufor et al., cds., Die Geschichte warnt (Kiev, 1986), p. 77, and Professor Siosnovy
(Kharkov municipality) ro Dr. Martin of the German military' administration, Sep­
tember 28, 1942, Kharkov Oblast Archives, Fond 2982, Opis 4, Folder 390a.
37. See the statistics as of the end of 1942 in the report of Himmler's Srabshaupt-
amt, in Miiller, Hitlers Ostkriqj, pp. 200-204. The figure of expulsions comprises
365,000 Poles from incorporated territories ro the Generalgouvernement, 295,000
persons from Alsace-Lorraine and Luxembourg to France, and 17,000 Slovenes to
Serbia.
38. Reich Chancellery memorandum, Mav 27, 1941, NG-844.
39. lext in Susanne Heim and Görz Aly, eds., Bmilkerunflsstruktur und Massen­
mord (RcrWn, 1991), pp. 145-51.
40. Joachim S. Hohmann, Geschichte der Zujeunerverfolpung in Deutschlattd (Frank­
furt, 1981), pp. 13-84. The origin of the Gypsies, now determined to be India, was
the subject of treatises for hundreds of years. One seventeenth-century' writer, Johann
Christof Wagenseil, wrote an essay to prove that “the very first Gypsies were Jews

THE PERPETRATORS
for some time, and in 1899 the Munich police began to track nomadic
Gypsies in Bavaria. Fingerprinting of Gypsies was introduced by Bavaria
in 1911, and in 1929 the Gypsy information office of the Munich police
became the Central Office for Combatting Gypsies under the German
Criminal Commission.41
During the Nazi period in the 1930s Gypsy families moving in car­
avans were concentrated in small urban camps,42 and by 1938 sizable
groups were incarcerated in concentration camps, where they were cate­
gorized as “asocial.”43 On December 8,1938, Himmler issued a circular
order for “combatting the Gypsy plague,” empowering the Criminal Po­
lice to identify, upon investigation by race experts, all Gypsies, Gypsy
Mischlinge, and persons wandering about in a Gypsy-like manner.44 It
turned out that of an estimated 30,000 persons with Gypsy ancestry in
the Old Reich and Austria, fewer than 10 percent were pure Gypsies.45

who stemmed from Germany.” Sec his Der Meister-Singer Holdseligen Kunst (1697),
introduction. In the eighteenth century they were linked to Jews, beggars, and vaga­
bonds. Sec a contemporary German drawing in Wolfgang Ayass et al., Feinderklärung
und Prävention (Berlin, 1988), p. 10.
41. Hans-Joachim Döring, Die Zigeuner im nationalsozialistischen Staat (Ham­
burg, 1964), pp. 25-31. Döring’s book was published in a scries of the Deutsche
Kriminologische Gesellschaft, an organization concerned with criminology'. Two
comprehensive studies of German actions against the Gypsies are Michael Zimmer­
mann, Rassenutopie und Genozid—Die nationalsozialistische “Lösung der Zigeunerfrage ”
(Hamburg, 1996) and Guenter Lcwy, The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies (New York,
2000).
42. Michael Zimmermann, “Von der Diskriminierung zum ‘Familicnlagcr’ Ausch­
witz—Die Nationalsozialistische Zigcuncrvcrfolgung” Dachauer Hefte 5 (1994):
87-104, on pp. 90-94.
43. Ibid., p. 96. Döring, Die Zigeuner, pp. 50-58. Romani Rose and Walter Weiss,
Sinti und Roma im Dritten Reich (Göttingen and Heidelberg, 1991), pp. 16, 28,40,
172. Sec also the categorization of the 371 Gypsies in Sachsenhausen as of Novem­
ber 10, 1938, in Nationale Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Sachsenhausen Archive R 201,
Mappe 3 (Gcfangcnen-Geld- und Effcktcnvcrwaltcr). On November 11, 1939, the
RSHA ordered that Gypsy fortune teller women, who were considered dangerous to
morale in wartime, be placed in concentration camps. Zimmermann, “Diskrimi­
nierung” Dachauer Hefte 5 (1994): 101. On June 18, 1940, Nebc informed his
offices that Gypsies would no longer be released from concentration camps. Staats­
archiv Leipzig, Collection Polizeipräsident Leipzig S 2327.
44. Circular Decree by Himmler, December 8, 1938, Ministerialblatt des Retcbs-
und Preussischen Ministeriums des Innern, 1938, p. 2105. Investigations of ancestry
and personal characteristics were conducted by the Rassenhygienische Forschungs-
stclle of the Gesundheitsamt. H. Küppers, “Die Beschäftigung von Zigeunern’'
Reichsarbeitsblatt, vol. 5, March 25, 1942, p. 177, reprinted in Die Juden frage (Ver­
trauliche Beilage), April 15,1942, pp. 30-31.
45. See the article by Robert Ritter (Chief of the Rassenhygienische Forschungs-
srcllc), “Die Bestandaufnahme der Zigeuner und Zigeunermischlinge in Deutsch-

REFLECTIONS
The Criminal Police labeled diese individuals Z (Zigeuner). Gypsy Misch­
linge of predominandy Gypsy origin were ZM + , and those with equal
Gypsy and German “bloodshares” (such as offspring of half-Gypsies)
ZM. Anyone descended from a pure Gypsy and a pure German became a
ZM of the first degree. A quarter-Gypsy was classified as a ZM of the
second degree. Gypsy ancestry of less than one-quarter resulted in the
classification ZM —. Roving Germans received the letters NZ, for Nicht
Zigeuner, or non-Gypsies.* 46 All pure Gypsies and Gypsy Mischlinge, ex­
cept the ZM —, were subjected to special wage and tax regulations.47
In May 1940, about 2,800 Gypsies from a large region in western
Germany were deported to the Generalgouvernement, lest they become a
danger as spies in a war zone.48 Some deportees were employed in forced
labor near the Bug.49 50 Many were assigned to dilapidated buildings that
had once housed Jews.so
Close to 8,000 Roma Gypsies lived in the Austrian Burgenland. Half of
them were concentrated in a camp at Lackenbach, where typhus raged
earlv in 1942.51 In November 1941, 5,000 Burgenland Gypsies, includ­
ing 2,000 from Lackenbach, were transported to the Lodz Ghetto. There,
613 succumbed to typhus by January 1, 1942. Most of the remainder
were gassed in Kulmhof shortly thereafter.52

land,” in Der öffentliche Gesundheitsdietist, vol. 6, February 5, 1941, pp. 477-89. On


the Austrian Gypsies, see Selma Steinmerz, “Die Verfolgung der burgcnländischen
Zigeuner,” with appended dixuments, in Tilman Ziilich, In Auschwitz vergast, bis heute
verfolgt (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1979), pp. 112-30.
46. Circular Decree by Himmler, August 7, 1941, Ministerialblatt des Reichs- und
Preussischen Ministeriums des Innern, 1941, p. 1443.
47. Küppers, “Beschäftigung,” Reichsarbeitsblatt, vol. 5, p. 177. Döring, Die
Zigeuner, pp. 135-38.
48. Hcydrich letter to Kriminalpolizcileitstcllcn in Hamburg, Bremen, Hannover,
Düsseldorf, Cologne, Frankfurt am Main, and Stuttgart, April 27, 1940, and his
directive to the same offices on the same date, T 175, Roll 413. Gypsies in mixed
marriages, those with fathers or sons in the army, and a few other categories were
exempt. Sec also correspondence. May 1940, of the Kriminalpolizcistellc Darmstadt,
and railroad bills, ibid. The final count of 2,800 is taken from a compilation prepared
by the Security Police for Mav 14-Novcmbcr 15, 1940, NO-5150.
49. Personnel record of Hermann Dolp, Berlin Document Center.
50. Ursula Korber, “Die Wiedergutmachung und die ‘Zigeuner,’ ” in Grirz Alv, cd.,
Feinderklarutg und Pmvetttton (Berlin, 1988), pp. 167-68, 172-73. Döring, Die
Zigeuner, pp. 96-106. Philip Friedman, Roads to Kxtmctiim (New York, 1980), p. 385.
51. Steinmerz, “Die Verfolgung der burgenländischen Zigeuner,” in Zülich, In
Auschuntz ingast, pp. 115-17. Zimmermann, Rassenutopie, pp. 225-26.
52. Antoni Galinski, “Nazi Camp for Gypsies in Lodz,” Main Commission for the
Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Poland, International Scientific Session on Nazi
Genocide in Poland, Warsaw, April 14-17, 1983. Mortality statistics in Lucjan
Dobroszveki, The Chronicle of the Ijidz Ghetto, 1941-1944 (New Haven. 1984), entry

THE PERPETRATORS 1071


In the Protektorat, the Czechoslovak government had already adopted
a Vagrant Gypsies Act in 1927, and had given the itinerant Gypsies an
identity card different from those assigned to Czech citizens.53 On Octo­
ber 10, 1941, Heydrich decided that the Gypsies of Bohemia and Mo­
ravia were to be “evacuated.” He was thinking of the Commander of
Einsatzgruppe A, Stahlecker, as their prospective host,54 but they were
not deported before 1943, in conjunction with the mass transports of
Gypsies from Germany. In the meantime, the Czech Gypsies were to be
concentrated in two camps, Lety in Bohemia and Hodonin in Moravia.
In each, one barrack was to be set aside for men over fourteen, another for
women over fourteen, and a third for children. Eventually, additional
uninsulated barracks were added, and some of the inmates were left in
their wagons, without the wheels and the horses.55
Toward the end of 1942, Himmler decided that the pure Sinte Gypsies
of the Old Reich were to be allowed to stay, subject to existing restric­
tions. Also privileged were “good Mischlinge,” intermarried Gypsies, the
families of soldiers still serving in the army, and Gypsies with permanent
addresses and steady employment. Those remaining in the Reich, except­
ing only the pure Gypsies and the good Mischlinge, were to be sterilized.
All the others, in the main Sinte Mischlinge and Roma, were to be de­
ported to Auschwitz.56 The Mischlinge were ranked below the pure Gyp­
sies, because it was thought that the German ancestors of these people
came from the lowest strata of society.
Eventually, 22,000-23,000 Gypsies from the Old Reich, Austria, the
Protektorat, Poland, Belgium-Northern France, and the Netherlands ar­

for January 1-5, 1942, pp. 107-8. There was a request for 120 skilled metal work­
ers needed in Poznan. Labor Office in Poznan to Gcttovcrwaltung in Lodz, No­
vember 22, 1941, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives Record Group
0.7007*01 (Gypsies in Austria).
53. Karl Holomek, “Reflection in Society on the Genocide of the Roma,” in
International Scientific Conference, The Holocaust Phenomenon (Prague-Tcrezin, Oc­
tober 6-8,1999), pp. 23-28.
54. Summary of conference, held on October 10,1941, under the chairmanship of
Heydrich and attended by Karl Hermann Frank, Eichmann, and SS officers stationed
in the Protektorat, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives Record Group
48.005 (Stare Archives of Prague selected documents), Roll 3. The concentration
process is described by Holomek, The Holocaust Phenomenon, pp. 25-27.
55. Sec the order of the Gcncralkommandant of the Non-Uniformed (Czech)
Protektorat Police (Criminal Police), September 30, 1942, and other documents in
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives Record Group 07.013*01 (Prague,
Gypsies).
56. Döring, Die Zigeuner, pp. 153-55, and text (without appended forms) of
RSHA V-A-2 circular to Kriminalpolizeileitstellen, January 29, 1943, pp. 214-18.
See also the memoir of a Gypsy in hiding: Alfred Lessing, Mein D'ben im Versteck
(Düsseldorf, 1993).

1072 REFLECTIONS
rived in Birkenau, where a special section, the so-called Zigeunerlager,
was reserved for them. They were to be kept as families in these barracks
indefinitely. Two transports aggregating about 2,700 Gypsies from the
Bialvstok District were gassed shortly after arrival because of suspicions of
typhus. More than 3,000 were transferred to other camps. Of the re­
mainder, all but 2,897 died. The last group was killed in a gas chamber on
August 2, 1944, and in October of that year, 800 were returned from
Buchenwald to be gassed as well.57
The Gvpsies of other occupied territories also became victims. In Ser­
bia, hundreds of Gypsies were shot in 1941.58 In Poland, about 1,000
Gypsies in the Warsaw District were tunneled through the Warsaw Ghetto
to Treblinka.59 A similar number were shot in the southern parts of the
Generalgouvernement.60 In Byelorussia, Gypsies encountered by military
patrols in the countryside were to be shot.61 On December 4, 1941,
Reichskommissar Lohse of the Ostland decided that Gypsies wandering
about {umherirrende) be treated like the Jews.62 Many hundreds of seden­
tary Gypsies and refugees from Riga were concentrated in camps within
the Daugavpils District and shot at the end of 1941.63 In Estonia, 243

57. A rural of 20,943 were registered in the camp. See the name list in the two
volumes, paged consecutively, of the State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau and the
Cultural Centre of German Sintis and Roma in Heidelberg, Memorial Book—The
Gypsies at Auschwitz-Birkenau (Birkenau, 1993). Also, Danuta Czech, Kalendarium
der Ereignisse tm Konzentrationslager Ausclnvitz Birkenau 1939-1945 (Reinbek bei
Hamburg, 1989), entries from February 26, 1943, through October 10, 1944,
passim.
58. RSHA1V-A-1, Operational and Situation Report USSR No. 108 (50 copies),
October 9, 1941, NO-3156. Turner to Feld- und Kreiskommandanturen, Octo­
ber 26, 1941, NOKW-802.
59. Raul Hilberg, Stanislaw Staron, and Josef Kermisz, eds., The Warsaw Diary of
Adam Czemiaktm’ (New York, 1979), pp. 346-47, 351,364-68, 375.
60. Stanislaw Zabierowski, “Die Ausrottung der Zigeuner in Südostpolen,” and
Cczary (ablonski, “Extermination of Jews and Gypsies in Western Counties of the
Radom District, 1939-1945,” International Session, Warsaw, April 14-17, 1983.
61. Order by Generalmajor von Bechtolsheim, October 10, 1941, and his order of
November 24, 1941, reiterating command to shoot Gypsies in the countryside, U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives Record Group 53.002 (Belarus Central State
Archives), Roll 2, Fond 378, Opis 1, Folder 698.
62. Trampcdach to Generalkommissar in Riga, August 24, 1942, enclosing
Lohsc's directive of December 4, 1941, Latvian Central State Archives, Fond 69,
Opis la. Folder 2. Arrest order by KdO Knecht (I-itvia) of January 27, 1942, affect­
ing Gypsies without domicile and employment, in his letter to the SS and Police
Ixadcr, March 11, 1942, ibid., Fond 83, Opis 119, Folder 1.
63. Petition ot Janis Petrovs (a Gypsy) to the Gebietskommissar in Daugavpils,
November 21, 1941, and Gcbicrskommissar in Daugavpils to Generalkommissar/
He, February 26, 1942, reporting “dissolution” of the camp in Ludza at the end of
December by Security Police. German Federal Archives, R 92/522.

THE PERPETRATORS 1073


were shot in October 1942.64 Army Group Center ordered that Gypsies I
who could not prove a domicile for two years be handed over to the I
Security' Police.65 Einsatzgruppe D systematically killed the Gypsies on I
the Crimean peninsula.66 '
The governments of several countries took anti-Gypsy measures that
were similar to the German model. Vichy France interned almost 3,000
nomadic Gypsies in camps.67 Croatia and Romania initiated drastic ac­
tions against Gypsies in much the way they had acted against Jews. In
Croatia, many thousands of Gypsies outside the Moslem region of Bosnia
were rounded up in June 1942 and sent to Jasenovac, where the large
majority perished.68 In April 1941, over 200,000 Gypsies lived in Ro­
mania’s reduced territory'. From this population, 11,441 nomads, 13,176
who were deemed dangerous, and 69 former prison inmates, were sent
between May and September 1942 to Transnistria, where almost all were
eventually concentrated in the Golta, Berezovka, and Oceakov districts.
With little food or medical attention, the deportees—who included old
people and many children, as well as young men and women —were
exposed to starvation and typhus, even as more children were born. Dur-

64. Jaan Viik of Estonian Security' Police B IV (Political Police) to OStuf. Bcrg-
mann of Einsatzkommando la, Section IV A (Communism), October 30, 1942,
mentioning shooting on October 27, 1942, of Gypsies in Harku; and indictment
before and judgment of a court in the Estonian SSR, 1961, mentioning killing of
Gypsies by Estonian Security Police in 1943, in Raul Kruus, People Be Watchful
(Tallinn, 1962), pp. 102,106-8, 146,148.
65. Military Government Ordinances (Militarvcrwaltungsanordnungcn) by Army
Group Center, OQu VII, document Hccrcsgruppc Mitte 75858, located in the Fed­
eral Records Center, Alexandria, Va., in postwar years. See also the virtually identical
instructions of Fcldkommandantur 551 in Gomel (signed Lt. Col. Laub), Novem­
ber 1, 1941, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives Record Group 53.005
(Belarus State Archives of Gomel Oblast), Roll 1, Fond 1318, Opis 1, Folder 1.
Further, the instructions for turning over Jews and Gypsies to the Security Police by
the 339th Division/Ic, November 2, 1941, German Federal Archives at Freiburg,
RH 26-339/5; a report by Secret Field Police Group 719 to Security Division 213,
October 25, 1942, on the shooting of two small Gypsy groups southeast of Kharkov,
Zcntralc Stclle Ludwigsburg, UdSSR 245a, pp. 437-48, and a report by Security
Division 454/Ic (signed Obcrleutnant Gottschalk), December 6, 1942, on incar­
cerating a group of Gypsies in a Jewish camp, NOKW-2856.
66. For Crimean killing, see RSHA IV-A-1, Operational Report USSR No. 150,
January' 2,1942, NO-2834; Report No. 178, March 9,1942, NO-3241; Report No.
184, March 23, 1942, NO-3235; Report No. 190, April 8, 1942, NO-3359. For
Einsatzgruppe B, sec Report No. 195, April 24,1942, NO-3277.
67. Denis Peschanski, Les tsipanes en France, 1939-1946 (Paris, 1994). In one
camp the Gypsies were given ca. 1,400 calorics a day. Ibid., p. 64. French Gvpsics
were not deported.
68. Karola Fings, Cordula Lissncr, and Frank Sparing, “. . . einziges Ijmii in dem
Judenfrgge und Zigeutierfrage¿felosf' (Cologne, no date, probably 1993), pp. 17-27.

1074 REFLECTIONS
ing this banishment, Gypsy deaths were roughly proportional to those ot
the Romanian Jews who had preceded them to Transnistria.69
In the end, however, the Jews retained their special place. The most
encompassing solution was reserved for them, and the parole '■'’all Jews”
defined the nature of the entire racial hierarchy.

THE OBSTACLES
A destructive development unparalleled in history had surfaced in Nazi
Germany. The bureaucratic network of an entire nation was involved in
these operations, and its capabilities were being expanded by an atmo­
sphere facilitating initiatives in offices at ever)' level. Destruction was
brought to its logical, final conclusion, and even as this fate overtook the
Jews, a veritable target series was established to engulf yet other groups.
The German bureaucracy, however, did not always move with unen­
cumbered ease. From time to time barriers appeared on the horizon and
caused momentary pauses. Most of these stoppages were occasioned by
those ordinary difficulties encountered by every bureaucracy in every ad­
ministrative operation: procurement difficulties, shortages, mixups, mis­
understandings, and all the other annoyances of the daily bureaucratic
process. But some of the hesitations and interruptions were the products
of extraordinary administrative and psychological obstacles. These blocks
were peculiar to the destruction process alone, and they must therefore
receive special attention.

Administrative Problems
The destruction of the Jews was not a gainful operation. It imposed a
strain upon the administrative machine and its facilities. In a wider sense,
it became a burden that rested upon Germanv as a whole.
One of the most striking facts about the German apparatus was the
sparsencss of its personnel, particularly in those regions outside the Reich
where most of the victims had to be destroyed. Moreover, that limited
manpower was preoccupied with a bewildering variety of administrative
undertakings. Upon close examination, the machinery of destruction
turns out to have been a loose organization of part-timers. There were at

69. Radu Ioanid, I be Holocaust in Romania (Chicago, 2000), pp. 225-37.1 am also
indebted to the Romanian historian Viorel Achim for facts and insights regarding the
Gypsies ousted from Old Romania. There is little information, however, about Gypsy
deportees from Bessarabia and the relatively few who were native in Transnistria. A
Jewish survivor ot the Vapniarka camp reports that he brought food to a camp housing
Roma halt a mile away in December 1942. The Gypsies were barefoot and starving. He
heard later that almost all had died of typhus. Nathan Simon, “. . . auf alien Vienn
werdet iltrbinauskricchen* (Berlin, 1994), p. 81.

THE PERPETRATORS 1075


most a handful of bureaucrats who could devote all their time to anti- <
Jewish activities. These were the “experts” on Jewish affairs in the minis­
tries, the mobile killing units of the Reich Security Main Office, the
commanders of the killing centers. But even an expert like Eichmann had
two jobs: the deportation of Jews and the resettlement of Ethnic Ger­
mans. The mobile killing units had to shoot Jews, Gypsies, commissars,
and partisans alike, while a camp commander like Höss was host to an
industrial complex next to his gas chambers.
In the totality of the administrative process, the destruction of the Jews
presented itself as an additional task to a bureaucratic machine that was
already straining to fulfill the requirements of the battlefronts. One need
think only of the railroads, which served as the principal means for trans­
porting troops, munitions, supplies, and raw materials. Every day, avail­
able rolling stock had to be allocated, and congested routes assigned for
trains urgently requested by military and industrial users.70 Notwith­
standing these priorities, no Jew was left alive for lack of transport to a
killing center. The German bureaucracy was not deterred by problems,
never resorting to pretense, like the Italians, or token measures, like the
Hungarians, or procrastination, like the Bulgarians. German administra­
tors were driven to accomplishment. Unlike their collaborators, German
decision makers never contented themselves with the minimum. They
always did the maximum.
Indeed there were moments when an agency’s eagerness to participate
in the decision making led to bureaucratic competition and rivalry. Such a
contest was in the offing when Unterstaatssekretär Luther concluded an
agreement with the Reich Security Main Office to preserve the Foreign
Office’s power to negotiate with Axis satellites on Jewish matters.71
Again, within the SS itself, a jealous struggle was waged between two
technocrats of destruction, Obersturmbannführer Höss and Kriminal­
kommissar Wirth, over the replacement of carbon monoxide with Zyklon
B in the death camps.72 We have observed this bureaucratic warfare also in
the attempt of the judiciary to conserve its jurisdiction in Jewish affairs.
When that attempt was finally given up, Justice Minister Thierack wrote

70. See statement by Fritz Schclp (in charge of Reichsbahn traffic division),
February' 16,1966, Case Ganzenmüller, vol. VI, pp. 139-42, and letter by Schclp to
prosecutor Uchmann, July 14, 1967, vol. XVIII, p. 31, insert pp. 3-17. For an
exhaustive treatment of Germany’s wartime railroads, see Eugen Kreidler, Die Eisen­
bahnen int Machtbereich der Achsenmächte während des Zweiten Weltkrieges (Göttingen,
1975).
71. Memorandum by Luther (Foreign Office Inland division), August 2, 1942,
NG-2586-J.
72. Interrogation of Höss, May 14,1946, NI-36. Statement by Gerstein (disinfec­
tion officer, WVHA), April 26, 1945, PS-1553.

1076 REFLECTIONS
to his friend Bormann: “I intend to turn over criminal jurisdiction against
Poles, Russians, Jews, and Gypsies to the Reichsfiihrer-SS. In doing so, I
base mvself on the principle that the administration of justice can make
only a small contribution to the extermination of these peoples.”73 This
letter reveals an almost melancholy tone. The judiciary had done its
utmost; it was no longer needed.
The bureaucrats did not spare themselves, nor could they spare the
economv. Just how expensive was the destruction of the Jews? What were
the effects of this cost? Table 10-1 reveals the economic aspects of the
operations. An analysis of the table reveals two important trends: with the
progress of the destruction process, gains declined and expenditures
tended to increase. Looking at the table horizontally, one discovers that in
the preliminary phase financial gains, public or private, far outweighed
expenses but that in the killing phase receipts no longer balanced losses.
The German confiscations during the second half of the process were
largely confined to personal belongings. Within Germany itself most of
the assets had already been taken. In occupied Polish and Soviet territo­
ries, the victims had few possessions from the start, while in the satellite
countries, Jewish property abandoned by the deportees was claimed by
collaborating governments. Costs, on the other hand, were more exten­
sive. Only the visible outlays, particularly for deportations and killings,
were comparatively small. Freight cars were used for transport. German
personnel were employed sparingly, in both killing units and killing cen­
ters. The camps as a whole were constructed and maintained with thrift,
notwithstanding Speer’s complaint that Himmler was using scarce build­
ing materials too extravagantly.74 The installations were erected with
camp labor, and the inmates were housed in large barracks with no light
and no modern toilet facilities. The investment in gas chambers and ovens
was also modest. All of this economizing was possible because it did not
jeopardize the process, either in scale or speed.
Sheer savings, however, were not the decisive consideration. The para­
mount aim was the completion, in the fullest sense of the word, of the
destruction process. A case in point was the razing of the Warsaw Ghetto
ruins after the battle of April-May 1943. For this Himmler project the
Finance Ministry received a bill in the amount of RM 150,000,000.75
Himmler felt that a park should obliterate the site of the ghetto, lest
Warsaw's Poles fill the empty space and the city grow back to its prewar
size.
73. Thicrack to Bormann, October 13, 1942, NG-558.
74. Speer to Himmler, April 5, 1943, Himmler Files, Folder 67.
75. On Warsaw Ghetto clearance operations and billing, see correspondence
(1943-44), in Nuremberg documents NO-2503, NO-2517, NO-2205, NO-2504,
NO-2515, and NG-5561. The project, not completed, was funded only in part.

THE PERPETRATORS 1077


TABLE 10-1
THE ECONOMIC BALANCE SHEET

RECEIPTS, GAINS, SAVINGS EXPENDITURES AND LOSSES

PRELIMINARY PHASE

Net profits to industry from pur­ Loss of markets abroad in conse­


chase and liquidations of Jewish quence of buyers’ resistance and
enterprises: ca. one-fourth to boycott
one-half of value of Jewish busi­ Loss of scientific manpower
ness property in Reich- because of emigration
Protektorat area. These profits
probably amounted to billions
of Reichsmark.
Tax on profits made in acquisitions
of Jewish firms (during fiscal
years 1942,1943,1944):
49.000. 000 Reichsmark
Reich Flight Tax: 900,000,000
Reichsmark
Reich Property Tax (fine):
1.127.000. 000 Reichsmark
Wage differentials and other in­
dustry savings as result of em­
ployment of Jewish labor:
probably in tens of millions
Wage differentials, special income
tax, and other wage savings ac­
cruing to Reich: probably in
tens of millions
Exactions from ghettos for Ger­ Direct expenditures for personnel
man administration and walls and overhead (prior to killing
phase)

KILLING PHASE

Confiscation under the 11 th Ordi- Direct expenditures for:


nance (securities and bonds) : Personnel and overhead (in kill-
186,000,000 Reichsmark ing operations)
Transport
TABLE 10-1
CONTINUED

RECEIPTS, GAINS, SAVINGS EXPENDITURES AND LOSSES

KILLING PHASE

Camp installations (in hundreds


of millions)
Confiscations under the 11th Or­ Extraordinary bill for razing of
dinance (not including se­ Warsaw Ghetto: 150,000,000
curities and bonds): Reichsmark
592,000,000 Reichsmark
Confiscations in German occupied Loss of unpaid rents and odier
territories Jewish debts
Exactions from Jewish commu­ Loss of Jewish labor
nities in Reich by Gestapo for
transports
Gain of apartment space for rent

Nutt: Arvanization differentials, Reich property tax, and confiscations under the 11th
Ordinance are listed in a letter from Restverwaltunfi des chcmaliqen Rcicbsjinanzminis-
tcriums to Allied Control Commission, November 14, 1946, NG-4904. The Reich
Flight fax was extrapolated from figures of Jewish registered property and estimates of
Jewish emigration.

A more important assertion of total destruction was the forfeiture of


the Jewish labor potential. Himmler never made any pretense that for
him the destruction of the Jews had priority' even over armaments. When
procurement officials objected to removals of Jewish workers, Himmler
had only this reply: “The argument of war production, which nowadays
in Germany is the favorite reason for opposing anything at all, I do not
recognize in the first place.”"6 In the measured language of the Ministry
for Eastern Occupied Territories, the priority of the destruction process
was phrased as follows: “Economic questions should not be considered in
the solution of the Jewish question.”77
The loss of Jewish labor was brought about by successive restrictions,
dislocations, and deportations. From the beginning, Jew's were dismissed
from jobs. In the East the Jewish population in its entirety w'as crowded

76. Himmler to UebellvxT, October 10, 1941, Himmler Files, Folder 94.
77. Rraungam (Ministry for Hasrcm Occupied Territories) to Reichskommissar of
rheOstland, December 18, 1941, PS-3663.

THE PERPETRATORS
into ghettos. There the incarcerated communities were engaged in pro- I
duction, but the ghetto was not an ideal place for major manufacturing. !
Its industry' was undercapitalized, its residents underemployed, its la­
borers undernourished. Once the killings were under way, the SS itself
attempted to husband Jewish workers in its camps, but eventually that
remnant was to disappear as well.
Germany was at war. The economies of the occupied countries were
harnessed to German needs. Foreign goods were demanded for the Ger­
man market even as foreign workers were transported to German facto­
ries and farms. In the wake of these expanding requirements for output
and in the face of the growing shortage of labor, a reservoir of Jewish
manpower was sacrificed to the “Final Solution.” Of all the costs that were
generated by' the destruction process, this relinquishment of an increas­
ingly irreplaceable pool of labor was the greatest single expenditure.78

Psychological Problems
The most important problems of the destruction process were not admin­
istrative but psychological. The sheer conceptualization of the drastic
Final Solution was dependent on the ability of the perpetrators to cope
with weighty psychological obstacles and impediments. The psychologi­
cal blocks differed from the administrative difficulties in one important
respect. An administrative problem could be solved and eliminated, but
the psychological difficulties had to be dealt with continuously. They
were held in check but never removed. Commanders in the field were
ever watchful for symptoms of psychological disintegration. In the sum­
mer of 1941 Higher SS and Police Leader Russia Center von dem Bach
shook Himmler with the remark: “Look at the eyes of the men of this
Kommando, how deeply shaken they are. These men are finished [fertig]
for the rest of their lives. What kind of followers are we training here?
Either neurotics or savages [Entweder Nervenkranke oder Rohlinjje] !”79
Von dem Bach was not only an important participant in killing opera­
tions. He was also an acute observer. With this remark he pointed to the

78. In three years (1941-43) production in the Reich was ca. 400 billion Reichs­
mark, in occupied countries ca. 300 billion. About 260 billion of German output was
war production; 90 billion was the comparable figure in occupied areas. Testimony
by Economy Minister Funk, Trial of the Major War Criminals, XIII, 129-30. On
European-wide labor recruitment, sec the summary of a conference held on January 4,
1944, and letter of German Labor Plenipotentiary' Sauckcl to Lammcrs on the follow­
ing day, PS-1292. For specific data about foreign laborers in the Reich, sec Edward
Homze, Foreign Labor in Nazi Germany (Princeton, N.J., 1967), and Ulrich Herbert,
Fremdarbeiter (Berlin, 1985).
79. Von dem Bach in Aufbau (New York), August 23,1946, pp. 1 -2.

REFLECTIONS
basic psychological problem of the German bureaucracy, namely that the
German administration had to make determined efforts to prevent the
breakdown of its men into either “savages” or “neurotics.” This was essen­
tially a dual task, one part disciplinan', the other moral.
The disciplinan' problem was understood clearly. The bureaucrats
were fullv aware of the dangers of plundering, torture, orgies, and atroci­
ties. Such behavior was first of all wasteful from an administrative point of
view , for the destruction process was an organized undertaking which had
room only for organized tasks. Moreover, “excesses” attracted attention to
aspects of the destruction process that had to remain secret. Such were the
activities of Brigadefiihrer Dirlewanger, whose rumored attempts to make
human soap drew' the attention of the public to the killing centers. Indeed,
atrocities could bring the entire “noble” work into disrepute.
What was wasteful administratively was dangerous psychologically.
Loose behavior w'as an abuse of the machine, and a debauched admin­
istration could disintegrate. That was why the German administration
had a certain preference for quick, blow-type {schlajjartijje) action. Max­
imum destructive effect was to be achieved w ith minimum destructive
effort. The personnel of the machinery of destruction were not supposed
to look to the right or to the left. They w'ere not allowed to have either
personal motives or personal gains. An elaborate discipline was intro­
duced into the machine of destruction.
The first and most important rule of conduct of this discipline was the
principle that all Jewish property belonged to the Reich. So far as Himm­
ler was concerned, the enforcement of this rule was a success. In 1943 he
told his Gruppenfiihrer:
The riches which they [the Jews] owned we have taken from them. I
have given strict orders, w'hich Obergruppenflihrer Pohl has carried
out, that this wealth should naturally [selbstvcrstandlicb] be delivered to
the Reich. We have taken nothing. Individuals w ho have transgressed
are being punished in accordance w'ith an order which I gave in the
beginning and which threatened that anyone who takes just one mark is
a condemned man. A number of SS men, not many, have transgressed
against that order, and they will be condemned to death mercilessly. We
had the moral right vis-a-vis our people to annihilate [umzubrinjjen ] this
people which wanted to annihilate us. But w'e have no right to take a
single fur, a single w'atch, a single mark, a single cigarette, or anything
whatever. We don't want in the end, just because we have exterminated
a germ, to be infected by that germ and die from it. I will not stand by
while a slight infection forms. Whenever such an infected spot appears,
we will burn it out. But on the w hole we can say that we have fulfilled

THE PERPETRATORS
this heavy task with love for our people, and we have not been damaged
in the innermost of our being, our soul, our character.80
There is, of course, considerable evidence that more than a few individ­
uals ‘"transgressed” against die discipline of the destruction process. No
estimate can be formed of the extent to which transport Kommandos,
killing units, the ghetto and killing center personnel, and even Kom- '
mando 1005 (the grave-destruction Kommando) filled their pockets with
the belongings of the dead. Moreover, Himmler’s rule dealt only with
unauthorized takings by participating personnel in the field. It did not deal
with authorized distributions to the participants.
The essence of corruption is to reward people on the basis of their
proximity to the loot, and in the course of the destruction process many
distributions were made to the closest participants. Examples, which are
bountiful, include the Finance Ministry’s appropriation of fine furniture
during the deportations of Jews from Germany; the distribution of better
apartments to civil servants; the cuts taken by the railways, SS and Police,
and postal service in the allocation of the furniture of the Dutch, Belgian,
and French Jews; the “gifts” of watches and “Christmas presents” to SS
men and their families. The destruction process had its own built-in hand­
out system. Only unauthorized taking was forbidden.
The second way in which the Germans sought to avoid damage to “the
soul” was in the prohibition of unauthorized killings. A sharp line was
drawn between killings pursuant to order and killings induced by desire.
In the former case a man was thought to have overcome the “weaknesses”
of “Christian morality”;81 in the latter case he was overcome by his own
baseness. That was why in the occupied USSR both the army and the civil
administration sought to restrain their personnel from joining the shoot­
ing parties at the killing sites.
Perhaps the best illustration of the official attitude is to be found in an
advisory opinion by a judge on Himmler’s Personal Staff, Obersturm­
bannführer Bender. Bender dealt with procedure to be followed in the
case of unauthorized killings of Jews by SS personnel. He concluded that
if purely political motives prompted the killing, if the act was an expres­
sion of idealism, no punishment was necessary unless the maintenance of
order required disciplinary action or prosecution. However, if selfish,
sadistic, or sexual motives were found, punishment was to be imposed for
murder or for manslaughter, in accordance with the facts.82
Sometimes, the locus of authority had to be underscored. That is what

80. Speech by Himmler at Gruppenführer meeting at Poznan, October 4, 1943


PS-1919.
81. See Himmler to Milch (Air Force), November 13, 1942, PS-1617.
82. Memorandum by Bender, October 22, 1942, NO-1744.

1082 REFLECTIONS
happened in a case brought against a German civilian before a German
military court in Proskurov. The defendant was a supervisor in a road­
building project employing forced Jewish labor. On one occasion he re­
marked that exhausted Jews could be “bumped oft?’ When he noticed
two verv weak Jewish women regularly lying down by the road, he mo­
tioned to his Polish foreman to move the two women and to do with
them “as one might wish.” The Pole then instructed a Lithuanian guard to
shoot them. The court did not see in the defendant’s behavior any charac­
teristic that under German law would warrant a determination of incite­
ment to murder. It could find no lust or other base motive, no attempt to
cover up a felony by killing witnesses, no means that were dangerous to
bystanders, no cunning, and no cruelty. It found him guilty, however, of
arrogation of power. He could have reported the women to the SS, who
would have taken care of the problem. Instead he had acted alone. What
he had said to the Pole was a sufficiently clear expression of intent that in
the nature of the situation could not have been interpreted in any other
way. Accordingly the defendant received a sentence of three months.83
The German disciplinary system is most discernible in the mode of the
killing operation. At the conclusion of the destruction process, Hitler
remarked in his testament that the Jewish “criminals” had “atoned” for
their “guilt” by “humane means.”84 The “humaneness” of the destruction
process was an important factor in its success. It must be emphasized, of
course, that this “humaneness” was evolved not for the benefit of the
victims but for the welfare of the perpetrators. Time and again, attempts
were made to reduce opportunities for “excesses” and Sclmeinenien of all
sorts. Much research was expended for the development of devices and
methtxls that arrested propensities for uncontrolled behavior and at the
same time lightened the crushing psychological burden on the killers. The
construction of gas vans and gas chambers, the employment of Ukrai­
nian, Lithuanian, and Latvian auxiliaries to kill Jewish women and chil­
dren, the use of Jews for the burial and burning of bodies — all these were
efforts in the same direction. Efficiency was the real aim of all that
“humaneness.”

83. I.inicnchef, Organisation Todr Russland Sud/Kinsatz Durchgangsstrassc IV


to O T Hmsatzgruppc Russland Siid/Gruppcnsrab — Nebcnstellc Vinnitsa, April 3,
1943, enclosing the opinion of the military court of Feldkommandantur 183 in the
case of Johann Mcisslcin, March 12, 1943, Military History Institute, Prague, File
OT (F.Gr VII) Ic/1, Karton 1. The court considered two factors as mitigating: drag­
ging the women to work could lower efficiency, and the sight of women resting by the
road could have encouraged malingering among other Jews. Professor Konrad Kw'iet
discovered rhis document and it is used here through his courtesy. The Lithuanian
Schutzmannschaft Battalion 7 w as assigned to Vinnitsa.
84. Hitler’s political testament, April 29, 1945, PS-3569.

THE PERPETRATORS 1083


So far as Himmler was concerned, his SS and Police had weathered the \
destruction process. In October 1943, when he addressed his top com- \
manders, he said to diem: j
Most of you know what it means when 100 corpses lie there, or 500 lie
there, or 1,000 lie there. To have gone through this and —apart from
the exceptions caused by human weakness — to have remained decent,
that has hardened us. That is a page of glory in our history never
written and never to be written.85
However, the descent into savagery was not nearly so important a
factor in die destruction process as the feeling of growing uneasiness that
pervaded the bureaucracy from the lowest strata to the highest. That
uneasiness was the product of moral scruples that were the lingering
effect of two thousand years of Western morality and ethics. A Western
bureaucracy had never before faced such a chasm between moral precepts
and administrative action; an administrative machine had never been
burdened with such a drastic task. In a sense the task of destroying the
Jews put the German bureaucracy to a supreme test. The German tech­
nocrats solved also this problem and went on with their work.
That they did not stop themselves has a special significance, because
they were not specially chosen men. In their moral makeup they cannot
be differentiated from the rest of the population. The German perpetra­
tor was not a different kind of German. What may be said about his
morality applies to Germany as a whole, if only because the very nature of
administrative planning, of the jurisdictional structure, and of the bud­
getary system precluded the special selection or special training of person­
nel for the specific purposes of destruction. Any member of the Order
Police could be a guard at a ghetto. Every lawyer of the Reich Security
Main Office was presumed to be suitable for service in a mobile killing
unit. Any functionary in an appropriate office of the railways and any
chemist of I. G. Farben could readily be stationed in Auschwitz. In other
words, all necessary operations were accomplished with whatever person­
nel were at hand. However one may wish to draw the line of active partic­
ipation, the machinery of destruction was a remarkable cross-section of
the German population. Every profession, every skill, and ever)' social
status was represented in it. In a totalitarian state the formation of an
opposition movement outside the bureaucracy is next to impossible, but
if there is very serious opposition in the population, if there are insur­
mountable psychological obstacles to a course of action, such impedi­
ments reveal themselves within the bureaucratic apparatus. They emerged
clearly in the Italian Fascist state. Again and again the Italian generals and

85. Himmler speech, October 4,1943, PS-1919.

REFLECTIONS
consuls, prefects and police inspectors, refused to cooperate in the depor­
tations. The destruction process in Italy and the Italian-controlled areas
was carried out against their unremitting opposition. No such objection
is to be found in the German area. No obstruction stopped the German
machine of destruction. No moral problem proved insurmountable.
When all participating personnel were put to the test, there were very few
lingerers and almost no deserters. The old moral order did not break
through anywhere along the line. This is a phenomenon of the greatest
magnitude.
How did the German bureaucrat cope with his moral inhibitions? He
did so in an inner struggle, recognizing the basic truth that he had a
choice. He knew that at crucial junctures every individual makes deci­
sions, and that every decision is individual. He knew this fact as he faced
his own involvement and while he went on and on. At the same time he
was not psychically unarmed. When he wrestled with himself, he had
at his disposal the most complex psychological tools fashioned during
centuries of cultural development. Fundamentally, this arsenal of de­
fenses consisted of two parts: a mechanism of repressions and a system of
rationalizations.
First of all, the bureaucracy wanted to cloak its deeds, to conceal them
not only from all outsiders but also from the censuring gaze of its own
conscience. The repression proceeded through five stages.
As one might expea, ever)' effort was made to hide the ultimate aim of
the destruction process from Axis partners and from the Jews. Inquiries
such as Hungarian Prime Minister Kallay put to the Foreign Office about
the disappearance of European Jewry86 or questions that foreign journal­
ists in Kiev asked army authorities about mass shootings87 could ob­
viously not be answered. Rumors, which could spread like wildfire, had
to be smothered. Radio communications from the field containing “exact
numerical reports about executions” were to be replaced by courier mes­
sages.88 “Plastic” evidence, such as “souvenir” photographs of killings,
the mass graves, and the wounded Jews who had risen from graves, had
to be destroyed. In Theresienstadt, a film was made for foreign audiences,
featuring workshops, lectures, and a concert, while hiding the starvation
and deaths of the ghetto.89

86. Memorandum hv Luther, October 6, 1942, NG-5086.


87. Report by Colonel Stolze (Armed Forces Intelligence), October 23, 1941,
NOKW-3147. (The report was signed by General Lahousen.)
88. Police Regiment Center to its battalions, September 16, 1941, Military His­
tory Institute, Prague, File SS-Police Regiment A-3-1-7/4, Karton 1.
89. Karel Margry, '“Theresienstadt’ (1944-1945): The Nazi Propaganda Film
Depicting the Concentration Camp as Paradise,’’ Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and
Television 12 (1992): 145-62.

THE PERPETRATORS
Despite such attempts, the annihilation of the Jews was becoming an
open secret. As early as October 1941, a Viennese enterprise referred to
deportation as causing “'more or less quick and certain doom.”w In 1942 a
Berlin firm refused to assign to the Finance Ministry the pensions of
Jewish employees who had been “shoved off?’ The remittances were not a
Jewish property right that the Reich could claim for itself; they were
assistance payments intended for beneficiaries, and in one case at issue
diere was no indication that the pensioner was “still alive.1"'" Much later a
Viennese court, tied to legal presumptions and procedures, could not
manage to be so insightful. In May 1944 the RSHA complained to the
Justice Ministry that the Landgericht in Vienna was making too many
inquiries to elicit the whereabouts of deported Jews for the purpose of
rendering decisions in proceedings involving proof of descent (Abstamm-
ungsverfabren). The Landgericht had been told repeatedly, said the com­
plaint, that no information could be given about deportees, but the court
had persisted in making inquiries. Quite apart from the fact that the
“Jews” (that is, the persons seeking clarification of their status) had been
given plenty of time to clear questions about their descent, these people
were only trying to hide their ancestry in order to remove themselves
from the effect of “Security Police measures” (sicherheitspolizeiliche Mass-
nahmen). For these reasons, and because of more pressing war work, the
Security Police could not furnish replies.90 91 92
Thus the first stage in the repression was to shut off the supply of
information from all those who did not have to know it. Whoever did not
participate was not supposed to know. The second stage was to make sure
that whoever knew would participate.
There was nothing so irksome as the realization that someone was
watching over one’s shoulder, that someone would be free to talk and
accuse because he was not himself involved. This fear was the origin of
what Ixo Alexander has called the “blood kit,”93 the irresistible force that
drew every official “observer” into the destruction process. The “blood
kit” explains why so many office chiefs of the Reich Security Main Office
were assigned to mobile killing units and why staff officers with killing

90. Army Weapons Office to Armed Forces Office, October 22, 1941, enclosing
letter by Brunner Vcrzinkcrci/Briidcr Boblick (Vienna) to Dr. G. von Hirschfeld
(Berlin), October 14, 1941, Wi/1D.415. Document formerly in Federal Records
Center, Alexandria, Va.
91. Berliner Handels-Gesellschaft (legal division) to Economy Group Private
Banking/Ccntral Association of German Banks and Bankers, Julv 20, 1942, T 83,
Roll 97.
92. RSHA to Justice Ministry, May 3, 1944, NG-900.
93. Leo Alexander, “War Crimes and Their Motivation,” Journal of Criminal lau­
ernd Criminology 39 (September-Octobcr 1948): 298-326.

REFLECTIONS
units were ordered to participate in the killing operations.94 The “blood
kit" also explains why Unterstaatssekretar Luther of the Foreign Office’s
Abtcilung Deutschland insisted that the Political Division countersign all
instructions to embassies and legations for the deportation of Jews.95
Finally, the “blood kit" explains the significant words spoken by Gene-
ralgouverneur Frank at the conclusion of a police conference in Krakow:
“We want to remember that we are, all of us assembled here, on Mr.
Roosevelt's war-criminals list. I have the honor of occupying first place on
that list. We are therefore, so to speak, accomplices in a world-historical
sense."96 97
The third stage in the process of repression was the prohibition of
criticism. Public protests by outsiders were extremely rare. The criticisms
were expressed, if at all, in mutterings on the rumor circuit. It is some­
times hard even to distinguish between expressions of sensationalism and
real criticism, for often the two were mixed. One example of such mixed
reactions is to be found in the circulation of rumors in Germany about the
mobile killing operations in Russia. The Party Chancellery, in confidential
instructions to its regional machinery, attempted to combat these rumors.
Most of the reports, the Chancellery stated, were “distorted" and “exag­
gerated." “It is conceivable,” the circular continued, “that not all of our
people, especially people who have no conception of the Bolshevik terror,
can understand sufficiently the necessity for these measures." In their very
nature, “these problems," which were sometimes “very difficult,” could be
solved “in the interest of the security of our people" only with “ruthless
severity."9'’
In all of Germany no one pitted himself publicly against the policy of
destruction, save for one Catholic priest, Bernhard Lichtenberg, who
prayed for the Jews in open serv ices at St. Hedwig’s Cathedral in Berlin.
He prayed not only for baptized Jews but for all the Jewish victims. While
in custody he declared that the position of the National Socialist state on
the Jewish question contradicted the Christian duty to love one’s neigh­
bor. Tliis man, declared the court, was not going to learn better; were he
to remain free, he might even call upon his congregation to be disobe­
dient to the state. Herein, the court concluded, lay a danger that was not
to be underestimated. It sentenced him to two years in prison. Upon his

94. Report by General Lahousen’s deputy. Colonel Stolze, October 23, 1941,
NOKW-3114. In an affidavit of March 17, 1948, Lahouscn named Stolze as the
author of the report. NOKW-3230.
95. Affidavit by Karl Klingenfuss (Luther’s office), November 7, 1947, NG-3569.
96. Frank Diary, January 25, 1943, PS-2233.
97. Partv Chancellery, Vertrauliche Informationen (for Gau and Kreis offices only),
October 9, 1942, PL-49.

THE PERPETRATORS
release the police picked him up, and Lichtenberg died on the way to a
concentration camp.98
Within the bureaucracy there were a few more examples of criticism,
though again it was very seldom outspoken protest. Of course, it was
permissible to criticize measures from the viewpoint of German welfare.
Much discussion took place about the Mischlinge and Jews in mixed
marriages, that is, persons against whom action could not be taken with­
out hurting Germans. A voluminous correspondence dealt with the ad­
verse effects of anti-Jewish measures on the war effort. It was also permis­
sible to mention the harmful psychological effects of killings on the
perpetrators, but a sharp line was drawn between such criticisms and the
implication that the destruction process itself was intrinsically wrong.
A director of the Reichsbank, Wilhelm, overstepped the line when he
cautioned his chief, Puhl, not to visit concentration camps and when he
announced his refusal to participate in the distribution of Jewish belong­
ings with the words: “The Reichsbank is not a dealer in second-hand
goods.”99 Generalkommissar Kube of White Russia violated the injunc­
tion against moral condemnations by making accusations against the
Commander of Security Police in White Russia, Strauch. Kube implied
that Jews, at least those who had come from Germany (“from our own
cultural level”), were human beings and that Strauch and his killers were
maniacs and sadists who had satisfied their sexual lust during shootings.
Strauch did not take kindly to such criticism. In a complaint against Kube
he wrote that “it was regrettable that we, in addition to having to perform
this nasty job, were also made the target of mudslinging.”100 In the Inte­
rior Ministry the expert on Jewish affairs, Ministerialrat Lösener, was
disturbed by reports of killings that had occurred in Riga. He began to
put questions to his chief, Staatssekretär Stuckart, and requested a trans­
fer. After a while, a colleague asked Lösener to stop pestering the Staats­
sekretär, for Stuckart’s position was difficult enough.101
In the Grodno area of the semi-incorporated Bialystok District, the
local Landrat was confronted with two expressions of disapproval. When
a German forester received an emergency assignment (Notdienstverpflicht-
ung) to assist police in the deportation of the Jews of Marcinkance, sorne-

98. Text of judgment of the special court in Berlin, May 22, 1942, in Bernd
Schimmlcr, Recht ohne Gerechtigkeit (Berlin, 1983), pp. 32-39. Legationsrat Dr.
Haidlcn (Foreign Office, Political Division) via Erdmannsdorff and Wörmann to
Weizsäcker (Staatssekretär of the Foreign Office), November 11, 1941, NG-4447.
Günter Wciscnbom, Der lautlose Aufetand (Hamburg, 1953), pp. 52-55.
99. Affidavit by Wilhelm, January 23,1948, NI-14462.
100. Kube to Lohsc (Rcichskommissar of the Osrland), December 16, 1941, Occ
E 3-36. File memorandum by Strauch, July 20,1943, NO-4317.
101. Affidavit by Lösener, Februar)' 24, 1948, NG-1944-A.

REFLECTIONS
thing happened. The Gendarmerie fired into the panic-stricken crowd,
killing 130 people, mainly women and children. All the remaining Jews,
about 300 of them, including many of the young men, escaped to the
forest. During the breakout, in which an assistant forester was hurt, Forst­
meister Lehmann deserted his post alter firing two shots with his pistol
into the air. In the correspondence generated by this incident Lehmann
pointed out that the Jews were going to allow themselves to be trans­
ported without resistance before the senseless shooting began, and that as
a forest official it was not his job to “shoot Jews to death.” The Landrat of
Grodno, irked, replied that Lehmann had been the only one to take a posi­
tion against the assignment, and that notably the members of the forest
administration had helped out selflessly whenever they were needed.102
If the Landrat had to be somewhat restrained in his exchanges with
Lehmann, he could act more freely against Miss Dzinuda, a German
employee in Skidel. He charged her with having “no understanding” of
the Jewish action. “You have kept a Jewess to perform chores in your
household,” he wrote, “and then you have tried to hold on to her.” He
went on to say, “You have even cried, and in defiance of police prohibi­
tions you have given her something to take along.” For all of that, Miss
Dzinuda was to go back to the Reich immediately.103
On the highest level the following story was told by Gauleiter Schi­
rach’s secretary'. While Schirach’s wife was staying in a hotel in Am­
sterdam, she watched a roundup of Jews at night. The Jewish women
“screamed terribly.” Mrs. Schirach’s nerves were so much on edge that she
decided to tell her husband about it. The Gauleiter advised her to tell the
story' to Hitler himself, since the Führer would not tolerate such “abuses”
{Misstände). During their next visit to Hitler, Mrs. Schirach told the story.
Hitler listened “ungraciously” interrupting several times and telling her
not to be so sentimental. Every one present found the exchange between

102. Lehmann ro Kreiskommissar of Grodno (fondrat von Ploctz), complaining


about the Gendarmerie, November 2, 1942, and subsequent exchanges, U.S. Holo­
caust Memorial Museum Archives Record Group 53.004 (Belarus State Archives of
Grodno Oblast), Roll 1, Fond 1, Opis 1, Folder 59. According to postwar surv ivor
testimony, Lehmann was subsequently captured in a train derailment by Jewish par­
tisans, identified by a Marcinkance escapee as a participant in the roundup, and put ro
death immediately. See Christopher Browning, Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German
Killers (New York, 2000), p. 166.
103. Plexrz ro Gertrud Dzinuda, November 14, 1942, U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum Archives Record Group 53.004 (Belarus Stare Archives of Grodno Oblast),
Roll 3, Fond 1, Opis 1, Folder 277. See also the copy of a letter by Captain Osrcmiann,
commander of VV'aldlager V, a satellite in the Mühldorf complex of Dachau, who or­
dered the arrest of an unnamed German woman who had distributed fruit rev a march­
ing column of Jewish inmates despite an explicit warning of the guard that her act was
impermissible. Osrcmiann to Landrat in Mühldorf, August 30,1944, T 580, Roll 32.

THE PERPETRATORS
Hitler and Mrs. Schirach “very embarrassing” (ausserstpemlich). The con­
versation broke down, no one spoke, and Mr. and Mrs. Schirach left the
room. The Schirachs departed the next day without saying good-bye.104
In its fourth stage the repressive mechanism eliminated the destruction
process as a subject of social conversation. Among the closest partici­
pants, it was considered bad form to talk about the killings. This is what
Himmler had to say on the subject in his speech of October 4 1943 , :
I want to mention here very candidly a particularly difficult chapter.
Among us it should be mentioned once, quite openly, but in public we
will never talk about it. Just as little as we hesitated on June 30 1934 , ,
to do our duty and to put comrades who had transgressed [the brown-
shirts] to the wall, so little have we talked about it and will ever talk
about it. It was with us, thank God, an inborn gift of tactfulness, that
wc have never conversed about this matter, never spoken about it.
Every one of us was horrified, and yet every one of us knew that we
would do it again if it were ordered and if it were necessary. I am
referring to the evacuation of the Jews, to the extermination of the
Jewish people.105
This then was the reason why that particular “page of glory” was never to
be written. There are some things that can be done only so long as they
are not discussed, for once they are discussed they can no longer be done.
Among those who were not quite so close to the killing operations the
sensations of the destructive process were irresistible. The rumor network
was spread all over Axis Europe. One Foreign Office official stationed in
Rome mentions that he discussed details of the killings with at least thirty
of his colleagues.106 But the urge to talk was not so deep in men who were
heavily involved in the destructive process. Hoss, the Auschwitz com­
mander, says that he never spoke about his job even to his wife. She found
out about what he was doing because of an inadvertent remark by a family
friend, Gauleiter Bracht.107 The Treblinka guard Hirtreiter never spoke of
his task at all.108
The fifth and final stage in the process of repression was to omit
mention of “killings” or “killing installations” even in the secret corre­
spondence in which such operations had to be reported. The reader of

104. Affidavit by Maria Hopkcn, January 19, 1946, Schirach-3. Affiant was not a
witness but claims that the identical story was told tea her on separate occasions by
Schirach and his wife.
105. Himmler speech, October 4, 1943, PS-1919.
106. Affidavit by Ulrich Dortenbach, May 13, 1947, NG-1535.
107. Testimony by Hoss, Trial of the Major War Criminals, XI, 396-411.
108. “Ein Wachmann von Treblinka,” ¥rankfurtcr Zatutui, November 11, 1950,
P-3-
REFLECTIONS
these reports is immediately struck by their camouflaged vocabulary': End­
lösung der Judenfrage (“final solution of the Jewish question”), Lösungs­
möglichkeiten (“solution possibilities”), Sonderbehandlung or SB (“special
treatment”), Evakuierung (“evacuation”), Aussiedlung (same), Umsied­
lung (same), Spezialeinrichtungen (“special installations”), durchgeschleusst
(“dragged through”), and many others.
There is one report that contains a crude cover story'. In 1943 the
Foreign Office inquired whether it would be possible to exchange 30,000
Baltic and White Russian Jews for Reich Germans in Allied countries.
The Foreign Office representative in Riga replied that he had discussed
the matter with the Security' Police commander in charge. The Com­
mander of Security' Police had felt that the “interned” Jews could not be
sent awav for “weighty Security' Police reasons.” As was known (bekannt­
lich), a large number of Jews had been “done away with” in “spontaneous
actions.” In some places these actions had resulted in “almost total exter­
mination” {fast völlige Ausmerzung). A removal of the remaining Jews
would therefore give rise to “anti-German atrocity' propaganda.”109
A particularly revealing example of disassociation may be found in a
private letter written by a sergeant of the Rural Police to a police general.
The sergeant, at the head of twenty-three German gendarmes and five
hundred Ukrainian auxiliary' policemen, had killed masses of Jews in the
Kamenets-Podolskv area. These are excerpts from his letter.
Naturally we are cleaning up considerably', especially among the
Jews. . . .
I have a cozv apartment in a former children’s asylum. One bed­
room and a living room with all of the accessories. Practically nothing
is missing. Naturally, the wife and the children. You will understand
me. Mv Dieter and the little Liese write often, after their fashion. One
could weep sometimes. It is not gtxxl to be a friend of children as I
was. I hope that the war, and with it the time of service in the East,
s(X)n ends.110
The process of repression was continuous, but it was never completed.
The killing of the Jews could not be hidden completely, either from the
outside world or from the inner self. Therefore the bureaucracy' was not
spared an open encounter with its conscience. It had to pit argument
against argument and philosophy against philosophy. Laboriously, and
with great effort, the bureaucracy' had to justify' its activities.
The attempt to rationalize the deed was two-pronged. One line of
contention was designed to show that all actions were countermeasures,

109. Windeckcr to Foreign Office, April 5, 1943, NG-2652.


110. Fritz Jacob to Rudolf Qucrner, May 5, 1942, NO-5654.

THE PERPETRATORS
that in essence they were defensive. This kind of explanation, furnished by
an army of propagandists, was centered entirely on the Jews. The other
approach, which was internal, offered reassurances to those who per­
formed specific acts by virtue of their positions. Such words dealt only
with the perpetrator himself. Yet, taken together, the two strategies were
complementary, and each carried a set of exculpatory' themes.
The open propaganda campaign was fashioned to portray the Jew as
evil, and that message was formulated for long-range effect. The allega­
tion was repeated often enough so that it could be stored in the mind and
drawn upon according to need. Thus the statement “The Jew is evil,”
taken from the storehouse, could be converted by a perpetrator into a
complete rationalization: “I kill the Jew because the Jew is evil.” To under­
stand the function of such formulations is to realize why they were being
constructed until the very end of the war. Propaganda was needed to
combat doubts and guilt feelings wherever they arose, whether inside or
outside the bureaucracy, and whenever they surfaced, before or after an
event.
In fact, we find that in April 1943, after the deportations of the Jews
from die Reich had largely been completed, the press was ordered to deal
with the Jewish question continuously and without letup.111 In order to
build up a storehouse, the propaganda had to be turned out on a large
scale. “Research institutes” were formed,112 doctoral dissertations were
written,113 and volumes of propaganda literature were printed by every'
conceivable agency. Sometimes a scholarly investigation was conducted
too assiduously. One economic study, rich in the common jargon but
uncommonly balanced in content, appeared in Vienna with the notation
“Not in the book trade.” The author had discovered that the zenith of
Jewish financial power had been reached in 1913.114 On the other hand,
the publication of more suitable literature could even lead to bureaucratic
competition. Thus Unterstaatssekretär Luther of the Foreign Office had
to assure Obergruppenführer Berger of the SS Main Office that the For­
eign Office’s pamphlet Das russische Tor ist aufgestossen (Die Russian Gate Is
Thrown Open) in no way competed with Berger’s masterpiece Der Unter­
mensch (The Subhuman).115

111. Instructions by Reich Press Chief, April 29, 1943, NG-4705.


112. Notably the Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage in Frankfurt, under Dr.
Klaus Schickcrt. Stcengracht to Rosenberg, January 22,1944, NG-1689.
113. Dr. Hans Praescnt, “Neuere deutsche Doktorarbeiten überdas Judcnnim,”
Die Judenfrage, November 15, 1943, pp. 351-53.
114. Wolfgang Höfler, Untersuchungen über die Machtstellung der Juden w dtr
Weltwirtschaft. Vol. 1, England und das Vomationalsozialistche Deutschland (Vienna,
1944).
115. Luther to Berger, June 22, 1942, NG-3304.

REFLECTIONS
What did all this propaganda accomplish? How was the Jew portrayed
in this unending flow of leaflets and pamphlets, books, and speeches?
How did the propaganda image of the Jew serve to justify the destruction
process?
First of all, the Germans drew a picture of an international Jewry ruling
the world and plotting the destruction of Germany and German life. “If
international-finance Jewry,” said Adolf Hitler in 1939, “inside and out­
side of Europe should succeed in plunging the nations into another world
war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and with it
the victor)' of the Jews, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Eu­
rope.”116 In 1944 Himmler said to his commanders: “This was the most
frightening order which an organization could receive, the order to solve
the Jewish question,” but if the Jews had still been in the rear, the front
line could not have been held, and if any of the commanders were moved
to pit)’, thev had only to think of the bombing terror, “which after all is
organized in the last analysis bv the Jews.”117 118
The theory of world Jewish rule and of the incessant Jewish plot
against the German people penetrated into all offices. It became inter­
woven with foreign policy and sometimes led to preposterous results.
Tims the conviction grew that foreign statesmen who were not very
friendly tow ard Germany were Jews, part-Jews, married to Jew's, or
somehow dominated by Jews. Streicher did not hesitate to state pub­
licly1 18 that he had it on good Italian authority that the Pope had Jewish
blood. Similarly, Staatssekretar Weizsiicker of the Foreign Office once
questioned the British charge d’affaires about the percentage of “Aryan”
bltxxl in Mr. Rublee, an American on a mission in behalf of refugees.119
Tli is type of reasoning was also applied in reverse. If a power was friend-
Iv, it was believed to be free of Jew'ish rule. In March 1940, after Ribben-
trop had succeeded in establishing friendly relations with Russia, he as­
sured Mussolini and Ciano that Stalin had given up the idea of world revo­
lution. The Soviet administration had been purged of Jew's. Even Kaga­
novich (the Jewish Politburo member) looked rather like a Georgian.120

116. Hitler speech, January' 30, 1939, German press.


117. Himmler speech, June 21, 1944, NG-4977.
118. Memorandum by Ribbcnrrop, November 18,1939, on the Italian protest in
the Streicher affair. Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918-1945, Ser. D, IV, 524-
25. The pontiff in question was the “temperamental Pope,” Pius XI, not the “diplo­
matic Pope,” Pius XII.
119. Weizsäcker to Wörmann, trade and legal divisions, Referat Deutschland
(Aschmann), November 7, 1938, NG-4686. The British diplomat replied that he
didn’t think Rublee had any Jewish blood.
120. Summary of conference between Ribbcnrrop, Mussolini, and Ciano, May 10,
1940, PS-2835.

THE PERPETRATORS
The claim of Jewish world rule was to be established irrefutably in a
show trial. Toward the end of 1941 the Propaganda Ministry, the Foreign
Office, and the Justice Ministry laid plans for the trial of Herschel Gryn-
zpan, the man who had assassinated a German embassy official (vom
Rath) in Paris in 1938.121 The trial was to prove that Grynzpan’s deed was
part of a “fundamental plan by international Jewry to drive the world into
a war with National Socialist Germany,”122 but it was never held because
the Justice Ministry in its eagerness had made the fatal mistake of adding
homosexuality to the indictment. At the last moment it was feared that
Grynzpan might reveal “the alleged homosexual relations of Gesandt­
schaftsrat vom Rath.” And so the whole scheme was dropped.123
When Germany began to lose the war in Stalingrad, the propaganda
machine sought to make up in sheer volume of endless repetition for the
“proof” it had failed to obtain in the ill-fated Grynzpan trial. The Jew was
now the principal foe, the creator of capitalism and communism, the
sinister force behind the entire Allied war effort, the organizer of the
“terror raids,” and, finally, the all-powerful enemy capable of wiping Ger­
many off the map. By February 5,1943, the press had to be cautioned not
to “over-estimate the power of the Jews.”124 On the same day, however,
the following instructions were issued:
Stress: If we lose this war, we do not fall into the hands of some other
states but will all be annihilated by world Jewry. Jewry firmly decided
[fest entschlossen\ to exterminate all Germans. International law and
international custom will be no protection against the Jewish will for
total annihilation [totaler Vemichtunßsmlle derJuden].125
The idea of a Jewish conspiracy was also employed to justify specific
operations. Thus the Foreign Office pressed for deportations from Axis
countries on the ground that the Jews were a security risk.126 The Jews

121. Ministerialrat Diewerge (Propaganda Ministry') to Gesandter Dr. Krümmer


(Foreign Office), December 22, 1941, NG-971. Krümmer to Foreign Office press
division, January 2, 1942, NG-971. Summary of international conference, Janu­
ary 23, 1942, NG-973. Rjntelcn to Weizsäcker, April 5, 1942, NG-179. Krümmer
via Luther to Weizsäcker, April 7, 1942, NG-179. Schlcgclbergcr to Goebbels,
April 10,1942, NG-973. Memorandum by Diewerge, April 11,1942, NG-971.
122. Rintclen to Weizsäcker, quoting Ribbentrop’s views, April 2,1942, NG-179.
123. Summary' of Grynzpan conference, January 23, 1942, NG-973. Louis P.
Lochncr, cd., The Goebbels Diaries (Garden City', N.Y., 1948), entries for February 11
and April 5,1942, pp. 78, 161. Grynzpan was kept “on ice.” In 1957 he was reported
living quietly in Paris. Kurt R. Grossman, “Herschel Grucnspan lebt!” Aufinm (New
York), May 10, 1957, pp. 1, 5-6. He was not found.
124. Zeitschriften Dienst (Propaganda Ministry), February 5,1943, NG-4715.
125. Deutscher Wochetulienst, February' 5, 1943, NG-4714.
126. Summary' of Mussolini-Ribbcntrop conference, held on February 25, 1943,

REFLECTIONS
were the spies, the enemy agents. They could not be permitted to stay in
coastal areas because, in the event of Allied landings, they would attack
the defending garrisons from the rear. The Jews were inciters of revolt;
that was why they had to be deported from Slovakia in 1944. The Jews
were the organizers of the partisan war, the ’■''middlemen” between the
Red Army and die partisan field command; diat was why they could not
be permitted to remain alive in partisan-threatened areas. The Jews were
the saboteurs and assassins; that was why the army chose them as hos­
tages in Russia, Serbia, and France.127 The Jews were plotting the destruc­
tion of Germany; and that was why they had to be destroyed. In Himm­
ler’s words: “We had the moral right vis-ä-vis our people to annihilate this
people which wanted to annihilate us.” In the minds of the perpetrators,
therefore, this theory could turn the destruction process into a kind of
preventive war.
The Jews were portrayed not only as a world conspiracy but also as a
criminal people. This is the definition of the Jews as furnished in instruc­
tions to the German press:
Stress: In the case of the Jews there are not merely a few criminals (as in
even' other people), but all of Jewry rose from criminal roots, and in its
very nature it is criminal. The Jews are no people like other people, but
a pseudo-people welded together by hereditary' criminality [eine zu
einem Scheinvolk zusammetiqeschlossene Erbkriminalität]. . . . The anni­
hilation of Jewry is no loss to humanity, but just as useful as capital
punishment or protective custody against other criminals.128 129
And this is what Streicher had to say: “Look at the path which the Jewish
people lias traversed for millennia: Everywhere murder; evervwhere mass
murder!”120
A Nazi researcher, Helmut Schramm, collected all the legends of Jew­
ish ritual murder.130 The book was an immediate success with Himmler.
“Of the txx)k The Jewish Ritual Murders," he wrote to Kaltenbrunner, “I
have ordered a large number. I am distributing it down to Standarten­
führer (SS colonel]. I am sending you several hundred copies so that you

and dated Fcbniary 27, 1943, D-734. Vccscnmayer (German Minister in Hungary)
via Ambassador Ritter to Ribbenrrop, July 6, 1944, NG-5684.
127. Military Commander in Armvansk to Army Rear Area Commander 533/
Quartermaster, in Simferopol, November 30, 1941, NOKW-1532. Staatsrat Turner
(Serbia) to Higher SS and Poliee leader in Danzig, Hildcbrandt, October 17, 1941,
NO-5810. Military Commander in France (von Stulpnagel) to High Command of
the Army/Quartermaster General, December 5, 1941, NG-3571.
128. DrutsdnT Wochendienst, April 2, 1944, NG-4713.
129. Speech by Stretcher in Nuremberg, September 1939, M-4.
130. Helmut Schramm, Der judiscbe Ritualmoni — tine historische Untcrsudmnq
(Berlin, 1943).

THE PERPETRATORS
can distribute them to your Einsatzkommandos, and above all to the men
who are busy with the Jewish question.”131 The Jewish Ritual Murders was
a collection of stories about alleged tortures of Christian children. Actu­
ally, hundreds of thousands of Jewish children were being killed in the
destruction process. Perhaps that is why The Jewish Ritual Murders be­
came so important. In fact, Himmler was so enthusiastic about the book
that he ordered Kaltenbrunner to start investigations of “ritual murders”
in Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria. He also suggested that Securin'
Police people be put to work tracing British court records and police
descriptions of missing children, “so that we can report in our radio
broadcasts to England that in the town of XY a child is missing and that it
is probably another case of Jewish ritual murder.”132 133
How the notion of Jewish criminality was applied in practice may be
seen in the choice of some of the expressions in die reports of killing
operations, such as the term execution (in German, hingerichtet, exekutiert,
Vollzugstdtigkeit). In correspondence dealing with the administration of
the personal belongings taken from dead Jews, the SS used the cover
designation “utilization of the property of the Jewish thieves [Verwertung
desjüdischen Hehler undDiebesgutes\Vxl1
A striking example of how the theory invaded German thinking is
furnished in the format of portions of two reports by the army’s Secret
Field Police in occupied Russia:134
Punishable offenses by members of the population
Espionage 1
Theft of ammunition 1
Suspected Jews (Judenverdacht) 3
Punishable offenses by members of the population
Moving about with arms (Freischdrlerei) 11
Theft 2
Jews 2
In the culmination of this theory, to be a Jew was a punishable offense
(strafbare Hand lung). Thus it was the function of the rationalization
of criminality to turn the destruction process into a kind of judicial
proceeding.

131. Himmler to Kaltenbrunner, May 19, 1943, NG-4589.


132. Ibid.
133. August Frank (WVHA) to Chief of Standortvcrwaltung Lublin and Chief of
Administration Auschwitz, September 26, 1942, NO-724.
134. Secret Field Police Group 722 to 207th Securin' Division/lntelligence, Feb­
ruary 23, 1943, NOKW-2210. Group 722 to 207th Securin' Division/lntelligence,
March 25, 1943, NOKW-2158. The division was located in northern Russia and
Estonia.

REFLECTIONS
A third rationalization that focused on the Jew was the conception of
Jewry as a lower form of life. Generalgouverneur Frank was given to the
use of such phrases as “Jews and lice.” In a speech delivered on Decem­
ber 19, 1940, he pointed out that relatives of military personnel surely
were sympathizing with men stationed in Poland, a country “which is so
full of lice and Jews.” But the situation was not so bad, he continued,
though of course he could not rid the country of lice and Jews in a year.135
On July 19,1943, the chiefof the Generalgouvernement Health Division
reported during a meeting that the typhus epidemic was subsiding. Frank
remarked in this connection that the “removal” {Beseitigung) of the “Jew­
ish element” had undoubtedly contributed to better health (Gesundung)
in Europe. He meant this not only in the literal sense but also politically:
the reestablishment of sound living conditions {gesunder Lebensverhält­
nisse) on the European continent.136 In a similar vein, Foreign Office Press
Chief Schmidt once declared during a visit to Slovakia, “The Jewish ques­
tion is no question of humanity, and it is no question of religion; it is solelv
a question of political hygiene [eine Frage der politischen Hygiene].”137
In the terminology of the killing operations, the conception of Jews as
vermin is again quite noticeable. Dr. Stahlecker, the commander of Ein­
satzgruppe A, called the pogroms conducted by the Lithuanians “self­
cleansing actions” (Selbstreinigungsaktionen). In another report we find the
phrase “cleansing-of-Jews actions” {Judensäuberungsaktionen). Himmler
spoke of “extermination” {Ausrottung). Many times the bureaucracy used
the word Fntjudung. This expression, which was used not only in connec­
tion with killings but also with reference to Aryanization of property,
means to rid something ofJen>s.liH One of the most frequently applied terms
in this vocabulary was judenrein, which means clean of Jews. Finally, it
should be noted that at the spur of the moment a German fumigation
company, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung, was
drawn into the killing operations by furnishing one of its lethal products
for the gassing of a million Jews. Thus the destruction process was also
turned into a “cleansing operation.”
In addition to the formulations that were used to justify the whole
undertaking as a war against “international Jewry',” as a judicial proceed­
ing against “Jewish criminality,” or simply as a “hygienic” process against
“Jewish vermin,” there were also rationalizations fashioned in order to

1 AS. Speech bv Frank to men of guard battalion, December 19, 1940, Frank
Dian, PS-2233
136. Summary of Generalgouvernement health conference, July 9, 1943, Frank
Diary, PS-2233.
137. ¡'Sonauzatntui (Belgrade), July 3, 1943, p. 3.
138. Compare Entlausung (ridding of lice) and Entwesung (ridding of vermin, or
fumigation).

THE PE&PBTRATOB.S 1097


enable the individual bureaucrat to justify his individual task in the de­
struction process. It must be kept in mind that most of the participants v
did not fire rifles at Jewish children or pour gas into gas chambers. A g< >od I
many, of course, also had to perform these very' “hard” tasks, but most of
the administrators and most of the clerks did not see the final, drastic link
in these measures of destruction.
Most bureaucrats composed memoranda, drew up blueprints, signed
correspondence, talked on the telephone, and participated in conferences.
They could destroy a whole people by sitting at their desks. Except for
inspection tours, which were not obligatory, they never had to see “100
bodies lie there, or 500, or 1,000.” However, these men were not naive.
They realized the connection between their paperwork and the heaps of
corpses in the East, and they also realized the shortcomings of arguments
that placed all evil on the Jew and all good on the German. That was why
they were compelled to defend their individual activities. Their justifica­
tions contain the implicit admission that the paperwork was to go on
regardless of the actual plans of world Jewry and regardless of the actual
behavior of the Jews who were about to be killed. The rationalizations
focused on the perpetrators can be divided into five categories.
The oldest, the simplest, and therefore the most effective device was
the doctrine of superior orders. First and foremost there was discipline.
First and foremost there was duty. No matter what objections there might
be, orders were given to be obeyed. A clear order was like absolution.
Armed with such an order, a perpetrator felt that he could pass his respon­
sibility and his conscience upward. When Himmler addressed a killing
party in Minsk, he told his men that they need not worry. Their con­
science was in no way impaired, for they were soldiers who had to carry'
out every order unconditionally.139
The reality was more complex. Even in the field it was sometimes
possible to refuse participation in a shooting without suffering dire con­
sequences, especially if the objection could be perceived as an expression
of a psychological inability rather than an undisguised challenge. Once,
when members of the 2d Lithuanian Schutzmannschaft Battalion who
had just arrived in Byelorussia were ordered to shoot Jews in the town of
Rudensk, a young man said that he could not kill the people. The Lithua­
nian company commander then suggested that all those who could not
shoot step back. Fifteen or seventeen men accepted this offer and watched
the shooting by their compatriots from a distance of 20 to 30 yards.140 In

139. Von dem Bach inAufbau (New York) August 23, 1946, pp. 1-2.
140. Deposition of Martynus Kaciulis, August 16, 1982, in United Stares v.
Jurgis, U.S. District Court in Tampa, C.A. No. 81-1013-CIV-T-H. The deponent was
an eyewitness. The officer was 1st Lieutenant Kristaponis, Commander of 2d C om-
pany. The battalion commander was Major Impulevicius.

REFLECTIONS
the Lublin District, the commander of the 101st Reserve Police Battalion,
Major Trapp, went further. Full of qualms himself, he invited the older
men who could not shoot women and children to step out.141 142 143 In both
cases the choice had been given to men without experience in such killing,
and both of these units were involved in subsequent shooting with less
hesitation.I4-
As to those who occupied desks, flexibility was greater. Opportunities
for evading instructions almost always increase as one ascends in the
hierarchy. Even in Nazi Germany orders were disobeyed, and they were
disobeyed even in Jewish matters. We have mentioned the statement of
Reichsbankdirektor Wilhelm, who would not participate in the distribu­
tion of “second-hand goods.” Nothing happened to him. A member of
the Reich Security Main Office, Sturmbannführer Hartl, simply refused
to take over an Einsatzkommando in Russia. Nothing happened to this
man either.i4i Even Generalkommissar Kube, who had actually frustrated
a killing operation in Minsk and who had otherwise expressed himself in
strong language, was only warned.
The bureaucrat clung to his orders not so much because he feared
his superior (with whom he was often on good terms) but because he
shrank from his own conscience. The many requests for “authorization,”
whether for permission to mark Jews with a star or to kill them, demon­
strate the true nature of these orders. When they did not exist the bu­
reaucrats had to invent them.
The second rationalization was the administrator’s insistence that he
did not act our of personal vindictiveness. In the mind of the bureaucrat,
duty was an assigned path; it was his “fate.” The German bureaucrat made
a sharp distinction between duty and personal feelings. He insisted that
he did not “hate” Jews, and sometimes he even went out of his way to
perform “good deeds” for Jewish friends and acquaintances. When the
trials of war criminals started, there was hardly a defendant who could nor
produce evidence that he had helped some half-Jewish physics professor,
or that he had used his influence to permit a Jewish symphony conductor
to conduct a little while longer, or that he had intervened on behalf of
some couple in mixed marriage in connection with an apartment. While
these courtesies were petty in comparison with the destructive concep­
tions that these men were implementing concurrently, the “good deeds”
performed an important psychological function. They separated “duty”

141. Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men (New York, 1992), notably pp. 1 -77,
191.
142. Bor other examples ot refusals, sec David Kirterman, “Those Who Said ‘No,’ ”
( ierman Studies Renew 11 ( 1988): 243- 54.
143. Affidavit by Albert Hartl, October 9,1947, NO-5384.

THE PERPETRATORS
from personal feelings. They preserved a sense of '■‘'decency'.” The de­
stroyer of the Jews was no ‘■‘■anti-Semite.”
Staatssekretär Keppler of the Office of the Four-Year Plan was interro­
gated after the war as follows:
question [by Dr. Kempner of the prosecuting staff]: Tell me, Mr.
Keppler, why were you so terribly against the Jews? Did you know the
Jews?
answer: I had nothing against the Jews.
question : I am asking for the reason. You were no friend of the
Jews?
answer: Jews came to me. Warburg invited me. Later Jews looked
me up in the Reich Chancellery and asked me to join the board of
directors of the Deutsche Bank.
question: When were you supposed to join the board of di­
rectors?
answer: I didn’t want to; it was in 1934, they wanted to give me a
written assurance that I would be a director in half a year. If I had been
such a hater of Jews, they would not have approached me.
questi o n : But you transferred capital from Jews into Aryan hands.
answer: Not often. I know the one case of Simson-Suhl. Also the
Skoda-Wetzler Works in Vienna. But it turned out that was no Jewish
enterprise.
Keppler was then asked whether he had not favored the “disappearance”
of the Jews from Germany. The Staatssekretär fell back on Warburg, with
whom he had once had an “interesting discussion.” The interrogator
broke in with the remark that “now we do not want to talk about anti-
Semitism but about the final solution of the Jewish question.” In that
connection, Keppler was asked whether he had heard of Lublin. The
Staatssekretär admitted hesitandy that he had heard of Lublin and offered
the explanation that he was “deeply touched by this matter [dass mich das
furchtbar peinlich berührt].” What did Keppler do when he was touched
like this? “It was very unpleasant for me, but after all it was not even in my
sphere of jurisdiction.”144
Another defendant in a war crimes trial, the former commander in
Norway, Generaloberst von Falkenhorst, offered the following explana­
tions for his order to remove Jews from Soviet prisoner-of-war battalions
in his area. Von Falkenhorst pointed out that, to begin with, there were
no Jews among these prisoners, for the selection had already' taken place
in Germany (i.e., the Jewish prisoners had already been shot as they were
shutded through the Reich). The order was consequently “entirely super­

144. Interrogation by Kcmpncr of Keppler, August 20,1947, NG-3041.

REFLECTIONS
fluous and might just as well not have been included. It was thoughtlessly
included by the officer of my staff who was working on it, from the
instructions sent to us, and I overlooked it.” The general then continued:
For the rest it may be inferred from this that the Jewish question
played as infamous a part in Norway as elsewhere, and that I and the
Army w ere supposed to have been particularly anti-Semitic.
Against this suspicion I can only adduce the following: First, that in
Scandinavian countries there are only very few Jews. These few are
hardly ever in evidence. The sum total in Norway was only about 350.
[Actual figure, 2,000.] A negligible number among two or three mil­
lion Norwegians. These [Jews] were collected by [Reichskommissar]
Terboven and according to orders despatched to Germany by steam­
ship. In this manner the Jewish problem in Norway was practically
solved [i.e., by deportation to Auschw itz].
As regards myself, I made at this time an application to Terboven at
the request of the Swedish Consul, General Westring, in Oslo, who did
not much like visiting Terboven, for the release of a Jew' of Sw edish
nationality and of his family w'ith permission to leave the country,
gladly and, as a matter of course, fulfilling the Consul’s w'ish to facili­
tate the return of these people to Stockholm.
If I had been a rabid anti-Semite I could, without further ado, have
refused this request, for the matter did not concern me in the slightest.
On the one hand, however, I wanted to help the Swedish Consul,
and, on the other hand, I have nothing against the Jew's. I have read
and heard their writings and compositions with interest, and their
achievements in the field of science are worthy of the highest respect. I
have met many fine and honorable people among them.,4S
How' widespread the practice of “good deeds” must have been may be
gauged from the following remark by Heinrich Himmler: “And then they
come, our 80,000,000 good Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. It
is clear, the others are swine [Schweitie], but this one is a first-class Jew'. Of
all those who speak thus, no one has seen it, no one has gone through
it.”14* But even if Himmler regarded these interventions as expressions of
misplaced humanity, they w'ere necessary tools in the attempt to crystal­
lize one of the important justifications for bureaucratic action — duty.
Only after a man had done “everything humanly possible” could he de­
vote himself to his destructive activity' in peace.
The third justification was the rationalization that one’s ow'n activity
was not criminal, that the next fellow’s action was the criminal act. The 145 146
145. Affidavit by von Falkcnhorst, July 6, 1946, in Trial of Nikolaus von Falkenlwrst
(I^ondon, 1949), p. 25.
146. Speech by Himmler, October 4, 1943, PS-1919.

THE PERPETRATORS 1101


Ministerialrat who was signing papers could console himself with the ^
thought that he did not do the shooting. But that was not enough. He ti
had to be sure that if he were ordered to shoot, he would not follow I
orders but would draw the line right then and there. ]
The following exchange took place during a war crimes trial. A Foreign |
Office official, Albrecht von Kessel, was asked by defense counsel (Dr.
Becker) to explain the meaning of “Final Solution.”
answer: This expression “final solution” was used with various
meanings. In 1936 “final solution” meant merely that all Jews should
leave Germany. And, of course, it was true that they were to be robbed;
that wasn’t very nice, but it wasn’t criminal.
judge maguire : Was that an accurate translation?
dr . becker : I did not check on the translation. Please repeat die
sentence.
answer: I said it was not criminal; it was not nice, but it was not
criminal. That is what I said. One didn’t want to take their life; one
merely wanted to take money away from them. That was all.147
The most important characteristic of this dividing line was that it could
be shifted when the need arose. To illustrate: Once there was a Protestant
pastor by the name of Ernst Biberstein. After several years of ministering
to his congregation, he moved into the Church Ministry. From that
agency he came to another office which was also interested in church
matters: the Reich Security Main Office. That agency assigned him to
head a local Gestapo office. Finally he became the chief of Einsatzkom-
mando 6 in southern Russia. As commander of the Kommando, Biber­
stein killed two or three thousand persons. These people, in his opinion,
had forfeited the right to live under the rules of war. Asked if there were
Jews among the victims, he replied: “It is very difficult to determine that.
Also, I was told at that time that wherever there were Armenians, there
were not so many Jews.”148 To Biberstein the moral dividing line was like
the receding horizon. He walked toward it, but he could never reach it.
Among the participants in the destruction process there were very' few
who did not shift the line when they had to cross the threshold. One
reason why the person of Generalkommissar Kube is so important is that
he had a firm line beyond which he could not pass. The line was arbitrary,
and very advanced. He sacrificed Russian Jews and fought desperately
only for the German Jews in his area. But the line was fixed. It was not
movable, it was not imaginary, it was not self-deceptive. The destruction
process was autonomous, in that it could not be stopped internally. The

147. Testimony by Albrecht von Kessel, Case No. 11, tr. pp. 9514-15.
148. Interrogation of Biberstein, June 29, 1947, NO-4997.

1102 REFLECTIONS
adjustable moral standard was one of the principal tools in the mainte­
nance of this autonomy.
There was a fourth rationalization that implicitly took cognizance of
the fact that all shifting lines are unreal. It was built on a simple prem­
ise: No man alone can build a bridge and no man alone can destroy the
Jews. The participant in the destruction process was always in company.
Among his superiors he could always find those who were doing more
than he; among his subordinates he could always find those who were
ready to take his place. No matter where he kx>ked, he was one among
thousands. His own importance was diminished, and he felt that he was
replaceable, perhaps even dispensable.
In such reflective moments, the perpetrator quieted his conscience
with the thought that he was part of a tide and that there was very little a
drop of water could do in such a wave. Ernst Göx, who served in the
Order Police and who rode the trains to Auschwitz, was one of those who
felt helpless. “I was always a socialist,” he said, “and my father belonged to
the Socialist Part)' for fifty years. When we talked with each other — which
was often — I always said that if there was still justice, things could not go
on like that much longer.”149 When Werner von Tippelskirch, a Foreign
Office official, was interrogated after the war, he pointed out that he had
never protested against the killing of Jews in Russia because he had been
“powerless.” His superiors, ErdmannsdorfF, Wormann, and Weizsäcker,
had also been “powerless.” All of them had waited for a “change of re­
gime.” Asked by Prosecutor Kempner whether it was right to wait for a
change of regime “and in the meantime send thousands of people to their
death,” von Tippelskirch replied, “A difficult question.”150 For Staats­
sekretär von Weizsäcker himself the question of what he could have done
was circular. If he had had influence he would have stopped measures
altogether. But the “if” presupposed a fairyland. In such a land he would
not have had to use his influence.151
The fifth rationalization was the most sophisticated of all. It was also a
last-ditch psychological defense, suited particularly to those who saw
through the self-deception of superior orders, impersonal duty, the shift­
ing moral standard, and the argument of powerlessness. It was a conclu­
sion also for those whose drastic activity or high position placed them out
of reach of orders, duty, moral dividing lines, and helplessness. It was the
jungle theory.

149. Sratemcnr bv Gbx, April 6, 1972. I^andcsgericht, Vienna, Case Novak, file
1416/16, vol. 18,pp. 330-32.
150. Interrogation ofTippelskirch by Kempner, August 29, 1947, NG-2801.
151. Note by Ernst von Weizsàcker in his diarv, following May 23, 1948, in
Ixonidas E. Hill, Die Wetzsàtker-Paptere 1933-1950 (Vienna and Frankfurt am Main,
1974), p. 42S.

THE PERPETRATORS
Oswald Spengler once explained this postulate in the following words:
“War is the primeval policy of all living things, and this to the extent that
in the deepest sense combat and life are identical, for when the will to
fight is extinguished, so is life itself?’152 Himmler remembered this idea
when he addressed the mobile killing personnel at Minsk. He told them
to look at nature. Wherever they would look, they would find combat.
They would find it among animals and among plants. Whoever tired of
the fight went under.153 154
From this philosophy Hitler himself drew strength in moments of
meditation. Once, at the dinner table, when he thought about the de­
struction of the Jews, he remarked with stark simplicity: “One must not
have mercy with people who are determined by fate to perish [Man durj'e
kein Mitleid mit Leuten haben, denen das Schicksal bestimmt babe, zugrunde
zu gehen]?^4

THE VICTIMS
The Germans overcame their administrative and psychological obstacles.
They surmounted the problems of the bureaucratic machine. But the
internal technocratic and moral conflicts do not fully explain what hap­
pened. In a destruction process the perpetrators do not play the only role;
the process is shaped by the victims too. It is the interaction of perpetra­
tors and victims that is “fate.” One must therefore examine the reactions
of the Jewish community and analyze the role of the Jews in their own
destruction.
When confronted by force, a group can react in one or more of five
ways: by resistance, by an attempt to alleviate or nullify the threat (the
undoing reaction), by evasion, by paralysis, or by compliance. These
responses may be measured, each in turn.
The reaction pattern of the Jews is characterized by almost complete
lack of resistance. In marked contrast to German propaganda, the docu­
mentary evidence of Jewish resistance, overt or submerged, is very slight.
On a European-wide scale the Jews had no resistance organization, no
blueprint for armed action, no plan even for psychological warfare. They
were completely unprepared. In the words of Anti-Partisan Chief and

152. Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes (Munich, 1923), vol. 1,
pp. 545-46.
153. Von dem Bach in Auföau (New York) August 23,1946, pp. 1-2.
154. Henry Picker, cd., Hitlers Tischgespräche im Führerhauptquartier 1941-W42
(Bonn, 1951), entry for April 2,1942, p. 227. The entries arc summaries by Pickerot
“Hitler’s remarks at the dinner table.”

1104 REFLECTIONS
Higher SS and Police Leader Russia Center von dem Bach, who observed
Jews and killed them from 1941 to the end:
Thus the misfortunate came about. ... I am the only living witness
but I must say the truth. Contrary to the opinion ol the National
Socialists that the Jews were a highly organized group, the appalling
tact was that they had no organization whatsoever. The mass of the
Jewish people were taken completely by surprise. They did not know
at all what to do; they had no directives or slogans as to how they
should act. That is the greatest lie of anti-Semitism because it gives the
lie to the slogan that the Jews are conspiring to dominate the world
and that they are so highly organized. In reality they had no organiza­
tion of their own at all, not even an information service. If they had had
some sort of organization, these people could have been sav ed by the
millions; but instead they were taken completely by surprise. Never
before has a people gone as unsuspectingly to its disaster. Nothing was
prepared. Absolutely nothing. It was not so, as the anti-Semites say,
that thev were friendly to the Soviets. That is the most appalling mis­
conception of all. The Jews in the old Poland, who were never commu­
nistic in their sympathies, were, throughout the area of the Bug east­
ward, more afraid of Bolshevism than of the Nazis. This was insanity.
They could have been sav ed. There were people among them who had
much to lose, business people; they didn’t want to leave. In addition
there was love of home and their experience with pogroms in Russia.
After the first anti-Jevvish actions of the Germans, they thought now
the wave was over and so they walked back to their undoing.1
The Jews were not oriented toward resistance. Even those who con­
templated a resort to arms were given pause by the thought that for
the limited success of a handful, the multitude would sutler the conse­
quences.2 3 Outbreaks of resistance were consequently infrequent, and al­
most always they were local occurrences that transpired at the last mo­
ment. Measured in German casualties, Jewish armed opposition shrinks
into insignificance. The most important engagement was fought in the
Warsaw Ghetto (fourteen dead and eighty-five wounded on the German
side, including collaborators).·' Following the breakout from the Sobi-

1. Von dem Bach made this statement to Leo Alexander, who quoted it in his
article “War Crimes and Their Motivation,” journal of Criminal Ijiw and Crimitwlwiy
39 (Scptcmbcr-October 1948): 298-326, at p. 315.
2. Diary of Hmmanucl Ringelblum (Warsaw), entry of June 17, 1942, in Tad
Vashem Studies 7 (1968): 178.
3. Stroop (SS and Police Leader in Warsaw) to Krüger (Higher SS and Police
Ijcadcr in Generalgouvernement), May 16, 1943, PS-1061.

THE VICTIMS
bor camp, there was a count of nine SS men killed, one missing, one
wounded, and two Ethnic Germans killed.4 In Galicia sporadic resistance
resulted in losses also to SS and Police Leader Katzmann (eight dead,
twelve wounded).5 In addition, there were clashes between Jewish par­
tisans and German forces in other parts of the East, and occasional acts of
resistance by small groups and individuals in ghettos and killing centers.
It is doubtful that the Germans and their collaborators lost more than a
few hundred men, dead and wounded, in the course of the destruction
process. The number of men who dropped out because of disease, ner­
vous breakdowns, or court martial proceedings was probably greater. The
Jewish resistance effort could not seriously impede or retard the progress
of destructive operations. The Germans brushed that resistance aside as a
minor obstacle, and in the totality of the destruction process it was of no
consequence.
The second reaction was an attempt to avert the full force of German
measures. The most common means of pursuing this aim were written
and oral appeals. By pleading with the oppressor, the Jews sought to
transfer the struggle from a physical to an intellectual and moral plane. If
only the fate of the Jews could be resolved with arguments rather than
with physical resources and physical combat, so Jewry reasoned, there
would be nothing to fear. A petition by Rabbi Kaplan to French Commis­
sioner Xavier Vallat reflects this Jewish mentality. Among other things,
the rabbi pointed out that a pagan or an atheist had the right to defame
Judaism, but in the case of a Christian, did not such an attitude appear
“spiritually illogical as well as ungrateful?” To prove his point, Kaplan
supplied many learned quotations.6 The letter reads as though it were not
written in the twentieth century. It is reminiscent of the time toward the
close of the Middle Ages when Jewish rabbis used to dispute with repre­
sentatives of the Church over the relative merits of the two religions.
Yet, in various forms, some more eloquent than others, the Jews ap­
pealed and petitioned wherever and whenever the threat of concentration
and deportation struck them: in the Reich, in Poland, in Russia, in
France, in the Balkan countries, and in Hungary.7 Everywhere the Jews

4. Report of Order Police in Lublin District, October 15,1943, in Jüdisches His­


torisches Institut Warschau, Faschismus-Getto-Massenmord, 2d cd. (East Berlin,
1961), p. 565.
5. Katzmann (SS and Police Leader in Galicia) to Krüger, June 30,1943, L-18.
6. Kaplan to Vallat, July 31,1941, American Jewish Year Book, 43 (1945-46): 113—
16.
7. An example of a petition by an individual is a letter by an elderly woman, Fanny
Steiner, to the Mayor of Frankfurt. Kommission zur Erforschung der Geschichte der
Frankfurter Juden, Dokumente zur Geschichte der Frankfurter Juden 1933-1945 (Frank­
furt am Main, 1963), pp. 516-17. A letter on behalf of an individual is that of Isra-

REFLECTIONS
pitted words against rifles, dialectics against force, and almost everywhere
they lost.
Petitioning was an established tradition, familiar to every Jewish house­
hold, and in times of great upheaval many a common man composed his
own appeal. Ghettoization curtailed this independent activity, as individ­
ual Jew s no longer had regular access to “supervisory authorities.” Families
exposed to particular privations were now dependent on Jewish councils
or other Jewish institutions for immediate relief. The councils in turn
became the representatives of the community vis-a-vis the perpetrator.
They carefully formulated statements and addressed them to appropriate
offices.
In satellite countries, such as Romania and Bulgaria, the Jewish leader­
ship would probe for weaknesses or sympathy at the highest levels of
government; at that, the eventual outcomes of Jewish representations to
these unstable rulers hinged on the evolving fortunes of war.* 8 In German-
occupied Salonika, Rabbi Koretz “tearfully” asked Greek puppet officials
to intercede with the German overlords, lest die 2,000-year-old commu­
nity of that city be totally “liquidated.”9 His was a lost cause. In the
ghettos of Poland, the Jew ish councils had few opportunities to approach
any ranking administrator. The chairman of the Warsaw Jewish Council,
Adam Czcrniakow, would make weekly rounds to see various German
functionaries. He would outline his problems to them and occasionally
he would ask them to transmit his requests to their superiors. At night he
poured his frustrations into a diary.10
The ghetto councils in particular had to plead for what they needed,

elowicz (liaison office of Union Generale des Israelites de France) to Security Police in
Paris, Yad Vashem document O 9/5-la. The preoccupation of Jewish councils with
appeals for categories of people or for an entire communin' is sometimes reflected in
the records and correspondence of these councils. See also the discussion of “interven­
tions” by Isaiah Trunk, Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe utider Nazi
Occupation (New York, 1972), pp. 388-94.
8. Theodore Lavi (Loewenstein), “D<xumcnts on the Struggle of Romanian
Jewry for Its Rights during the Second World War,” Tad Vashem Studies 4 (1960):
261-315; Alexandre Safran (former chief rabbi of Romania), “The Ruler of Fascist
Roumania I Had to Deal With,” Tad Vashem Studies 6 (1967): 175-80. On German
failure in Romania, see von Killinger (minister in Bucharest) to Foreign Office,
August 28, 1942, and September 7, 1942, NG-2195. On Bulgaria, see Frederick B.
Chars’, ¡he Bulgarian Jen’s and the Final Solution, 1940-1944 (Pittsburgh, 1972),
pp. 90-100, 131-56.
9. Wisliceny (Security Police in Salonika-Acgean) to Dr. Merten (Army Admin­
istration) and Consul General Dr. Schonbcrg in Salonika, April 16, 1943, Alexandria
d<xument VII-173-b-16-14/26, microfilm T 175, Roll 409.
10. Raul Hilberg, Stanislaw Staron, and Josef Kcrmisz, eds.. The Warsaw Diary of'
Adam Czcrniakow (New York, 1979).

THE VICTIMS 1107


whether it was food, coal, or the right to levy taxes. At the same time they
would also try to ward off a danger (an arrest of hostages) or seek a
reduction of hardship (an early curfew). When Czerniakow was required <
to finance the ghetto wall, he argued in effect that a prisoner does not pay
for his prison.11
In a flow of petitions the fewest were ever approved, but a very small
success had a significant effect on the petitioners. With the grant of some
concession, the German supervisor would instantaneously become a pa­
tron. He might only allow some soap to be shipped into a ghetto for
hygienic reasons,12 or he might permit the reopening of schools for a
temporary normalization,13 or he might authorize the transfer of munici­
pal fees, in the amount contributed by ghetto tenants, to Jewish organiza­
tions for welfare.14 Any manifestation of such solicitude would encourage
the pleaders and fetter them even more to their course of action.
The largest setbacks, on the other hand, would not put an end to the
entreaties. Failure of efforts on behalf of an entire group would lead to
maneuvers to save it in part. Internal struggles could then ensue over the
contents and timing of an appeal. The preparation of a list could become a
matter of life and death — not to be included was to be abandoned. An ex­
ample is the conflict within the Vienna Jewish community over the peti­
tioning for exemptions from deportations. At the end of 1941, when the
community organization (Kultusgemeinde) made an “agreement” with
the Gestapo about “exempt” categories, the head of the Jewish war in­
valids, who had been left out of the “negotiations,” accused the deporta­
tion expert of the Kultusgemeinde of “sacrificing” the disabled veterans.
Later on, when the war invalids were pressed to the wall, the leaders of
the veterans’ organization discussed the advisability of presenting an in­
dependent petition. One of the war-invalid chiefs remarked: “Fundamen­
tally, I am of the opinion that we cannot afford a war with the Kultus­
gemeinde.” Another commented: “The Hauptsturmfuhrer will say to
himself, These are Jews, and those are Jews. !Let them fight among them­
selves. Why should I worry about that?’ He [the SS-Hauptsturmfiihrer]
will eventually drop us in this matter [Er wird uns in dieser Frage eventuell
fallen lassen]” Thereupon the head of the war veterans said: “My answer is
that in such an eventuality it will be time to disband our organization.”15

11. Ibid., entry for December 2,1941.


12. Report by Krcishauptmann of Radzvri (Lublin District) for February 1941,
(signature illegible, possibly Dr. Schmigc), in Yad Vashcm microfilm JM-814.
13. Remarks by Schulrat Kliinder in Lublin district conference held on Decem­
ber 5, 1940. Text of conference summary in JM-814.
14. Sec, for example, report dated March 7,1941, by Krcishauptmann of Petrikau
(Radom District) for February 1941 (signature illegible), in JM-814.
15. Memorandum by Kolisch (chairman of Organization of Jewish War Invalids),

1108 REFLECTIONS
In many situations the Jews would also use bribes. Money was more
effective than verbal submissions, but the objects attained by such pay­
ments were limited and the benefits short-lived. Typical were offers tor
the release of forced laborers or a ransom of Jews about to be shot.
Sometimes the aim was more diffuse. If key officials could profit person­
ally from the continued existence of the community, they might help to
keep it alive.16 Not surprisingly, the briber)' worried Heinrich Himmler.
It did not, however, affect the progress of his operations.
There was yet another way in which the Jews tried to avoid disaster.
They anticipated German wishes, or divined German orders, or attempted
to be useful in serving German needs. A Jewish council in Kislovodsk
(Caucasus), acting with full awareness of the German threat, confiscated
all Jewish valuables, including gold, silver, carpets, and clothing, and
handed the property to the German Commander.17
More common, however, w as the effort to seek salvation through labor.
Indeed, the records of several ghettos reveal an upward curve of employ­
ment and output. The zeal with w hich the Jews applied themselves to the
German w ar effort accentuated the differences of interests that paired in­
dustry and armament inspectorates against the SS and Police, but the Ger­
mans were resolving their conflicts to the detriment of the Jew's. Generally,
Jewish production did not rise fast enough or high enough to support the
entire communin'. In the balance of payments of many an East European
ghetto, the gap benveen income and subsistence living could not be
bridged w'ith limited outside relief or finite sales of personal belongings.
Starvation was increasing, and the death rate began to rise. The clock w'as
winding down even as German deportation experts w'ere appearing at the
ghetto gates. Ultimately, “product! vization” did not save the ghettos. The
Germans deponed the unemployed, the sick, the old, the children. Then
they made distinctions between less essential and more essential labor. In
the final reckoning, all of Jcw'ish labor w'as still Jewish.
The Jewish dedication to w'ork was based on a calculation that libera­
tion might come in time. To hold on w as the essential consideration also
of appeals and the many forms of Jewish “self-help,” from the elaborate
social services in the ghetto communities to die primitive “organization”
in the killing centers.18 The Jews could not hold on; they could not
survive by appealing.

October 16,1941, Occ E6a-10; minutes of war invalids conference under chairman­
ship ot Kolisch, June 9, 1942, Occ E 6a-18; minutes of conference under Kolisch,
August 5, 1942, Occ E 6a-10.
16. On briber)', see Trunk, Judmrnt, pp. 394-400.
17. Protocol bv Prof. P. A. Osrankov and others, July 5, 1943, USSR-1 A (2-4).
18. To “organize” in a camp meant to take a bit of food or some item of clothing
wherever it could be found.

THE VICTIMS
The basic reactions to force are fundamentally different from each i
other. Resistance is opposition to the perpetrator. Nullification or allevia­
tion is opposition to the administrative enactment. In the third reaction,
evasion, the victims try to remove themselves from the effects of force bv
fleeing or hiding. The phenomenon of flight is more difficult to analyze.
Before the war, the emigration of approximately 350,000 Jews from Ger­
many and German-occupied Czechoslovakia was forced. In many cases
the emigrating Jews had been deprived of their livelihood, and thev
reacted to the consequences of anti-Jewish measures rather than in antic­
ipation of disaster. The flight of the Belgian and Parisian Jews in 1940 and
the evacuation of Soviet Jews a year later was compounded with mass
migrations of non-Jews. Here again, the flight was not simply a pure
reaction to the threat of the destruction process but also a reaction to
the war. Later, only a few thousand Jews escaped from the ghettos of
Poland and Russia; only a few thousand hid out in the large cities of
Berlin, Vienna, and Warsaw; and only a handful escaped from camps.
Von dem Bach mentions that in Russia there was an unguarded escape
route to the Pripet Marshes, but few Jews availed themselves of the op­
portunity'.19 In the main, the Jews looked upon flight with a sense of
futility. The great majority of those who did not escape early did not
escape at all.
There were instances when in the mind of the victim the difficulties of
resistance, undoing, or evasion were just as great as the problem of auto­
matic compliance. In such instances the futility' of all alternatives became
utterly clear, and the victim was paralyzed. Paralysis occurred only in
moments of crisis. During ghetto-clearing operations, many Jewish fam­
ilies were unable to fight, unable to petition, unable to flee, and also
unable to move to the concentration point to get it over with. They
waited for the raiding parties in their homes, frozen and helpless. Some­
times the same paralytic reaction struck Jews who walked up to a killing
site and for the first time gazed into a mass grave half-filled with the
bodies of those who had preceded them.
The fifth reaction was automatic compliance. To assess the administra­
tive significance of that cooperation, one must view the destruction pro­
cess as a composite of two kinds of German measures: those that perpe­
trated something upon the Jews and involved only action by Germans,
such as the drafting of decrees, the running of deportation trains, shoot­
ing, or gassing, and those that required the Jews to do something, for
instance, the decrees or orders requiring them to register their property,
obtain identification papers, report at a designated place for labor or
deportation or shooting, submit lists of persons, pay fines, deliver up

19. Statement by von dem Bach mAujbau (New York), September 6,194t>, p. 40.

1110 REFLECTIONS
property, publish German instructions, dig their own graves, and so on.
A large component of the entire process depended on Jewish participa­
tion, from the simple acts of individuals to the organized activity in
councils.
Often the Jews were marshaled by the Germans directly. Word would
come through ordinances, placards, or loudspeakers. In answer to sum­
monses, lines would form or processions would march, almost without
end. To some close observers of these scenes, the assembled crowds ap­
peared to have lost all capacity for independent thought. Jewish resistance
organizations attempting to reverse the mass inertia spoke the words:
“Do not be led like sheep to slaughter.”20 Franz Stangl, who had com­
manded two death camps, was asked in a West German prison about his
reaction to the Jewish victims. He said that only recently he had read a
book about lemmings. It reminded him of Treblinka.21
Not all Jewish cooperation was purely reflexive observance of German
instructions, nor was all of it the last act of emaciated, forsaken people.
There was also an institutional compliance by Jew ish councils employing
assistants and clerks, experts and specialists. During the concentration
stage the councils conveyed German demands to the Jewish population
and placed Jew ish resources into German hands, thereby increasing the
leverage of the perpetrator in significant ways. The German administra­
tion did not have a special budget for destruction, and in the occupied
countries it was not abundantly staffed. By and large, it did not finance
ghetto walls, did not keep order in ghetto streets, and did not make up
deportation lists. German supervisors turned to Jewish councils for infor­
mation, money, labor, or police, and the councils provided them with
these means every day of the week. The importance of this Jewish role was
not overlooked by German control organs. On one occasion a German
official emphatically urged that “the authority of the Jewish council be
upheld and strengthened under all circumstances.”22
Members of the Jewish councils were genuine if not ahvays representa­
tive Jew ish leaders who strove to protect the Jew ish community from the
most severe exactions and impositions and who tried to normalize Jewish

20. Proclamation of Jewish Battle Organization in Warsaw, January 27, 1943,


Jüdisches Historisches Institut, Faschismus-Getto-Massenmord, p. 498; proclamation
of United Anti-Fascist Organization in Rialystok, August 16, 1943, ibid., pp. 558-
59. The phrase was the opening line of an appeal by the underground to the Jewish
population in Vilna during the winter of 1941-42. Testimony by Abba Kovner,
Fachmann trial transcript. May 4, 1961, scss. 27, pp. U1-U2.
21. C'utta Sercny, Into I bat Darkttess (New York, 1974), pp. 232-33.
22. Mohns (Deputy Chief of resettlement division, Warsaw District) to Leisr
(Plenipotentiary for the Citv of Warsaw), January 11, 1941, Yad Vashem microfilm
JM-1113.

THE VICTIMS 1111


life under the most adverse conditions. Paradoxically, these very attributes
were being exploited by the Germans against the Jewish victims.
The fact that so many of the council members had roots in the Jewish
community or had been identified from prewar days with its concerns
gave them a dual status. They were officiating with the authorin' con­
ferred upon them by the Germans but also with the authenticity they
derived from Jewry. Day by day they were reliable agents in the eyes of the
German perpetrators while still retaining the trust of Jews. The contradic­
tion became sharper and sharper even as they kept on appealing, to the
Germans for relief, to the Jews for acquiescence.
Similarly, when the councils endeavored to obtain concessions, they
made a subtle payment. Placing themselves into a situation of having to
wait for German decisions, they increased not only their own subser­
vience but also that of the entire community, which perforce was waiting
as well.
The councils could not subvert the continuing process of constriction
and annihilation. The ghetto as a whole was a German creation. Every­
thing that was designed to maintain its viability was simultaneously pro­
moting a German goal. The Germans were consequently aided not only
by Jewish enforcement agencies but also by the community’s factories,
dispensaries, and soup kitchens. Jewish efficiency in allocating space or in
distributing rations was an extension of German effectiveness, Jewish
rigor in taxation or labor utilization was a reinforcement of German
stringency, even Jewish incorruptibility could be a tool of German admin­
istration. In short, the Jewish councils were assisting the Germans with
their good qualities as well as their bad, and the very best accomplish­
ments of a Jewish bureaucracy were ultimately appropriated by the Ger­
mans for the all-consuming destruction process.
Looking at the Jewish reaction pattern, one would see its two salient
features as a posture of appeals alternating with compliance. What ac­
counts for this combination? What factors gave rise to it? The Jews at­
tempted to tame the Germans as one would try to tame a wild beast. They
avoided “provocations” and complied instantly with decrees and orders.
They hoped that somehow the German drive would spend itself. This
hope was founded in a 2,000-year-old experience. In exile the Jews had
always been a minority, always in danger, but they had learned that they
could avert or survive destruction by placating and appeasing their en­
emies. Even in ancient Persia an appeal by Queen Esther was more ef­
fective than the mobilization of an army. Armed resistance in the lace of
overwhelming force could end only in disaster.
Thus over a period of centuries the Jews had learned that in order to
survive they had to refrain from resistance. Time and again they were
attacked. They endured the Crusades, the Cossack uprisings, and the

1112 REFLECTION S
czarist persecution. There were many casualties in these times of stress,
hut always the Jewish community emerged once again like a rock from a
receding tidal wave. The Jews had never disappeared from the earth.
After surv eying the damage, the survivors had always proclaimed in affir­
mation of their strategy the triumphant slogan, “The Jewish people lives
[Am Israel Chat]'' This experience was so ingrained in the Jewish con­
sciousness as to achieve the force of law. The Jewish people could not be
annihilated.
Only in 1942, 1943, and 1944 did the Jewish leadership realize that,
unlike the pogroms of past centuries, the modern machinelike destruc­
tion process would engulf European Jewry. But the realization came too
late. A 2,000-year-old lesson could not be unlearned; the Jews could not
make the switch. They were helpless.
One should not suppose, however, that compliance was easy. If it was
difficult for the Germans to kill, it was harder still tor the Jews to die.
Compliance is a course of action that becomes increasingly drastic in a
destruction process. It is one thing to comply with an order to register
property but quite another to obey orders in front of a grave. The two
actions an part of the same habit. The Jews who registered their property
were also the ones who lined up to be killed. The Jews who lined up on a
killing site were the ones who had registered their property. Yet these two
activities are very different in their effects. Submission is altogether more
burdensome in its last stages than in its beginning, for as one goes on,
more and more is lost. Finally, in the supreme moment of crisis the
primeval tendency' to resist aggression breaks to the surface. Resistance
then becomes an obstacle to compliance, just as compliance is an obstacle
to resistance. In the Jewish case the cooperation reaction was the stronger
one until the end.
European Jewry' consequently made every' effort to reinforce its tradi­
tional behavior, much as the German bureaucrats were buttressing their
thrust into destruction. The Jews, like the Germans, developed psychic
mechanisms for suppressing unbearable truths and for rationalizing ex­
treme decisions. One is struck by the fact that the Germans repeatedly
employed very' crude deceptions and ruses. The Jews were bluffed with
“registrations" and “resettlements," with “baths" and “inhalations." At
each stage of the destruction process the victims thought that they were
going through the last stage. And so it appears that one of the most
gigantic hoaxes in world history' was perpetrated on live million people
noted for their intellect. But were these people really fooled or did they
deliberately fool themselves?
The Jews did not always have to be deceived, they were capable of
deceiving themselves. Not evetyone discovered everything at once, for
that would hardly have been possible. But neither could the discovery' of

THE VICTIMS 1113


the “Final Solution” be avoided indefinitely by all. Even those who were
sealed in their ghettos had to become conscious of a growing silence
outside. The killings might have been secluded and shrouded in secrecy',
but the disappearance of people could not be concealed. In the Warsaw
Ghetto, the isolated Adam Czerniakow wrote down statistics of Jews de­
ported from Lublin and other cities, and, as he did so, he could not ward
off thoughts about the ominous implications of those occurrences.23 Yet
rumors and reports seeping through ghetto walls did not reverse the
momentum of Jewish actions. The Jewish leadership clung to the tenet
that German orders could not be refused in the absence of clear evidence
that the victims were facing an imminent death. Seldom did the councils
ask themselves if they should go on without reliable indications that
everyone would be safe. Sometimes, notably in Belgium24 25 and Slovakia,23
facts were gathered systematically and passed on to England or Switzer­
land. More often the news was not placed on the table, and inevitable
conclusions were not drawn. Between growing doubts and unwanted
revelations, the councils persevered in their course. In two instances
council chairmen approached the Germans for information. In July 1942,
Czerniakow repeatedly asked German Security Police officers if the de­
portations were going to start. He was assured that the rumors were
untrue.26 The Viennese Elder, Lowenherz, walked into the Vienna Ge­
stapo office to inquire whether the deportees were actually dead. He was
told they were alive.27
In the Lodz Ghetto, where mass deportations began as early as January'
1942 and from which more than a fourth of the residents were removed
by April of that year, an SS officer explained that the deportees were
staying in a well-equipped camp, repairing roads and working in agricul­
ture. The very next month, truckloads of clothing were unloaded in
ghetto warehouses. Letters and identity cards fell out of the garments.28
No more had to be found out. After the subsequent deportation waves,

23. See Czcrniakow’s entries for March 18, April 1, April 29, May 3, July 8,
July 16, and July 18, 1942. Hilbcrg, Staron, and Kcrmisz, eds., The Warsaw Diary,
pp. 335-36, 339-40, 347-48, 349, 375-77, 381-82.
24. Report by Victor Martin (Christian member of the Belgian resistance) on
Auschwitz, undated (winter 1942-43), in Yad Vashem document M 26/4.
25. Gisi Flcischmann (Bratislava) to Dr. A. Silbcrschein (Geneva), July 27, 1942,
Yad Vashem document M 7/2-2 and subsequent letters in M/20.
26. See Czcmiakow’s diary from July 20, 1942. Hilbcrg, Staron, and Kcrmisz,
eds., The Warsaw Diary, pp. 382-85.
27. Statement by Dr. Karl Ebncr (Vienna Gestapo), September 20, 1961, Case
Novak, vol. 6, pp. 111-16.
28. Danuta D^browska and Lucjan Dobroszycki, eds., Kromka qctra lodzl'ieao
(Lodz, 1965), vol. 1, pp. 457-58,619-20.

REFLECTIONS
the Jewish ghetto chroniclers would chart the mood of the remaining
people by noting the fluctuating prices of a consumers’ product. The
commodity was saccharin.29
In Lithuania the Jewish population was inundated by shootings from
the very beginning. A detailed report of Einsatzkommando 3 reveals how
in seventy-one localities the Jews were being decimated. Fourteen of
these communities were struck more than once at intervals averaging a
week.30 A residual fraction of Lithuanian Jewry clung to what was left.
One surv ivor of the Kaunas Ghetto recalls that in its closing days the
slogan of the victims was “life for an hour is also life \A sho qelebt is oich
gelebt] ”31
Throughout Europe the Jewish communities strove for continuity'.
They treated the sick who would not have time to recover, they fed the
unemployed who would not work again, they educated the children who
would not be allowed to grow up. For a middle-aged leadership there was
no alternative. Younger people also were caught in the psychological web.
The children, however, were least prone to fall into illusion. When in the
Theresienstadt Ghetto a transport of children was tunneled into ordinary
showers, they cried out: “No gas!”32
The Jewish repressive mechanism was largelv self-administered, and it
could operate automatically, without any misleading statements or prom­
ises by German functionaries or their non-German auxiliaries. In the
minutes of meetings held by the Vienna Jewish war invalids, we discover
the same significant absence of direct references to death and killing cen­
ters that we have already noted in German correspondence. The Jewish
documents abound with such roundabout expressions as “favored trans­
port” (meaning Theresienstadt transport), “I see black,” “to tempt fate,”
“final act of the drama,” etc.33 The direct word is lacking.
The attempt to repress unbearable thoughts was characteristic not onlv
of the ghetto community but of the killing center itself. In Auschwitz the
inmates employed a special terminology of their own for killing opera­
tions. A crematorium was called a “bakery,” a man who could no longer
work, and who was therefore destined for a gas chamber, was designated

29. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 460,466,483,488.


30. Report by Jäger (Commander of Kinsatzkommando 3), December 1, 1941.
Zeutralc Stelle Eudwigsburg, UdSSR 108, tilm 3, pp. 27-28.
31. Samuel Gringauz, “'Die Ghetto as an Experiment in Jewish Social Organiza­
tion,” Jewish Social Studies 11 (1949): 17.
32. H. G. Adler, Theresienstadt 1941-1945, 2d ed. (Tubingen, 1960), p. 154. The
transport had arriv ed from Riatysrok. on August 24, 1943.
33. See the documents in the YIVO litsritute, folders Occ E 6a-10 and Occ E
6a-18.

THE VICTIMS 1115


a “Moslem,” and the depot holding the belongings of the gassed was <
named “Canada.”34 These, it must be emphasized, are not Nazi terms;
they are expressions by the victims. They are the counterparts of the Nazi
vocabulary and, like the German euphemisms, they were designed to blot
out visions of death.
There were junctures, of course, when the issue could not be evaded,
when forgetting was no longer effective. In such moments of crisis the
victims, like the perpetrators, resorted to rationalizations. The Jews, tcx>,
had to justify their actions. There were two basic thought processes of this
kind. The first was the characterization of compliance as a way of preserv­
ing lives.
The Security Police in Lithuania orally informed the councils there that
any propagation among Jews was undesirable, that pregnant Jewish
women had to reckon with their “liquidation,” and that the Securin’
Police would not pursue Jews for abortion delicts.35 Subsequently, the
council in Siauliai was asked three times whether any births had occurred
in the ghetto, and each time it had replied in the negative. At one point,
however, the council was confronted with twenty pregnancies. It decided
to use persuasion and, if need be, threats to the women to submit to
abortions. One woman was in her eighth month. The council concluded
that in this case a doctor would induce premature birth and that a nurse
would kill the child. The nurse would be told to proceed in such a way
that she would not know the nature of her act.36
The death of one to save another was magnified in the rationalization
that the sacrifice of the few would save the many. This psychology, which
often served the Germans in their notably successful deportations of the
Jews by stages, may be observed in the Vienna Jewish community, which
made a deportation “agreement” with the Gestapo, with the “under­
standing” that six categories of Jews would not be deported.37 Again, the
Warsaw Ghetto Jews argued in favor of cooperation and against re­
sistance on the ground that the Germans would deport sixty thousand

34. On “bakery,” see Olga Lcngycl, Five Chimneys (Chicago and New York, 1947),
p. 22. On “Moslem” (Muselmann), sec report by commander’s office, Auschwitz III,
May 5,1944, NI-11019. On “Canada,” sec Judge Jan Schn, “Extermination Camp at
Oswi^cim,” Central Commission for Investigation of German Crimes in Poland,
German Crimes in Poland (Warsaw, 1946), vol. 1, p. 41.
35. Undated, unsigned report of Einsatzkommando 3 (December 1941-January
1942), Latvian Central State Archives, Fond 1026, Opis 1, Folder 3.
36. Minutes of council meeting of March 24, 1943, in Jewish Rlack Rook Com­
mittee, The Black Book (New York, 1946), pp. 331-33. A similar order, threatening
incarceration in a concentration camp of pregnant Jew ish women, w as issued in
Vienna. Viktor Frankl, Was nicht in meinen Büchern steht (Munich, 1995), pp. 65-66.
The author, a physician, wrote about his w'ife, who had an abortion.
37. Memorandum by Kolisch, October 14, 1941, Occ E 6a-10.

1116 REFLECTIONS
Jews but not hundreds of thousands.38 39 The bisection phenomenon oc­
curred also in Salonika, where the Jewish leadership cooperated with the
German deportation agencies upon the assurance that only “Commu­
nist” elements from the poor sections would be deported, while the “mid­
dle class” would be left alone.30 This fatal arithmetic was also applied in
Vilna, where Judenrat chief Gens declared: “With a hundred victims I
save a thousand people. With a thousand I save ten thousand.”40
In situations where compliance with death orders could no longer be
rationalized as a life-saving measure, diere was still one more justification:
the argument that with rigid, instantaneous compliance, unnecessary' suf­
fering was eliminated, unnecessary' pain avoided, and necessary' torture
reduced. The entire Jewish community', and particularly the leadership,
now concentrated all its efforts in one direction —to make the ordeal
bearable, to make death easy.
This effort is reflected in the letter the Jewish Council in Budapest sent
to the Hungarian Interior Minister on the eve of the deportations: “We
emphatically declare that we do not seek this audience in order to lodge
complaints about the merit of the measures adopted, but merely ask that
they be carried out in a humane spirit.”41
Moritz Henschel, chief of the Berlin Jewish community' from 1940 to
1943, defended the assistance rendered by his administration to the Ger­
mans during the roundups in the following words:
It could be asked: “How could you permit yourself to take part in this
work in any' manner whatsoever?” We cannot really decide whether we
acted for the best, but the idea which guided us was the following: if m
do these things, then this will always be carried out in a better and
gentler way than if others take it upon themselves — and this was cor­
rea. Direct transports by the Nazis were alway's done roughly — with
terrible roughness.42
And this was Rabbi Leo Baeck, chief of the Reich Association of Jews in
Germany:
I made it a principle to accept no appointments from the Nazis and to
do nothing which might help them. But later, when the question arose

38. See the material in Philip Friedman, ed.. Martyrs and Fighters (New York,
1954), pp. 193-95, 199.
39. ( axiI Roth, “The I-ast Days of Jewish Salónica,” Commentary, July 1955, p. 53.
40. Philip Friedman, “Two ‘Saviors’ Who Failed,” Commentary, December 1958,
p. 487.
41. Eugene Lcvai, Black Rook on tlx Martyrdom of Hungarian Jewry (Zurich and
Vienna, 1948), p. 134.
42. Statement by Mortiz Henschel made before he died in Palestine in 1947 and
introduced in the Eichmann trial transcript, May 11, 1961, scss. 37, p. Nnl.

THE VICTIMS 1117


whether Jewish orderlies should help pick up Jews tor deportation, I
took the position that it would be better for them to do it, because they
could at least be more gentle and helpful than the Gestapo and make
the ordeal easier. It was scarcely in our power to oppose the order
effectively.43
When Baeck was in Theresienstadt, an engineer who had escaped from
Auschwitz informed him about the gassings. Baeck decided not to pass
on this information to anyone in the ghetto city because “living in the
expectation of death by gassing would only be harder.”44
The supreme test of the compliance reaction came in front of the grave.
Yet here, too, the Jews managed to console themselves. From one of
the numerous German eyewitness reports comes the following typical
passage:
The father was holding the hand of a boy about ten years old and was
speaking to him softly; the boy was fighting his tears. The father
pointed to the sky, stroked his head, and seemed to explain something
to him. ... I remember a girl, slim and with black hair, who passed
close to me, pointed to herself, and said, “Twenty-three.” . . . The peo­
ple, completely naked, went down some steps which were cut in the
clay wall of the pit and clambered over the heads of the people lying
there, to the place where the SS man directed them. Then they lay
down in front of the dead or injured people; some caressed those who
were still alive and spoke to them in a low voice. Then I heard a series
of shots.45
The German annihilation of the European Jews was the world’s first
completed destruction process. For the first time in the history of Western
civilization the perpetrators had overcome all administrative and moral
obstacles to a killing operation. For the first time, also, the Jewish victims,
caught in the straitjacket of their history, plunged themselves physically
and psychologically into catastrophe. The destruction of the Jews was
thus no accident. When in the early days of 1933 the first civil servant
wrote the first definition of “non-Aryan” into a civil service ordinance, the
fate of European Jewry was sealed.

43. Leo Baeck in Eric H. Boehm, ed., We Sunnwd (New Haven, 1949), p. 288.
44. Ibid., pp. 292-93.
45. Affidavit by Hermann Friedrich Gracbc, November 10,1945, PS-2992.

1118 REFLECTIONS
THE NEIGHBORS
The Jews had many neighbors. During the catastrophe these onlookers
tended to stand aside. Noninvolvement appeared to be their uppermost
motive, at times, almost a doctrine. This solidified passivity was firmly
rooted in a situational background and a calculated posture.
In much of Europe before Hitler’s rise to power the relationships
between Jews and Gentiles were largely limited to necessary interactions
and transactions. The old legal barriers had almost disappeared, but a
complex pattern of mutual isolation had remained in place. A major
factor in this continuing divide was the nature of Jewry’s geographic
distribution.
The Jewish communities were spatially compact. Jews were living in
cities to a far greater extent than non-Jews, and they were a relatively large
component of urban populations. In Poland they constituted approx­
imately 40 percent of all the inhabitants in cities of more than 10,000
people: roughly 33 percent in Warsaw, Lodz, and Lvov, 40 percent in
Lublin and Radom, and nearly 50 percent in Bialystok and Grodno.1
Furthermore, a number of European cities had Jewish neighborhoods.
Berlin, which was divided into twenty administrative districts, housed 70
percent of its Jewish population in five of them.2 3 Vienna was organized
into twenty-five districts under the Nazi regime, and upon the outbreak
of war about 46 percent of its Jews had their apartments in the II Dis­
trict.2 In Warsaw, three adjacent districts, which later became the heart of
the ghetto, contained just over half of that city’s Jews.4 In Belgrade, nearly
two-thirds of the Jews lived within a bend of the Danube River.5 Antwerp
had a concentration of Jews within a single district in the vicinity of the
central railroad station.6 In Rome, manv of the poorer Jews could be
found in the area of the Old Ghetto.7 In Marseille, more than 60 percent

1. From 1931 census data in Hwarar Friesei, cd., Atlas of Modem Jewish History
(New York, 1990), p. 93.
2. From June 1933 data, in Fsra Bennathan, “Die demographische und wirtschaft­
liche Struktur der luden, in Werner Mossc, ed., Entscheidungsjahr 7932 (Tübingen,
1966), p. 92.
3. The number in the II District (Ixopoldstadt) was 45,653 for October 1, 1939,
out of 99,353 Jews with idcnritication cards in the citv. About 13,000 foreign Jews
did not hav e cards. Gerhard Bor/, Wohnungspolitik und Judendeportation in Wien 1938
Ins ¡943 (Vienna-Salzburg, 1975), pp. 73,169.
4. From 1938 dara, in Friesei, Atlas, p. 94.
5. From 1921 data, ibid ,, p. 100.
6. From 1936 data, as estimated by R. van Doorslacr, in Licvcn Sacrens, “Ant­
werp's l’re-war Attitude toward the Jews,” in Dan Michman, ed., Belgium and the
Holocaust (Jerusalem, 1998), pp. 160-61.
7. Robert Katz, Black Sabbath (New York, 1969), pp. 173-98. These Jews were
particularly vulnerable to quick arrest in October 1943.

THE NEIGHBORS 1119


of the Jews were situated within a radius of a mile from the Old Port.8 In
Paris, from which many Jews fled at the beginning of the occupation,
about 52 percent of the remaining Jewish population lived in five of the ^
twenty arrondissements in 1940 and 1941.9
Added to this residential segmentation was a differentiation between i
Jews and non-Jews in the economy. The Jews had urban occupations not
only in the cities but also in small towns and villages. Within the cities,
moreover, Jews and Gentiles engaged in different economic activities. In
Poland more than half of the Jews were self-employed, and very few were
in the police or municipal administrations.10 On the whole, places where
Jews and non-Jews worked side by side were exceptions, as in the case of
Jewish department stores in the West or state industrial plants in the
Soviet Union.
In some European cities, there was also a linguistic separation between
Jews and non-Jews. The prime illustration is Salonika, which was part of
the Ottoman Empire until the First Balkan War in 1912. The inhabitants
in 1913 included 61,439 Jews, 45,867 Turks, 39,957 Greeks, and 10,626
others.11 After the Greek-Turkish population exchange in the 1920s, the
Greeks were predominant and the Jewish minority still spoke Ladino, an
offshoot of fifteenth-century Spanish, after a residence of four and a half
centuries. In the spring of 1943, these Jews could not find refuge in the
Greek community.12 A similarly complex history is presented by Riga,
which was part of Imperial Russia until 1918, when—after a transition
under German occupation — it became the capital of independent Latvia.
Here too the Jews had been present for centuries, and here they also
spoke their own language, Yiddish. As late as the 1930s Jewish children
still attended Yiddish and Hebrew elementary schools.13 About 90 per­

8. Donna F. Ryan, The Holocaust and the Jem cf Marseille (Urbana, III., 1996),
pp. 16-18. A substantial portion were caught in identity checks and dragnets during
1943. Ibid., passim.
9. Data in Jacques Adler, The Jem ofParis and the Final Solution (New York, 1987),
pp. 10, 12. Some 58 percent of the Parisian Jews targeted for the roundup of July
1942 resided in the same five districts. Sec the circular by Hennequin of the Munici­
pal Police ofParis, July 13, 1942, with projected arrest figures, in Serge Klarsfeld,
Vichy-Auscbwitz 1942 (Paris, 1983), pp. 250-56.
10. See Joseph Marcus, Social and Political History of the Jem of Poland (Berlin,
1983), particularly statistical tables in appendix.
11. Sec the entry' for “Salonicco,” Enciclopedia italiana (1949).
12. Erika Kounio Amariglio, Front Thessaloniki to Auschnntz and Back (London,
2000), pp. 47-48.
13. Mendel Bobc, “Four Hundred Years of the Jews in Latvia,'" in Association of
Latvian and Estonian Jews in Israel, The Jews in Latvia (Tel Aviv, 1971), pp. 21-77,
and Z. Michaeli (Michclson), “Jewish Cultural Autonomy and the Jewish Sclux'l
System,” in ibid., pp. 186-216. The language of the Jewish intelligentsia in Riga,

REFLECTIONS
cent of Riga’s Jews were shot within months after the arrival of the Ger­
man army in 1941. A small remainder was bottled up in the ghetto.
Again, in Warsaw and many other Polish cities, Yiddish was the primary
language in Jewish homes, despite the progress of assimilation, which
brought more and more Jewish children into Polish schools and a more
perfect command of Polish.
The life of the Jews amidst their neighbors was consequently marked
by definable boundaries. Some were territorial. Others were marked in
economic activities, which tended to be complementary between the two
groups rather than integrated at a personal level. Still others were defined
by the differences of religion, culture, social institutions, or language. In
short, emancipation had not yet evolved into copious intermingling. Any
amalgamations ranging from joint business activities to mixed marriages
were still new' and in several regions sparse.
Although the two communities had remained apart from one another,
the population at large was aw'are of the Jewish dilemma from the onset
of anti-Jewish legislation, and often enough this awareness increased even
as existing contacts with Jews w'ere successivelv severed. In its very na­
ture, the upheaval could not simply be overlooked. Boycotts, dismissals,
Aryanizations, Jewish stars, and ghettos were highly visible steps, and the
disappearance of Jews was conspicuous in itself.
The rise of neutrality as the predominant reaction pattern was, there­
fore, not a matter of ignorance. Rather, it was the outcome of a strategy
that for the large majorin' of people w'as the easiest to follow' and justify. It
was a safe course, without the risks and costs of helping someone and
w ithout the moral burden of siding with the perpetrator in face-to-face
infliction of hurt. The static response w'as also steadv in that it w as not
necessarily affected by the sight of Jewish endangerment or suffering.
Although there w'ere critical junctures w’hen the conscience of a motion­
less spectator wras momentarily troubled or w'hen sentiments of disap­
proval or consternation were expressed in private letters, as was the case
in a region of southern France,14 the failure to protest openly against
arrests or to do something for an endangered victim could ahvays be
rationalized. After all, one had to w’orrv about one’s family and take care
of oneself first. The French Bishop of Nîmes, Jean Girbeau, had already
written in October 1941 that, whereas in God's eyes there was neither
Jew nor gentile, man could live with a “hierarchy of affections.”15

(erniup, and Bratislava was German. On Bratislava, see Yehuda Bauer, Retbinkinsi the
Holocaust (New Haven, 2001 ), p. 172.
14. Robert Zarcrsky, Nîmes at War (University Park, Pa., 1995), pp. 107-12. The
letters were written in the departement of Gard after the roundup of August 1942.
15. Ibid , p. 113.

THE NEIGHBORS 1121


In practical terms, the sheer capacity for help was not boundless. Po­
land’s prewar apartment density was already about four per room. Under i
German occupation, hunger quickly overtook Ukrainian cities. As the
war went on, food and fuel were diminished in Poland and Greece and
during the last winter in the Netherlands. Generally, that to which one
was accustomed became increasingly scarce. In the occupied territories,
moreover, the status of a nation in German eyes was particularly relevant
when questions arose about opposing the Germans or assisting the Jews.
Wherever die Germans were unrestrained in their reprisals, the prospec­
tive helpers had a problem. For Poles and Ukrainians die threat of severe
retaliation was acute,16 and even Lithuanians could be killed for shelter­
ing Jewish escapees.17
The major inhibitor, however, was sheer self-absorption, which was
noticeable in most of the countries. Many a report by German military
offices or the Security Police points to a mass of individuals preoccupied
with personal affairs. Even while they suffered anxiety and trauma, they
clung to a semblance of normal life. Children went to school and students
sought degrees. The intellectuals of Paris could be found in their custom­
ary coffee houses. In that city Pablo Picasso went on painting, and Jean-
Paul Sartre wrote his plays.18 Those with less lofty aspirations looked for
escape in movies, sports, or alcohol. Everywhere, everyday routines were
maintained, and if need be reconstituted. The quest was a necessity, pur­
sued day after day.
Immersed in their own existence, the neighbors of the Jews only had to
glance at the Jewish community in its distress to reassure themselves that

16. See the texts of two decisions by special courts against Poles who harbored
Jews, in Waclaw Biclawski and Czeslaw Pilichowski, Zbrodnie na Polakach dokonane
przez bitlerowzow zapomoz udzielna Zydom (Warsaw, 1981), pp. XLI-XLV. In one case,
dated June 23, 1943, the court in Piotrkow Trybunalski imposed the punishment of
death on the farmer Wladyslaw Rutkowski and his wife, Gcnowefa Rutkowska, for
harboring two Jews in December 1942, even though there was no evidence that the
wife was present when the two fugitives, one of whom was known to her husband,
had asked for refuge. The Jews managed to escape during a search of the house. The
other case was decided by a court in Rzsezow on April 19, 1944. The defendant, a
twcnty-fivc-year-old woman, Stanislawa Korzccka, had hidden her Jewish fiance in
1943. Although the court expressed understanding for her motivation, it concluded
that the law allowed only the death penalty for her action.
17. Decision of a German court (Srandgcricht) in Biah'stok, September 20,1943,
sentencing two Ethnic Lithuanians, Hipolit Jaskielcwicz and Maria Jaskielewicz, to
death for sheltering Jews. U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives Record
Group 53.004 (Belarus State Archives of Grodno Oblast), Roll 2, Fond 1, Opis 1,
Folder 167, and addendum noting that the sentence was carried out on October 16,
1943, ibid.
18. See the photographs in Gilles Pcrrault and Pierre Azema, Parts under the
Occupation (New York, 1989).

1122 REFLECTIONS
they did not share the Jewish fate. That was the situation most of the time
in most of Europe. Not being Jewish thus became a status in itself. It was
an inescapable thought as well as a potent factor in any relations with
Jews, and at times it was manifest in the stares of the onlookers when they
saw the victims marched off under guard, be it in Poland, Hungary, or
Corfu. A Jew who was transported in an open coal car from Auschwitz to
Nordhausen in early 1945 recalls that in Germany “many people stood
on the bridges, along the way, they saw us, they knew what was happen­
ing. No reaction, no human movement. We were alone, abandoned by
the people to whom we had once belonged.”19 And the following obser­
vation was offered bv Aldo Coradello, a former Italian vice consul in
Danzig, about a troupe of fifty Jews who looked like “skeletons” after they
returned from a month of work in Königsberg to Stutthof: “Did not the
population of Königsberg see these beings, barely alive as they went to
the railwav station or their daily labor? Did the population of Königsberg
only shrug and utter the repeated view that, when all is said and done,
these were only foreign inmates or Jews, so that one was released from the
duty to think about them and their fortunes?”20
Clearlv, all the prewar divisions between Jews and non-Jews were
deepened as the non-Jewish neighbors turned their concerns inward for
the sake of material and mental stability. It was at this point that the
witnesses distanced themselves from the victims, so that physical prox­
imity no longer signified personal closeness.
What, then, was the extent of the help given to the Jews? If one asks
what percentage of a Jewish communin' was saved, then it is Copenhagen
that is the leader, inasmuch as more than 99 percent of its Jewish popula­
tion survived. By the same reasoning, Warsaw is almost the exact op­
posite, having lost nearly 99 percent of its Jews. From a perspective that
rakes into account only a German goal or a Jewish need, the problem
cannot be put any other way. The results are bound to be assessed in a
range of such fractions. If, however, the issue is the capacin' or willingness
of a non-Jewish population to do something for the threatened Jews, the
principal question must be framed in terms of a ratio between the poten­
tial saviors and the number of saved. In this equation, the size of a citys
non-Jewish inhabitants should be placed on one side of the ledger, and
the count of “illegal” survivors on the other. Once this simple calculation
has been made, the results look very different. Only in Paris might the
figure of those who survived illegally have constituted as much as 3 per-
W. Heinz Galinski in a 1987 broadcast, quoted by Gerhard Hoch, Von Auschwitz
nach Holstein (Hamburg, 1990), pp. 79-80.
20. Undated notes by Aldo Coradello about the concentration camp Stutthof, in
lüdisches Historisches Institut Warschau, Faschismus-(¡etto-Massenmord (East Ber­
lin, 1961 ),pp. 465-66.

THE NEIGHBORS 1123


cent of the non-Jewish majority.21 For both Copenhagen and Warsaw, as I
well as Rome and Amsterdam, the number is approximately 1 percent. 1
For German cities it is lower still. In all of Bohemia and Moravia the Jews I
who survived in hiding are reported to have been 424.22 |
The assistance that was offered came in part from institutions specially
chosen or created for this purpose by an underground, as in the Nether­
lands and Poland. Not surprisingly, much of the help was channeled to
specific categories of victims. Favored were children who, if old enough,
spoke the language of the hosts without inflections revealing Jewish
origins, or whose presence, in the event of discovery, could be explained
away most easily. Among the adults, part-Jews and long-time converts to
Christianity had an advantage.
In many places, there were exceptional individuals like Marion Pritch­
ard, who sheltered small Jewish children and killed a Dutch policeman to
forestall their arrest.23 There were also exceptional moments, when some­
one gave timely warning, as office secretaries did in Clermont-Ferrand.24
Finally, there were exceptional circumstances, particularly those attribu­
table to a tie between people, as exemplified in the demonstration of
German women in Berlin who reclaimed their Jewish husbands from
custody in the Rosenstrasse.25
But what about the reverse of assistance? What may be discerned in
that behavior? The opposite of the willingness to help and die attendant
sacrifices of the rescuers was a readiness to profit from the misfortune of
the Jews and, in the case of many young men, to join the perpetrators in

21. The population of Paris in September 1940 reached a low of 1,700,000 before
rising again. Adler, The Jews of Paris, p. 6. In October 1940, 149,734 Jews were
registered in the Seine departement, which includes Paris, and by early 1941, the
flight of Jews southward reduced this number to 139,979. Serge Klarsfeld, Vichy-
Auschmtz (Hamburg, 1989), p. 26. From May 1941, when arrests of Jews began for
internment in camps, to July 1944, about 40,000 Jews were seized in Paris. Klarsfeld,
ibid., pp. 25,31,35,101,287,305-17. During this period there was a further Jewish
exodus, but of undetermined volume, from Paris. Some 30,000-40,000 Jews were
still living openly in their apartments when the city was liberated. Adler, The Jews of
Paris, p. 245, n. 7, and Klarsfeld, Vichy-Auschwttz, p. 306. That leaves a remainder of
some tens of thousands in hiding.
22. H. G. Adler, Theresienstadt, 2nd cd. (Tubingen, 1960), p. 15.
23. Marion Pritchard, “It came to pass in those days,” Sh'ma, April 27, 1984,
pp. 97-102.
24. John Sweets, Choices in Vichy France (Oxford, 1986), p. 132.
25. Sec Nathan Stolzfus, Resistance of the Heart (New York, 1996). Generally the
non-Jewish husbands and wives remained steady partners in mixed marriages. See,
however, the draft letter by the mayor of Mogilev (Fclicin) to the Feldkommandan-
tur, March 19, 1942, about divorce petitions, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
Archives Record Group 53.006 (Belarus State Archives of Mogilev Oblast), Roll 1,
Fond 259, Opis 1, Folder 22.

1124 REFLECTIONS
the perpetration.26 The easiest way of taking advantage of the situation
was to make use of opportunities resulting from dismissals or Aryaniza-
tions, or to acquire articles already confiscated, or to occupy an apartment
after it had been vacated by deportees. Such indirect benefits were ac­
cepted on a large scale, even when — as happened in Berlin or Vienna,
Bratislava or Sofia — the Jews were evicted precisely tor the relief of the
housing shortage.
Often enough, passive aggrandizement verged on an active form. A
small but telling illustration is the story of a Jewish family in Sighet which
entrusted cash and jewelry' to the wife of a Hungarian army officer. When
the family ran out of money and dispatched a daughter to reclaim some of
it, the Hungarian woman feigned ignorance, asking: “What money?”27
More open ways of taking were observed by officials who, in conquered
territories, reported the ransacking of empty Jewish apartments or aban­
doned Jewish belongings by local neighbors in Radom, Lvov, Riga, Cer-
naup, Salonika, and elsewhere. A Polish physician in the town of Szcze-
brzeszyn noted in his diary' that peasants from the countryside, expecting
an imminent roundup, had come with their wagons and waited all day for
the moment they could start looting.28
Still more active were the volunteers who aligned themselves with the
Germans. As a percentage of the population in their countries, they were
most numerous in the Baltic region, where they were grouped into a
stationary' and mobile Schutzmannschaft, and where they killed local
Jews before going on to more killing, of Jews deported to the Baltic as
well as Jews outside the area. In Paris, Rome, and other cities, militia and
bands made arrests of Jews or guarded them, pending transport. Few
were the areas without such collaborators.
In the aggregate, the local by standers formed a human wall around the
Jews entrapped in laws and ghettos. For the longest time the Jews hesi­
tated before making an attempt to submerge or flee, to scatter themselves
in the population at large. The line of guards was thin. The double ghetto
of Grodno was guarded by the “larger part” of a police company.29 For

26. For rhe social composition of the Byelorussian and Ukrainian Schutzmann­
schaft, see Martin Dean, Collaboration in the Holocaust (New York, 2000), pp. 60-77.
27. Hedi Fried, Fragments of a Life (Guidon, 1990), pp. 59, 60, 62. When per­
sonal possessions were handed to Christian acquaintances on the eve of deportations,
the reaction of the recipients was sometimes complex. See an account of such fare­
wells in Marburg bv John K. Dickinson, German and Jew (Chicago, 2001), pp. 293-
309.
28. Jan Thomas Gross, “Two Memoirs from the Edge of Destruction,” in Robert
Moses Shapiro, cd.. Holocaust Cljronicles (New York, 1999), pp. 226-27. Gross
quotes from the diary of Dr. Zygmunt Klukowski, entry of April 13, 1942.
29. Report of Reserve Police Battalion 91 lor January 10 to February 9, 1942,

THE NEIGHBORS 1125


the newly sealed Lodz Ghetto, with its 164,000 inhabitants, a daily con­
tingent of about 200 policemen sufficed,30 and throughout the years of ^
the ghetto’s existence the German overseers did not have a list of its
inhabitants.31 Almost everywhere the barriers were nevertheless great.
Escape meant risk of denunciation or extortion. Anyone could be dan­
gerous and help was uncertain. When the deportations engulfed the Jews
of Galicia in the fall of 1942, the German Order Police noted that many
Jews had fled from the ghettos of Drohobycz, Boryslaw, Sambor, and
Stry on the eve of impending roundups. Jews of Stry were hiding in
Polish and Ukrainian apartments. A week later, however, a significant
number of escapees from the four ghettos, who apparently had found no
refuge, were already returning, only to discover that they had stepped
into the trap of the waiting police.32
In a Europe that included Germans and Lithuanians as well as Italians
and Danes, there was a variety of nations, each with a diversity of people,
but the dominant pattern in most of these regions was unmistakable.
Jewry had been singled out, and once it was branded the line of separation
was indelible.

with reference to the deployment of 1st Company, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Mu­
seum Archives Record Group 53.004 (Belarus State Archives of Grodno Oblast),
Roll 6, Fond 12, Opis 1, Folder 5.
30. Chief of the Order Police (signed von Bomhard), Situation Report Mav 31,
1940, T 501, Roll 37.
31. Report by Dr. Horn (WVHA accountant) to Pohl, January 24,1944, NO-519.
32. Reports by the commander of 5th Company, Police Regiment 24 (Captain
Lcderer) to the Commander of Order Police in Galicia (Lt. Col. Soosrcn), Octo­
ber 19 and 25, 1942, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives, Record Group
11.001 (Center for Preservation of Documentary Collections, Moscow), Roll 82,
Fond 1323, Opis 2, Folder 292b. Returnees, out of resources and facing starv ation,
were not rare in Szczcbrzcszyn cither. Those who joined or formed bands, robbing
the peasants, aroused the ire of the Polish population. Zygmunt Klukowski, Dtary
from the Tears of Occupation, 1939-1944 (Urbana, III., 1993), entries of November 18,
20, 22, 1942, pp. 225-27. The American edition of the diary is somewhat abridged.

1126 REFLECTIONS
CHAPTER ELEVEN

CONSEQUENCES

he destruction of the European Jews was a major upheaval and its


impact was felt in the first instance bv the Jewish communin',
secondly bv Germany, and ultimately also by those outside the
destructive arena who watched it come to pass.
For the Jews, the consequences were pervasive. Physically, the dimen­
sions of Jewish population, its distribution, and even its character under­
went a permanent change. The statistics in Table 11-1 reveal in rough
outline what happened: World Jewry lost one-third of its number. It
declined from an all-time high of more than 16,000,000 people to about
11,000,000. The geographic concentration of the population loss altered
the distribution of the Jews. Before the rise of the Nazi regime, the bulk of

1127
TABLE 11-1
THE JEWISH POPULATION LOSS, 1939-45

1939 1945
Austria 60,000 7,000
Belgium 65,000 40,000
Bulgaria 50,000 47,000
Czechoslovakia 315,000 44,000
Denmark 6,500 5,500
France 270,000 200,000
Germany 240,000 80,000
Greece 74,000 12,000
Hungary 400,000 200,000
Italy 50,000 33,000
Luxembourg 3,000 1,000
Netherlands 140,000 20,000
Norway 2,000 1,000
Poland 3,350,000 50,000
Romania 750,000 430,000
USSR 3,020,000 2,500,000
Estonia 4,500
Latvia 95,000
Lithuania 145,000
Yugoslavia 75,000 12,000

Note: The statistics for 1939 refer to prewar borders, and postwar frontiers have been
used for 1945. The figure of80,000 for Germany includes 60,000 displaced persons.
The estimate of2,500,000 for the USSR comprises about 300,000 refugees, deportees,
and surv ivors from newly acquired territories.
For other compilations, see Report of the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry Regard­
ing the Problems of European Jewry and Palestine (London, 1946), Cmd. 6808, pp. 58-59;
Institute of Jewish Affairs, “Statistics of Jewish Casualties during Axis Domination”
(mimeographed; New York, 1945); American Jewish Committee, American JcnHsh Tear
Book (New York), 48 (1946-47): 606-9; 50 (1948-49): 697; 51 (1950): 246-47.

Jewish population, wealth, and power was centered in Europe. When


Germany was smashed, nearly half the world’s Jews were living in the
United States, and most of the Jewish wealth was located there. In that
country, too, were henceforth to be found many of the decisive voices in
world Jewish affairs. Finally, the relatively large number of Jews in the
Moslem world, who were inert and forgotten for centuries, have been
drawn into the center of Jewish life. Their higher birthrates were an
important factor in postwar Jewish population increases. Yet this commu-

CONSBQUENCES
nitv could not make up the loss. Fifty years after the end of the catastro­
phe, the Jews of the world, facing the end of their growth, numbered 13
million.1
Because the destruction of the Jews was accomplished in blood, the
altered appearance of the Jewish community is its most striking conse­
quence. Ironically, the catastrophe overtook a population that was al­
ready declining, not only in Western Europe and Germany, but even in
Poland and the USSR. The falling Jewish birthrate, which in Germany
was noted already at the beginning of the twentieth century,2 and the
rising rate of intermarriages that accompanied this trend, continued with­
out significant abatement in the United States and the Soviet Union after
1945.3
If the extent of the Jewish loss was felt immediately, the manner in
which it occurred was to have disturbing effects over the years. The Jews
were not prepared for the events of 1933 to 1945, and when that which
was least expected became the overwhelming truth, it brought about a
deep transformation in Jewish attitudes and thought.
Throughout the Second World War the Jewish people adopted the
Allied cause as their own. They shut out many thoughts of their disaster
and helped achieve the final victory. The Allied powers, however, did not
think of the Jews. The Allied nations who were at war with Germany did
not come to the aid of Germany’s victims. The Jews of Europe had no
allies. In its gravest hour Jewry stood alone, and the realization of that
desertion came as a shock to Jewish leaders all over the world.
In the United States the principal Jewish organizations had gotten
together in 1943 to form the American Jewish Conference, which soon
became a forum for manv disappointed voices. At the second session in
New York, December 3-5, 1944, Dr. Joseph Tenenbaum of the Ameri­
can Jewish Congress made the following remarks:
Let us not rely on others to defend our interests. When Japan was
accused of using gas against the Chinese, there was a solemn warning
by the President of the United States who threatened to retaliate with

1. U. C). Schmclz and Sergio DdlaPcrgola in American Jewish Tear Book, 1996,
p. 437.
2. Helix A. Theilhaber, Der Unterpanp der deutschen Juden (Munich, 1911).
3. Fred Masarik and Alvin Chenkin, “United States National Jewish Population
Study: A First Report," American Jewish Year Book 74 (1973): 264-306, particulary
pp. 271, 293-98. On USSR, see Alec Novc and J. A. Newrh, “The Jewish Popula­
tion: Demographic Trends and Occupational Patterns,” in Lionel Kochan, cd.. The
Jem in Soviet Russia since 1Q17 (London, 1970), pp. 125-58, particularly pp. 143-45.
See also Zvi Grilichcs, “Erosion in the Soviet Union,” Near East Report 17 (July 25,
1973): 118; Roberto Bachi, “Population Trends of World Jewry,” Institute ot'Gin-
temporary Jewry, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 1976.

CONSEQUENCES 1129
gas warfare on the Japanese. Millions of Jews were suffocated in the 5
lethal gas chambers, but nobody even threatened the Germans with jj
retaliation — there was no threat to gas their cities. Jews must stop I
being the expendables among the nations.4
The third session of the Jewish Conference was permeated with the
theme of disappointment. Speaker after speaker rose to explain that the
Jews had been abandoned, forgotten, left alone, betrayed. Professor
Hayim Fineman of the Labor Zionist bloc had this to say :
In terms of comparative statistics, the number of Jews destroyed in
what was Rider’s Europe totals twenty-two times the number of
Americans who fell in batde. What renders the situation so horrifying
is the fact that this tragedy was not unavoidable. Many of those who
are dead might have been alive were it not for the refusal and delays by
our own State Department, by the International Red Cross, the War
Refugee Board, and other agencies to take immediate measures.5
From Germany a survivor, the president of the liberated Jews in the
American zone, Dr. Zalman Grinberg, came to the conference to add the
following remarks:
Ladies and gendemen: I realize that we are living in a cynical world. I
am aware of the fact that humanity is accustomed to brutality. [But] I
myself would never have believed that the civilized world of the twen­
tieth century could be so unmoved by the decimation of the Jewish
people in Europe. I am forced to believe that it is only because these
things happened to the Jewish people and not to another people.6
Thus in speech after speech, one may discern the theme that the Allied
leaders had not merely been callous, but that they had reserved their
callousness for the Jews. This accusation reflected a deep-seated anxiety in
the Jewish ranks. It was the unverbalized fear that the Allies secretly
approved of what the Germans had done and that, given the appropriate
circumstances, they might even repeat the experiment.7
If there was a subtle problem in defining the relationship of Jewry with

4. Verbatim remarks by Tcnenbaum in Alexander S. Kohanski, cd.. The American


Jewish Conference, Proceedings of the Second Session, December 3-5, 1944 (New York,
1945), p. 71.
5. Verbatim remarks by Fineman in Ruth Hershman, cd., The American Jewish
Conference, Proceedings of the Third Session, February 17-19, 1946 (New York, 1946),
p. 47.
6. Verbatim remarks by Grinberg, ibid., p. 148.
7. Note conjecture by Edwin M. Scars in his article “Was Hitler Right?” Jennsh
Forum 24 (April-May 1951): 69, 71,87-90, and the scenario by the British novelist
Frederick Raphael, Lindmann (New York, 1964), pp. 307-9.

1130 CONSEQUENCES
the Allied countries in the wake of the wholesale abandonment of the
victims to their fate, there were even greater difficulties in coming to grips
with a Germany, now broken into pieces, which had caused the disaster in
the first place. Everyone in the Jewish community knew the basic truth
that what had happened was not merely an annihilation of five million
people who coincidentally were Jews, but a killing of Jewry that had
reached a total of five million. The living knew that the Jews of Europe
were brought to death deliberately, that women, girls, and small children
died like cattle.
Unprecedented as that event may have been, there was no demand
for mass revenge. Solitary figures such as Treasury Secretary Morgen-
thau, presidential advisor Bernard Baruch, or columnist Walter Winchell
fought a losing battle against the emerging rapprochement,8 9 but they were
alone. The prevailing pattern was based on the long-established maxim
diat Jews, to be secure, could not act as though the “good will” of the
countries in which they lived might be expended without limit. In 1945,
Jewish organizations and public personalities strove to be representative
of the societies of which they were a part. As Americans, they had to look
at Germany through “American eyes,” rejecting any imputation of collec­
tive German guilt, emphasizing that there were good Germans and bad
Germans,1' eschewing recitals of “Nazi horrors”10 or even explaining Naz­
ism as a psychiatric phenomenon.11 In newly Communist Hungary, the
Budapest Jewish community organ, Uj Elet, cautioned that in modern so­
ciety there were no guilt)' nations, only guilty classes and ruling classes.12
The restraint that the Jewish community mustered toward Germany
was replaced, at least among the Jews of the Western world, with acts of
militancy on behalf of Israel. The reaction of displaced hostility is not

8. Sec Morgenthau's Germany Is Our Problem (New York and London, 1945). On
Baruch, see his testimony before the Senate Military Affairs Committee in hearings
on elimination of German resources for war, 79th Cong., lstsess., 1945,pt. l,pp. 1-
28. Some organizations, too, were involved in reminding and warning activities.
Chief among them was the Society for the Prevention of World War III. The Jew ish
War Veterans, the American Jew ish Congress, and the Anti-Defamation league con­
fined themselves on the whole to protesting the arrival of German artists, etc.
9. Joseph Dünner, “Appeal to Reason,"” Congress Weekly, January' 28, 1952, pp. 5-
7. See also a depiction of good Jews and bad Jews by David Riesman, “The “Militant'
Bight against Anti-Semitism," Commentary, January 1951, pp. 12-13.
10. Introduction bv Samuel Elowerman in Paul Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction
(New York, 1949).
11. National Conference of Christians and Jews, Conference, spring 1949, p. 5,
citing Dr. David Levy, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University.
12. Editorial in Uj Elet (Budapest), October 20, 1949, as cited by Eugene Du-
schinskv, “Hungary,” in Peter Meyer et al., The Jews in the Soviet Satellites (Syracuse,
N.Y., 1953), pp. 468-69.

CONSEQUENCES 1131
uncommon in the annals of individual and mass behavior. Here it was I
almost inevitable. Israel is Jewry’s great consolation. It is a vast “undoing”
achievement, one of the greatest in history. Even while the Jews of Eu­
rope were being slaughtered, the delegates to the first session of the
American Jewish Conference were turning their attention to the future-
state. Their thoughts were expressed to some extent in a speech delivered
by Dr. Israel Goldstein of the General Zionists during the rescue sym­
posium: “For all our rivers of tears and oceans of blood, for our broken
lives and devastated homes, for all our gutted synagogues and desecrated
scrolls, tor all our slain youths and spoliated maidens, for all our agony
and for all the martyrdom of these black years, we shall be consoled when
in Eretz Israel, reestablished as a Jewish Commonwealth, land of our
sunrise, and in every land where the dispersed of Israel dwell, the sun of
freedom will rise,” etc., etc.13 From this came the great concentration of
fury upon England and, to a lesser extent, the Arab countries after the
war. In the years 1945 to 1949, England was Jewry’s primary enemy. The
English, and the Arabs, moved into this position because, in seeking to
frustrate the establishment of a Jewish homeland, they were reopening
wounds that only Israel could heal.
Significantly, the creation of the state of Israel resulted in the develop­
ment of conditions under which Jews could express themselves in larger
numbers and in much stronger terms as Germany’s enemies. For a while
at least, Israel kept its distance from Germany. No diplomatic representa­
tives were exchanged.14 Germans could not easily visit Israel, and use of
the German language as well as the performance of German music were
banned there.15
Within the Jewish community, questions arose at the outset about the
reactions of the Jews in Western countries toward the victims destroyed
in the gas chambers. Over the centuries the dispersion of the Jews had a
functional utility: whenever some part of the Jewish community was
under attack, it depended on help from the other Jews. In the period of
the Nazi regime, this help did not come. Henceforth an insider could not

13. Alexander S. Kohanski, cd., The American Jewish Conference — Its Organization
and Proceedings of the First Session, August 29 to September 2, 1943 (New York, 1944),
pp. 80-81.
14. An Israeli mission was sent to West Germany for the purpose of selecting
goods for shipment as reparations to Israel. Israel itself received no Gemían mission.
The Israeli attitude toward Germany in international organizations was summarized
by a study group of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel and the United
Nations (New York, 1956), pp. 176, 198.
15. “Israel Backs Ban on Use of the Gemían Language,” Ihe New York Tina's,
January' 2, 1951, p. 4; “Israel Philharmonic Drops ‘Kulenspicgcl,'” ünd., December 9,
1952, p. 42.

1132 CONSEQUENCES
reflect deeply about his fate without coming to the conclusion that the
outsider had not done his all. “They were outside” wrote Dr. Rezso
Kasztner, “we were inside. They were not immediately affected; we were
the victims. They moralized, we feared death. They had sympathy for us
and believed themselves to be powerless. We wanted to live and believed
rescue had to be possible.”16 The Jewish catastrophe was attended by a
twofold paralysis: the Jews inside could not break out, the Jews outside
could not break in.
With the passage of time, the response of the entire Jewish community
to its massive loss became a pervasive problem. At the beginning there
was little memorialization. No special observances were held, no major
monuments were erected, and not many efforts were made to record the
meaning of Auschwitz and Treblinka. Little by little, some documents
were gathered and books were written, and after about two decades the
annihilation of the Jews was given a name: Holocaust.17
In the United States these sparse beginnings became a veritable out­
pouring of activity by the second half of the 1970s. Television programs
were presented, conferences held, prayers composed, and courses taught.
By executive order, the President’s Commission on the Holocaust was
established in 1978 and this advisory body was transformed by a law of
Congress into the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, charged
with creating a museum and drafting research and education programs.18
A major impetus for the surge of remembrance came from surv ivors, for
whom the preservation and dissemination of knowledge about the event
became a consuming interest. Encouraging those who wanted to tell
were those who wanted to be told, especially members of a new genera­
tion, most of them born after the war. This development, to be sure, was
accompanied by pronounced reservations in those segments of the Jewish
community who felt that Holocaust preoccupations and studies were

16. Dr. Rezso Kasztner (Rudolf Kasrner). “Der Bericht des jüdischen Remings-
komitees aus Budapest 1942-1945” (mimeographed), pp. 88-89. ln March 1957,
Kästner was killed by assassins in Tel Aviv tor his activities in Budapest. Gershon
Swet, "Rudolph Kästners Ermordung,” Aufbau (New York), March 22, 1957, pp. 1,
4. Criticism, let alone violence, directed at surviving leaders was rare.
17. See Gerd Korman, “ Die HokKaust in American Historical Writing,” Soaetas 2
(1972): 251-70, at 259-62. Several institutes devoted early attention to the subject,
notably the Y1VO Institute in New York City, the Centre de Documentation Juive
Conremporaine in Paris, and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. The latter is an official memo­
rial authorin'. See Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance (Yad Vashem) Law, 1953,
Sefcr Ha-Cbukkini, No. 132, August 28, 1953, p. 144.
18. Executive Order 12093 ot November 1, 1978, Federal Register, vol. 43,
p. 51377. Executive Order 12169 of October 26, 1979, Federal Register, vol. 44,
p. 62277. Public Law 96-388, October 7, 1980,94 Stat 1549, 36 USC 1401-8.

CONSEQUENCES 1133
replacing and sometimes obliterating the traditional focus on three thou­
sand years of Jewish history.19
Under the surface of the memorialization projects, the Holocaust was
invading the very core of Jewish consciousness, shaping and defining the
post-Holocaust Jew. The old religious community, still existing with its
rabbinate and synagogues, was being transformed into a community of
fate in which a Jew is anyone who, had he lived in 1942, would have been
eligible for death in a gas chamber. Yet, if the Nuremberg principle of
descent could thus subsist in a nonreligious self-definition, it has also
undermined the prewar assimilationist stance. The post-1945 Jew seldom
became a political or social Marrano. He would not apologize for his
existence, as Walther Rathenau had done when he called upon the Jews of
Germany to remove dieir remaining peculiarities,20 and if he had half-
Jewish children, he was not likely to consign them to the Christian faith
for the sake of their worldly prospects or out of concern for their physical
security.21
German reactions to the destruction process, once the deed was done,
were scarcely less complex. In one sense they were the exact opposite of
the Jewish tendency to derive an identification from the Holocaust —the
German aim was disassociation. Of all the terms used in postwar years
to describe the actions of the Nazi regime, the most telling is the all-
encompassing reference to the “past” (Vergangmheit).22 It encloses the
occurrence, disconnecting it from the present.
For several decades, reminders of a Jewish presence in Germany hardly
ever emerged in view. The casual observer could easily assume that Jews
had not lived in Germany for centuries. The land on which synagogues
had once stood was acquired from the Jewish communities in Nazi times,
and in the course of later construction it was visually Germanized. In
Vienna, where shields proclaim the historic importance of many build­
ings, two small houses in which Jews had been concentrated prior to their
deportation were unmarked. In Germany, Jewish cemeteries were repeat­
edly vandalized during the immediate postwar years.23

19. Robert Alter, “Deformations of the Holocaust,” Commentary, Februars· 1981,


pp. 48-54. Jacob Ncusncr, Stranger at Home (Chicago, 1981), pp. 61-96, par­
ticularly p. 81.
20. Walther Rathenau, Zur Kritik der Zeit, 4rh cd. (Berlin, 1912), p. 220.
21. Masarik and Chcnkin, “United States National Jewish Population Study,”
American Jewish Tear Book 74 (1973): 298.
22. The ubiquity of the term is illustrated by its use in the headlines of two articles
in a single issue of Die Zeit, May 15, 1981 (overseas edition), pp. 6, 16. Note also the
headline in Der Spiegel, Nr. 5, 1979, p. 17: “‘Holocaust:’ Die Vergangenheit kommt
zurück.”
23. Jack Raymond, “Germans Defacing Jewish Cemeteries,” The \’nv York limes,

1134 CONSEQUENCES
To be sure, the destruction of the Jews could not be blotted out en­
tirely, and hence there were manifold reactions in print. Some of these
words were exculpatory, from crude attempts to brand historical state­
ments about the event a lie24 to the resurrection of old notions about
Jewish world rule, criminality, and parasitism.25 In this manner, the deed
was denied or justified, but in the main it was disowned.

May 14, 1950, p. 6. See zkaAufbau (New York), June 30, 1950, p. 3; July 14, 1950,
pp. 20, 22; September 1, 1950, p. 3; November 2, 1951, p. 32; May 2, 1954, p. 26.
There were 1,700 Jewish cemeteries in West Germany. The leftover Jewish commu­
nin’ was not in a position to care for them. The Interior Ministry was prevailed upon
to assume financial responsibility for the upkeep of the graveyards. However, the
exercise of this responsibility required a new law, since the superv ision of “cultural”
matters is normally a prerogative of the provinces. A report issued in 1956 stated that
“this law is being prepared quietly in order to avoid unnecessary public debate.” Hans
Wallenberg, Report on Democratic Institutions in Germany (New York, 1956), p. 52.
Much later, the dead Jews appeared in jokes about Auschwitz and ashes. See Alan
Dundes and Thomas Hauschild, “Auschwitz Jokes,” Western Folklore 42 (1983): 249-
60.
24. “Wie viele Juden wurden wirklich ermordet? 6-Millioncn-Liigc endgültig
zusammengebrochen,” Deutsche National-Zeitung und Soldaten-Zeitung, March 3,
1967, p. 1.
25. Jack Ravmond, “Bonn Delay Seen on Claim Payment,” The Nen> York Times,
October 14, 1951, p. 29. In Austria field representatives of Jewry were believed to be
lurking in everv American occupation office. When the U.S. High Commissioner in
Vienna, Donnellv, refused at an Allied Control Council meeting to give uncondi­
tional approval to an Austrian amnesty measure for the benefit of wartime Nazis on
the ground that the Austrian government was proposing to indemnity ex-Nazis be­
fore giving consideration to the victims of Nazism, the chairman of the People's Party
and later Chancellor of Austria, Julius Raab, resorted to an attack upon “certain
emigrants” in the office of the High Commissioner. John MacCormac, “Vienna Is
Critical of U.S. Emigrants,'” the Neip York Times, June 8, 1952, p. 14. No such
“emigrants” were serving in the High Commissioner’s office. “Hs geht schon w ieder
los in Wien"Aufbau (New' York), June 13, 1952, p. 4; “Die Wiener Herze gegen CUS-
Emigranten,’” ibid., June 20, 1952, p. 9.
On allegations of ritual murders, see “Ritualmordschw indel in Memmingen,”
ibid., April 1, 1949, p. 3; “Ritualmordschvvindel in München,” ibid., September 9,
1949, p. 7; S. Wiesenthal, “Tiroler Ritualmord-Märchen — und die Kirche ändert
nichts daran,” ibid., May 11, 1950, p. 40; “Tiroler Rimalmord-Spiele — Neue Kontro­
verse um den Bischof Rusch,” ibid., June 1955, p. 5. On ritual murder legends in
Hungary, see Ferenc Nagy, Use Struggle behind the Iron Curtain (New York, 1948),
pp. 246-48; Eugene Dusch insky, “Hungary,” in Mever et al., The Jews in the Sinnet
Satellites, pp. 419-20, 25.
On charges of parasitism, see “Der Skandal von München: Antisemitismus wird
erlaubt —Auf Juden w ird geschossen? Aufbau (New' York), August 19, 1949, pp. 1-
2. The charge w as expressed also by the playwright Rainer Werner Fassbinder in “Der
Müll, die Stadt und der T<xi” (a recasting of the old themes of Jud Süss into a modem
setting), Stucke 3 (Frankfurt am Main, 1976), pp. 91-128. The publisher of this work
w'as Suhrkamp Verlag.

CON SEQUENCES 1135


Distributing guilt was a major undertaking, especially for as long as
men who had been deeply involved in the process were still in possession
of their physical health and intellectual powers, and before it could be
said that “That was another generation.” The following words were ex­
changed on April 18, 1946, before an international court, between a
German defense counsel and former Generalgouverneur Frank:
d r . s e i d l : Did you ever participate in the annihilation of the I ews ?
f ran k : I say “yes”; and the reason why I say “yes” is because, having
lived through 5 months of this trial, and particularly after having heard
the testimony of the witness Hoess, my conscience does not allow me
to throw the responsibility solely on these minor people. I myself have
never installed an extermination camp for Jews, or promoted the exis­
tence of such camps; but if Adolf Hitler personally laid that dreadful
responsibility on his people, then it is mine too, for we have fought
Jewry for years; and we have indulged in the most horrible utterances —
my own diary bears witness against me. Therefore, it is no more than
my duty to answer your question with “yes.” A thousand years will pass
and still this guilt of Germany will not have been erased.26
To Frank the destruction of the Jews was an act of world-historical pro­
portions, and he clearly saw himself as a major participant in this act. But
if he were called upon to answer for that participation, Germany as a
whole had to share his guilt.
The challenge that Frank had hurled at the tribunal could be broad­
ened still more. In fact, a German theologian was to make that attempt.
Late in 1945 a number of Lutheran churchmen met at Stuttgart and
issued a declaration that read in part as follows:
The council of the Evangelical Church in Germany welcomes to its
meeting of October 18 and 19, 1945, the representatives of the Ecu­
menical Council of Churches.
We are all the more grateful for this visit because we realize that we
are bound to our people not only in a community of suffering but also
in a solidarity of guilt. With heavy pain we say: Through us, unending
misfortune was brought to many countries and nations.
Among the signers of this declaration were such church dignitaries as
Wurm, Niemoller, and Asmussen. When the Catholic Church objected to
the guilt formulation, Asmussen explained that he could understand the
objection in the sense that
nobody may maintain that the guilt that Adolf Hitler and his tribunes
have shouldered upon themselves may be collected from the entire

26. Testimony by Frank, Trial of the Major War Criminals, XII, 13.

1136 CONSEQUENCES
German people. No international tribunal has the right before God
and man to do a thing like that. So far as that is concerned, there can be
no talk of collective guilt.
With weighty emphasis we must, however, stress the right of God
to pursue those secret connections that link Hider’s guilt and mine. If
the danger of misunderstanding were not so great, I should add that
God is in a position, and in my opinion willing, to shed light upon
those connections that link the murders of Heinrich Himmler and the
attitude of an ordinary' American citizen. For there can be no doubt
about this: Although every man is responsible for his own deeds, as
certain that mankind is one kind is the certainty that this guilt is an­
chored forever in all mankind. In Adam we have all died.27
The theologian Asmussen transformed a collective guilt into a universal
one. In his explanatory' hands guilt became indistinguishable from life
itself.
Widening the imputation of responsibility was not as successful as
reconcentrating accountability on Frank and his colleagues. Much to the
discomfiture of former Nazi party functionaries and SS men, who felt that
they' were being singled out for an action that had required the participa­
tion of many a respected bureaucrat, industrialist, diplomat, or army
officer, an early' postwar school of German historians represented die
Nazi phenomenon as a usurpation of power that had been imposed on
the German people. The literature of these historians was concentrated
on causal analysis, particularly on the elections of 1932. It emphasized the
repression of German political opposition and portrayed the high point
of the anti-Jcwish drive as November 1938, the night of broken glass.
By the 1960s and 1970s the Germans were economically prosperous,
but their lives lacked luster. On occasion, subtle tensions would surface
between Germans and non-Germans and a stiffing atmosphere would
separate German fathers from their sons. Then, in 1985, Chancellor Kohl
made an attempt to lead the Germans out of their psychological desert.
His aim was to be achieved with a symbolic act: the visit of the president
of the United States to a typical German military' cemetery on May 8,
exactly forty' years after the end of the war. The chosen burial ground
was at Bitburg. It contained the graves of about 2,000 men, including 47
SS men.28
The proposed visit was a problem for the American Jews and conse­
quently also tor U.S. Secretary' of State Shultz. If the president went to

27. Or. Hans Asmussen, “Die Stuttgarter Erklärung,” Die Wandlung (Heidel­
berg), 1948, pp. 17-27.
28. On Birburg, see Geolfrey Hartman, ed., Bitburq in Moral and Political Perspec­
tive (Bloomington, Ind., 1986).

CONSEQUBNCBS 1137
Bitburg, thought Shultz, he would be ‘■‘hitting the most sensitive people |
at the most sensitive time, in the nation about which they were most I
sensitive.” The Secretary attempted to change President Reagan's itiner- I
ary, but Chancellor Kohl persevered, first writing to Reagan, and then
telephoning him. In the call Kohl said that his government would fall if
the president did not make the visit. That day, Elie Wiesel, the survivor
who chaired the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, publicly urged the
president not to go to that place. Kohl prevailed, but at a price.29 To the
world, the “past” was momentarily revealed more glaringly than before.
In Germany itself, the episode brought forth consternation and confu­
sion, but only for a while.
The generation of the perpetrators was dying out. So long as these
contemporaries of the Nazi era were occupying positions of influence, so
long as they were walking in the streets, discussion was still muted. Yet
the old mentality, with all the rationalizations of the Nazi regime, was
passing from the scene.30 The moment arrived for casting out long-held
taboos, for research, writing, publication, and reflection.31 Fifty years
after the conclusion of the war, the Germans were freeing themselves.
The Allied coalition fought the Second World War because it had been
challenged and driven into retreat by the Axis powers. The principal
objective of the Allies was to reconquer lost ground and to win the con­
test. All else was secondary. Their effort to emerge victorious included
neither an aim to destroy any segment of the German population nor a
plan to save any part of Germany’s victims. The postwar punishment of
perpetrators was largely a consequence of afterthoughts. The liberation of
the survivors was almost entirely a byproduct of victory. The Allies could
harmonize with their war effort all sorts of denunciations of the Germans,
but there was no disposition to deviate from military goals for the deliv­
erance of the Jews. In that sense the destruction of the Jews presented
itself as a problem with which the Allies could not effectively deal.
During the war the rescue of dying Jewry interfered with the doctrine
of victory first. After the war the rectifications in favor of Jewry conflicted
with the attempts that both East and West were carrying on to woo the
occupied German power sphere. Thus there developed from the begin­
ning an ambiguity in the Allied position. The condemnations of persecu­
tion, the freedom propaganda, and the expressions of sympathy for the

29. George P. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph (New York, 1993), pp. 539-60.
30. See Gcrda Ledcrcr, “Wic antiscmitisch sind die Deutschen?” in Christine
Kulkc and Gerda Lederer, cds., Dcr gewobnlicbe Antisemitismus (Patfenweile, 1994k
pp. 19-39, particularly survey data indicating anti-Semitic responses correlated with
age, on p. 29.
31. See Walter H. Pehle, “Verschweigen oder publizieren?” Mapaztti fur I.itrmtur
und Politik, April 1995, pp. 21 -36.

1138 CONSBQUENCES
oppressed were hedged in by reservations that preserved more basic Al­
lied interests. These reservations were responsible for the functional
blindness that afflicted the Allies during decisive moments of the Jewish
catastrophe.
The repressive pattern manifested itself primarily in a refusal to recog­
nize either the special character of German action or the special identity of
the Jewish victims. Examples of the obscuration of the German destruc­
tion process are the periods of total silence, extending particularly from
1941 through 1942; the subsequent generality of language, such as the
profuse but exclusive employment in the three-power Moscow Declara­
tion of descriptive terms on the order of “brutalities,” “atrocities,” “mas­
sacres,” “mass executions,” and “monstrous crimes”;32 the constant em­
phasis in the literature and in speeches upon “concentration camps,” often
including the cpitomization of Dachau and Buchenwald but rarely em­
bracing any mention of Auschwitz, let alone the faraway camps of Tre-
blinka, Sobibor, and Bclzec; the tendency in public statements to link the
Jewish fate with the fate of other peoples, such as the reference in a
declaration by President Roosevelt to “the deportation of Jews to their
death in Poland or Norwegians and French to their death in Germany”;33
and finally the lawyers1 invocation of the “act of state” doctrine to show
that at least some of the German measures against Jewry were nothing
special — they were “acts of government” by the “authorities of the Ger­
man state”34 35 or at worst “governmental persecution . . . under the mu­
nicipal law of another state.”33
Closely linked to the obliteration of the German destruction process is
the disappearance of the Jewish victim. In the one case the annihilation
phase is not fully recognized; in the other it descends upon an amorphous
group of people. The aforementioned Moscow Declaration, which bears
the heavy imprint of Churchill's hand and which also carries the signa­
tures of Roosevelt and Stalin, managed to omit any reference to the
Jewish disaster. This document, drafted in October 1943, contains the
public warning that “Germans who take part in the wholesale shooting of
Italian officers or in the execution of French, Dutch, Belgian or Nor­

32. Statement signed by Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, released to the press by
the Department of State, November 1, 1943, in report bv Justice Jackson to the
President on International Conference on Military 7rials, Department of State Publica­
tion 3080, 1949, pp. 11 -12.
33. Statement by the President released to the press by the White House,
March 24, 1944, ibid., pp. 12-13.
34. Justice Jackson in International Conference on Military Trials, p. 333.
35. Judge I .earned Hand in Bernstein v. Van Hevgen Freres Societe Anonvme
(1947), 163 F 2d 246. Privately, Learned Hand expressed reservations also about the
Nuremberg trials. Gerald Gunther, foamed Hand (New York, 1994), p. 547.

CONSEQUENCES 1139
wegian hostages or of Cretan peasants, or who have shared in slaughters
inflicted on the people of Poland or in the territories of the Soviet Union >
which are now being swept clear of the enemy, will know that they will be
brought back to the scene of their crimes and judged on the spot bv the
peoples whom they have outraged.”36
In this declaration the Jews are among the “French hostages”; they are
a component part of the “people of Poland”; they are lost in the “territo­
ries of the Soviet Union.” The Western and Soviet governments alike
were able to take from the Jews their special identity by the simple device
of switching classifications. Thus the Jews of German nationality' became
Germans, the Jews of Polish nationality were converted into Poles, the
Jews of Hungarian nationality into Hungarians, and so on.37
Some of the most fantastic legal consequences flowed from this legalis­
tic interplay. For example, in 1942 Home Secretary' Morrison replied to
an inquiry' by a member of Parliament that Jews in England who were
rendered stateless by German decree would still be treated as German
nationals because the United Kingdom government did not recognize the
competence of an enemy state in time of war to deprive its citizens of their
nationality. In Berlin the Foreign Office legal expert Albrecht read about
this development in a Transocean news report and wrote, “Good.”38 In
1944 British military authorities in Belgium interned about 2,000 Jews as
“enemy aliens.” When Sidney Silverman, M.P., intervened with the Earl
of Halifax in Washington, he was told that the measure was dictated by
“military necessity.”39 In the Soviet Union prominent Jews about to be
purged had to expect as a matter of course to be accused of “spying” for
the Germans.40 Some 15,000 Hungarian Jewish forced laborers taken by

36. Statement by Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, International Conference on


Military Trials, pp. 11-12.
37. In the United States the Office of War Information (OWI) as a matter of policy
refrained from mentioning Jews as a special group of victims. Verbatim statement bv
Dr. Leon A. Kubowitsky (World Jewish Congress) in Kohanski, cd., American Jen’isb
Conference, First Session, p. 119. The OWI was headed by Elmer Davis. The domestic
branch was under Gardner Cowles, policy and development under Archibald Mac-
Lcish, the overseas branch under Robert Sherwood.
38. Transocean report, dated July 31,1942, with notation by Albrecht, NG-2 111.
39. Dr. Maurice L. Pcrlzwcig (chairman, British section of World Jewish Con­
gress) in Kohanski, cdAmerican Jewish Conference, Second Session, p. 214. The treat­
ment of denationalized Jews in British, South African, American, French, and Swiss
courts is discussed by H. Lautcrpacht in “The Nationality' of Denationalized Persons,"
Jewish Tear Book of International Law, 1948, pp. 164-85. Article 44 of the Geneva
Convention of 1949 on Civilian Persons in War states that a belligerent in its ow n
territory' shall nor treat as enemy aliens “refugees who do not, in fact, enjov the
protection of any government.” Department of State Publication 3938, 1950.
40. Sec, for example, the case of the Red Army generals in W. G. Krivitskv, In

CONSBQUBNCBS
the Red Army on the eastern front did not return home. They remained
in captivity as “prisoners of war”41
The general inclination for obscuration was maintained over a period
of decades. The Jewish fate was omitted from textbooks, encyclopedias,
historiography, plays, and film.42 A major change in this posture was
signaled bv President Carter in 1978 when he established a commission
to memorialize the Holocaust. There was an element of rectification in
this act, a reaching out for the millions of dead whose very identity as Jews
had not been readily recognized when they were being subjected to de­
struction.43 But no sooner had the commission met when questions were
raised by observers about memorializing only the Jewish victims. The
Holocaust, it was argued, had struck a wide variety of groups, particularly
the Slavs but also such concentration camp inmates as homosexuals.44
One critic finally characterized the insistence of the Jews on their special

Stalin's Secret Service (New York and London, 1939), p. 212. The author was chief of
Red Army intelligence in Western Europe. See also the case of Wiktor Alter and
H. Ehrlich, Jewish Socialists from Poland shot in the USSR after organizing an
international Jewish anti-Fascist committee on the ground that they had appealed to
the Soviet armies “to conclude an immediate peace with Germany.” Bogomolov
(Soviet Ambassador in London) to Rasziiiski (Polish Foreign Minister), March 31,
1943, in Government of Poland/Polish Embassy in London, Polisb-SmHet Relatiotis,
1918-1943, p. 180, and preceding correspondence on pp. 178-79. During the pe-
ruxl 1940-41 the Soviets also practiced the deportation of unwanted Jews of German
nationality to German or Gcrman-<xcupied territory. Victor Kravchenko, I Chose
Freedom (New York, 1946), pp. 210, 217, 264; Alexander Weissberg, The Accused
(New York, 1951), pp. 501-5. On the approach of an American court toward the
extradition of a Jew to Germany, see In re Normano, 1934, 7 F. Supp. 329.
41. The figure is given bv the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry in its report
of April 1946, Cmd. 6808, p. 59. A somewhat higher estimate is supplied bv Du-
schinskv, “Hungary,” in Meyer et al., The Jews in the Soviet Satellites, pp. 392-95.
42. Omissions from textbooks are discussed by Henry Friedlander, “Publications
on the Holocaust,” in Franklin Lirtell and Hubert Locke, eds., The German Church
Struggle and the Holocaust (Detroit, 1974), pp. 69-94, 296-303. See also Gerd
Korman, “Silence in the American Textbooks,” Tad Vashem Studies 8 (1970): 183-
202. The major general encyclopedias published for three and a half decades after
1945 contain no entries under the headings Auschwitz, Trcblinka, or the subject of
the Holocaust. Note also the absence of the very word Jew in the play about the
Frankfurt trial of Auschwitz perpetrators, by Peter Weiss (Die Ermittlung, Hamburg,
1969), and in the documentary film about Auschwitz and other camps, Night and
Fog, made in France in 1955 under the direction of Alain Resnais.
43. See the text of remarks by President Carter, September 27, 1979, Office of the
White House Press Secretary.
44. Note particularly the letter by John Cardinal Krol (Archbishop of Phila­
delphia) to Dr. Irving Greenberg, Director, President’s Commission on the Holo­
caust, April 2, 1979. In the files of the Commission. On the argument for the inclu­
sion of homosexuals, see Frank Rector, The Nazi Fxtermmatwn of Homosexuals (New
York, 1981).

CONSEQUENCES 1141
catastrophe as a “curious elitism.”45 As so many times before in their
history, the Jews had received a privilege that was becoming a burden.

THETRIALS
The Allied leaders began to think about the postwar treatment of their
Axis opponents in the fall of 1943. At that time thinking was confined to
the possible proceedings against the top strata of the Axis leadership.
These men, central targets of Allied resentment, were to suffer death. The
only question open for consideration was the method of implementation:
summary execution or execution after trial.
During the Moscow Conference on War Criminals in October 1943,
American Secretary of State Hull declared himself in favor of a “drum­
head court-martial.” He did not see why the Axis “outlaws” should have
the benefit of a “fancy trial.” The Soviet delegation agreed with “loud
exclamations of approval.” British Foreign Secretary Eden dissented; he
thought that “all the legal forms” should be observed.1
Much later a law-and-order movement began in the U.S. War Depart­
ment under Secretary Stimson and Assistant Secretar}' McCloy. Although
President Roosevelt personally favored shooting, he appointed one of his
assistants, Judge Samuel Rosenman, to “study the question for him.” On
January 18, 1945, Stimson, Rosenman, and Attorney General Biddle
agreed that legal action should be taken.2
The Soviets, in the meantime, also veered to a policy of trial. A sur­
prised Churchill reported to Roosevelt on October 22,1944, that Stalin
had suddenly adopted an “ultra-respectable line.” The Soviet dictator
felt that the world might draw the wrong conclusions from a summary
procedure.3
When both the Americans and the Russians had switched their posi­
tions, the British turned too. They were now against a trial. In a lengthy
aide-mémoire handed by Sir Alexander Cadogan to Judge Rosenman on
April 23, 1945, the British official recorded his anxiety that the whole

45. Theodore Ziolkowski, “Versions of the Holocaust” Sewanee Review (Fall


1979): 676-85, on p. 683.
1. Cordell Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull (New York, 1948), vol. 2, pp. 1289-
91.
2. Henry Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War (New
York, 1948), pp. 584-86. The Stimson movement w'as in response to a Morgcnthau
proposal for summary shooting. The full text of the Morgcnthau plan has not been
published. In his book Germany Is Our Problem, Morgcnthau docs nor even make
passing reference to the treatment of the Gemían perpetrators.
3. Churchill to Roosevelt, October 22, 1944, in Winston S. Churchill, Ihe Secotul
World War, vol. 6, Triumph and Tragedy (Boston, 1953), p. 240.

1142 CONSEQUENCES
procedure would be regarded as a “put-up job” that it would be “exceed­
ingly long,” and that in the confusion attending an amalgamation of Rus­
sian, American, and British ideas the defense might even score some
“unexpected point.”4
The British reluctance to try the prospective defendants before execut­
ing them was soon overcome by American arguments.5 In the following
summer months representatives of the United States, Great Britain, and
Russia met in London to draw up a charter for an international military
tribunal that would tty those “major criminals” whose offenses had no
particular geographic localization and who, in the words of the wartime
Moscow Declaration, were to be “punished by joint decision of the Gov­
ernments of the Allies.”6 The chief problem now was to define what was
meant by “offenses.” The prospective “major criminals” were responsible
for manv deeds across the lands of Europe. How, in that context, were the
four delegations going to handle the destruction of the European Jews?
For a period of two years preceding the Charter Conference in Lon­
don, the Jewish leadership in the United States had been concerning itself
precisely with that question. To the Jews the problem of definition was
paramount. An interim commission established during the first session of
the American Jewish Conference in 1943 stated succinctly that the trials
were “not a matter of vengeance or of punishment of the guilty in the
ordinary sense”; they were a matter of “practical” import. The non­
punishment of the Germans for their crimes against an entire people
would “signify the acquiescence of the democratic nations in the act
of Jewish extermination.” Already there were disquieting reports from
German-occupied territories of “infection” with the anti-Jewish “virus.”
That “infection” had to be expunged, and a “warning” would have to be
issued to “other countries, on other continents, that are trying to intro­
duce the Nazi racial theories and methods in public life.” The commission
therefore recommended to the State Department that annihilation of a
people, including all acts whereby this aim was sought to be accom­
plished before and during the war, in Axis territories and occupied areas,
be made a punishable crime.7
For the Allies the concept of Jews killed as Jews posed unbridgeable
difficulties. McCloy, wrestling with the problem, could muster only the
thought that persecutions of Jews might be deemed to have been a “mili­
tary” measure designed to effect Germany’s war aims. That way he could
4. Cadogan to Roscnman, April 23, 1945, in International Conferetice on Military
Trials, pp. 18-20. Cadogan was Permanent Undersecretary in the Foreign Office.
5. See American memorandum of April 30, 1945, in ibid., pp. 28-38, 39n.
6. Ibid., p. 22n.
7. Report of the Commission on Post-War in American Jewish Conference, Report
of Interim Committee (New York, 1944), pp. 90-91,98-99, 106, 123-25.

THE TRIALS 1143


accommodate the Jewish concern.8 The Soviets were even farther re­
moved from the issue. Their interest in the facts themselves was limited,
and they had not probed much to uncover information about the struc­
ture and nature of the German apparatus. Thus a list of prospective war
criminals prepared in the USSR during 1944 lacked conceptional as well
as territorial depth. It included names of military officers on the eastern
front and identified some civilian officials serving in the East. Also recog­
nized were a few members of Einsatzkommandos, and specific mention
was made of Kommando 1005. Not mentioned, however, were any per­
sonalities in death camps, let alone bureaucratic decision makers in Ber­
lin. Nothing at all was said in Soviet memoranda about such distant
questions as actions against Jews in Germany or farther west. For the
Soviets there was no pattern of anti-Jewish activities calling for special
consideration.9
When the conferees met in London during the summer of 1945, they
discussed three kinds of offenses. The first was “crimes against peace.” To
the American and British delegations, this was the “essence” of their
complaint.10 The American chief representative, Justice Jackson, was par­
ticularly concerned with this charge. As Attorney General of the United
States in 1940, Jackson had advised President Roosevelt that the United
States would not be violating its obligations as a neutral by extending aid
to the Allies. Now Jackson was determined to show that the United
States had not done an illegal thing. He wanted to justify American action
on the ground that German aggression had violated everybody’s rights.
Here in London he wanted to establish German responsibility in the only
way that was still open to him: by declaring the planners of aggression
personally culpable for their deeds.11 No conceivable accusation could
have been more remotely applicable to anti-Jewish acts, and in a sense no
indictment could have done more to overshadow and obscure them.

8. McCloy to Colonel William Chanlcr, December 5, 1944, cited by Bradley


Smith, The Road to Nuremberg (New York, 1981), p. 94. See also a similar line of
thought in memorandum by Edmund M. Morgan (Acting Dean, Harvard Law
School) in reply to questions by Major General John M. Weir (Deputy Chief, Judge
Advocate General), January 12, 1945, in Bradley Smith, cd., The American Road to
Nuremberg: The Documentary Record, 1944-1945 (Stanford, 1982), pp. 105-7.
9. Report by Office of Strategic Scrviccs/Rcscarch and Analysis Branch, No.
1988. 1, April 30, 1945, Harry S. Truman Library, Papers of Samuel I. Rosenman.
The list of657 names (43 of them Finns) is on pp. 66-100 of the report. Notable is a
trial in Kharkov, December 1943, in which the prosecution brought up gas vans. The
victims were described as “peaceful Soviet people.” Pp. 39-41 of the report.
10. Statement by Sir David Maxwell Fyfc in verbatim minutes of Guidon Con­
ference, International Conference on Military Trials, p. 305.
11. Jackson to President Truman, June 6, 1945, ibid., pp. 42-52. Jackson m
verbatim minutes of London Conference, ibid., pp. 299,383-85.

CONSEQUENCES
The second charge was of primary interest to the Russians and French.
It dealt with war crimes. In its final form this category of offenses was
defined to
include, but not be limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to
slave labor or for any other purpose of civilian population of or on oc­
cupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons
on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property,
wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justi­
fied by military necessity.12 13
War crimes have long been recognized as punishable under interna­
tional law, and any definition of them would have covered the vast major­
ity of German actions against the Jews. The very extent of the destruc­
tion process, its geographic range and administrative thoroughness, had
trapped the perpetrators in the vise of this law. The killing of the Jews in
the guise of antipartisan operations was a war crime. The shooting of
Jewish Red Army men in a German Stalag was a war crime. The gassing
of Reich Jews on Polish soil at Auschwitz was a war crime. Under the
traditional law of war, almost the entire destruction process between
1939 and 1945 consisted of acts for which the perpetrators could be
condemned, and for many of these acts the}' could be condemned to
death. Yet there remained important segments of German activity' to
which the law of war could not apply. It did not automatically cover anti-
Jewish measures wholly performed within Axis territories, nor did it
reach the prewar decrees.
The four delegations, though satisfied themselves, had not vet solved
the problem for the Jews. The two categories of offenses did not embrace
everything the Germans had done. Conceivably some of the '■''major crim­
inals” might even escape conviction for their acts. Moreover, no special
deterrent had been erected to prevent “other countries, on other conti­
nents,” from introducing a destructive regime into their public life. The
destruction of a minority on home territory was still legal, even when
carried to an extreme. Confronting this situation, the Anglo-American
delegates were faced with a dilemma. They wanted to remove the limita­
tion upon the jurisdiction of the proposed tribunal,12 they wanted to get
Streicher,14 but in this sphere of human activity they did not want to make
new law.
In attempting to resolve the issue, the Anglo-American representatives
set up a series of acts that could be recognized as criminal if they were a
part or a product of the “conspiracy” to commit an aggression or a war
12. Text of charter, August 8, 1945, ibid., p. 423. Italics added.
13. Sec note submitted by Jackson to other delegations, ibid., p. 394.
14. Statement by Sir David Maxwell Fvfe, ibid., p. 301.

THE TRIALS 1145


crime. In short, this was not an independent category of offenses; it had
to have a connection either with preparing for an illegal war or with
fighting a war illegally. The chief of the British delegation, Sir David
Maxwell Fyfe, explained the matter this way:
The preparation would in my view include such acts as the terroriza­
tion and murder of their own Jewish population in order to prepare for
war; that is, preparatory acts inside the Reich in order to regiment the
State for aggression and regimentation. This would be important po­
litically for us because the ill-treatment of the Jews has shocked the
conscience of our people and, I am sure, of the other United Nations;
but we should consider it at some stage, and I thought it was covered
by this act in the preparation of this design. I just wanted to make it
clear that we had this in mind because I have been approached by
various Jewish organizations and should like to satisfy them if possible.
I have in mind only such general treatment of the Jews as showed itself
as part of the general plan of aggression.15
Justice Jackson, concurring in this view, pointed out in unmistakable
language why there could be no other basis for jurisdiction:
It has been a general principle from time immemorial that the internal
affairs of another government are not ordinarily our business; that is to
say, the way Germany treats its inhabitants, or any other country treats
its inhabitants, is not our affair any more than it is the affair of some
other government to interpose itself in our problems. . . . We have
some regrettable circumstances at times in our own country in which
minorities are unfairly treated. We think that it is justifiable that we
interfere or attempt to bring retribution to individuals or to states only
because the concentration camps and the deportations were in pur­
suance of a common plan or enterprise of making an unjust war in
which we became involved. We see no other basis on which we are
justified in reaching the atrocities which were committed inside Ger­
many, under German law, or even in violation of German law, by
authorities of the German state.16

15. Statement by Sir David Maxwell Fyfe in verbatim minutes of London Con­
ference, ibid., p. 329. Sec also his statement on p. 361. Sir David was attorney general
in the Conservative government.
16. Justice Jackson in verbatim minutes, ibid., pp. 331, 333. See also Jackson to
Truman, June 6, 1945, ibid., pp. 48, 50-51. The first American draft, prepared bv
representatives of the State, War, and Justice Departments in conference with Justice
Jackson, referred specifically to acts which were unconnected with any other crime
but which were in “violation of the domestic law of any Axis [sower." Narrowly
construed, only “excesses” would have been covered by such a provision. Moa· con­
troversial would have been the contention that in Gemían constitutional law the

CONSEQUENCES
After fifteen drafts the tribunal was therefore invested with power to
try defendants for
Crimes against humanity: namely, murder, extermination, en­
slavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against
any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecutions on
political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection
with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not
in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.17
The London delegates were unwilling to recognize the destruction of
European Jewry as a crime suigcneris. In the end they were not even able
to cover the prewar anti-Jewish decrees under the count of aggression.
During the trial the prosecution failed completely to establish any con­
nection between these decrees and the “conspiracy” to make war.18 The
“crimes against humanity” were deadwood.
About three months after the conclusion of the agreement, the trial

Hitler regime rested entirely upon illegal foundations. For a discussion ot the latter
point, see testimony by Prof Herman Jahrrcis, Case No. 3, tr. p. 4253 ft. Jahrrcis
makes a distinction between “illegality” and “illegitimacy.” Overriding w as the view­
point, expressed by Secretary of War Stimson in a memorandum dated September 9,
1944, that nor ev en “excesses” could be dealt with by an “external court.” Stimson and
Bund\', On Active Service p. 585.
17. Text of agreement and charter, August 8, 1945, signed by Justice Robert
Jackson for the United States, Judge Robeit Falco for France, Lord Chancellor Jovvitt
for Great Britain, and Maj. Gen. Nikitchcnko and Prof. A. Trainin for the USSR, with
protocol containing correction, dated October 6, 1945, International Cotiference on
Military irials, pp. 423,429.
18. Judgment of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, Trial of the
Major War Criminals, XXII, p. 498. The French delegation had suggested that per­
secutions be defined as an independent crime. See French draft and explanation by
Prof Andre Gros in International Conference on Military irials, pp. 293, 360. The
French government had already proposed during the killing of the Armenians in
World War I that in v iew of these “crimes of Turkey against humanity,” the Allied
governments should announce publicly that all members of the Ottoman government
and those of their agents who were implicated in the massacres would be held person­
ally responsible for their acts. See American Ambassador in France (Sharp) to Secre­
tary of State, May 28, 1915, enclosing French note of May 24, Foreign Relations of the
United States, 1V15, Suppl., p. 981. The warning w as duly delivered by the American
Ambassador in Constantinople. Morgenthau to Secretary' of State, June 18, 1915,
ibtd., p. 982. French delegate Gros did not think that the prosecution would be able
to prove that the anti-Jewish persecutions had been inflicted in pursuit of aggression.
Statement by Gros, International Cotiference on Military Trials, p. 361. The Soviet
delegates were indifferent to the entire issue. They w ere preoccupied w ith procedural
problems such as the location of the proposed tribunal, etc. The principal Soviet
delegate, Maj. Gen. Nikitchcnko, took the view that the “chief war criminals” had
“already been convicted” and that their “conviction” had already been “announced”
by the Moscow' declaration. Sec his statement in verbatim minutes, ibid., pp. 104-5.

THE TRIALS 1147


began in Nuremberg before an international military tribunal.19 Most of
the defendants, most of the exhibits, and most of the witnesses were
produced by the Americans.20 The chief defendant was Goring. From the
party the prosecution had selected Hess, Ley, and Streicher. The ministers
included Schacht, Funk, Frick, Ribbentrop, and von Papen. There were
two ranking officials of the central bureaucracy: Kaltenbrunner of the
RSFiA and Ministerialdirektor Fritzsche of the Propaganda Ministry.
The armament and labor mobilization machinery was represented by
Speer and Sauckel. In the military the choice had fallen upon Keitel and
Jodi, as well as Raeder and Doenitz. In addition, there were five territorial
chiefs: von Schirach (Vienna), von Neurath (Protektorat), Frank (Gene­
ralgouvernement), Rosenberg (Eastern Territories), and Seyss-Inquart
(Netherlands).21
Although the selection of the defendants betrayed a definite emphasis
on the charge of aggression, the great bulk of them had been heavily
implicated in actions against the Jews. There was no longer any way of
hiding these actions. Too many copies had been made of too many re­
ports, and in the closing phase of the war they could not be destroyed in
time. Now this secret correspondence was introduced, item by item, to
the judges.22 “My own diary bears witness against me,” said Frank as he
surveyed the situation and saw that he was doomed.23 The crushing writ­
ten evidence was reinforced by oral testimony from former subordinates
of the defendants, such as Staatssekretäre Biihler and Steengracht and the
SS men Ohlendorf, Wisliceny, Höttl, Höss, and Pohl. The sight of these

19. The judges, as well as the prosecutors, were drawn from the four powers.
Nikitchenko now sat on the bench.
20. Statement by Jackson, International Conference on Military Trials, p. 343. On
Soviet unpreparedness, see statement by Nikitchenko, ibid., p. 213.
21. Indictment in Trial of the Major War Criminals, 1,68-79. Industry was to have
been represented by Gustav Krupp von Bohlen and Halbach. He was judged too ill to
stand trial.
22. The prosecution had assembled for the tribunal the following document se­
ries: EC, L, M, PS, R, RF, UK, and USSR.
23. Testimony by Frank, Trial of the Major War Criminals, XII, 13. Rudolf Hess
complained that everybody was looking at him with “strange, glassy eyes.” Testimony
by Hess, ibid., XXII, 370-71. The German Labor Front leader Lev committed sui­
cide. He left a note in which he explained that he had a new solution to the Jewish
problem. To remove the suspicion that he was advancing the solution for personal
reasons, he had decided to kill himself. The Nazis, said Lev, had gone too far. “This is
no criticism of my dead Führer,” he continued, for the Führer “is too great and too
noble to be tainted by a passing mistake.” Ley was now worried that the triumphant
Jews would go too far. That would be the same mistake. His plan consisted of a
“conciliation” in which the returning Jews and the old anti-Semites would form a
committee to make peace. Suicide statement by Dr. Ley found in his cell, October 25,
1945, after discovery ofthe body, in Nazi Conspiracy and Agression, MI, 740-48.

1148 CONSBQUENCES
men provoked consternation in the defense, and when Himmler’s own
favored general, Obergruppenführer von dem Bach-Zelewski, testified
for the prosecution, the prisoners were unanimous in calling him a
Schwein.2*
The defense did not have much to expect. Its arguments were desper­
ate. Notwithstanding their high positions in the machinery of destruc­
tion, the accused claimed ignorance: they did not know that Jewry was
being annihilated. Von Schirach knew nothing.24 25 Funk knew nothing.26
Keitel knew nothing.27 Jodi knew nothing.28 Kaltenbrunner knew noth­
ing.29 30 Insofar as any of them had taken part in the destruction process,
that participation was innocent. No one except Streicher blamed the Jews
anymore. (Streicher, after getting into an argument with his own defense
counsel, would not relinquish his assertion that the Jews were practicing
ritual murder.)50 Yet all the defendants had an excuse for their behavior:
thev acted under orders, and the man who gave the orders was Adolf
Hitler.
How could one man give so many orders to so many people? “The
Führer,” explained Streicher, “had such a power of hypnotic suggestion
that the entire people believed in him.”31 Why, then, could no one peti­
tion Hitler? Answer: “The Führer could not be influenced.”32 Streicher’s
explanation was couched in psychological terms. Speer enlarged upon the
theory in the language of engineering. To him, the totalitarian state was
like a telephone exchange; it could be served and dominated by a single
will. Earlier dictators had needed highly qualified assistants, but modern
technology had dispensed with them. The communication system had
“mechanized” subordinate leadership and had made it into an “uncritical
recipient of orders.”33
The defendants had not meant to harm die Jews. Schacht was trying to
help them emigrate.34 Streicher was a Zionist.35 Von Schirach believed

24. Ott-the-rccord comments recorded bv the prison psychologist G. M. Gilbert


in his Nuremberg Diary (New York, 1947), pp. 113-14.
25. Testimony by von Schirach, Trial of the Aiajor War Criminals, XIV, 487.
26. Testimony by Funk, ibiä., XXII, 387.
27. Testimony by Keitel, ibid., XI, 594.
28. Testimony by Jodi, ibid., XV, 295, 331-33.
29. Testimony by Kaltenbrunner, ibid., XI, 275. Also, comments bv Doenitz,
Keitel, and Ribbentrop in prison, Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary, pp. 45-46.
30. Testimony by Streicher, Trial of tlx Major War Criminals, XII, 306-7,336-37.
31. Testimony by Streicher, ibid., p. 322.
32. Ibid., p. 324.
33. Testimony by Speer, ibid., XXII, 406.
34. Testimony by Schacht, Und., p. 389.
35. Testimony by Streicher, ibid., XII, 384.

THE TRIALS
that the deportations from Vienna to Poland were “really in the interests
of Jewry.”36
Above all, the defendants were not alone in their deed; they had merely
been singled out. Fritzsche felt that he was a stand-in for Goebbels.37
Kaltenbrunner asserted that he had taken the place of the Reichsfuhrer-
SS. He was completely innocent. The guilty ones were the dead Himmler,
the assassinated Heydrich, and the missing Muller. The line of command
was really Himmler-Muller-Eichmann. Kaltenbrunner had nothing to do
with the Jews.38 Von Schirach, somewhat like Kaltenbrunner, was prone
to ascribe exclusive responsibility to subordinates.39 Hess reminded the
tribunal that the Nazis were not the first to have established concentra­
tion camps; the British had erected them during the war with the Boers.40
When Streicher was asked whether any publication other than his Stiir-
mer had treated the Jewish question in an anti-Semitic way, he replied:

Anti-Semitic publications have existed in Germany for centuries. A


book I had, written by Dr. Martin Luther, was, for instance, confis­
cated. Dr. Martin Luther would very probably sit in the defendants’
dock today, if this book had been taken into consideration by the
Prosecution. In the book The Jews and Their Lies, Dr. Martin Luther
writes that the Jews are a serpent’s brood and one should burn down
their synagogues and destroy them.41

In constructing their defense, the accused were evidently reaching be­


yond the tribunal to address the whole world. Even so, they knew that
they could not ward off the end.
The trial ended on October 1, 1946. The sentences imposed by the
judges and the extent to which the destruction of the Jews was noted in
the judgment may be seen in Table 11-2. The pattern of sentences con­
tained a few anomalies. Schacht could not be convicted of crimes against
humanity because his administration of the expropriatory exchange con­
trols took place entirely before the war. Von Neurath, on the other hand,
could not escape punishment for his enforcement of anti-Jewish measures
in Prague because the tribunal was acting under the assumption that the

36. Testimony by von Schirach, ibid., XIV, 431, 508-10.


37. Final plea by defense counsel Dr. Fritz, ibid., XIX, 350.
38. Testimony by Kaltenbrunner, ibid., XXII, 378-81. Argument by Dr. Gawlik
(defense counsel for the SD), ibid., pp. 36-40, particularly p. 39.
39. Testimony by von Schirach on deportations in 1941 and arriv al of Hungarian
Jews in 1944, ibid., XIV, 416-17, 511. The subordinates involved were Dr. Dell-
briigge and RR Dr. Fischer.
40. Testimony by Hess, ibid., XXII, 371.
41. Testimony by Streicher, ibid., XII, 318.

1150 CONSEQUENCES
TABLE 11-2
JUDGMENTS OF THE INTERNATIONAL MILITARY TRIBUNAL

ANTI-JEWISH
CONVICTED ACTION AN
OF CRIMES APPARENT
AGAINST FACTOR IN
DEFENDANT SENTENCE HUMANITY CONVICTION

Goring Death X X
Hess Life
Streicher Death X X
Schacht Free
Funk Life X X
Frick Death X X
Ribbentrop Death X X
Von Papen Free
Kaltenbrunner Death X X
Fritzsehc Free
Speer 20 years X
Sauckel Death X
Keitel Death X
Jodi Death X
Raedcr Life
Doenitz 10 years
Von Schirach 20 years X X
Von Neurath 15 years X X
Frank Death X X
Rosenberg Death X X
Seyss-lnquart Death X X

Sotc: Inal of the Major \\’ar('nminals, XXII, 524-89. The Soviet judge, Nikitchenko,
wan of the opinion that Schaeht, von I’apen, and Fritzsehc should have been eonvieted
and that Hess should have been sentenced to death. He did not dissent from the other
sentences. Ibid., p. 589.

Prorckrorat, as a territory with international personality (i.e., autonomy),


had been under military occupation.42
Stranger still is the contrast between Stretcher’s conviction and Fritz-
schc's acquittal. Stretcher was hanged because of his “incitement to mur­
der and extermination at the time when Jews in the East were being
42. Judgment, ibid., p. 581.

THE TRIALS 1151


killed”;43 Fritzsche was allowed to go free because he “did not urge per­
secution or extermination of Jews.” Though that subtle dispenser of ratio­
nalizations had broadcast that the war had been caused by Jews and that
their fate had turned out “as unpleasant as the Führer predicted,” the
tribunal still felt that he had not been “aware” of what was happening to
them.44 Even in Nuremberg the tribunal was safeguarding the freedom to
engage in declaratory propaganda.45
Before the establishment of the first tribunal in Nuremberg, the princi­
pal difficulty was the formulation of an indictment that would spell out
why the accused were being tried. When the prosecution of “lesser” per­
sonalities was brought into focus, the primary consideration became the
question of who was to be charged. Whereas the qualitative issue was
fought out mainly between the Allies, the quantitative problem con­
cerned also a large number of Germans who waited in uncertainty for
their fate.
The high point of Allied sentiment for massive punitive measures was
reached in the spring of 1945 with the widespread publication of detailed
accounts of wartime German activities. Thus in May 1945 the editor of
the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Joseph Pulitzer, addressing the Society for the
Prevention of World War III in Carnegie Hall, urged the shooting of
1,500,000 Nazis. He was joined by Representative Dewey Short of Mis­
souri, who demanded mass executions of SS men and the OKW.46
Yet the countercurrents and counterpressures against such a program
were building up even before its beginning. On June 15,1944, a commis­
sion of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America had declared
that, while the punishment of “those most responsible” for the “system­
atic extermination of the Jews of Europe” was an “elementary demand of
justice,” such punishment had to be limited to men whose responsibility
was “central” and could not extend, for example, to “soldiers who were
implicated because they carried out orders.”47 Among die Jews them­
selves there was little eagerness for mass trials. In all the sessions of the

43. Judgment, ibid., p. 549.


44. Judgment, ibid., p. 584.
45. With regard to the other sentences, it should be noted that the judges were not
in possession of Speer’s full record. They did not know, for instance, of his connection
with “primitive construction” in Auschwitz and other concentration camps. Ibid.,
pp. 597-98. In the case of Goring, Funk, Frick, Ribbcntrop, von Neurath, Rosen­
berg, and Scyss-Inquart, the evidence was almost overwhelming. Yet all of these
defendants were convicted also of aggression, and now it is no longer clear w hich
charge was most decisive in determining their sentence.
46. “Urges Execution of 1,500,000 Nazis,” The New York Times, Mav 23, 1945,
P·11·
47. Declaration of Federal Council of Churches, cited in American Jewish Con­
ference, Report of the Interim Committee, pp. 104-5.

1152 CONSEQUENCES
American Jewish Conference and its interim committees, no proposal
was put forward for the trial of any specific individual or category of
individuals save one: the ex-Mufti of Jerusalem.48 The restraining influ­
ences could thus prevail. No significant group in the Allied world set out
to achiev e large-scale revenge.
The prosecution of the “lesser” offenders became essentially a process
of elimination, and in that process basic attitudes in the ranks of the Allies
came to the fore once again. The Americans were most persistent in
reaching the lower strata of German leadership; the British limped along;
and for the Russians the show was already almost over.
On April 26, 1945, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff sent a directive
to the U.S. commander, subjecting the following ten groups to automatic
arrest:49
1. Pam' officials down to Ortsgruppenleitcr
2. Gestapo and SD
3. YVaffen-SS down to lowest noncommissioned rank (USchaf.)
4. General Staff officers
5. Police officers down to Oberleutnant
.
6 SA to lowest commissioned rank (Stuf.)
7. Ministers and leading civil servants as well as territorial officials down
to Bürgermeister in the Reich, and civil and military town commanders
in occupied territories
8. Nazis and Nazi sympathizers in industry and commerce
9. Judges and prosecutors of special courts
10. Allied traitors
The automatic detainees were the chief suspects, and the most important
among them faced trial by Allied military' tribunals. Those Germans and
their foreign collaborators whose activities had been confined to an oc­
cupied territory' could expect to be charged on the soil of the countrv
where they had committed their offense. The rest were to be channeled to
German courts.
The trial of such masses posed special difficulties, since there was not
48. Rurh Hershman, cd., '¡he American Jewish Conference, Proceedtivjs of the 'third
Session, February 17-19, 194b (New York, 1946), p. 236. During rhe first conference.
Dr. DeSola Pool of the General Zionists went so far as to oppose rhe arrest of
Germans who had acted under "compulsion.” He preferred a resolution that would
have urged the detention only of those who had given orders or who had committed
acts of their own accord. Alexander S. Kohanski, ed., I he American Jewish Confer-
eme — Its ( hpantzatvm and Proceedinqs of the First Session, A ujfust 29-September 2,1943
(New York," 1944), pp. 198-99, 203-4.
49. J. C. S. Directive 1067/6 to Commander in Chief of U.S. f orces of Occupa­
tion, April 26, 1945, in Report of U.S. Military Governor, Denazification, 1948,
pp. 14-16.

THE TRIALS 1153


enough evidence to form a complete picture of what each individual had
done. Too many German documents had been destroyed, and too few
made specific mention of people in the lower ranks. The American delega­
tion at the London conference therefore hit upon the solution of accus­
ing, along with the chief defendants, the organizations that they had led.
If, after proof, an organization was declared criminal by the tribunal, all
subsequent proceedings in individual cases could be confined to the sole
question of membership.50 Interestingly enough, the Soviet delegation
did not quite see the need for the two-stage procedure. “The question of
what the Gestapo really is,” remarked Professor Trainin, “is perfectly well
known to all countries.” To this Jackson replied, “You don’t want to
depend on American judges to know all about the Gestapo.”51
The prosecution asked for declarations of criminality against six orga­
nizations. The tribunal admitted only three and, in doing so, set limita­
tions on subsequent convictions by making them applicable only to those
of the accused who had served in certain positions, at certain times, under
certain conditions (see Table 11-3). The tribunal’s thinking in choosing
these limits is not without interest. The lack of all-inclusiveness was based
on the notion that “mass punishments should be avoided.” The member­
ship date of September 1, 1939, or after was decisive because it was
founded on the ruling that crimes against humanity could not have been
committed before the war. The conditions of participation were included
in obedience to the principle that “criminal guilt is personal.”52 Three
organizations were not declared criminal: the SA, because its activities
after the outbreak of war were too insignificant; the Cabinet, because it
was too small; and the “High Command and General Staff?’ because the
definition given to that group by the prosecution comprised only a hand­
ful of generals. The prosecution had failed altogether to reach down into
the civil service and into the officers’ corps.53

50. American memorandum, April 30, 1945, presented at San Francisco and in
London, International Conference on Military Trials, pp. 32-33. Jackson to Truman,
June 6, 1945, ibid., pp. 47-48. Compare this proposal with the Smith Act, 54 Stat.
671, promulgated in 1940 when Jackson was Attorney General.
51. International Conference on Military Trials, pp. 241-42.
52. Trial of the Major War Criminals, XXII, p. 500. Not spelled out was the
question of who had the burden of proof with respect to defendants’ knowledge. In
subsequent proceedings the burden was divided, in that knowledge was presumed
after the prosecution had established certain facts. The tribunal ruled that all members
of the Gestapo and SD had joined these organizations voluntarily. Ibid., p. 503. In the
case of the party and the SS, the voluntary character of membership was left to be
established in each individual case.
53. Ibid., pp. 517-23. In this connection, note that the RSHA was covered only in
Offices III, IV, VI, and VII. The Kripo, because of its regular law-enforcement func­
tions, was not even charged.

CONSEQUENCES
ABLE 11-3
R1M1NAL MEMBERSHIP IN ORGANIZATIONS

RECOMMENDED
MAXIMUM PENALTY
(UNDERTHE
DENAZIFICATION
LAW OF THE
POSITION TIME CONDITION AMERICAN ZONE)

art)' Upper echelons September 1, Voluntary 10 years


only 1939, or after membership
with knowl­
edge of crimi­
nal purpose of
the party
lestapo All echelons September 1, Knowledge of 10 years
nd SD except clerks, 1939, or after criminal pur­
stenographers, pose of the
janitors, etc. Gestapo and
SD
;s All echelons September 1, Voluntary Waffen-SS officers down
1939, or after membership to Sturmbannführer,
with knowl­ 10 years
edge of crimi­
nal purpose of Waftcn-SS below that
the SS rank, 5 years

Vote: Trial of the Major War Criminals, XXII, 498-517.

The top strata were tried by Allied military tribunals, particularly in the
American and British zones. By August 1946 the American Subsequent
Proceedings Division, headed by Brigadier General Telford Taylor, had
compiled a trial list of close to 5,000 names. The list had to be cut down
because of “time, staff, and money,” and in the reduction process an
attempt was made to achieve “balance” with respect to types of offenses
and occupations of offenders. In the end the bottom line was sometimes
drawn by “the size of the defendants’ dock in the particular courtroom
which was to be used.” Fewer than 200 men were brought into the court­
rooms.54 However, these defendants had not been minor cogs in the

54. Brig. Gen. Telford Taylor (chief counsel tor war crimes), Final Report to the
Secretary of tlse Army on the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials under Control Council Law

THE TRIALS H55


destructive machine; they were its central core, and the evidence amassed
against them was so great that for the trial of most of them there was
litde need to rely upon membership in criminal organizations to secure
convictions.55
The 185 accused were divided into twelve groups for arraignment.
The first case was brought against the medical doctors. In the second the
sole defendant was Generalfeldmarschall Milch. The third group con­
sisted of Schlegelberger and his associates in the judiciary. The fourth was
Pohl and the bureaucracy of the concentration camps. In the fifth case the
defendants were the industrialists of the Flick combine. In the sixth, they
came from I. G. Farben. The seventh case involved the generals of the
Southeast. Next came the RuSHA case. For the ninth the choice had
fallen upon Ohlendorf and other officers of the Einsatzgruppen. The
tenth case was directed against Krupp. In the eleventh case the chief
defendants were Weizsacker, Wormann, Hencke, Lammers, Stuckart,
von Krosigk, Berger, Schellenberg, and Rasche. The twelfth case engulfed
the generals who had invaded Russia.
As the indictment drew nearer, the bureaucrats of destruction were
seized with anxiety and depression, self-torture and visions of death.
There were some who felt doomed because they knew they were guilty;
others believed themselves guilty only because they thought they were
doomed. Among the self-accusers the Interior Ministry’s Conti did not
wait for a trial. He left a note explaining that he was taking his life because
he had lied during an interrogation under oath to cover up his knowledge
of medical experiments.56 A former food official, brooding in his cell
about the effects of his wartime rationing decrees on the lives of people in
the concentration camps, excused himself by saying that he had been
ignorant and overburdened and that an eye disease had prevented him
from reading every paper that he had signed. Writing to a German jour­
nalist and former inmate of Buchenwald, Eugen Kogon, he asked for
forgiveness. Then he killed himself.57

No. 10 (Washington, D.C., 1949), pp. 50-51,54-55,73,85,91. The control coun­


cil, as the four-power governing body of Germany sitting in Berlin, authorized the
trials to be held in the four zones. Though the nationality of the judges in the sub­
sequent proceedings at Nuremberg was American, the tribunals were therefore
international.
55. There were ten times as many defendants in the subsequent proceedings as in
the original trial, and there was ten times as much evidence. The documents collected
by the American prosecution for these trials u'erc divided into four series: NG (gov­
ernmental, i.c., ministerial materials), NI (industry), NO (Nazi organizations, par­
ticularly the SS), and NOKW (armed forces).
56. Dr. Leonardo Conti to interrogating officer, undated, NO-3061.
57. Text of letter in Eugen Kogon, "Politik der Versöhnung,” Frankfurter Hefte.

CONSEQUENCES
Edmund Veesenmayer, tot), thought that there was no escape. He had
in tact surrendered “voluntarily.” Yet his reasons did not imply any waver­
ing or doubt. He did not accuse himselt. “It I am not here” he said,
“others will be held responsible.”58 When prosecutor Kempner asked him
what he thought about the trial, Veesenmayer said: “As main defendant I
am your enemy, the type which must be eliminated. I do not know it
otherwise. I am a criminal who must be exterminated.” To this the Jewish
prosecutor replied: “What you are is to be clarified betöre the American
Tribunal.”59
Notwithstanding the heavy sense of hopelessness in the Nuremberg
prison, a force of 206 defense attorneys prepared for all-out battle. One
hundred and thirty-six of these lawyers had been party members. Ten had
been in the SS. One, Dr. Rudolf Dix, was a former president of the
German Bar Association. Another, Dr. Ernst Achenbach, had been a
deportation expert in the Paris Embassy.60 There was no disposition in
this group to hold back any argument. The old arsenal was emptied to
exhaustion. All the defendants had been ignorant; all had carried out
orders. Everyone was being discriminated against by being selected as a
defendant. No one was a criminal. Even Blobel of the Kiev massacre was
“decent at heart.”61
The accused were, without exception, so kindly disposed toward their
victims that Weizsäckers lawyer, Dr. Becker, began to feel a little crowded.
Ina moment of irritation, he was moved to remark: “Everybody has saved
the few survivors, nobody has killed the many dead [Jeder hat die wenigen
Geretteten gerettet, keiner hat die vielen Toten umgebracht] ”62 Blame was
passed upward, downward, and sideways. And for teeth-puller Pook, w'ho
had salvaged the gold from the mouths of the gassed, counsel Dr. Ratz had
a unique defense: “The corpse has no more rights of any sort, but no one
has any right to the corpse either. The body, so to speak, from a legal point
of view, floats between heaven and earth.”63
The most significant element in the defense array was the return to the
offense. This was pronounced most clearly in United States v. Ohlendorfby

April 1948, pp. 323-24. Kogon did nor identity the nun, who may have been
Moritz. He forgave him. Generals Blaskowitz and Böhme, facing trial in the Nurem­
berg subsequent proceedings against ranking held commanders, also committed sui­
cide. Taylor, Final Report, p. 91.
58. Interrogation by Kempner of Veesenmayer, August 20, 1947, NG-2905.
59. Interrogation by Kempner of Veesenmayer, November 1, 1947, NG-3691.
60. Taylor, Pinal Report, pp. 47-48. Defense lawyers were paid by the American
government, received cheap meals, free cigarettes, etc. Ibid., p. 49.
61. Statement by BlolxT’s counsel. Dr. Heim, Case No. 9, rr. pp. 339-41.
62. Statement by Becker, Case No. 11, German rr. p. 26789.
63. Statement by Ratz, Case No. 4, tr. p. 7902.

THE TRIALS 1157


the chief defendant himself. Ohlendorf maintained that the Jews had to be
destroyed. Even if they had not actually started the war, they had now
been attacked, and after such an assault one could expect from them only
the most dangerous reactions. Asked by prosecutor Heath what had hap­
pened to the Jewish children, Ohlendorf replied, “They were to be killed
just like their parents.” Questioned about the reason for such relentless­
ness, he said, “I believe that it is very simple to explain if one starts from
the fact that this order did not only try to achieve security but also perma­
nent securin' because the children would grow up, and surely, being the
children of parents who had been killed, they would constitute a danger
no smaller than that of their parents.” Then he added, “I have seen very
many children killed in this war through air attacks for the securin' of
other nations.”64
The judges in Nuremberg were established American lawyers. They
had not come to exonerate or to convict. They were impressed with their
task, and they approached it with much experience in the law and little
anticipation of the facts. That is not to say that they w ere immune to
outside pressures. On the first day of the I. G. Farben trial, Judge James
Morris remarked to Prosecutor Josiah DuBois at luncheon: “We have to
worn' about the Russians now; it wouldn’t surprise me if they overran the
courtroom before we get through.”65 Indeed, Chief Prosecutor Taylor
was prompted to remark in his final report that on the whole “the sen­
tences became lighter as time went on.”66
There were variations from case to case which reflected more funda­
mental influences. The most stringent judgments were handed down in
the SS cases, where the judges perceived murder in its most direct and
unmitigated form. Three of these cases —the trials of the doctors, the
Einsatzgruppen leaders, and the concentration camp administrators —
were the only ones that resulted in death sentences.67 Several defendants
in the judiciary were imprisoned for life.68 A sickening feeling had over­
come the tribunal as it glanced upon the defendants who had once been
judges themselves, and the court gave vent to this feeling in the statement
that “the prostitution of a judicial system for the accomplishment of
criminal ends involves an evil to the state which is not found in frank

64. Testimony by Ohlendorf, Case No. 9, Trials of War Criminals, IV, 356-58. See
also legal opinion by Dr. Rcinhard Maurach, Ohlendorf-38. Phosphorus bombs,
blockbusters, and atomic bombs were hurled as constant reminders bv the defense at
the tribunals.
65. Josiah DuBois, The Devil's Chemists (Boston, 1952), p. 95.
66. Taylor, Final Report, p. 92.
67. Originally, seven in the doctors’ case, lour in the Pohl case, and fourteen in the
Ohlendorf case.
68. Klemm, Ocschcv, Rothaug, and Schlegelbergcr.

1158 CONSEQUENCES
atrocities which do not sully judicial robes."69 In the military, too, several
defendants were sentenced to life imprisonment.70 The bureaucracy' tared
better, with a maximum of twenty years.71 Among the industrialists, only
Alfried Krupp and two of his associates received as much as twelve years
in prison. In the I. G. Farben case, live defendants were convicted for
their participation in I. G. Auschwitz. Two of them, Diirrfeldt and Am·
bros, were handed eight years; Ter Meer got seven; Krauch and Biite-
fisch, six.7- In the Flick case no defendant was convicted for anti-Jewish
actions — the Petschek Aryanizations were not crimes against humanity.73
When judgments were rendered in all twelve cases of the subsequent
Nuremberg proceedings, thirty-five defendants were declared not guilty,
ninety-seven received prison terms ranging from time served to twenty-
five vears, twenty were imprisoned for life, and twenty-five were con­
demned to death. Considering the difficulties facing the accusers, the
American prosecution had scored no minor success. However, as soon as
the judgments were written, the reduction process began.
In the concentration camp case the tribunal itself reduced four sen­
tences.74 Then the military' governor, General Clay, commuted another.75
Finally, a special clemency' board arrived from the United States to review
all the decisions for the High Commissioner.76 The Clemency' Board
consisted of three officials: David W. Peck, Presiding Judge, Appellate
Division, First Department, New York Supreme Court, chairman; Fred­
erick A. Moran, chairman, New York Board of Parole; and Brigadier
General Conrad E. Snow, Assistant Legal Adviser, Department of State.
The board began its work in April 1950. Although the members felt
themselves “bound" by the tacts in the judgments, the defense was al­
lowed to introduce “new evidence" and to present old arguments.77 The

69. Judgment, Case No. 3, tr. pp. 10793-94.


70. Milch, List, Kuntze, Warlimont, and Rcinccke.
71. Earn me rs and Vccscnmaycr.
72. Judge Hebert in a dissent said that three other defendants should have been
held guilty on the Auschwitz charge. No defendants were found guilts for the supply
ot poison gas to the camp. The eight-year sentences were the maximum pronounced
in the case. One judge had remarked privately during the proceedings that there were
“too many Jews on the prosecution.” DuRois, The Devil's Chemists, pp. 182-93. Two
Jews served on the I. G. Farben trial ream. Ibid.
73. Judgment, Case No. 5, Trials of War Criminals, VI, 1212-16.
74. Georg Iairner, Kiefer, Fanslau, Bobermin.
75. Sommer.
76. A High Commissioner responsible to the State Department replaced the
military governor and took over from him responsibility and control over convicted
war criminals. Hxccunvc Order 10062 of June 6, 1949, and Executive Order 10144
of July 21, 1950, in Trials of War Criminals, XV, 1154-56.
77. None of these materials were published, but their impact can broadly be

THE TRIALS 1159


board then did four things. It recommended a downward revision of
individual sentences on the basis of the newly acquired testimony.78 It
urged that variations in sentences for similar offenses be resolved in favor
of the most lenient treatment.79 Insofar as imprisonment before and dur­
ing trial had not been counted, such confinement was to be deducted
now.80 The board asked, finally, that the time credited to prisoners for
“good behavior” be increased from five days to ten per month, thus
cutting the reduced sentences by a third.81
High Commissioner McCloy was under considerable pressure not
merely to accept these recommendations but to go beyond them.82 “With
difficulty” he commuted several more death sentences on his own.83
When he announced his decisions on January 31, 1951, the 142 con­
victed defendants had shrunk to less than half: 77 were free, 50 were still
imprisoned, one had been sent to Belgium,84 the seven condemned in the
doctors’ case had already been hanged, and five remained under sentence

gauged from the following paragraph, in which the board gave its description of the
anti-Jewish destruction process: “The elimination of Jews, occasionally by deporta­
tion, but generally by outright slaughter. This organized business of murder was
centered in SS groups which accompanied the army for the purpose of eliminating
the Jews, Gypsies, and all those even suspected of being partisans. No less than 2
million defenseless human beings were killed in this operation.” Report of Advisors'
Board on Clemency for War Criminals (signed Peck, Moran, and Snow) to High
Commissioner McCloy, August 28,1950, ibid., p. 1159.
78. In the main it would appear that these Gemían appellants succeeded in con­
vincing the board that their position had been more “remote” and also more difficult
than the tribunals had assumed. Ibid., pp. 1163-64. Statement and announcement of
decisions by McCloy, January 31, 1951, ibid., pp. 1176-91, passim. The individual
recommendations of the board were not published.
79. See particularly the evening-out of the sentences in the industrial cases to effect
release of the Krupp defendants. Decisions by McCloy, January' 31, 1951, ibid.,
pp. 1187-88.
80. Ibid., p. 1180. This recommendation affected the prison sentences in the SS
cases.
81. Ibid., p. 1180.
82. Sec summary by Arthur Krock of the minutes of a meeting held on January 9,
1951, between McCloy and a German delegation consisting of Hermann Ehlcrs
(president of the Bundestag), Heinrich Hofler (Free Democrat), Carlo Schmid (So­
cial Democrat), Jakob Altmeicr (a Jew), Hans von Mcrkatz (German party ), and
Franz Josef Strauss (Christian Democrat, Bavarian wing), “In the Nation,” The Nen'
York Times, April 26, 1951, p. 28. One Gemían periodical explained that “automatic
sympathies” were accruing to many a defendant because of the “composition” of the
prosecution. “Die Juden,” Die Gegenwart, September 1, 1949, pp. 5-6.
83. Decisions by McCloy in Einsatzgruppcn case, Trials of War Criminals, XV,
1185-87.
84. Strauch.

1160 CONSEQUENCES
of death. Among the freed were all the convicted industrialists. As the
I. G.'s Ter Meer walked out of jail, he remarked to his entourage, “Now
that they have Korea on their hands, the Americans are a lot more
friendly.”85
The prisons still held a number of generals who had been granted no
reductions, and Chancellor Adenauer’s military advisers lost no time in
pointing out that this lack of clemency rested as a “heavy psychological
burden upon Germany’s effort to rearm [eine schwere psychologische Be­
lastung des Wiederbewaffnungsproblems] .”86 The five who faced death in­
cluded the now solitary figure of Pohl and four Einsatzgruppen leaders:
Blobel, Braune, Naumann, and Ohlendorf. Though the sentences of
these men had been reviewed again and again, the pressures for com­
mutation did not abate. Bishop Johannes Neuhäusler declared that it
would have been more “humane” to have decided quickly and then to
have quickly carried out the decision.87 In his prison cell Ohlendorf him­
self dictated a statement in which he protested his innocence, declaring
that he had tried to rescind the Himmler order, that he had commanded
the smallest Einsatzgruppe, that of thousands of Einsatz personnel only
thirty-three had been tried and only fourteen condemned to death, and
that, therefore, he was a martyr.88 High Commissioner McCloy gave way
no more. As one of the captains of the law-and-order movement in 1944,
he could not scuttle the trials in 1951. To the accompaniment of the
protests of Vice-Chancellor Franz Blücher and a chorus of voices in the
German press, the five were hanged on June 7.89
What was happening in Nuremberg was duplicated on a smaller scale
in the British zone. Among the defendants in the British trials were a

85. “Flick, Dietrich, among 19 Nazi Criminals Freed from Jail after Serving 5
Years,” The New York Times, August 26, 1950, p. 7.
86. “Yon 28 Todeskandidaten wurden 21 begnadigt,” Süddeutsche Zeitung (Mu­
nich), February 1, 1952, pp. 1-2.
87. “Um die Landsberger Entscheidung,” ibid., February 2, 1951, p. 1. In appeals
to U.S. federal courts the defense argued that the German constitution of 1949 had
abolished the death penalty and that in view of Allied recognition of Germany’s new
independence in 1951, the sentences could no longer be carried into effect. The
appeals failed, not because the U.S. military tribunals had derived their powers from
an international agreement and not because jurisdiction over war criminals was re­
served by the Allies, but on the ground that the district judge had received no official
certification that the state of war was over, and so long as war continued, nonresident
enemy aliens could not obtain relief in a federal court. Memorandum of the District
Court of Columbia, May 29, 1951, and Supreme Court denial of certiorari, Trials of
War Criminals, XV, 1192-98.
88. Text of Ohlendorf statement, January 19, 1951, in Neues Abendland (Augs­
burg), March 1951, pp. 133-34.
89. Drew Middleton, “Germans Condemn U.S. on Execurioas,” The New York
Times, June 8, 1951, p. 5. The remaining prisoners were released by 1958.

THE TRIALS 1161


number of SS men in the Auschwitz-Belsen group, three members of the
TESTA firm which had supplied Auschwitz with poison gas, and an as­
sortment of generals from various theaters of war. The British military'
courts, unlike the American tribunals, were staffed with military' men, and
defense counsel too were British officers. The proceedings were handled
with a certain amount of dispatch. From the SS group, eleven were sent
to the gallows. Notable among the condemned were Kramer, Klein,
Hossler, and Irma Grese.90 The Zyklon B supplier, Dr. Bruno Tesch, was
also hanged.91 The generals, on the other hand, were not tried imme­
diately, and that delay led to different results. Von Rundstedt and Strauss
were freed as unfit to stand trial.92 Von Brauchitsch died before indict­
ment.93 Kesselring was condemned to death, but his sentence was com­
muted to life and then reduced to twenty-one years. Released on medical
parole and granted clemency in expectation that he would die, he re­
sumed an active life in 1952.94 In December 1949 von Manstein was
sentenced to eighteen years. Two months later his sentence was reduced
to twelve years, and by 1952 he, too, was free.95
Once the British had joined their American partners in going to court.
Now they followed the Americans in opening the prison doors. In Febru­
ary 1952 both powers agreed with the new Germany to establish a tripar­
tite clemency board to review once more the sentences of the imprisoned
war criminals.96 When the board began its work in 1955, the number of
anti-Jewish perpetrators still filling the American and British jails had
shrunk to about two dozen.97
Although the proceedings before the military tribunals of the Ameri­
can and British zones were in the focus of world attention, a few major
participants in the destruction of the Jews met their fate outside of Ger-
90. Law Reports of Trials of War Criminals (London, 1947), vol. 2, pp. 153-54.
The royal warrant under which the judges sat limited their jurisdiction to crimes
against Allied nationals. In one of the affidavits against an SS guard, it was alleged that
he had shot a girl deported from Hungary to Bcrgen-Bclscn. The defense objected on
jurisdictional grounds. The prosecutor answered that by that time the Hungarians
had “come to the Allied side” and that therefore they were “at least some form of
Allies,” though he did not know “to what extent.” The defendant, Karl Egcrsdort, was
pronounced not guilty. Ibid., pp. 150, 153. The British judgments were not accom­
panied by reasoning.
91. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 102. His Prokurist, Karl Weinbachcr, suffered the same fate.
92. “British to Free von Rundstedt and Strauss,” The New York Times, May 6,1949,
p. 4; “Poles Question Britain on Nazis,” ibid., May 20,1949, p. 14.
93. “Brauchitsch Dies of Heart Attack,” ibid., October 20,1948, p. 7.
94. Alistair Home, Return to Power (New York, 1956), p. 52.
95. Ibid.
96. “Adenauer Explains Board,” The Next’ York Times, February 21,1952, p. 6.
97. In March 1954 the United States had decided to discontinue announcements
of releases. “War Criminals Policy' Is Changed by U.S.,” ibid., March 26, 1954, p. 5.

CONSEQUENCES
TABLE 11-4
NATIONAL TRIALS, WEST AND EAST

K. H. Frank
by Czechoslovakia: i Ludin
Wisliceny
Biihler
Bv the Netherlands: Rauter — Executed · by Poland: °rciscr
Stroop
Hoss

by Denmark: Best by Russia: Jeckeln


by Belgium: Falkenhausen f Freed by Russia: Clauberg
by France: Abetz

many in foreign courts. Here one must distinguish between the foreign
collaborators, who had to answer not so much for murder as for treason,
and the Germans who under the Moscow Declaration were sent back to
the countries “in which their abominable deeds were done.” Among the
collaborators who died by the hand of the executioner were Laval of
France, President Tiso of Slovakia, Bagrianov of Bulgaria, the two An-
tonescus of Romania, and Sztojay of Hungary. The captured and extra­
dited Germans encountered varied treatment, depending not only on
what they had done but also on when and where they were drawn on
account. Table 11-4 reveals some of the contrasts in the disposition of
these cases to 1955.
When Clauberg returned from Russia to Germany in October 1951,
he had the first opportunity in ten years to tell interviewing reporters that
just prior to his capture he had perfected his sterilization method after all.
The new method consisted of a simple injection, and he was now looking
forward to its application, albeit only in “special cases.”98
Those Germans who were not tried as war criminals by an Allied or
foreign tribunal did not have so much to fear. They were left to Ger­
man jurisdiction. Two kinds of proceedings evolved within the German
sphere: one, denazification, was prescribed by the Allied occupation au­
thorities; the other, trial in the regular criminal courts, depended upon
German initiative. The denazification laws were based on the principle of

98. “Nazi Camp Doctor Back in Germany,” ibid., October 18, 1955, p. 10; “Doc­
tor Who Sterilized Women for Nazis Still Proud of His Work,” Nap York Post, Octo­
ber 18, 1955, p. 3.

THE TRIALS 1163


TABLE 11-5
CLASSIFICATION OF MAJOR OFFENDERS AND OFFENDERS

CLASS I CLASS II
(PRESUMPTIVE MAJOR (PRESUMPTIVE OFFENDERS)
OFFENDERS)

RSHA executive officials Other RSHA personnel I


GFP to Feldpolizeidirektoren Other GFP and all Abwehr 1
All Gestapo, as well as executives of Other Kripo down to Kriminal- 1
Kripo ( leit) stellen kommissar
Generals and colonels of police All police officers with Einsatzgruppen
and Einsatzkommandos, as well as other
police officers promoted after Januars' 30.1
1933, or in office after December 31,
1937
NSDAP officials down to Amtsleiter Members of Institut zur Erforschung j
of Kreisleitungen der Judenfrage
Waften-SS to Sturmbannführer All other Waffen-SS
Ministers and bureaucrats to Regierungspräsidenten, Ober­
Oberpräsidenten; Generalkommissare, finanzpräsidenten, labor trustees, and i
and Ministerialdirektoren, as well as Foreign Office officials down to consul
Ministerialräte in newly created offices
General Staff officers in OKW, OKH, Other General Staff officers on or after
OKM, or OKL on or after February 4, February 4,1938
1938
Chiefs of military or civil administra­ Town commanders
tion in occupied territories
Chairmen, presidents, and deputies of Executives of lower Chambers of
Reich and Gau Chambers of Commerce, Commerce, Main Rings, Special Rings,
of Reich Groups, and of Reich Associa­ Main Committees, Special Committees,
tions and executives of Reich Groups and As­
sociations, as well as all managers who
belonged to the part}'
Judges and prosecutors of special Presidents and prosecutors of Land­
courts, party courts, and SS courts; presi­ gerichte
dents of administrative courts; presidents
of Oberlandesgerichte appointed after
December 31,1938; and prosecutors of
Oberlandesgerichte appointed after
March 31,1933

Note: Law for Liberation from National Socialism and Militarism by the Land Govern­
ments of Bavaria, Greater Hesse, and Württemberg-Baden, March 5, 1946, with annota­
tions by U.S. military government in Report of the Military' Governor, Demztßcatum
(Cumulative Review), April 1948, pp. 52-92.
automatic conviction. The design of the law enacted by the German
lÀnder in the American zone provided for the classification of the accused
into five categories: major offenders, offenders, lesser offenders, fol­
lowers, and the exonerated group. Inclusion in the first two categories
was to be determined in the first instance by the defendant’s former posi­
tion. The positions enumerated in the law were taken from Control
Council Directive No. 24, which was binding on the German authorities
(see excerpts in Table 11-5).
With regard to possible classification as lesser offenders, the law pro­
vided for “careful special investigation” of persons who had been involved
in Aryan izations and of officials who had served in military or civilian
capacity in occupied areas. On the other hand, special consideration was
to be given to all respondents for resignation from the party, “resistance,”
regular church attendance, good deeds, subjection to “persecution,” and
(in the case of those born after January' 1, 1919) “youth.”99 The meaning
of these special considerations is clearly visible in the divergence between
the charges that the prosecutors were required to make on the basis of the
defendant’s former position and the findings by the trial judges. The
figures in Table 11-6 are cumulative for the American zone (minus Bre­
men and Berlin) to March 31,1947. The penalties provided by the law for
the first four classifications may be summarized as follows:100

Major offenders (mandatory' sanctions):


Two to ten years in a labor camp, with possible credit for internment
after May 8, 1945, and with allowance for disability
Confiscation of all property' save necessities
Ten-year prohibition of every' activity except ordinary' labor
Prohibition to hold public office
Loss of claims for pensions
Restrictions on housing and residence
Offenders:
Up to five years in a labor camp or assignment to special labor
Confiscation of property' in whole or part
Five-year prohibition of every' activity except ordinary' labor
Prohibition to hold public office
Loss of claims for pensions
Restrictions on housing and residence

W. Law tor Liberation from National Socialism and Militarism, by the Land
Governments for Bavaria, Greater Hesse, and Württemberg-Baden, March 5, 1946,
w ith annotations by U S. military government, in Report of the Military Governor,
Denazification (Cumulative Review), April 1948, pp. 52-97.
1(H). Ibid., pp. 59-63.

THE TRIALS 1165


Lesser offenders :
Fines
Confiscation of property acquired by political means, especially
Aryanization and blocking of other property values
Probationary prohibition of every activity except ordinary labor
Followers:
Fines to 2,000 Reichsmark
Statistically, the sanctions imposed by mid-1949 revealed the follow ­
ing picture:101
Registrants 13,199,800
Charged 3,445,100
Amnestied without trial 2,489,700
Fines 569,600
Employment restrictions 124,400
Ineligibility for public office 23,100
Property confiscations 25,900
Special labor without imprisonment 30,500
Assignments to labor camps 9,600
Assignees still serving sentences 300
In a sense, the most significant figure in this tabulation is the last one.
After four years, only 300 persons were still in labor camps under sen­
tences imposed by the denazification tribunals.
Denazification in all the occupation zones did not do much to those
who had once staffed the machinery of destruction.102 Hinrich Lohse,

101. Report of Military Governor, July 1949, Statistical Annex (Final Issue),
p. 280. In many cases, more than one sanction was imposed on the same individual.
The amnesties were enacted because the military government was in a hurry to con­
clude the program. See Denazification (Cumulative Review) and John H. Herz, “The
Fiasco of Denazification in Germany,” Political Science Quarterly 63 (1948): 569-94.
102. In terms of administrative design, the British denazification decrees dif­
fered from the American in only two major respects: there was no total registration
(charges were largely confined to the 27,000 persons under automatic arrest), and the
program was discontinued in January 1948, except for members of criminal organiza­
tions. Report of the U.S. Military Governor, Denazification (Cumulative Review),
pp. 12-13,138-55.
Austrian denazification was basically a three-pronged procedure: arrests and con­
victions, dismissals from the private economy and public positions, and a fine based
on incomes of January 1944. Arrests, totaling 53,520, were conducted by the (xcupv-
ing powers, and from April 1946 by the Austrian government. As of May 1, 1947,
16,509 persons were still detained. Job dismissals were over 100,000 by July 1946.
The fine ultimately brought in ca. 300,000,000 schillings. Special features in Austria
were trials before people’s courts. Sec Dieter Stiefel, Entnazifizierung in Österreich
(Vienna, 1981).

CONSEQUENCES
TABLE 11-6
DENAZIFICATION STATISTICS IN THE U.S. ZONE

FINDINGS BY TRIAL JUDGES


MANDATORY MAJOR LESSER PROCEEDINGS
CHARGES OFFENDERS OFFENDERS OFFENDERS FOLLOWERS EXONERATED QUASHED

Major
offenders 2,548 447 1,139 714 170 50 28
Offenders 59,192 54 4,268 14,402 29,761 1,989 8,718
Lesser
offenders 41,554 0 131 6,795 26,521 2,494 5,613
once Reichskommissar of the Ostland, received the maximum of ten
years. Released in 1951 because of health, he was awarded a pension.10·*
The former chief of the Main Trusteeship Office East, Dr. Max Winkler,
was exonerated.103 104 Ex-Staatssekretär Stuckart of the Interior Ministry,
gravely ill, was sentenced in the eleventh case to time served, on the
ground that any confinement would be tantamount to a death penalty.
Brought before a denazification tribunal after his release, he was classified
as a follower and fined 500 Deutsche Mark, payable upon receipt of a
pension. Shortly thereafter he was killed in an automobile crash.105 Ober­
gruppenführer Wolff, who had headed Himmler’s Personal Staff, was
extradited by the Americans to the British zone to be tried there for his
crimes.106 Placed before a denazification court instead, he was sentenced
to four years, with credit for previous confinement. Informed by the
presiding judge that he could leave “in clean and unstained dress [mit
reinem und fleckenlosem Kleid]” he walked out of the courtroom with a
radiant face, while his lawyer angrily demanded exoneration.107 In 1964,
after a trial in a Munich court, he was sentenced to fifteen years.108
There was one more hurdle confronting the former perpetrators: the
Allies had also empowered the ordinary German courts to try cases involv­
ing war crimes. But, judging from its results, that punitive expedition
assumed only the slightest proportions. The former Jewish expert of the
Foreign Office, Legationsrat Rademacher, was sentenced to three years
and five months. After his conviction, he skipped bail and did not return
for thirteen years. He was sentenced again, but in view of his failing health
remained outside prison until his death.109 Gerhard Peters of DEGESCH,
whose Zyklon B had killed almost one million Jews in Auschwitz, got five
years. The defense succeeded in obtaining another trial, but drew a six-
year sentence. Trying again in 1955 before another tribunal, Peters was
declared not guilty. This time the prosecution had left its evidence at
home.110 Proceedings begun against Leibbrandt of the East Ministry and

103. Gerald Rcitlingcr, The Final Solution (New York, 1953), p. 512.
104. “Ein grosser Hehler des Nazi-Regimes entlastet,” Auflau (New York), Au­
gust 26,1949, p. 5.
105. “Himmlers Stellvertreter tödlich verunglückt,” ibid., December 11, 1953,
p. 4.
106. Taylor, Final Report, p. 78.
107. “Sie gehen mit fleckenlosem Kleid” Auflau (New York), July 1, 1949, p. 4.
The cases cited above were all decided in the British zone.
108. Judgment of Landgericht München II, 1 Ks 1/64.
109. Christopher Browning, The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office
(New York, 1978), pp. 187-206.
110. “Gemütliches Deutschland,” Aujbau (New York), March 30, 1951, p. 10.
Kurt R. Grossmann, “Kronzeuge aus dem Grabe,” ibid., Mav 6, 1955, pp. 1-2, and
Grossmann, “Der Freispruch im Blausäurcprozess,” ibid., June 10, 1955, p. 3.

1168 CONSEQUENCES
Generalkommissar Frauenfeld (Melitopol) were dropped.111 Obersturm-
baiintlihrer Dr. Schafer (BdS in Serbia, of Semlin fame) had received
twentv-one months from a denazification tribunal. Tried afterward for his
Serbian activities, he was declared to be a “basically clean and decent man,"
and sentenced to another six and a half years.112 Obergruppenfuhrer von
dem Bach, who had served as Higher SS and Police Leader Russia Center,
as well as chief of the antipartisan units, had been a prosecution witness at
Nuremberg. Escaping extradition to Russia, he was sentenced by a de­
nazification court to ten years of house arrest.113 Fretting in his home, von
dem Bach denounced himself for mass murder.114 In 1964 he was sen­
tenced to life tor his role in the death of six Communists. Seven years later
he was discovered, furloughed from prison, resting in a comfortable pri­
vate clinic in Nuremberg. Reimprisoned, he died in 1972.115
In 1958, the Lander of the German Federal Republic established a
Zentrale Stelle in Ludwigsburg to investigate persons who might have
committed so-called NS-crimes, a category diat included acts against
Jews, political persecutees, as well as victims of euthanasia. The findings
of the Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen were to be turned
over to regular prosecutors, who were to decide whether court proceed­
ings were warranted. The statute of limitations had already eliminated
jurisdiction in all cases save those of manslaughter and murder as of
May 8,1955. Hence, activities that had involved the taking of property or
ghettoization were no longer triable. Manslaughter fell away on May 8,
1965, leaving only murder, including willful acts resulting in death. The
distinction between manslaughter and murder was not simple. Murderer
was someone who took unnatural pleasure in killing or whose motives
were so base as to be contemptible. Base w as sexual desire, greed, racial
hatred, or the wish to be arbitrary master over life and death. Also defined
as murder was the taking of a life with cunning, as in the exploitation of
the victim's ignorance of killing operations, or with caieltv, tor example,
the lining up of people about to be shot in such a way that they could
observe the deaths of those who were preceding them. For more than
twenty years, the Zentrale Stelle, under Erwin Schiile and from 1966,
under his successor, Dr. Adalbert Riickerl, collected masses of evidence to
enable prosecutors in the criminal courts to draw up indictments within
!! 111. “Judenmbrder lauten trei herum, ibid., December 8, 1950, p. 3. “Haftenr-
1 lassung Frauenfelds" ibid., February 27, 1953, p. 3.
112. "Gestapo-Leirer der Judenvernichrung angeklagt,” ibid., September 19,
1952, p. 3. Horne, Return to Power, pp. 55-56.
113. Re it linger, IIjc Final Solution % p. 505.
114. "Selbstanzeige vvegen Masscnmwdcs? Aujbau (New York), April 18, 1952
P· U·
115. The Nnv York Times, March 21, 1972, p. 40.

THE TRIALS 1169


these legal constraints. The documentation, including much original tes­
timony gathered in statements and interrogations, remains a vital source
of information about the destruction of the Jews, but it was not sufficient
to bring many a prospective defendant to trial. Often, moreover, an aging
perpetrator no longer in good health was for all practical purposes ac­
corded a biological amnesty. No member of die German railroads was
tried and few sentences were pronounced in cases involving the Foreign
Office. Even generals like von Bechtolsheim, in Minsk during the mas­
sacres of October 1941, and Rossum, in Warsaw during the ghetto battle
of 1943, were not touched. The defendants were in the main conspicuous
veterans of the SS and Police: members of Einsatzgruppen, camp guards,
or police personnel engaged in direct killings. From 1958 through 1977
most of the accused were drawn from the lower ranks, that is to say,
noncommissioned officers and enlisted men or civilian equivalents. The
following is a tabulation of outcomes for these twenty years:116
Accused 816
Sentenced to life 118
Other prison terms 398
No conviction 300
In Austria, trials before people’s courts resulted in 23,495 convictions.
Death sentences were 43, of which 30 were carried out, and prison sen­
tences numbered 13,625, of which 695 were for terms of five years or
more.117 The Polish government was enabled to tty heavily implicated
perpetrators, among them ranking members of the occupation regime,
when 1,817 persons were extradited to Poland from the four zones of
Germany. The Polish convictions included 193 death sentences and 69 to
life imprisonment.118

116. Adalbert Rückcrl, Die Strafverfolgung von NS-Verbrechen 1945-1978 (Heidel­


berg and Karlsruhe, 1979). Sec discussion of legal problems throughout the text,
statistics for 1957-77 on pp. 127-28. Earlier statistics combine NS-crimes and war
crimes. Life is the maximum sentence for murder. See also detailed accounts of trials
in Adalbert Rückerl, cd., NS-Prozesse (Karlsruhe, 1971). The Zentrale Stelle did not
have jurisdiction in RSHA cases, which were handled directly by courts in Berlin. For
Austrian denazification proceedings and war crimes trials, combined under people's
courts, sec report of U.S. High Commissioner (Lt. Gen. Gcoffrcv Keyes) to Joint
Chiefs of Staff, Military Government in Austria, for November 1947, pp. 145-46.
Later, trials were conducted in Austrian regular courts.
117. Data to 1972, in Stiefel, Entnazifizierung in Österreich, pp. 255-57. For the
political environment of trials in Belgium, France, Greece, Czechoslovakia, and Hun­
gary, see Isrvan Deik, Jan T. Gross, and Tony Judt, cds.. The Politics of Retribution in
Europe (Princeton, 2000).
118. Bogdan Musial, “NS-Kricgsvcrbrccher vor polnischen Gerichten,'' I 'Urtel
jahrsheftefiir Zeitgeschichte 47 (1999): 25-56.

1170 CONSEQUENCES
In the United States, too, there was an organized effort to unearth men
who had helped in the destruction of the Jews and who had not disclosed
their incriminating activities on their applications to enter the country.
Most of these people were not German but former members of Baltic or
Ukrainian Schutzmannschaften employed in guard duty, seizures, and
shootings. A few, such as Mayor Kazys Palciauskas of Kaunas, whose
name appears under an order establishing a ghetto in his city, had been
ranking officials. The majority had come to the United States as displaced
persons and had lived in their new home virtually undisturbed. They
were left alone because war crimes were not an investigative priority in
the Justice Department during the Cold War years, and because coopera­
tion with Soviet officials for the acquisition of necessary information was
not favored by the State Department at that time, lest a Soviet purpose be
furthered in such an endeavor.
With the rise of detente and a resurgence of interest in Holocaust
occurrences, the search for the ex-perpetrators became a special program.
In 1973 the Justice Department set up the Project Control Office in New
York City, and in 1977 the Special Litigation Unit was established in the
department’s Immigration and Naturalization Service. Shortly thereafter
the Office of Special Investigations was formed in the Criminal Division
of the department. Headed by Allan Ryan, the office was staffed with a
team of lawyers and historians. They pursued several dozen cases, either
for denaturalization of individuals who had obtained citizenship or for
deportation of those who had not become or were no longer citizens. In
federal courtrooms the Holocaust was thus relived forty' years after the
event.111'
Yet, long before the investigations and trials in Germany and other
countries were substantially over, many of the men who had staffed the
machinery' of destruction were resuming their careers. The businessmen
were the quickest to extricate themselves from their past. Friedrich Flick
established a new holding company with investments in France and 119

119. Report by (Comptroller General of the United -States (Elmer Staats), GGD-
78-73, May 15, 1978. Hearings before the Subcommittee on Immigration, Citzen-
ship, and International Law of the House Judiciary (Committee, August 3, 1977,
95th (Cong., 2d sess., and July 19-21, 1978,96th Cong., Isrsess. Allan A. Rvan, Jr.,
Quiet Neighbors — Prosecuting Nazi War Criminals in America (San Diego, 1984).
United States v. Palciauskas, 559 F. Supp. 1284 (1983). In (Canada, where a large
number of similar perpetrators had migrated, a case w as brought in an extradition
proceeding against a former German Gestapo member in Kaunas who was involved
in mass shootings of Jews in the ghetto. Judgment of Supreme (Court of Ontario (by
(Chief Justice Evans) in the case between Federal Republic of Germany and Helmut
Rauca, heard October 12-13, 1982. Through the courtesy of Christopher A.
Amerasinghc of Criminal Prosecutions, Canadian Department of Justice.

THE TRIALS 1171


Belgium.120 Krupp regained control of an industrial empire.121 The for­
mer rulers of I. G. Farben and I. G. Auschwitz—Ambros, Bütcfisch,
Dürrfeld, and Ter Meer—were all elected to boards of directors of new
concerns.122 Ambros, for example, eventually served as director of six
German corporations and as chairman of Knoll, a BASF subsidiary'. In
addition, he was a consultant to Distillers Ltd. of England, Pechiney in
France, Dow Europe in Switzerland, and the U.S. Department of Energy.
Until the end of 1981 Ambros was also on the payroll of W. R. Grace and
Company in the United States.123 When an American correspondent
called him about his wartime activities at his home in Mannheim during
1981, Ambros replied: “This happened a very long time ago. It involved
Jews. We do not think about it anymore.”124
Outside of business the ex-perpetrators registered progress too. Many
retired with pensions.125 Some, like Achenbach and Best, entered right-
wing politics.126 Leibbrandt’s former deputy, Bräutigam, obtained a posi­
tion in the new Foreign Office’s Eastern Division.127 The old Foreign
Office’s northern expert, von Grundherr, became the federal envoy to
Greece.128 Gustav Hilger, a knowledgeable member of the Reich Foreign
Minister’s bureau and specialist in Soviet matters, was brought to the
United States to share his expertise with government agencies in Wash­
ington.129 The Interior Ministry’s Hans Globke, who had once bestowed

120. ‘Έχ-Nazi Invests in Belgian Steel,” The New York Times, April 12,1956, p. 5.
121. “Allies Decontrol Krupp Industries” ibid., March 5,1953, p. 5.
122. “Strafentlassene machen Karriere,’"Aufbau (New York), July 29,1955, p. 23.
123. Admiral James W. Nance, director of the President’s Private Sector Survey
on Cost Control (White House), to Congressman Tom Lantos, March 16, 1982.
Through the courtesy of Mr. Lantos.
124. San Francisco Chronicle, March 6,1982, p. 12.
125. In 1958 pensions were paid to approximately 1,550 generals or their wid­
ows, and to 2,000 ranking civil servants (to Ministerialräte) or widows. Konrad
Wille, “Pension eines Gencralfeldmarschalls: 2500 D-Mark,” Aufbau (New York),
March 7,1958, pp. 1-2.
126. “German Quits Unit Wooing Ex-Nazis” The New York Times, November 29,
1952, p. 5; “Free Democrats in Adenauer Bloc Begin a Purge of Nazi Members,” ibid.,
April 27,1953, p. 13.
127. Arnold Künzli, “Rcnazifizierung der Bundesrepublik,” Aufbau (New York),
June 1,1956, p. 3.
128. “Ribbentrop-Mann nach Athen,” ibid., December 22, 1950, p. 7. Von
Grundherr applied for retirement in May 1952. “Säuberung in Bonn,” ibid., July 25,
1952, pp. 1,26.
129. “Barbie Called One of Many Ex-Nazis Aided by U.S.,” The New York Times,
February 20,1983, p. 4. The news item quotes George F. Kcnnan on Hilger. See also
Comptroller General’s report of May 15, 1978, p. 33; and Frank Carlucci, Deputy
Director of the Central Intelligence Agency’, to J. K. Fasick, Director, International
Division, General Accounting Office, May 18, 1978. Copy of the letter through the

1172 CONSEQUENCES
upon all of Reich Jewry the middle names “Israel” and “Sara” found in
postwar Germany unparalleled opportunities for a new official life. Start­
ing as City Treasurer of Aachen, he was subsequendy appointed as Minis­
terialdirektor to the Chancellor’s Office, and as of 1953 stood as Staats­
sekretär at Adenauer’s side.* 130
An all-encompassing roster of perpetrators would fill a multivolume
directory. Short of such a catalogue, the list below contains the names of a
few along with their fate.131 But for the large majority there is no postwar
report. A few fled to South America, Australia, or the Arab Middle East.
Some kept completely silent and escaped notice. Most were simply by­
passed. By die law they had not lived. By the law they did not die.
Abetz, Otto (Ambassador in Paris): Sentenced in France to twenty years.
Released, 1954. Burned to death in auto collision, 1958.
Achenbach, Ernst (German Embassy in Paris): Became a member of the
Bundestag in 1957 and of the European Parliament in 1964.
Alien, Hans Dietrich (Führer Chancellery): Internments by British and
American authorities in the 1940s. Practicing attorney in Hamburg.
Sentenced by a West German court in 1968 to eight years, with credit
for previous arrests.
Altenbunj, Gunther (Foreign Office): General Secretary'of German dele­
gation, International Chamber of Commerce.
Altstötter, Josef'{Justice Ministry ): Sentenced by U.S. military' tribunal to
fix e years for membership in criminal organization.
Ambros, Otto (I. G. Farben): Sentenced by U.S. military' tribunal to eight
years. Aufsichtsrat, Bergwerkgesellschaft Hibernia; Aufsichtsrat, Süd­
deutsche Kalkstickstoffwerke; Aufsichtsrat, Grünzweig und
Hartmann, 1955.
Antonescu, Ion (Marshal): Executed in Romania, 1946.
Antotuscu, Mihai: Executed in Romania, 1946.
Artukoric,Andrija (Croatian Interior Minister): Entered the United

courrcsv of John Tipton, Audit Manager, General Government Division, General


Accounting Office. During the early 1950s, Hilgers name appeared in the Wash­
ington telephone directory.
130. Erwin Holst, “Von Globke und Genossen,” Aufbau (New York), Decem­
ber 29, 1950, p. 5. “Adenauer Names New Aide,” Ttse New York Times, October 28,
1953, p. 15.
131. Compiled from United Nations War Crimes Commission, History of the
United Nations War Crimes Commission (London, 1948); Trials of War Criminals; Law
Reports of Trials of War Criminals; a High Commissioner's report on the late of Nazi
ministers and party leaders; GenSt-8; Aufl/au (passim); 'The New York Times (passim);
Narionalrat der Nationalen Front des Demokratischen Dcurschland/Dokumenta-
rionszentrum der Staatlichen Archivs crwaltung, Braunbuch (East Berlin, 1968); Tom
Bower, The Pledge Betrayed (Garden City, N.Y., 1982).

THE TRIALS 1173


States as “visitor,” 1948. Stay of deportation granted 1959, over­
turned 1981. Arrested, 1984.
Asche, Kurt (Security Police, Belgium): Sentenced by Kiel court to seven
years, 1981.
Auerswald, Heinz (Warsaw Ghetto Kommissar): Investigated by West
German prosecutors in mid- 1960s. Not placed on trial. Subsequently
deceased.
Bach, Erich von dem (Higher SS and Police Leader Russia Center, and
Chief of Anti-Partisan Units): Sentenced by denazification court to
ten years of house arrest. Denounced himself for mass murder, 1952.
Sentenced by German court in Nuremberg in February 1961 to three
and a half years for participation in 1934 purge. Sentenced to life,
1962.
Backe, Herbert (Acting Food Minister): Died, 1947.
Baer, Richard (Commander of Auschwitz I): Arrested near Hamburg in
December 1960 after the posting of a reward for his capture. Died be­
fore trial, 1963.
Baier, Hans (WVHA): Sentenced by U.S. military tribunal to ten years.
Baky, Ldszld (Hungarian Interior Ministry): Executed in Hungary, 1946.
Bdrdossy, Ldszld (Hungarian Interior Ministry): Executed in Hungary,
1946.
Barren, Werner von (Foreign Office Representative in Belgium): Minis­
ter for Special Purposes in new Foreign Office, March 1952. Declared
by Bundestag committee as unfit for service because of past activities,
July 1952. Federal Ambassador to Iraq, November 1960. Retired in
1963.
Baur, Friedrich vom (Ostbahn): Bundesbahndirektor.
Beckerle, Adolf Heinz (Police President of Frankfurt and German Minister
to Bulgaria): Returned from Soviet captivity to West Germany, 1955.
Arrested, 1960. Not tried because of poor health.
Bender, Horst (SS jurist): Member of the Bar in Stuttgart, 1973.
Bene, Otto (Foreign Office Representative in Holland): Reported in new
Foreign Office, 1952.
Berger, Gottlob (SS Main Office): Sentenced by U.S. military tribunal to
twenty-five years. Sentenced reduced by Clemency Board to ten years.
Released, 1951.
Best, Werner (Plenipotentiary in Denmark): Condemned to death in
Denmark. Sentence commuted to five years. Released, 1951. With
Hugo Stinnes concern. Died 1989.
Biberstein, Ernst (Einsatzgruppe C): Condemned to death by U.S. mili­
tary tribunal. Sentence commuted to life by Clemency Board.
Biebow, Hans (Lodz Ghetto administration): Condemned to death in
Poland and executed, 1947.

1174 CONSEQUENCES
Bierkamp, Walter (Commander of Security Police, Generalgouverne­
ment): Believed a suicide, 1945.
Btlfinger, Rudolf (RSHA): Judge in Mannheim, 1964.
Blankenburg, Werner (Führer Chancellery): Denazified. Died in Stutt­
gart, 1957.
Bbbel, Paul (Einsatzgruppe C): Condemned to death by U.S. military
tribunal and executed, 1951.
Blotne, Kurt (Party Main Office Health): Acquitted by U.S. military
tribunal.
Blume, Walter (Einsatzgruppe B): Condemned to death by U.S. military
tribunal. Sentence commuted to life by Clemency Board.
Bobermin, Hans (WVHA): Sentenced by U.S. military tribunal to twenty
years. Sentence reduced by the tribunal to fifteen years. Freed by
Clemency Board, 1951.
Bock, Fedor von (Commander, Army Group Center): Retired, 1942. Re­
ported killed in air raid, 1945.
Böhme, Franz (Military' Commander, Serbia): Committed suicide after
indictment by U.S. prosecution in Nuremberg.
Bormann, Martin (Party' Chancellery): Believed killed in Battle of Berlin,
1945.
Bothmann, Hans (Kulmhof Commander): Suicide while in British
custody, 1946.
Böttcher, Herbert (SS and Police Leader, Radom): Condemned to death
in Radom, 1948, and executed, 1952.
Bouhler, Philipp (Führer Chancellery'): Suicide, 1945.
Bousquet, Rene (Secretary' General of Police, France): Secretary General
of the Bank of Indo-China, Paris, 1952. Charged 1991. Assassinated
before trial, 1993.
Bracht, Fritz (Gauleiter, Upper Silesia): Missing.
Brack, Viktor (Führer Chancellery): Condemned to death by U.S. mili­
tary' tribunal and executed, 1948.
Bradfisch, Otto (Einsatzgruppe B, Gestapo in Lodz): Insurance salesman.
Sentenced for Einsatzgruppe activities to ten years in Straubing,
1961, and for Lodz to thirteen years in Hannover, 1963. Second sen­
tence concurrent with first. Furloughed 1965.
Brandt, Karl (Plenipotentiary for Health): Condemned to death by U.S.
military' tribunal and executed, 1948.
Brandt, Rudolf (Secretary' of Heinrich Himmler): Condemned to death
by U.S. military' tribunal and exccitted, 1948.
Brauchitsch, Walter von (Commander-in-chief of the army): Died in Brit­
ish army hospital waiting for trial, 1948.
Braune, Werner (Einsatzgruppe D): Condemned to death by U.S. mili­
tary tribunal and executed, 1951.

THE TRIALS 1175


Bräutigam, Otto (East Ministry): Foreign Office, 1956.
Brizgys, Vincent (Auxiliary Bishop of Kaunas): In the United States.
Brunner, Alois (SS deportation expert in Vienna, Berlin, Salonika,
France, and Slovakia): Reportedly fled through Rome to Middle
East. Believed to be in Damascus, 1982.
Brunner, Anton (Gestapo, Vienna) : Condemned to death by People’s
Court in Vienna and hanged, 1946.
Bühler, Josef'(Generalgouvernement): Condemned to death in Poland
and executed, 1948.
Burger, Anton (Commander of Theresienstadt and SS deportation spe­
cialist in Greece): Escaped from internment camp near Salzburg, Aus­
tria, 1947. Arrested in 1951, held in Vienna prison, and escaped after
two weeks. Reportedly died in Germany in 1991.
Biitefisch, Heinrich (I. G. Farben): Sentenced by U.S. military' tribunal to
six years. Aufsichtsrat, Deutsche Gasolin A. G., Berlin; Aufsichtsrat,
Feldmühle, Papier- und Zellstoffwerke, Düsseldorf; Director, Techni­
cal Committee of Experts, International Convention of Nitrogen In­
dustry', 1955.
Calotescu, Comeliu (Governor, Bukovina): Condemned to death in Ro­
mania. Indefinite stay granted by King Mihai upon petition from
Prime Minister Groza and Justice Minister Patra§canu.
Canaris, Konstantin (Inspector of Security Police in East Prussia, includ­
ing Bialystok, and Plenipotentiary of Security Police in Belgium):
Sentenced by Belgian court to twenty years in 1951. Released 1952.
Employed by Henkel Works in Düsseldorf. Accused before West Ger­
man court, 1980, and declared unable to stand trial.
Canaris, Wilhelm (Admiral, OKW): Purged 1944. Executed April 1945.
Catlos, Frantisek (Slovak War Minister): Deserted to insurgent territory',
1944. Arrested by Soviets and released. Died, 1972.
Clauberg, Carl (Medical experimenter, Auschwitz): Released by Soviets,
1955. Died of apoplexy while awaiting trial in Kiel, 1957.
Conti, Leonardo (Interior Ministry): Suicide in Nuremberg, 1945.
Daluege, Kurt (ORPO and Protektorat): Executed in Czechoslovakia,
1946.
Dannecker, Theodor (RSHA): Believed to have died in American cap­
tivity, 1945.
Darquier de Pellepoix, Louis (Vichy Commissariat on Jewish Affairs): In
Spain. Died there, 1980.
Dejaco, Walter (Auschwitz): Architect in Austria, 1962. Exonerated by
Austrian court, 1972.
Dirlewanger, Oskar (Dirlewanger Brigade): Reportedly died in French
captivity, 1945.

1176 CONSEQUENCES
Dorfnniiller, Julius (Transport Minister): Retained by occupation forces.
Died, July 1945.
Dorsch, Xaver (Organisation Todt): Partner, Dorsch-Gehrmann,
Wiesbaden, Hamburg, and Munich, 1964. Died 1986.
Diirrfeld, Ernst (Warsaw City' Administration): Reported killed in Polish
Warsaw uprising, August 1944.
Durrfild, Walter (I. G. Auschwitz): Sentenced by U.S. military tribunal
to eight years. Vorstand, Scholven-Chemie A. G. Gelsenkirchen,
1955.
Eberl, Irmjried (Commander of Treblinka): Arrested by U.S. authorities
in Blaubeuren near Ulm, 1948. Committed suicide in his cell.
Ehlers, Ernst (Einsatzgruppe B, Commander of Security Police,
Belgium): Verwaltungsgerichtsrat in Schleswig-Holstein. Indicted,
1980. Suicide before trial.
Ehrliriger, Erich (Einsatzgruppe A): Sentenced in Karlsruhe to twelve
years in 1961. On appeal, case remanded to trial court. Proceedings
discontinued 1969 because of defendant’s permanent disability.
Eicfnnann, Adolf (RSHA): Escaped unrecognized from internment camp
in American zone, 1946. Apprehended by Israel agents in Argentina
and flown to Israel for trial, May 1960. Condemned to death in 1961
and hanged in 1962.
Eirenscbmalz, Franz (WVHA): Condemned to death by U.S. military tri­
bunal. Sentence commuted by Clemency Board to nine years.
Eisfeld, Kurt (I. G. Auschwitz): Vorstand, Dynamit Nobel, Troisdorf,
1967.
Endre, luiszlo (Hungarian Interior Ministry): Executed in Hungary,
1946.
Ealkenhausen, Alexander von (Military'Commander, Belgium): Sen­
tenced in Belgium to twelve years. Released, 1951. Died 1966.
Eanslau, Heinz (WVHA): Sentenced by U.S. military' tribunal to twenty-
five years. Sentence reduced by the tribunal to twenty years, further
reduced by Clemency' Board to fifteen years.
Eellgiebel, Erich (OKW): Purged and executed, 1944.
Felmy, Helmut (LXVIII Corps, South Greece): Sentenced by U.S. mili­
tary' tribunal to fifteen years, but not for anti-Jewish acts. Sentence re­
duced by Clemency Board to ten years. Released, 1952.
Eendler, iMthar (Einsatzgruppe C): Sentenced by U.S. military' tribunal
to ten years. Sentence reduced by Clemency' Board to eight years.
Eerenczy, /^/¿(HungarianGendarmerie): Executed in Hungary', 1946.
Eilor, Bogdan (Bulgarian Prime Minister): Executed in Bulgaria, 1945.
Fischer; Ludwig (Gouverneur, Warsaw): Executed in Poland, 1947.

THE TRIALS 1177


Flick, Friedrich (Mitteldeutsche Stahlwerke): Sentenced by U.S. military
tribunal to seven years, but not for anti-Jewish acts.
Forster, Albert (Gauleiter, Danzig-West Prussia): Executed in Poland,
1948.
Frank, August (WVHA): Sentenced by U.S. military tribunal to life.
Sentence reduced by Clemency Board to fifteen years.
Frank, Hans (Generalgouverneur): Sentenced to death by International
Military Tribunal and hanged, 1946.
Frank, Karl-Hermann (Protektorat): Executed in Czechoslovakia, 1947.
Frauendorfer, Max (Generalgouvernement): With Allianz Insurance.
Also in politics, 1963.
Frauenfeld, Alfred (Generalkommissar, Melitopol): Arrested for neo-
Nazi activities and freed after investigation by German court, 1953.
Freisler, Roland (Justice Ministry): Killed in air raid, 1945.
Frick, Wilhelm (Interior Minister and Reichsprotektor): Sentenced to
death by International Military Tribunal and hanged, 1946.
Fuchs, Wilhelm (Einsatzgruppe in Serbia) : Tried in Belgrade and exe­
cuted, 1946.
Funk, Walter (Economy Minister): Sentenced to life by International
Military' Tribunal. Released for reasons of health, 1957. Died, 1960.
Fünfen, Ferdinand aus der (Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Hol­
land): Condemned to death in Holland. Sentence commuted to life
after reported intervention by Adenauer, 1951.
Ganzenmüller, Albert (Staatssekretär, Reichsbahn): Consultant to Argen­
tinian State Railways, 1947-55. Transport specialist, Höchst A. G.,
1955-68. Indicted in Düsseldorf, 1973. Not tried because of ill
health.
Gebhardt, Joseph (Finance Ministry): Judge, supreme federal tax court
(Bundesfinanzhof).
Gebhardt, Karl (Chief clinician, SS): Condemned to death by U.S. Mili­
tary Tribunal and executed, 1948.
Geitmann, Hans (Reichsbahndirektion Oppeln): President, General­
betriebsleitung Süd, Stuttgart, Bundesbahn. As of 1957, member of
Vorstand, Bundesbahn.
Gemmeker, Albert Konrad (Commander of Westerbork): Reportedly liv­
ing in Düsseldorf, February 1960.
Genzken, Karl (Medical service, SS): Sentenced by U.S. military' tribunal
to life. Sentence reduced by Clemency Board to twenty years. Fined
by West Berlin denazification court, 1955.
Glas, Alfons (Ostbahn): Bundesbahninspektor.
Globke, Hans (Interior Ministry): Ministerialdirektor, Chancellors Of­
fice, 1950. Staatssekretär, 1953.
Globocnik, Odilo (SS and Police Leader, Lublin): Suicide, 1945.

1178 CONSEQUENCES
Glücks, Richard (WVHA): Reported by Höss to have been delivered,
“half dead,” to naval hospital in Flensburg just before surrender. Ap­
parent suicide attempt resulting in death.
Goebbels, Paul Josef (Propaganda Minister and Gauleiter of Berlin): Sui­
cide in Berlin, 1945.
Goldschmidt, Theo (DEGESCH): Aufsichtsrat, Farbenfabriken Bayer
A. G., Leverkusen, 1951.
Görinjj, Hermann: Condemned to death by International Military Tri­
bunal. Commited suicide before execution, 1946.
Grabncr, Max (Auschwitz administration): Sentenced to death in Po­
land, 1947.
Granitz·, Ernst (Reich Physician, SS): Suicide, 1945.
Greijiit, Ulrich (Stall Main Office): Sentenced by U.S. military tribunal
to life. Died, 1949.
Greiser, Artur (Gauleiter, Wartheland): Executed in Poland, 1946.
Grell, Tim (Foreign Office): In Berchtesgaden, 1961.
Grese, Irma (Auschwitz administration): Condemned to death by British
court and executed, 1945.
Grundinrr, Werner von (Foreign Office): Federal Ambassador to Greece,
1952. Forced into retirement upon investigation by Bundestag com­
mittee during the same year.
Guderian, Heinz (Commander of Panzer Group 3, Russia Center, and
Chief of General Stall): Retired.
Günther, Rolf (KSHA): Missing, believed dead.
Haberland, Ulrich (I. G. Farben): Vorstand, Farbenfabriken Bayer A. G.,
Leverkusen, 1951.
Haensch, Walter (Einsatzgruppe C): Condemned to death by U.S. mili­
tary tribunal. Sentence commuted to fifteen years by Clemency
Board.
Hatfen, Herbert (Security Police, France): Active in West German com­
merce. Sentenced in Cologne to twelve years, 1980.
Hahn, Ludwig (Commander of Security Police, Warsaw District): In in­
surance and investment business. Arrested, 1960. Sentenced in Ham­
burg for acts involving Pawiak prison (Warsaw) to twelve years,
1973, for acts against Jews to fifteen years, 1975.
Haider, Franz (Chief of General Staff): Indicted as major offender before
Bavarian denazification court. Exonerated, 1948.
Handbser, Siegfried (Chief, Armed Forces Medical Service): Sentenced
by U.S. military tribunal to life. Sentence reduced by Clemency Board
to twenty years.
Harster, Wilhelm (Commander of Security Police in Holland and Italy).
Sentenced by Dutch court to twelve years, 1949. Released 1955. Sub­

THE TRIALS 117»


sequently in Bavaria as Regierungsrat, 1956; Oberregierungsrat,
1958. Pensioned, 1963.
Hartjenstein, Fritz (Auschwitz administration): Sentenced by British
court to life. Charge involved no acts at Auschwitz.
Heinburg, Kurt (Foreign Office) : Bundestag committee on record
against retention in new Foreign Office, 1952.
Hellenthal, Walter von (Foreign Office): Ambassador to Lebanon. Re­
tired, 1968.
Hering, Gottlieb (Commander of Belzec and Poniatowa): Died October
1945 after an illness.
Heydrich, Reinhard (RSF1A and Reichsprotektor): Assassinated in
Prague, 1942.
Hildebrandt, Richard (Higher SS and Police Leader, Danzig, and chief,
RuSHA): Sentenced by the U.S. military tribunal to twenty-five years.
Extradited to Poland and executed, 1952.
Hilger, Gustav (Foreign Office): In the United States.
Himmler, Heinrich: Committed suicide upon capture, 1945.
Hindenburg, Oskar von (Commander of PW camps, East Prussia): Fined
by denazification court. Died, 1960.
Hitler, Adolf: Suicide, April 30,1945.
Hoepner, Erich (Commander of Fourth Panzer Army, Army Group
North): Purged and executed, 1944.
Hofle, Hermann (Office of the SS and Police Leader, Lublin): Arrested in
Salzburg, Austria, January 1961. Suicide, 1962.
Hofle, Hermann (Higher SS and Police Leader, Slovakia): Condemned
to death in Czechoslovakia, 1948.
Hofmann, Otto (RuSHA): Sentenced by U.S. military tribunal to
twenty-five years. Sentence reduced by Clemency Board to fifteen
years.
Hohberg, Hans (WVHA): Sentenced by U.S. military tribunal to ten
years. Sentence reduced by Clemency Board to time served, 1951.
Hoss, Rudolf (Commander of Auschwitz): Condemned to death in Po­
land and executed, 1947.
Hossler, Franz (Auschwitz administration): Condemned to death by Brit­
ish court and executed, 1945.
Hoth, Hermann (Commander of Panzer Group 3, Army Group Center,
and commander of Seventeenth Army, Army Group South): Sen­
tenced by U.S. military tribunal to fifteen years.
Hottl, Wilhelm (RSHA): In conference with Chancellor Raab on Nazi
vote in Austria, 1949. Arrested in Vienna by U.S. military in connec­
tion with Communist espionage, 1953.
Houdremont, Eduard (Krupp Essen): Sentenced by U.S. military tribunal

1180 CONSBQUENCES
to ten years. Sentence reduced by Clemency Board to time served,
1951.'
Hoven, Waldemar (Camp doctor, Buchenwald): Condemned to death by
U.S. military tribunal and executed, 1948.
Hummel, Herbert (Warsaw District): Killed August 1944 in Polish
uprising.
Hunsche, Otto (RSHA): Practiced as attorney. Sentenced by a Frankfurt
court to five years, 1962. Retried and acquitted, 1965. Tried again
and sentenced to twelve years, 1969.
Ihn, Max Otto (Krupp personnel): Sentenced by U.S. military tribunal to
nine years. Sentence reduced by Clemency Board to time served,
1951.
llifner, Max (I. G. Farben): Sentenced by U.S. military tribunal to three
years, but not for anti-Jewish acts. Vorsitz, Vorstand des Freundes­
kreises der internationalen Gesellschaft für christlichen Aufbau, 1955.
Imredy, Bela (Hungarian Economy Minister): Executed in Hungary,
1946.
Isopescu, Modest (Golta Prefecture, Transnistria): Condemned to death in
Romania. Indefinite stay granted by King Mihai upon petition from
Prime Minister Groza and Justice Minister Patra$canu.
Jacobi, Karl (Reichsbahn): Reported arrested and transported from
Berlin by Soviet authorities, 1945. Disappeared.
Jäger, Karl (Einsatzkommando 3, Lithuania): Suicide while in detention
awaiting trial in West Germany, 1959.
Jaross,Andor (Hungarian Interior Minister): Executed in Hungary,
1946.
Jeckeln, Friedrich (Higher SS and Police Leader, Ostland): Executed in
USSR, 1946.
Jodi, Alfred (OKW): Sentenced to death by International Military Tri­
bunal and hanged, 1946.
Jost, Heinz (Commander of Einsatzgruppe A): Sentenced by U.S. mili­
tary tribunal to life. Sentence reduced by Clemency Board to ten
years. Fined 15,000 marks by West Berlin denazification court, 1959.
Jiittner, Hans (Chief of SS Operational Main Office): Reportedly in
charge of sanatorium at Bad Tolz, 1961.
Kallmeyer, Helmut (Führer Chancellery): Oberregierungsrat, Statis­
tisches Landesamt in Kiel, with FAO in Cuba.
Kaltenlrrunner, Ernst (RSHA): Sentenced to death by International Mili­
tärs' Tribunal and hanged, 1946.
Kammler, Hans (WVHA): Probably killed or a suicide, May 1945.
Kappler, Herbert (Security' Police, Rome): Sentenced to life by Italian
court, 1948. Escaped from Rome military hospital, 1977. Died in
West Germany, 1978.

THE TRIALS 1181


Kasche, Siegfried (Minister to Croatia) : Executed in Yugoslavia, 1947.
Katzmann, Fritz (SS and Police Leader, Galicia): Died in Darmstadt,
1957.
Kehrl, Hans (Economy Ministry and Armament Ministry): Sentenced by
U.S. military tribunal to fifteen years. Sentence reduced by Clemency
Board to time served, 1951.
Keitel, Wilhelm (OKW): Sentenced to death by International Military
Tribunal and hanged, 1946.
Keppler, Wilhelm (Foreign Office) : Sentenced by U.S. military tribunal to
ten years. Sentence reduced by Clemency Board to time served, 1951.
Kesselring, Albert (Commander-in-chief, South) : Condemned to death
by British court. Sentence commuted to life and subsequently re­
duced to twenty-one years. Released, 1952.
Kiefer, Max (WVHA): Sentenced by U.S. military tribunal to life. Sen­
tence reduced by the tribunal to twenty years, and further reduced by
Clemency Board to time served, 1951.
Killinger, Manfred von (Minister to Romania): Suicide in Bucharest,
1944.
Klein, Fritz (Auschwitz Camp Doctor): Condemned to death by British
court and executed, 1945.
Kleist, Ewald von (Panzer Group 1, Army Group South): Extradited
from Yugoslavia to USSR in 1949. Reportedly died there in 1954.
Klemm, Bruno (Reichsbahn): Reported arrested in Berlin by Soviet au­
thorities and transported from there, 1945. Disappeared. Declared
dead in 1952.
Klemm, Herbert (Justice Ministry): Sentenced by U.S. military tribunal
to life. Sentence reduced by Clemency Board to twenty years.
Klingelhofer, Woldemar (Vorkommando Moskau): Condemned to death
by U.S. military tribunal. Sentence commuted to life by Clemency
Board. Released, 1956.
Klingenfuss, Karl Otto (Foreign Office): Wanted in American zone but
not extradited from Konstanz, 1949. In Argentina from 1950. Testi­
fied in Rademacher trial in Bamberg, 1968.
Klopfer, Gerhard (Party Chancellery): Practiced law. Died 1987 in Ulm.
Kluge, Gunther von (Commander of Army Group Center): Suicide,
1944.
Knochen, Helmut (Commander of Security Police, France): Sentenced to
death in Paris, 1954. Commutation, 1958. Released, 1962. Subse­
quently active as insurance salesman, Offenbach, Main.
Koch, Erich (Reichskommisar, Ukraine): Seized by British, 1949. Extra­
dited to Poland, 1950. Brought to trial in 1958 and condemned to
death in 1959. Execution postponed indefinitely because of continu­
ing illness.

1182 CONSEQUENCES
Kohl, Otto (ETRA West): Living in Munich, 1958.
Koppe, Wilhelm (Higher SS and Police Leader, Wartheland and General­
gouvernement): Reported under arrest in Bonn, 1961. Released on
payment of bail, 1962. Indicted in Bonn, 1964. Trial not held because
of his ill health. Died 1975.
Körner, Paul (Office of Four-Year Plan): Sentenced by U.S. military tri­
bunal to fifteen vears. Sentence reduced by Clemency Board to time
served, 1951. Pensioned.
Korschan, Heinrich Leo (Krupp Markstädt): Sentenced by U.S. military
tribunal to six years. Sentence reduced by Clemency Board to time
served, 1951.
Kramer, /«^’(Commander of Auschwitz II and commander of Bergen-
Bclsen): Condemned to death by British court and executed, 1945.
Krauch, Carl (General Plenipotentiary Chemical Industry'): Sentenced
bv U.S. military' tribunal to six years. Released 1950.
Krebs, Friedrich (Oberbürgermeister of Frankfurt): Elected to City
Council on the ticket of German Party, 1952.
Kritzinper, Friedrich Wilhelm (Reich Chancellery'): Died at liberty after
severe illness, 1947.
Krosipk, Sclnverin von (Finance Minister): Sentenced by U.S. military' tri­
bunal to ten years. Sentence reduced by Clemency' Board to time
served, 1951.
Kriiper, Friedrich (Higher SS and Police Leader, Generalgouvernement):
Probably killed or a suicide, May 1945.
Krumey, Hermann (Einsatzkommando Eichmann): Pronounced lesser
ortender by denazification court, 1948. Rearrested in Waldeck near
Frankfurt upon Austrian allegation of extortion against Hungarian
Jews, April 1957. Released without bail. Active in right-wing politics
and as drugstore owner, November 1957. Reported under arrest
again, April 1958. Sentenced to five years, 1965. Retried 1969 and
sentenced to twelve years.
Krupp, Alfried: Sentenced by U.S. military tribunal to twelve years and
deprivation of property'. Sentence reduced by Clemency Board to time
served and restoration of assets.
Kube, Wilhelm (Generalkommissar, White Russia): Assassinated, 1943.
Küchler, Ceorp von (Commander of Eighteenth Army and commander of
Army Group North): Sentenced by U.S. military tribunal to twenty'
years. Sentence reduced by Clemency' Board to twelve y'ears because
of defendant’s age.
Kuntze, Walter (Commander-in-chief, Southeast): Sentenced by U.S.
military tribunal to life.
Kvatemik, Eupen (Croatian Interior Ministry): Reported in Argentina,
1950.

THE TRIALS 1183


Kvatemik, Slavko (Croatian Defense Minister): Executed in Yugoslavia,
1946.
Lages, Willy (Security Police and SD, Amsterdam): Condemned to death
in Holland, 1949. Sentence commuted to life, 1952.
Lammers, Hans Heinrich (Reich Chancellery): Sentenced by U.S. mili­
tary' tribunal to twenty years. Sentence reduced by Clemency' Board to
ten years. Released, 1952. Died 1962.
Landfried, Friedrich (Economy Ministry): Released from custody be­
cause of mental condition. Pensioned. Died, 1953.
Lange, Rudolf (Einsatzkommando 2, Latvia): Believed killed in the battle
ofPoznan, 1945.
Lanz, Hubert (XXII Corps, Greece and Hungary): Sentenced by U.S.
military tribunal to twelve years, but not for anti-Jewish acts. Sen­
tence reduced by Clemency Board to time served, 1951.
Lasch, Karl (Gouverneur of Radom District): Purged for corruption. Re­
portedly shot without trial, 1942.
Laval, Pierre (Premier of France): Executed in France, 1945.
Lechthaler, Franz (Major of Order Police): Sentenced by Kassel court to
three years and six months, 1961. Retried in 1963. Sentence reduced
to two years.
Leeb, Wilhelm von (Commander, Army Group North): Sentenced by
U.S. military tribunal to three years, but not for anti-Jewish acts.
Leguay, Jean (Vichy Police Delegate in Occupied Zone): President,
Warner Lambert Inc., London, and President, Substantia Laborato­
ries, Paris. Died 1989.
Leibbrandt, Georg (East Ministry): Proceedings before a German court in
Nuremberg discontinued, 1950. Wrote a monograph about Black Sea
Ethnic Germans. Died, 1982.
Leist, Ludwig (Civilian German Commandant of City of Warsaw): Sen­
tenced in Poland to eight years, 1947.
Liebehenschel, Arthur (Commander of Auschwitz): Condemned to death
in Poland and executed, 1948.
Lindow, Kurt (RSHA): Brought to trial before a Frankfurt court and ex­
onerated, 1950.
Lischka, Kurt (Director of Reichszentrale for Jewish Emigration, 1939.
Subsequently in Security Police, France): Sentenced in absentia to life,
France, 1950. Business executive (Prokurist) with Krücken firm in Co­
logne. Sentenced by Cologne court to ten years, 1980.
List, Wilhelm (Wehrmacht commander, Southeast): Sentenced by LIS.
military tribunal to life. Released on medical parole, 1951.
Löhr, Alexander (Army Group E, Southeast): Executed in Yugoslavia,
1945.
Jj)hse, Hinrich (Reichskommissar, Ostland): Sentenced by denazification

1184 CONSEQUENCES
court to ten years. Released because of ill health, 1951. Pension
voided, 1955. Died, 1964.
Ijyrenz, Werner (VOMI): Sentenced by U.S. military' tribunal to twenty'
years. Sentence reduced by Clemency' Board to fifteen years.
Ijyrkovic, Mladen (Croatian Foreign Minister): Purged and executed by
Croatian government, 1944.
Lorner, Georg (WVHA): Condemned to death by U.S. military tribunal.
Sentence commuted by the tribunal to life, further reduced by Clem­
ency Board to fifteen years. Upon release, acquitted by Bavarian de­
nazification court, 1954.
IJrmer, Hans (WVHA): Sentenced by U.S. military tribunal to ten years.
Sentence reduced by Clemency Board to time serv ed, 1951.
Losacker,; Ludwig (Generalgouvernement): Chairman of the Board,
Deutsches Industrie Institut, Cologne.
Losener, Bernhard (Interior Ministry'): Prosecution witness. Released
1949. Oberfinanzdirektor, Cologne. Died, 1952.
Loser, Lwald (Krupp): Sentenced by U.S. military' tribunal to seven years.
Sentence reduced by Clemency Board to time served, 1951.
Ludin, HantisElard (Minister to Slovakia): Condemned to death in
Czechoslovakia, 1946.
Luther, Martin (Foreign Office): Purged. Died in concentration camp.
Mach, Saho (Slovak Interior Minister): Sentenced in Czechoslovakia to
thirtv years.
Mackensen, Eberhard von (Commander in Rome): Condemned to death
by British court. Released, 1952.
Manstein, Erich von (Commander, Eleventh Army): Sentenced by British
court to eighteen years. Sentence reduced to twelve years. Released,
1952. Informal consultant to West German Defense Ministry' during
subsequent years.
Markl, Hermann (Prosecutor in Katzenberger race pollution case): Re­
turned to Bavarian Judiciary, 1951; Oberlandesgerichtsrat, 1955.
Massute, Ertvin (Ostbahn): Professor, Technical College of Hannover,
1949.
Meisinger, Josef (Commander of Security' Police, Warsaw District): Sen­
tenced to death in Poland, 1947, and executed.
Mengcle, Josef (Auschwitz physician): Fled to Argentina. West German
requests for extradition denied by Argentinian government. Went to
Paraguay, 1959, and subsequently to Brazil. A body disinterred in
Brazil in 1985 identified as Mengele’s. Death is believed to have oc­
curred in 1979.
Merten, Max (Chief of military' administration, Salonika): Active as at­
torney after the war. Returned to Greece as representative of travel
bureau. Arrested there and sentenced to twenty-five years, 1959. Re­

THE TRIALS 1185


leased before conclusion of indemnification agreement between West
Germany and Greece during the same year.
Meyer, Alfred (East Ministry): Suicide, 1945.
Meyszner, August (Higher SS and Police Leader, Serbia): Executed in
Yugoslavia, 1947.
Michel, Elmar (Military Administration, France): Ministerialdirektor,
Federal Economy Ministry. Chairman of the Board, Salamander A. G.
Milch, Erhard (Air Force and Jägerstab): Sentenced by U.S. military tri­
bunal to life. Sentence reduced by Clemency Board to fifteen years.
Released, 1954. Pensioned.
Möckel, Karl (Auschwitz administration) : Sentenced to death in Poland,
1947.
Mrugowsky, Joachim (Chief, Hygienic Institute, SS): Condemned to
death by U.S. military tribunal and executed, 1948.
Müller, Erich (Krupp Artillery Construction): Sentenced by U.S. military
tribunal to twelve years. Sentence reduced by Clemency Board to time
served, 1951.
Müller, Heinrich (RSHA): Missing.
Müller, Johannes (Commander of Security Police, Warsaw and Lublin
Districts): Died while in detention awaiting trial, 1961.
Mummenthey, Karl (WVHA): Sentenced by U.S. military tribunal to
life. Sentence reduced by Clemency Board to twenty years.
Naumann, Erich (Commander of Einsatzgruppe B) : Condemned to
death by U.S. military tribunal and executed, 1951.
Naumann, Karl (Generalgouvernement): Landrat in Holzminden,
1952-58. Chairman, League of Germany’s Large Families.
Nebe, Artur (RSHA): Reported purged and executed, 1944-45.
Nedic, Milan (Chief of Serbian government): Suicide.
Neubacher, Hermann (Mayor of Vienna and Economic Plenipotentiary,
Southeast) : Sentenced in Yugoslavia to twenty years of hard labor.
Amnestied after seven years. With Austrian Airlines, 1958. Died,
1960.
Neurath, Konstantin von (Foreign Minister and Reichsprotektor): Sen­
tenced by International Military Tribunal to fifteen years. Released,
1954.
Nosske, Gustav (Einsatzgruppe D): Sentenced by U.S. military' tribunal to
life. Sentence reduced by Clemency' Board to ten years.
Novak, Franz (RSHA): Sentenced in Vienna to eight years, 1964. New
trial in 1966 ended in acquittal. Tried again in 1969 and sentenced to
nine years. Fourth trial held in 1972, with a final sentence of seven
years.
Oberg, Karl (SS and Police Leader, Radom, Higher SS and Police

1186 CONSEQUENCES
Leader, France): Sentenced to death in France, 1954. Commutation,
1958. Released 1962. Died in West Germany. 1965.
Oberhäuser, Josef (Betzec): Sentenced by a Munich court to four years and
six months, 1965.
Ohlendorf', Otto (Commander of Einsatzgruppe D): Condemned to
death by U.S. military tribunal and executed, 1951.
Ott, Adolf (Einsatzgruppe B): Condemned to death by U.S. military tri­
bunal. Sentence commuted to life by Clemency Board. Released,
1958.
Paersch, Fritz (Generalgouvernement): Landeszentralbank von Hessen,
Frankfurt, 1961.
Panzinper, Friedrich (RSHA): Released from Soviet captivity, 1955. Col­
lapsed and died in Munich apartment upon arrest by German police,
1959.
Pavelic,Ante (Chief of Croatian state): In Argentina until 1957. Died in
Madrid, 1959.
Petnsel, Max Joseph (Chief of staff to commanding general in Serbia):
Commander, Military District IV, West German Army, during
mid-1950s. Commander, II Corps, 1961.
Pfanuenstiel, Wilhelm (Professor, Marburg an der Lahn): Investigation
begun by German authorities in Marburg, 1950. Apparently no trial.
Pjimdtner, Fians (Staatssekretär, Interior Ministry): Suicide, 1945.
Pleiper, Paul (Hermann Goring Works): Sentenced by U.S. military tri­
bunal to fifteen years. Sentence reduced by Clemency Board to nine
years.
Pohl, Oswald (WVHA): Condemned to death by U.S. military tribunal
and executed, 1951.
Pokorny, Adolf (Author of sterilization plan): Acquitted by U.S. military
tribunal.
Pook, Hermann (WVHA): Sentenced by U.S. military tribunal to five
years. Sentence reduced by Clemency Board to time served, 1951.
Pradel, Johannes (RSHA): Police officer in Hannover. Arrested there,
January 1961.
Priitzmann, Hans (Higher SS and Police Leader, Ukraine): Suicide,
1945.
Puhl, Emil (Reichsbank): Sentenced by U.S. military tribunal to five
years. Vorstand, Hamburger Kreditbank A. G., 1961.
Rademacher, Franz (Foreign Office): With Reemtsma cigarette concern.
Sentenced by German court in Nuremberg to three years and five
months, 1952. Skipped bail and fled to Syria during same year. Im­
prisoned in Syria for acts involving Arab affairs, 1963. Returned vol­
untarily to Germany, 1966. Sentenced to five years by Bamberg court,
1968, but released because of poor health. Died, 1973.

THE TRIALS 1187


Radetzky, Waldemar von (Einsatzgruppe B): Sentenced by U.S. military
tribunal to twenty years. Sentence reduced by Clemency Board to
time served, 1951.
Rahm, Karl (Commander of Theresienstadt): Tried at Leitmeritz,
Czechoslovakia, 1947. Condemned to death and executed.
Rabn, Rudolf (On Foreign Office mission in France, Foreign Office Rep­
resentative in North Africa, Ambassador to Italy): Denazified, 1950.
General Secretary, Coca-Cola Company, Essen.
Rapp, Albert (Einsatzgruppe B): Sentenced by Essen court to life, 1965.
Rascb, Otto (Commander of Einsatzgruppe C): Indicted before U.S. mil­
itary tribunal. Too ill to be tried.
Rasche, Karl (Dresdner Bank): Sentenced by U.S. military' tribunal to
seven years. Released, 1950.
Rascber, Sigmund (Medical experimenter, Dachau) : Purged. Rumored
shot in Dachau, 1945.
Rauff Walter (RSHA) : Reported in Chile, 1963. Died there, 1984.
Rauter, HannsAlbin (Higher SS and Police Leader, Holland): Con­
demned to death in Holland and executed, 1949.
Reeder; Eggert (Chief of Civil Administration, Belgium): Sentenced in
Brussels to twenty years, 1951. Released same year.
Reichenau, Walter von (Commander Sixth Army and commander, Army
Group South): Died, 1942.
Reinecke, Hermann (OKW): Sentenced by U.S. military tribunal to life.
Released in 1954. Died, 1963.
Reinhardt, Hans (Commander, Panzer Group 3, Army Group Center,
and commander Third Panzer Army): Sentenced by U.S. military' tri­
bunal to fifteen years.
Rendulic, Lothar (Commander, 52d Infantry Division, Russian front):
Sentenced by U.S. military tribunal to twenty years. Sentence reduced
by Clemency Board to ten years. Released, 1952.
Ribbentrop, Joachim von (Foreign Minister): Sentenced to death by Inter­
national Military Tribunal and hanged, 1946.
Richter, Erich (Ostbahn): Bundesbahnoberrat, Nuremberg, 1964.
Richter, Gustav (SS deportation expert in Romania): In Stuttgart, 1959.
Rintelen, Emil von (Foreign Office): Active at diplomacy' school in
Speyer.
Ritter, Karl (Foreign Office): Sentenced by U.S. military' tribunal to tour
years, but not for anti-Jewish acts.
Roques, Karl von (Commander, Rear Area Army Group South): Sen­
tenced by U.S. military tribunal to twenty' years. Died, 1949.
Rose, Gerhard (Robert Koch Institute/Division of Tropical Medicine):
Sentenced by U.S. military tribunal to life. Sentence reduced by
Clemency Board to fifteen years.

1188 CONSEQUENCES
Rosenberg, Alfred (East Minister): Sentenced to death by International
Military Tribunal and hanged, 1946.
Rossum, Fritz (Oberfeldkommandant, Warsaw): Retired in Diisseldort.
Rothaug, Oswald (Judiciary): Sentenced by U.S. military tribunal to life.
Sentence reduced by Clemency Board to twenty years. Pensioned.
Rothenberger, Curt (Justice Ministry): Sentenced by U.S. military tri­
bunal to seven years. Pensioned.
Rotbke, Heinz (Securin' Police, France): In legal work, at Wolfsburg.
Died in 1968.
Ruehl, Felix (Einsatzgruppe D): Sentenced by U.S. military tribunal to
ten years. Sentence reduced by Clemency Board to time served.
Rundstedt, Karl von (Commander, Army Group South): Held in British
zone for trial, 1948. Pronounced too ill to be tried, 1949. Subse­
quently freed and retired with pension of ca. 2,000 Deutsche Mark
per month, 1951. Died in 1953.
Rust, Bernard (Education Minister): Suicide, 1945.
Salmuth, Hans von (Commander, XXX Corps, Eleventh Army, and com­
mander, Second Army, Army Group Center): Sentenced by U.S. mili­
tary tribunal to twenty years. Sentence reduced by Clemency Board to
twelve years. Released, 1953. Died, 1962.
Sammem-Frankenegg, Ferdinand von (SS and Police Leader, Warsaw):
Killed by partisans in Yugoslavia, 1944.
Sandberger, Martin (Einsatzgruppe A): Condemned to death by U.S.
military tribunal. Sentence commuted to life by Clemency Board. Re­
leased, 1953.
Sauckel, Fritz- (Labor Plenipotentiary): Sentenced to death by Interna­
tional Military' Tribunal and hanged, 1946.
Schacht, Hjalmar (Reichsbank): Acquitted by International Military Tri­
bunal, 1946. Stopped during international flight at Lod, Israel, and
strolled in air terminal unmolested, 1951.
Schafer, Emanuel (BdS, Serbia): Sentenced by denazification court to one
year and nine months. Subsequently sentenced by German criminal
court to an additional six years and six months.
Scheide, Rudolf (WVHA): Acquitted by U.S. military tribunal.
Scbellenberg, Walter (RSHA): Sentenced by U.S. military tribunal to six
years, but not for anti-Jewish acts. Released before serving sentence.
Died in Italy, 1952.
Scbelp, Fritz (Reichsbahn): President, Bundesbahndirektion Hamburg,
1950. Vorstand Member, Bundesbahn, 1952.
Schimana, Walter (Higher SS and Police Leader, Athens): Died, 1948.
Scbirach, Baldurwn (Reichsstatthalter of Vienna): Sentenced by Interna­
tional Military' Tribunal to twenty' years.
Scblegelbetger, Franz (Justice Ministry'): Sentenced by U.S. military' tri­

THE TRIALS 1189


bunal to life. Released on medical probation upon recommendation
of Clemency Board, 1951.
Schmelter, Fritz (Armament Ministry)'· Deutsche Industriefinanzierungs-
A. G. Frankfurt, 1964.
Schmid, Theodor (Ostbahn): Bundesbahnoberrat.
Schmidt, Paul Karl (Foreign Office Press Chief): As Paul Carell, author
of best-selling books about Second World War.
Schmitz, Hermann (I. G. Farben): Sentenced by U.S. military tribunal to
four years, but not for anti-Jewish acts. Chairman of Aufsichtsrat,
Rheinische Stahlwerke, 1955.
Schnitzler, Georg von (I. G. Farben): Sentenced by U.S. military tribunal
to five years.
Schobert, Ritter von (Commander, Eleventh Army). Killed in action,
1941.
Schöngarth, Karl (BdS in Generalgouvernement and BdS Holland):
Condemned to death by British court, 1946.
Schreiber, Walter (Army Medical Service): Under 180-day contract with
Air Force School of Aviation Medicine at Randolph Field, San An­
tonio, Texas. Upon contract expiration, dropped by Secretary
Thomas K. Finletter because of charges in regard to medical experi­
ments by Boston group of doctors, 1952.
Schröder, Oskar (Air Force Medical Service): Sentenced by U.S. military
tribunal to life. Sentence reduced by Clemency Board to fifteen years.
Schubert, Heinz Hermann (Einsatzgruppe D): Condemned to death by
U.S. military tribunal. Sentence commuted by Clemency Board to ten
years. Released 1951.
Schulz, Erwin (Einsatzgruppe C): Sentenced by U.S. military tribunal to
twenty years. Sentence reduced by Clemency Board to fifteen years.
Released, 1954. Pensioned. Died 1981.
Schumann, Horst (Auschwitz physician): In private practice. Fled from
Germany, 1951. In Sudan, 1955-59, and in Ghana thereafter. Extra-
dieted to West Germany, 1966. Tried 1970-71 without result be­
cause of illness. Released, 1972. Died, 1983.
Schweinoch, Werner (Ostbahn): Bundesbahnoberinspektor, 1964.
Seibert, Willi (Einsatzgruppe D): Condemned to death by U.S. military
tribunal. Sentence commuted by Clemency Board to fifteen years.
Seidl, Siegfried (Commander of Theresienstadt): Condemned to death bv
Austrian court, 1946.
Seyss-Inquart, Artur (Reichskommissar, Holland): Sentenced to death bv
International Military Tribunal and hanged, 1946.
Siebert, Friedrich Wilhelm (Generalgouvernement): Sentenced in Poland
to twelve years.

1190 CONSEQUENCES
Singers, Wolfram (Ahnenerbe): Condemned to death by U.S. military tri­
bunal and executed, 1948.
Sima, Horia (Iron Guard Leader): In Spain, 1964.
Simon, Gustav (Chief of Civil Administration, Luxembourg): Arrested in
1945. Suicide.
Six, Franz (Vorkommando Moskau): Sentenced by U.S. military tri­
bunal to twenty years. Sentence reduced by Clemency Board to ten
years. Released 1952. Subsequently director of sales promotion in
Porsche-Diesel-Motoren GmbH. Died, 1975.
Sollmann, Max (Lebensborn): Sentenced by U.S. military tribunal to
time served for membership in criminal organization.
Sommer, Karl (WVHA): Condemned to death by U.S. military tribunal.
Sentence commuted to life by Military Governor; further reduced by
Clemency Board to twenty years.
Speer, Albert (Armament Minister): Sentenced by International Military
Tribunal to twenty years, 1946.
Speidel, Flans (Chief of Staff, Military Commander, France, 1940-42):
Commander of NATO ground forces, Central Europe, mid-1950s.
Speidel, Wiliielm (Military' commander, Greece): Sentenced by U.S. mili­
tary' tribunal to twenty' years, but not for anti-Jewish acts. Sentence re­
duced by Clemency Board to time serv ed, 1951.
Sporrenberp, Jakob (SS and Police Leader, Lublin): Condemned to death
in Poland, 1950. Executed.
Stahlecker, Franz Walter (Commander of Einsatzgruppe A): Killed in ac­
tion, 1942.
Stanpl, Franz (Commander of Treblinka): Fled to Italy and with help of
Bishop Hudal, to Damascus, 1948. In Brazil, 1951-67. Extradictcd
from there and sentenced in Düsseldorf to life, 1970. Died, 1971.
Steenpracht van Moyland, Adolf (Foreign Office): Sentenced by U.S. mili­
tary' tribunal to seven years. Sentence reduced by the tribunal to five
years by removing conviction for aggression. Released, 1950.
Steimle, Hupen (Einsatzgruppe B): Condemned to death by U.S. military'
tribunal. Sentence commuted by Clemency Board to twenty years.
Released, 1954.
Steinbrinck, Otto (Mitteldeutsche Stahlwerke): Sentenced by U.S. mili­
tary tribunal to five y'ears, but not for anti-Jewish acts.
Stier, Walther (Ostbahn). Amtsrat. Main Administration of Bundesbahn,
Frankfurt, 1963. Subsequently Bundesbahndirektor.
Strauch, Eduard (Einsatzgruppe A): Condemned to death by U.S. mili­
tary' tribunal. Extradited to Belgium and condemned to death again.
Execution stayed because of defendant's insanity'.
Strauss, A/io/f (Commander, Ninth Army, Army Group Center): Field in
British zone for trial, 1948. Pronounced too ill to be tried, 1949.

THE TRIALS 1191


Streckenbach, Bruno (RSHA): Sentenced in the USSR to twenty-five
years. Released in 1955. Investigated in Hamburg. Died 1977.
Streicher, Julius (Publisher, Der Stürmer) : Sentenced to death by Interna­
tional Military Tribunal and hanged, 1946.
Stroop, Jürgen (SS and Police Leader, Warsaw): Condemned to death in
Poland and executed, 1951.
Stuckart, Wilhelm (Interior Ministry): Sentenced by U.S. military tri­
bunal to time served because of ill health. Fined 500 Deutsche Mark
by denazification court. City treasurer of Helmstedt, then Director of
the Institute for the Promotion of the Lower Saxony Economy. Killed
in automobile accident, 1953.
Stülpnagel, Heinrich von (Commander, Seventeenth Army, and military
commander, France): Purged and executed, 1944.
Stülpnagel, Otto von (Military commander, France): Committed suicide
in French prison, 1948.
Szdlasi, Ferenc (Hungarian Chief of State): Executed in Hungary, 1946.
Sztôjay, Dime (Hungarian Prime Minister): Executed in Hungary,
1946.
Ter Meer, Fritz (I. G. Farben): Sentenced by U.S. military tribunal to
seven years. Released, 1950. Deputy Chairman, T. G. Goldschmidt
A. G., Essen; Aufsichtsrat, Bankverein Westdeutschland A. G., Düs­
seldorf; Aufsichtsrat, Düsseldorfer Waggonfabrik, 1955.
Thadden, Eberhard von (Foreign Office): Indicted before German court
in Nuremberg, 1948. Escaped to Cologne, where state attorney re­
fused extradition, 1949 and 1950. Still in Cologne, 1953. While un­
der investigation in 1964, died in automobile accident.
Thierack, Otto (Justice Minister): Suicide, 1946.
Thomas, Georg (OKW/Wi Rü): Purged and incarcerated in Buchenwald.
“Liberated” there by Allies, 1945. Died 1946.
Thomas, Max (BdS Ukraine): Probable suicide, 1945.
Tiso, Jozef (President of Slovakia) : Shielded by Cardinal Faulhaber in Ba­
varian monastery, May 1945. Caught by Americans and extradited to
Czechoslovakia, November 1945. Executed there in 1947.
Tschentscher, Erwin (WVHA): Sentenced by U.S. military tribunal to ten
years. Sentence reduced by Clemency Board to time served, 1951.
Tuka, Vojtech (Slovak Prime Minister): Condemned to death in Czecho­
slovakia, 1946.
Turner, Harald (Office of military governor, Serbia): Condemned to
death in Yugoslavia, 1947.
Vallat, Xavier (French Commissar/Jews): Ten-year sentence in France,
1947. Released by Justice Minister René Mayer, 1950. Died 1972.
Veesenmayer, Edmund (Minister to Hungary): Sentenced by U.S. militarv

1192 CONSEQUENCES
tribunal to twenty years. Sentence reduced by Clemency Board to ten
years. Commercially active in Darmstadt, 1961.
Verbeck, Franz Heinrich (Ostbahn): Bundesbahndirektor.
Vialon, Friedrich (Ostland): Federal Finance Ministry, 1950-58; Office
of Federal Chancellor, 1958-62; Staatssekretär, Federal Ministry' for
Economic Cooperation (Wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit), 1962-66.
Volk, Leo (VVVHA): Sentenced by U.S. military' tribunal to ten years.
Sentence reduced by Clemency Board to eight years.
Wächter, Otto (Gouverneur of Galicia): Died in Rome Hospital Santo
Spirito under protection of Bishop Alois Hudal, 1949.
Wagner, Fduard (Generalquartiermeister of the Army): Suicide, July
1944.
Wagner, Horst (Foreign Office): Arrest ordered by German authorities in
1949. Fled to Spain and then to Italy. Extradition proceedings in Italy
commenced in 1953 and failed. Subsequently went back to Germany.
Arrested after making application for pension and released on
80,000-mark bail, April 1960. Not tried. Died, 1977.
Wagner, Robert (Reichsstatthalter of Baden and Chief of Civil Admin­
istration in Alsace) : Executed in France, 1946.
Walbaum,Jost (Generalgouvernement): Extradition to Poland denied by
British occupation authorities, 1948-49. Practicing physician. West
German investigation terminated 1963 without trial.
Warlimont, Walter (OKW): Sentenced by U.S. military tribunal to life.
Sentence reduced by Clemency Board to eighteen years.
Weichs, Maximilian von (Commander, Second Army, Army Group Cen­
ter, and commander-in-chief, Southeast): Indicted before U.S. mili­
tary tribunal. Too ill to be tried.
Weizsäcker, Ernst von (Foreign Office): Sentenced by U.S. military tri­
bunal to seven years. Sentence reduced by the tribunal to five years by
removing conviction for aggression. Released, 1950. Died, 1951.
Wendler, Richard (Gouverneur of Krakow District): Attorney in Munich.
Werkmeister, Karl (Foreign Office): Ambassador to Sweden, 1963.
Westerkamp, Eberhard (Generalgouvernement): State Secretary, Interior
Ministry of Lower Saxony, 1956-59. Law practice, 1960. President,
German Red Cross of Lower Saxony.
Wetzel, Erhard (East Ministry): In Soviet captivity. Released, 1955. Min­
isterialrat in Lower Saxony. Retired, 1958. Subsequent West German
investigation terminated without trial.
Winkelmann, Otto (Higher SS and Police Leader in Hungary): City
Councillor in Kiel. Appealed withdrawal of pension bv Schleswig-
Holstein, 1974.
Winkler, Max (Main Trusteeship Office East): Exonerated by denazifica­
tion court, 1949.

THE TRIALS 1193


Wisliceny, Dieter (SS deportation expert in Slovakia, Greece, and Hun­
gary): Executed in Czechoslovakia, 1948.
Wohler, Otto (Eleventh Army): Sentenced by U.S. military tribunal to
eight years.
Wohlthat, Helmut (Office of the Four-Year Plan): Aufsichtsrat, Farben­
fabriken Bayer A. G., 1951.
Wolff, Karl (Chief of Himmler’s Personal Staff): Sentenced by denazifica­
tion court to time served, 1949. Sentenced by criminal court in Mu­
nich to fifteen years, 1964. Released, 1971. Died, 1984.
Wörmann, Ernst (Foreign Office): Sentenced by U.S. military tribunal to
seven years. Sentence reduced by the tribunal to five years by remov­
ing conviction for aggression. Released 1950. Died 1979.
Wurster, Karl (I. G. Farben): Acquitted by U.S. military tribunal. Chair­
man, Badische Anilin and Sodafabrik, Ludwigshafen, 1951.
Zabel,Martin (Ostbahn): Vizepräsident, Bundesbahndirektion Kassel,
1964.
Zahn, Albrecht (Ostbahn): Bundesbahndirektor in Stuttgart.
Zimmermann, Herbert (KdS, Bialystok): Suicide, 1966.
Zitpins, Walter (Criminal Police, Lodz): Polizeidirektor in Hannover.
Arrested there, November 1960. Proceedings discontinued, 1961.
Zopf, Wilhelm (Security Police, Netherlands): Sentenced by a Munich
court to nine years, 1967.

RESCUE
The most effective rescue is that which is undertaken before the danger
point has been reached. In the Jewish case this meant emigration before
the outbreak of war, but that migration was limited by two decisive fac­
tors. The first was the inability of the European Jews to foresee the future.
The second was the limitation of reception facilities for prospective emi­
grants. Most of the world’s surface offered no economic base for a new,
productive life, and the two countries that historically had been the most
feasible goals of Jewish emigration, the United States and Palestine, were
saddled with entry restrictions.1
In the United States the maximum number of immigrants to be admit­
ted in one year was fixed in accordance with the following formula: 1

1. Sec letter by Albrecht (Foreign Office, Legal Division) to Himmler on immigra­


tion laws in the United States, Canada, Brazil, Guatemala, El Salvador, Ecuador,
Bolivia, South Africa, and Palestine, November 10, 1937, NG-3236. For British
immigration policy, see Louise London, Whitehall and tlx Jews, ¡933-1948 (Cam­
bridge, England, 2000). For Australia, see Colin Golvan, The Distant Holocaust
(Crows Nest, New South Wales, 1990).

1194 CONSEQUENCES
Population of U.S. in 1920
Yearly quota of admissible whose “national origin” was
persons born in a given country _ ______ traced to such country
150,000 Total population of
European descent in
U.S. in 1920
On April 28,1938, the “national origin immigration quotas” were conse­
quently distributed as follows:2
Great Britain 65,721
Germany (including Austria) 27,370
Eire 17,853
Poland 6,524
Italy 5,802
Sweden 3,314
Netherlands 3,153
France 3,086
Czechoslovakia 2,874
USSR 2,712
Norway 2,377
Switzerland 1,707
Belgium 1,304
Denmark 1,181
Hungary 869
Yugoslavia 845
Finland 569
Portugal 440
Lithuania 386
Romania 377
All other states under the quota system less than 300
Until 1939 the United States provided a ready haven lor German- and
Austrian-born Jews who wanted to emigrate and who had the money for
train and ship fare. That year the German quota was oversubscribed,3 and I

I 2. Proclamation by the President, April 28, 1938, 8 USCA 211. In the case of
I quotas exceeding 300, no more than 10 percent of the quota was to be exhausted in
1 one month. Ibid. Not affected by the quota system were all immigrants bom in
American countries, the spouses or unmarried children of U.S. citizens, residents
returning from temporary visits abroad, ministers of the church (including rabbis),
professors, students, and women who had lost U.S. citizenship by reason of marriage,
8 USCA 204.
3. David S. Wyman, Paper Walls (Amherst, Mass., 1968), pp. 220-22. See also
Wyman’s discussion ot refusal by Congress in 1939 to pass a bill admitting 20,000

RESCUE 1195
many of the Polish-born Jews in the Reich-Protektorat area, assigned to
the much smaller quota of Poland, faced a long waiting list.
The Jews were therefore dependent upon Palestine as well. Here, how­
ever, they encountered all the difficulties created by British Middle East­
ern policy. The British were thinking not only about the Jews but also
about the Arabs. In the event of war, the support of the world Jewish
community was assured in any case. The Jews could not choose sides; the
Arabs could. That consideration was decisive.
The mandate that the British government had received from the
League of Nations provided in Article 6 that “the Administration of
Palestine, while ensuring that the rights and position of other sections of
the population are not prejudiced, shall facilitate Jewish immigration
under suitable conditions.” These words allowed for considerable inter­
pretation. In 1922 the Colonial Secretary (Winston Churchill) inter­
preted the provision to hold that “this immigration cannot be so great in
volume as to exceed whatever may be the economic capacity of the coun­
try at the time to absorb new arrivals. It is essential to ensure that the
immigrants should not be a burden upon the people of Palestine as a
whole, and that they should not deprive any section of the present popu­
lation of their employment.”* 4
In pursuance of this policy the British allowed unrestricted entry of so-
called capitalists, that is, Jews who had a certain amount of money in
pounds sterling. Workers, on the other hand, were no longer free to
immigrate in unlimited numbers.5 In May 1939 the Colonial Office
moved to bring the Jewish Palestine-bound refugee migration to a con­
clusion. In a statement of policy that has become known as the “White
Paper,” the British declared that “His Majesty’s government do not read
[their previous statements] as implying that the mandate requires them,
for all time and in all circumstances, to facilitate the immigration of Jews
into Palestine subject only to consideration of the country’s economic
capacity.” The time had come to take account also of the political situa­
tion. The Arab population was exhibiting “widespread . . . fear of indefi­
nite Jewish immigration.” Accordingly, Jewish immigration was to be
permitted only for another five years, at the rate of 10,000 per year. In
addition, “as a contribution to the solution of the Jewish refugee prob­
lem,” 25,000 refugees were to be admitted as soon as the High Commis­

childrcn, ibid., pp. 67-98, and his description of other U.S. immigration hindrances
during the 1938-41 crisis in the same volume. For broader histories of U.S. policy
toward endangered Jews, sec Henry Feingold, The Politics of Rescue (New Brunswick,
N.J., 1970) and David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jem (New York, 1984).
4. Cmd. 1700.
5. See Albrecht to Himmler, November 10,1937, NG-3236.

1196 CONSBQUENCES
sioner was satisfied that adequate provision for their maintenance was
ensured.6
The year 1939 was thus a year of crisis. The number of Jews who were
clamoring to get out was greater than the number that the world was
willing to receive. In the year before the war the Jews of the Reich-
Protcktorat area were seeking places of refuge in areas that offered little
hope for w ork and subsistence. Fifty thousand found a haven, at least for
an interim period, in Britain. Thousands of families booked passage for
Cuba to wait there for quota entry' into the United States. Many thou­
sands clogged ships on the way to Japanese-occupied Shanghai. Tens of
thousands w ent only as far as France, Belgium, and Holland, where most
of them were overtaken by German armies in 1940. The total picture can
no longer be reconstructed with accuracy', for the Jews went from one
country' to the next, but the follow ing table is an approximate listing, by
initial area of departure and ultimate place of destination.
From7
Old Reich and Sudeten 320,000
Austria 130,000
Bohemia-Moravia 25,000
To8
United States 155,000
6. Palestine statement of policy presented by the Secretary of State for Colonies to
Parliament in May 1939, Cmd. 6019. The Permanent Mandates Commission of the
Ixague of Nations unanimously abstained from endorsing the White Paper. Four
members of the commission held that the paper was inconsistent with the mandate.
Three thought that it was not in accordance with the commission’s previous inter­
pretation of the mandate and that the Council should be consulted on whether a new
interpretation was possible under the circumstances. The League Council never met
to consider the issue.
7. All emigration statistics emanate in one form or another from the Reichs­
vereinigung in Berlin, the Kultusgemeinde in Vienna, and the Gemeinde in Prague.
See consolidated report of these organizations to Fachmann, November 14, 1941,
Leo Baeck Institute, microfilm 66. The total number of emigrants reported up to
October 31, 1941, was 539,000. This figure is too large because of (a) high assump­
tions ot initial Jewish populations under Nuremberg definition, (b) double counting
(return ot emigrants, movements from Old Reich to Austria and Czechoslovakia, and
from Austria to Czechoslovakia), and (c) inclusion of deportations to Poland. The
unadjusted data from this report were, however, used by Heydnch in addressing the
conference ot January 20, 1942, NG-2586. See also Korherr to Himmler, April 30,
1943, NO-5193; American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, reports for 1939,
1940, and 1941; American Jewish Yearbook, 1950, p. 75; and Hans Lamm, “Über die
Innere and Äussere Entwicklung des Deutschen Judentums im Dritten Reich’' (Er­
langen, 1951), mimeographed, pp. 209-45.
8. See the sources in the preceding footnote. The Rcichsvcrcinigung report of
November 14, 1941, lists only initial destinations, and for some areas the figures

RESCUE 1197
Palestine 70,000
Other countries out of German reach up to 150,000
Countries overtaken by Germans over 100,000
With the onset of the war and the beginning of the “final solution of
the Jewish question” in Europe, the problem of migration was funda­
mentally altered. Before the war the Jews made every attempt to hold on,
and the Germans applied every pressure to effect a Jewish mass departure.
By 1941 all the Jews of German-dominated Europe wanted to leave, but
now the German machinery of destruction held them captive.
On the outside the issue between the world Jewish community and the
Allied governments had sharpened. Before the war the Jews could argue
only that emigration was necessary for the relief of misery, and the Allied
position was correspondingly based on “absorptive capacities” and “po­
litical considerations.” Now rescue had become for the Jews a matter of
life and death. If the Nazi ring could not be sprung open and the Jews
brought to a safe destination, they would die in mounting numbers as the
catastrophe quickened. The British government and its helpers were not
moved to drastic action by this situation. The old reasons for barring the
Jews from Palestine were even stronger now, and the old arguments with
respect to the political situation were reinforced with the war. Signifi­
cantly, however, the dichotomy between the Jewish and Allied positions
was not from the outset clearly visible. The Jews were slow to react to the

appear to be too high. On Britain as a refuge, see Bernard Wasscrstcin, Britain and the
Jem of Europe, 1939-1945 (London, 1979), pp. 9-11, 81-120. On Shanghai, sec
David Kranzler, Japanese, Nazis and Jem (New York, 1976). At first, there were no
legal restrictions on arrivals in the Shanghai area comprising the International Settle­
ment, French Concession, and Hongkew (former Japanese part of Settlement). Fi­
nancial conditions, drafted by the Municipal Council of International Settlement,
were given effect by the Japanese Naval Landing Party Headquarters (Marines) in
August 1939. About 14,000 Rcich-Protcktorat Jews and more than a thousand Po­
lish Jews reached Shanghai. Following the 11th Ordinance of the Reich Citizenship
Law and the Japanese entry into war against the United States and Britain, the high-
level Japanese Imperial Liaison Conference decided on “strict surv eillance” of Jews in
Japan’s power sphere, but not until February 1943 was a ghetto established in
Hongkew. Jewish refugees not already residing there had to move in, but Chinese and
others did not have to leave. Ibid., particularly pp. 90-91,114-17,232-39,267-74,
480-83, 488-93, 605-9, 620-24. On the German reaction to earlier pro-Jcwish
sentiments by the Japanese, sec party correspondence in April 1939, YIVO document
G-231. German reports of Japanese anti-Semitic movements in Die Judenfrape, July 1
and October 1,1942, pp. 144,202-5. Continuing German Foreign Office interest in
August-Novcmbcr 1944 correspondence, NG-3002. For accounts by former Shang­
hai Ghetto inmates, sec Dr. Felix Grucnbcrgcr (psychiatrist), “Hie Jewish Refugees in
Shanghai,” Jewish Social Studies 12 (1950): 329-48, and statement by Dr. F.manuel
Bcrgglas, 1962, Yad Vashem Oral History, 3226/216.

CONSEQUENCES
challenge. When the apparatus of Jewish organizations was finally acti­
vated on behalf of the victims in Europe, the Jewish leadership, already
confronted with millions of dead, was prepared to do little more than
save those who were already safe.
In no wav did the Jews anticipate the “final solution.” When they woke
up to the tacts, the disaster was already upon them. By the summer of
1942, however, the volume of deportations and killings had far surpassed
the limits within which such an operation could be kept secret from
the outside world. Hints, rumors, and reports began to accumulate in
information-gathering agencies at widely scattered points.
Yet even then these signals were not fully exploited. Insofar as any mes­
sages reached a Jewish organization in Palestine, Britain, or the United
States, they rested in uncertain hands. The Jews had not created a central
intelligence apparatus of their own. As passive recipients of data they did
not build upon knowledge or study documents for clues to larger facts.
Hence each new communication came to them as a surprise, even as late as
1944. Allied intelligence agencies were in a better position to assemble
and assess information, but they in turn lacked the frame of mind and
sense of urgency that would have been required to address the Jewish fate.
Consequently, they were either slow to evaluate and disseminate material
in their possession or they did not do anything at all.
Without an effective a priori intelligence effort aimed at acquisition of
precise evidence of critically important German actions against the Jews,
a coherent account of the disaster could not emerge in time. Analytical
connections were not made, and implications were not seen. The process
of destruction was observed mainly in segments: shootings, deportations,
and camps. At the beginning, at least, the shooting operations were per­
ceived as incidents of slaying and massacres. Deportations were disap­
pearances, and camps were a virulent form of labor utilization. Not until
the end did the true nature of these phenomena become self-evident.
The following are some of the significant reports received by the press,
Jewish organizations, and Allied governments, together with the reac­
tions to which these accounts gave rise. It may be noted that throughout
the process of discovery, the findings, when published, were seldom
front-page news.
During the summer of 1941 and intermittently thereafter, the Brit­
ish Government’s Code and Cypher School intercepted and deciphered
wireless Order Police reports of shootings in the occupied USSR. These
messages, which frequently mentioned Jews, included among others the
following:

An SS-Cavalry Brigade report on August 17,1941, of 7,819 “execu­


tions” in the Minsk area

RESCUE 1199
A summary report on the same day by von dem Bach, noting 30,000
shootings
Seventeen reports between August 23 and 31,1941, on shootings of
Jews in groups ranging from 61 to 4,200 in the southern sector
A report on September 12,1941, by Police Regiment South on the
shooting of 1,255 Jews at Ovruch
Intercepts of the German police communications were regularly sent to
the Military' Intelligence section concerned with Germany (MI 14), and
weekly summaries were presented to the Prime Minister.9
On March 1, 1942, Dr. Henry Shoskes (Chaim Szoszkies), a Jewish
leader who had left Warsaw at the beginning of the German occupation,
presented detailed figures of dead in the ghettos of Poland. The monthly'
average, he said, was 10,000.10
From Lisbon, the Office of Strategic Services received a report, dated
June 20, 1942, that began with the words “Germany is no longer per­
secuting the Jews. It is systematically exterminating them.” The informa­
tion came from a British officer who had escaped from captivity by hiding
in the Warsaw Ghetto at the beginning of June. The officer spoke of filth
and malnutrition. “Children die atrophied.” He mentioned a “Jewish
militia of human vermin.” He then said that Himmler had visited Frank in
April to tell him that Jews were not disappearing fast enough to please the
Führer, and that the orders were the “virtual extermination” of all Jews by
a specified date. A trial speeding up had been ordered at Lublin, “where
for a time trainloads were taken daily to the Sobibor station in the sub­
urbs, thence to an isolated area where they were machinegunned.” Peas­
ants left nearby farms because of the stench of thinly covered corpses.11
Following the highly public roundups of Jews in Paris and Warsaw
during July, news of the greatest import was received in Switzerland.
Three Germans who were not in touch with one another brought the
information and disseminated it among their acquaintances. One of the
visitors was a newspaper correspondent, Ernst Ixmmer. He talked about
gas chambers, both stationary and mobile, but he was not considered
reliable.12
The second, Artur Sommer, was an economist who served as Deputy'

9. F. H. Hinsley, British Intelligence in the Second World War, vol. 2 (New York,
1981), pp. 669-73. The school also intercepted an order by Dalucge of Septem­
ber 13, 1941, warning held commanders to use couriers, rather than wireless, for
such reports. Ibid.
10. “Extinction Feared bv Jews in Poland,” The New York Times, March 1, 1942,
p. 28.
11. Letter from Lisbon, June 20, 1942, in National Archives, Record Group 226,
Office of Strategic Services 26896.
12. Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret (Boston and Toronto, 1980), pp. 211-12.

CONSEQUENCES
Director of the Allied and Neutral States Section in the Economy Office
of the OKW/Wi Rii. He passed a note to Edgar Salin, a professor at the
University of Basel, stating that camps were being readied in the East for
gassing, and urged that die BBC broadcast daily warnings. Salin con­
tacted the American president of the Bank for International Settlements,
Thomas McKittrick, who subsequently told Salin that he had passed on
the message to the American minister in Berne and that the minister had
cabled the news to “Roosevelt.” Such a message has not been found in ar­
chives, but Salin also discussed the matter, without mentioning Sommer’s
name, with Chaim Pozner, a representative of the Jewish Agency for
Palestine in Switzerland. Pozner informed Chaim Barlas, the Jewish
Agency representative in Istanbul, from where Pozner received no word
of any further transmission.13
The third informant was Eduard Schulte, from Breslau, Silesia, who
headed the Bergwerksgesellschaft Georg von Giesche’s Erben. On July 30,
1942, he approached a Jewish business associate, Isidor Koppelmann,
who informed the press officer of the Jewish Community, Benjamin
Sagalowitz. This man aimed to the chief of the Geneva office of the World
Jewish Congress, Gerhart Riegner. At that time, Riegner was not given
Schulte’s name. As summarized by Riegner in a telegram, the report
referred to a plan discussed and under consideration in the Führer head­
quarters for the deportation of the European Jews to the East, where they
were to be “exterminated at one blow” to resolve once and for all the
Jewish question in Europe. Among methods “under discussion” for
planned action in the autumn was prussic acid. Riegner added that he was
transmitting this information “with all necessary reservation as exactiaide
cannot be confirmed,” but that his informant had close connections with
highest German authorities and that his reports were generally speaking
reliable.14 His cable was sent via the American and British consulates to
Rabbi Dr. Stephen Wise in the United States and M. P. Sidney Silverman

13. Kdgar Salin, “Über Arrur Sommer, den Menschen und List-Forscher,” Mit­
teilungen der List Gesellschaft, vol. 6 (1967), pp. 81-90. Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz atui
the Allies (New York, 1981), pp. 42-44, 46, 56. Monty Penkowcr, The Jews Were
Expendable (Urbana and Chicago, 1983), pp. 59-62, 66-67, 317, 319. Walter La-
queur in Ijqucur and Richard Breitman, B renkt tip the Silence (New York, 1986),
p. 264.
14. See the memorandum ot U.S. Vice Consul Howard Kiting in Geneva, Au­
gust 8, 1942, with the attached draft of Riegner’s telegram. National Archives of the
United States, Record Group 84, American Legation Bern, Confidential File 1942,
Box 7, 840.1 J. For the transmission ot Schulte’s message to Riegner, see Richard
Breitman and Alan M. Kraut, American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933-1945
(Bloomington, Ind., 1987), pp. 148-57, 279-81, and Gerhart Riegner, “Riegner
Telegram,” in Walter Laqueur, cd.. The Holocaust Encyclopedia (New Haven, 2001),
pp. 562-67.

RESCUE 1201
in England. Silverman got the information, Wise did not. Silverman then
transmitted the message to Rabbi Wise. The rabbi, who was American
Jewry’s most prominent leader, decided to carry the report to Undersecre­
tary of State Sumner Welles. The Undersecretary asked him not to release
the story until an attempt could be made to confirm it.15
While the State Department was attempting to verify the contents of
the Riegner telegram, reports of the Jewish catastrophe were multiplying
in the press. Newsweek noted on August 10, 1942, that trainloads of
Warsaw Jews were vanishing into “black Limbo.”16 On August 20, The
New York Times quoted the French newspaper Paris Soir of the previous
day to the effect that Jews from France were being deported to “Polish
Silesia.”17 On October 5, 1942, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported
systematic deportations of Jews from Lodz who, said the agency, “are
poisoned by gas.”18 The November 1942 issue of the Jewish Frontier;
published in New York, contained an exceptionally detailed description
of the processing of Jews in Chetmno (Kulmhof), complete with data
about gas vans.19 On November 23, Hebrew newspapers in Palestine,
reacting to cumulative reports, appeared with black borders.20
It is at this time that Wise, no longer restrained by the Department of

15. Stephen Wise, Challenging Years (New York, 1949), pp. 274-75. Henry Mor-
genthau, Jr., “The Morgcnthau Diaries VI— The Refugee Run-Around,” Collier’s,
November 1, 1947, pp. 22-23, 62, 65. Morgcnthau was then U.S. Secretary of the
Treasury. In 1942 the Treasury' Department was not yet apprised of anything. Gilbert,
Auschwitz and the Allies, pp. 58-61; Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe,
pp. 168-69. On the other hand, the Federal Bureau of Investigation had the informa­
tion and passed on a summary' of the cable to several agencies. Sec J. Edgar Hoover to
Assistant Secretary of State Adolf A. Bcrlc, Jr., with copies to the Director of Naval
Intelligence and to Brigadier General Hayes P. Kroner, Military Intelligence, Septem­
ber 9, 1942, National Archives Record Group 165.77, Box 1191-Gcrmanv, File
3500. In the letter, Hoover states that he also informed Elmer Davis, Office of War
Information. Document through the courtesy of John Ferrell, Archivist, U.S. Holo­
caust Memorial Council.
16. Newsweek, August 10,1942, p. 40.
17. The New York Times, August 20, 1942, p. 11. Even more specific was a letter,
dated July 27, 1942, by Gisi Fleischmann of the Bratislava Jewish Council to Dr.
Adolf Silbcrschcin, head of a Jewish rescue organization (Relico) in Geneva, stating
that 60,000 Slovak Jews, including women, children, and babies, had been deported,
many of them to the eastern part of Upper Silesia: Auschwitz. The letter was subse­
quently handed to the International Red Cross. Yad Vashcm M 7/2-2.
18. Jewish Telegraphic Agency', Daily News Bulletin, New York, October 6, 1942,
p. 4, NI-12321.
19. “The Extermination Center,” Jewish Frontier, November 1942, pp. 15-16. The
entire issue was devoted to the Jew'ish fate. I am grateful to Marie Syrkin for calling
my attention to the publication and for sending me a copy.
20. The New York Times, November 24, 1942, p. 10.

1202 CONSEQUENCES
Stare, made his disclosures,21 and during the next few days, news items
appeared in The New York Times, albeit in its inside pages. On Novem­
ber 25, the paper carried a report, based on information from the Polish
Government in Exile, that mentioned Belzec, Sobibór, and Treblinka.
Added to this article was an item from Jerusalem with details about con­
crete buildings on the former Russian frontier used as gas chambers and
about crematoria at Oswiycim (Auschwitz). The same page contained
also a figure, supplied by Dr. Wise, of two million Jewish dead.22 On the
next day, The Nnv York Times quoted Dr. Ignacy Szwarcbart, a Jewish
member of the Polish National Council in London, to the effect that Jews
were being gassed and that in Belzec they were being subjected to death
by electric current. The same issue of the paper cited Dr. Wise with
“before” and “after” figures by country. Prussic acid was mentioned by
Wise as having been abandoned in favor of air bubbles, and bodies, he
said, were being exploited for fat, soap, and lubricants.23
Clearly, the transmission and publication of the facts had taken several
months. One million Jews had been gassed or shot during this period
alone. In the end, accurate statements about these events had been mixed
with the rumors of electrocutions and soap making.24 Incomplete and
sketchy as this picture was, it constituted an outline of annihilation. The
underpowered Jewish organizations, however, could see no way of deal­
ing with this situation directly. Any independent action against the Ger­
mans was altogether inconceivable. Thus, in the United States, the Jewish
leadership confined itself to mobilizing support in its own community,

21. M urgent hau, “The Morgcnthau Diaries,” Collier's, November 1, 1947.


22. The Nav York Times, November 25, 1942, p. 10. Such a figure had already been
reported in the same newspaper on September 3, 1942, p. 5.
23. Ibid., November 26, 1942, p. 16.
24. The rumor of electrocution originated in the Belzec area. See the testimony of
VVIadislawa Gobel (an hrhnic German woman who was a resident), December 17,
1959, in Zentrale Stelle Ludwigsburg 8 AR-Z 256/59,1 Js 278/60 (Belzec case), vol.
3, pp. 402-7. A soap rumor was received by Wise at the beginning of September
1942. Feingold, Politics of Rescue, p. 170. It is mentioned (with attribution to a letter
from the Geneva office of the Jewish Agency to the U.S. government, dated Au­
gust 30, 1942) also in a note by the U.S. representative at the Vatican, Myron C.
Taylor, to Cardinal Secretary of State Maglionc, September 26, 1942, Foreign Rela­
tions 1<M2, III, 775-76. Interestingly enough, the rumored utilization of bodies
for commercial purposes made its way back from America to Himmler’s desk. On
November 20,1942, the Reichstiihrer-SS enclosed a report about a September mem­
orandum on the subject by Wise, in a letter to Gestapo chief Müller. “We both know
(Wir wissen beide)'' said Himmler, that in the course of labor there was heightened
Jewish mortality. Miiller was to make certain that all these dead Jews (verstorbene
Juden) were buried or burned. Any misuse (Missbrauch) of the bodies was to be
reported to Himmler at once. Himmler to Miiller, November 20, 1942, T 175,
Roll 68.

RESCUE 1203
the churches, and the government. Within this domestic horizon, much
energy was expended on an arousal campaign, complete with plans for
demonstrations, processions, broadcasts, and advertisements. The peak
of the effort was to be a meeting with Roosevelt, and after a month of
lobbying, on December 8, 1942, a five-man delegation was admitted to
the White House. The Jewish leaders came with two memoranda, one a
twenty-page descriptive summary similar to the contents of newspaper
reports then being published, the other a short appeal calling on the
President to warn the Nazis and to establish a commission that could
receive evidence for submission to “the bar of public opinion.” Roosevelt
was “cordial” and assured the delegates that their memoranda would be
given “full consideration.”25
Having taken this half-step, the Jewish leaders received a part of what
they had asked for. On December 17, 1942, the Allied governments
issued a declaration entitled “German Policy of Extermination of the
Jewish Race,” which stated that the responsible perpetrators “shall not
escape retribution.”26
When the U.S. chargé d’affaires at the Vatican, Harold H. Tittmann,
asked Cardinal Secretary of State Maglione whether there was not some­
thing the Holy See could do “along similar lines,” the cardinal replied that
the papacy was “unable to denounce publicly particular atrocities.” It
could only condemn atrocities in general. For the rest, “everything possi­
ble was being done privately to relieve the distress of the Jews.”27 The
Pope did utter some public words in his lengthy Christmas message at the
end of 1942. As he talked about the war dead, their widows and orphans,
the victims of air raids, and refugees, he included a sentence about the

25. Texts of memoranda, December 8, 1942; summary of meeting of American


Jewish Congress Governing Council, Maldwin Fcrtig presiding, November 12,
1942; and summary of American Jewish Governing Board, Louis Lipsky presiding,
December 10, 1942, all in the file of American Jewish Congress Governing Council,
through the courtesy of Mr. Will Maslow, American Jewish Congress. The delegation
had been promised 15 minutes and received 29, but 23 of these minutes were used up
by the president conversing on sundry topics, including the situation in newly liber­
ated portions of North Africa. Report by Adolph Held, delegate of the Jewish Labor
Committee [December 8, 1942], in David Wyman, ed., America and the Holocaust
(New York, 1990), vol. 2, pp. 72-74. On the other hand, the Jewish delegates,
intimidated, did not have much to say.
26. Department of State press release of December 17, 1942, in Intematimial
Conference on Military Trials, pp. 9-10. For original British draft of declaration, to­
gether with U.S. and Soviet amendments, sec correspondence dated December 7-17,
1942, in Foreign Relations 1942, I, 66-70. The British House of Commons stood
in silence in support of the statement. 385 H.C. DEB. 5s., 17, December 1942,
pp. 2081-88.
27. Tittmann report in telegram by Harrison (U.S. Minister in Switzerland 1 to
Hull, December 26, 1942, Foreign Relations 1942,1, 70-71.

1204 CONSEQUBNCBS
“hundreds of thousands” who, without fault and “sometimes only be­
cause of their nationality or race,” were “consigned to death or to a slow
decline.”28 The generality of this language became die subject of a specific
discussion between the Pontiff and Tittmann. On that occasion, Pius XII
said that he had spoken “clearly enough,” and he was surprised when the
American told him that there were some who did not share his belief. The
Pope, reiterating his policy, then said to Tittmann that, when talking
about atrocities, he could not name the Nazis without at the same time
mentioning the Bolsheviks.29
Gestures having for the moment been exhausted, no further action was
in the oiling. For the Jewish leadership, however, an issue had arisen that
w as not going to disappear. What did these leaders propose to do in this
situation? On January' 6, 1943, Henry Monsky, president of B’nai Brith,
called a preliminary meeting of the American Jewish Conference. In his
letter of invitation, which was sent to thirty-four Jewish organizations, he
wrote:
American Jewry, which will be required in large measure to assume the
responsibility of representing the interests of our people at the Victory
Peace Conference, must be ready to \roice the judgment of American
Jews along with that of other Jewish communities of the free countries
with respect to the post-war status of Jews and the upbuilding of a
Jewish Palestine.
In this letter no warning to the Germans is proposed, no scheme to put an
end to the destruction process is suggested; the destruction of the Euro­
pean Jews is not even mentioned.30 The European Jews are already given
up, and all thoughts turn to postwar salvage. Clearly the worldwide Jew­
ish action machinery, the network of Jewish pressure groups, was at a
standstill. Budgets were at a low point. The Holocaust was unopposed.
The paralysis was complete.
On January' 21, 1943, Undersecretary of State Welles received Cable
482 from the Legation in Berne. The cable contained a message from
Riegner, who reported that Jews were being killed in Poland at the rate of
6,000 a day, and that Jeyvs in Germany and Romania yvere starving to
28. Text of message in 11kNew York Times, December 25, 1942, p. 10.
29. Harrison (Switzerland) to Hull, January 5, 1943, enclosing message from
Tittmann of December 30, 1942, Foreign Relations 1943, II, 911-13. Writing to
Bishop Preysing of Berlin on April 30, 1943, the Pope said that his remarks in the
Christmas message were “short, but well understood." Secretaire d’Etat de Sa Sain-
tete, Actcs et Documents du Saint Siege relatijs a la Seconde Guerre Motidiale (Vatican,
1967), vol. 2, pp. 318-27, on p. 322. See also Saul Friedlander, Pius XII and the Third
Retch (New York, 1966), pp. 130-35.
30. Kohanski, ed., 11kAmerican Jewish Cottference— Its Organtzatwn and Proceed­
ings of the FirstSession, August 29-September 2,1943 (New York, 1944), pp. 15, 319.

RESCUE 1205
death. Welles passed on the cable to Wise and instructed Minister Har­
rison to keep sending full reports from Switzerland. The Jewish organiza­
tions now seemed to be jolted. A mass meeting was held in Madison
Square Garden, relief agencies doubled their efforts, and rescue schemes
poured into Washington.31
The Jewish restlessness apparently disquieted the State Department,
and the department took the position that the question had to be “ex­
plored.” Some of its political experts dien decided to suppress the flow of
information. A cable (numbered 354) was dispatched under the signa­
ture of Undersecretary Welles to Harrison in Berne. It referred to “Your
cable 482, January 21.” The text then proceeded as follows:
In the future we would suggest that you do not accept reports submit­
ted to you to be transmitted to private persons in the United States
unless such action is advisable because of extraordinary circumstances.
Such private messages circumvent neutral countries’ censorship and it
is felt that by sending them we risk the possibility that steps would
necessarily be taken by the neutral countries to curtail or forbid our
means of communication for confidential official matter.32
The cable was initialed by four officers of the Foreign Service. The
message was handled only by the European Division and the political
adviser of the State Department; the Undersecretary is believed to have
signed the document without full awareness of its contents.33 It appears,
then, that the career men were attempting to withhold the information
not only from the Jewish community but also from the men who directed
the affairs of the United States government.

31. Morgcnthau, “The Morgcnthau Diaries,” Collier’s, November 1, 1947. Du-


Bois, The Devil’s Chemists, pp. 184, 187. DuBois was then in the Foreign Funds
Control Division of the Treasury Department.
32. Text of cable 354, dated February 10, 1943, in Morgcnthau, “The Mor­
gcnthau Diaries,” Collier’s, November 1,1947.
33. Josiah DuBois reports that “the ‘political boys’ had ordered that Treasury was
not under any circumstances to have a copy.” DuBois, The Devil’s Chemists, p. 187.
Neither Morgcnthau nor DuBois believed that Welles signed the message with intent
to suppress information about the Jewish catastrophe. The attitude of the European
Division in Jewish matters appears to have been recorded before the end of 1941,
upon receipt of a suggestion from the Turkish Minister in Bucharest that the Roma­
nian Jews be brought across Turkey to Palestine. Cavendish Cannon wrote at that
time to the acting chief of the division (Atherton) and the adviser on political rela­
tions (Dunn) that no formal note should be sent to the British. The arguments against
tackling the problem included, among others, “ships,” the “Arab question,” the pos­
sibility of “pressure for an asylum in the western hemisphere,” and a possible request
for similar treatment of the Jews in Hungary “and, by extension, all countries where
there has been intense persecution.” Memorandum by Cannon, November 12, 1941,
Foreign Relations 1941, II, 875-76.

1206 CONSEQUENCES
On March 15, the principal Jewish organizations in the United States
formed a Joint Emergency Committee on European Jewish Affairs,34 35 and
before long, the Jewish leaders were given another opportunity to be
heard. British Foreign Secretary Eden had arrived in Washington for
conferences with U.S. officials, and on March 27, at noon, Stephen Wise
of the American Jewish Congress and Judge Joseph Proskauer of the
American Jewish Committee met with Eden at the British Embassy. In­
voking an ancient Jewish formula, they suggested that the Allies “issue a
public declaration to Hitler asking him to give Jews permission to leave
occupied Europe.” In reply, Eden characterized the scheme as “fantas­
tically impossible.” The Jewish representatives then requested England’s
help to get the Jews out of Bulgaria. Eden’s response to this plea was that
“Turkey does not want any more of your people.” Wise and Proskauer
thereupon went to the State Department to talk with Undersecretary
Welles, who promised to press their ideas in a conference with Eden that
afternoon.3·’
During that meeting, the American Secretary of State Hull brought up
the problem of rescuing the Jews in the presence of President Roosevelt,
Harry Hopkins, Undersecretary Welles, British Ambassador Halifax, and
the Assistant Undersecretary of State in the British Foreign Office, Wil­
liam Strang. Hopkins summarized the exchange as follows:
Hull raised the question of the 60 or 70 thousand Jews that are in
Bulgaria and are threatened with extermination unless we could get
them out and, very urgently, pressed Eden for an answer to the prob­
lem. Eden replied that the whole problem of the Jews in Europe is very
difficult and that we should move very cautiously about offering to
take all Jews out of a country' like Bulgaria. If we do that, then the Jews
of the world will be wanting us to make similar offers in Poland and
Germany'. Hitler might well take us up on any such offer and there
simply are not enough ships and means of transportation in the world
to handle them.
Eden said that the British were ready to take about 60 thousand
more Jews to Palestine but the problem of transportation, even from
Bulgaria to Palestine, is extremely difficult. Furthermore, any such
mass movement as that would be very' dangerous to security because
the Germans would be sure to attempt to put a number of their agents

34. Unsigned memorandum of Seprcmber 28, 1943, Archives of rhe American


Jewish Committee, EXO-29, Moms D. VValdman files (Joint Emergency Commit­
tee).
35. Minutes of March 29, 1943, meeting of Joint Emergence Committee, Ste­
phen Wise presiding. Archives of American Jewish Committee, EXO-29, VValdman
files (Joint Emergency Committee).

RESCUE 1207
in the group. They have been pretty successful with this technique
both in getting their agents into North and South America.
Eden said that the forthcoming conferences in Bermuda on the
whole refugee problem must come to grips with this difficult situation.
Eden said he hoped that on our side we would not make too ex­
travagant promises which could not be delivered because of lack of
shipping.36
The U.S.-British Bermuda conference to which Eden had referred was
a forum for futile discussions.37 When Jewish groups in the United States
attempted to elicit some commitments from the Allied governments, a
senior American official, Assistant Secretary of State for Special Problems
Breckenridge Long, expressed a secret anxiety in his private diary. One
danger in such activities, he wrote, was that they might “lend color to the
charges of Hitler that we are fighting this war on account of and at the
instigation and direction of our Jewish citizens.”38 Given such reasoning,
a decision not to help the Jews could be a psychological guarantee of the
purity of the Allied cause.
During the following months two abortive rescue schemes were con­
sidered in London and Washington. The British government, through
the Swiss legation in Berlin, offered to admit to Palestine 5,000 Jewish
children from the Generalgouvernement and the occupied eastern ter­
ritories. The German Foreign Office agreed to deliver the children to
Britain in exchange for interned Germans. The British refused to release
any Germans on the ground that the children were not nationals of the
British Empire. That was where the matter rested.39
The second rescue scheme evolved when Undersecretary of State
Welles cabled to Berne for more information about the destruction of the
European Jews. In reply he received what appears to be the Antonescu
plan for the release of some 60,000 Jews in exchange for money. The State
Department experts were not enthusiastic about a ransoming attempt.
They had to be worn down by the department’s economic adviser Dr.
Herbert Feis, the weighty intervention of the Treasury Department’s For­
eign Funds Control Division under John Pehle, and an appeal by Rabbi
Wise to President Roosevelt himself. After eight months the State Depart­

36. Memorandum by Hopkins on meeting between Roosevelt, Hopkins, Hull,


Welles, Eden, Halifax, and Strang, March 27,1943, in Robert E. Sherwood, Roosavlt
and Hopkins (New York, 1948), p. 717.
37. See Feingold, Politics of Rescue, pp. 190-214.
38. Entry'of April 30,1943, in Fred Israel, cd.,The War Diary of Breckcnridpe i/»ui
(Lincoln, Neb., 1966), p. 307.
39. Wagner to Miiller (RSHA), July 13, 1943, NG-4747. Wagner via Staats­
sekretär to Ribbentrop, July 21,1943, NG-4786. Von Thadden to Wagner, April 29,
1944, NG-1794.

1208 CONSEQUENCES
ment issued a license enabling Jewish organizations to deposit money to
the credit of Axis officials in blocked accounts in Switzerland. The license
was issued over the opposition of the British Foreign Office, which — in
the words of a note delivered to the American Embassy in London by the
British Ministry of Economic Warfare —was concerned with the “diffi­
culties of disposing of anv considerable number of Jews” in the event of
their release from Axis Europe.40
The rescue effort was failing. Within the State Department there was
disinclination to undertake large-scale action, within the Foreign Office
there was fear of large-scale success, and within Axis Europe fewer and
fewer Jews remained. The frustrations inherent in this situation finally
resulted in an establishment of special rescue machinery in the American
Jewish community and in the United States government itself.
From August 29 to September 2, 1943, the first session of the Ameri­
can Jewish Conference, which had been called seven months before, met
in deliberation. The destruction of the European Jews was still not on its
agenda. In the preliminary meeting onlv two substantive points had been
drawn up for discussion: “rights and status of Jews in the post-war world”
and “rights of the Jewish people with respect to Palestine.” In the words
of the B’nai B’rith delegate David Blumberg, the purpose of the Con­
ference was the formulation of a program to be heeded “by the proper
authorities alter the war is over.” Rabbi Dr. Stephen Wise, as delegate of
the American Jewish Congress, then declared that the conference would
have to deal immediately with the problem of rescuing European Jewry.
An observer, the chairman of the British section of the World Jewish
Congress, Dr. Maurice L. Perlzweig, proposed that the conference urge
the Allied nations to demand from the Axis the release of its Jewish
victims and to proclaim the right of asylum for any Jews who should
succeed in escaping. The conference thereupon adopted a resolution call­
ing for a “solemn warning” to the Axis and the establishment of a “tempo­
rary asylum” for the Jews.41 The delegates then adjourned and left the
business of the conference in the hands of an interim committee which on
October 24, 1943, established a rescue commission.42
It was late now. More than a year had passed since the receipt of
Riegner’s momentous telegram, and much that the Jewish leaders had
done since then, including their various pressure and publicity oriented
activities, was a process of going through motions. Once, the Executive

40. Morgenthau, “The Morgcnrhau Dianes,” Coliter's, November 1, 1947. Du-


Bois, 77«· Deni's Chemists, pp. 185-88.
41 Kohanski, al.,American Jewish Conference, hint Seaton, particularly pp. 15, 18-
19,25-26,33,73, 115-17, 127-30.
42. American Jewish Conference, Report of Interim Committee, November 1,1944,
p. 13 rt.

RESCUE 1209
Vice-President of the American Jewish Committee, Morris Waldman,
writing to the committee’s President Proskauer, said outright that
‘‘'Nothing will stop the Nazis except their destruction. The Jews of Europe
are doomed whether we do or we don’t.”43 Moreover, even when the
Jewish organizations did something in concert for a perceived emergency,
they remained divided over the long-range future. On October 27,1943,
four days after the establishment of the rescue commission by the Ameri­
can Jewish Conference, the adamantly non-Zionist American Jewish
Committee withdrew from the Conference.44 A summary of the position
taken by the American Jewish Committee, dated November 8, 1943,
contains such points as these: “There is a sharp division among American
Jews on the Zionist issue. . . . We should concentrate on winning the
war. . . . We have opposed present demands for Jewish control of immi­
gration to Palestine.”45 Proskauer communicated this text to Secretary of
State Hull, and the reply, in a two-page letter over Hull’s signature,
referred directly to the fissure in the Jewish community: “As you indicate,”
wrote Hull, “there is considerable difference of opinion among the Jewish
people as to the policies which should be pursued in rescuing and assisting
these unfortunate people, and no one course of action would be agreeable
to all persons interested in this problem.”46
The rescue commission, still functioning, planned its actions in the old
groove. One of its efforts was directed toward the creation of a parallel
agency in the government. Outside the American Jewish Conference, a
newly formed Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Eu­
rope, led by a young man, Peter Bergson, exerted pressure as well. Berg­
son’s group short-circuited the uncooperative Assistant Secretary Ix>ng,
and appealed directly to newly appointed Undersecretary of State Stet-
tinius and to Congress for action.47 A decisive step was taken when Mor-
genthau made a “personal report” to Roosevelt on the State Depart-

43. Waldman to Proskauer, May 19,1943, Archives of American Jewish Commit­


tee, EXO-29, Waldman files (Joint Emergency Committee). The Joint Emergency
Committee existed until November 1943.
44. Mimeographed statement of withdrawal, October 27,1943, Archives of Amer­
ican Jewish Committee, EXO-29, Waldman files (American Jewish Conference).
45. Archives of American Jewish Committee, EXO-16, Proskauer files (Joint
Emergency Committee).
46. Hull to Proskauer, no typed date, Archives of American Jewish Committee,
EXO-16, Proskauer files (Joint Emergency Committee). The letter, an original, is
stamped December 2, 1943.
47. Feingold, Politics of Rescue, pp. 221-22, 237-39. Zionist-Revisionist in orien­
tation, the Bergson Committee, according to Feingold, “gave rescue priority.” Berg­
son appealed to Proskauer tor political support, bur was rebutted. See Rcrgson-
Proskauer correspondence in Archives of American Jewish Committee, HXO-ltv
Proskauer files (Joint Emergency Committee).

1210 CONSEQUENCES
mcnt's conduct in the refugee question. Reacting to this intervention,
Roosevelt established a War Refugee Board by executive order, dated
January' 22, 1944, and named the Secretaries of State, Treasury, and War
(Hull, Morgenthau, and Stimson) as its members. The executive director
was John Pehle of the Treasury Department. The board maintained its
own network of special representatives abroad.48
The rescue program had thus been centralized. A specific agency had
been created for the task. The agency had centers for the receipt of infor­
mation, means of communication, and powers of negotiation. Moreover,
it could call upon private Jewish organizations for detailed knowledge,
age-old experience, and —in the event of ransom possibilities —“quickly
available funds.” The challenge came soon, for in the spring of 1944
Hungarian Jewry' was threatened with destruction.
On March 19,1944, the Hungarian government was overthrown, and
the line to Auschwitz was cleared. For the Germans there was no further
barrier; for Jewry’ there was no more protection. Between the Jews and
the gas chambers there remained only a series of predetermined bureau­
cratic steps. However, the activation of these steps required a certain
amount of preparation, and the Germans did not have very much time.
They were losing the war. Every' day the German position was becoming
more difficult. The steady buildup of diis destructive operation was the
work of an administrative machine in which the bolts were already begin­
ning to loosen. Everything therefore depended on the ability of outside
forces to recognize these weaknesses and to immobilize the machine be­
fore it could deliver its blow, but time was of the essence.
There was now a great deal of information in the hands of the U.S.
government. Reports had been obtained with descriptions of Warsaw,
Rawa Ruska, Majdanek, and Treblinka.49 The most remarkable docu­

48. lTic following is a list of the posts:


United Kingdom: Josiah F.. DuBois, Jr., general counsel of the board, from the
Treasury Department
Turkey . Ira A. Hirschmann, department store executive
Portugal: Dr. Robert C. Dexter, Unitarian Service Committee
Sw eden: IverC. Olsen, Treasury
Switzerland: Roswell McClelland, American Friends Service Committee
Italy: l>eonard Ackerman, Treasury
Another post was established in North Africa. Ibid., pp. 19-22; Executive Director,
War Refugee Board (William O’Dwvcr), Final Summary Report (Washington, D.C.,
1945), pp. 1-6. Morgenthau, “The Morgenthau Diaries,” Collier's, November 1,
1947. DuBois, Πte I'kvtl's Chemists, pp. 15, 31, 188, 198.
49. See statement by a medical student who escaped from Poland on April 15,
1943, dated in Geneva November 1, 1943, in National Archives Record Group 226,
Office of Strategic Services (OSS) 95436; an International Red Cross Committee
report of ghetto clearances in Galicia (including the December 1942 massacre in

RESCUE 1211
ment, however, was about Auschwitz. The two-part report, prepared by a
Polish source, was written on August 10 and 12, 1943, and received in
London by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). In the Washington
headquarters of the OSS, it was passed by F. L. Belin to Dr. William
Langer (Chief of the Research and Analysis Branch) with a note stating
that the Polish source had asked that the subject be given publicity. Belin's
cover letter was dated April 10, 1944, and was marked “'secret.” The
report contained the following information. The number of prisoners at
the moment of writing was 137,000. Up to September 1942, 468,000
nonregistered Jews had been gassed. Between September 1942 and the
beginning of June 1943, the camp received approximately 60,000 Jews
from Greece; 50,000 from Slovakia and the Protectorate; 60,000 from
Holland, Belgium, and France; and 16,000 from Polish towns. At the be­
ginning of August, 15,000 Jews arrived from Sosnowiec and B^dzin. Two
percent of all of these people were still alive. On arrival, men were sepa­
rated from women and taken by lorry to the gas chamber in Birkenau. The
report added that before entering the gas chamber the condemned were
bathed. There were three crematoria in Birkenau that could burn 10,000
people daily. Jewish girls were experimented on with artificial insemina­
tion and sterilization. In winter, prisoners worked in wooden shoes. Of
more than 14,000 Gypsies, 90 percent had been gassed. Poles were arriv­
ing in large numbers; professionals among them had been executed, and
women were subjected to sadism. “History,” said the report, “knows no
parallel of such destruction of human life.” As many as 30,000 people had
been gassed in a single day. The report went on to list names. The com­
manding officer was Obersturmbannfiihrer Hoss. Hauptsturmfiihrer
Schwarz was “one of the most deadly enemies of Poland.” Hauptsturm-
fuhrer Aumeier was stated to be in charge of hangings and shootings. A
woman warden, Mandel, was named as a personification of evil. The
Political Department was under Untersturmfuhrer Grabner. Oberschar-
fiihrer Boger and several others were listed as torturers. Although the
facts in the report had manifestly been gathered by the Polish under­
ground in the camp itself, the OSS official, Belin, who transmitted the
account to Langer, noted that he had been given no indication as to the
reliability of the source. “This report,” he said, “is for your information
and retention.”50

Rawa Ruska), September 25, 1943, OSS 61701; report on Majdanek shootings
dated February 24, 1944, OSS 89494; statement by Treblinka escapee David Mil-
grom, August 30, 1943 (sent by Melbourne, the American Vice Consul in Istanbul,
on January 13, 1944), OSS 58603.
50. National Archives Record Group 266, OSS 66059. Ferdinand Ltmmot Belin,
a retired foreign service officer in OSS, had been ambassador to Poland in 1932-33.

1212 CONSEQUENCES
Even as the OSS was filing away the most detailed portrayal of Ausch­
witz that had been brought to its attention, two young Slovak Jews,
Rudolf Vrba (then Walter Rosenberg) and Alfred Wetzler, escaped from
the camp and made long statements about their observations to the Jew­
ish Council of Slovakia in ¿ilina. They had broken out on April 10, and
walked at night until they arrived, with the help of Polish partisan sym­
pathizers, at the Slov ak frontier. By April 25, they were received in ¿ilina,
where their identity was verified by Jewish leaders from two-year-old
deportation lists. The leaders then listened, horror-stricken, to the de­
scription of the camp. On the 27th a Slovak text was prepared. A German
version was then completed in haste and delivered to Geza Boos, a dissi­
dent member of the Hungarian Foreign Office in Budapest. There the
forty-page report was translated into Hungarian during the first week of
May and distributed in carbon copies to local church dignitaries, Jewish
leaders, and persons close to Horthy. The report was also brought, in
summary and full detail, to Switzerland, where the representative of the
Czechoslovak Government in Exile, Jaromir Kopecki, received it on or
about June 10. After conferring with Jewish advisers, Kopecki passed it
on to War Refugee Board representative Roswell McClelland, who dis­
patched it to the Executive Director, Pehle, on June 16. The Jewish youth
group (Hechalutz) leader in Switzerland, Nathan Schwalb, complained
to Kopecki on June 22, because he had been left out of the loop when
Kopecki had not been able to find him. After all, the report from Slovakia
had been addressed to Schwalb.51

linger, a professor of history at Harvard University, was subsequently also President


of the American Historical Association. The report, originally compiled by a Polish
woman agent in December 1943, was received by Polish General Stall Headquarters
in I.ondon on )anuary 28, 1944, with her request that it be given publicity. The OSS
was nor its only recipient. It was passed on in English translation to an American
military attache on March 13, 1944, who transmitted a copy to War Department
Military Intelligence on March 17, 1944. There it was filed under Europe-Africa/
Central Europe 2. Another copy was given to the U.S. member of the United Nations
War Crimes Commission, Herbert Pell. See Major Langcnfeld (Polish General Staff,
U>ndon) to Captain Paul M. Birkeland (U.S. Assistant Military Attache, London),
enclosing report, March 13, 1944, and Birkeland to War Department Military Intel­
ligence Division, noting a copy was given to Pell, March 17, 1944, in National
Archives Record Group 165 (War Department General and Special Stalls), Box
3138, Poland 6950. The language and British spellings of the report in the OSS tile
are duplicated in the War Department document, bur the typing is different. The
attache report in the War Department bears the high reliability' raring of A-2. High­
lights of the report, with conditions in the camp ascribed to December 1943, were
broadcast from London by the Polish radio station “Swir” on March 16, 1944. KdS
Lublin, “Spiegel der illegalen Polenpropaganda” No. 13, March 22, 1944, U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives Record Group 15.034 (KdS Lublin), Roll 6.
51. Rudolf Vrba and Alan Bcstic, / Cannot Forgive (New York, 1964), pp. 244-46.

RBSCUB 1213
Yet another, inconspicuous, event occurred on April 4,1944: an Allied
reconnaissance aircraft appeared over Auschwitz. The flight was the first
of several photographic intelligence missions launched for the specific
purpose of acquiring information about “Activity at I. G. Farbenindus-
trie/Synthetic Oil and Synthetic Rubber Works at Oswiecim.” From Al­
lied air bases in Italy, Auschwitz had come within range, and as German
industrialists were building plants in the eastern portions of the Greater
Reich, American bombers of the 15th Air Force were going to strike at
these new targets. The Auschwitz industries, according to interpretations
of photographs, were partially still under construction, and the output of
oil there had not yet risen to significant levels. Hence the building activity
was being watched to determine the optimum time for a raid. All the
photographs were accordingly centered on Auschwitz III (Monowitz).
No one analyzed these pictures at the time to discover what was revealed
in their corners: the gas chambers.* 52 The bombing of Auschwitz III, with

Vrba, “Die missachtete Warnung” Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeitgeschichte 44 (1996): 1-24.


Oskar Neumann (Chairman of the Jewish Council in Slovakia at the time), Im Schat­
ten des Todes (Tel Aviv, 1956), pp. 178-81. John Conway, “Frühe Augcnzeugcnbc-
richtc aus Auschwitz,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 27 (1979): 260-84. Sandor
Szcncs and Frank Baron, Von Ungarn nach Auschwitz (Münster, 1994). Miroslav
Karny, “The History of the Vrba and Wetzler Auschwitz Report” and Erich Kulka,
“The Efforts of Jew'ish Fighters to Stop the Shoah in Auschwitz” in Dczidcr Toth,
cd., The Tragedy of Slovak Jewry (Banka Bystrica, Slovakia, 1992), pp. 175-204,281 —
98. Memorandum by Richard Lichthcim (Geneva Representative of the Jewish
Agency) on meeting with Kopccki and Schwalb, June 23, 1944, U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum Archives Record Group 48.004 (Military Historical Institute,
Prague), Roll 3, Fond 117 (Kopccky Papers).
52. See Interpretation Reports by Mediterranean Allied Photo Reconnaissance
Wing of sorties flown by 60th Photo Reconnaissance Squadron on April 4,1944, and
June 26,1944 (60 PR/288 and 60 PR/522), dated April 18,1944, and July 1,1944,
respectively, and note reference in July 1 report to a sortie on May 31, 1944 (60
PR/462). National Archives Record Group 18, 15th Squ. Combat Mission, July 1,
1944. Sec also Target Information Sheet of July 18, 1944, including photograph of
April 4 and noting that production of both oil and rubber was now in progress. The
photograph of April 4 includes all of Monowitz and portions of Auschwitz I, but not
Birkenau. Record Group 18, Army Air Forces, 15th Squ. Combat Mission, July 18,
1944. (Files are labeled 15th Squadron, although it did not take over photography of
Auschwitz from the 60th Squadron until September.)
The photographs of April 1944 to January 1945 were reexamined after more than
thirty years by Dino Brugioni and Robert Poirier (both of the Central Intelligence
Agency), using the latest available equipment and techniques. See their paper, “'Hie
Holocaust Revisited: Analysis of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination Complex,”
ST-79/20001, February 1979, distributed by the National Technical Information
Service, NTISUB/E/280-002. Sec also photograph of sortie 60 PR/522, June 26,
1944, showing gas chambers and train, Record Group 373 Con C 1172 exp 5022,
and photo of sortie 60 PR/694, August 25, 1944, Record Group 373 Con F 536~

1214 CONSEQUENCES
500-pound bombs, commenced in August and was repeated three times
in September and December:53
Date Number of Bombers Bombs Dropped
August 20,1944 127B-17’s 1,336
September 13, 1944 96B-24\s 943
December 18,1944 2 B-17’s and 47 B-24’s 436
December 26,1944 95 B-24’s 679
The four raids over Monowitz were all aimed at an oil refinery in an
estimated area of 1,100 by 1,200 yards and at a rubber plant occupying
an area of 1,800 by 1,200 yards. Several facilities were knocked out, but
the Germans were able to repair roofs of buildings, and track damage was
insufficient to choke traffic.54 Bombings conducted in formation at fairly
high altitudes could not be expected to be highly accurate, and repeated
attempts to destroy a target were not an uncommon occurrence. That w as
the setting in which any proposal to disrupt the killing operations from
the air w as going to be weighed by Allied governments.
Spurred by the German invasion of Hungary' and the Vrba-Wctzler
reports of gassings in Auschwitz, several Jewish groups in Bratislava and
Budapest requested bombings of the gas chambers in Auschwitz and of
the railway' lines leading to the death camp. The messages, transmitted to
Jerusalem and Switzerland, reached the British and American govern­
ments during the second half of June. In Britain the suggestion to bomb
Auschwitz was made by Chaim Wcizmann (President of the World Zion­
ist Organization) and Moshe Shertok (head of the Political Department
of the Jew'ish Agency in Palestine) in a meeting on June 30 with the

exp 3185. In addition, sec Hrugiom, “Auschwitz-Birkenau — Why the World War II
Photo Interpreters Failed to Identify' the Extermination Complex,” Military Intel­
ligence, January-March 1983, pp. 50-55.
53. Target Information Sheet of July 18, 1944, report titled “Synthetic Oil Plant
of I. G. Farben at Oswiccim near Krakow, Poland,” with “Summary I.G.F. Synthetic
Rubber and Oil Plant, Oswiccim, Poland, Synthetic Oil Section,” as of January' 1945,
all in Record Group 18, Army Air Forces, 15th Squ. Combat Mission, July 18, 1944.
54. Ibid. Also, Interpretation Reports of photographs taken by 60th Squadron on
August 23, and 25, 1944 (60 PR/686 and 60 PR/694), Record Group 18, Army Air
Forces, 15th Squ. Combat Mission, August 30, 1944. Further reports in Record
Group 18, Army Air Forces, 15th Squ. Com bat Mission, September 13, 1944, and
Record Group 18, 15th Squ. Combat Mission, December 26, 1944. Note also the
report by SS Central Administration chief Mockcl of the Auschwitz camp to SS
Construction Inspectorate Silesia, September 18,1944, about the September 13 raid,
stating that the Rcichsbahn was able to repair damage to its railw'ay installations
immediately, and that other damage was caused mostly to windows and some roofs.
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives RG 11.001 (Center for Preservation of
Historical lSocumentarv Collections, Moscow), Roll 20, Fond 502, Opis 1, Folder
28.

RESCUE 1215
Parliamentary Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs, G. H. Hall. They made
the point without much emphasis.55 A week later, on July 6, the two
Jewish representatives met with British Foreign Secretary Eden and, at
the end of a long list of proposals, added a request for the bombing of the
railway lines. Eden replied that he had already referred the gas-chamber
bombing suggestion to the Air Ministry and that he would now supple­
ment it by including the railways.56 An explanatory Jewish note of July 11
stated that bombing the death installations was “hardly likely to achieve
the salvation of the victims to any appreciable extent,” but that it would
constitute a message to the Germans.57 On August 13, Air Commodore
Grant could not find Birkenau. Before anything could be undertaken, he
wrote to V. Cavendish-Bentinck of the Joint Intelligence Committee, he
would need some aerial photographs of the place.58 Finally, on Septem­
ber 1,1944, Richard Law, Minister of State in the Foreign Office, sent an
official reply to Weizmann. As promised, said Law, Eden had imme­
diately put the proposal to the Secretary of State for Air. The matter had
received the most careful consideration of the Air Staff, but because of
“the very great technical difficulties involved,” the Foreign Office had
“no option but to refrain from pursuing the proposal in present circum­
stances.” Law said he realized that the decision was going to prove a
“disappointment” to Weizmann, but, he added, “you may feel folly as­
sured that the matter was most thoroughly investigated.”59
In the meantime, parallel requests had been received by the War Refu­
gee Board in Washington.60 At the suggestion of Executive Director
Pehle, the chairman, Morgenthau, sent a paraphrase of a cable, calling for
the bombardment of railway junctions at Kashau (sic) and Pressov to the
War Department, where Assistant Secretary McCloy passed it on to the
Civil Affairs Division, which in turn handed the proposal to the Opera­

55. The bombing request, part of several proposals for the rescue of the remaining
Jews, is noted in the British record. Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe, p. 309.
It is not mentioned in Shertok’s report of the meeting to Jewish Agency chief Bcn-
Gurion, June 30,1944, Weizmann Archives, Rehovoth, Israel.
56. Note of meeting by Weizmann and Shcrtok with Eden and Walker (Refugee
Department), July 6,1944, Weizmann Archives.
57. Note of July 11,1944, Weizmann Archives.
58. Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe, pp. 314-15.
59. Law to Weizmann, September 1,1944, Weizmann Archives.
60. Apparently they originated in Bratislava at the time when the deportations
began. One of the requests was passed on to the War Refugee Board by Jacob Rosen­
heim (head of Aguda Israel World Organization, representing Orthodox Jews) on
June 18, 1944, another a few days later by Ricgncr in Geneva. Martin Gilbert, Ausch­
witz and the Allies (New York, 1981), p. 236, and David S. Wyman, “Why Auschwitz
Was Never Bombed,” Commentary, May 1978, pp. 37-46.

1216 CONSEQUENCES
tions Division for action.61 The Operations Division felt that, inasmuch
as McCloy had directed the request to the Civil Affairs Division, the reply
should come from there. Operations considered that appropriate action
on its part could consist of drafting the answer that the Civil Affairs
Division might send to Secretary Morgenthau. The suggested phrasing,
signed by Major General J. E. Hull (the Operations Division's group
chief for theaters of war) on June 26, was that air strikes were “impractica­
ble" for the reason that they would require “diversion of considerable air
support essential for the success of our forces now engaged in decisive op­
erations."62 Pehle then received a cable from his representative in Switzer­
land (McClelland) containing another proposal for bombings of railway
lines, and he promptly renewed his request on June 29.63 On July 3,
1944, McCloy s assistant, Colonel Harrison Gerhardt, wrote the follow­
ing memorandum to McCloy: “I know you told me to 'kill' this but since
those instructions, we have received the attached letter from Mr. Pehle. I
suggest that the attached reply be sent." The suggested answer contained,
almost word for word, the Operations Division's formulation.64

61. Major General J. H. Hilldring (Director, Civil Affairs Division) to Operations


Division, June 23, 1944, enclosing paraphrase of cable, National Archives Record
Group 163, War Department General and Special Staffs, OPD 383.7 (sec II). The
paraphrase in the War Department files is not dated, but the same message with
different wording in the files of the American Jewish Committee bears the date
June 12, 1944, and is identified as having been transmitted bv representatives of
Jewish organizations in Sw itzerland after they had approached the American and
British legations in Berne with “no result.” Moses Jung to M. Gottschalk (both in
American Jewish Committee), June 20, 1944, Archives of American Jewish Commit­
tee, KXO-29, Waldman files (Hungary).
62. Hull to Director, Cavil Affairs Division, copies to Commanding General/
Army Air Forces and sections in Operations, June 26, 1944, Record Group 163, War
Department General and Special Staffs, OPD 383.7 (sec II).
63. Pehle to McClov, June 29, 1944, in National Record Group 107, Secretary of
War/Asst. Sec. War, ASW 400.38 Jews.
64. Gerhardt to McCloy, July 3, 1944, with draft of McCloy reply to Pehle dated
July 4, 1944, ibid. Following renew als of bombing requests, a more elaborate set of
reasons for nor accepting the suggestion, including consideration of ranges and
losses, was prepared by Hull. See Pehle to McCloy, November 8, 1944, transmitting
eyew itness account of Auschw'itz, and Hull to McCloy, November 14, 1944, reciting
difficulties, in National Archives Record Group 319, Armv Staff, ABC 383.6, No­
vember 8, 1944, Sec. 1A. See also Wyman, “Why Auschwitz Was Never Bombed,”
Commentary, May 1978, pp. 37-46, letter by Herbert Loebcl, surv ivor of so-called
Gypsy camp in Auschw'itz and experienced pilot, suggesting that a night raid would
have been effective in view- of flames from crematoria, and letter by Milt Groban,
navigator-bombadier in Auschwitz raid of August 20 and other raids on oil targets,
including Ploic$ti, subsequently also staff operations officer, 15th Air Force, empha­
sizing improbability of hitting targets, attritional losses of bombers in raids, conse­
quence of carpet bombing (dropping strings of bombs at intervals of 400 feet), and

RESCUE 1217
Half a million Jews were killed in Auschwitz between May and No­
vember 1944. The decision not to bomb the gas chambers during that
time was a product, in the first instance, of perceptual insufficiencies: the
Jews lacked knowledge; the Allies, motivation. The Jewish proposals,
presented in an uncoordinated manner at the last moment, either were
incomplete or failed to provide specifics about the targets. The Allied
replies, couched in the ready-made language of diplomatic or bureau­
cratic usage, were drafted without serious reflection or prolonged preoc­
cupation in matters pertaining to the Jewish disaster.* 65 More fundamen­
tally, bombing was an idea whose time had not come. Neither Jewish
traditions nor Allied doctrines could make it an imperative. The Jewish
leaders were not accustomed to thinking about rescue in terms of physical
force, and Allied strategists could not conceive of force for the purpose of
rescue.66
If any major part of the remaining Jewish community was to be saved,
such action would have to be taken with nonphysical means. To this end
some preparations had been made. The War Refugee Board and Jewish
organizations had posted their representatives at the perimeter of the
destruction arena. There the rescuers waited for openings, opportunities,
and offers. Incredibly enough, an offer was to come.
On April 6 and 7, at a time when the German momentum in Hungary
was approaching its climax, the Armaments Ministry secured from Hitler
himself an authorization to remove 100,000 of the expected Jewish de­
portees from Auschwitz to construction projects that were then being
planned by the Pursuit Planes Staff. Two and a half weeks after this diver­
sion had been authorized, Obersturmbannführer Eichmann called to his
office in the Budapest Hotel Majestic a leader of the Jewish rescue com-

thc possible psychological burden placed on those bombing the camp, Commentary,
July 1978, pp. 7-11, with Wyman’s reply on pp. 11 -12. For a wide-ranging review of
the problem, sec the essays and documents in Michael Ncufcld and Michael Beren-
baum, eds., The Bombing of Auschwitz (New York, 2000).
65. Sec the comments by General Telford Taylor in “Why the World Did Not
Listen” (his review of Walter Laqucufs The Terrible Secret), The New York Times Book
Review, February 1, 1981, pp. 1, 18. Symptomatic were quotation marks placed
around the words death camps and extermination in OSS documents processed in
1944. Record Group 226, OSS 61701 and OSS 80227. A Soviet commander, ad­
vancing upon Auschwitz in January' 1945, had been told that he might enter con­
centration camps, including Auschwitz, but what he saw there was beyond his imagi­
nation. Remarks by Lt. Gen. Petrenko in Brewster Chamberlain, ed., The Liberation of
the Nazi Concentration Camps 1945 (Washington, D.C., 1987), pp. 188-89.
66. The idea of bribing the Hungarian government with a promise of bombing
immunity for Hungarian cities in exchange for Jewish safety from deportation did not
arise. Allied bombers roared over Hungary' at will, killing Hungarians and lews alike.

CONSEQUENCES
mittce in Hungary; Joel Brand.67 Eichmann received Brand with words in
the following vein:
Do you know who I am? I have carried out the Aktionen in the
Reich — in Poland — in Czechoslovakia. Now it is Hungary’s turn. I let
you come here to talk business with you. Before that I investigated
you —and your people. Those from the Joint and those from the
Agency.68 And I have come to the conclusion that you still have re­
sources. So I am ready to sell you —a million Jews. All of them I
wouldn’t sell you. That much money and goods you don’t have. But a
million — that will go. Goods for blood — blood for goods. You can
gather up this million in countries which still have Jews. You can take it
from Hungary. From Poland. From Austria. From Theresienstadt.
From Auschwitz. From wherever you want. What do you want to
save? Virile men? Grown women? Old people? Children? Sit down —
and talk.
Brand was a careful negotiator. How was he to get goods, he asked, that
the Germans could not confiscate on their own? Eichmann had the an­
swer. Brand was to go abroad. He was to negotiate directly with the Allies
and bring back a concrete öfter. With these words Eichmann dismissed
Brand, warning him in parting that the discussion was a Reich secret that
no Hungarian was allowed to suspect.
Sometime in the beginning of May, following the railway conference
in Vienna that determined the routing of the transports, Eichmann called
Brand again. “Do you want a million Jews?” If so, Brand was to leave
immediately for Istanbul. He was to bring back an öfter to deliver trucks.
“You deliver one truck for every' hundred Jews. That is not much.” The
total would be 10,000 vehicles. The trucks had to be new and suitable for
winter driving. “You can assure the Allies that these trucks will never be
used in the West. They will be employed exclusively on the eastern front.”
In addition, the Germans would be pleased if the Allies would throw in a
few thousand tons of tea, coffee, soap, and other useful items.
Cautiously Brand replied: “Mr. Obersturmbannführer, I personally
can believe that you will keep your word, but I do not possess ten thou­
sand trucks. The people with whom I must negotiate in Istanbul will
demand guarantees. Nobody is going to deliver ten thousand trucks in

67. F.xcept as indicated otherwise, the entire account of the Brand mission is taken
from Alexander Weissberg, Du Geschuhte iwi Joei Brand (Cologne-Bcrlin, 1956). On
Brand's background, see also comments by Andreas Biss (an industrialist who tor a
time had employed Brand), Der Stopp der Endlosutiß (Stuttgart, 1966), pp. 40-49.
68. Reference here is to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and
the Jewish Agency for Palestine.

RESCUE 1219
advance. What assurance can you offer that these million Jews will actu­
ally be freed?”
Eichmann thereupon gave a decisive answer. “You think we are all
crooks. You hold us for what vom are. Now I am going to pros e to you that
I mist you more than you trust me. When you come back from Istanbul
and tell me that the offer has been accepted, I will dissolve Auschwitz and
move 10 percent of the promised million to the border. You take over the
100,000 Jews and deliver for them afterwards one thousand trucks. And
then the deal will proceed step by step. For every hundred thousand Jews,
a thousand trucks. You are getting away cheap.”
Brand had to conceal his excitement. For the first time he saw a way
out. If the verbal assurance could be given in time, the Jews could score a
major breakthrough without delivering a single vehicle. To be sure, the
Germans could change their conditions. So far they had made no conces­
sions. But if Brand could return with a promise, the Germans could not
kill so long as they wanted the trucks. Without blood, no merchandise.69
Eichmann’s initiative, according to his testimony in Jerusalem, had
been influenced largely by the propensity of rival SS factions to negotiate
with the Jews. He was going to confine the offer to freeing 100,000 Jews,
but then thought that only a major gesture, involving a million, was
going to have any impact. When Himmler approved the scheme, Eich­
mann was actually surprised. Himmler, believing that the Jews might
make deliveries, was thinking about motorizing the 8th SS-Cavalry Divi­
sion Florian Geyer and the 22d SS-Volunteer Cavalry Division Maria
Theresia, both assigned to Hungary.70
The rescue committee now telegraphed to Istanbul that Brand would
be arriving there. The answer came quickly: “Joel should come, Chaim
will be there.” To the committee this could mean only that Chaim Weiz-
mann himself would be on hand.
On May 15 Brand saw Eichmann for the last time. It was the day
on which the deportations began. Eichmann warned Brand to return
quickly. If the offer came in time, Auschwitz would be “blown up” (dann
spren0 e ich Auschwitz in die Lufi), and the deportees now leaving Hungary
would be the first to be sent to the border.71
On the following day, Brand secured “full powers” from the Zentralrat
der Ungarischen Juden; he also received a companion: a Jew who had

69. Brand did not know of the German plan to use up to 100,000 Jews for forced
labor in any case.
70. Testimony by Eichmann, July 5,1961, Eichmann trial, sess. 86, pp. Ol, PI.
71. Eichmann at his trial denied having talked about destroying Auschwitz, since
he had no jurisdiction to do so. His testimony, July 5, 1961, Eichmann trial, sess. 86,
p.Rl.

1220 CONSEQUENCES
served the Abwehr, Bandi Grosz. The two went to Vienna and, paying for
their fare in dollars, left by special plane to Istanbul.
When Brand landed at the Istanbul airport, he made a disturbing
discover)'. The Jewish Agency had not processed an entry visa for him,
and “Chaim” was not there. The man to whom Jerusalem had referred
was not the agency’s chief executive, Chaim Weizmann, but the chief of
its Istanbul Office, Chaim Barlasz, and that man was riding around in the
city at the verv moment of the plane’s arrival to obtain a visa for Brand.
Fortunately, Brand’s counterintelligence companion, Grosz, had many
connections in Istanbul. After a few telephone calls by Grosz, the two
men were allowed to move into a hotel. There the Jewish Agency repre­
sentatives were waiting for the emissaries.
Brand was angry' and excited. “Comrades, do you realize what is in­
volved? . . . We have to negotiate. . . . With whom can I negotiate? Do
you have the power to make agreements . . . ? Twelve thousand people
are hauled away every' day . . . that is five hundred an hour. . . . Do they
have to die because nobody from the Executive is here? ... I want to
telegraph tomorrow that I have secured agreement. . . . Do you know
what is involved, comrades? The Germans want to negotiate. The ground
is burning under their feet. They feel the coming of the catastrophe.
Eichmann has promised us an advance of a hundred thousand Jews. Do
you know what this means? ... I insist, comrades, that a man come here
whom all the world knows. The Germans are observing us. They will
know at once that Weizmann is here or [Moshe] Shertok. Even if you
cannot accomplish anything concrete with the Allies while I am here, I
can go back and tell Eichmann that the Agency has accepted. Then Ausch­
witz can be blown up.”
To the representatives of the Jewish Agency the matter was not so
simple. They could not be sure, they said, that a telegram sent to Jeru­
salem would arrive there without mutilation. No one had enough influ­
ence to obtain a plane. No representative of the War Refugee Board was
on the scene. Brand wanted to reach Steinhardt, the American Ambas­
sador in Ankara. “Steinhardt,” he said, “is supposed to be a good Jew. And
besides that, a good man.” But no plane seat could be bought for a trip to
Ankara. The hours began to pass, then the days. Brand, still waiting for
someone to arrive in Istanbul, gave the Jewish Agency representatives
some important data. “I gave the comrades an accurate plan of the Ausch­
witz concentration camp. I demanded the bombing of the gas chambers
and crematories insofar as this was technically possible. I demanded di­
versions and air strikes against the junctions on the railway lines which led
to Auschwitz. I gave our comrades accurate information about places
where parachute troops could land, and I gave them a list of documents
and other things that the parachutists absolutely had to have to get

RESCUE 1221
through. I named a number of addresses of reliable helpers on the roads
to Budapest.”
Brand had exhausted his mission, and it was exhausting him in turn. In
repeated discussions with the Jewish Agency representatives he gained
the distinct impression that they did not quite realize what was at stake.
’■‘They did not, as we did in Budapest, look daily at death.”
As Brand waited for a reply, a number of unexpected things began to
happen. For a few days he was in danger of deportation. The Turkish
authorities had ordered his apprehension, together with Bandi Grosz,
although the latter was a “director” of a Hungarian transport corporation
engaged in discussion with the director of a Turkish state transport com­
pany. Why the deportation of Grosz? Already Brand suspected that the
British were controlling the “main switch,” but he dismissed the thought.
“I could not believe,” he states, “that England—this land which alone
fought on while all other countries of Europe surrendered to despo­
tism — that this England which we had admired as the inflexible fighter
for freedom wanted simply to sacrifice us, the poorest and weakest of all
the oppressed.”
Soon, however, another curious situation arose. Moshe Shertok was
unable to obtain a visa to Turkey. The agency decided to bring Brand to
Aleppo in British-occupied Syria; there Shertok was to meet him. On
June 5,1944, after fifteen fruitless days in Istanbul, Brand, widi a British
visa in his German passport, boarded the Taurus express train. When the
train passed through Ankara, a representative of the Jewish Revisionists
(Irgun), accompanied by an Orthodox party man, got on to warn him
that he was moving into a “trap.” Shertok had not obtained a visa because
the British wanted to lure Brand into British-controlled territory, where
they could arrest him. Britain was in this matter no “ally” (Die Engländer
sind in dieser Frage nicht unsere Verbündeten). They did not want his mis­
sion to succeed. If he continued on his journey, he would never be able to
return; he would be arrested.
Brand was confused. The train was about to pull out, and he decided to
stay on it. On June 7, 1944, he arrived in Aleppo. A porter entered the
compartment and took off Brand’s luggage. Brand wanted to follow the
porter, when an Englishman in civilian clothes blocked his way.
“Mister Brand?”
“Oh, yes.”
“This way, please.”
Before Brand knew what was happening, two plainclothcsmen had
pushed him into a waiting jeep whose motor was already running. He
tried to resist, but it was too late.
Brand’s reports in Istanbul had been passed on to London and Wash­
ington. In the British capital, the Cabinet Committee on Refugees, which

1222 CONSEQUENCES
included Foreign Secretary Eden and Colonial Secretary Oliver Stanley,
met on May 31 and adopted a negative stance.72 73 Six days later, as Brand
was boarding his train for Aleppo, the British Embassy in Washington
sent a detailed aide-memoire to the Department of State. If the sugges­
tion had come from the Gestapo, said the British note, it was a clear case
of blackmail. Ten thousand lorries would strengthen the enemy. To leave-
selections of persons for exchange in Hitler’s hands, without providing
for Allied internees and prisoners, would lay governments open to serious
protest. Wcizmann had been told of the proposal, but no comment had
been made to him beyond a statement that the United States had been
informed. Weizmann had merely observed that it looked like one more
attempt to embarrass the Allies, but that he wanted to reflea on the
affair.72 On June 6 Weizmann wrote to Eden, saying that the story
had given him a “shock” and requesting a meeting with the Foreign
Secretary'.74
Not until June 11 was Shertok permitted to interview Brand in
Aleppo. Brand, answering questions for six hours in two sessions, said at
one point that six million Jews were dead. In his notes Shertok wrote: “I
must have looked a little incredulous, for he said: ‘Please believe me: they
have killed six million Jews; there are only two million left alive.’ ”75 When
the session was over, Shertok went into a huddle with the British repre­
sentatives. Then he turned to Brand. “Dear Joel, I have to tell you some­
thing bitter now. You have to go south. The British demand it. I have
done everything to change this decision, but it is a decision of the highest
authorities. I could not alter it.”
For a second Brand did not understand what had been said to hint.
When he finally caught on, he screamed: “Do you know what you arc
doing? That is simply murder! That is mass murder. If I don’t return our
best people will be slaughtered! My wife! My mother! My children will
be first! You have to let me go! I have come here under a flag of truce. I
have brought you a message. You can accept or rejea, but you have no

72. Wasscrstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe, pp. 249-53. One member feared
that negotiations might “lead to an offer to unload an even greater number of Jews on
our hands,” ibid., p. 252.
73. British Embassy to State Department, June 5, 1944, Foreign Relations of the
United States, 1944,1, 1056-58. Undersecretary Hall of the Foreign Office had met
with Weizmann on June 2. See Hall to Weizmann, June 5,1944, Weizmann Archives.
In the State Department, the matter was in the hands of Undersecretary Stettinius,
who consulted also with McCloy. Stettinius to McCloy, June 14,1944, thanking him
without elaboration for his comments of June 10. National Archives Record Group
107, Assistant Secretary of War, 291.2 Jews. Through the courtesy of Mr. Mark
Be ri beau.
74. Weizmann to Eden, June 6, 1944, Weizmann Archives.
75. Shertok’s “Preliminary Report," June 27, 1944, Weizmann Archives.

RESCUE 1223
right to hold the messenger. ... I am here as the messenger of a million
people condemned to death. . . . What do you want from us? What do
you want from me?”
Brand was brought to Cairo for exhaustive intelligence interrogations.
Henceforth he was a prisoner. Shertok returned to Jerusalem, where he
reported to the Jewish Agency on June 14 and, with David Ben-Gurion,
to the British High Commissioner on the 15th. He wanted to fly to
London, but needed air priority. On the 21st, the American Consul Gen­
eral in Jerusalem told him that War Refugee Board representative Ira
Hirschmann, who had missed meeting with Brand in Turkey, was going
to Cairo and wanted to see Shertok there also. Shertok now flew to Cairo,
where Hirschmann had caught up with Brand. On the 23d, Shertok
received his air priority, but delayed the trip for two days to settle some
matters in Jerusalem. He arrived in London on the 27th and, with Weiz-
mann, went to see Undersecretary Hall on the 30th and Foreign Minister
Eden on July 6.76 At the July 6 meeting the two Jewish leaders reiterated
their desire that “an intimation should be given to Germany that some
appropriate body is ready to meet for discussing the rescue of the Jews.”
Eden expressed his “profound sympathy,” but he had to act in unison
with America and had to have the agreement of the Soviet Government.
The Foreign Secretary “doubted” that ransom was a possible course.
There could not be “anything that looked like negotiating with the
enemy.”77
There were to be no negotiations, just as there was to be no bombing.
Only parachutists were dropped, but these Jewish volunteers from Pal­
estine were released over military targets, where most of them could die
for England.78
By the beginning of July most of the Hungarian Jews were dead. The
Jews of Budapest were waiting for their turn. They were saved at the last
moment, when the Regent Horthy and die Sztojay government, wearied
by the protests of neutral states and the Church and frightened by in­
tercepted Anglo-American teletype messages containing among odier
things the Jewish requests for target bombings of Hungarian government
offices as well as the names of seventy prominent officials, decided to stop
the operation in its tracks. Two days after the deportations had come to a

76. Ibid. See also Ira A. Hirschmann, Lifeline to a Promised Land (New York,
1946) , pp. 109-32.
77. See note of interview' with Eden, July 6, 1944, aide-memoire handed by
Weizmann and Shertok to Eden during the meeting, and Shertok to Ben-Gurion and
Nahum Goldmann, July 6, 1944, Weizmann Archives.
78. Marie Syrkin, Blessed Is the Match — 7'he Story of Jewish Resistance (Philadelphia.
1947) , pp. 19-35. Michael R. D. Foot and James M. Langley, Ail 9 (Boston, 1980K
pp, 179-81. Veesenmayer to Ritter, July 8, 1944, NG-5616.

1224 CONSBQUENCES
halt outside the Hungarian capital, Prime Minister Churchill wrote the
following letter to Eden:
There is no doubt that this is probably the greatest and most horrible
crime ever committed in the whole history' of the world, and it has
been done by scientific machinery' by nominally civilised men in the
name of a great state and one of the leading races of Europe. It is quite
clear that all concerned in this crime who may tall into our hands,
including the people who only obeyed orders by carrying out the
butcheries, should be put to death after their association with the
murders has been proved. . . . There should therefore, in my opinion,
be no negotiations of any' kind on this subject. Declarations should be
made in public, so that everyone connected with it will be hunted
down and put to death.79
This letter reveals a great deal about the British Prime Minister’s thoughts.
In these instructions Churchill was not immediately concerned with the
safety' of the Jews; he was worried about the reputation of the German
nation. The culprits had disgraced their race.
The Jews continued to be gassed. Outside Hungary' the operation w as
not over. The Jews were being deported from Italy, they w'ere shipped out
from the islands of Greece, they were hauled out of the ghetto of Lodz,
they were thinned out in Theresienstadt, they were moved out of the
Polish labor camps. In the fall came the turn of the remaining Slovakian
Jews.
Once more, ransom negotiators were sent out from Germany. This
time the associate president of the Zionist Organization in Hungary',
Kastner, accompanied by Standartenführer Becher, arrived in Switzer­
land. They too were conferring with the w'rong party. On the opposite
side stood the president of the Jewish community' in Switzerland, Salv
Mayer. He disliked the negotiations and refused to promise the Germans
anything.80 If Saly Mayer reflected upon his tactics after the war, his only'
consolation must have been the circumstance that the SS and Police were
determined to destroy the Slovak Jews in any case. The negotiators on the
German side had not been the right party either.
In Cairo, Joel Brand remained in custody. His mission had failed, and
his wife and children in Budapest had almost paid the penalty' tor the
failure. He was constantly afraid that they might still have to pay. But the
British would not let him go. He was now invited to clubs and hotels,
more as an object of curiosity' than a source of intelligence information.
79. Churchill to Eden, July 11, 1944, in Winston S. Churchill, The Second World
War; vol. 6, Triumph and Tragedy (Boston, 1953), p. 693.
80. Dr. Rczsö Kasztner (Rudolf Kastner), “Der Bericht des jüdischen Rettungs-
komitecs aus Budapest” (mimeographed, Library of Congress), pp. 91-99.

RESCUE
One day at the British-Egyptian Club, Brand was engaged in conversa­
tion by a man who did not introduce himself. The Englishman asked once
more about the Eichmann offer and how many Jews were involved.
Brand replied that the offer encompassed a million people. “But Mr.
Brand,” the British host exclaimed, ‘"what shall I do with those million
Jews? Where shall I put them?”81 There were no longer a million. The
entire network of standby organizations had become a vast organization
of bystanders.
By the beginning of 1945, five million Jews were dead. There were no
more gassings. Auschwitz had been abandoned. But tens of thousands of
Jews were still to die. On October 15, 1944, Judge Proskauer of the
American Jewish Committee telegraphed McCloy, urging that internees
in concentration camps be recognized by the U.S. government as pris­
oners of war,82 but the Assistant Secretary of War expressed doubt that
such a step was “legally justified” or that it would “really help” the people
it was designed to assist.83 During the shadow months of the Nazi re­
gime, Roswell McClelland of the War Refugee Board negotiated in Berne
with Standartenführer Becher of the SS and Police for die amelioration of
camp conditions. In the final weeks the International Red Cross also
made itself felt. The Germans began to release thousands of Jews. The
Allied armies found the remainder alive, dying, or dead in the camps.84
Many of the survivors had lost enough body weight to look like living
corpses.85
Up to May 8, 1945, the Jewish masses could not be rescued from
catastrophe; now the survivors had to be saved from its consequences.

81. Weissberg, Brand, pp. 214-15. A British Foreign Office official, Alec Randall,
is reported as having made such a statement to Shcrtok on June 28. Shlomo Aronson,
Hitler, the Allies, and the Jews (Cambridge, England, 2004), pp. 252-54. Aronson
believes Brandt heard it from Shcrtok. Long afterward Eichmann said: “The plain fact
was that there was no place on earth that would have been ready to accept the Jews,
not even this one million.” Life, December 5,1960, p. 148.
82. Proskauer to McCloy, October 15, 1944, Archives of American Jewish Com­
mittee, EXO-16, Proskauer files (Joint Emergency Committee).
83. McCloy to Proskauer, October 17, 1944, Archives of American Jewish Com­
mittee, EXO-16, Proskauer files (Joint Emergency Committee).
84. Kasztner, “Bericht,” pp. 112-13. War Refuge Board, Final Report, pp. 34,43-
45, 59. Jean-Claude Favcz, Das Internationale Rote Kreuz und das Dritte Reich (Zu­
rich, 1989), pp. 468-506.
85. In one stratified sample of survivors studied by Leo Eitingcr in Israel, the
percentage of Jewish camp survivors who had been found in a cadaverous state was
nearly a third. L. Eitingcr, “Concentration Camp Survivors in Norway and Israel,”
Israel Journal of Medical Sciences 1 (1965): 883-95, particularly p. 889. See also his
“The Concentration Camp Syndrome and Its Late Sequelae,” in loci Dimsdalc, cd..
Survivors, Victims, and Perpetrators (Washington, 1980), pp. 127-62. Eitingcr, a phy­
sician, was a Jewish deportee from Norway in Auschwitz.

1226 CONSEQUENCES
On the conquered territory of the former German Reich, some tens ot
thousands of Jews clustered around the liberated concentration camps:
Bergen-Belsen in the British zone, the Dachau complex in the American
zone, Mauthausen in Austria.86 Thousands of the worst cases among the
camp survivors were taken to hospitals in Germany, Switzerland, and
Sweden. Thousands more began to trek back to Hungary and Poland in
search of lost families. To the south and east, the broken Jewish remnant
communities formed a belt of restlessness, extending from the Balkans
through Poland to the depths of Russia. The Hungarian-Romanian area
still contained half a million Jews. Many were dispersed, most were desti­
tute, and all were insecure.87
In Poland the scattered survivors found possessions and homes in
other hands. Not a few of these Polish Jews, emerging from labor camps
and out of hiding, were greeted with the query: “Still alive?”88 These
Jews, too, wanted to get out, but no door was opened to them. The
United States still had its immigration quotas. (The total quotas allotted
to all the people born in the eastern half of Europe could not exceed
about 1,500 a month.) In Palestine the White Paper of 1939 had set a
permissible immigration total of 75,000 Jews for a period of five years.
When it was discovered in the autumn of 1943 that only 44,000 of these
certificates had been used, the British government agreed to the utiliza­
tion of the remaining 31,000 passes after 1944.89 By the end of 1945, no
certificates were left. From January 1, 1946, therefore, the British Labor
government, under the severest pressure, allowed the Palestinian migra­
tion to continue at the rate of 1,500 a month.90 In short, the United
States and Palestine together offered the Jews accommodation at the
trickling rate of a few thousand month after month. For the hundreds of
thousands of uprooted survivors, the only prospect was a wait of years.
In Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary many Jews chose not to wait;
they decided to embark on their journey, even if in the meantime they
could not travel more than halfway. From Poland the exodus began
through Czechoslovakia to the American zone in Germany.91 From Hun­
gary and Romania the Jews began to arrive in Austria.92 By November

86. Most of these camp inmates were Hungarian Jews. Other significant groups
were deportees from Poland, Holland, Slovakia, and Lithuania.
87. Duschinsky, “Hungary,” in Meyer et al., The Jews in the Soinet Satellites,
pp. 373-489; Nicolas Sylvain, “Rumania,” ibid., pp. 491-556.
88. VVeinryb, “Poland,” ilnd., p. 244.
89. Report of the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry Regarding the Problems of
European Jenny and Palestine (London, 1946), Cmd. 6808, pp. 65-66.
90. ¡hid.
91. VVeinryb, “Poland,” in Meyer, ct al.. The Jews in the Soviet Satellites, pp. 254-57.
92. Report of the Anglo-American Committee, 1946, Cmd. 6808, pp. 48-49.

RESCUE 1227
1945 the flow was beginning to thicken, and thousands of refugees were
spilling over into Italy.93 These infiltrations were only an introduction.
Under a Soviet-Polish agreement, all Jews and Poles in Soviet Russia who
had been Polish citizens before September 19, 1939, were permitted to
return to Poland.94 Over 150,000 Jews in Soviet Asia were affected by
that agreement. From their Uzbek, Turkmen, Tadzhik, and Kazakh exiles,
the Jews now started to move westward to the new Polish frontier. Passing
the gutted ghettos, they were sent on to the newly administered Polish
territory' to the west, where they could come into possession of aban­
doned German lands and homes. But the migrants from the Asian USSR
did not stop in the Pomeranian-Silesian region. Joining the survivors of
Poland, they overflowed into the Western-occupied zones of Germany.95
The British authorities in Germany looked upon the influx of the Jews
as a vast conspiracy to explode the immigration barriers to Palestine.
Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Morgan, who served as chief of dis­
placed persons operations in Germany for the United Nations Relief and
Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), declared in an interview be­
fore newsmen that a secret Jewish organization was behind the infiltra­
tion into Germany from the east, that these Jews were “well dressed, well
fed, rosy cheeked,” and that they had “plenty of money.” “They certainly
do not look like persecuted people,” he observed. Then, warning that the
European Jews were “growing into a world force,” he confided that they
were all planning to leave Europe.96
The sentiments expressed by this general guided the British in their
actions. The Jewish Brigade was withdrawn from Austria, and the fron­
tier controls were tightened.97 To the north, in Germany, the British
denied admission to displaced persons camps in their zone to all persons
who arrived there after June 30, 1946. The protests of Director General
La Guardia of UNRRA to Prime Minister Attlee did not change the
British decision in this matter.98 Toward the end of 1946 the British
government decided to adopt a compulsory labor law for residents of the
displaced persons camps in the British zone of Germany. The UNRRA

93. Transit to Italy was facilitated by the Jewish Brigade from Palestine, then
stationed in the British zone of Austria, astride the route from Vienna to the Italian
frontier. Ibid.
94. Weinryb, “Poland,” in Meyer ct al., The Jews in the Soviet Satellites, pp. 361-62.
95. Ibid., pp. 362, 366-68.
96. “UNRRA Aide Scents Jews’ Exodus Plot,” The Netv York Times, January 3,
1946, pp. 1, 3.
97. Report of Anglo-American Committee, 1946, Cmd. 6808, p. 48.
98. George Woodbridgc (Chief Historian of UNRRA), UNRRA —The History of
the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (New York, 1950), vol. 2,
p. 512.

1228 CONSEQUENCES
administration’s protest that the law contained no safeguard for Jews and
other ex-inmates of German concentration camps was entirely in vain."
Blocked by the British, the Jews poured into the American zones.
From January to April 1946, the rate of entry' was 3,000 per month
into the American zone of Germany and nearly 2,000 into American-
occupied Austria, including the Vienna area.99 100 In April the Jewish dis­
placed persons population in Western-occupied Germany was 3,000 in
Berlin, 1,600 in the French zone, 15,600 in the British zone, and 54,000
in the American zone. The comparable figures for Austria were 1,000 in
the British zone and 6,500 in the American zone.101 By the end of 1946
the number of displaced Jews in the Western zones of Germany and Aus­
tria had risen to about 204,000. The American area contained 183,600,
or about 90 percent of them.102
The concentration of so many displaced persons in the American zones
prompted Senator Conolly to express the opinion that the United States
was “the biggest sucker in the world” and that in Germany the Americans
were “accepting people from all the other zones and feeding them.”103
Senator Conolly’s remark indicated that, whereas the Palestine issue was
dictating British actions, the cost of maintenance would become the
chief problem in the American zones. Under Control Council Law No. 2,
the care of displaced persons on German soil was a German responsi­
bility'. From 1946 on, however, the United States guaranteed to the Ger­
mans a minimum standard of living. To make good that guarantee, the
United States army was spending in Germany over $500,000,000 a year

99. Ibid., p. 520.


100. German sraristics from Jav B. Krane, chief, reports and analysis branch of
UNRRA Central Headquarters for Germany, to Ira Hirschmann, special representa­
tive to the Director General of UNRRA, June 26, 1946. Typewritten carbon copy of
the original letter in UNRRA Central Headquarters for Germany, Miscellaneous
Documents, 1945-47, Columbia Uiw Library. For monthly statistics of arrivals and
departures of Jews in the American-held territory' of Austria, from November 1945 to
August 1949, see U.S. High Commissioner, Civil Affairs Austria—Statistical Annex,
August 1949, p. 11.
101. Report of Atuilo-American Committee, 1946, Cmd. 6808, pp. 47-48. In Italy
there were about 16,000. Ibid., p. 58.
102. Testimony by Assistant Secretary' of State John H. Hilldring, Hearings before
Subcommittee on Immigration and Naturalization of the Committee on the Judi­
ciary, House of Representatives, 80th Cong., lstsess., Junc-July 1947, pp. 124-25.
The division between the two U.S. zones was: Germany, 152,803; Austria, 30,797.
lTe Austrian figure is 6,200 higher than the one in the Statistical Annex of the High
Commissioner’s report (August 1949, p. 11). Hilldring’s figure for the number of
Jewish displaced persons in Italy on December 31, 1946, was 21,288.
103. Confidential report by George Meadcr, Chief Counsel, Special State Com­
mittee Investigating the National Defense Program, November 22, 1946, mim­
eographed, p. 8. The report was subsequently released.

RESCUE 1229
under the budget heading “Government and Relief in Occupied Areas”
(GARIOA). Insofar as the German economy did not supply the needs of
the displaced persons (and it supplied in the main only fringe services of
an administrative character), the clothing and feeding of these people had
to be financed from GARIOA. And while non-Jewish displaced persons
were leaving the American zone to go back to their homes, more and
more Jews arrived on the scene.104
Searching for a solution to this problem, War Department officials
thought of ridding themselves of 70 percent of their displaced person
(DP) burden by closing the camps to all but persecutees. The plan failed
when strong Catholic and Protestant groups protested to President Tru­
man that the measure was an act of discrimination that would favor only
the Jews.105 The military authorities then considered the less novel solu­
tion of reducing the standards of upkeep, for both shelter and food.
The billeting problem was complicated by the arrivals of trainloads of
German expellees from Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Although by an old
military directive displaced persons were accorded priority over the Ger­
man population in matters of housing,106 the practice was often quite
different. Thus a group of 300 Jews who were living in houses at the DP
center in Fiirth was ejected by military police in order to make room for a
trainful of Germans who were waiting at a siding to move in.107
In June 1946 the Third Army directed its three divisions that under no
circumstances were substandard accommodations to be provided for
persecutees.108 Nevertheless, the great bulk of the Jews were forced to

104. At the end of the war Jews constituted a negligible percentage among mil­
lions of DPs. By the end of 1946,30 percent of all DPs in camps of the American zone
were Jews. The yearly budget for DP maintenance in that zone was calculated at
$109,000,000. For each DP the cost was as follows: food, $12 monthly ($13.20 for
persecutees, including Jews); maintenance, $5 monthly; initial outfit of clothing,
$49. Mcader report, p. 47. The cost of maintaining the Jews was thus in the neighbor­
hood of $33,000,000 per year.
Unlike Germany, Austria was a recipient of UNRRA aid, and from April 1 to
December 1, 1946, UNRRA took responsibility for supplying the DPs. From Jan­
uary 1 to August 18, 1947, the American army bore the cost. The army, howev er,
spent only $10 per month. Headquarters, United States Forces in Austria,/! Review of
Military Government, September 1, 1947, p. 166. At that rate, the cost to the U.S.
Army of supplying the Jewish DPs in Austria was approximately $2,500,000.
105. Kranc to Hirschmann, June 26, 1946, UNRRA Miscellaneous Documents.
Mcader report, p. 43.
106. Louise W. Holborn, The International Refugee Organization (Dsndon, New
York, and Toronto, 1956), p. 131, citing SHAEF memorandum of April 16, 1945.
107. Leo W. Schwarz, The Redeemers (New York, 1953), pp. 104-6.
108. Krane to Hirschmann, June 26, 1946, in UNRRA Miscellaneous Docu
ments.

1230 CONSEQUENCES
remain in the camps. Frequently these camps were overcrowded. Some
lacked basic facilities tor heating, cooking, and washing. Family privacy
could often be achieved only by partitioning the barracks with blankets
swung across ropes.Im In a somewhat similar vein, the clothing goal was
met bv a yearly issue of one complete set of clothes — sometimes a little
“strange and worn.”109 110 The food allowance was fixed in calories, two-
thirds of which came from bread and potatoes.111 The UNRRA’s histo­
rian, Woodbridge, states that “since the indigenous populations resented
the giving of food to displaced persons,” and “since the military authori­
ties frequently sympathized with the indigenous populations ... it re­
quired unremitting efforts by the UNRRA officials to keep their charges
from starvation.”1 *-
Unlike the British, the Americans did not require the Jewish DPs to
pay for their upkeep bv donating their labor to the German economy.113
“It is understandable,” said Assistant Secretary of State Hilldring, that
Jews “have no wish to work for or under the Germans.”114 Not all Ameri­
cans, however, were so understanding. George Meader, the Chief Coun­
sel of a special Senate committee investigating the defense program, com­
pared the Jews with the Balts. In contrast to the industrious Balts, he said,
the Jews “do not desire to work, but expect to be cared tor, and complain
when things are not as well done as they think they should be. . . . It is
very doubtful,” he added, “that any country' would desire these people as
immigrants.”115
By April 1947 the War Department followed the British example by

109. Holborn, The International Refugee Organization, vol. 2, p. 583, pp. 218-19.
Woodbridge, UNRRA, vol. 2, p. 503.
110. Woodbridge, UNRRA, vol. 2, p. 503.
111. Ibid., pp. 503-4. From October 1945 to August 1946 the number of calories
for Jewish DPs in Germany dropped from 2,500 to 2,200 in the U.S. zone, and from
2,170 to 1,550 in the British zone. In the American zone of Austria, the drop was
from 2,400 (U.S. Army) to 1,200 (UNRRA). Ibid., p. 503; Report of An/jlo-American
Committee, 1946, Cmd. 6808, p. 49. The U.S. Army made additional allowance for
persecuted persons (mostly Jews). In Germany that allowance was 200 calories (in­
cluded in figures above). The British classified Jews bv “nationality.”
112. Woodbridge, UNRRA, vol. 2, p. 504.
113. Wages accruing from German employment could be paid only in Reichs­
mark, which had no foreign exchange value and could not even be used for purchas­
ing in the rationed German market. The Americans could nor benefit either. DP
income was subject to German taxation, and savings were headed for devaluation.
114. Testimony by Maj. Gen. Hilldring in hearings before Immigration Subcom­
mittee, House Judiciary Committee, 80th Cong., 1st sess., Junc-July 1947, pp. 126-
27.
115. Meader report, pp. 45, 52.

RESCUE 1231
closing the gates to the camps. After April 21 no new arrivals were al­
lowed refuge in them.116
It should be pointed out that the military authorities in all occupation
zones undertook responsibility only for essential care and that on occa­
sion there were lapses in the exercise even of this responsibility. To plug
some of the gaps and to supply all the “supplementals” from additional
food rations to schooling of children and training of adults, the resources
of international organizations and private societies had to be brought
into operation. Up to June 30,1947, the international agency concerning
itself with refugee matters was UNRRA. Since UNRRA had been created
for the relief and rehabilitation of Allied nations only, a question arose
immediately whether Jews who were stateless or who carried the na­
tionality of an enemy or ex-enemy state should receive any aid at all.
The British government took the view that such Jews were not entitled
to assistance. In a letter by Sir George Rendel to UNRRA’s displaced
persons division, the British delegate declared: “The fact that Jews can, as
a race, be identified by certain characteristics, and that political develop­
ments, and in particular the National Socialist racial doctrine, have given
them peculiar problems of importance in international politics, are not
sufficient reasons for treating ‘Jews’ as a separate national category.”117
The British objection was overcome by an American-sponsored resolu­
tion that extended UNRRA’s aid to all persons “who have been obliged to
leave their country or place of origin or former residence or who have
been deported therefrom, by action of the enemy, because of race, reli­
gion or activities in favor of the United Nations.”118
The type of assistance rendered by UNRRA was in the main a round­
ing out of essential care. Table 11-7 shows UNRRA’s responsibility be­
ll 6. Headquarters, United States Forces in Austria, A Review of Military Govern­
ment, September 1,1947, p. 165; Woodbridgc, UNRRA, vol. 2, p. 512.
117. Text of British memorandum in UNRRA Standing Technical Subcommittee
on Displaced Persons for Europe, 9th meeting, August 11, 1944, TDP/E(44)38.
Also, British draft resolution on UNRRA operations in enemy or ex-enemy areas,
September 12,1944, UNRRA Council, 2d scss., document 32.
118. Council Resolution No. 57, 2d scss., September 1944, in Woodbridgc,
UNRRA, vol. 1, p. 135. The wording of the resolution was such that aid could not
easily be given to posthostility refugees. The UNRRA administration solved that
problem by adopting the doctrine of “internal displacement”; that is, the “infiltrees"
were covered because they were displaced from the moment they were forced to leas e
their homes by the Germans. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 509-10. The British restriction with
respect to “nationality'” would have deprived more than 20,000 Jews of UNRRA
benefits. Sec chart of Jews receiving IRO assistance (by nationality), July 31, 1947,
from Report of Special Subcommittee on Displaced Persons and the International
Refugee Organization, House Foreign Affairs Committee, 80rh Cong., 1st scss.,
1947, p. 8, in Holborn, The International Refugee Organization, p. 199. The IRO took
over UNRRA’s function in refugee matters on July 1, 1947.

1232 CONSEQUENCES
TABLE 11-7
UNRRA AID TO DISPLACED PERSONS

SUPPLY OF
ESSENTIAL
SUPERVISION FOOD, FUEL,
COUNTRY OF CAMPS AND CLOTHING

1 American zone All camps l


Germany | $2,427,000 for food
l British zone Most camps i
Austria Less than half Complete for April-
the camps December 1946
Italy A few camps Complete

Note: YVoodbridge, UNRRA, vol. 2, pp. 491-92, 500 It. Compilations of camps under
UNRRA supervision in Holborn, The International Refugee Organization, p. 236. On
December 31, 1946, die division of the Jews in Austria was as follows:
UNRRA camps 9,833
Military camps 20,213
Testimony by Hilldring, Immigration Subcommittee, House Judiciary Committee, 80th
Cong., 1st sess., June-Julv 1947, p. 125. UNRRA had a $4-bilIion operation financed
to the extent of 70 percent bv the United States. Expenditures for DPs were approx-
imatelv $60,000,000. The Jewish share was about $15,000,000. See statistics in Wood-
bridge, UNRRA, vol. 3, pp. 423,428,500, 506. Germany was not entitled to UNRRA
aid. Austria and Italy received $135,513,200 and $418,222,100, respectively. Ibid.,
p. 428.

fore its liquidation. When the International Refugee Organization as­


sumed UNRRA’s caretaking functions on July 1, 1947, it attempted to
improve the accommodations, clothing, and food rations of the DPs.119
Nevertheless, the combined rate of military and international spending
was only enough to guarantee to the survivors continued life, and it fell to
Jewish organizations to invest substantial sums for the innumerable
needs of a completely rootless community'.120
Between 1945 and 1948 a quarter of a million Jews had become DPs.

119. Holborn, The International Refugee Organization, pp. 218-38. Unlike


UNRRA, rhe IRO was devoted entirely to refugees. Operating to the end of 1951,
it spent $400,000,000. Expenditures, with overhead, for care of DPs were ca.
$175,000,000. Care of Jewish DPs may have cost about $30,000,000. Ibid., pp. 124,
199-200,238.
120. The Jewish share of military-international spending probably exceeded
$150,000,000. During the life of the IRO the principal Jewish relief organization
(the Joint Distribution Committee) contributed about $26,000,000 to the upkeep of
Jewish DPs. Ibid., pp. 148-49. The total Jewish contribution is considerably greater.

RESCUE 1233
Germany had created these displaced Jews, but it took the whole world to
prolong their displacement for years. The Jews were being dammed up:
they were coming in a massive flow but could leave only in trickles. One
of the small openings was an order by President Truman, dated Decem­
ber 22, 1945, that visas within the quota limits be distributed so far as
possible to DPs of “all faiths, creeds and nationalities” in the American
occupation zones.121 Most other openings were smaller still. The war-
torn countries of Europe were largely closed, and the British Dominions
were not anxious to receive masses of Jews. The Jews themselves were
more and more resolved to move to their national home. In 1946 the
authorized migration to Palestine was beginning to be supplemented by
small, crowded ships attempting to crash the British blockade. Several
thousand Jews were landed. Sixteen thousand were intercepted and in­
terned on the island of Cyprus. One ship, the Exodus, was boarded, and its
passengers were sent back to Germany. But in 1948 the British were
ready to quit. When the Jewish state was established in Palestine on
May 15, the logjam was finally broken.
One month after the mass movement of Jews to Israel got under way,
the United States, too, opened its doors. Special legislation was required
for the large-scale admission of the stranded DPs, and a skeptical Con­
gress had debated such legislation for a year. The lawmakers’ skepticism
was reflected in the thinking of Texas Representative Gossett of the Immi­
gration Subcommittee of the House. If the United States was going to
follow humanitarian motives, he reasoned, why not admit Chinese, In­
dians, and all other suffering groups in unlimited numbers? Conversely, if
economic considerations were going to be decisive, America could get
better people than DPs. With regard to the Polish Jews, he was convinced
of one thing: their rightful place was behind the Iron Curtain. “Some­
body,” he said, “has to fight communism in those countries, and are not
some of these people equipped to do that?” Told about the pogroms, he
asked Secretary of State Marshall, “But the thing that puzzles me is why

121. See statement by Truman, December 22,1945, and his letter of the same dare
to Secretaries of State and War, Attorney General, Surgeon General, and Director
General of UNRRA, in The New York Times, December 23, 1945, p. 10. With respect
to the provision of the immigration law requiring immigrants to pay their ow n fare,
the President authorized admission of DPs whose fare was advanced by private wel­
fare organizations. Ibid.
British Labor Minister George Isaacs attempted to facilitate the entry of DPs from
the British zones to England. He was unsuccessful. The British government wanted
only young unmarried people, who could be pur up in barracks and who would nor
complicate the housing situation. Testimony by Rabbi Philip S. Bernstein (adviser on
Jewish DPs to General Clay), Immigration Subcommittee, House Judiciary Commit­
tee, 80th Cong., lsrscss., Junc-July 1947, p. 241.

1234 CONSBQUENCBS
there would be any persecution of Jews in Poland when half of the Polish
Government are Jews?”122
The final outcome of the doubts and opposition was the passage of a
compromise bill at the end of a long legislative day at two o’clock in the
morning. The act excluded (with certain exceptions) all DPs who had
arrived in Germany, Austria, or Italy after December 22,1945. A total of
202,000 admissions were authorized for the period between July 1,
1948, and June 30,1950. The annual national origins quotas were lifted
to the extent of allowing consular officials to draw upon 50 percent of a
quota for a succeeding year. A minimum of 40 percent of all the available
visas were allotted to Balts and a minimum of 30 percent were set aside
for those of any nationality engaged in agricultural pursuits. Several oc­
cupational preferences without numerical specifications were established
for DPs with professional or industrial qualifications, including clothing
and garment workers.123 Apart from that provision, the Jews had only
one advantage: their organizations were well prepared. They could em­
ploy major resources to speed the processing of the DPs and to provide
assurances of support for the period of their integration. This preparation
paid oft'. During the two-year period about 40,000 Jewish DPs were
admitted to the United States.124
In the winter of 1949-50, hearings were resumed with a view to
extending the Displaced Persons Act. The Jews were interested in three
amendments: They wanted the removal of the cutoff date of Decem­
ber 22, 1945, in order that the later infiltrees could come into the United
States; they asked that eligibility be granted to the Shanghai Jews; and
they desired that agricultural and clothing workers be placed on an equal
footing as preferential categories.
The Jews were not the only petitioners. Polish, Greek, and Italian in­
terests were working too. Above all, the German-American organizations
were demanding major concessions. Though Senator Langer of North
Dakota had secured one-half of the German-Austrian quotas from July
1948 to June 1950 for Ethnic German refugees, the German-Americans
were decidedly not satisfied. Testifying before a subcommittee of the

122. Remarks by Gossett in Hearings of Immigration Subcommittee, House


Judiciary Committee, 80rh Cong., 1st sess., Junc-July 1947, pp. 237, 511.
123. Displaced Persons Act, approved by the President on June 25, 1948,62 Stat.
1009.
124. Statement by Lewis Neikrug, Director General of the Hebrew Immigrant
Aid Society (HIAS), cited in report of special subcommittee of House Judiciary
Committee on Displaced Perstans in Europe and Their Resettlement in the United
States, 81st Cong., 2d sess., January 20, 1950, pp. 76, 80-81. Also, Senate Report
No. 1237, January 25,1950, United States Code Congressional Service, 81st Cong.,
2d sess.. No. 5, pp. 1337-43.

RESCUE 1235
Senate Judiciary Committee, Otto Hauser of American Relief for Ger­
many, Inc., declared: “Thirty-three millions of German extraction de­
mand the same rights under the immigration laws of the United States as
are enjoyed by Americans of any other extraction.”12S Otto Durholz of the
Committee for Christian Action in Central Europe argued that an exclu­
sion of Ethnic Germans would be “racist.”126 J. H. Meyer of the Steuben
Society assured the senators that the “co-racials” of the prospective immi­
grants in the United States were good, hard-working farmers.127
Congressman Celler then came to testify before the Senate Committee.
As chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, his influence was consid­
erable. Now he found himelf in a difficult position: he was a Jew. He had
reason to suspect that Ethnic Germans had participated out of propor­
tion to their numbers in the destruction of the Jews; yet he did not wish
to jeopardize the extension of the act. Resigning himself to a horse­
trading session, he said, “There are some good Volksdeutsche, there
are some bad Volksdeutsche.”128 The Jews got their revisions. An addi­
tional 22,000 Jewish DPs were brought into the country. The German-
American organizations secured authorization for the admission of an
additional 54,744 Ethnic German refugees.129
In the final tally the 250,000 Jewish DPs found their homes in the
following places:130

125. Testimony by Hauser, Hearings, Senate Judiciary Committcc/Subcom-


mittec on Amendments to the Displaced Persons Act, 81st Cong., 1st and 2nd scss.,
March 25,1949 to March 16,1950, p. 187.
126. Testimony by Durholz, ibid., p. 77.
127. Testimony by Meyer, ibid., p. 161.
128. Testimony by Celler, ibid., pp. 192-93.
129. The cutoff'date was extended from December 22, 1945, to January 1, 1949,
benefiting Jewish DPs and German expellees alike. A total of4,000 visas were autho­
rized for DPs in China. Farm and clothing workers received preferences without
specified numbers or percentages. The Gcrman-American organizations scored a
number of successes. Only the first 7,000 Ethnic German immigrants were charge­
able to the German-Austrian quotas; the remainder was taken off the quotas of the
respective countries of birth. Since the IRO was paying for transportation of DPs
only, the U.S. government transported the Ethnic German refugees. See Displaced
Persons Act Amendment, approved June 16, 1950, 64 Stat. 219. A total of about
64,000 Jews arrived in the United States under the DP Act and its amendments from
July 1948 to June 1952. During the same period, 53,448 Ethnic Germans were
admitted to the country. Final Report of Displaced Persons Commission, The DP
Story (Washington, D.C., 1952), pp. 248, 366.
130. For the period July 1, 1947, to December 31, 1951, statistics of Jewish DP
movements totaling 231,548 may be found in Holborn, The International Rcfujitr
Organization, p. 440. Adjustments for the two years preceding IRO operations are
approximations. The IRO contributed, with overhead, more than $20,000,000 to
the transportation of Jewish DPs. Jewish organizations covered the remaining costs.

CONSEQUENCES
Israel 142,000
United States 72,000
Canada 16,000
Belgium 8,000
France 2,000
Others 10,000
It is noteworthy that before the war the United States received more than
twice as many refugees as Palestine. After the war, in spite of the Dis­
placed Persons Act, this ratio was reversed.
Nor was this all. In the Eastern countries the Jewish communities
could no longer maintain themselves. The catastrophe had brought to
Jewry rampant physical privation. In the immediate postwar years the
principal American Jewish relief organization, the Joint Distribution
Committee, gave aid to more than 300,000 Jews in Romania and Hun­
gary alone.1 31 Tens of millions had to be spent to prevent disease, starva­
tion, and death. The Romanian-Hungarian area in particular was affected
by another plague — deportations.
On September 1, 1949, a roundup struck the Transnistrian Jews.
These people originallv hailed from the Bukovinian-Bessarabian region.
They had been deported east when Romania expanded, and transported
w est when the Romanian line receded. Many reached Old Romania and
began to settle there. But the Bukovinian-Bessarabian provinces had be­
come Soviet territory, and the hounded remnants of Transnistria w'ere
claimed by the Soviet Union as its citizens. The)' disappeared by ship and
rail behind the Soviet border.131 132
In February' 1952, Romanian police launched a drive to relieve the
“overpopulation of Bucharest” by deporting from the city' a sizable num­
ber of former shop owners and other “unproductive” people. The de­
portees, who included many Jews, w ere sent to the Danubian-Black Sea
canal construction project and to further destinations within the USSR.133
Shortly thereafter, Hungarian officials decided to solve their housing
shortage in Budapest in an identical manner.134 The Jews behind the Iron
Curtain thus found themselves in an impossible position. The Communist
party' looked upon them as exponents of capitalistic cosmopolitanism.
131. Sylvain, “Rumania,” in Meyer, er al., The Jews in the Soviet Satellites, pp. 520-
23, 543; Duschinsky, “Hungary',” ibid., pp. 407-8,434,464-66.
132. American Jewish Year Book 52 (1951): 351-52, from a report in the Jewish
Daily Forward (New York), October 4, 1949.
133. Wolfgang Brctholz, “Tragödie in Rukaresr,” Aufbau (New York), April 18,
1952, pp. 1,12. Sylvain, “Rumania,” in Mover ct al., Tlte Jews in the Soviet Satellites,
p. 550.
134. Duschinskv, “Hungary',” in Meyer et al., The Jews in the Soviet Satellites,
pp. 471-82.

RESCUE 1237
Within the population itself there was a tendency to identity them with
Communist rule. The Jews in the Soviet satellites had no viable future, yet
they could not simply move out.
Mass emigration from Eastern Europe was easiest in non-Communist
Greece and in the neighboring states of Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. It was
beset with obstacles, interruptions, and restrictions in the countries to the
north, particularly in Romania and Hungary. It could not even begin in
Russia. The obstructions were introduced because of economic consider­
ations. The “necessary” Jews had to stay behind; the others had to leave at
least some of their possessions. The emigrating Jews were subjected to
heavy passport fees in Czechoslovakia.135 Passage had to be booked for an
exorbitant price on government ships in Romania.136 Dollar ransoms
were paid to get 3,000 Jews out of Hungary.137
In spite of all the impediments, the migration continued. The Hungar­
ian revolt of 1956 occasioned the immediate departure of some 18,000
Jews, and a purge of Jews launched by the Polish government in 1967-
68, following the Six-Day War in the Middle East, drove all but a handful
of the 20,000 Jews, still living in Poland at that time, into exile. Emigra­
tion from the Soviet Union underwent freezes and thaws. Before 1971,
the total migration was in the single thousands. By the end of 1981, it
passed a quarter of a million. During the years 1982 to 1988, when the
doors were almost shut again, emigration was not much more than
30,000. Then came the abandonment of restrictions and the breakup of
the Soviet Union, which facilitated an outflow, from 1989 through 1999,
of approximately 950,000. Accounting for the Jewish exodus from all of
Eastern Europe and the natural decrease resulting from an aging popula­
tion, the decline in this region was about 2,700,000. At the beginning of
2000, about 550,000 were left (see Table 11-8).
In the center of Europe the Jews of Germany and Austria in the 1950s
totaled 5 percent of the number who had lived there in 1933. Germany
still had 25,000 Jews, Austria about 10,000. These Jews no longer con­
stituted a viable community. They were composed of surv ivors in mixed
marriages, old people from Theresienstadt, DPs who had not moved on,
and returnees from prewar emigration. In 1950,13 percent of the Jews in
Germany were under eighteen.138 The economy of the Jews in Germany

135. Meyer, “Czechoslovakia,” ibid., pp. 145-52; A. Nissim, “Falls Dr. F’ischl
auftauchen sollte,'nAuJbau (New York), May 11,1951, p. 7.
136. Sylvain, “Rumania,” in Mcvcr ct al., The Jem in the Simet Satellites. pp. 548-
50.
137. “Last Jews to Quit Red Hungary' Sail,” The New York Times, November 18,
1953, p. 5. The price was $3,000,000.
138. American Jewish Year Book 52 (1951): 316. Thirty years later, the Jewish
population of West Germany and Austria, with new immigrants from Faster» Fu-

CONSEQUENCES
was partly marginal, partly terminal. Roughly a third of them derived an
income from business, professional fees, or employment. The business
sector consisted of about 1,800 shopkeepers and 100 owners of small
manufacturing plants. Most of these businessmen were DPs. The self-
employed professionals also numbered about 100; most of them were
lawyers. There were in the neighborhood of 3,000 employees, including
wage earners in Jewish establishments and the personnel of the Jewish
community machinery. The remaining Jews were dependent on pensions
and indemnification payments, rent from restituted property, Jewish as­
sistance, and government relief.139
For nearly forty vears, this West German community remained numer­
ically stable, albeit with internal transformations. Emigration and the
excess of deaths over births were compensated by small infusions of im­
migrants, some of them late returnees, others new arrivals from neighbor­
ing Czechoslovakia and countries farther distant. In 1989, 695 Soviet
Jews arrived, a vanguard of much larger numbers. Faced with differences
between the German Jews, who opted for this increase, and Israel, which
opposed it, the German government decided to offer permanent status to
tens of thousands of immigrants. They came in the following half-decade
at a rate of several thousand annually. By 2000, the Jewish community in
united Germany was reported to be 92,000, a doubling in ten years
attributable mainly to the influx from the republics of the former Soviet
Union.140 Spurred by this development was the building of new syn­
agogues, some of them with single entrances and bulletproof glass.141
More so than anywhere else, the Jews of Western Europe have re­
established their normal mode of existence. But one problem is peculiar
to this region. Thousands of children who had been sheltered in convents
and homes had become Jewish orphans in Christian custody, and the
return of these children to the Jewish community was a slow and drawn-
out process. Some were not returned at all. “It would thus seem,” re­
marked a Jewish writer, “as if the Jewish people, after having lost 6 mil­
lion souls through the savagery and sadism of Nazi paganism, will have to

rope, was still about 35,000. American Jewish Yearbook 84 (1984): 205-11, 225. This
Week in Germany, June 22, 1984, p. 5. West Germany's total membership in Jewish
congregations in 1984 was 27,791, Austria’s about 7,500.
139. Kurt R. Grossman, “Die Wirtschaftslage der Juden in Deutschland,” Aufbau
(New York), August 31,1956, pp. 25,37. For an earlier study, sec Jack Hain, Status of
Jewish Workers and Employers in Post-War Germany, Office of U.S. Military Govern-
mcnt/Manpower Division, Visiting Expert Scries No. 10, August 1949.
140. Sec the postwar volumes of the American Jewish Year Book through the year
2000.
141. Dagmar Aalund and David Wessel, “New Synagogues for Germany,” The
Wall Street Journal, June 21, 2000, pp. B1, B12.

RESCUE 1239
SURVIVORS AND DP NEW
RETURNEES, MIGRATION, MIGRATION, REMAINING,
COUNTRY 1945-46 1945-48 1948-99 2000

Czechoslovakia 40,000 5,000 30,000 6,000


Poland 225,000 150,000 65,000 4,000
Romania 430,000 40,000 320,000 12,000
Hungary 200,000 25,000 90,000 52,000
Bulgaria 50,000 — 49,000 2,000
Yugoslavia 12,000 — 8,000 3,000
Greece 12,000 — 6,000 5,000
USSR 2,300,000 — 1,130,000 470,000

Note: Statistics in the main from volumes of the American Jewish YearBooky 1945-2000. For Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and the USSR, the figures com­
prise also their successor states. Raw data of Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union and successor states, which include non-Jewish family members, are
adjusted in this table to include only the probable number of declared Jews. See Sergio DellaPergola in ibid. (1999), pp. 464-70. The census figure of Jan­
uary 1989 was 1,451,000. The estimate of about 470,000 Jews remaining in the former Soviet Union at the beginning of2000 reflects, in addition to em­
igration, a substantial natural decrease.
The 200,000 survivors and returnees in Hungary include “Jews” under the wartime definition, whereas die figure of 1995 excludes converts or Chris­
tians of Jewish ancestrv. In the Hungarian census of 1946, only 144,000 persons identified themselves as Jew ish. Their median age was ca. 41, and in the
age group 20-40, women outnumbered men 4:3. See Randolph Braham, The Politics of Gemcide (New York, 1981), pp. 1143-47.
According to the American Jennsh Tear Book volume for 1947-48, 428,312 Jews were registered by the World Jewish Congress in Romania. This figure
probably includes some double counting. The emigration stream to Israel from May 15, 1948, to die end of 1970, as reported in the Encyclopedia Judoka.
vol. 9, pp. 535 and 541, comprised 229,779 persons.
resign itself to the loss of another few thousand to the mercy of Christen­
dom.”142 In 1983 one of these few thousand was named a cardinal.143

SALVAGE
The hurt inflicted by Nazi Germany on the Jews of Europe defies mea­
surement. One is forced to think about the suffering and dying of the
victims, the impact of their deaths on those of who were closest to them,
and the long-range effects of this catastrophe on Jewry as a whole. All this
adds up to a vast, almost nonassessable loss. What, then, is to happen after
such damage has been done? When ordinary' justice prevails, there is an
expectation of compensation for every' wrong, and the bigger the injury',
the greater will be the claim for payment. However, the postwar situation
confronting the Jews was far from ordinary'. They were caught in the
midst of a cold war, and neither side was dependent on their support.
Much that the Jews wanted had to be gotten in Germany, and Germany
itself was the battleground.
In 1945 the demarcation line running through Germany split Europe
in two. East and West carried out their separate policies in their respective
areas. The Soviet policy' was directed toward maximum exploitation of
the newly' conquered zone, and during this stage the Jews were not recog­
nized as a special group with special problems of their own. When East
Germany was graduated to junior satellite status, the Jews, with Mos­
cow’s blessing, continued to be ignored. Now that the Soviets had had
their meal, the Germans had to eat. For Jewry nothing was left except the
principles of socialist equality'.
The Western aim in Germany was wholly different from that of die
Soviets. Though initially concerned with depriving Germany of its war
industries and external assets, the Western coalition soon began to look
upon the West German industrial complex as a potential bulwark against
the Soviet Union. This consideration dictated the preservation and ul­
timately ev en the expansion of Germany’s productive capacity'. During
the ensuing buildup the United States and England rendered great assis­
142. Israel Cohen, Cmitemporary Jewry (London, 1950), pp. 263-64. See also
Hildegard Ix'vel, “Return to Holland,” Congress Weekly, January 2, 1950, pp. 9-11.
Three eases of conversion and kidnapping aroused publicity in Western Europe and
America. The cases involved the Finalv brothers in France, Rebecca Melhado and
Anneke H. Beckman in Holland. Anneke disappeared. See The New York Times Index
and other papers, 1953-54.
143. Jean-Marie Lustiger, bom in Paris in 1926, taken in by a Catholic family in
Orleans, and converted at the age of fifteen, was appointed Archbishop of Paris in
1981. The New York Times, February 3, 1981, p. A5. His elevation to cardinal fol­
lowed two years later. Ibid., January 6, 1983, pp. Al, A10.

SALVAGE 1241
tance to the Germans. At the same time, nothing was to be shipped out of
Germany that was needed for German recovery. Insofar as there were any
significant exports of the least essential items, the accruing foreign credits
were to be used only for the most essential imports. The claimants outside
Germany’s borders could thus be paid neither in goods nor in money.
However, the Allied controls in their very nature were designed to guar­
antee an eventual German ability to make some payments abroad. Conse­
quently the Allied authorities did not summarily dismiss the question of
admitting claims advanced by the Jews.
From the start the Jews had three objectives: they insisted on the
restitution of all Aryanized and confiscated Jewish property, proper in­
demnification for survivors who had suffered damage and injury, and
reparations for the rehabilitation of the displaced.1 In all these demands
the Jews confined themselves to the needs of the victims who were still
alive. For all those who had gone down with everything they had there
was no further claim. Though European Jewry had for centuries been the
fountainhead of all that mattered in Jewish life, the Jews of the world did
not step forward now as its heirs in law. One might say that the Jewish
organizations were reversing the inherent proportionality between inflic­
tion and adjustment: their claim was like a salvage operation in which
recovery is inversely proportional to the depth of the loss. In a sense, the
perpetrators were asked to pay for the incompleteness of their job. Yet
even this bill was not paid in full.2
The Jews could expea their earliest success in the battle for restitution.
However, this contest became at the very outset a struggle for two objec­
tives: the return of property values to individual survivors and the recov­
ery of assests that had no heirs. The first objeaive was much easier to
achieve than the second. At that, the difficulties within the realm of indi­
vidual restitution were already quite formidable. Some of these obstacles

1. Dr. Chaim Wcizmann (Jewish Agency for Palestine) to governments of United


Kingdom, United States, USSR, and France, September 20,1945, in Government of
Isracl/Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Documents Relating to the Agreement between the
Government of Israel and the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany (Jerusalem,
1953), pp. 9-12. Statement of the American Jewish Conference on the German
Peace Treaty, together with proposals lor inclusion in the treaty, approved by the
interim committee, of the conference on January 22, 1947, and signed by Henry
Monsky, chairman of the interim committee, and Louis Lipskv, chairman of the
executive committee, in American Jewish Conference, Nazi Germany's War against the
Jews (New York, 1947), pp. iii-xv. The conference proposals differed from those of
the agency principally in their emphasis upon restitution and indemnification. While
Weizmann demanded German contributions for resettlement in Palestine, the con­
ference spoke only of “token” reparations.
2. In Jewish terminology the demands were “material claims.” The Germans called
their payments “amends” (Wiedergutmachuttg).

1242 CONSEQUENCES
were the product of intrinsic factors; the others were the outcome of
extraneous causes.
The inherent limitations in the individual procedure were threefold. In
the first place, the restoration of a property' right was feasible only to the
extent that the object was identifiable; that is, it had to be something that
could be spotted in the hands of a wrongful possessor. Little could be
done, for example, to effect the return of movables that had long been in
non-Jewish homes. Second, the restitution laws did not lend themselves
to the re-creation of an asset that had disappeared, such as a liquidated
business or a job that was no longer in existence. A third limitation was
generally the repossession of something that had only been rented, such
as an apartment. Clearly, these were natural limits. The very' idea of a
restitution process did not encompass the solution of such problems.
Hoyvcver, the Jeyvs yvere also confronted yvith complications that yvere
not rooted in the administrative characteristics of the operation but yvere
the result of outside forces. These factors, yvhich effectively blocked or
impeded the return of tangible property', could be found primarily in
Eastern Europe and in occupied Germany.
Because of the communization of the East, the Jeyvs could no longer
count on the permanent recovery' of agricultural land or industrial enter­
prises. In the former Axis states (Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary'), Jeyv-
ish property' that had been acquired by the Germans yvas treated by the
Soviets as a German asset; that is, it yvas noyv subject to Soviet acquisition
as part of German reparations.3 The Czechoslovak government looked
upon all Jeyvs yvho had held German or Hungarian nationality' in 1930 as
enemy aliens who yvere not entitled to the receipt of their former belong­
ings.4 On the whole, not much yvas returned to the Jews in the East. The
meagerness of the results forced more and more Jeyvs to the edge of
departure, and the ensuing emigration nullified much of yvhat had already
been granted.
In Germany the principal problem arose from the fact that most of the
claimants were already outside the country'. These preyvar refugees did not
3. Sylvain, “Rumania,” in Meyer et al.. The Jews in the Soviet Satellites, p. 515. In
Paris during the peace conference of June 1946, the Jewish organization had suc­
ceeded in inserting into the treaties with Romania and Hungary provisions for the
restoration of property rights. The Bulgarian Jewish community' did nor desire the
insertion of such a clause in the peace treaty w'irh Bulgaria. Israel Cohen, “Jewish
Interests in the Peace Treaties,” Jewish Social Studies, 11 (1949): 111-12. The USSR
was undeterred by these treaty provisions, although it was a party' to the treaties. The
Soviet stand w ith regard to Aryanizcd property' in German hands was duplicated in
Austria. See report of an incident in Soviet Vienna by the U.S. High Commissioner,
Civil Affairs Austria, August 1949, pp. 54-55.
4. Mevcr, “Czechoslovakia,” in Meyer ct al., 77«· Jews in the Soviet Satellites, pp 78-
84.

SALVAGE 1243
merely want their property returned to them; they wanted to sell it and
enjoy the proceeds. The goal was not to be attained without an uphill fight.
The anchor of Jewish hopes lay in an ancient Western commitment : a
Western system of law could not ipso facto recognize changes brought
about by contracts that had not been freely negotiated. The United States
in particular took that position from the beginning. In the earliest direc­
tive from the Joint Chiefs of Start', the U.S. zone commander was in­
structed to “impound and block” all “property which has been the subject
of transfer under duress.”5 A long time elapsed, however, between the
initial blocking of the “duress properties” and their ultimate restitution.
The drafting of a restitution law was tackled toward the end of 1946,
and the law was proclaimed on November 10, 1947.6 Its basic provi­
sions, which in substance were duplicated in British and French legisla­
tion as well as by a joint enactment for the three Western sectors of
Berlin, dealt with “identifiable property” (i.e., in the main, business
firms and real estate).7 The holder of such property had to report it to

5. Par. 48r of Joint Chiefs of Staff Directive 1067/6, April 26, 1946, in Special
Report of Military' Governor, Property Control in the U.S.-Occupied Area of Germany,
1945-1949, July 1949, pp. 46-47. Sec also American Military Government Law
No. 52 (revised text, July 1945), ibid., p. 39. Further, Par 42b of Control Council
Proclamation No. 2 on “Certain Additional Requirements Imposed on Germany,”
September 20,1945, ibid., p. 38.
6. American Military' Government Law No. 59 on Restitution of Identifiable Prop­
erty, November 10,1947, together with implementary regulations. Ibid., pp. 72-83.
During the drafting period the United States attempted two alternate approaches:
(1) to bring about a four-power agreement on a restitution law for the whole of
occupied Germany, and (2) to persuade the newly constituted German provincial
governments to enact an acceptable measure in the U.S. zone. Both attempts failed.
Ibid., pp. 40-41,44.
The following laws were enacted in the other zones: French Decree No. 120,
November 10, 1947, Amtsblatt des französischen Oberkommandos in Deutschland,
1947, p. 1219. British Law No. 59, May 12, 1949, Amtsblatt der Militärregierung
Deutschland/Britisches Kontrolle!ebiet, 1949, p. 1196. West Berlin Ordinance BK/
0(49) 180 (by the three Western powers jointly), July 26,1949, Verordnungsblattfiir
Gross-Berlin, vol. 1, p. 221. In the Soviet zone the enactment of restitution laws was
entrusted to German provincial authorities, which (except in the case of Thuringia)
did not even admit claims from absentee owners. In 1953 East Berlin declared all
unclaimed Jewish property in control of the state to be “people’s property.” “Ost-
Bcrlin macht jüdisches Eigentum zu Volkseigentum,” Aufbau (New York), Janu­
ary 16, 1953, p. 1.
7. Generally speaking, three types of property' were not recoverable under the
provisions of the law: (1) All tangible personal property the value of which did not
exceed RM 1,000 at time of loss, (2) stock certificates, unless they represented owner­
ship in a Jewish enterprise, and (3) discriminatory' taxes, including “fines,” emigration
taxes, and the Sozialausgleichsabgabe. (In the case of real estate encumbered bv such
taxation, the encumbrance devolved on the pcrsecutec.)

CONSEQUENCES
the occupation authorities, and the original owner had to file claim
with them. Recovery could be effected by agreement between claimant
and possessor or by an order from a German restitution agency from
which appeal could be taken via German courts to an American board of
review.
Insofar as any asset was subject to restitution, the original transfer was
deemed to be incomplete, and the claimant was given the option of final­
izing the transaction or voiding it. In the first case the seller could treat the
acquirer as a debtor and demand the difference between the original
purchase price and fair market value, with interest. In the second case the
entitled owner could view the holder as a trustee and recover the lost
property together with accumulated profits by refunding the original
purchase price plus costs of reasonable maintenance.8
Since most of the claimants were no longer living in Germany, one
might expect that a great many of them would rather have chosen read}'
money than the cumbersome route that — dirough refunding, reposses­
sion, and eventual sale — could theoretically lead to the same result. Even
assuming, however, that the restitutor’s money was read}', an added factor
had been introduced into the picture: the currency reform of 1948. Un­
der that law, old Reichsmark were converted into new Deutsche Mark at
rates as drastic as ten to one. Insofar as any judgment allowed the holder
to discharge his obligation at that rate (and such was the decision of the
American board of review),9 the simple path to restitution was virtually
extinguished.
Fortunately for the claimant, the 10:1 conversion was also applied to
refunds paid to the Aryanizer.10 Yet this was no decisive change, for in that
case the recoverable profits were decreased to 10 percent as well. If the
profits had been large, so was their reduction; if they had been small, so

8. Management costs generally could not exceed 50 percent of net protits, and the
restitutor was liable for profits that should have been made bur for his willful failure
or neglect. Depreciation was subtracted from the refund; the costs of improvements
were added to it.
9. Decision No. 147 by the U.S. Court of Restitution Appeals, reported by the
American Federation of Jews from Central Europe. “Umstcllung des Anspruches auf
Nachzahlung," Att/fraM (New York), February 22, 1952, p. 8.
10. Decision No. 15 by U.S. Court of Restitution Appeals, April 26, 1950, re­
ported by Herman Muller of Federation of Central European Jews in “Wichtigc
Enrschcidungdes amerikanischcn Ruckcrsratrungsberufungsgerichrs,”ibid., April 18,
1950, p. 22. Decision by Restitution Chamber of West Berlin Chancery Court (3
W. 1376/50), reported by Lvoncl J. Meyer in "Eine Entscheidung des Kammerge-
richts," ibid., August 3, 1951, p. 6. Decision by British Board of Review (51/66),
May 30,1951, reported by Federation of Central European Jews in “Riickgcwahr dcs
Kaufprciscs,” ibid.

SALVAGE 1245
were the chances for a future sale. In this intricate mechanism the oppor- 1
trinities to achieve a fast recovery in full were few.11 '
A claimant who finally received an amount in cash was confronted with
still another difficulty: to exchange that money for the currency of the
country where the proceeds were to be spent. At first this simple transac­
tion was impossible. Only after a while did the Allied authorities permit
the sale of blocked accounts to non-German investors,12 but such dis­
posals entailed losses of about 40 percent.13 With the improvement of the
German trade position, the permissible uses of the funds were increased,
and the value of the Sperrmark rapidly began to approximate that of the
Deutsche Mark itself. By the end of 1954 there was no longer a transfer
problem.14 In the interval, those who could least afford to wait had been
forced to take the greatest loss.
For much of the Jewish property that had remained on European soil
there were no living owners and no surviving heirs. Ordinarily, heirless
property falls to the state, and, indeed, few of these assets were made
available to the Jewish communities. In the East their restitution was al­
most negligible. Hungary turned over a few movables and several hun­
dred buildings. Romania supplied the Federation of Jewish Communities
with old furs and old valuables. Czechoslovakia handed over to the Jew-

11. German industrial interests in the meantime fought for changes of the fol­
lowing order: (a) no restitution of property acquired before November 9, 1938;
(b) admissibility of the plea of “good faith”; (c) conversion ratios favorable to the
restitutor; (d) no interest payments on differentials; (e) no restitution of profits; (f) no
liability for value diminution except in cases of gross neglect; (g) exclusive jurisdiction
of German courts. The industrialists were basing their hopes on the supposed weary­
ing of the British and French and on a decline of the “influence of Jewish circles in
America.” Summary of meeting in the legal committee of the Industrial Associa-
tions/Commission for Restitution Questions, held on March 2, 1950, in Bonn,
reprinted under the title “Ncues Attentat auf die Wiedcrgutmachung,” in Aufbau
(New York), April 21,1950, pp. 1-2. The German attempt did not succeed.
Jewish property “returned or compensated for” in the U.S. zone was estimated at
DM 906,000,000 for the period to May 1954. The program was three-fourths com­
pleted by that time. See Margaret Rupli Woodward, “Germany Makes Amends,”
Department of State Bulletin, 31 (July 26,1954): 128-29.
12. Initially, four types of investments were recognized: (a) the purchase of securi­
ties; (b) the acquisition of real estate, (c) construction and reconstruction; (d) credits
and business participation. Advertisement for Sperrmark by Hamburg-Bremen
Steamship Agency, Aufbau (New York), May 18,1951, p. 5 .Aufbau earned dozens of
ads for German Sperrmark and Austrian Spcrrschillingc.
13. From mid-1951 to mid-1953, the Sperrmark rose from a low of 10 cents to
roughly 14 cents. The Deutsche Mark on the free market rose from about 19 cents to
23 cents.
14. When Sperrmark were abolished in September of that year, the Deutsche
Mark was traded for 23.5 cents. “Kcinc Sperrmark mehr,” Aufbau (New York),
September 17,1954, p. 1.

1246 CONSEQUENCES
ish community of Bohemia-Moravia the leftovers oi Theresienstadt,
amounting to about 60,000,000 crowns, or $ 1,200,000.15 Outside of the
Communist sphere, heirless-property laws were enacted during the first
postwar years in Greece, Italy, and the Western zone of Trieste. In West
Germany the Allies found two kinds of assets: remnants of valuables that
the Germans had hauled in from the Polish killing centers, and capital
investments that had once belonged to Jews deported from the Reich. So
far as the valuables were concerned, the Allies promptly decided to sell this
haul for non-German currency' and to turn over 90 percent of the receipts
to Jewish relief organizations for rehabilitation.16 The sales were accom­
plished with due dispatch, but it was a small operation that netted only
petty'cash.17
The disposal of the immovable property that the dead Jews of Germany
had owned promised somewhat greater results, but they were not to be
achieved so easily'. The Allies did recognize that the Jewish community in
Germany was no longer large enough to make use of that property. Under
the restitution laws, title to the assets was therefore granted to Jewish
successor organizations for the benefit of surviving victims everywhere.18
There was no time, however, for the prolonged process of effecting recov­
ery' ten-thousand-fold. Pressed by survivors’ needs, the organizations sold
their claims to German provincial authorities for whatever the traffic
could bear.19 Since the proceeds had to be used all over the world, the
successor organizations were then faced with the transfer problem. Once

15. Cohen, Contemporary Jewry, pp. 259-60.


16. Paris Reparations Agreement, Pan 1, Article 8-B (so-called nonmonetary gold
clause), January 14, 1946, US. Treaties and Other International Acts Series, No. 1655.
Implementation agreement between the United States, Great Britain, France, Czech­
oslovakia, and Yugoslavia, June 14,1946, ibid., No. 1657. Report bv H. W. Emerson,
director, Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, to Preparatory Commission of
the International Refugee Organization, PREP/6, Geneva, February 13, 1947. Most
of the gold was convened into bullion for sale to governments. Anistic items, includ­
ing procelain, rugs, etc., were sold at auction in New York. IRO/Public Information
Office/Monthly Digest No. 3, November 1947, pp. 7-8,26-27.
17. Early in 1949 the proceeds amounted to $2,171,874, and the final figure was
expected to total ca. $3,500,000. IRO/General Council, 2d sess., report by the Di­
rector General on the activities of the organization from July 1, 1948, GC/60,
March 22, 1949, pp. 79-87.
18. The Jewish Restitution Successor Organization in the American zone, the
Jewish Trust Corporation in the British and French zones, and both organizations in
West Berlin.
19. Claims amounting to about DM 150,000,000 in the American zone were thus
reduced to less than half. Jack Raymond, “Jews’ Claims Cur to Aid Restitution,” The
New York Times, February 13, 1951, p. 11. Raymond, “Restitution Pact Made in
Bavaria, ibid., March 16, 1952, p. 12. “Erbloses jüdisches Eigentum in Berlin,”
Aufbau (New York), January 6, 1956, p. 9.

SALVAGE 1247
that obstacle had been overcome, a bitter struggle broke out over the right
of refugee Jews from Germany to receive a special allocation.20
The restitution laws had been designed for the upper middle class.
They covered the kind of property that was substanial enough to be
preserved in identifiable form. For those who had never possessed such

20. Rabbi Dr. Leo Baeck (president of the Council for the Protection of the Rights
and Interests of Jews from Germany) to Monroe Goldwater (president, Jewish Res­
titution Successor Organization), March 24, 1954, Aufbau (New York), April 2,
1954, p. 2; Goldwater to Baeck, ibid., April 23, 1954, p. 7. The successor organiza­
tions were also engaged in two other operations : the recovery of community property
and the collection of individual items on behalf of owners who had missed the dead­
line for tiling their claims.
The Austrian restitution laws did not deal with hcirlcss property. The four occupy­
ing powers consequently inserted a provision into Article 26 of the Austrian State
Treaty under which such assets were to be made available for the relief and rehabilita­
tion of persecutees, with the qualification that Austria was not required to “make
payments in foreign exchange or other transfers to foreign countries.” State Treaty for
the Re-Establishment of an Independent and Democratic Austria, signed on May 15,
1955, and entered into force on July 27, 1955, U.S. Treaties and Other International
Acts Series, No. 3298. After signing the treaty, the Austrian government agreed to
relinquish its hold over the assets for the benefit of surviving victims resident in
Austria. “Entschädigung in Österreich geregelt,’'"Aufbau (New York), July 15, 1955,
p. 1.
Under the Paris reparations agreement, each signatory power was given title to
German assets within its frontiers. The United States subsequently released the por­
tion of its share that had belonged to Jews who had left no heirs. The portion, which
was worth $3 million, was to be used for rehabilitation work within the United
States. Amendment to the Trading with the Enemy Act, August 23, 1954, 68 Stat.
767. The recipient of the funds was the Jewish Restitution Successor Organization.
“JRSO empfangt jüdisches erbloses Eigentum in U.S.A.” Außau (New York), Jan­
uary' 21,1955, p. 9.
The Paris reparations agreement also provided that hcirlcss assets in neutral coun­
tries be made available to persecutees. However, in the implementation agreement be­
tween the United States, Great Britain, France, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, the
two Eastern signatories declared that they had not given up their claim to the forth­
coming inheritances, “which, according to the provisions of international law, belong
to their respective states.” Sec Eli Ginzberg, “Reparation for non-Rcpatriablcs,” De­
partment of State Bulletin 15 (July 14,1946): 56,76. Switzerland subsequently recog­
nized Polish and Hungarian claims to hcirlcss property of Polish and Hungarian Jews
and utilized such assets pursuant to agreements with Poland and Hungary to compen­
sate Swiss owners of property nationalized in the two Communist countries. “Herren­
loses Vermögen in der Schweiz,” Außau (New York), March 3, 1950, p. 10. Alan
Cowell, “Swiss Used Victims’ Money for War Payments, Files Reveal,” The New York
Times, October 24, 1996, pp. Al, A10. William Z. Slany ct al. (coordinated bv
Stuart E. Eizenstat), U.S. and Allied Efforts to Recover and Restore Gold and Other Assets
Stolen or Hidden by Germany during World War II (Washington, D.C.), Mav 199”,
pp. 193-94,199-200,203-5. For texts of Swiss agreements from 1947 to 1973 with
Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary', Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia, see the Hcar-

1248 CONSEQUENCES
assets, there was as yet no remedy. The masses of the poorer Jews who had
lost their relatives, their health, their liberty, and their economic prospects
could not make use of restitution laws. These Jews could be served only
bv a money grant, and such payment had to be obtained out of the public
funds of the country that was responsible for their misery: Germany. This
was a much tougher proposition.
The occupying power that promised to take the initiative in the mat­
ter was once more the United States. When the restitution law was
drafted in the American zone, the U.S. military government adopted the
view “that persons who [had] suffered personal damage or injury through
National Socialist persecution should receive indemnification in German
currency.”* 21 In the course of the following two years, the lengthy process
of pressure and drafting got under way. The pressure came from Jewish
organizations; the drafting was done by the German Lander governments
in the American-occupied territory. Toward the end of this development
the military grew weary, the State Department seemed dubious, and the
British Foreign Office expressed its opposition. At the last moment the
High Commissioner designate, John J. McCloy, cast his lot for the Jews.
As a result, a general claims law went into effect for the U.S. zone.22
The design of the law was to allow every persecutee to file a claim if he
resided in the U.S. zone on January' 1,1947, or if he had emigrated from
there before that time. The eligible claimants thus comprised postwar
displaced persons as well as prewar refugees. The losses for which a claim­
ant was covered included the killing of relatives who had given support to
the victim, damage to health, deprivation of freedom, confiscation or
destruction of property' and capital, discriminatory' exaction of taxes, the
impairment of professional or economic advancement, and the curtail­
ment of insurance payments and pensions. Except for the property' losses,
the law recognized injuries and damage without regard to the place where
they had been inflicted, so long as they were the product of discrimina­
tory' action by the German state.23
The American-sponsored general claims law served as a model for

ing of the U.S. Congress, House Banking Committee, “The Disposition of Assets
Deposited in Swiss Ranks bv Missing Nazi Victims,” 104th Cong., 2d sess., Decem­
ber 11, 1996, pp. 285-321.
21. Military Government Regulation 23 2050/Directive on U.S. Objectives and
Basic Policy in Germany, July 15, 1947, in Office of Military Government, Property
Control, November 1948, p. 21.
22. Jack Raymond, “McCloy, Reversing U.S. Position, Orders Payment to Nazis’
Victims,’’ The New York Times, August 10, 1949, pp. 1,14.
23. For a summary analysis, see Herman Muller, “Das Entschädigungsgesetz in der
amerikanischen Zone,” Aufbau (New York), August 19, 1949, pp. 5-6; August 26,
1949, p. 11 ; September 2,1949, p. 16.

SALVAGE 1249
similar legislation in the French zone and in West Berlin.24 The British,
however, departed from the American principle. In their zone a victim
was barred from filing a claim if he was no longer a resident at the time of
the enactment of the legislation. In short, compensation was granted,
with few exceptions, only to German persecutees.25
After a while difficulties developed in the American zone with respect
to the administration of the law. The administrators were German pro­
vincial authorities, and in Bavaria that authority was used in attempts to
subvert and disrupt the indemnification process. The first attempt was a
Bavarian implementation decree that simply eliminated die refugees.26
With regard to the displaced persons, the Bavarians appeared to have
another scheme. In the case of awards above $600, the law directed that
one-half of the amount be paid in cash and that the rest fall due in 1954.
The displaced persons who were in great need frequently sold the unpaid
half of the claim for about 45 percent of nominal value. The promissory
notes were collected by banks such as the Bayrische Staatsbank, the Hy­
potheken- und Wechselbank, the Gemeindebank, the Vereinsbank, and
Seiler and Company. Reportedly these Bavarian banks had made an
agreement with the Bavarian Staatssekretär for Finance, Dr. Richard
Ringelmann, to resell the notes to the government for 62-65 percent of
value in 1952.27
On March 9, 1951, the Bavarian administration pulled off a minor
coup. The Jewish president of the Indemnification Office, Philip Auer­
bach (an Auschwitz survivor), was dismissed from his office and placed
under arrest to face a variety of charges, including the fraudulent use of
the title “Doctor,” the granting of credits without adequate guarantees,
the deposit of private money as organization income in order to obtain a
more favorable currency conversion rate, the receipt of kickbacks from a

24. In the French zone each province enacted its own law: Baden on January 10,
1950; Wiirttcmbcrg-Hohenzollern on February 14, 1950; and Rheinland-Pfalz on
May 22, 1950. For an analysis of the laws, which were substantially alike, sec Ameri­
can Federation of Jews from Central Europe/Unitcd Restitution Otfice/Indemnitka-
tion Section, “Entschädigungsgesetz in der französischen Zone,” ibid., June 23,1950,
p. 5. A West Berlin city ordinance was adopted on October 26, 1950. Walter Braun,
“Berlins Entschädigungsgesetz für Naziopfer,” ibid., November 24, 1950, p. 9; De­
cember 1, 1950, p. 8.
25. “Protest gegen ein böswilliges Gesetz,” ibid., August 24, 1951, p. 15. The law
under criticism was the newly passed measure in Nordrhcinland-Wcstfalen.
26. For correspondence between the editor o(Aufbau (Manfred George), Ba­
varian Indemnification Commissioner Philip Auerbach (Jewish survivor), and the
office of the High Commissioner, see Aufbau (New York), December 30,1949, pp. 2,
26; February 10,1950, pp. 1 -2. The decree, dared November 26, 1949, removed the
eligibility of victims who had left Bavaria before January 1, 1947.
27. “Rings um den Fall Auerbach,” ibid., April 6, 1951, pp. 1 -2.

CONSEQUENCES
contractor charged with the renovation of a Jewish cemetery, and the
processing of 111 claims of allegedly nonexistent persons. For weeks the
Indemnification Office was closed while Munich police were looking for
evidence.
At the trial Auerbach admitted his use of the title “Doctor” (he had
been called by that title for so long that he finally adopted it). The court
itself freed him from the principal charge of making payments to “dead
souls.” His conviction upon the remaining charges led to a sentence of
two and a half years in prison and $643 in fines. Stunned, Auerbach on a
sickbed protested his innocence. Then he took his life.28 29
The Jewish organizations were now prompted by a dual necessity to
press for a West German indemnification law. They had to resolve the
problem of inequality between the zones, and they had to have insurance
against the Allied abdication of power. Only one measure could give the
Jews both uniformity and continuation: an indemnification law enacted
at the behest of the Allies by the new West German parliament.
The organizational spokesmen made their views known to the State
Department on September 27, 1951.2y During the following months the
Western Allies conducted negotiations with the West German govern­
ment for the replacement of the occupation regime with a contractual
relationship. The Jewish request was inserted as one of the chapters in the
proposed settlement. The Germans accepted the provision. They did not
have their freedom yet, they needed good will, and they could not very
well proceed with the indemnification of German persecutees, let alone
with the pensioning of Nazi perpetrators, without also recognizing the
Jewish claim.30

28. “SPD drängt auf Klärung der Massnahmen gegen das Entschädigungsamt,”
Süddeutsche Zeitung (Munich), February 3-4, 1951, p. 2; “Bis jetzt 200 Fälschungen
aufgedeckt,” ibid., Februar),' 5, 1951, p. 2; “Jewish Aides Guilty in Nazi Victim
Fraud,” The New York Times, August 15, 1952, pp. 1, 3; Manfred George, “Exit
Auerbach” Aufbau (New York), August 22, 1952, pp. 1-2; “Das grosse Echo auf
Auerbachs Selbstmord,” ibid., August 29,1952, pp. 7-8. See also running accounts in
these papers, 1951-52.
29. The conference was attended by the following officials:
Department of State: Henry A. Byrode, Geoffrey Lewis, George Baker
Congress (representing a refugee district): Jacob K. Javits
American Federation of Jews from Central Europe: Rudolf Callmann, Hermann
Muller, Alfred Prager
Axis Victims Ix'ague: Bruno Weil, Fremont A. Higgins
American Association of Former European Jurists: Julius B. Weigert
“Mindestforderungen fur die Durchführung der Wiedergutmachung —Eine Kon­
ferenz im Department of State,” Aufbau (New York), October 5, 1951, p. 28.
30. See Chapter 4 of the Convention on the Settlement of Matters Arising out of
the War and the Occupation, signed by the United States, Great Britain, France, and

SALVAGE 1251
The Federal Indemnification Law was enacted on September 19,1953.
Its basic framework was taken from the claims law in the American Zone.
It superseded all the Lander laws. However, no victim could receive pay­
ment for the same thing twice, and the 730,000,000 Deutsche Mark that
had already been paid out were no longer a charge against West Ger­
many.31 Money was going to be appropriated by the federal government,
but the law required the aggregate of the Lander to match these appropri­
ations, each Land making its contribution in proportion to its popula­
tion.32 That division of the burden was to make any revision in favor of the
victims a difficult proposition politically.33 The following outline is de­
signed to show how the law in its amended form categorized the eligible
claimants and the losses for which a claim could be made.34

I. Eligible Claimants (generalcoverage)


Residents of West Germany or West Berlin on December 31, 1952
(mostly German political persecutees).
People who emigrated (or were deported) from an area that was Ger­
man on December 31,1937 (mostly Jewish refugees).
Nonrepatriable displaced persons who were housed in a camp in
West Germany or West Berlin on January 1, 1947 (mostly Jewish
survivors).
Admissible Claims for
Loss of Life caused by persecution, if claimant had been a wife or child of
the deceased, or if claimant, as a dependent husband, parent, grand­

Germany on May 26,1952, U.S. Treaties and Other International Agreements VI, pt. 4,
pp. 4474-76. The detailed outline of the proposed federal law was agreed upon in
Protocol No. 1, signed by Chancellor Adenauer for Germany and Dr. Nahum Gold­
man for the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany, September 10,
1952, in Government of Israel, Documents Relating to the Agreement, pp. 152-57.
31. The figure of 730,000,000 Deutsche Mark is taken from “Wiedergut­
machungs-Statistik 1957? Aufbau (New York), April 18,1958, p. 17.
32. In the case of West Berlin the cost was to be borne by the federal government
(60 percent), the nine Länder (25 percent), and the city itself (15 percent).
33. See an analysis of counteragitation from the Rheinland-Pfalz by Konrad Wille,
“Es geht schon wieder los: Dunkle Machenschaften gegen Wiedergutmachung,”
Aufbau (New York), February 21,1958, p. 17.
34. Indemnification Law, September 18, 1953, BGBl I, 1387. Second Law
(amendment), August 10, 1955, BGBl I, 506. Third Law (amendment), June 29,
1956, BGBl I, 559. For text of the law as amended in 1956, see Bundesentschädi­
gungsgesetz, with introduction by Dr. H. G. van Dam (Düsseldorf-Benrath, 1956).
See also Final Law (Schlussgesetz) of September 14, 1965, BGBl I, 1315. A c<xii-
fied text with extended commentary was prepared by Walter Brunn and Rich­
ard Hebenstreit, BEG — Bundesentschädigungsgesetz (Berlin, 1965), with Nachtrag
(1967).

1252 CONSBQUENCES
parent, or orphaned grandchild, had been deprived of support from the
deceased.
Monthly payments to claimant equal to the pension that would have
been granted if the deceased had held a German civil service rank,
commensurate with his economic or social status before his persecu­
tion, and if he had thereupon suffered accidental death on duty.
Payments terminable upon achievement of reasonable self-support,
or after remarriage in the case of a widower or widow, or at age
seventeen in the case of a child. Lump-sum payment for the period
from date of death to November 1, 1953, on the basis of the rate
paid in November 1953.
Damage to Body and Health, including
Medical Costs: in accordance with rates established by the German
government tor its civil serv ants in the case of accidents.
Reduction of Income: provided that income was reduced by at least 25
percent. The income was presumed to be that which claimant, on the
basis of his economic and social status before his persecution, would
have received in the German civil service on May 1,1949.
Compensation from 15 percent of the civil service salary (in the
case of 25 percent disability) to 70 percent (in the case of total
disability)- Monthly payments, in accordance with prevailing salary
rates, for the duration of the disability. Lump-sum payment for im­
pairment to November 1,1953, with Reichsmark, salaries converted
into Deutsche Mark at the rate of 10:2.
Reeducation: to the extent that such training was conducive to an
increase of income.
Loss of Freedom, including
Wearing of the star outside of a ghetto or camp (Reich, Protek-
torat, Gcneralgouvernement, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg,
France, Serbia, and Croatia).
Liv ing in “illegality under degrading conditions” (hiding).
Incarceration in a ghetto (including Shanghai).
Incarceration in a camp.
Individual arrest.
Lump-sum payment at the rate of 150 Deutsche Mark for each
month of deprivation of liberty'.
Property losses involving belongings which in the area of the Reich (bor­
ders of December 31, 1937) were
Destroyed
Damaged
Lost, or
Abandoned because of emigration, deportation, or hiding.
Lump-sum payment of replacement value up to a maximum of

SALVAGE 1253
75,000 Deutsche Mark for all property losses, provided that for loss
of personal belongings, a persecutee could demand payment of 150
percent of his yearly income of 1932, converted 1:1, up to a max­
imum of 5,000 Deutsche Mark. The Federal Restitution Law of
1957 as amended recognized claims without a maximum for identi­
fiable property confiscated by the Reich or any of its subdivisions in
an area bounded by West Germany, West Berlin, and East Berlin, or
for identifiable property confiscated elsewhere if it was brought into
this territory by the German confiscators during the war (as in the
case of furniture from the West and jewelry from all occupied areas).
Under the provisions of a law enacted in 1969, the loss of identifi­
able business property (such as firms, land, or licenses) was indemni­
fiable also if it was confiscated in an area bounded by East Germany,
provided that the claimant was a German national at the time of the
deprivation.
Capital Losses involving capital which in the area of the Reich (borders
of December 31, 1937) was diminished by at least 500 Reichsmark be­
cause of
Boycott.
Liquidation.
Transfer of Reichsmark into foreign currency with a loss of more than
20 percent.
Emigration expenses.
Lump-sum payment, by converting Reichsmark loss into Deutsche
Mark at the rate of 10:2, up to a maximum of 75,000 Deutsche
Mark for all capital losses, provided that emigration expenses were to
be compensated up to a maximum of 5,000 Deutsche Mark.
Discriminatory Taxes to the Reich or any of its subdivisions, insofar as
recovery was not effected through restitution laws.
Lump-sum payment at the rate of 10:2 without maximum, except
that a persecutee who in the course of a restitution proceeding had
paid an Aryanizer at the rate of 10:1 for removal of discriminator)'
tax encumbrances was now repaid at the same rate. Many claimants
were unable to recover taxes under the Federal Indemnification Law
because such suits were deemed to be actions for return of assets
sufficiently “identifiable” to have been covered by die restitution
laws. The difficulty was removed by the Federal Restitution Law,
which provided, however, for a conversion rate of 10:1.
Impairment of Professional or Economic Advancement, in the case of entre­
preneurs: provided that income was reduced by at least 25 percent.
Payment in either:
Lump sum, for a period ending with the achievement of an “ade­
quate standard of living” (in terms of a German civil service career)

1254 CONSEQUENCES
or ar age seventy, such sum to consist of a differential between actual
earnings and 75 percent of the salary earned by the equivalent civil
servant at the end of such period, plus 20 percent of that differential,
with possible adjustments in favor of claimants in countries where
the purchasing power of the local currency might be out of line with
official exchange rates, up to a maximum of40,000 Deutsche Mark,
or:
at the election of a claimant who had no reasonable expectation of
achieving an adequate living standard, monthly rates for life consist­
ing of a differential between actual earnings (if any) and two-thirds of
such pension as claimant would have received if he were a civil ser­
vant at the time of entry into force of the law, plus twelve monthly
payments for the period preceding November 1, 1953, the max­
imum monthly payment not to exceed 600 Deutsche Mark.
Private Employees
Payment in lump sum only, calculated as above, except that em­
ployees covered by social security or pension could not receive the
20 percent addition to their differential.
Public Servants (including university professors and employees of the
Jewish community who were in office before 1933).
Lump-sum payment consisting of a differential between pension
received (if any) and three-fourths of the last full salary, for the pe-
riocl from date of dismissal or forced retirement to April 1, 1950,
converted 10:2.
Students or Trainees
Lump-sum payment up to a maximum of 10,000 Deutsche Mark.
A persecutee who, in addition to a claim for impairment of ad­
vancement, won recognition of either a death claim or claim for
damage to health, could receive the bigger award in full and the
smaller award to the extent of 25 percent.
Loss of Life Insurance Payments and Private Pensions (insofar as no satisfac­
tion was received under the restitution laws).
In the case of holders of life insurance
Payment in lump sum or annuities — depending on the provisions of
the policy —converted according to a rate applicable to the policy
under the currency laws. If there were unpaid premiums, claimant
had the option of having such premiums deducted from the award at
the rate of 10:1, or of claiming such sums as he would have received
under the terms of the policy' for the money he had paid in. (Lump­
sum indemnification in such cases was made at the rate of 10:2.)
Maximum payment to claimant: 25,000 Deutsche Mark.
In the case of pensioners
Payment in lump sum or annuities, as provided for in the pension,

SALVAGE 1255
converted 10:2. However, no annuities were granted for the period
prior to November 1, 1952, and maximum payments to claimant
and his survivors could not exceed 25,000 Deutsche Mark.
II. Special Claimants (limited coverage)
A. Corporate persons (or their successors) who maintained their head­
quarters in West Germany or West Berlin on December 31,1952, or
who had removed their headquarters from an area that was German
on December 31,1937, because of persecution.
Admissible Claims for
Property and Capital Losses: Payments as above, except that in the
case of religious organizations or their successors, the maximum
could be exceeded.
B. Persons who, because of persecution, lost real estate in the area of
West Germany or West Berlin.
Admissible Claims for
Property Losses: Payments as above.
C. Persons who, because of their nationality, suffered permanent im­
pairment of their health (mainly as a result of medical experiments).
Admissible Claims for
Damage to Health: Monthly payments, depending on disability',
from 100 to 200 Deutsche Mark.
D. Heirs of persons who died as a result of persecution before Decem­
ber 31, 1952, and whose last residence was in West Germany or
West Berlin.
Admissible Claims for
Death of the Persecutee: Payments as above, provided that the
requirements of the claim were fulfilled as above.
E. Persons who had lived in an area from which Germans were expelled
after the war (principally Czechoslovakia and western Poland) and
who could be considered German by reason of language or culture.
Admissible Claims for
Death of another person in the same category: Conditions and
payments as above, but no payment was granted for periods to
January 1,1949.
Damage to Health: Payments as above.
Loss of Freedom: Payments as above.
Discriminatory Taxes: Lump-sum payment at the rate of 100:6.5,
up to a maximum of9,750 Deutsche Mark.
Impairment of Advancement: Payments as above, except that the
maximum of the lump-sum payment was fixed at only 10,000
Deutsche Mark, and maximum monthly payments were limited to
200 Deutsche Mark.
F. Persons who had lost their nationality (other than Austrian) and

1256 CONSEQUENCES
who were resident in some country other than Israel as of October 1,
1953.
Admissible Claims (only in cases of nonsupport from any public
agency)for
Death of another person in the same category: Conditions and
payments as above, but no payment was granted for periods to
January 1,1949.
Damage to Health: Payments substantially as above, except diat
no payment was granted for periods of disability prior to Jan­
uary 1,1949, or lor retraining.
Loss of Freedom: Payments as above.
G. Persons who had lost their nationality' (other than Austrian) and
who were resident in Israel as of October 1,1953.
Admissible Claims (only in cases of non-support from any public
agency') for
Death of another person in the same category: Conditions and
monthly payments as above, except that no lump-sum payment
was granted at all.
IjOSSofFreedotn: Payments as above.
H. Persons not eligible for indemnification under other provisions of
the law, who were residents of a non-Communist country' on De­
cember 31,1965, and who did not possess the nationality of a Com­
munist state on that date, provided that they were not covered in a
European country' under programs set up with West German funds.
Admissible Claims (only in cases of nonsupport from any public
agency ) for
Death of a Spouse because of persecution, subject to the proviso
that the claimant had not remarried: Lump-sum payment of DM
2,000, or DM 2,500 if claimant was at least 65 years old.
Disability because of persecution, if at least 80 percent: Payment
as for death of a spouse.
Loss of Freedom, if at least for six months: For incarceration in a
camp or ghetto, lump-sum payment of at least DM 3,000, with
larger sums provided for those who were deprived of freedom in
this manner for a y'ear or more. For those who wore the star or
were in hiding but who could assert no other claim, a lump-sum
payment of DM 1,000.

The Federal Indemnification Law contained a double compromise:


(1) it did not cover all the surviving victims and (2) it did not provide full
indemnification for diose whom it covered.
Omitted were all die survivors of Eastern Europe who did not emi­
grate to a non-Communist country by the end of 1965. Limited and late

SA1VAGB 1257
was the coverage afforded in 1965 to those who were part of the East
European migration during the preceding twelve years. Relatively small
were the DM 977,000,000 made available by West Germany to twelve
European countries for compensation of victims, non-Jewish as well as
Jewish.35 One of these countries was Austria.36
The West Germans felt that the Austrians had been sufficiently active
partners in the Nazi destruction process to share in the payment for its
effects. The Austrians on their part contended that as an “occupied nation”
they were not responsible for actions of the Reich. At the outset only a few
resisters — the “active” persecutees—or their surviving descendants were
deemed to have a right to compensation. For the much larger “passive”
group of victims, which for all practical purposes included the Jews and
Gypsies, the legislation was in principle an assistance program restricted to
domestic recipients.37 In 1956, following long debates, a law was passed
that recognized victims no longer living in Austria. Payments were to be
granted in lump sum to victims who had been Austrian citizens, or who
had resided in Austria for the entire decade from 1928 to 1938. A total of
550,000,000 Schillings, or $21 million, was appropriated to compensate
individuals who had suffered (a) loss of earning capacity due to impair­
ment of health (S 10,000 to a maximum of S 30,000, or $385 to $1,155),
(b) total disability caused by persecution (S 30,000, plus S 10,000 if the
disability was incurred as result of at least six months of harsh imprison­
ment), or (c) persecution in general, to the extent that funds permitted,
with priority for elderly victims in need (up to S 20,000).38
Under Article 26 of the Austrian State Treaty of 1955, the Austrian
government was obligated to indemnify persecutees for property losses
incurred in Austria. After an exchange of notes with Great Britain and the
United States in 1959, the Austrian parliament authorized $6 million for

35. Agreements were concluded between 1959 and 1964 with Luxembourg,
Norway, Denmark, Greece, the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Italy, Switzerland,
Austria, Great Britain, and Sweden. France received DM 400,000,000, Holland
DM 125,000,000, Greece DM 115,000,000, Austria DM 101,000,000. Rolf Vogel,
Deutschlands Weg nach Israel (Stuttgart, 1967), p. 112. On Greek and French agree­
ments, sec Aufbau (New York), September 29, 1961, p. 25, and October 13, 1961,
p. 19, respectively.
36. The agreement was ratified in 1962. Announcement by Austrian Embassy in
Washington, Außau (New York), November 23,1962, p. 29. East Germany w as on
its own. Survivors who lived there could receive indemnification only at age sixty in
the case of men and at age fifty-five in the case of women. Maximum payments were
480 (Eastern) Mark per month. Bruno Weil, “Verneinung der Wiedergutmachung,”
ibid., October 21, 1955, p. 11.
37. Brigitte Bailer, Wiedergutmachung kein Thema (Vienna, 1993), pp. 11-62.
38. “Das Wiener Entschädigungs-Abkommen,” Aufbau (New York), July 22,
1955, pp. 1,4. “Österreichischer Hilfsfonds,” ibid., November 2, 1956, p. 6.

CONSEQUENCES
this purpose. The law, passed in March 1961, covered only bank deposits,
notes, cash, confiscated mortgage payments, and discriminatory taxes,
with adjustments for currency réévaluations and provisions for maximum
payments. At the same time Austria envisaged a separate measure provid­
ing compensation for wearing the star, reduction of earning capacity, and
interruption of education, subject to a financing agreement with West
Germany.39 With a German subvention, S 600,000,000 were made avail­
able in 1962 for expenditure.40
In 1990, Austria took another step, extending periodic social insur­
ance payments to persécutées living outside of Austria, if they had been in
Austria on March 13,1938, and had been born between March 12,1923,
and Mav 9, 1930. Qualified applicants had to make a one-time payment
into the system.41
In 1995, a law was passed to indemnify' all the victims, including Jews,
homosexuals, and “asocials,” if they had been citizens and residents of
Austria on March 13, 1938, or had resided without interruption or had
been born in the country' during the prior ten y'ears. Funding began with
S 600,000,000, and claims were processed to give priority' to the oldest
applicants.42 Ultimately, the one-time payment was fixed, except for spe­
cial cases, at S 70,000 (at its highest dollar value, about $5,800), and by
April 25,1999,25,881 persons had been paid.43
Austria had tired of awarding compensation to victims as early as
1949, when it was looking for an end to the discharge of its obligations,
and even after it appropriated funds for disbursements over the decades
through 1995, it had no ambition to keep up with the Germans.
At the start, and for many years thereafter, the German law itself was
not all-encompassing. Even those who were fully eligible to assert a claim
found limitations placed upon limitations. Not only was the coverage for
losses and injuries limited, but conditions had been placed on giving
effect to the coverage, and that effect was modified in turn by' restrictions
on payments.
To begin with, the law did not recognize every' kind of loss. There was
no recognition of sheer torment. No provision of the law authorized
payments for suffering as such. For the pure hurt inflicted by the German
state there was no remedy at all. Recovery for pain could be effected only
in the regular courts from private defendants. Similarly', the law autho­
rized no compensation for forced labor, nor could anyone who had once
39. "Zwci Gesetze,” ibid., March 31, 1961, p. 25.
40. Bailer, Wiederputnuuhutip, pp. 86-108.
41. Ibid., p. 243."
42. Murray Gordon, the entry “Austria,” American Jewish Tear Book (1996), p. 303,
ibtd ( 1998), pp. 335-36, ibid. ( 1999), p. 362.
43. Austrian Information, August 1999, p. 3.

SALVAGE 1259
been compelled to work for a public agency now find satisfaction under
any law. Those, however, who had been detailed to private firms could
sue those corporations under the civil code in the regular courts. One ex­
laborer of I. G. Auschwitz thus won DM 10,000 in a suit. The liquidators
of the I. G. Farben concern, fearing a cascade of such actions, thereupon
moved quickly to effect a settlement with a Jewish claims conference for
DM 27,000,000, and several other companies, finding themselves in a
similar situation, contemplated negotiations.44 By the 1960s, five agree­
ments were made with the following results:45
Number of
Company Claimants Paid Amounts in DM
I.G. * 5,855 27,841,500
Krupp 3,090 10,050,900

44. Agreement signed by Dr. Fritz Brinckmann and Dr. Walter Schmidt (liquida­
tors for the I.G.) and Dr. Ernst Katzenstein (for the Conference on Jewish Material
Claims against Germany, Inc.), February 6,1957. Sec also letter by Brinckmann and
Schmidt to the stockholders February 1957. Photostatic copies through the courtesy
of Mr. Frank Pctschek. The agreement covered Buna IV, Heydcbrcck, Fürstengrube,
and Janinagrube. The number of Jewish claimants was estimated at 3,400. An addi­
tional DM 3,000,000 was made available for non-Jcwish slave laborers who qualified
as “persccutces.”
Following the passage of a federal law that placed a time limit on wartime claims
against private German firms, ex-inmates who had slaved for the AEG, Brabag,
FIcinkel, Holzmann, Krupp, Moll, Rheinmctall Borsig, Siemens-Schuckert, Tcle-
fiinken, and other companies formed a committee of former Jewish slave laborers in
Germany to expedite matters. “Ein Komitee früherer jüdischer Zwangsarbcitcr,’M«/-
bau (New York), December 13, 1957, p. 2. In 1959 the claims conference made a
settlement with Krupp in the amount of DM 6 million to DM 10 million, assuming
1,200 to 2,000 claimants. “Friedrich Krupp will Sklavenarbeiter entschädigen,” ibid.,
January 1,1960, p. 1.
45. Benjamin B. Fercncz, Less Than Slaves (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), pp. 210-11.
Fcrcncz describes the negotiations in detail. In 1963 Dynamit Nobel A. G. was
approached by the Claims Conference on behalf of about 1,000 claimants for
DM 5,000,000. The company, then controlled by Friedrich Flick, ultimately refused
payment. Ibid., pp. 158-70. After the enterprise (renamed Feldmühle Nobel A. G.)
had been acquired by the Deutsche Bank, the sum was paid in 1986. James Markham,
“Company Linked to Nazi Slave Labor Pays $2,000,000,” The New York Times,
January 6,1986, p. A3.
Daimler-Benz joined the indemnification payers in 1988, splitting DM 20,000,000
($10,500,000) evenly between Jewish old-age homes and non-Jewish institutions.
Clemens Staudingcr, “Rüstung mit dem Stern,” Volksstimme (Vienna), July 15, 1988,
page Wochenende Panorama I.
In 1997, the arms and automotive parts manufacturing concern Karl Diehl of
Nuremberg established a fund paying DM 10,000-15,0(H) to 180 Jew ish women.
Hans-Werner Loose, “Gutachten cntlasrcd Scniorchcf des Rüstungskonzems Diehl,”
Die Welt, August 17, 1999, p. 2.

CONSEQUENCES
Number of
Company Claimants Paid Amounts in DM
AEG 2,223 4,312,500
Siemens 2,203 7,184,100
Rheinmetall 1,504 2,546,095

Although the indemnification law did recognize a wide variety of


losses, it made the recognition of many of them conditional. We have seen
the condition of a minimum: the property losses had to amount to at least
500 Reichsmark; transfer losses had to reach at least 20 percent; reduc­
tion of income had to be at least 25 percent. There was also a condition
with regard to the place of the damage. Property' and capital losses, re­
gardless of size, were not indemnifiable if they had occurred outside of
the borders of 1937. A host of additional conditions were interpolated in
the course of interpretation, with the effect of blocking awards until final
rulings could be obtained. Examples of such complications were ques­
tions of the following order: Was a place a ghetto if it had no walls?46 Was
a claimant a persccutee if his captors were not Germans?47 What were the
conditions for indemnifying an illness if it w'as a neurosis?48
Ultimately', time frames were established to fix German responsibility'
for actions by' satellite states. Thus Slovakia and Croatia were considered
to have lacked any power of their own from the beginning of their exis­
tence, and all their persecutory' activities were treated as German. Vichy
France was deemed to have lost its independence only after August 12,
1942, Italy after September 8,1943, and Hungary' after March 18,1944.
The law of 1965, however, specified that Germany was to be held ac­
countable for measures taken by Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary as
early as April 6, 1941, if these actions had deprived the victims of all
their freedom. The deprivation was total only if it had been caused by

46. Kurt R. Grossmann, “.Sabotage der Wiedergutmachung — Der Fall des 'nicht
abgeriegelten Ghettos’” (IY/.emvsIanv), Aufbau (New York), September 30, 1955,
p. 5. Hventually, Generalgouvernement ghettos were deemed chased after Octo­
ber 15, 1941. Brunn and Hebenstreit, REG, p. 191. Forced residence (as in France)
was not ghettoizarion. Ibid., p. 172. Forced labor was not deprivation of freedom,
unless restrictions of movement were greater than those that w ould have been im­
posed solely for the extraction of work. Ibid., p. 172.
47. Early difficulties were encountered by claimants from Romania. See R. M. W.
Kempner, '‘Entschädigung tiir Juden aus Rumänien vorläufig gestoppt,” Aufbau
(New York), July 19, 1957, pp. 5-6. Herman Muller, ''Entschädigung fur Juden aus
Rumänien," Und., August 9, 1957, p. 13. Bukowincr Freunde, “Entschädigungs-
Ansprüche der Bukowinaer Juden,” Und., March 7, 1958, p. 6.
48. Richard Dyck, “Die Neurosen in der Wiedergutmachung,” ibid., March 7,
1958, p. 15; March 21, 1958, pp. 19-20; April 4, 1958, p. 16; comments by Dr.
Hans Strauss in the issue of April 18, 1958, p. 18.

SALVAGE 1261
such relatively drastic measures as ghettoization, incarceration in a camp,
or service in a Hungarian labor company. Star decrees did not suffice.4''’
Finally, there were the limitations on payment. These limitations were
manifested dirough (1) the insertion of ceilings on amounts, (2) arbitrary
conversion, (3) failure to compensate for delay, and (4) the provisions for
the contingency of the claimant’s death. In the case of income reductions,
maximum amounts were fixed by “assimilation” with the German civil ser­
vice;49 50 in die case of property losses by outright figures.51 Arbitrary con­
versions were applied in many claims that were founded on damage mea­
sured in Reichsmark (claims for disability, capital losses, discriminators'
taxes, and lost pensions). For lump-sum payment the Reichsmark amounts
in such instances were conv'erted into Deutsche Mark at the rate of 10 to 2
or less (i.e., for a 100,000-Reichsmark loss, 20,000 Deutsche Mark).
For a long time, this situation was aggravated for claimants in the
United States. For every 4.2 Deutsche Mark they could receive one dol­
lar; yet the dollar on the receiving end was not the equivalent in purchas­
ing power of 4.2 Deutsche Mark in Germany. Not until 1960 did the
German courts adopt realistic exchange rates for American claimants.52
There was also the problem of delay. The basic correction for delay in
payment is interest, but the indemnification legislation provided for no
interest payments aside from limited allowances in the case of articles
confiscated by the Reich. More serious still was the provision for the
event that the claimant died. During the mid-1950s older refugees and
survivors were dying off noticeably.53 With the death of a claimant, all

49. Brunn and Hebenstreit, BEG, pp. 166-71. The Shanghai Ghetto (up to
May 8,1945) qualified for indemnification. Ibid., p. 171.
50. The prewar economic and social status was to be considered in the assimilation
procedure. However, in the case of death and health claims, social status was not to be
used to the detriment of the claimant. Sec Par. 11 of the 1st Implementation Decree
(death claims) and Par. 14 of the 2nd Implementation Decree (health claims) in H. G.
van Dam, Durchführutiqsverordnurnjen zum Bundesentschädtffun^spesetz (Düsseldorf,
1957), pp. 27, 39.
51. The Federal Restitution Law of 1957 did allow actions without maximum.
The law provided, however, for a total expenditure of not more than DM 1.5 billion.
Insofar as the allowable claims were to exceed that sum, the built-in safety provisions
of the law stipulated in effect that awards to the extent of DM 10,000 be paid in hill,
that determinations between that figure and DM 100,000 be largely satisfied, and
that larger amounts be reduced in rough proportion to the remaining funds. Hie
windup of the program was projected for the early 1960s.
52. Robert Held, “Zweierlei Miss"Aufbau (New York), October 18,1957, p. 18.
Robert Kcmpner, “Neuer Wiedergutmachungs-Entscheid,” Und., March 11, 1960,
p. 1. Walter Peters, “Zum Streit um die Kaufkraft,” ibid., March 18, 1960, p. 33.
Robert O. Held, “Lösung des Kaufkraft-Problems?” ibid., March 31, 1961, p. 25.
53. Kurt Grossmann, “Pläne zur Finanzierung des Lasrcnausgleichs,” tbtd., Fcbni-
ary 21,1958, p. 17.

1262 CONSEQUENCES
monthly payments lapsed. For the contingency that a lump-sum payment
had not vet been granted, there was a threefold regulation:54

1. The law admitted as claimants all heirs of victims whose last residence
had been West Germany or West Berlin and who had died at any time
before December 31,1952.
2. Insofar as an otherwise fully eligible claimant had died before ad­
judication, the payments for property, capital, and tax losses could be
claimed by any heir; the award of payments for other losses was re­
stricted to heirs in the immediate family.
3. In the event that a special claimant from an expellee area had died be­
fore a decision had been reached, payments for discriminator}' taxes were
granted only to heirs in the immediate family; and in the event that a
special claimant in the nationality category had died before an award, the
payments for death were disallowed altogether.

The provisions of the Indemnification Law reflected the complexity


and exceeded the duration of the destruction process that had given rise
to them. By the end of 1985, cumulative payments under the laws of
Lander governments before and outside the Federal Indemnification Law
were DM 1,835,000,000. Expenditures pursuant to the Federal Indem­
nification Law itself had reached DM 59,878,000,000, and those under
the Federal Restitution Law had risen to DM 3,923,000,000.55 All these
sums exceeded original estimates.
For decades, the yearly outlays in pursuance of the Indemnification
Law remained on a plateau.56 Completed lump-sum payments and termi­
nated monthly remittances were offset by new obligations that covered
the expanded claims based on amendments or judicial rulings, the added
claimants from Eastern Europe, and the automatic increases for impair­
ment of health or income. By the end of 2002, the accumulated disburse­
ments of 43.1 billion Euros (ca. 12.5 billion from 1985), or $45.2 bil­
lion, included $17.7 billion to Israel and $13.7 billion to the United
States. That year 83,843 persons were still paid.5" Earlier, when German
residents were a fifth of the compensated claimants, they received a third

54. I· there was no will, heirs-in-law were not excluded, but in no case was
payment made to a foreign state. A victim who was missing after the war was pre­
sumed to have died on May 8, 1945, unless there was evidence to support an earlier
date.
55. Christian Pross, Paying for the Past (Baltimore, 1998), appendix B, table 8.
56. Data of German Finance Ministry in Aujbau (New Ynrk),/Mf»m.
57. Statement by Judah Gribctz, Special Master, In re Holocaust Victims Assets
Litigation, U.S. District Court/Eastcrn District of New York, CV 96-4849, April 16,
2004, Appendix F.

SALVAGE
of the money.58 Eventually, all the beneficiaries worldwide were elderly
collectors of monthly sums.
An important part of the rehabilitation cost rested upon the Jewish
community and the individual survivor himself. The portion borne by the
community in Israel and elsewhere became the cause of a special claim:
the “reparations.” The Jews had to obtain their reparations through the
use of two separate channels: (1) the allocation of a share from Allied
takings after the war and (2) direct negotiations with the West Germans
themselves. The first operation did not yield very much.
The Allied reparations plan envisaged a broad division between East
and West and a further subdivision among the Western countries. Russia
was to satisfy its own requirements and those of Poland from three
sources: removals in its occupied territory, deliveries from the Western
zones, and the acquisition of German external assets in the former Axis
satellites of Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. Since the Soviets were
primarily interested in hard economic gain, it is hardly necessary to add
that the Jewish community received nothing in the Eastern area.59
The Western reparations policy was based more on a containment of
the German war potential than on an exploitation of available spoils.
Accordingly, the Western powers concentrated their attention on ship­
ping, heavy industry, and German external assets in Allied and neutral
states. At the Paris Reparations Conference, the United States proposed
that a small part of the enemy assets in neutral countries be allocated to
nonrepatriable displaced persons. The sum agreed upon was $25 million.
Under a subsequent agreement the money was to be made available by
the Allied governments as a priority on the proceeds of the liquidation of
the German property in the neutral countries, and 90 percent of the funds
were to be devoted to Jewish rehabilitation.60
The administering authority of the $25 million was to be the Interna­

58. German Information Center, “Making up for the Past: Facts and Figures on
Restitution in Germany” (press release, New York, August 1971). As of Septem­
ber 17, 1965, by far the largest categories in the cumulative distributions of external
payments by type of claim were for interruption of professional advancement and
impairment of health. Pross, Paying for the Past, appendix B. Two headings in the
tabular material were incorrectly reversed.
59. An exception was the abandoned German property made available by the
Poles to Jewish repatriates from Siberia. The Jews soon left. It should be pointed out
that the Jewish needs that were now unrecognized stemmed from Jewish losses that
the Soviets had not forgotten to figure in for their justification of reparations claims.
The Jewish dead from territories bounded by the postwar USSR and Poland num­
bered four million.
60. See Ginzbcrg, “Reparation for Non-Rcparriablcs,” Department of State Bulletin
15 (July 14, 1946): 56, 76. The author, professor of economics at Columbia Univer­
sity, was the U.S. representative at the five-power conference of June 14, 1946.

CONSEQUENCES
tional Refugee Organization (IRO). When the Preparatory Commission
of the IRO discussed the use of the money in February 1947, the repre­
sentative of the United Kingdom, Sir George Rendel, questioned the
allocation of 90 percent of the proceeds to Jewish organizations. The
Jews, he said, now constituted less than 10 percent of the refugees. No
class of refugee, said Sir George, should be excluded from the utmost help
that international action could give.61
In the meantime, there were as yet no funds. The first payment was
made by Sweden, not from German assets but out of its own treasury.
That sum amounted to 50,000,000 kroner.62 Switzerland followed with
20,000,000 Swiss francs. The dollar equivalent of these two amounts was
approximately $ 18,500,000.65 The remaining payments were made later :
S3 million from Swiss funds in 1953, and $3.5 million in Swiss funds on
behalf of Portugal in 1955 and 1956.64
Years afterward the new state of Israel, staggering under the influx
of survivors, turned its attention to the reparations question.65 On
March 12, 1951, the Israeli government dispatched identical notes to
Washington, London, Paris, and Moscow, to ask for the help of the four
occupying powers in securing from the two German republics repara­
tions equal to the cost of the absorption and rehabilitation of 500,000
victims in Israel. That cost was $1.5 billion.66 The three Western govern-

61. Summary records (mimeographed), PREP/SR/6, February 15, 1947.


62. Accord between the United Stares, France, the United Kingdom, and Sweden,
signed on July 18, 1946, entered into force March 28, 1947, 61 Srat., Part 3, 3191;
Treaties and Other Intematiotial Acts Series, No. 1657. IRO/Public Information Office,
Monthly Digest No. 3, November 1947, pp. 26-27. The agreement specified that the
German assets be used exclusively to satisfy Swedish claims and for the purchase of
commodities essential to the German economy, that German owners be indemnified
in German money, and that Germany be required to confirm the transfers.
63. IRO/Gcncral Council, 2d sess., report by the Director General, GC/60,
March 22, 1949, pp. 79-87. Disbursements as of December 30, 1948, totaled
$13,867,359, including $4,636,344 to the Joint Distribution Committee, $9,019,392
to the Jewish Agency, and $211,623 to non-Jewish organizations. Ibid. In England
£250,000 (or $700,000) from confiscated German assets were allotted to victims
there through a “Nazi Victims Relief Trust.” “Britischer Hilfsfonds fur Naziopfer,”
Aufbau (New York), November 15, 1957, p. 19.
64. Slanv et al., U.S. and Allied Efforts, pp. 99-101.
65. In 1950 German investments in Israel were impounded as security for the
collection of future reparations. The assets, which did not include certain properties
of the Church, were worth about $9,000,000. Most of the owners had been deported
by the British to Australia during the war. Congress Weekly (New York), January 30,
1950, p. 2. Haim Cohn (Attorney General of Israel), “The New Law in the Country
of the Law,” United Nations World, September 1950, pp. 62-63.
66. Israel note to the four occupying powers, March 21, 1951, Government of
Israel, Documents Relating to tlx Agreement, pp. 20-24. The figure of 500,000 in­
cluded prewar refugees as well as anticipated arrivals.

SALVAGE 1265
ments replied that they were precluded by the terms of the Paris repara­
tions agreement from asserting, either on their own behalf or on behalf of
other states, further reparations demands on Germany.67 The Soviet
Union did not bother to reply.
The stage was now set for a gesture from the government in Bonn. The
West Germans could no longer sidestep the problem. They had been
endowed with freedom of action; yet it was precisely this freedom that
compelled them to act. Much that was recessed and remote came to the
foreground now. At this moment, particularly, the inner disturbance
could not be removed without an outer settlement; and at this moment,
too, there was much German concern with possible Jewish opposition to
the reestablishment of Germany as a power in the world. It was also
realized that the Jewish figure, somewhat reduced in total and greatly
spread out in years, would not constitute Germany’s heaviest burden.
Accordingly, on September 27,1951, Chancellor Adenauer declared be­
fore the German Parliament diat in view of the terrible crimes that in
another epoch had been committed in the name of the German people,
the federal government was ready to settle with representatives of Jewry
and of Israel the problem of material amends.68
The representatives of Jewry were quick to accept die Chancellor’s
invitation. In October 1951, twenty Jewish organizations formed the
Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany, Inc., in order to
request the payment of $500 million for the rehabilitation of Jewish
victims outside Israel.69
In Israel the decision to dispatch emissaries of the Jewish state to a
conference with German officials was not so easy to make. After Ade­
nauer indicated a willingness to accept Israel’s figures as a basis of dis­
cussion, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion submitted die question to Parlia­
ment,70 and the legislature consented by a narrow margin.71 The figure of
Israel’s claim against West Germany was $1 billion.

67. Notes by the United States, the United Kingdom, and France to Israel, July 5,
1951, ibid., pp. 34-41.
68. Declaration by Adenauer before Parliament, September 27, 1951, ibid.,
pp. 42-43.
69. Resolution by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims, October 26, 1951,
ibid., pp. 46-47.
70. Adenauer to Dr. Nahum Goldmann (chairman of Claims Conference), De­
cember 6, 1951, ibid., p. 57; statement by Ben-Gurion in Knesset (Israel's one-house
legislature), January 7, 1952, ibid., pp. 57-60.
71. The vote was 61 to 50, with five abstentions and four absences. To the right of
center, the Herut part)' and General Zionists were in basic opposition. The left (con­
sisting of the pro-Soviet Mapam and the Communists) voted against negotiations, in
reflection of the attitude of the USSR. The majority in the center included a few votes
of Arab deputies. See Dana Adams Schmidt, "Foes of Bonn Talks lose Israeli Vote,”

CONSEQUENCES
The negotiations began at The Hague in the Netherlands on March 21,
1952. The delegations were headed by the following specially chosen
men:
West Germany: Prof. Franz Josef Bohm, Rector of Frankfurt University;
Dr. Otto Kiister, lawyer
Claims Conference: Moses A. Leavitt
Israel: Dr. F. E. Shinnar, Foreign Office; Dr. Giora Josephthal, Jewish
Agency

The official language of the meetings was English.72


The $500 million figure of die Claims Conference was reduced by the
Germans to 500,000,000 Deutsche Mark. Ten percent of that amount
was to be made available by the federal government for aid to converts;
the other 450,000,000 Deutsche Mark ($107 million) was to be received
by the Claims Conference, over a period of ten years, for relief, rehabilita­
tion, and resettlement of Jewish victims in all parts of the world.73
When the Israelis submitted their total of $1 billion (representing
West Gcrmanv’s expected contribution to Israel’s $1.5 billion absorption
cost), the German delegates asked some twenty-five questions about the
basis of the claim. They wanted to know whether the emigration of fugi­
tives from Eastern Europe was not the result of Communist rather than
Nazi measures. They questioned the estimate of $3,000 for resettlement
cost per person.74 Following the questioning, they presented a round

7he Λ'πγ York Times, January 10, 1952, p. 14. See also advertisement by Zionist-
Revisionists of America (Herut), ibid., Januars' 6, 1952, p. 15.
72. Michael Hoffman, “Bonn Assures Jews on Reparation Aim,” ibid., March 22,
1952, p. 5. On Böhm, see “Der Unterhändler,” Aufbau (New York), Februars' 8,
1952, p. 5. On Küster (a former indemnification commissioner in Württemberg-
Baden), see Albion Ross, “Slave Laborers Find a Champion,” The New York Times,
March 6, 1955, p. 9.
73. “Bonn Makes Jesvs S107,000,000 Offer," The Neu> York Times, June 17, 1952,
p. 3; Protocol No. 2 between West Germany and the Claims Conference, signed at
Luxembourg on September 10, 1952, by Adenauer and Goldmann, in Government
of Israel, Documents Relahtui to the Agreement, pp. 161-63. Under the agreement the
Deutsche Mark accruing to the Claims Conference were paid to Israel, svhich was to
make available the funds in the required currencies. During the first year of its opera­
tions, the Claims Conference spent $8,705,000 in fifteen countries. Of that amount,
over $7,000,000 was spent for direct relief, $900,000 was allocated for “cultural
reconstruction” (grants to scholars, with emphasis on catastrophe research), and
$800,000 was given to the United Restitution Office, a legal agency that processed
indemnification claims of eligible Jewish victims. “100,000 Naziopfer profitieren von
den deutschen Reparationen,” Aufbau (New York), October 15, 1954, p. 17.
74. “Bonn and Israelis Push Claims Talks,” The New York Times, April 1, 1952,
p. 13.

SALVAGE 1267
figure of their own. The $1 billion, or DM 4,300,000,000, were scaled
down to DM 3,000,000,000, or $715 million. The Germans then de­
clared that because of their country’s current economic and financial posi­
tion, diey could not even guarantee die payment of that sum.75
The complicating factor in the situation was a concurrent conference in
London between thirty states (representing private holders of prewar
German public bonds) and the West German government over the settle­
ment of Germany’s external debts. The leader of the German delegation
in London, Hermann J. Abs (Deutsche Bank), had agreed with Professor
Böhm of The Hague delegation that no commitments were to be made
until it was possible to assess Bonn’s total obligation.76 When the Israelis
were confronted with this impasse, Israel’s Parliament voted to break oft
the negotiations.77
Following the action by the Israelis, Böhm reworked his agreement
with Abs in order to be able to resume the talks, but he found an unrelent­
ing opponent in Finance Minister Schaffer. The theory that there was
only one pot from which to pay had become a basic precondition in
Bonn, and at that moment Germany’s foreign credit was considered more
important than Germany’s moral debt. At a cabinet meeting in mid-May,
Adenauer apparently sided with Schaffer. Böhm and Küster thereupon
pulled an unexpected stunt: they resigned. In their statement of resigna­
tion these independent men charged their government with insincerity.78
Faced with the necessity of retrieving its position, die federal govern­
ment now tried something else. Hermann Abs informally approached
Israeli aides in London and suggested a downpayment of deliveries
amounting to DM 1,000,000,000 (about $250 million) over a period of
three years, the balance to be settled later. He was refused.79 The Ger­
mans then made their “binding offer” of $715 million.80 That offer was
accepted.
Under the terms of the agreement, the obligation was to be discharged
in the course of the ten years following exchange of ratifications. The
federal government was to deposit the money in the agreed installments
at the Bank Deutscher Länder. An Israeli mission with diplomatic status

75. Statement by German delegation, April 5, 1952, in Government of Israel,


Documents Relating to the Agreement, p. 82.
76. “Bonn-Jewish Talk at Crucial Stage,” The New York Tima, April 3,1952, p. 5.
77. Decision of the Knesset, May 6, 1952, in Government of Israel, Documents
Relating to the Agreement, p. 90.
78. “Top Germans Quit in Israel Fund Lag,” The New York Times, Mav 20, 1952,
PP· 1,11-
79. “New Bonn Feeler to Israel Spurned,”/#«/., June 1, 1952, p. 9.
80. “Bonn, Jews Reach New Parley Basis,” ibid., June 11, 1952, p. 7.

1268 CONSEQUENCES
was empowered to draw upon the account for the purchase of steel,
machines, chemicals, and a variety of other capital goods.81
After the document had been signed, the Israelis awaited the approval
of Bonn before doing anything. The German parliament was taking its
time. A number of German industrialists were worried about the loss of
the Arab market,82 while German shipping interests were protesting the
absence of a stipulation extending some business to their flag.83 At last the
approval came, over the opposition of a coalition of elements from the
extreme left and extreme right wings.84 The Israel Cabinet then ratified
the instalment without submitting it to the legislature tor another vote.85
The agreement was carried out in its entirety between 1953 and 1966.
The principal categories of deliveries, expressed in percentages of the total
value of the reparations, were as follows:86

81. Text of agreement (with exchange of letters) signed at Luxembourg on Sep­


tember 10, 1952, bv Sharett (Shertok) and Adenauer, in Government of Israel,
Documents Relating to the Agreement, pp. 125-51. Certain items (such as oil) could be
purchased with German-held balances in foreign markets, and special consideration
was to lx· given by Israel to industries of West Berlin. No discrimination was to be
exercised bv the federal government against Israel in the event of any restrictions
upon exports, and no commodities obtained by Israel were to be reexported to anv
third state. Clauses calling for renegotiation were included to provide for the pos-
sibilitv of economic inability to pay, or of inflation. Israel agreed not to advance any
further claim against West Germany, and, subsequent to the entry of the treaty into
force, negotiations were begun in Rome between Israel, West Germany, and Australia
for the return to the Palestine Germans of the money obtained by Israel from the sale
of their assets. “Templer fordern Wiedergutmachung von Israel,”/! ufbau (New York),
January 22, 1954, p. 17. Of interest, too, was Israel’s immediate offer to release ca.
$15,000,000 in bank deposits belonging to Arab refugees. “Israel Will Free Arabs’
Bank Funds,” The New York Times, October 10, 1952, pp. 1,3.
82. The Bonn government offered the Arabs $95,000,000 in credits, bur Cairo
wanted ten rimes as much. M. S. Handler, “Bundesrar in Bonn Gets Israeli Pact,” The
Nar York limes, February 14, 1953, p. 3. The Free Democrats suggested that the
reparations be administered by the United Nations and that a part of the funds be
diverted for Arab refugees. “German-Arab Plan Drawn,” ibid., November 14, 1952,
p. 8. For a while, some of the industrialists were also talking about a “vendors’ strike,”
i.c., a refusal to make deliveries to Israel. “Israel Will Press Bonn on Payments,” ibid.,
January 6, 1953, p. 12.
83. “Vertrag Bonn-Tcl Aviv vor deni deutschen Parlament,” Aufbau (New York),
February 27, 1953, p. 1. Israel’s government thereupon lifted the ban on German
shipping in its (sorts. “Die Israel-Regierung hebt den Boykott dcr deutschen Flagge
aut;’ ibid., March 6, 1953, p. 1.
84. For an analysis of the vote in the Bundestag (lower house), see Kurt R.
Grossmann, “Rarifiziert!” ibid., March 27, 1953, pp. 1-2.
85. Dana Adams Schmidt, “Tel Aviv Ratifies Reparations Pact,” The New York
Times, March 23, 1953, p. 12. Ratifications were exchanged on March 27, 1953, in
New York.
86. For the history· of the agreement and its implementation, sec Nicholas Balab-

SALVAGB 1269
Oil (purchased in the United Kingdom) 29.1
Ships 17.0
Iron and steel for construction 11.3
Machinery (cranes, pumps, etc. ) 9.2
Electrical products (generators, etc.) 6.5
Chemicals 4.7
Railway equipment, pipes, etc. 3.8
Other items, including textiles, leather, timber, special­
ized vehicles, optical instruments, coin presses, and
agricultural products 11.0
Services, including obligations assumed by West Ger­
many for indemnification of German owners of prop­
erty sequestered in Israel and transferred to Israel 7.4

For the West German economy, whose output was rising steadily, the
burden of the payments was declining correspondingly. They amounted
to 0.22 percent of the West German gross national product in 1954, and
to 0.06 percent by 1963. The compensation program as a whole —repa­
rations, indemnifications, and official restitution — represented a shrink­
ing share of national output. The combined total of external payments
under the three headings was 0.84 percent of gross national product in
1961, and 0.30 percent in 1966.* 87 For this price Germany was at peace
with itself.
This aspect of the settlement was to produce some unexpected psycho­
logical repercussions. After a while it became clear that the Germans were
engaging in strange behavior: they were praising the Jews. In countless
articles and editorials, in mass demonstrations at Bergen-Belsen, in vast
and silent attendance at the performance of a play whose simple lines
were taken from the diary of a dead Jewish girl, Germans were paying
homage to the massacred Jews and to living Jewry everywhere. The con­
trast between this spectacle and all that had preceded it was so strong that
observers were struck by something uncanny in the demonstration.88 It
seemed almost as though the Germans were deifying the slain.
The West German decision to make peace with Israel placed the East
Germans in an awkward position. At one point, in fact, an East German
spokesman, caught at a press conference in West Germany, found himself

kins, West German Reparations to Israel (New Brunswick, N.J., 1971). Sec derailed
discussion of deliveries, ibid., pp. 155-88.
87. Ibid., pp. 192-93.
88. Sec Alfred Werner, “Germany’s New Flagellants,” American Scholar, Spnng
1958, pp. 169-78. Sec also William S. Schlamm, Die Grenzen des Wunden (Zurich,
1959), pp. 62-73, particularly pp. 63-65.

CONSEQUENCES
speaking about the possibility of negotiations with Israel.89 To be sure,
this willingness was soon withdrawn. At the end of 1953, Albert Norden
of the East German government declared before a press gathering in
Soviet-controlled territory that Israel had no right to reparations, since
it was a military base of the United States and not the legal successor
of millions of Jewish victims of Nazi tyranny. In the event of a peace
conference, East Germany was not going to recognize West Germany’s
commitment.90
For the Jewish community the satisfaction of its claims meant the
abandonment of a host of reservations that it had hitherto retained in its
dealings with Germany. Outside Israel the channels of trade were cleared
almost immediately;91 in Israel itself restrictions were thrown aside one
by one. Even while negotiations were still in progress, the Tel Aviv-Jaffa
Chamber of Commerce was faced with the question of what to do with
member firms who were assuming the representation of German com­
panies in violation of the boycott.92 In 1953 the Israeli government lifted
its ban on the registration of German patents and trademarks.93 A few
years later, German travel bureaus were booking tourists for visits to
Israel, and a five-man German industrial delegation left for Israel to exam­
ine the opportunities for investments there.94 In 1957 West German For­
eign Minister Heinrich von Brentano, in answer to a question whether
any power had been approached to bring about an establishment of
Gcrman-Israeli diplomatic relations declared:

No steps have been taken to establish diplomatic relations with Israel


in the near future. When we arrive at such a decision, there will be no
need for a third power as an intermediary. Our relations with Israel are
so unequivocal and good that, in my opinion, only direct talks between
Israel and the Federal Republic will be required in order to put them

89. “Israelis Welcome East German Bid,” The Nav Tork Times, September 22,
1952, p. 5. The speaker was East German Agriculture Minister Goldenbaum.
90. “Ostdeutschland lehnt offiziell Wiedergutmachung ab? Aufbau (New York),
January 1, 1955, p. 11.
91. See the comment on the spur of German diamond exports, “Diamond Indus­
try in Germany Grows,” The New Tork Times, February 21, 1952, p. 43. On the
interesting development in which Jewish public relations experts were enlisted in the
drive for recovery of German assets in the United Stares, sec William Harlan Hale and
Charles Clift, “Enemv Assets —The $500,000,000 Question,” Reporter, June 14,
1956, pp. 8-15.
92. “Um die Vertretung deutscher Firmen in Israel,” Aufbau (New York),
April 25, 1952, p. 8.
93. “Wieder deutsche Patente in Israel,” ibid., June 26, 1953, p. 31.
94. Kurt R. Grossmann, “Deutsch-israelische Annäherung wächst,” ibid., June 21
1957, p. 1.

SALVAGE 1271
on a formal basis as soon as both of us shall consider the moment
appropriate.95
After many years of normalization Germany made additional pay­
ments to fill several gaps in the provisions for restitution, indemnifi­
cation, and reparations. The distributor of these supplementary contri­
butions was the Claims Conference. The first of the new agreements
between Germany and the Conference, which was made in 1980, re­
sulted in the establishment of a hardship fund for emigrants from Soviet
Bloc countries who had missed the deadlines extended to 1965 by the
Indemnification Law. The fund was augmented by the German govern­
ment from time to time, and the Claims Conference dispensed a total of
DM 1,001,000,000 through 1999. Awards were one-time grants of DM
5,000 each. The approved claimants numbered 202,271.
A second fund financed by the German government was created by the
Claims Conference pursuant to Article 2 of the Implementation Agree­
ment to the German Unification Treaty of October 3, 1990. Applicants
were eligible to receive benefits if they fulfilled one of the following
conditions:

• six months in a camp


• eighteen months in a ghetto
• eighteen months in hiding under die age of eighteen and separated
from the parents
• six months of incarceration, in Austria or on the Hungarian-Austrian
border, in special camps for Jews
• six months in the Bor copper mines
• six months in a Hungarian labor battalion on the Ukrainian front.

They were not eligible if any of the following conditions applied to diem:

• they were not persecutees as defined in the Indemnification Law


• at the time of persecution they were citizens of a country that did not
turn Communist after the war
• they still resided in a former Communist country'
• they had already received compensation of DM 35,000
• they were not needy. (In the United States, persons were over the limit
if they were single and had an income of more than $16,000, or mar­
ried with an income of more than $21,000, not counting, as of Janu­
ary 1,1999, the Social Security income of those who were at least
seventy years old.)

95. Neivs from the German Embassy (Washington, D.C.), June 24, 1957, p. 3.
Ambassadors were exchanged in 1965. Vogel, Deutschlands U tyy, pp. 175-94.

CONSEQUENCES
For the years 1993 through 1999 die German government committed
DM 1,167,000,000 for the Article 2 Fund, as it was called, and for the
years 2000 through 2003 another DM 1,360,000,000 were added. Pay­
ments to beneficiaries were fixed at DM 500 a month. As of Decem­
ber 31, 1999, the Claims Conference had approved 48,948 claims.
In January 1998, the Claims Conference reached an agreement with
the German government for a third fund, allowing victims residing in the
territories of the former Communist Bloc counties of Central Europe and
Eastern Europe, including the areas of the former Soviet Union, to obtain
compensation for the first time. The commitment of the German govern­
ment, for the period of four years from January 1, 1999, amounted to
DM 200,000,000. The eligibility requirements with respect to wartime
experiences were the same as for the Article 2 Fund. Considering that the
Jewish population of Hungary was still about 52,000, and that several
thousand other Jews were living in adjacent areas that had been part of
Greater Hungary during the war, the stipulations of eligibility with regard
to Hungary w ere of major importance. Payments to beneficiaries were to
be DM 250 a month. As of May 31, 2000, the Claims Conference had
approved 13,479 claims.
The Claims Conference also took over Jewish properties that had been
sold under duress or confiscated in East Germany during the Nazi re­
gime, and that had not been reclaimed by its former owners by Decem­
ber 31, 1992. These assets were sold by the Claims Conference Res­
titution Successor Organization, and compensation was collected for
properties that could not be restituted. By 1999, the proceeds of these
operations exceeded one billion Deutsche Mark. Allocations were made
mainly for social programs and other projects in thirty countries.96
All told, these improvements, hedged as they were, provided some
relief, particularly for those who were poor and who had received very
little or nothing at all. Yet closure was not achieved. The loss had not been
“made good again.” Much chagrin was buried in the Jewish community
while Israel w'as still endangered and for as long as the Cold War was not
over. Only after the collapse of the Soviet Union could all restraints be
abandoned. With newly developed economic and political power, Jew s
found the words they had never voiced before, and they revealed their
anger in vehement statements. An outburst of claims descended upon
companies and governments in several countries for having enriched
themselves with Jewish assets and the value of forced Jewish labor. Now
w'as the time to collect all that was owed with interest.

96. Claims Conference, Annttal Report 1999 with 2000 Highlights, pp. 17-22, 27.
The figure of DM 1,167,000,000 for the initial injection into the Article 2 Fund is
computed from other data in the report.

SALVAGE 1273
In 1992 the following Jewish organizations created a World Jewish
Restitution Organization (WJRO): Agudath Israel World Organization
(Orthodox Jews), the American Gathering/Federation of Jewish Holo­
caust Survivors, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee,
B’nai B’rith International, the Center of Organizations of Holocaust Sur­
vivors in Israel, the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Ger­
many, the Jewish Agency for Israel, the World Jewish Congress, and the
World Zionist Organization.97 The first major targets of this coalition
were the Swiss banks that held Jewish accounts dating from the Second
World War or before. Under Swiss law, these accounts had not escheated
to the Swiss government, and there were known cases of heirs who did
not have enough precise information to claim any money. The principal
spokesman for this group was Edgar M. Bronfman, President of the
World Jewish Congress and the WJRO. Bronfman, a member of the
family that built Seagram Ltd., a whisky enterprise, had become ac­
customed to voicing Jewish concerns during the 1980s. When Bronfman
arrived in Switzerland on September 12, 1995, to meet with the Swiss
Bankers Association, he was left standing with his delegation in a spare
room before Georg Krayer, president of the association, came in to in­
form him that searches had uncovered accounts aggregating 32,000,000
Swiss Francs. Bronfman considered this amount “a bribe.” He demanded
a procedure to find all of the accounts.98
The Senate Committee on Banking of the United States Congress held
hearings about the Swiss banks on April 23, 1996. On that occasion,
Bronfman introduced himself in the following words:
I hope it will not sound presumptuous, Mr. Chairman, but I speak to
you today on behalf of the Jewish people. With reverence, I also speak
on behalf of the 6 million, those who cannot speak for themselves.
He emphasized that he was not going to discuss numbers, whether
$32 million (sic) “or as may be closer to the truth, several billion.” The
Swiss banks, he said, had lost their integrity, and an audit would have to
be conducted that was not controlled by them.99
Bronfman had his way. An “Independent Committee of Eminent Per­
sons” was established on May 2, 1996, by the World Jewish Restitution

97. The list is appended to a statement by Edgar M. Bronfman in Hearing before


the Senate Banking Committee, “Swiss Banks and the Status of Assets of Holocaust
Survivors or Heirs,” 104th Cong., 2d scss., April 23, 1996, p. 42.
98. Edgar M. Bronfman, Good Spirits (New York, 1998), pp. 241-42.
99. Statement by Bronfman in Hearing before the Senate Banking Committee,
“Swiss Banks and the Status of Assets of Holocaust Survivors or Heirs,“ 104th C one,,.
2d scss., April 23, 1996, pp. 40-42.

1274 CONSEQUENCES
Organization in concert with the World Jewish Congress on the one side,
and the Swiss Bankers Association on the other. The committee chose as
its chairperson the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Paul
Volcker, who was qualified by his experience and who was neither Swiss
nor Jewish. The budget of the committee was to be funded by the Swiss
Bankers Association.100 By November 1996, the committee had engaged
six major accounting firms,101 which employed some 650 auditors. This
was a labor of years, which cost the banks SFr 310,000,000, or roughly
$200 million.102
There was no letup of pressure on the Swiss. Statements were issued.
Congressional hearings were conducted, and mass mailings were sent
out. In the Executive Branch of the United States government, Stuart
Eizenstat, who was made the Department of State’s Special Envoy for
Property Claims in Central and Eastern Europe early in 1995, continued
this activity for the next five years while serving successively as Under­
secretary of Commerce tor International Trade, Undersecretary of State
for Economic Affairs, and Deputy Secretary of the Treasury.103 Reacting
in October 1996, the Swiss government appointed Thomas Borer, a dep­
uty secretary general of the Swiss Foreign Ministry, as chair of a task
force to cope with the emerging crisis. In February 1997 the Swiss
banks established a humanitarian fund to assist needy victims. The three
major banks, Credit Suisse, the Swiss Bank Corporation, and the Union
Bank of Switzerland (UBS) pledged SFr 100,000,000, smaller institu­

100. Memorandum of Understanding between the World Jewish Restitution Or­


ganization and the World Jewish Congress (representing also the Jewish Agency and
allied organizations) for the Jewish side, and the Swiss Bankers Association, May 2,
1996. lfic understanding w as signed bv Bronfman, Avraham Burg (State of Israel),
/.vi Barak (also of Israel), Israel Singer (General Secretary, World Jewish Congress),
and the Swiss negotiators Georg Kraycr, Joseph Ackcrmann, and Hans J. Baer (| Bar |,
Chairman of Bank Julius Baer |Bar], a major private bank in Jew ish hands). Bronf­
man and Kraycr did not )oin the committee. Singer and Baer became alternate mem­
bers. Text in House of Representatives Committee on Banking, “ l'he Disposition of
Assets Deposited in Swiss Banks by Missing Nazi Victims,” 104th Cong., 2d scss.,
lX'ccmbcr 11, 1996, pp. 190-93. Testimony by Volcker in ibid., pp. 40, 42.
101. Independent Committee of Eminent Persons (Volcker committee) memo­
randum of Nov ember 19, 1996, in ibid., p. 195.
102. Independent C ommirrcc of Eminent Persons, Report on Dormant Accounts of
Victims of Nazi Persecution in Swiss Ranks (Berne, 1999), pp. 4, 5, 53-54. The Swi.ss
Bankers Association contributed a small part of this total. The bulk was incurred by
the individual banks. Their indirect costs (administrative assistance in the searches)
are nor included.
103. See his testimony before the Senate Banking Committee, April 23, 1996, and
before various committees through 2000. During the Carter administration, Eizcn-
srat was an official in the White House dealing with Jewish matters.

SALVAGB 1275
tions SFr 80,000,000, and the National Bank of Switzerland another
SFr 100,000,000 to the fund.104
Even as the Swiss tried to defuse the situation, they faced a new chal­
lenge when a private lawyer, Edward D. Fagan, followed by other law­
yers, launched class-action suits against Swiss banks in United States
courts. These attorneys wanted much more than the kind of sums depos­
ited in the humanitarian fund, and they could bring the actions to courts
at home, because the banks conducted substantial business activities in
the United States. The lawyers, however, had to face the possibility that
not enough money would be found in the accounts to justify demands for
billions of dollars. For this contingency they included in their claims the
recovery of the gain that the banks had derived from German deposits of
looted Jewish assets, as well as the recapture of the profit that the banks
had made from such German deposits as were attributable to the use of
Jewish slave labor.105
The appearance of the lawyers created questions for the World Jewish
Congress and the World Jewish Restitution Organization. Had these
lawyers seized the initiative? Would the organizations lose control? Who
would speak for the Jews now? There was only one solution to the prob­
lem. As Israel Singer of the World Jewish Congress put it in testimony
before the Senate Banking Committee: “We have all agreed to act in
partnership with the class-action lawyers, because the majority of these
people that we are associated with are working pro bono in this case.”106

104. Sec the advertisement of the Swiss Bankers Association in The New York
Times, October 14,1997, p. A15. The fund was placed under a board chaired by Rolf
Bloch, a chocolate entrepreneur who headed the Swiss Jewish Community. State­
ment by Bloch in Hearing before the House Banking Committee, uThc Eizcnstat
Report and Related Issues,” 105th Cong., 2d sess., June 25, 1997, pp. 262-65. For
an extensive chronology' to the beginning of 1999, sec Luzi Stamm, Der Kniefall der
Schweiz (Zofingcn, Switzerland, 1999), pp. 235-52.
105. Richard Capone and Robert O’Brien (both American officers of Swiss
Banks), “What’s Right with the Swiss Banks’ Offer,” The New York Times, June 30,
1999, Op-Ed page.
106. Testimony by Israel Singer in Hearing before the Senate Banking Commit­
tee, “Current Developments in Holocaust Assets Restitution,” 105th Cong., 2d sess.,
July 22, 1998, p. 17. When the cases were consolidated in a federal district court in
New York, two of the lead lawyers for the plaintiffs were Burt Ncubornc and Michael
Hausfeld. On Ncubornc, a professor at New York University Law School, see Andy
Newman, “Lawyer Has Voice in Many Rights Cases,” Tlje Neu’ York Times, Febru­
ary 10,2000, p. A28. On Hausfeld, a partner in a law firm, see Paul M. Barrett, “Why
Americans Look to the Courts to Cure the Nation’s Social Ills,” TJ>e Wall Street
Journal, January 4,2000, pp. A1, A10. On Edward Fagan, who started his own small
firm in 1994, see Barry Meier, “Lawyer in Holocaust Case Faces I.itanv of Com­
plaints,” The New York Times, September 8, 2000, pp. Al, A24. Fagan wished ro be
paid for his services.

1276 CONSEQUENCES
With this arrangement in place, the plaintiffs could count on the support
not only of Jewish organizational representatives but also of those public
officials in state and federal positions who could easily be mobilized for
the cause.
The difficulties facing the banks became manifest when Credit Suisse
and UBS, two of the largest, prepared to merge. Both institutions had
branches and subsidiaries in the State of New York, and the Acting Super­
intendent of Banks of New York State, Elizabeth McCall, was in a posi­
tion to frustrate their plans. In light of this obstacle, the banks indi­
cated that they would make a substantial offer, and on the strength of this
“sea change in their attitude,” they received approval.107 The offer was
$600 million, including the $70 million the three major banks had al­
ready contributed to the humanitarian fund. The sum was immediately
condemned by Avraham Burg, an Israeli member of the Independent
Committee of Eminent Persons, as “humiliating,”108 and by Burt Ncu-
borne, one of the lead lawyers for the claimants, as “insulting.” Neuborne
explained that 90 percent of the amount constituted interest, reducing
the amount to $60 million in 1945 dollars.109 For Roger Witten, a lawyer
for the Swiss banks, the issue was different. “We believe that there is no
legitimate regulatory objection to the merger,” he said, “and we wanted to
make sure that we were free from efforts to use that process to extort a
result on another front.”110
On July 22, 1998, Eizenstat, who had attempted to act as a “facilita­
tor” in the negotiations, testified before the Senate Banking Committee
that “There is a perception among many Swiss which is close to becoming
hardened into an irreversible conviction that no matter what or how
much they do, it will never be enough to satisfy their critics.” In the same
testimony, Eizenstat opposed sanctions by state and local officials. They
would reinforce Swiss inflexibility', he said, and counter the American
interest in an open financial market.111 A lawyer for the plaintiffs dis­
agreed. The Sw'iss banks, he testified, needed some “prodding.”112
On the same day, the Comptroller of the State of New York, H. Carl
McCall, made his own statement before the committee. Thanking Edgar

107. David S. Sanger, “Swiss Banks Said ro Offer Holocaust Payment,” The New
York Times, June 5, 1998, p. A9.
108. Sanger, “Swiss Ranks Make Offer on Nazi Loot,” ibid., June 20, 1998, p. A4.
109. Burt Neuborne, “Totaling the Sum of Swiss Guilt,” ibid., June 24, 1998, Op-
Ed page.
110. Sanger, “How Gold Deal Eluded Mediator,” ibid., July 12, 1998, p. 6.
111. Testimony by Eizenstat in Hearing before the Senate Committee on Bank­
ing, “C urrent Developments in Holocaust Assets Restitution,” 105th Cong., 2d scss
July 22, 1998, pp. 10,12.
112. Testimony by Hausfcld, ibid., p. 54.

SALVAGE 1277
Bronfman and the World Jewish Congress “for bringing this issue to my
attention ” he pointed out that he had worked on the matter for two years.
In December 1997 he had joined New York City Comptroller Alan
Hevesi in a moratorium against sanctions, but by the beginning of July
1998, it was clear to him that no progress had been made. He and Hevesi
had therefore announced a series of four graduated sanctions, beginning
on September 1, 1998. The last step, on July 1, 1999, would be the
consideration of a divestment by the state’s $107 billion pension fund of
its business with all Swiss firms. He appreciated the position of the State
Department, but found that sanctions imposed by state and local govern­
ments against South Africa had been instrumental in dismantling apart­
heid. His statement was followed by that of Steven Newman, First Dep­
uty Comptroller of the City of New York, announcing the same schedule
of city sanctions. Newman noted that the city pension fund of $84 billion
included ownership of $735 million in stock of Swiss companies, of
which $137.6 million were stock in Swiss banks.113
A threatened dumping of all Swiss shares was a broadening of pres­
sure, encompassing also the major Swiss pharmaceutical companies, and
five days after the Senate Hearing, on July 27,1998, the Jewish lawyers,
whose claims had been consolidated in a single proceeding before a fed­
eral district court in Brooklyn, demanded $1.5 billion. The banks rejected
this amount as fantasy. The federal judge, Edward R. Korman, thereupon
invited the deadlocked parties to convene in a Brooklyn seafood restau­
rant on August 10. Following dinner that evening Korman proposed that
the parties accept one of two options:
$ 1.05 billion, plus any sum above this amount — if justified by findings
of the Volcker committee — up to $450 million,
or
a total of $1.25 billion.
The defendants, completely surprised, realized for the first time where the
judge stood, and they had to weigh the risk of hostile publicity and
boycotts. The plaintiffs in turn had to consider that a much larger award
was improbable. In the end, the $1.25 billion figure was accepted bv
both.114

113. Statements by McCall and Newman, ibid., pp. 70-75. McCall, an elected
official and an African American, became a candidate for the Democratic nomination
lor governor of New York in 2001. Richard Pcrcz-Pcna, “A Pair of Contrasting Rivals
Start Bids for Governor Early,” The New York Times, Februarv 1, 2001, pp. RI, R2.
Hevesi became a candidate for the Democratic nomination for Mavor of New York
City in 2001. Adam Nagourncv, “Hevesi Counters Quiet Image,” Ihe Xew York
Times, April 23, 2001, pp. Bl, B3.
114. Daniel Ammann and Erik Nolmans, “Showdow n ini Eischresraurant,” harts

1278 CONSBQUENCES
More than five months passed before a settlement agreement was
signed bv the opposing parties on January 26, 1999. The following
classes of claimants were established:
1. depositors who were victims or targets of Nazi persecution, and who
opened accounts before May 9,1945, and their heirs and successors (the
“Deposit” class),
.
2 owners or part-owners of accounts that were cloaked under another
name or that were Aryanized or confiscated under the auspices of the
Nazi regime, and their heirs (the “Looted Assets” class),
3. slave laborers who “actually or allegedly” performed labor for com­
panies or entities that deposited the revenues or proceeds of that labor,
and the heirs of the laborers,
4. slave laborers who “actually or allegedly” performed labor for com­
panies based in Switzerland or their affiliates elsewhere, and the heirs of
the laborers, and
5. refugees seeking to avoid Nazi persecution who were denied entry
into Switzerland, or after having been given entry' were deported or mis­
treated, and their heirs.115
Judge Korman dien appointed an experienced lawyer, Judah Gribetz, as
Master of the Court to develop a plan for the distribution of the money to
the various classes. For this purpose, Gribetz awaited the findings of the
Volcker committee. They were published in December 1999, but with­
out a hard figure.
In a process of elimination, the examiners had concentrated on four
categories of accounts, as shown in Table 11 -9. The estimated book values
were then converted into current values by adding back fees that had been
deducted, subtracting interest that had been paid, and multiplying the
new numbers by ten to include cumulative interest equal to that of long­
term Swiss bonds. In this calculation, die total for categories I and II was
believed to be a maximum of SFr 411,000,000, or close to $260 million at
the 1999 rate of exchange. Category III was not computed, because the
sample of 11 percent contained deposited securities that had a much
higher average value than the more representative accounts of I and II. In
category IV relatively few accounts were believed to have belonged to

(Zurich), August 20, 1998, pp. 22-24. The report is based mainly on an interview
with a lawyer tor the banks, Peter VVidmer. The meeting lasted more than six hours.
115. Text of the Settlement Agreement, signed by Joseph T. McLaughlin for
Credit Suisse, Robert C Dmcrstcin for UBS A.G., Michael Hausteld, Robert Swift,
and Melvin I. Weiss for the plaintiffs, and Israel Singer and Avraham Burg for
the World Jewish Restitution Organization, January 26, 1999. In Re Holocaust Vic­
tims Assets Litigation, United States District Court, Eastern District of New York,
CV-96-4849. The agreement covered other listed Swiss banks.

8ALVAGB 1279
TOTAL
NUMBER OF
CATEGORY ACCOUNTS

I Exact or near-exact matches of 3,191


names with other records
II Unmatched accounts, but inactive 7,280
or identified by banks as belonging
to victims
III Matches for 14,716 of the 30,692
accounts, but all 30,692 closed by
persons unknown and lacking
evidence of inactivity
IV Unmatched accounts, but possibly 12,723
relevant
PERCENTAGE
OF ACCOUNTS AVERAGE ESTIMATED
WITH AN BOOK BOOK VALUE
INDICATED VALUE IN OF ENTIRE
BOOK VALUE SFR CATEGORY IN SFR

70 3,027 9,659,157

80 3,008 21,898,240

11 20,101 not estimated

98 330 4,195,246
victims.116 When Volcker testified before the House Banking Committee
in February 2000, he mentioned a figure of 25,000 accounts in all as
having the highest probability of relevance. Asked by Committee Chair­
man James Leach how “the math” would work for these 25,000, Volcker
declined to make an estimate of their aggregate value and contented
himself with the conclusion that the agreed $1.25 billion were more than
sufficient to satisfy all plausible claimants in the deposit class.117
“Probable” relevance suggested that some of the highlighted accounts
would turn out not to be Holocaust-related. An offset could be supposed
because some banks had not been searched or because the victims had
entrusted their money to nominal Swiss holders. There was, however, no
ready adjustment for die simple fact that the Volcker committee had
labeled the 30,692 accounts in Category III, including the 14,716 that
were “matched,” as “closed, unknown by whom.” They had existed, but
they were no more. The simplest surmise was that a large portion of them
must have been emptied out by their owners after the war. The people
who could do just that were prewar refugees from the Reich-Protektorat
area, as well as wartime residents of France, Hungary, or Romania who
had never been deported —two groups whose numbers in this context
must have been significant.
With such statistics and complications Gribetz had to propose his
allocations. He considered that the settlement agreement had to be inter­
preted as bestowing priority on deposit accounts. Accordingly he recom­
mended and the judge agreed that $800 million be set aside for valid
claimants (in the main, heirs) to these deposits. For the contingency that
this reserve would not be exhausted after justifiable disbursements, the
way was left open to reallocate the balance to the other claimant classes.118

116. Independent Q>mmirtee of'Eminent Persons, Report on Dormant Accounts of


Victims <f Nazi Persecution in Swiss Ranks, particularly pp. 72, 75.
117. Testimony by Volcker in Hearing before the House Banking Committee,
“Restitution of Holocaust Assets,” 106th C ong., 2d sess., February 9 and 10, 2000,
p. 40 ff.
118. See the rulings by Judge Korman of July 6, 2000, and December 8, 2000,
and other documents in the files of the court under Master Docket CV 96-4849. The
settlement covered, in addition to Jews, also Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and —
regardless of their ethnic or religious background— homosexuals, and physically or
mentally impaired victims. Only a small portion of the payments was expected to be
made to non-Jewish groups. The “Nazi regime” was defined to include the Axis
countries. An action led by Fagan and other lawyers before a federal district court in
New York against two major Austrian banks (Bank Austria and Creditanstalt) eventu­
ated in a settlement of 540,000,000. See the notice transmitted by Nationalfonds der
Republik Österreich tiir Opfer des Nationalsozialismus, Vienna, August 1999, and
the article by Anton Ixgercr, “Lösung Ungewiss,” Neue Welt (Vienna), August-
September, p. 14.

SALVAGE
Judge Korman appointed two special masters, Paul Volcker and Mi­
chael Bradfield, to oversee the resolution of claims to deposits. To assist
claimants in identifying an account in which they might have an interest,
the whole list of those accounts identified as “probably or possibly” hav­
ing belonged to victims was to be published in February 2001. Awards
were to be made by a Claims Resolution Tribunal.119
Before the turn of the century, two other highly visible thrusts were
launched, one against insurance companies, the other against employers
of victims impressed for labor. The insurance sector, like the Swiss bank­
ing scene, was identified with a few very prominent firms, and these
companies, like their Swiss counterparts, felt threatened. Unlike the large
Swiss banks, which were joined in the settlement by a host of smaller
Swiss banking institutions, the towering insurance carriers did not have a
train of followers. They did not even present a unified front, because they
did not think of themselves as having had a common past. Seven Euro­
pean insurance companies, which had subsidiaries in the United States,
were nevertheless subjected to a single lawsuit before a federal district
court in March 1997.120
In this situation, the German colossus, Allianz Versicherungsgesell­
schaft, took a defensive position, openly admitting that it had sold fire
insurance to SS enterprises in camps,121 but it represented itself as a new
postwar corporation risen from the rubble with almost nothing intact
except its name. The company and its codefendants in the suit faced a
claim of $7 billion. Allianz chief Henning Schulte-Noelle branded such a
sum as “completely unrealistic.”122 As an Allianz executive explained mat­
ters, a large number of life insurance policies with a cash surrender value
were liquidated when prospective emigrants needed the money. Others
were cashed in by their owners when they were in dire financial straits
before their deportation. For a smaller but still significant number, the
Reich subsequently stepped in and demanded the amount that the com­
pany would have had to pay to the Jewish owners for the release from its
insurance obligation. Relatively few policies, undetected, were still in
possession of the company, and with respect to this remainder Allianz had

119. Sec rhc advertisement placed by Volcker and Bradticld in The New York Times,
February 5, 2001, p. A9.
120. Martha Druckcr Cornell et al. v. Assicurazioni Generali ct al., Civil Action
No. 97 CIV 2262, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, filed
March 31, 1997. The lead counsel was Fagan. Sec the Insurance Forum, vol. 25,
September 1998, p. 1.
121. Interview of Allianz board member (Vorstand) Herbert Hansmever in Der
Spiegel, June 2,1997, p. 54. A facsimile of an Allianz fire insurance policy bought bv the
DAW in Auschwitz for October 15,1942, to October 15, 1943, is in ibid., p. 54.
122. Ibid., p. 62.

CONSBQUENCES
contacted the World Jewish Congress and had sought the services of the
accounting firm Arthur Andersen to clear things up as soon as possible.123
The Italian giant, Assicurazioni Generali, argued that it was an enter­
prise established in 1831 by Jews in Trieste, then a port of the Austro-
Hungarian Empire, and that its current chairman was a Jewish Auschwitz
survivor. It had been forced to relinquish its majority holding in the
Austrian firm Fenix; its branches in Axis Europe were entirely captives of
the enemy, and those in areas subsequently occupied by the Communists
were nationalized after the war. Moreover, the company did pay out
“numerous” claims on policies of victims from Western countries.124
Their protestations notwithstanding, the insurance companies,
whether German, Italian-Jewish, French, Swiss, or Dutch, were dis­
trusted, and possible claimants were numerous. On the other hand, the
insured had been poorer than the bank depositors, and a typical policy
was worth less than the usual bank account. The average value of an
individual’s life insurance, as estimated by an Allianz spokesman, was
RM 2,500 (little more than a thousand dollars), and an owner or heir
who sealed with the company after the currency reform would have
received DM 250.125 If policies had been confiscated by the Nazi regime,
redress could be pursued by eligible claimants under the German Federal
Restitution Law, but the requirements of proof were often burdensome,
time-consuming, and frustrating. That left the path of class-action suits in
the United States, where government officials could force the companies
to bear the burden of finding the unpaid policies and of making adequate
restitution.
Direct coercive power was held by the insurance regulators of a state
government, provided only that a company had branches or subsidiaries
within its borders. Since a number of states could assert such jurisdiction,
the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) estab­
lished a working group and conducted hearings to obtain testimony from
firms.126 In addition, a bill was introduced in the House of Representa-

123. Statement by Hansmever in Hearing before the House Banking Committee,


“The Restitution of Art Objects Seized by the Nazis from Holocaust Victims and
Insurance Claims of (Certain Holocaust Victims and Their Heirs,” 105th Cong., 2d
scss., February 12, 1998, pp. 330-32. For a detailed discussion of Jewish life-
insurance policies in the Reich and of early postwar claims, see Gerald Feldman,
Allianz and the German Insurance Business, ¡933-1945 (Cambridge, Eng., and New
York, 2002), pp. 236-77,523-38.
124. Statement by Scott Vavcr, lead counsel of Generali in the United Stares,
Hearing Before the House Banking Committee, pp. 333-43.
125. Alan Cowell, “German Group to Investigate Claims of Nazi Victims,” The
New York Times, April 18, 1997, p. A3.
126. National Association of Insurance Commissioners, “Holocaust Insurance
Claims,” in Hearing before the House Banking Committee, Insurance Claims, Febru­

8ALYAGE 1283
tives of the United States Congress to prohibit seventeen named foreign
insurance companies from participating in any payment system, includ­
ing electronic transfers, within the United States, or from conducting any
business with a federally insured deposit institution, unless they disclosed
to the U.S. Attorney General the names of the victims to whom they had
sold policies.127
As result of this pressure an International Commission on Holocaust
Era Insurance Claims was formed in April 1998, with members drawn
from American state insurance regulators, the State of Israel, the World
Jewish Congress, and European insurance companies, including Allianz,
Generali, the French Axa group, the Swiss Winterthur Versicherungs-
Gesellschaft, Zurich Insurance, and the Netherlands Insurance Associa­
tion representing all Dutch insurers. Former U.S. Secretary of State Law­
rence Eagleburger was brought in as chairman. Payment was to be made
by the company that owed money to a claimant, based on the value the
policy would have had at the insured event (the date of death or the
maturity date), with upward adjustments for inflation and accumulated
interest, and with reductions if a loan was taken out by the insured during
the life of the policy and not repaid, or if the policyholder could not pay
the premiums and converted it to a “paid-up” status for a lesser benefit on
the date of death or maturity. A special fund was to be established for
claims that could not be attributed to a particular insurance company, or
that related to companies no longer in existence, or that affected policies
issued by member companies in countries where private property was
nationalized after the war by Communist regimes, or that pertained to
those policies for which the cash value had been confiscated by the Ger­
man Reich. A second fund was to serve needy Holocaust victims and
other humanitarian purposes arising from the Holocaust.
In an agreement with the commission and Israel, Generali promised
payment of $100 million. Austria pledged $25 million. The German
government agreed with the United States on July 17, 2000, that it
would set up a foundation to which German insurance companies w ould
make contributions. The amount, aggregating DM 500,000,000, w ith
anticipated interest of up to DM 50,000,000, was to be divided into
payments of between DM 150,000,000 and DM 200,000,000 in com­
pensation for policy losses, and the remainder for humanitarian needs.

ary 12, 1998, pp. 266-69. Christopher Wren, “Panel Weighs Testimony on Insurers
of Nazi Era,” The New York Times, May 19, 1998, p. A3. Insuratice Forum, vol. 23,
September 1998, pp. 82-100.
127. Testimony of Representative Mark Foley, a cosponsor ot House Resolution
3143, which he enclosed, before the House Banking Committee, “Insurance Claims,"
February 12, 1998, pp. 134-47.

CONSEQUENCES
No claim was to be honored if an award had already been made under the
Federal Restitution Law.
The difficulties arising from the insurance claims were exceptional.
Guidelines for calculating the current monetary value of a policy had to be
fashioned for each country of issuance, and preliminary results indicated
that in more than 80 percent of the filled-out forms, claimants had not
even specified a company. In the matter of ownership, however, the insur­
ance policies mirrored the banking accounts. The poor possessed neither.
In his prepared statement before a congressional committee, Eagleburger
noted that in 1938 only 270,000 life-insurance policies were in force in
all of Poland, which had a population of more than 30,000,000 at the
time.128
While the offensives against the banks and insurance companies were
in progress, a third front was opened against the German wartime em­
ployers of former slave laborers. Again, a salvo was fired by class action
lawyers who sought very large sums of money, this time from industrial
firms that exported their products to the United States.129 130 The German
companies did not offer heavy resistance. They tried to avert damaging
publicity and the threat of boycotts. They also knew that their problem
was magnified by the imminent need to meet the claims, not only of
surviving Jews, but also of a much larger number of former Polish, Byelo­
russian, and Ukrainian laborers who were still alive. To this end thev
approached their government for financial assistance. The newly elected
chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, desired to begin his rule with a clean
slate,1,0 and he considered the fact that the concentration camps, which
had been involved in the slave labor economy, were agencies of the Reich.
By February 1999, Schröder announced that twelve major companies —
Daimler-Chtysler, Volkswagen, BMW, Krupp, Höchst, Bayer, BASF, De­
gussa, Siemens, Allianz, the Dresdner Bank, and the Deutsche Bank —
had agreed to set up a global fund to “end the campaign being led against
German industry and our country.” The size of the proposed fund, ac-

128. Based on the Testimony by Eaglcburgcr and other witnesses in Hearing


before the House Committee on Government Reform on “Holocaust-Era Insurance
Issues,” November 8, 2001, in Federal News Service, Inc. (Web sire lexis-nexis.com/
congcomp/docu), and on the undated statement of the commission, “Valuation of
Unpaid Policies” (Web site www.icheic.org).
129. Fagan and associates tiled a class action suit against Daimler-Benz, Volks­
wagen, BMW, Audi, and five nonautomorivc concerns in late August 1998 at a
federal district court, hinting that they would demand $75,000 per laborer. Ed­
ward L. Andrews, “53 Years loiter. Lawsuit Is Filed on Behalf of Hitler’s Slave I^ibor,”
77h· New York Times, September 1, 1998, p. A9. Erie Peters, “Don’t Blame VW for
Nazi Crimes,” ΊΊκ Wall Street Journal, September 14, 1998, p. A32.
130. Edmund L. Andrews, “Schröder Acts to Explore Compensating Slave Work­
ers,” The New York Times, October 20, 1998, p. A3.

SALVAGE 1285
cording to unofficial reports, was estimated at three billion Deutsche
Mark, or $1.7 billion, and an added contribution by the government was
in the offing.131 Protracted negotiations, in which Eizenstat participated,
were conducted about such questions as the recognition of heirs as claim­
ants, and the liabilities for small enterprises, most of them disbanded
upon the Soviet entry into the eastern portion of the Reich.132 Then
something happened.
A federal district court judge in New Jersey, Dickinson R. Debevoise,
dismissed four consolidated class-action suits against Degussa and Sie­
mens. The plaintiffs, he said, had characterized their case as an ordinary
suit of individuals against private entities, analogous to a claim for assault
and battery, but in his eyes the present case was not simply a controversy
between private parties. The activities of the corporations had constituted
an “integral part of Germany’s war effort,” and under international law
only governments in their dealings with each other could resolve any
questions about appropriate remedies. Agreements, he noted, had al­
ready been made to set limits to German reparations. Plaintiffs would
have him try his hand at “refashioning” these clauses, but they were not
within judicial reach. That day a case against Ford also failed.133
Jewish groups immediately recognized the implications of these out­
comes for yet other pending court judgments. In his lengthy written
opinion, Debevoise himself had called attention to suits brought in the
United States against forty-one major German corporations, which he
named. That route was now imperiled, and a decision was made to ad­
dress the public at large. Within weeks, two full-page advertisements
were taken out by B’nai B’rith International, the American Jewish Con­
gress, and other Jewish organizations against Mercedes-Benz and the
Ford Motor Company in The New York Times.134 The group of large

131. Roger Cohen, “German Companies Set Up Fund for Slave Laborers under
Nazis,”ibid., February 17, 1999, pp. Al, A7.
132. Sec Guido Hcinen, “NS-Zvvangsarbcitcr: Neue Forderungen,” Die Welt,
August 24,1999, p. 4.
133. Burger-Fischer v. Degussa A. G., 65 F.Supp. 2d 248. The action against the
Ford Motor Company and the German Ford Werke was dismissed by another federal
district court judge in New Jersey. Iwanowa v. Ford, 67 F.Supp. 2d 424. Fisa
Iwanowa had been subjected as a Russian to forced labor in Germany. Judge Joseph
A. Greenaway concluded in the Ford case that the claim was time barred and not
justiciable. The two printed opinions were revised versions of the original decisions
handed down on September 13, 1999. On reverberations of the rulings, sec Ronald
Smothers, “Legal Setbacks Could Complicate U.S.-German Talks on Forced Ijbor,
Officials Say,” 7he New York Times, September 15,1999, p. A28.
134. The dates were October 4, 1999, p. A23, and October 6, 1999, p. A13. In
the advertisement about Ford, no evidence was proffered that Jewish slave labor was
employed by its German subsidiär)'.

CONSEQUENCES
German companies, expanded to seventeen, which attempted to avert a
showdown, were joined by the German government in raising the pledge
to $3.85 billion by November 1999, and to roughly $5 billion (or, more
precisely, 10,000,000,000 Deutsche Mark, which had fallen against the
dollar) bv December of that year.135 Slave laborers, defined as having
been held in camps, were to receive up to DM 15,000; other forced
laborers up to DM 7,500. Heirs were not to be paid.136
In March 2000 Eizenstat negotiated with the Germans in the matter
of allocations. The resulting formula rested on a presumption that of
240,000 slave laborers still alive, half were Jewish, and that of another
million forced laborers, the Jewish component was negligible. On this
basis, the Jewish Claims Conference was to collect DM 1,812,000,000
(DM 15,000 multiplied by 120,000), which amounted to approximately
$900 million at the rate of exchange prevailing at the time.137 Dis­
bursements from the Swiss bank settlement for laborers were deemed
supplementary. Counting only Jewish slave laborers formerly in German
confinement and still alive in 1999, a figure of 120,000 could not possibly
have been reached, but the foundation operating under German law
subsequently decided to include labor services that had been formed and
deployed by satellite governments for their own purposes in the shadow of
an adjacent German presence.
In the meantime, the lawyers, organization men, and public officials
continued their march. Austria was induced in the year 2000 to enact a
law compensating the slave and forced laborers who had been exploited
on its soil. The sum appropriated for these awards was six billion schil­
lings or somewhat over $400 million.138 In October 2000, negotiations
were begun by Eizenstat with the Austrians in Vienna and finalized on

135. Roger C>ohen, “Nazi Slave Labor Talks Halt over Payments” The New York
Tunes, November 4, 1999, p. A12. Edmund Andrews, “Germans to Set Up 5.1
Billion Fund tor Nazi Slaves,” ibid., December 15, 1999, pp. Al, A7. Andrews,
“German Parliament Backs Fund for Nazis’ Slave Workers,” ibid., Julv 7, 2000, p. A8.
136. Testimony by Otto, Graf Lambsdortf, who was a former German Economy
Minister and who was appointed in August 1999 as the German Government Special
Representative for the Foundation, in the Hearing before the House Banking Com*
mittee, “Restitution of Holocaust Assets,” 106th Cong., 2d sess., February 9, 10,
2000, pp. 11-16.
137. Testimony by Eizenstat in Hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, “Legacies of the Holocaust” 106th Cong., 2d sess., April 5, 2000,
pp. 13-16, 20-22. The distribution agreement was concluded on March 24.
138. The Austrian document number of the signed law is BGBL/GS/2000808/
1/74. For expenditure, the law established a “conciliation fund” to which private
enterprises were expected to contribute. Payments were fixed at S 105,000 for slave
laborers, S 35,000 for forced laborers in industry and public works, and S 20,000 for
those employed in agriculture and serv ice.

SALVAGE 1287
January 16-17, 2001, in Washington, D.C., for additional Austrian in­
demnification of its own prewar citizens and residents. Two Austrian laws
were thereupon passed, one to pay $150 million ($7,000 per recipient)
for broken apartment and commercial leases as well as household goods,
the other making available $210 million for liquidated enterprises and
business property, bank accounts, and insurance policies, but not for
losses that had already been sufficiently indemnified. In these legislative
Austrian enactments, the obligated payments are actually denominated in
dollars, and the payout of the $210 million is explicitly predicated on the
cessation of all suits against Austria and Austrian companies by June 30,
2001.139 Germany and Austria alike were seeking only Rechtssicherheit, or
“legal peace,” and throughout this process their only question was: When
will it end? Is this all?
Nothing was overlooked. Museums had to search their collections for
looted art. Jewish community property was reclaimed in former Commu­
nist countries.140 Finally the momentum engulfed five Israeli banks and
the State of Israel itself.141 Midway through this offensive, Israel Singer of
the World Jewish Congress glimpsed victory. In testimony before the
House Banking Committee he attributed the success of the effort to the
committee, the work of Eizenstat, “and the shrill voices coming out of
New York, frequently my own.”142

139. Materials of the Austrian parliament respecting the $150,000,000 Law,


350/A-XXI GP, including text and explanations, and the $210,000,000 Law, 476-
XXI GP, through the courtesy of Martin Weiss, Austrian Press and Information
Service in Washington, D.C.
140. Sec the testimony by Eizenstat in the hearing of the House Banking Commit­
tee, “Heirless Property Issues of the Holocaust,” 105th Cong., 2d scss., August 6,
1998, pp. 4-22; various statements in the House Banking Committee Hearing,
“World War II Assets of Holocaust Victims,” 106th Cong., 1st scss., September 12,
1999; and testimony by Eizenstat in the Hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, “Legacies of the Holocaust,” 106th Cong., 2d scss., April 5, 2000,
pp. 13-37. In the United States itself, the Congress passed the Holocaust Victims
Redress Act of February 13, 1998, covering principally hcirless assets and art objects
nor previously restituted. Public Law 105-158,112 Stat. 15. Sec also the findings and
the detailed staff' report of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust As­
sets in the United States, Plunder and Restitution (Washington, D.C., December
2000). The chairman of the commission was Edgar Bronfman. In an appendix to the
findings there is a list of commissions in twenty-four countries, and a list of another
twenty-two countries conducting assets research, pp. 53-54.
141. “Report of the Knesset Inquiry Committee on the Location and Restinirion
of Assets (in Israel) of Victims of the Holocaust,” Jerusalem, December 2004.
142. Testimony by Singer in the Hearing before the House Banking Committee,
“The Eizenstat Report and Related Issues,” 105th Cong., 1st sess., June 25, 1997,
p. 90.

CONSEQUENCES
CHAPTER TWELVE

IMPLICATIONS

he destruction of the Jews ended in 1945, but while the perpetra­

T tion was over the phenomenon remained. The postwar world


was cognizant of what had happened and it was conscious of a
need to create mechanisms in the form of treaties, laws, and public actions
that would at the very least place all nations on record as recognizing the
possibility of a recurrence and doing something to confront this danger.
The watchword of the newly liberated concentration camp inmates was
“never again.” They had in mind primarily a revived Nazi Germany or a
European imitator learning from the Germans just as the Nazi regime
had used the precedents accumulated since the Middle Ages. For govern­
ments the task was broader. They had to make sure that the Jewish fate
1289
would not befall any people anywhere at the hands of any power on earth.
That challenge called at the outset for unambiguous wording with bind­
ing force and an unceasing determination to act on the basis of what had
been resolved.
In the international arena, the principal instrument for the prevention
of another “final solution” was the Genocide Convention. The word
“genocide” itself was coined by Raphael Lemkin in a book published
while the war was still in progress.1 The convention was directed at per­
sons who commit acts with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a
national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. Under its terms, each member
state that may be the scene of these acts is obligated to try such persons for
their offense. Should there be no trial, or should a government itself have
been involved, any contracting party may submit the case to the Interna­
tional Court of Justice.2
At first glance, the text reads as though all the signatory states regarded
themselves as potential perpetrators. Yet no country would admit that
its own government might destroy a minority group. That possibility
was ascribed only to other countries. The United States, for example,
attempted to insert a provision against the destruction of “economic
groups,” and the Soviet Union proposed the inclusion in the preamble of
a declaration that “genocide is organically bound up with fascism-nazism
and other similar race ‘theories’”3 For a long time the United States did
not even ratify the treaty, because fear was expressed that, under Article 6
of the U.S. Constitution, the convention as “supreme law of the land”
would be invoked by minority groups to strike down various discrimina­
tory laws and actions of various state and local jurisdictions.4 The Soviets

1. Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Washington, D.C., 1944),


pp. 79-95.
2. Text of the convention, adopted by the General Assembly, December 9, 1948,
and opened for signature and ratification or accession in U.N. Press Release PGA/
100, pp. 12-16. Much later the United Nations developed an “international hu­
manitarian law” for acts falling short of genocide, such as “ethnic cleansing,” and
established a tribunal to try individuals accused of violations of this law in Bosnia-
Herzegovina. The jurisdictional basis of these proceedings was derived from a provi­
sion in the United Nations Charter empowering the organization to determine and
act upon “threats to international security.” See the text of Securin’ Council Resolu­
tion 827 of March 23,1993,23 I.L.M. 1203 (1993).
3. U.S. amendment of October 4, 1948, U.N. Doc. A/C.6/273. Soviet amend­
ment of November 18, 1948, U.N. Doc. A/C.6/273. Neither amendment was
adopted.
4. Sec the testimony by George A. Finch (American Bar Association) in Hearing
before Subcommittee of Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the Genocide Con­
vention, 81st Cong., 2d sess., January 23 to February 9, 1950, p. 217. See also re­
plies and explanations by Adrian Fisher (Legal Adviser, Department of Stare), tl’id.,
pp. 263-64.

IMPLICATION 8
accepted the convention only with the reservation that they would not be
answerable tor their actions to the International Court.5
The Genocide Convention did not prohibit the kind of verbal assault
on a group of victims that in Europe had preceded physical measures ot
destruction. During the drafting of the convention, the Soviet delegate
had invited ¿ill the prospective High Contracting Parties to enact the
“necessary legislative measures” which would outlaw “all forms of public
propaganda (press, radio, cinema, etc.) aimed at inciting racial, national
or religious enmities.”6 The American delegate expressed fears that such
legislation would infringe on the freedom of the press.7 Speech in the
United States was sacred.
The United States government in particular would not tolerate any
international regulation of its internal affairs, be it in die realm of discrim­
inatory practices or in advocacy of discrimination. Moreover, the demoli­
tion of prescribed inequalities was not a national passion. Yet even before
World War II the New World was faced with the irreconcilability of its
claims of equal treatment with the facts of discrimination.8 Now a catalyst
was introduced into the picture. In the words of President Truman, “Hit­
ler’s persecution of the Jews did much to awaken Americans to the dan­
gerous extremes to which prejudice can be carried if allowed to control
government actions.”9 With uncommon perception, the president saw
that the retention in mid-century of discriminatory barriers signified the
maintenance of a springboard, and the preservation of a target, for de­
struction. To remove this possibility, the goal had to be the full integra­
tion of all minorities into American society. Inherently the path to ab­
sorption is the exact reverse of the destruction process that the Germans
had brought to perfection. The same steps must be traversed, but in the
opposite direction (see Table 12-1). The problem is that absorption is
slower than destruction and more difficult to achieve. In the course of the

5. Text of Soviet reservation \n American Journal of International Law 45, suppl.,


pp. 11-14.
6. Proposed amendment by the USSR, October 9, 1948, U.N. Doc. A/C.6/
215/Rev. 1. The Russians had the support of France. The amendment was rejected.
Prejudice in the USSR against Jews did nor vanish. Opinion polls conducted there
during 1988-1994 showed significant percentages of anti-Semitic answers to ques­
tions about Jews. See Robert J. Brvm, The Jem of Moscow, Kiev, and Minsk (New York,
1994), pp. 46-47, and his “Russian Attitudes Towards Jews: An Update,” Hast Euro­
pean Jewish Affairs 26 (1996): 55-64.
7. Summary of remarks by John Maktos in General Assemblv/Legal Committee,
Official Records, October-December 1948, pp. 213-14, 224-26. Maktos was sup­
ported by Great Britain. Compare with the decision bv the U.S. Supreme Court in
Terminiello v. Chicago, 337 US 1 (1949).
8. See Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma (New York, 1944), vol. 1, pp. xli-lv.
9. Harry S. Truman, Memoirs (Garden City, N.Y., 1956), vol. 2, p. 184.

IMPLICATIONS 1291
American experiment shortcuts were attempted, which lengthened the
task and hindered its success.
The dismantling of restrictions became an object of measures by all
levels of government. Federal action was designed to eliminate the in­
volvement in discrimination by the government itself: thus the Con­
gressional legislation to guarantee to all people the right to vote, the
executive order for the desegregation of the armed forces, the executive
orders requiring companies under contract with the government to re­
frain from discrimination in employment, and a Supreme Court decision
that no court of any state may enforce a clause of a contract that prohibits
the purchaser of the house from reselling the property to a member of a
minority group.
On state and local levels, laws were aimed primarily at discrimination
in the private sector. The most significant were the fair employment prac­
tices acts (or prohibitions of discrimination in private employment), laws
against exclusions in private schools, laws forbidding restrictions in the
renting of apartments, and public accommodation laws which make
criminal the refusal to serve customers in hotels, restaurants, and the like,
because of race or creed.
The prohibitory measures were subsequently supplemented by the fed­
eral government with more elaborate mandatory schemes, notably the
busing of black (African-American) children to integrate the schools, the
redrawing of congressional distrias to facilitate the election of African-
Americans to the House of Representatives, and affirmative action rules
(including goals, time tables, set-asides, and preferences) to benefit desig­
nated minorities in employment and business aaivities. Inevitably, how­
ever, these particular laws and regulations emphasized group identity and,
for better or worse, perpetuated a differentiation of status and treatment
on the basis of race.
Added to the commitments under international arrangements and to
the safeguards of domestic laws were the diplomatic and legislative fall­
back measures establishing rights of escape and asylum. Thus the provi­
sions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:10

Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own. . . .
Everyone has the right to seek and enjoy in other countries asylum
from persecution.

10. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the General Assembly on


December 10, 1948. U.N. Press Release PGA/100, pt. 4, pp. 11-16. The United
Nations established a Commission on Human Rights under the hconomic and Social
Council. This commission had a subcommission on the Prevention of Discrimination
and Protection of Minorities.

1292 IMPLICATIONS
TABLE 12-1
THE ABSORPTION AND DESTRUCTION PROCESSES

Emancipation from slaver)' Definition

Déconcentration Dismissals and expropriations

Diversification of economic activity Concentration

Abolition of group identity Forced labor and food controls

Annihi ation

Prevention of birth Infliction of death


Marriage and birth
regulations
Sterilizations Indirect methods
Physical separation Exposure Direct methods
of sexes Starvation |----------------------------------------- 1
Local Mobile Central
killing killing killing
operations operations operations

Opening the exit doors of the Soviet Union took decades,11 and provid­
ing for asylum in the laws of the United States and Western European
countries was a similarly slow undertaking.12
In the end the whole network of precautions, which was the work of
the developed world, underwent tests in countries that had not even been
independent in the immediate postwar years. These eruptions, like the
destruction of the Jews, were unexpected, and they caught Europeans
and Americans unprepared. In the aftermath of decolonization, some
mass deaths were judged to be the fallout of civil wars. In Cambodia, it
was difficult to separate an “’auto-genocide” of a regime killing its own
people on a “class” basis from the simultaneous slaughter by that Com-

11. On the politics of Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union, see Henry
Kissinger, Tears of Upheaval (Boston, 1982), pp. 249-55, 430, 463, 469, 986-98,
1022, 1030, and Robert G. Kaufman, Henry M. Jackson (Seattle, 2000), pp. 268-83,
401-2.
12. On U.S. provisions to permit entry of pcrsccutces, sec Public Law 87-510 of
June 28, 1962, 76 Stat. 121, and its extension to Indochina refugees in Public Law
94-23 of May 23, 1975,89 Stat. 87.

IMPLICATIONS 1293
munist government of minorities, principally Vietnamese. The United
States, having just pulled out of the Vietnam conflict and having tied its
hands by a legislative resolution to refrain from further interventions in
the area, stood by. The Soviet Union, too far from the scene, protested
impotendy. Finally, the Vietnamese Communists invaded Cambodia as
liberators and put a stop to the massacres.13 But die purest genocide was
ignited in Rwanda, a landlocked country situated in the heart of Africa,
on April 7,1994. Here, the defiance of the carefully crafted postwar dicta
was unambiguous.
Rwanda was a German colony until World War I and a Belgian man­
date under the League of Nations, which was continued as a trusteeship
under the United Nations until 1962, when independence was achieved.
Its area of slighdy more than 10,000 square miles and its population of
more than seven million almost matched Belgium’s statistics. The people,
like those of Belgium, were largely Catholic, and they were divided, like
the Belgians, into two distinct groups, the Tutsi and Hutu. One looked
like Nilotic East Africans, the other like Central African Bantu, but indi­
vidual members of the two communities could not always be told apart
by their appearance, and intermarriages were increasing. Under Belgian
rule in the 1930s, a registration system was introduced under which
everyone was given one or another identity. For the offspring of a mixed
union the father’s affiliation was used automatically.
Unlike the Flemish and Walloon Belgians, the Tutsi and Hutu had not
managed to live in complete harmony, even though they spoke a common
language, Kinyarwanda, and lived intermingled as neighbors. The Tutsi,
possibly 14 percent of the population, were historically dominant in eco­
nomic and social spheres, but the country as a whole, with its high birth
rate and low life expectancy, was poor. Yet the majority were literate, and
there was a radio for every dozen people. An efficient bureaucracy had
been built, with prefects and burgomasters, and the registrations were
kept locally up-to-date.
Tension and violence between Hutu and Tutsi gripped independent
Rwanda, and by 1993 the Hutu-dominated government took some omi­
nous steps. Since its army of some 7,000, including presidential guards
and gendarmerie, could not afford to purchase a stock of weapons for a
much-expanded force, it doubled its imports of machetes. Two Hutu
militias, consisting of the youth wings of two political parties, were mobi­
lized: the Interahamwe and the Impuzamugambi. Lest they be confused

13. For a short analysis of the Cambodian disaster, see Kenneth Quinn, “Explain­
ing the Terror,” in Karl D. Jackson, cd., Rendezvous with Death (Princeton, 1989),
pp. 215-40. Vietnam’s counteraction took place between December 25, 1978, and
January 7,1979.

IMPLICATIONS
with any Tutsi, they wore identifying colors, blue-yellow garb and black-
vellow-red kerchiefs, respectively. When they moved to targeted commu­
nities they were also adorned with a distinctive leaf indicating the plant
growing in their place of origin.
The preparations came to the attention of Canadian General Dallaire,
who commanded 2,500 United Nations peacekeepers charged with
maintaining a truce between armed Hutu and Tutsi factions. In January
1994 he was told by an informant that the Tutsi in the capital, Kigali,
would be registered, that a Belgian contingent of the United Nations
forces would be attacked to induce its departure, and that masses of Tutsi
could be killed. When the violence was unleashed, Dallaire requested
reinforcements to take preventive action, but he was instructed by United
Nations headquarters in New York to remain impartial and to act beyond
his mandate only to assure the evacuation of foreigners.14
The onslaught on the Tutsi began on April 7, 1994, a day after the
Rwandan president and the president of adjacent Burundi were killed in a
plane crash. Shootings of Tutsi commenced in the region of the capital,
Kigali. Within days the operation covered large parts of the country.
Distances were small enough and the military and militia sufficiently
mobile to move from place to place, but much reliance was placed on local
Hutu who were summoned to pitch in, and on literate “intellectuals” to
check passes of people on the roads. Ruses were employed to lure Tutsi
into traps : assurances of transportation to safety, guarantees of sanctuary
in churches, promises of protection from foreign peacekeeping units in
the vicinity. Internally, primitive euphemisms were quickly developed:
the Tutsi were “invenzi” (cockroaches), killing was “work,” and the ma­
chetes were “tools.”
Two possible obstacles faced the killing machine. Peacekeepers nearby
could intervene, and armed Tutsi refugees joined by Hutu dissidents in a
Rwandan Patriotic Front occupied a strip about ten miles deep below the
northern border. The European countries and the United States, how­
ever, were reluctant to use force, if only because they had no tolerance for
casualties in their own ranks.
After ten Belgians were killed, the 400 Belgian peacekeepers left, and
by April 25 a total of 2,000 of Dallaire’s troops had been withdrawn.15
The units of the Rwandan Patriotic Front began to move almost imme-

14. Samantha Power, "A Problem from Hell” (New York, 2002), pp. 343-53.
15. Ibid , pp. 366-69. For the text of the Securin’ Council Resolution 912 of April
21, 1994, authorizing a reduction in strength of the Mission Force, see United
Nations Blue Book Scries, vol. X, The United Nations and Rwanda, ¡993-1996 (New
York, 1996), pp. 268-69. The resolution was based on the Special Report 470 of the
United Nations Secretary General outlining three alternatives, April 20, 1994, in
Und., pp. 262-65.

IMPLICATIONS
diately, but their primary objective of seizing control dictated movements
into regions sparsely inhabited by Tutsi. They reasoned that the slaughter
of the victims was so rapid in any case that large-scale rescue was not
possible.
The Tutsi captured Kigali on July 4, and completed their advance by
August 21,1994. They had won a complete victory, shooting more than
a few Hutu along the way, but the Tutsi dead surpassed 500,000. In raw
numbers the Tutsi in Rwanda at the beginning of April might only have
been about a tenth of the Jews successively caught in the German vise, yet
in percentage terms the Tutsi loss was just as heavy as the Jewish toll of
five million.16
The disaster of the Tutsi took place in full view of the world. No global
crisis overshadowed this event. No lack of aircraft or manpower ham­
pered countervailing action. The challenge was posed and not met. Legal
specialists in the Department of State of the United States opposed even
the use of the word “genocide” with reference to Rwanda, lest its utter­
ance be construed as an obligation to do something. On April 30 Presi­
dent William Clinton referred in a public radio message only to the “hor­
rors of civil war and mass killings in Rwanda” in the course of the
preceding three weeks,17 and on May 17 the United Nations Security
Council followed in a unanimous resolution to condemn the “killing of
civilians,” and to decide that it would “remain actively seized of the mat­
ter.”18 History had repeated itself.

16. A comprehensive account of the Hutu operation, from which most of the
information in the preceding pages is taken, was written by Alison Dcs Forges, based
on research by eight collaborators, and published by Human Rights Watch and the
Federation Internationale des ligucs dcs droits dc l’hommc, Leave None to Tell the Tale
(New York and Paris, 1999). See also Alain Dcstcxhe, Rwanda and Genocide in the
Twentieth Century (New York, 1994,1995), and Arthur Jay Klinghoft’cr, The Interna­
tional Dimension of Genocide in Rwanda (New York, 1998). For the rate of killing and
the feasibility of foreign intervention, sec Alan J. Kuperman, “Rwanda in Retrospect,"
Foreign Affairs 79 (2000): 94-118. The historical background of the outbreak is
analyzed by Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers—Colonialism, Nativ-
ism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, 2001).
17. Text of the president’s radio message, April 30, 1994, in Department of State,
Dispatch, May 2, 1994, p. 250.
18. TcxrofU.N. Security Council Resolution 918 of May 17,1994, in '¡'he United
Nations and Rwanda, pp. 282-84. In this resolution the Security Council authorized
an increase of the Mission Force to 5,500 men. They were not quickly deploved, and
as of May 31, government forces still held the western half of the country. See the map
in ibid., p. 298.

IMPLICATIONS
A P P ENDIX A

GERMAN RANKS

1297
TABLEA-I
CIVIL SERVICE RANKS

ADMINISTRATIVE
RANK UNIT

Reichsminister Reichsministerium
Staatssekretär—StS.
Unterstaatssekretär—UStS. Abteilung
Ministerialdirektor—MinDir.
Ministerialdirigent — MinDirig. Unterabteilung or Amt or
Amtsgruppe
Ministerialrat—MinRat. Referat
Oberregierungsrat—ORR.
Regierungsrat—RR.
Botschaftsrat (Foreign Office) — BR.
Gesandtschaftsrat (Foreign Office) — GR.
Legationsrat (Foreign Office) — LR.
Amtsrat—AR.

Note: See Arnold Brecht, The Art and Technique of Administration in German Ministries
(Cambridge, 1940), pp. 171-85. The Referent (level of Referat) was usually an expert.
Most first drafts of decrees were prepared by Referenten. Ibid., pp. 179 — 82. For com­
plete classifications by salary, see the following decrees: December 16,1927, RGBl I,
349; March 19,1937, RGBl 1,342; March 30,1943, RGBl 1,189.

1298 APPENDIX A
TABLE A-2
SS AND ARMY RANKS

SS GERMAN ARMY U.S. ARMY

Reichsführer—RF-SS GeneralfeldmarschalJ — General of the army


Gfm.
Obcrst-G ruppenführer Generaloberst — General
— Obs tG ruf. Genobst.
Obergruppenführer — General der Infanterie, Lieutenant general
OG ruf. Artillerie, etc. — Gen.
d. Inf
Gruppenführer — Gruf. Generalleutnant—Glt. Major general
Brigadeführer — Brif. Generalmajor— Brigadier general
Gcnmaj.
Oberführer—Obf.
Standartenführer — Staf. Oberst — Obst. Colonel
Obersturmbannführer — Oberstleutnant — Obstlt. Lieutenant colonel
OStubaf.
Sturmbannführer — Major—Maj. Major
Stubaf.
Hauptsturmführer— Hauptmann-Hptm. Captain
HSruf.
Obersturmführer — Oberleutnant — Olt. First lieutenant
OStuf
Untersturmführer — Leutnant — Lt. Second lieutenant
USruf.

GERMAN RANKS 1299


APPENDIX B

STATISTICS OF
JEWISH DEAD

n November 26, 1945, a former Sturmbannfiihrer in the Se­

O curity Service, Dr. Wilhelm Hbttl, signed an affidavit in which


he described a conversation with Adolf Eichmann in Budapest
at the end of August 1944. On the occasion, according to Hbttl, Eich­
mann had told him that six million Jews had been killed, four million of
them in camps and two million in other wavs, particularly in the course of
shootings during the campaign against the USSR.1 The International

1. Affidavit by Wilhelm Hbttl, November 26, 1945, PS-2738.

1301
Military Tribunal, in its judgment of September 30, 1946, cited the six
million figure, attributing it to Eichmann without mention of Hottl.2
Eichmann may well have indicated six million,3 but at the meeting of
his officers at the end of the war he had remarked that he would laugh­
ingly jump into his grave for the deaths of five million victims,4 and in
1961, at his trial in Jerusalem, he repeated the lower number.5
During his service in the Reich Security Main Office, Eichmann had
collected numerous reports with statistics that could be added.6 After the
war, Jewish organizations made their own calculations, but in a totally
different manner. The principal method of these agencies was the subtrac­
tion of postwar data (including registrations) from prewar census figures
or estimates. In a mimeographed unpublished compilation prepared in
June 1945 by the Institute of Jewish Affairs in New York City, the death
toll was 5,659,600 to 5,673,100, including 1,250,000 within the August
1939 boundaries of the USSR. The Soviet share was based on the as­
sumption that originally there had been 2,100,000 Jewish inhabitants in
that portion of the old territory which was to be occupied by the Germans,
that Soviet authorities had evacuated half of the urban residents but a
smaller percentage of the village population from this region, and that
there was a residue of 30,000 survivors.7 A year later, Jakob Leszczynski
of the World Jewish Congress came out with an overall total of5,978,000
dead, including 1,500,000 Soviet Jews within the August 1939
frontiers.8
To this day, most of the published estimates have hovered between five
and six million. Moreover, the methods of calculating the results have
remained essentially the same. The numbers are extrapolated from the
available, sometimes fragmentary reports of German agencies, satellite
2. Judgment, International Military Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals,
XXII, 496.
3. The same number was given in June 1944 by a Jewish emissary', Joel Brand, who
had been sent out by Eichmann from Hungary' for ransom negotiations with the
Allies, to the Jewish Agency’s Moshe Shcrtok. “Preliminary' Report” by Moshc Shcr-
tok, June 27,1944, Wcizmann Archives, Rchovoth, Israel.
4. Affidavit by Dieter Wisliccny, November 29, 1945, in Office of United States
Council for Prosecution of Axis Criminality, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, VIII,
p. 610.
5. Testimony by Eichmann, July 7 and 20, 1961, Eichmann trial, English tran­
script, Session 88, p. Η 1, and Session 105, pp. LI 1, Mm 1. See also Eichmann’s
memoirs, Ich, Adolf Eichmann (Leoni am Starnbcrgcr Sec, 1980), pp. 460-61,472-
76.
6. Testimony by Eichmann, July 6, 1961, Session 87, p. Y 1.
7. Institute of Jewish Affairs, “Statistics of Jewish Casualties during Axis Domina­
tion,” August 1945, in the library of the Institute.
8. Jakob Leszczynski, “Bilan dc Pcxtermination,”Congres JuifMondial (Brussels,
Paris, Geneva, June 1946).

1302 APPENDIX B
authorities, and Jewish councils, or they are refined from comparisons of
prewar and postwar statistics. One must bear in mind, however, that the
raw data are seldom self-explanatory, and that their interpretation often
requires the use of voluminous background materials that have to be
analyzed in turn. Assumptions may therefore be piled on assumptions,
and margins of error may be wider than they seem. Under these circum­
stances, exactness is impossible.

ADDING
Any assessment based on additions must reflect the origins and meanings
of the numbers found in wartime documents. The large majority of these
figures stems from an actual count of die victims. By and large, the num­
bers fall into three categories: deaths as result of (1) privation, principally
hunger and disease in ghettos, (2) shootings, and (3) deportations to
death camps. This division corresponds to a broad jurisdictional segmen­
tation in the bureaucracy itself.
The statistics of privation were kept by Jewish councils and were re­
ported to German supervisory organs that utilized the figures to decrease
rations and space. There are tabulations indicating Jewish mortality in
the Reich-Protektorat area, and detailed enumerations exist also for the
ghettos of Warsaw and Lodz, but the data are sparse for other localities.
Hence, privation is hard to measure. Among the major causes of death, it
is the smallest category, but it is also the least firm.
Shooting statistics were produced by SS and Police units, especially the
Einsatzgruppen. At times, these formations seemed to justify their exis­
tence with numbers. The attention to detail is revealed in the field report
by Einsatzkommando 3 with its breakdowns of shootings by date, lo­
cality, and type of victim.9
Einsatzgruppen situation reports were consolidated daily in the RSHA
for distribution to privileged recipients. These long documents contain
many statistics, but they are not nearly as detailed as the numbers which
fill six pages in the progress report prepared by Einsatzkommando 3 in the
field. Some of the cumulative figures in the daily consolidations are not
specific about time spans, and sometimes they do not disclose whether
credit was taken for the entire result of a joint operation with some other
formation. When the shootings of other organizations, such as the Order
Police deployed by a Higher SS and Police Leader, are acknowledged, the
numbers arc often approximate.
Aside from such variations in Einsatzgruppen reports, there are some
9. Report by Jäger (Einsatzkommando 3), December 1, 1941, Zentrale Stelle
Ludwigsburg, UdSSR 108, film 3, pp. 27-38.

STATISTICS OF JEWISH DEAD 1303


major gaps in the picture as a whole. The descriptions of shootings in
1942 and 1943 are less complete than those of 1941, and small-scale
killings by army or SS units in the rear areas behind the Russian front, or
by civil agencies, are generally underreported.
The third set of statistics, dealing with deportations, is numerically the
largest category. Again, one may recall that there was occasion for meticu­
lous counting. In the western countries, the Reich-Protektorat area, and
Slovakia, transports were planned with lists. In Belgium, France, and
Italy, the rosters of names, made up in transit camps, have largely surv ived
intact. For Macedonia and Thrace under Bulgarian domination and also
for Hungary, there is more than one set of statistics, with slight differ­
ences between the reports. In Poland, the railway administration some­
times admonished its personnel to report the number of deportees by
train, so that the Security Police could be billed accordingly.
Occasionally, the documentation indicates not only the place of depor­
tation, but also the point of arrival. The routes of some of the transports
are discernible in reports of the railroads or guards of the Order Police.
Stops in the ghettos of Lodz or Theresienstadt were recorded. Deported
Jews shot in Minsk, Riga, or Kaunas were mentioned in the context of
local killing operations. Treblinka was identified in Stroop’s report as the
destination of 6,926 Jews caught in the course of the Warsaw Ghetto
battle in 1943. It should be noted, however, that there was no systematic
counting of arrivals by camp administrations. The deportees unloaded at
Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor were hastily shoved into the gas chambers.
Even in Auschwitz and Lublin only those Jews were registered who were
to be kept alive for a while. The multitudes were gassed immediately.
The keystone of all the German records is the recapitulation by the SS
statistician Dr. Richard Korherr about the “final solution of the Jewish
question.” The sixteen-page document, dated March 23, 1943, summa­
rizes the situation as of December 31, 1942. A seven-page supplement,
confined to deportation statistics, deals with the first three months of
1943.10

10. Cover letter by Korherr to Obersturmbannführer Brandt (Himmler’s adju­


tant), March 23, 1943, indicating transmission of report, NO-5195. Himmler to
RSHA, April 9, 1943, confirming receipt of report, NO-5197. Brandt to Korherr,
April 10,1943, passing on Himmler’s requests for changes in phraseology, NO-5196.
Korherr to Brandt, April 19,1943, noting that the draft of a supplement, for inclusion
in a shortened version intended for presentation to Hitler, had been sent to the RSHA,
NO-5193. Cover letter by Korherr to Hauptsturmfuhrcr Meine (in Himmler's adju­
tant office), April 28, 1943, stating that he was returning the report with editing as
requested in the letter of April 10, NO-5193. Text of the long report in NO-5194. In
this report, edited pages were substituted for the original ones. The first page, un­
changed, bears Himmler’s initial and date of receipt, March 27. Text of rhe supplc-

APPENDIX B
Not everything about the Korherr report, including even its entire
purpose, is completely clear. From the fact that the end of the lethal year
1942 was chosen as a benchmark,11 one might surmise that it was in­
tended as a progress report. But more was involved than a summation. By
the end of 1942, Himmler was under attack from Albert Speer, Minister
of War Production, and General Fromm, the Chief of the Replacement
Army, who were increasingly concerned with the preservation of man­
power. The “final solution” was threatening a reservoir of Jewish labor,
and concentration camps were swallowing potential German soldiers.
Speer and Fromm, evidently in collusion, approached Hitler himself to
challenge the adequacy and veracity of roundup and arrest statistics of­
fered by the Reich Security Main Office.12 The implication of die com­
plaint, that the SS was refusing to disclose the extent of its inroads on
human resources, presented Himmler with an odd dilemma. How could
he portray die full range of his achievements to Adolf Hider, yet couch
them in appropriate terms for “camouflage” (Tamung)? For this task, he
needed his professional statistician, Korherr, a man whose credentials
could not be impugned. On January 18, 1943, Himmler instructed
Korherr to compile the report,13 but then demanded deletions of refer­
ences to “special treatment” (Sonderbehatidlung) in the draft and ordered
substitute phraseology that would tell a casual reader only the number
of Jews w ho had been “dragged through” (durcbgeschleusst) unnamed
camps.14
Not surprisingly, most of Korherr’s statistics came from the RSHA. In
his postwar statements, he was vague about meetings and discussions,15
but Eichmann distinctly recalled a “sullen” statistician in search of an

mcnt with deportation data to March 31, 1943, in NO-5193. Since the long report
and its supplement overlap in contents and language, they will be referred to here as
“the Korherr report” without further distinctions between them. A summary, typed
with special large lettering in Eichmann’s office for submission to Hitler, is not extant.
Eichmann, Ich, p. 475.
11. Himmler had ordered the destruction of the Generalgouvernement Jews bv
the end of the year. Himmler to Krüger, July 19, 1942, NO-5574.
12. Entry in diary of Gerhard Engel (army adjutant in Hitler's headquarters) of
December 19, 1942, in Hildegard von Kotze, cd., Hecrcsaäjutant bei Hitler (Stutt­
gart, 1974), pp. 141-42.
13. Korherr to Rrandr, March 23, 1943, NO-5195.
14. Brandt to Korherr, April 10, 1943, NO-5196.
15. Statement by Korherr, July 13, 1951, Amtsgericht Regensburg, in Zentrale
Stelle Ludwigsburg, 202 AR 72/60, pp. 207-21; his statement of May 26, 1962, for
prosecution of I Landgericht Hamburg, 141 Js 573/60, Zentrale Stelle 202 AR 74/60,
pp. 2214-17; and his statement of January 22, 1965, before prosecution in Re­
gensburg, 9 Js 121/62, Zentrale Stelle 412 AR 536/61, pp. 49-52.

STATISTICS OF JEWISH DEAD 1305


overall view. There were talks, says Eichmann, about camps and “natu­
rally” about how many Jews the SS and Police Leader Globocnik had put
to death (ums Leben gebracht hatte) in the Generalgouvernement and how
many Jews the chiefs of the Einsatzgruppen had killed under their own
jurisdiction (in eigener Zuständigkeitgetötet hatten).16
Although Korherr consulted also with the WVHA about registered
Jewish inmates in Auschwitz, Lublin, and other regular concentration
camps, and with a Jewish functionary about data pertaining to the Ger­
man Jews, he did not, according to his testimony, probe elsewhere. To be
sure, it would have been difficult, if not unthinkable, to approach the
Foreign Office or the Reichsbahn, let alone foreign governments in­
volved with deportations. In fact, the Korherr report contains no refer­
ences to Hungarian Jewish labor companies, Romanian shootings, or
Croatian camps. Far less credible, however, is Korherr’s assertion that he
did not even understand the figures in his report or that he did not realize
that the Einsatzgruppen killed people. Throughout the postwar years,
Korherr as a potential witness or defendant in West German court pro­
ceedings was a frightened man, and ignorance was his banner.
No final summary was prepared in 1944 or 1945, although statistics of
new deportations were assembled in Eichmann’s office.17 During the last
six months of the war, at a time when footmarches began and shifts of
inmates took place from one camp to another, the Nazi system broke
down, and with it the counting.

SUBTRACTING
If the principal problem in the course of adding numbers is their in­
completeness, the difficulty in the subtraction of postwar counts or esti­
mates from prewar data is the need for adjusting the results. The first of
these corrections must be made for changes in the boundaries, from those
of 1938 to those of 1946, notably in the case of Poland and the USSR. A
second involves causal factors. Thus, in the interval between the last pre­
war and the earliest postwar determinations of Jewish population in any
given country or region, there were deficits not only due to the Holocaust
but also because of war, migrations, or changes in birth and death rates.

16. Eichmann, Ich, pp. 474-75. Eichmann docs not mention Korherr by name.
Korherr states that he had a deputy, Dr. Roderich Plate, and an administrative assis­
tant trained in statistics, Hauprsrurmfiihrcr Hofmann. On Korherr and Plate, see also
Gotz Aly and Karl Heinz Roth, Die restlose Erfassunq (Berlin, 1984), pp. 32-35,60-
61. Aly and Roth deal with registrations and counting as a tool of population policy
under Nazism. One chapter is devoted to German acquisitions of data about Jews.
17. Testimony by Eichmann, July 6, 1961, Eichmann trial English transcript,
session 87, p. Y 1.

APPENDIX B
The task, of calculating these components is magnified if—to cite the
Soviet Union —the two relevant census figures are dated 1939 and 1959,
or if there is no simple way to draw conceptional lines between normal
deaths and the Holocaust or between the war and the Holocaust.
The question of who was a Holocaust victim arises for deaths under
privation, particularly if someone succumbed to conditions short of com­
plete ghettoization, or died while in hiding or after flight. The Reich, for
example, had a Jewish community after 1939 in which the average age
was high, and in every area of Europe there were people old enough or ill
enough to have had short life expectancies. Still, the Holocaust toll can­
not be discounted for deaths that would have occurred in any case. Real
hardships, nor hypothetical normalcy, faced the Jewish communities un­
der German occupation, and particularly in conquered Poland normal
deaths of Jews must be presumed to have become fewer and fewer.
Quite different, however, is the attribution of cause to victims who
died after flight or escape. In this case, the key is the motivation of the
refugee. One and a half million Jews were on the move after Germany
invaded the USSR on June 22,1941. Inasmuch as even larger numbers of
non-Jewish inhabitants fled —or were evacuated — only to suiter higher
than normal death rates in the interior of the Soviet Union, one would
have to know how many Jews left their homes because they had feared a
specifically Jewish fate under German rule. Theoretically, the question is
not unanswerable. If a third of the Slavic residents and two-thirds of the
Jewish population in a given city had fled or been moved, this difference
would at least have to be analyzed. Some, though by no means all of the
dead among the refugees, were Holocaust victims. Practically, however,
such conclusions are not easily written in numbers.
One figure, in the tens of thousands, which would not be revealed in a
subtraction, is that of Christians who died in the Holocaust because they
were considered Jews by the perpetrators. Many of these baptized people
were in fact exempted by reason of a mixed marriage, but others were
drawn into the vortex of destruction. Even in the Warsaw Ghetto, Chris­
tians were not altogether rare.

RECAPITULATION
In every computation, there are question marks. For some countries,
including above all Poland and the USSR, one may at least seek some
clarification by juxtaposing the results obtained from an addition with the
findings from a subtraction. To be sure, such a cross-check entails yet
another complication. The Germans and their allies referred in their re­
ports to geographic areas that have no counterparts on the maps of 1938

STATISTICS OF JEWISH DEAD 1307


or 1946: the Protektorat, the Generalgouvernement, Transnistria, the f
Ostland, or Reichskommissariat Ukraine. Slovakia and Croatia were also |
creations de novo, and the military territories of Serbia and Salonika had |
novel configurations as well. The conversion of figures, reported for such §
entities, into numbers that are appropriate for recognizable countries |
with familiar frontiers is a formidable undertaking. For Poland and the |
USSR, which together account for more than 70 percent of the dead, i
some special comment is necessary. j
\
POLAND
On the map of Nazi Europe, Poland did not exist. To reconstruct it with
prewar frontiers from German administrative regions, one must examine
(1) the incorporated territories (including Upper Silesia, Lodz, areas at­
tached to East Prussia, and Bialystok), (2) the Generalgouvernement,
comprising five districts named Krakow, Warsaw, Radom, Lublin, and
Galicia, and (3), northeastern regions that became part of the Reichs­
kommissariat Osdand (Vilna and Polish White Russia) and part of the
Reichskommissariat Ukraine (Volhynia). Each of these three sectors pre­
sents its problems.
For the incorporated territories and the Generalgouvernement, the
most complete statistic may be found in Korherr’s report. In the follow­
ing two equations, all the numbers are taken from his tables. The figures
in the first three columns represent estimates or counts. The two figures
in the last column are, as he states, derivative.
Estimated
Number Remaining
of Jews Population Excess of
before on Deaths and
German December 31, Count of Emigration
Takeover 1942 “Evacuations” over Births

Incorporated
Territories 790,000 - (233,210 + 222,117) = 334,673
Generalgouvernement 2,000,000 - (297,914 + 1,274,166) = 427,920
All these numbers need interpretation. The starting populations, despite
the rounding to 790,000 for the incorporated territories and to 2,000,000
for the Generalgouvernement, are remarkably similar to figures that
would be obtained from a straight projection of 1931 Polish census data.18

18. The boundaries of the sixteen voivodships of prewar Poland did not corre­
spond to those of the administrative divisions created bv the Germans, blit local data

APPENDIX B
The 297,914 Jews stated as remaining in the Generalgouvernement on
December 31, 1942, include a figure of 50,000 for Warsaw, which is too
low.19 The “evacuation” counts of 222,117 and 1,274,166, respectively,
undoubtedly incorporate some non-Polish Jews temporarily quartered in
ghettos. Thus, there were twenty thousand Jews from the Old Reich,
Vienna, Prague, and Luxembourg in the Lodz Ghetto, and other thou­
sands from the Reich and Slovakia in the Generalgouvernement.
Korherr provides enough statistics for the following breakdown of the
“evacuation” figures:
From the Incorporated Territories 222,117
From the Warthegau (Lodz and environs)
“dragged through” the camps of the
Warthegau (meaning Kulmhof) 145,301
From the Bialystok District (meaning de­
portations to Auschwitz and Treblinka) 46,591
From Upper Silesia and regions attached
to East Prussia (meaning deportations
to Auschwitz and Treblinka) 30,225
From the Generalgouvernement 1,274,000
“Dragged through” the Generalgouverne­
ment camps (Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka
and Lublin)
Supplementing these totals are partial data tor 1943 and 1944. The Lodz
Ghetto, which according to Korherr still had 87,180 inhabitants at the end
of 1942, was wiped out when its remaining inhabitants were deported to
Kulmhof and Auschwitz during June-August 1944. The ghetto of War­
saw, where 63,000 Jews were still alive in September 1942, was emptied
after more deportations in January and the battle of April-May 1943,
leaving only scattered groups in hiding. In Galicia, the SS and Police

ot the Polish census could be used to estimate the initial size of the Jewish population
in any newly fashioned district. Korherr did nor furnish such numbers for the prewar
Polish portions of the Reichskommissariate.
19. See also Generalgouvernement meetings of March 26 and July 9, 1943, on
“summary” census of Generalgouvernement population in Werner Präg and Wolf­
gang Jacobmeyer, eds.. Das Diensttapcbuch des deutschen (lencralßtnti’cmeurs in Polen,
1V39-IQ45 (Stuttgart, 1975), pp. 636 and 700. An overall figure for the General­
gouvernement ot 14,741,000 was cited in March. At the second meeting in Julv,
Oberregierungsrat Dr. Josef Gor/., deputy chief of the Generalgouvernement statisti­
cal office, provided a breakdown that included 203,000 Jews. Nor included were tens
of thousands of unregistered Jews (many in hiding) who did not draw rations. 'Die
census was taken on March 1, 1943. Korherr to Brandt, March 27, 1943, T 175,
Roll 67.

STATISTICS OF JEWISH DEAD


Leader Katzmann reported on June 30, 1943, that 21,156 Jews were
left.20 Other documents about other localities tell a similar story.
Korherr had no count for '■''emigration” and ‘■''excess mortality,” and he
could not separate the two concepts when he calculated their combined
totals as 334,673 for the incorporated territories and 427,920 for the
Generalgouvernement. Compared with the starting populations, these
figures are clearly disproportionate. Their ratio is not, as one might have
expected, 2:5, but more nearly 4:5. The principal explanation for this
apparent discrepancy may be found in flights and expulsions from the
incorporated territories to the Generalgouvernement at the beginning of
the German occupation. There is no close estimate for these movements,
but the shift is almost certainly in the 50,000-100,000 range.21 The
addition of 334,673 and 427,920, which is 762,593, may therefore be
taken as an indication of a real deficit for the two regions as a whole, but
not as the unqualified measure of deaths from privation. About 150,000
to 200,000 Jews fled from this area, particularly to the interior of the
Soviet Union. Their number, which is the “emigration” in Korherr’s
heading, must be subtracted.22
The third major region of Poland, about which Korherr provides no
details, had a starting population of about 550,000 Jews. It was divided
into several administrative compartments, listed here with the number of
Jewish inhabitants crudely projected from 1931 census data:

20. Report by Katzmann, June 30,1943, L-18. In addition, a small number were
in hiding. The military reported in September that 6,000 Jews were left in Lvov, and
that the Jewish question in Galicia was "on the whole” (im grosse» und ganzen)
finished. OFK 365 to Wchrkrciskommando GG, report for August 16 to Septem­
ber 15,1943, dated September 17,1943, Poland 75022/13. Document once located
in Alexandria, Va.
21. Records of the statistical office of Lodz list 61,086 departures of Jews during
January-May 1940, including 51,739 in January, February, and March. Yad Vashem
O 6/79. Destinations are not indicated, but the first three months coincide with mass
expulsions. Sec additional statistics in Wlodzimicrz Jastrzebski, “Nazi Deportations
of Polish and Jewish Population from Territories Incorporated into the Third Reich,”
paper for Main Commission for Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Poland/Inter-
national Scientific Session on Nazi Genocide, Warsaw', April 14-17,1983.
22. Some additional adjustments arc necessary for war dead. Shootings in the
Bialystok District and, during 1941, also in Galicia, w'erc probably placed under the
“excess of deaths.” Births and normal deaths, if not completely balanced, mav con­
stitute another complication. In view' of these problems, it may be tempting to calcu­
late the privation deaths from the available Lodz and Warsaw Ghetto data alone. The
two communities lost about 19 percent of their combined cumulative populations
under ghettoization. For all of Poland (without war dead and those who escaped! that
percentage would spell out a toll of nearly 600,000. Warsaw and 1 ,<xlz, however, w ere
not sufficiently typical. Some of the smaller, so-called open ghettos were less harsh,
and other ghettos did nor last as long.

1310 APPENDIX B
To Reichskommissariat Ostland
Gencralbezirk Lithuania
Vilna region over 100,000
Generalbezirk White Russia
Hauptkommissariat Minsk
Wilejka-Glebokie region up to 20,000
Hauptkommissariat Baranowicze over 100,000
To Reichskommissariat Ukraine
Generalbezirk Volhynia-Podolia
Volhynia and most of Polesie about 330,000
Relatively few residents of these districts could flee to safety in the interior
of the USSR. Up to a third of the Jewish population of the Vilna region
was no longer present when the Germans arrived, but most of the refu­
gees from Vilna were able to reach only neighboring areas overtaken by
German forces. Einsatzkommando 9 of Einsatzgruppe B killed thousands
of Jews in Vilna during the summer of 1941.23 Einsatzkommando 3 of
Einsatzgruppe A then took over the region and shot 34,622 Jews as of
November 25, 1941. By that time, according to the Kommando, only
about 15,000 Jews were retained in the Vilna Ghetto as a concession to
war production.24 There were, however, several neighboring smaller
ghettos, which were subsequently thinned out by shootings, and whose
surviving inhabitants were eventually transferred to Vilna. In the summer
of 1943, the Vilna Ghetto was consequently a reservoir of20,000 people,
including 12,332 counted workers. Then, thousands were shot, and the
entire remainder was sent off to Estonia, Latvia, and Sobibor for more
labor, more selections, and more deaths.25
The Wilejka area was subjected to shootings in March 1942,26 27 and on
July 31, 1942, Generalkommissar Kube of White Russia reported re­
newed killings. Kube also noted a precipitous action by the German army
in neighboring Glcbokie and environs resulting in the deaths of 10,000
Jews.2"

23. RSHA IV-A-1, Operational Report No. 21, July 13, 1941, NO-2937, and
RSHA IV-A-1, Operational Report 67, August 29, 1941, NO-2837.
24. Report by Einsatzkommando 3, December 1, 1941, Fb 85/2.
25. Yitzhak Arad, Ghetto m Flames (New York, 1982), pp. 209-12,293,296,318,
333tt., and his Helzec, Sobibor,; '¡'reblinka (Bloomington, Ind., 1987), p. 137. Die
statistic is taken from the Wehrwirtschat'ts-Aussenstelle in Vilna, report for October
1943, Wi/ID 3.26, in Alexandria, Y'a., in postwar years.
26. RSHA IV-A-1, Operational Report No. 178, March 9, 1942, NO-3241, and
RSHA IV-A-1, Operational Report No. 184, March 23, 1942, NO-3235.
27. Kube to Reichskommissar Lohse, July 31, 1942, PS-3428. Acting Gcbiets-
kommissar Haase of neighboring Wilejka reported on April 8, 1943, that 3,000 Jews
were still alive in his area. Record of meeting of Gcbietskommissarc, Fb 85/1.

STATISTICS OF JEWISH DEAD 1311


The Baranowicze Hauptkommissariat was inundated with shcxnings
during 1941 and 1942. By August 8, 1942, a total of 95,000 Jews were
reported killed, and 6,000 were presumed to be in hiding.28 At the end of
1942, an expedition of SS and Police Leader von Gottberg of White
Russia reduced the population of escaped Jews in the western part of the
Hauptkommissariat by killing 3,658.29
Volhynia was traversed in 1941 by Einsatzgruppe C and a detachment
of Security Police from the Generalgouvernement. Together, they ac­
counted for many thousands of Jewish dead.30 In November 1941, units
of the Higher SS and Police Leader South carried out a massacre of about
15,000 Jews in the town of Rovno.31 A massive wave of killings began in
the summer of 1942. On December 29, 1942, Himmler reported to
Hitler that from August to November 363,211 Jews had been “executed”
in the Ukraine, South Russia, and the Bialystok District.32 There is little
doubt that the large majority of these victims had lived in the Volhvnian
portion of the Generalbezirk Volhynia-Podolia. The sweep was con­
ducted without regard to the production of carts and textiles in the facto­
ries. In ghetto after ghetto, laborers and their families were wiped out
overnight. The Volhynian Jews were annihilated.33
Polish Jewry as a whole lost more than 500,000 people in the ghettos,
well over 700,000 in shootings, and up to 1,700,000 in camps. Some
who sought sanctuary in the Soviet Union, but who died there of priva­
tion, were victims as well. To be sure, a calculation of this sort is at best an

28. Hauptkommissar in Baranowicze to Gcncralkommissar of White Russia


(Kubc), August 27,1942, NG-1315.
29. Report by Gcbictskommissar White Russia/III (signed Preckwinkcl), Decem­
ber 31, 1942, Wi/ID 2.705, Green Number 6. In April 1943, Gcncralkommissar
Hanwcg of Lida (in Baranowicze Hauptkommissariat) reported 4,419 Jews still alive
in his area. Fb 85/1.
30. RSHAIV-A-1, Operational Report No. 28, July 20,1941, NO-2943. RSHA
IV-A-1, Operational Report No. 43, August 5, 1941, NO-2949. RSHA IV-A-1,
Operational Report No. 56, August 18, 1941, NO-2848. RSHA IV-A-1, Opera­
tional Report No. 58, August 20, 1941, NO-2846. RSHA IV-A-1, Operational
Report No. 66, August 28,1941, NO-2839.
31. RSHA IV-A-1, Operational Report No. 143, December 8,1941, NO-2827.
32. Himmler to Hitler, December 29, 1942, NO-1128. The killings were the
work of Higher SS and Police Leader Priitzmann. Sec his reports to Himmler,
December 26 and 27, 1942, the first with statistics, the second with descriptions of
antipartisan operations centered on northern Volhynia and adjacent areas of the
Bialystok District, T 175, Roll 124.
33. A total of 61 Jews were caught between February 21 and April 21, 1943.
Report by Gcncralkommissar in Volhynia-Podolia, April 30, 1943, HAP 99/77, in
records at Alexandria, Va., during postwar years. On March 21, 1944, the Gebiers-
kommissariat of Brest-Litovsk (in Volhynia) reported that the area was free of Jew s.
EAP 99/85, in Alexandria during postwar years.

1312 APPENDIX B
approximation. The thrust of the addition may, however, be compared
with the result of a simple subtraction.34
Official Polish estimate of Jewish
population as of August 1939 3,351,000
Reported registration of survivors
on Polish soil in 1945 55,000
Repatriations from USSR 185,000
Displaced persons in Germany,
Austria, Italy, Romania, Czecho­
slovakia, and elsewhere, in 1946 over 100,000
Polish Jews in military forces, 1945 ca. 15,000
Emigrants to Palestine and other
areas, 1939-44 over 15,000
Survivors in Polish areas annexed
by USSR thousands
Refugees remaining in prewar ter­
ritory of USSR thousands
Victims of Soviet deportations thousands
War casualties thousands
Although accuracy is difficult to achieve even in postwar counts,
these numbers are small enough to suggest that the survivors, and the
dead from non-Holocaust causes, could not have been more than about
400,000.35 Thus, the overall picture is that of a toll approaching three
million.

THE USSR
In 1939 and 1940, the Soviet Union annexed eastern Poland, the Baltic
states, and parts of Romania. When the Germans attacked the USSR in
June 1941, they pushed through these buffer regions into the old Soviet
domains. The German reports about the occupied USSR did not feature
the Soviet frontier of August 1939, and some plenary statistics of Jewish
dead cover areas on both sides of this vanished line. To focus on the old
34. Report of the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry regarding the problems
of European Jewry and Palestine, April 20, 1946, London, Cmd. 6808, pp. 58-59.
Philip Friedman, Roads to Extitictum (New York and Philadelphia, 1980), pp. 211 —
43. Annual postwar volumes of thc American Jewish Yearbook.
35. The official Polish estimate is consistent with the assumption that between
1931 and 1939 the Jewish population increased at a lower rate than that of non-Jews
and that Jewish emigration exceeded immigration. The estimate docs not include
converts. In the tabulation, births between 1939 and 1945-46 are assumed not to
have been higher or lower than normal deaths. Some survivors were not registered,
but others were counted twice.

STATISTICS OF JEWISH DEAD 1313


territory of the USSR, one must therefore refer to a great many detailed
figures pertaining to specific locations. The following list is a basic com­
pilation for the old Soviet Union.

German Area
Einsatzgruppen operations
Einsatzgruppe A
February 1,1942: 218,050
Jews. Ultimate toll much
higher. Operated mainly in
Ostland area. Soviet portion,
not counting Reich deportees: low tens of thousands
Einsatzgruppe B
December 15,1942: 134,198
people. Ultimate toll not
much higher. Operated mainly
in military area of
Army Group Center. Jews
only, Soviet portion: over 100,000
Einsatzgruppe C
Sonderkommando 4a, to
November 30,1941: 59,018
persons.
Einsatzkommando 5, to
December 7,1941: 36,147
persons.
Ultimate toll of entire
Einsatzgruppe probably over
120,000. Operated mainly
in Ukraine. Jews only,
Soviet portion: over 100,000
Einsatzgruppe D
April 8, 1942: 91,678
persons. Ultimate toll,
about 100,000. Operated
mainly in southern Ukraine,
Crimea, and Caucasus. Jews
only, Soviet portion: about 90,000
Higher SS and Police leaders
Killings of Soviet Jews in
1941 at Berdichev, Dnepropetrovsk,
and other localities: around 50,000

1314 APPENDIX B
Killings in 1942 and 1943
within old Soviet portion of
White Russia diousands
Old Soviet portion of 363,211
Jews killed in 1942 in Bialystok
District, Ukraine, and south
Russia: thousands
Smaller scale killings by
German army, local
authorities, and in
prisoner of war camps: tens of thousands
Deaths in ghettos and of
fleeing Jews: tens of thousands
Romanian Area (Transnistria)
Shootings of Soviet Jews in
Odessa-Dalnik, the Golta
prefecture, and Berezovka
area: up to 150,000
Deaths of Soviet Jews in
Transnistrian ghettos: low tens of thousands
Total about 700,000
For the Einsatzgruppen, the cumulative figures apply to the latest
available dates,-'6 but there are also fragmentary data for subsequent kill­
ings and occasional indications of later shootings that were going to take
place. For example, Einsatzgruppe C reported on February 4, 1942, its
extensive preparations for the shooting of the Jews in Kharkov,36 37 and
Einsatzgruppe D, which in the summer of 1942 moved through Rostov
to the Pyatigorsk-Yesscntuki-Kislovodsk region of the Caucasus, left be­
hind a proclamation, dated September 7, 1942, ordering the Jews of
Kislovodsk to assemble.38 Korherr's report contains a single reference to

36. Einsatzgruppe A draft report (undated), PS-2273. Report of Einsatzgruppe


B, December 29, 1942, Russian Central Stare Archives, Fond 655, Opis 1, Folder 3.
Kommandos 4a and 5 in RSHA IV-A-1, Operational Report No. 156, January 16,
1942, NO-3405. Einsatzgruppe D in RSHA IV-A-1 Operational Report 195,
April«, 1942, NO-3359.
37. RSHA IV-A-1 Operational Report No. 164, February 4, 1942, NO-3399.
Reports by liaison officer of Economy Armament Office with 6th Army (Lt. Col
Maicr), November 24 and December 3 and 18,1941, Wi/ID 2.198. Sec also account
by Kharkov survivor Maria Markovna Sokol in Ilva Ehrcnburg and Vasilv Grossman,
eds., 77H- Black Book (New York, 1981), pp. 51 -56.
38. Kislovodsk proclamation in USSR-IA(2-4). See also account bv Kislovodsk
survivor Moiscv Samovlovich Even son, in Ehrcnburg and Grossman, eds.. The Black
Book, pp. 265-70.

STATISTICS OF JEWISH DEAD 1315


the '■‘evacuation” of 633,300 Jews in the “Russian areas, including the
former Baltic countries, from the beginning of the Eastern campaign.”
The figure, according to the report, was furnished by the RSHA, and in a
postwar interrogation, Korherr called it a “house number” in the jargon
of the German statisticians for seeming exactness devoid of known mean­
ing.39 There is little question, however, that the RSHA meant to convey
an overall toll of the Einsatzgruppen, and that a distant observer, working
with available documents, might calculate a similar result.40
Korherr specifically states in the concluding paragraphs of his report
that he was able to record “deaths of the Soviet Russian Jews in the
eastern occupied territories” only in part. He did not have the statistics
for the killings organized by the Higher SS and Police Leaders, who
reported to Himmler directly, and he did not attempt to estimate the
ghetto dead.41
The Romanian data can only be rounded. For the Odessa massacre,
probably the largest of the war, a German intelligence officer in contact
with a Romanian informant heard the figure 59,000, but postwar Roma­
nian estimates are somewhat lower.42 For the Romanian killings in the
Golta prefecture, the total established in postwar trials is close to 70,000,43
and for the killings in the Berezovka region, which were carried out by an
Ethnic German Kommando organized by the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle,
there is documentary indication of 28,000 dead.44 The deaths of Soviet
Jews from starvation and disease may best be assessed on the basis of
reports indicating the numbers of Romanian expellees and indigenous

39. Statement by Korherr, July 31, 1951, Zcntralc Stelle Ludwigsburg 202 AR
72/60, pp. 215-16.
40. A total of 55,000 Jews, killed in the summer of 1942 in the area of White
Russia (mainly within prewar Polish territory') were probably credited to the toll of
Einsatzgruppe A. It is also possible that the Kommandos of the Gencralgouverne-
ment Security Police, styled an Einsatzgruppe for Special Purposes, and operating in
newly occupied areas of eastern Poland in 1941, may have been included. For analysis
of Einsatzgruppen figures, sec Helmut Krausnick and Hans-Hcinrich Wilhelm, Die
Truppedes Weltanschaungskriepes (Stuttgart, 1981), pp. 605-9,618-22.
41. Killings by formations of the Higher SS and Police Leaders operating in the
areas of the Einsatzgruppen in 1941 are generally reported in the daily' RSHA sum­
maries. Sec, in particular, RSHA IV-A-1, Operational Report No. 94, September 25,
1941, NO-3146.
42. Director of German Armed Forces Intelligence (Abwehr) in Romania (signed
Rodlcr) to Eleventh Army/Intelligcncc, and intelligence sections of German army,
navy', and airforce missions in Romania, November 4, 1941, T 501, Roll 278. Other
materials in Matatias Carp, Cartea Ncopra (Bucharest, 1946-48), vol. 3, pp. 199-
209.
43. Extract from indictment of Romanian defendants before Bucharest People’s
Court, Carp, Cartea Neajjrd, vol. 3, pp. 215-16, 225-26.
44. Note, probably by Triska (German Foreign Office), May 16, 1942, NG-4.X1 ~.

1316 APPENDIX B
persons living in the same Transnistrian ghettos.45 The heavy death rate of
the Romanian Jews is known, and that of the Soviet Jews could nor have
been much lighter.
Given the importance of a total figure for the Soviet Union, one should
attempt to derive it also from Soviet census data. The starting point for
this subtraction is the census of 1939 and that of 1959:
Jewish population, January 1939 3,020,171
Jewish population, January 1959 2,267,814
Deficit 752,357
The 2,267,814 counted in 1959 include at least 100,000 survivors of
Polish, Baltic, and Romanian territories that had not been part of the
Soviet Union in 1939; hence, the deficit, adjusted tor the old boundaries
of the USSR, is more than 850,000.46
The next question is the impact of births and normal deaths between
the two census dates. From January 1939 to 1941, births exceeded
deaths, but the war depressed the birthrate and raised the death rate in the
reduced Jewish community of die unoccupied territory. That change was
probably enough to wipe out the earlier gain by January 1944. For the
subsequent fifteen-year period the picture is roughly as follows. There
were 434,000 Jewish children in the age group 0-14 as of January 1959,
of whom about 415,000 are attributable to parents born in prewar Soviet
territory.47 At an annual rate, these births were somewhat under 28,000.
Deaths in the entire Jewish population were 21,686 during the year pre­
ceding the 1959 census.48 Since the Jewish death rate, like that of all So­
viet deaths, had been declining from the height of the war to 1959,49 the
average, adjusted to the prewar area, might have been close to 24,000.
Such a scenario would allow a total increase for these years of some
60,000.

45. See the detailed report bv Jewish commission (signed Fred Saraga), Janu­
ary 31, 1943, Yad Vashcm M 20.
46. See the analysis, with statistical tables, by Ivor Millman, “Diaspora Jewish
Populations” in U. O. Schmelz, P. Glikson, and S. J. Gould, eds., Studies in Jewish
Detnojfrapijy (New York, 1983), pp. 99-109.
47. Data derived mainlv from Sergei Maksudov, “The Jewish Population Losses of
the USSR from the Holocaust,” in Lucjan Dobroszycki and Jeffrey S. Gurock, eds.,
The Holocaust in the Smnet Union (Armonk, N.Y., 1993),pp. 207-13,and MarkTolts,
“Trends in Soviet Jewish Demography since the Second World VV'ar,” in Yaacov Ro’i,
ed., Jetts and Jewish Lije in Russia and the Smnet Union (Ilford, England, and Portland,
Ore., 1995), pp. 365-82.
48. loirs, “Trends,” Jews in Russia, p. 367.
49. James W. Bracket, “Demographic Trends and Population Policy in the Soviet
Union,” in U.S. Congress, Joint Economic Committee, Hearings on Dimensions of
Sov iet Economic Power, 87rh Cong., 2d sess., 1962, p. 570.

STATISTICS OF JEWISH DEAD 1317


The deficit for the territory of 1939 could therefore be adjusted fur­
ther to a figure of somewhat over 900,000. From this number, however,
one must deduct at least five categories that are not attributable to the
Holocaust:
1. Jewish Red Army soldiers killed in battle or who died of wounds, ill­
ness, or accidents
2. Jewish prisoners of war who died in captivity unrecognized as Jews
3. civilian Jewish dead in battle zones, as in Leningrad
4. deaths caused by privation among Jews who fled or who had been
evacuated tor reasons other than fear of German anti-Jewish acts
5. Jewish dead in Soviet corrective labor camps.
Numbers can be affixed to these upheavals only with difficulty. Some
approximation may, however, be reached for the military' dead. Over­
all, deaths of uniformed Soviet forces outside of prisoner-of-war camps
passed the 7,000,000 mark in the fighting and wars waged from 1939 to
1945.50 Jews were 1.77 percent of the Soviet population in 1939, but
they were a smaller percentage in the Red Army for two reasons. One was
the Jewish birthrate, which was substantially lower than die national
average for more than thirty years before the war,51 and which (although
partially offset by the more favorable urban infant and child mortality
rates) resulted in a relatively smaller pool of men who were of military
age. The other factor was the loss in Byelorussia and Ukraine of Jewish
manpower which was not fully mobilized in time and which was no
longer available during the last year of the war. Assuming that the Jewish
soldiers who died were 1.25 percent of Soviet military fatalities, that toll
alone would approach 90,000.52 Together with Jews in prisoner-of-war
camps who were not shot there but who died of wounds, disease, or
hunger, the number could be over 100,000.53 If the remaining non-

50. Grigori Krivoshecv, ed., Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth
Century (London, 1997), pp. 53, 58, 77, 85. The period from 1939 to 1945 covers
the Far Eastern battles with the Japanese of 1939, the invasion of Poland in 1939, the
Russo-Finnish War of 1939-1940, the war with Germany and its European allies,
and the campaign against the Japanese in 1945. The aggregate figure from these
contests, which is 7,021,000, includes those killed in action, dead of wounds, disease,
and accidents, or shot for desertion. It docs not include the unrecorded deaths of men
abandoned, wounded or dying, on the battlefields or those who died as prisoners of
war.
51. Roberto Bachi, Population Trends of World Jewry (Jerusalem, 1976), p. 43.
52. This is Maksudov’s estimate in Dobroszcycki and Gurcxk, eds., The Holocaust
in the Soviet Union, p. 211.
53. As of May 1,1944, there was a German count of5,163,381 Soviet captives, of
whom 1,981,364 had died. Included were men who died of wounds; nor counted
were prisoners transferred to the SS who died in SS custody. See the German amiv

1318 APPENDIX B
Holocaust causes account for 50,000-100,000 dead,54 the gap between
the raw census figures of 1939 and 1959 is reduced to about 700,000.
This is roughly the same result as the one that was calculated from the
addition of Jewish losses.
The following recapitulation of the European-wide Jewish toll in­
cludes three tables. Table B-l is a breakdown by cause, Table B-2 by
country, and Table B-3 by year.

compilation in Nuremberg document NOKW-2125. Probably fewer than 100,000


Red Army men were taken prisoner during the last year of the war. Krivosheev, Soviet
Casualties, p. 237. Political officers listed as missing in action or prisoners of war
totaled 42,126. Krivosheev, So\net Casualties, p. 221. The figure of Jewish prisoners
was probably higher. Political officers and Jews were subject to summary shooting
and possibly half were shot. Russian figures indicate that only about 6,000 Jews
returned from captivity. Krivosheev, Soviet Casualties, pp. 236-37.
54. Maksudov estimates that 40,000 Jewish civilians died in war zones and that
20,000 perished in Soviet corrective labor camps after the war. Dobroszcycki and
Gurock, eds., The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, p. 212.

STATISTICS OF JEWISH DEAD


TABLE B-l
DEATHS BT CAUSE

Ghettoization and general privation over 800,000


Ghettos in German-occupied
Eastern Europe over 600,000
Theresienstadt and privation outside
of ghettos 100,000
Transnistria colonies (Romanian
and Soviet Jews) 100,000
Open-air shootings 1,400,000
Einsatzgruppen, Higher SS and Police
Leaders, Romanian and German ar­
mies in mobile operations; shootings
in Galicia during deportations; killings
of prisoners of war; and shootings in
Serbia and elsewhere
Camps up to 2,900,000
German
Death camps up to 2,600,000
Auschwitz up to 1,000,000
Treblinka up to 800,000
Belzec 434,508
Sobibor over 150,000
Kulmhof over 150,000
Lublin (main camp) over 50,000
Camps with tolls in the low tens of
thousands or below over 150,000
Concentration camps (Bergen-
Belsen, Buchenwald, Maut­
hausen, Dachau, Stutthof,
and others)
Camps with killing operations
(Poniatowa, Trawniki, Semlin)
Labor camps and transit camps
Romanian
Golta complex and Bessarabian
transit camps 100,000
Croatian and other under 50,000
Total 5,100,000

Note: Ghettos in German-occupied Eastern Europe, open-air shootings, and Auschwitz


figures are rounded to the nearest hundred thousand, other categories to the nearest fifty
thousand.

1320 APPENDIX B
TABLE B-2
DEATHS BT COUNTRY

Poland up to 3,000,000
USSR over 700,000
Romania 270,000
Czechoslovakia 260,000
Hungary over 180,000
Germany 130,000
Lithuania up to 130,000
Netherlands over 100,000
France 75,000
Latvia 70,000
Yugoslavia 60,000
Greece 60,000
Austria over 50,000
Belgium 24,000
Italy (including Rhodes) 9,000
Estonia over 1,000
Norway under 1,000
Luxembourg under 1,000
Danzig under 1,000
Total 5,100,000

Note: Borders refer to 1937. Converts to Christianity are included, and refugees are
counted with the countries from which they were deported.

TABLE B-3
DEATHS BY YEAR

1933-1940 under 100,000


1941 1,100,000
1942 2,600,000
1943 600,000
1944 600,000
1945 over 100,000
Total 5,100,000
Note: Rounded to the nearest 100,000.

STATISTICS OF JEWISH DEAD 1321


à
APPENDIX C

NOTATION ON
SOURCES

DOCUMENTS
etween 1933 and 1945 the public offices and corporate entities

B of Nazi Germany generated a large volume of correspondence.


Some of these documents were destroyed in Allied bombings,
and many more were systematically burned in the course of retreats or in
anticipation of surrender.1 Nevertheless, the accumulated paperwork of

1. In Germany on January 21, 1945, Generalgouvcrneur Frank and rhree officials


burned the largest part of the records that had been evacuated from Krakow. Furry of

1323
the German bureaucracy' was vast enough to survive in significant quan­
tities, and even sensitive folders remained. Inasmuch as numerous com­
munications had been prepared in multiple copies, a single set, as in the
case of the consolidated Einsatzgruppen reports, could have been left. If
an event had engaged the attention of several agencies, the reportage of
one of them might still have been intact. Hence by 1945 major collections
with much revealing information fell into Allied hands.
The first German documents to be seized by advancing Allied forces
were those of territorial administrations or field offices located outside
the Reich. Today these items are kept in the archives of the countries that
had been under German domination. Poland, for example, holds records
of the Generalgouvernement and incorporated territories as well as re­
ports of Jewish councils.
The files of central governing bodies were captured in Germany itself.
During the final months of the Nazi regime, large portions of these mate­
rials were removed by their German guardians from Berlin and dispersed
toward the western region, which was the target of Anglo-American
armies. Consequendy, Britain became the custodian of German Foreign
Office and Reich Chancellery records, while the United States acquired
documents of the ministries, the army, the party, industry', and banks. At
one point, American archivists, measuring the stock in their possession,
spoke of original folders in boxes taking up 40,000 linear feet of shelf.* 2
At an early stage of record gathering by the Allies, important docu­
ments were pulled out for utilization in the Nuremberg trials. Mimeo­

that date in Frank Diary, Werner Präg and Wolfgang Jacobmcycr, eds., Das Diensttage­
buch des deutschen Generalgouvemeurs in Polen (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt,
1975), p. 938. A directive of the Rcichsvcrteidigungskommissar of Berlin (Goeb­
bels), February' 20, 1945, provided for destruction of files in the following descend­
ing order of priority: (1) secret materials, (2) other important documents that “under
no circumstances arc to be allowed to fall into enemy hands (for example, dcjcwifica-
tion proceedings [Entjudungsvorgänge]),” (3) registries, and (4) personnel records.
The order was once located in Footlockcr 46/19, Federal Records Center, Alexandria,
Va. Some high-level items were spirited away. Note bibliography of Eugen Krcidler,
Die Eisenbahnen im Machtbereich der Achsenmächte während des Zweiten Weltkrieges
(Göttingen-Frankfurt: Musterschmidt, 1975), p. 400, where the author, a former
Ministerialrat, cites weekly reports of Gcncralbctricbslcirung Ost and other impor­
tant railway materials as part of his personal collection. The documents, which con­
tain references to transports of Jews, were deposited in the German Federal Archiv es
after Kreidler’s death.
2. For a history of U.S. record management, sec Robert Wolfe, ed.. Captured
German and Related Records—A National Archives Conference (Athens, Ohio: Ohio
University Press, 1974). The special problem of photographs is analyzed by Sybil
Milton, “The Camera as a Weapon: Documentary' Photography and the Holocaust,”
Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual 1 (1984): 45-68.

1324 APPENDIX C
graphed copies of these items were deposited in major libraries of the
United States. The National Archives designated the documents assem­
bled for the trials as Record Group 238. Microfilm copies were prepared
by the National Archives for public use.
The bulk of the captured records were processed en masse. The United
States moved materials under its control to the Berlin Document Center,
where part}' membership and SS personnel files were stored, and to the
Federal Records Center at Alexandria, Virginia, in which some 28,000
linear feet of shelf were lined with boxes arranged by collection with their
original German document numbers.
Many of the holdings in Alexandria were microfilmed. The filmed
records of an agency (such as the Reichsflihrer-SS) were assigned a T
number. Within each T collection, rolls were numbered consecutively.
From time to time the National Archives issues mimeographed Guides to
German Records Microfilmed at Alexandria, Virginia, which are tables of
contents that show the old German document numbers alongside the
new microfilm designations. The microfilmed collections as a whole were
placed into Record Group 242. Among Alexandria files not filmed were
the records of the Finance Ministry, numerous military reports, and a
variety of corporate papers. By the end of the 1960s, virtually all the
originals, filmed or not, were shipped back to West Germany. Records of
public agencies were turned over to the German Federal Archives, busi­
ness items to private firms.
The German Federal Archives, which received collections from Britain
as well as the United States, divided its inventory between Koblenz (for
documents of civilian agencies) and Freiburg (military). At Koblenz,
part}' items were labeled NS, and ministerial records R. Freiburg retained
the original 1933-45 designations for army documents. The West Ger­
man Foreign Office in Bonn was in charge of the old Foreign Office files.
The East German archives contained much material of the Interior Minis­
try, including valuable records of the Jewish community. The most con­
spicuous omission in archival holdings comprises the documents of the
German railroads.
The research for this study was conducted over a period of decades,
and the footnotes reflect the migrations of records during that time.
Nuremberg items are cited here with their Nuremberg numerations.
Original folders examined at Alexandria are identified by the German
numbers originally affixed to them. Anything taken from an Alexandria
microfilm is noted with the T and roll numbers of the National Archives.
If a document was retrieved from the German Federal Archives, the refer­
ence indicates a new West German identification.
The following is a list of collections.

NOTATION ON SOURCES 1325


1. Original documents once located at Alexandria cited in accordance
with the original German classification scheme:
EAP {Einheitsaktenplan, unified filing system)
H {Heer, High Command of the Army)
OKW {Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, High Command of the Armed
Forces)
Wi {Wirtschaft und Rüstung, Armament Inspectorates)
Polen (Generalgouvernement military offices and commands)
Heeresgruppe Mitte (Army Group Center)
Heeresgruppe Süd (Army Group South)
Südost (Southeast, military)
Rumänien (military)
RKO (Reichskommissariat Osdand)
A large part but not all of this material has been listed in the Guides.
2. Original documents at one time in the German Federal Archives of
Koblenz and Freiburg, cited with the notation that they are located in
the German Federal Archives, and with an additional notation, if they
were located in Freiburg. The archives in Potsdam, now a part of the
German Federal Archives, are cited with the notation Zentralarchiv
Potsdam, which was the designation of the facility during the existence
of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). Documents in
Potsdam are cited with the numbers they had before the Zentralarchiv
became a part of the German Federal Archives. By 1996, Nazi era items
of the German Federal Archives were concentrated in a new facility in
Berlin.
3. Original documents in archives of the former Soviet Union, cited
with a notation indicating their location. The name of the former
Moscow Special Archives is now the Center for the Preservation of His­
torical Documentary Collection, Moscow. The Archives of the October
Revolution in Moscow became the State Archives of the Russian Federa­
tion. Archives of the various Soviet republics, now separated from Rus­
sia, are listed either as central or state archives with the name of the
appropriate country. Regional archives in Ukraine and Belarus are re­
ferred to as oblast archives. Each of the archives located in the former
Soviet Union has collections known as Fonds. A subcollection is referred
to as Opis. The Delo, or Folder, is listed as Folder. Insofar as documents
from these archives are taken from microfilms of the U.S. Holocaust Me­
morial Museum Archives, which are part of the U.S. Holocaust Memo­
rial Museum, the reference lists the record group and, in parentheses, the
state, central, or oblast archives to which the record group number re­
fers, or an accession number if a collection was not yet given a record
group number at time of use. This information is followed by the micro­
film roll number, with Fond, Opis, and Folder numbers.

132« APPENDIX C
4. Original documents of the Military Historical Institute in Prague,
cited with a notation indicating their location. Some of these items are
on microfilms of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Record Group
48.004, and are cited as such.
5. Original documents at Koblenz, cited under their R number, with ad­
ditional notation in each case identifying Koblenz
.
6 Original documents at the YIVO Institute in New York City:
G
Occ
Ghetto collections
7. Original documents at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem:
Y
M
When cited, their location at Yad Vashem is indicated.
8. Original documents at the Centre de Documentation Juive Contem­
poraine in Paris, including correspondence of German provenance and
Jewish materials. Many of these items have been printed in publications,
and copies of others were distributed to various archives. When originals
are cited, the Centre is indicated.
9. Original documents at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York City,
cited with indication of their location there
10. Library of Congress/Manuscript Division:
Himmler Files (Reichsfuhrer-SS/Personlicher Stab)
11. Nuremberg documents:
EC
L
M
NG (governmental documents)
NI (industry)
NO (organizations of Nazi party and SS)
NOKW (armed forces)
PS
R
RF
SA
SS
UK
USSR
All documents beginning with the name of a defendant, tor instance.
Funk-13, Speer-10, etc.

Nuremberg documents other than NG, NI, NO, and NOKW were
assembled for the trial ot the major war criminals before the International

NOTATION ON SOURCES 1327


Military' Tribunal. Some of the series designations indicate only the place
or mode of their selection, not origins or content. PS, for example, refers
to documents gathered in Paris by Colonel Storey; L is an abbreviation
for London, England; R is the initial of a naval lieutenant (Rothschild)
who was stationed in London and who handled documents other than L,
andiVi stands for Melvin Jones, a British assistant prosecutor. In the entire
Nuremberg collection, series numbers represent the order of accession;
that is to say, documents following one another are not necessarily
related.
A number of the documents (other than NG, NI, NO, and NOKW)
may be consulted in two publications:
International Military Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals
(Nuremberg, 1947-49), 42 vols. (in German)
Office of United States Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality,
Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression (Washington, D.C., 1946-48), 8 vols.
and 2 suppl. (in translation)
Some of the documents used in Nuremberg subsequent trials (includ­
ing NG, NI, NO, and NOKW) are printed in
Nuremberg Military Tribunals, Trials of War Criminals (Washington,
D.C., 1947-49), 15 vols. (in translation)
A group of Nuremberg documents, some only in German, some only
in English, and some in both languages — but all dealing with Jewish
matters directly and augmented with some U.S. records about rescue
efforts — may be found in
John Mendelsohn, ed., The Holocaust— Selected Documents in Eighteen
Volumes (New York: Garland Publishing, 1982).
12. Copies of documents, assembled from various archives by the Israel
police for the Eichmann trial, cited as Israel Police.
13. Copies of documents assembled from various archives by the
Zentrale Stelle der Landes)ustizverwaltungen zur Aufklärung na­
tionalsozialistischer Verbrechen in Ludwigsburg, cited with indication
that they are located in Ludwigsburg.
14. Copies of documents assembled from various archives by' the In­
stitut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich, cited with indication that they' are in
Munich.
15. Specialized document collections published in the original lan­
guages or in English translation:
H. G. Adler, Die verheimlichte Wahrheit (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr,
1958). On Theresienstadt, in German.

1328 APPENDIX C
Jean Ancel, Documents Concerning the Fate of Romanian Jewry during
the Holocaust (Paris and New York: Beate Klarsfeld Foundation,
1986) 12 vols. In Romanian. Does not duplicate Carp’s Cartea
Neagra.
B. Baranauskas and K. Ruksenas, Documents Accuse (Vilnius: Gintaras,
1970). On Lithuania, in English.
Randolph L. Braham, The Destruction of Hungarian Jenny (New York:
World Federation of Hungarian Jews, 1963), 2 vols. Facsimiles of
German Foreign Office correspondence, including Nuremberg doc­
uments. In German.
Matatias Carp, Cartea Neagra: Suferintele Evreilordin Romania 1940-
1944 (Bucharest, 1946-48). 3 vols. In Romanian.
Centralna Zydowska Komis ja Historyczna w Polsce, Dokumenty i ma-
teriah do dziejow okupaeji niemeckiej iv Polsce (Warsaw, Lodz, and
Krakow, 1946), 3 vols. On Poland, in German.
Raul Hilberg, Sonderzüge nach Auschwitz (Mainz: Dumjahn, 1981).
Railroad documents in German.
Jüdisches Historisches Institut Warschau, Faschismus-Getto-
Massenmord (East Berlin: Rütten 8c Loening, 1961-62). On Po­
land, in German. Not identical to Dokumenty i materiah.
Serge Klarsfeld, Die Endlösung der Judenfrage in Frankreich (Paris:
Beate und Serge Klarsfeld, 1977). Documents about France from
the archive of the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine.
In German.
Serge Klarsfeld, Vichy-Auschwitz (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard,
1983 and 1985). 2 vols. Documents of the Vichy regime. In
French. Vol. 1 deals with 1942, vol. 2 with 1943 and 1944.
Serge Klarsfeld and Maxime Steinberg, Die Endlösung der Judenjmge
in Belgien (New York: Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, 1980). On
Belgium, in German.
Kommission zur Erforschung der Geschichte der Frankfurter Juden,
Dokumente zur Geschichte der Frankfurter Juden 1933-1945 ( Frank­
furt am Main: Waldemar Kramer, 1963). On Frankfurt, in German.
Werner Präg and Wolfgang Jacobmeyer, Das Diensttagebuch des
deutschen Generalgouvemeurs in Polen 1939-1945. (Stuttgart:
Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1975). A larger portion of the Frank
diary than is contained in document PS-2233 as printed in Nazi
Conspiracy and Aggression or Trial of the Major War Criminals. In
German. A more complete copy of the diary may be found on
twelve microfilm rolls in National Archives Record Group 238,
T992.

NOTATION ON SOURCES
AFFIDAVITS AND STATEMENTS UNDER OATH OR
AFFIRMATION
The Nuremberg collections include affidavits. Many of the Ludwigsburg
materials are pretrial statements. Detailed information was obtained from
local residents in Eastern Europe by Soviet and Polish investigator)' au­
thorities shordy after the retreat of Axis forces from occupied territories.
In addition, depositions for court proceedings were prepared in several
other countries. There is no catalog or central depositors' for rapid re­
trieval of all these statements.

TRIAL TESTIMONY
In the notes, testimony in trials is cited with reference to the trial tran­
script. Trial of the Major War Criminals contains the complete record, in
English, of the trial of Goring et al. Trials of War Criminals contains onlv
relatively short excerpts of testimony in subsequent trials. The English
mimeographed transcripts were therefore used for these cases, which are
numbered as follows:
Case 1 U.S. v. Karl Brandt et al. (doctors)
Case 2 U.S. v. Erhard Milch
Case 3 U.S. v. Josef Altstotter et al. (judiciary)
Case 4 U.S. v. Oswald Pohl et al. (camps)
Case 5 U.S. v. Friedrich Flick et al.
Case 6 U.S. v. Karl Krauch et al. (I. G. Farben)
Case 7 U.S. v. Wilhelm List et al. (generals, Southeast)
Case 8 U.S. v. Ulrich Greifelt et al.
Case 9 U.S. v. Otto Ohlendorf et al. (Einsatzgruppen)
Case 10 U.S. v. Alfried Krupp et al.
Case 11 U.S. v. Ernst von Weizsacker et al. (ministries)
Case 12 U.S. v. Wilhelm von Leeb et al. (generals, East)
The cases may now be consulted on microfilm, Record Group 238, M
series. For the Eichmann trial, reference in the notes is made to the En­
glish mimeographed transcript. For cases tried in West Germany or Aus­
tria, the original transcripts were used.

ORAL HISTORY
Outside a judicial framework, Germans have volunteered very little about
Jewish matters. A brief compilation of direct answers by ordinary Ger­
mans to open-ended questions is that of Walter Kempowski, Hahen Sir

1330 APPENDIX C
davon jjamsst? (Hamburg: Albrecht Knaus, 1979). Jewish survivors, on
the other hand, have ottered a large number of statements, generally short
accounts stressing salient personal experiences. One of the largest Jewish
collections mav be found at Yad Vashem, but such oral history' is widely
scattered in libraries and archives on several continents.

DIARIES AND PRIVATE PAPERS


Jews are seldom mentioned in diaries or private letters written by Germans
during the Nazi years. A famous exception is the Goebbels diary, in which
the Jewish fate is recorded again and again. The diary' of Higher SS and
Police Leader Erich von dem Bach-Zelewsky was presented to the German
Federal Archives, but in the version that appears to be sanitized. Several
entries in a diary' by Wilhelm Cornides (then a noncommissioned officer in
the German army) are remarkable for their explicit references to Belzec.
The Cornides diary was deposited in the Institut fur Zeitgeschichte.
Also scarce are diaries left by Jewish victims. Most often the authors
did not surv ive, and their papers were preserved by clandestine means. An
important example is The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czemiakow, ed. Raul
Hilberg, Stanislaw Staron, and Josef Kermisz (New York: Stein and Day,
1979). Another nonsurvivor is Philip Mechanicus (pseudony'm?), whose
diary', Tear of Fear (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1968), records a year at
the transit camp Westerbork in Holland. Raymond-Raoul Lambert, the
Jewish leader in France, also left a diary, edited by Richard Cohen, Carnet
d’un temoin, 1940-1943 (Paris: Favard, 1985). The notes of a teenager
who perished in the Lodz Ghetto afford a detailed view of life there in
Alan Adelson, ed., The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak (New York: Oxford
University' Press, 1996).

MEMOIRS
By and large, the Jews are not a subject of discussion in German memoirs.
Two major exceptions are the accounts by Rudolf Höss, Kommandant in
Auschwitz (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1963), and Adolf
Eichmann, Ich, Adolf Eichmann (Leoni am Starnberger See: Druffel,
1980). Book-length memoirs by Jews are much more numerous. Par­
ticularly valuable to the researcher are accounts by survivors who, because
of position or location, were able to observe significant events over a
relatively long period. Memoirs in this category' are those of Oscar Neu­
mann (who was chairman of the Slovak Jewish Council), Im Schatten des
Todes (Tel Aviv: Olamenu, 1956), Filip Müller, Eyewitness Auschwitz (New
NOTATION ON SOURCES 1331
York: Stein and Day, 1979), and Stanislaw Adler (who was a Jewish
police officer), In the Warsaw Ghetto, 1930-1943 (Jerusalem: Yad Vas-
hem, 1982).

LAWS, STATUTES, ETC.


The principal source of German law was the Reichsgesetzblatt (RGBl). In
addition, central ministries and regional authorities in areas outside the
Reich published ordinances in gazettes of their own. Examples of minis­
terial gazettes are the Reichsarbeitsblatt of the Labor Ministry' and the
Ministerial-Blatt of the Interior Ministry. Examples of territorial gazettes
published in occupied territory are the Verordnungsblatt des Reichsprotek­
tors in Böhmen und Mähren and the Verordnungsblatt des Generalgouver­
neurs. Large collections of these decrees may be found in the Columbia
Law Library and in the Foreign Law Division of the Library of Congress.
Readers may also be interested in consulting commentaries by German
bureaucrats. These commentaries are authoritative insofar as they were pre­
pared by the same people who had drafted the decrees. Examples of such
works are Stuckarfs Rassenpflege and Oermann’s Sozialausgleichsabgabe.

NEWSPAPERS AND PERIODICALS


Two newspapers published in German-occupied territories contain an
extraordinary amount of information about Jewish matters. The papers
are the Krakauer Zeitung (published in identical editions in Krakow and
Warsaw) and the Donauzeitung (published in Belgrade). They are avail­
able in the Newspaper Division of the Library of Congress.
One Nazi periodical was devoted entirely to Jewish affairs: Die Juden-
frage. Its confidential annex (Vertrauliche Beilage) contains interesting in­
formation about anti-Jewish action in Germany and other countries. Die
Judenfrage may be consulted in the Library of Congress and the YI VO
Institute.
The Jewish communities in Berlin, Vienna, and Prague published sep­
arate editions of the Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt. The counterpart of that
paper in Poland was the Gazeta Zydowska. In the Netherlands it was the
Joodsche Weekblad, in Romania the Gazeta Evreiasca. Copies of the Jewish
ghetto press are on deposit at the YIVO Institute.

1332 APPENDIX C
Authors of published works, and witnesses submitting statements or testimony are gener­
ally not cited in this index. Signatories and recipients of orders, letters, or reports, even it
mentioned only in footnotes, are listed here.

Aarhus 430 Adler, Fritz 144n


Abetz, Otto 582,649-50,652,658,666n, Adler, Lothar 144n
673n, 679,683n, 689n, 701, 1163, Adler (ship) 1053n
1173 AEG (Allgemeine Elektrizitätsgesellschaft)
Abortions. See Women 638,943n, 947,1261
Abrial, Jean Marie 663 Agudath (organization of Orthodox Jews)
Abromeit, Franz 582, 761-62, 882 183,521, 1274
Abs, Hermann J. 1268 Ahlwardt, Hermann 15-17,410
Abshagen (Institut fur medizinische Zoologie) Ahnenerbe 1012-13
373n Ahnert, Horst 685
AbwehrBlatter 47n Air raids
Achamer-Pifrader, Humbert 383, 395n anticipated 495, 893,978-79
Achenbach, Ernst 650,666n, 1157, 1173 effects of494-95, 538, 893,902n, 1214-
Ackerman, Leonard 121 In 15
Ackermann, Joseph (Civil Administration, Jewish pleas for 902,910-11, 1215-18,
Luxembourg) 633 1221
Ackermann, Joseph (Swiss Bankers Associa­ Akiba (traditionalist religious group) 530n,
tion) 1275n 531
Acmecctca 389 Akmechet. See Acmecetca
Adamovic, Franz von 880 Alatri, Lionello 759n
Adenauer, Konrad 1252n, 1266, 1268, 1269n Abania 575, 725-26

1333
Albert, Wilhelm 231,357η Antignac, Joseph 646
Albrecht, Erich 138n, 142n-43n, 463n, 580, Antonescu, Ion
588n,614,1140,1194n emigration policy 845-46
Aldemev 665n expulsion policy (Transnistria) 819,821,
Aleppo 1222-23 824,826-27, 847-51
Alfieri, Dino 663n, 691 n deportation policy 841
Alexianu, Gheorghe 36In, 380n, 388, 389n, fate 1163,1173
815,828 forced labor 833n
Algeria 661-62 marking of Jews 838
Alibert, Raphael 646,664n Odessa 313-156, 389-90
Allers, Dietrich 96In, 1173 position and personality 812-16
Alletag (finance official, Ostland) 376n taxes 835n
Alliance Assurance Company of London 101, Antonescu, Mihai 813n, 814-16,821,828,
103 835n, 836,841,844-45,852-53,
Allianz-Versicherung (firm) 35,1282-84 1163,1173
Allwörden, Wilhelm 401 Antwerp 636,642,644
Almansi, Dante 713 Apartments. See Housing
Alpers, Friedrich 55, 385 Apfelbaum, Dawid 538
Alsace 574,635,647,651 Apor, Vilmos 97
Altenburg, Günther 118, 744η, 748, 789η, Appeals 825-26
900,908η,913η, 1173 Arad 841
Altenloh, Wilhelm 541 Arajs, Viktors. See Arajs, Viktor
Altenstadt. See Schmidt von Altenstadt Arajs, Viktor 299n
Alter, Wiktor 1141η Archival holdings 1325-27
Altmeier, lakob 1160η Argentina 1177-78,1182-83,1185,1187
ALTREU (Allgemeine Treuhandstelle für die Arlt (Economy Ministry) 864n, 865n
Jüdische Auswanderung) 139 Arlt, Fritz 1008
Altstötter, Josef 63, 1173 Armament Inspectorates and Commands
Aluerz (Aluminiumerz-Bergbau und Industrie 368-70
A.G.) 864 Armament Ministry 53, 55
Alytus 298 Armenians 351,813, 1147n
Ambros, Otto 991-92,996n, 1159,1172-73 Armia Krajowa (Home Army in Poland) 513-
Ambrosio, Vittorio 692 14,534,538
Amend, Karl 957η Armia Ludowa. See Gwardia Ludowa
American Friends Service Committee 683 Army Field Gendarmerv 302n, 308n, 384,
American Gathering/ Federation of Jewish 388n, 676,750-51,753,820
Holocaust Survivors 1274 Army Secret Field Police 190,288, 308-309,
American Jewish Committee 1210 323,384,386,387,394n, 751,753,
American Jewish Conference 1129-30,1143, 1012n, 1074n, 1096n
1153,1205,1210 Army territorial commands 280
American Jewish Congress 1129,1131η, Belgium and Northern France 637
1286, Croatia 726
American Jewish Joint Distribution Commit­ Denmark 589
tee 658,670n, 1233n, 1237,1265n, District II 330n
1274 District VII 352
Amstelbank 104 District VIII 330n, 981
Amsterdam 601,612-14,618,621,625-27, District IX 333n
1124 District XVII 330n
Ananiev 339 District XX 330n, 347
Ancker, Edinger 438 District XXI 190, 330n, 55In
Ancona 22 France 647-49
Andorfer, Herbert 736 Generalgouvernement 198-99, 520n, 537
Andorra 689n Greece 726
Andre, Fritz 115n, 119n, 494n, 638n Italy 711-12
Angers 676 Netherlands 613-14
Anielewicz, Mordechai 530-31, 536, 538 Salonika 739
Annecy 692 Serbia 726-27
Ansei, Werner 935 USSR (occupied) 359, 370
Ansmann, Heinz 109n, 11 On, 111, 605 Army units
Antal, Istvin 879, 898 Army Group B 372n

1334 INDEX
Army Group Center 332, 362, 366, 385n 154th Reserve Division 520n
Army Group E 726, 752n, 754 207th Security Division 386n, 1096n
Army Group E 726, 752n 213th Security^ Division 385n, 1074n
Army Group North 362n 221st Security Division 294n, 309, 3 lOn
Army Group South 332, 336n , 385n 281st Security' Division 322n, 331,381,
Armeegruppe Wohler 851-82 386n
2d Army 347, 372n 444th Security Division 387n
3d Army 190n 454th Securitv Division 294n, 318n, 36In,
4th Army 372n 375n, 38In, 1074n
6th Army 308n, 31 On, 334n, 387n, 635 999th Storm Division Rhodos 754
9th Army 372n 202d Replacement Brigade 309n
11 th Armv 297n, 305n, 309n, 311,331 n, 677th Engineer Regiment 31 On
332, 334, 356n, 362n, 375n-76n, 65th Infantry Regiment 333n
38In, 387, 388n, 820 350th Infantry' Regiment 309
12th Army 726 433d Infantry' Regiment 733n
14th Armv 190, 721 528th Infantry' Regiment 332
17th Army 298n, 308, 309, 332 727th Infantry' Regiment 310
1st Panzer Army 332 734th Infantry Regiment 733n
2d Panzer Army 725-26, 752n 1017 Infantry Regiment 753n
3d Panzer Army 394n 2d Parachute Pursuit Regiment 715
4th Panzer Army 305 836th Rifle Battalion 339n
5th Panzer Army 687 449th Signal Battalion 731
Panzer Army Africa 687 521st Signal Battalion 731
Corps Group Kirchner 852n Army units (British) 1050
Corps Group Micth 852n Army units (Hungarian) 311-12,406, 871
XVII Corps 347n,852n Army units (Italian) 687,689,690,692, 737n
XXIX Corps 347, 362n Army units (Jewish Brigade) 1228
XXX Corps 308, 309n, 335, 336n Army units (Romanian) 312-15
XXXXIX Corps 347n Army units (Slovak) 406
XL Corps 852n Army units (Soviet) 1049n, 1050
XL1I Corps 362n Armyansk 309, 1095n
XLIV Corps 387n Arnim, Hans-Jürgen 687
XLIX Corps 852n Amswalde 35, 36
LXV Corps 732n Arrow Cross (Hungarian party') 898,915,
LXXXVI11 Corps 618,619n 919n
XV Mountain Corps 765n, 766n Artemovsk 298n, 387
XXI Mountain Corps 752n Arthur Andersen (firm) 1283
XXII Mountain Corps 750n, 75In, 752n, Artists, musicians, writers 88-89,621
753,890n Artukovic, Andrija 756, 1173
XLIX Mountain Corps 852n Aschaffenburg 34
22d Infantry Division 333n Asche, Kurt 582,637, 643,644n, 1174
52d Infantry Division 31 On Aschmann, Gottfried 1093n
99th Infantry' Division 308n Asmusscn, Hans 1136-37
113th Infantry Division 727 “Asociáis” 651 n, 923, 1067
170th I nfantry Division 312 Asschcr, Abraham 611,616-20,625
251st Infantry' Division 319n Assen 620-21. See also Westerbork
295th Infantry' Division 347n Avsicurazioni Generali (firm) 1282n, 1283-84
299th Infantry Division 362n Astra Werke 260
339th Infantry' Division 336, 1074n Atachi 823-25
342d Infantry’ Division 727, 731 Athens 750
704th Infantry’ Division 732n, 733n Atherton, Ray 1206n
707th Infantry Div ision 310 Attlee, Clement 1228
714th Infantry Division 732n Audi (firm) 1285n
718th Infantrv Div ision 759n Audinghcn 642
764th Infantrv Division 732n Auerbach, Philip 1250-51
22d lager Division 890n Auerswald, Heinz 228n, 231-32, 236, 240n,
69th lager Division 394n 241,250n, 260n, 261, 270, 273n, 522,
101st Light Infantry' Division 362n 935n, 1174
1 st Mountain Division 751 n Aumcier, Hans 966, 1038, 1212
24th Panzer Division 914 Auschwitz (camp)

INDEX 1335
arrival procedure 587n, 1036-41 Bach-Zelewski, Erich von dem
bombed 1046, 1214-15 postwar statements and täte 343-44, 1080,
confiscations 1014, 1016, 1021-22, 1024, 1104-5, 1110, 1149, 1169, 1174
1026 wartime role 294n, 302, 337, 375n, 383n,
construction 939-51 386,1200
as destination of transports from Bachi, Armando 723
Belgium 645 Bachmann, Hans 1055
Bergen-Belsen 1039 Backe, Herbert 53, 55, 82, 149n, 1174
Berlin 482,984 Bad Tolz 35
Bialystok District 1309 Baden 83n, 180,651,665, 1250n
concentration camps 472 Bader, Paul 726-27, 737n
Croatia 760, 762, 765 Badoglio, Pietro 711, 749
East Prussia 504 Baeck, Leo 180-83, 185-87,456n, 466,478,
France 672-73,685,687, 700 479n, 481 n, 892,1117-18,1248n
Hungary 894 Baenfer, Martin 80
Italy 716, 718, 722-23 Baer, Hans J. See Bar, Hans J.
labor camps 569 Baer, Richard 966-67,974, 1048η, 1174
Lodz 544-45 Baetz (major) 739n
Lublin concentration camp 984 Bagölyuk 900
Netherlands 620,628 Bagrianov, Ivan 1163
Norway 587 Baia-Mare 892
Rhodes 755 Baier, Hans 559n, 563n, 564n, 929,1174
Salonika 745 Baker, George 1251 n
Slovakia 785 Bakhchisarav 381, 388n
Theresienstadt 447n, 635,984 Baky, László 880,899,909,911 -12,1174
Upper Silesia 256, 504, 1309 Balbo, Italo 706
Wartheland 504 Ballensiefen, Heinz 285, 880
estimated Jewish dead 958, 1320 Balta 828n, 850
gas supply 951-57,960 Balp 312, 334,339
gassings and dead bodies 941 -42,1038- Bamberg (city) 483-84
39, 1041-42,1044 Bamberg, Georg 365n
Gypsies 1072-73, 1212 Baneasa 814
industry 983-84,987, 1282n Bang, Paul 31, 53, 81,175
inmates 472n, 940,943,973-8,995-99, Bangert (Justice Ministry) 583n
1020,1022 Bank Austria 128 In
liquidation of camp 1046-49 Bank der Deutschen Arbeit 633n, 641 n
location 920,938 Bank Deutscher Länder 1268
medical experiments 1004, 1008-11, 1012 Bank Julius Bär & Co. 1275n
orchestras 977 Bank of Manhattan 104
organization and personnel 939,965-71, Bar 830
973 Bär, Hans J. 1275n
revolts 1039, 1047-48 Bar Kochba, Simon 21 n
secrecy, rumors, and reports 64In, 627, Barandon, Paul 595
695, 788,881,894-95,1028-32, Barak, Zvi 1275n
1039,1203, 1212 Baranow 1047
selections 976, 1037,1039 Baranowicze 310, 369, 393-94,405, 1312
Auschwitz (city) 991, 103In Baranyai, Lipot 863
Ausnit, Max 835 Barbie, Klaus 698n
Aussig 109, 111 Bares 890n
Aust, Herbert 61 In, 645n Barcza, György 877
Australia 1194n, 1265n Bardossy, László 856, 870-71, 1174
Austria 123n, 128n, 1128, 1135n, 1170, Bardroff, Max 605n, 608n
1228-29, 1230n-33,1238,1248n, Bargen, Werner von 579, 582,637,642-44,
1258-59, 1284, 1287-88,1321 1174
Austrians 601, 733, 737, 962 Bärlad 852
Axa (insurance firm) 1284 Barlasz, Chaim 1201,1221
Azerbaijanians 351 Barozi, Gheorghc 390n
Barry (dog) 963-64
Baatz, Bernhard 730 Barth, Heinrich 199
Babtai 298 ßartha, Karoly 866

INDEX
Barthélemy, Joseph 646,658n, 668n confiscations 1016
Baruch, Bernard 1131 construction and layout 933-34,936-37
ßasarabeanu, Gr. C. (Romanian Council of count of dead 958,959n, 1230
Ministers) 85In as destination of transports 504, 512, 518,
Basching (WVHA) 928 844,958
Basel 105, 174, 1201 gassings and bodies 1028, 1940-41, 1043
BASF (firm) 1285 liquidation of camp 1045
Bastianini, Giuseppe 69 In, 693 orchestra 1035
Batz, Rudolf 290 personnel 960,962,980
Bauder, Theodor 197 secrecy, rumors, and reports 514, 541 n,
Bauer, Otto 552 1031, 1034, 1203
Bauer (Reichsbahn, Brussels) 648 Belzcc (labor camp) 256, 258n, 259
Baugeschaft Konrad Segnitz 946 Belzec (town) 514
Baum, Herbert 465n Ben-Gurion, David 1216n, 1224, 1266
Baumann, Hubert 99n Benda, Adalbert 982n
Baumert, Paul 1027n Bender, Horst 471,685n, 1082, 1174
Baur, André 668n, 669,679 Bender (Finance Ministry) 685n
Baur, Friedrich vom 1174 Bendorf-Sayn 467-68
Baur(Lodz) 257n Bene, Otto 582,616-17,618n, 619n, 623n-
Bavaria 83n, 172, 180, 188n, 1250-51 24n,625-26,627n-28n, 1174
Baver (firm) 1285 Benthin, Adolf 554n
Bayer, Friedrich 331 Bentivegny, Franz-Eccard von 278
Bavrhoftcr, Walter 80, 1023n Bcnvenisti, Misu 841
Beaune la Rolande 666-67,675,678 Bcnzler, Felix 582, 727, 729-30, 734-36
Bebenroth, Erich 428, 777 Berard, Leon 660
Becher, Kurt 79In, 882,886, 1225 Berdichev 296, 303
Bechtolsheim, Gustav Freiherr von Berenson, Bernard 717-18
Mauchenheim, genannt von 310, Berezov ka 390, 1074, 1316
1073n, 1170 Berg (camp) 586
Beck, Ludw ig 54 Bergen, Diego von 683n
Beck, Oskar 442n-43n Bergen-Belsen 624,628, 700, 722n, 723, 745,
Beck (Sauckel office) 462n 748,903, 1050-51,1053-54
Becker, August 345n-46n Berger, Gottlob
Becker, Eugen 167, 168n Dirlewangcr unit 258n
Becker, Helmut 1157 East Ministry^ 382
Becker, Henrvk 522 fate 1156, 1174
Becker, Herbert 204 financing the SS 202n
Becker (OKW) 279n on Hans Frank 198n
Beckerle, Adolf Heinz 581-82, 794-95, 798, Hungary'875-76,917n
802,804n, 806-7, 1174 propaganda activities 1092
Bçdzin 217, 570 Slovakia 768, 790
Beekmann, Anneke H. 124In SS Main Office 198n, 201,400n
Beger, Bruno 1013 Berger, Hugo-Fritz 80,603n
Behr, Max von 639 Berger, Wolfgang 285
Bcisicgel, Philipp 81, 353n, 459n Bcrgmann, Heinrich 1074n
Belarus. See White Russia Bergmann, Helmut 578,691n, 692n, 710n,
Belaya Tscrkov 294n 747η, 748η, 749n, 867n, 875n
Belev, Alexander 795, 803-6 Bcrgmann (Estonia) 1074n
Belgium Bergmaycr (Secret Field Police) 75In
developments in 635-45, 1114 Bergson, Peter 1210
Rwanda and 1294 Bcrgwcrks Aktiebolaget Freja. See Frcya
statistics 636,640,645, 1128, 1321 Bcringer (East Ministry) 381
war crimes trials 1160, 1163, 1176-77, Berle, Adolf A. 1202n
1188,1191 Berlin
Belgrade 729, 736-37, 1119 apartments 495-96
Belin, Ferdinand I^ammot 1212 deportations 215,365n, 466,477-83,984
Beim, René 646 Jewish community organizations 181,465-
ßcllwidt, Walter 537 66,478-81
Bctecc (death camp) Jewish population statistics 156,477,480,
arrival procedure 1035-36 1119

INDEX 1337
Jewish star 178 Birkenau. See Auschwitz
labor 458,460,481-82 Bischof, Max 232, 239n, 260-61,266
Lichtenberg protest 488-89 Bischolf, Karl 940n, 944n-45n, 948n, 950n,
Berliner, Cora 187 965,967n, 974, 1009n, 1028, 1044n,
Berliner Handels-Gesellschaft 492-93, 1086n 1048n
Berliner Illustrierte 215 Bismarck, Prince Otto von 763
Bermuda Conference 1208 Biss, Andreas 905n
Bemburg 931,963 Bitburg 1137-38
Bemdorff, Emil 285,472n BiuletynInformacyjny 56In
Bemdt, Alfred-Ingemar 15 In, 173n Black market 226, 236, 260-61,266,269-
Bernstein, Philip 1234n 70,273,875,976. See also Smuggling
Bershad 827 Blankart et Cie 104
Bertelsen, Aage 597 Blanke, Kurt 648
Bertram, Adolf Johannes Cardinal 179 Blankenburg, Werner961,962n, lOlOn,
Bertram (Sonderfiihrer) 868n 1011.1175
Beslegic (Croatian government) 756 Blaschke, Hanns 905
Bessarabia 295, 300, 361, 388,808-11, 818- Blaskowitz, Johannes 191,198,1157n
24,831-82,851 Blizyn 559,564n
Best, Werner Blobel, Paul 290, 328,406-407,1042,1157,
Denmark 582, 589-99 1161.1175
fate 1163, 1174 Bloch, Albert 607
France 648,652n, 671 n Bloch, Lippman 607
Security Police 174, 282,411 Bloch, Rolf 1276n
Bethlen, Béla 896 Blocked funds 137-43, 244,260,493,612,
Bettauer, Hugo 26 658,801,886,1246
Beuttel, Kurt 520n, 558n Blomberg, Werner von 54,88
Beyer (lieutenant, OKW) 796n Blome, Kurt 66,1175
Biala Podlaska 570n Blücher, Franz 1161
Bialystok (city) 296,1119 Blücher, Wippert von 584n
Bialystok (distria) Blum, Abrasza 531
deportations from 504, 507,958,1073 Blum, Marcel 653n
German administration 361, 383n, 540-41 Blumberg, David 1209
Polish population 317n Blume, Walter 290,1175
shootings 301 BMW (Bayrische Motorwerke) 1285
statistics 296,1309 B’nai Brith International 1274,1286
Bialystok (ghetto) 511,541,563,111 In Bobelis, Jurgis 32ln, 356n
Biberstein, Ernst 290-91, 323,1102,1174 Bobermin, Hans 929,987,1159n, 1175
Bichelonne, Jean 646-47 Bobruysk 297, 299, 376n
Biddle, Francis 1142 Bock, Fedor von 1175
Biebow, Hans Bock, Wilhelm 290,477,662n
confiscations 25In, 1014, 1018n Bockeiberg, Alfred von 648,649n, 70ln
deportations from Lodz Ghetto 516n, 542- Bockhom, Wilhelm 778n
45 Boda, Emö 884n
deportations to Lodz Ghetto 271 Bode (captain) 37ln
fate 1174 Boden, Hans August Constantin 870, 880,
food supply 265n, 268 887
Kulmhof 1014, 1043 Boegner, Marc 684n
labor utilization 257n, 259n Boehm, Johannes 523
looting 570n Boekh, von (Civil Administration, Nether­
position 231 lands) 603n
Bielfeld, Harald 749n Boemelburg, Carl 650
Bierkamp, Walter 204, 290, 560, 567n, 568, Boepple, Emst 196, 519n, 548n, 549
1175 Bogdanov (Soviet Embassy, Berlin) 230
Bijenkorf (firm) 603n Bogdanovca 388-89
Bilfinger, Rudolf284,441,497n, 1175 Bogdanovka. See Bogdanovca
Binder, Paul 98n, 99n, 12In, 122n Boger, Wilhelm 1212
Binding, Karl 930n Bogomolov, Alexej 1141 n
Binger, Ludwig 507 Bohemia-Moravia. See Protektorat
Birk, Louis 489 Bohle, Emst Wilhelm 70, 578, 580n
Birkeland, Paul M. 1213n Böhm, Franz Josef 1267-68

INDEX
Böhmcker, Heinrich 609n, 610-11 Bracht, Fritz 195,939n, 942, 1029,1090,
Böhme, Franz 726-27, 731-32, 1157n, 1175 1175
Böhme, Hans Joachim 341,355n Brack, Viktor 932-33,937n, 960,961, 1010,
Böhme, Horst 383,496n 1027, 1175
Böhmische Escompte Bank 94-95,98n, 99 Bracken, Edmund 225n
Böhmische Union Bank 99 ßradfield, Michael 1282
Bohr, Niels 596 ßradfisch, Otto 290, 1175
Böhrsch, Herbert 789n Braeckow, Ernst 147n
Bohumin 766,902 Braemcr, Walter 366n
Boikat (Grodno) 570n Bralley, Louis 646
Bojilov, Dobri 795 Brand, Joel 901,903-4, 1219-26, 1302n
Boley, Gottfried 438,441 Brandenburg (euthanasia Station) 931,963
Bologna 709,718n, 720n Brandes, Georg 32n
Bolzano 723 Brandt, Josef 199
Bömelburg, Carl 650 Brandner, Johann 751 n
Bonner, Egon 363n Brandt, Karl 931, 1003, 1004n, 1175
Bonnet, Georges 412 Brandt, Karl-Georg 523
Boos, Geza 1213 Brandt, Rudolf
Bor copper mines 867 concentration camps 927n, 960n, 969n,
Bor-Komorowski, Tadeusz 513 972,998, 1045n
Borcescu, Traian 833n confiscations 1015, 1018n, 1023n
Bordeaux 675-77 fate 1175
Borer, Thomas 1275 H ungar)' 888n
Borger, Wilhelm 81 Korherr report 1304
Borgo San Dalmazzo 697 Kube attair 400n
Borgonini-Duca, Francesco 907 labor utilization 564n, 569n
Boris III (King of Bulgaria) 795,802-3, 805- medical experiments 1007, 1009, 1012,
6 1013n
Boris, Andre 661 Minsk 400n
Borisov 330 Romania 813n
Bonspol 349 Theresienstadt 457n
Bormann, Martin Warsaw ghetto ruins 539n
corruption talks 251 Brandt (Kreishauptmann, Pulawy) 21 ln,
expulsions 213n 255n,1064n
fate 1175 Brasch, Friedrich 378n
“Final Solution" 415,417n Bra$ov 833n
housing 168n, 169n, 495 Bratislava 430, 775, 791, 112ln
Hungary' 875 ßrauchitsch, Walter von 54, 191, 256, 278,
judicial proceedings 470n, 472n, 1077 288,63ln, 654, 70ln, 1162, 1175
Netherlands 624n Brauer, Bruno 726
pogroms 46, 178n Braun (Foreign Office) 579
position 56 Braune, Fritz 290
Przemysl incident 554n Braune, Werner 290, 311 n, 1161, 1175
Borne, Ludwig 12 Braune-Krikau (major) 258n
Boryslav 1126 Braus, Karl 992,994,995n
Bosch (Robert Bosch firm) 35 Bräutigam, Otto 357, 363-64, 381, 392n,
Bosnak, Franz 77In 822n, 828n, 870n, 933, 1079n, 1176
Bosnia-Herzegovina (postwar) 1290n Brawer, Dawid 355n
Bosshammer, Friednch 425, 582, 711 Brazil 1185, 1191
Bothmann, Hans 960, 1045, 1175 Bredow, Leberecht von 541
Bottai, Giuseppe 706 Breendonck 643
Böttcher, Herbert 204,520, 568, 1175 Brchm (Stabshauptamt) 552n
Boue, Lucien 646 Breithaupt, Franz 201
Bouhler, Philip 56,930,932,961, 1010, 1175 Bremenburg, A. (SS) 957n
Bousquet, René 646,673,681,682n, 684n, Brenecke, Karl 662n
685,690,695, 1175 Brcncr, Maurice 695n
Bouthillicr, Yves 646,658n, 664n, 668n Brenner, Harro 588n
Bovcnsicpen, Otto 477 Brenner (Order Police, Galicia) 518n-19n
Boycott (anti-German) 41 Brentano, Heinrich von 1271-72
Boycott (anti-Jewish) 35,95-97, 181 Breslau 156, 179, 195

INDEX 1339
Brest-Litovsk 297, 301, 369-70,406, Bukovma 295, 312, 361,808-11,818-19,
1312η 822,849,851
Breyer, Hans-Joachim 278, 348, 350,662n Bulgaria
Breyhan, Christian 585n postwar developments 1128, 1177, 1207,
Bridoux, Eugcnc-Maric 646 1238,1240,1243,1248-49n,1261
Briese, Paul 996 wartime developments 463,793-808
Brinckmann, Fritz 1260n Billow, Bernhard Wilhelm von 578
Brinkmann, Rudolf 53, 81, 125,126n Billow-Schwante, Vicco K. A. von 65n
Brinon, Fernand de 646-47,671 Buna. See I.G. Farbcn/Auschwitz
Britsch, Walter 104n Bund (Jewish socialist organization) 521
Brix, Frirz 540 Bundke, Otto 539n
Brizgys, Vincent 316, 1176 Bunjes, Hermann 70In
Brno 474 Buradescu, Sever 83 In
Brocke, Carl 284 Burbock, Wilhelm 925
Bronfman, Edgar M. 1274, 1275n, 1277-78, Biirckel, Josef 96n, 167,413,414, 574,647,
1288n 651
Bro§teanu, Emil 340n, 390n, 822n Burckhardt, Roger 743
Brown, Boverie et Cie. 605,638 Bureau de secours national 658
Brucher Kohlenwerke A.G. 109-11 Burg, Avraham 1275n, 1277,1279n
Brück, August 947n Burger, Anton 454, 582,628n, 753,1176
Brüggemann, Max 992 Burger, Wilhelm Max 545n, 927n, 929, 1014,
Brunhoff, Kurt Heinrich Eduard 880 1026
Brunner, Alois Biirgin, Ernst 992
Berlin 481 Burgsdorff, Carl Ludwig 199
fate 1176 Biirkner, Leopold 278
France 582,650,668n, 695n, 698-99 Burmeister, Wilhelm 378n
Salonika 582, 740, 744 Burzio, Giuseppe 779, 787
Slovakia 582, 790 Busch, Alfred 119n
Vienna 450,466,476 Bu§ila, Constantin 815
Brunner, Anton 476, 1176 Business enterprises (Jewish). See also Statis­
Brunner Verzinkerei/Brüder Boblick 458n, tics; and under names of individual
1086n firms
Bruns, Georg Viktor 578 agencies 9, 123
Bruns (Ostland) 374n, 375n agriculture 122,633,707n, 708,771,816,
Brüsseler Treuhandgesellschaft 639 862,865
Brussels 636,642,644 Aryanizations and liquidations 92-132,
Brüx 109 245-49,603-8,640,653-58,663,
Bryansk 386 669, 757, 770-71, 798, 816, 861-65,
Brzesc. See Brest-Litovsk 885-87
Brzezinka. See Auschwitz banks 99,603
Brzeziny. See Löwenstadt coal and steel 100-120
Buch, Walter 38n, 42, 56 defined 91,121
Bucharest 809n, 821 department stores 93,124,603,608
Buchenwald 38n,614,700,1049-51, 1055, foreign 126
1073 “good will” 99
Bucher, Rudolf 332 industrial 125,640,655, 832-33
Budak, Mile 756 real estate 125, 127,639-41, 728n, 772,
Budapest 890,893-94,908-19,1237 816,832
Budzyn 559, 566 restitution and indemnification 1244-46,
Buffarini, Guido 712 1254
Buhl, Vilhelm 589 retail 125,914
Biihler, Albert 603n trustee administration 125, 245-49,638-
Bühler, Josef 39,633,653-57, 728, 746,885
confiscatioas 570n Busko 211
fate 1148, 1163, 1176 Bussard (ship) 1053n
“Final Solution71420-23, 502-3, 512, Bussiere, Amedee 646
519n Bussmann, Walter 685n
Maydanek (Lublin camp) 1046n Btitefisch, Heinrich 992,996n, 1159, 1172,
position 196 1176
Bührmann, Robert 246 Butkunas, Andrius 32In

INDEX
Butdar-Brandenfels, Horse 867n Ccrniup 296, 312, 818-19, 823-25, 1121n
Byelorussia. See White Russia Chaillet, Pierre 683
Byrodc, Henry A. 125In Chalons’sur-Marne 676
Chanler, William 1144n
Cado, Henri 68 In Channel Islands 665
Cadogan, Alexander 1142 Charleroi 636,642-43
Calara$i 817 Charvat (Police President, Prague) 172
Callmann, Rudolf 1251 n Ch^ciny 229
Calotescu, Comcliu 815, 824-25, 1176 Chelm 21 In, 1031
Cambodia 1293-94 Chelmno. See Kulmhof
Canada 1237 Chemnitz 188n
Canaris, Konstantin 541,637,644n, 1176 Chernigov 299
Canaris, Wilhelm 278,288n, 292,348, 350, Chernovtsy. See Cernau^i
384,1176 Chicti (camp) 709
Cancicov, Mircea 813n, 815 Children. See also Inheritance; Schools
Cannes 690 adoptions 707
Cannon, Cavendish W. 840n, 1206n in camps 681,759-60, 1036-37
Capon, Agosto 723 food rations 152,480
Carbidwerke Dcutsch-Matrei A.G. 94 emigration 853
Carda$, Agricola 815 exchange for Germans proposed 1208
Cardosi, Clara Pirani 723n in ghettos 233, 234, 270, 542
Carita, Mario 717n hidden 683, 1239, 1241
Carl, Heinrich 391-92,405n killed 294, 323, 340,405n, 736-37,931,
Carlucci, Frank 1172n 963,1036-37,1066, 1158
Carol II (King of Romania) 812 Mischlinge 147-48, 166, 169,435
Carpatho-Ukrainc 892,900 orphans, orphanages, and shelters 514, 525,
Carstersen, Pay 438 645,684,695,697-99, 790, 849, 851,
Carter, James E. 1141 893,903
Casdorf (Finance Ministry ) 80,939n, 106In seized 386n, 514, 542n, 644,661,681 -84,
Castellanc 693 698-99
Castruccio, Giuseppe 747n transports 624-25,678-79,681 -84, 780,
Cate, Cornelius Ludovicus ten 611 1115
Cathala, Pierre 646 Chile 667, 1188
Catholic Church. See also Vatican diplomacy Chisinau 296,818-19, 823
Croatia 759n Chmielewski, Karl 621
France 682-83 Chorazycki, Julian 981
Germany 445,489n Chorin, Ferenc 887n
Hungary' 857,860, 888-89, 899 Christian X (King of Denmark) 596
Italy 716, 718 Christiansen, Friedrich 614
Lithuania 316 Christiansen, Werner 956
medieval 6-10 Christmann, Kurt 290
Netherlands 6l9n, 625n Christmas 311,342, 389,629, 1204
Poland 545-46, 548n Christov, Docho 795
Slovakia 768,781,787 Church Ministry' 44
United States 40 Churches 69-70,618-19,624n, 625n, 776,
Catlos, Frantisek 767, 1176 779, 796n, 857,860,899. See also Cath­
Caucasus, Caucasians 351 olic Church; Protestant churches
Cavendish-Bentinck, Victor 1216 Churchill, Winston 1139, 1142, 1196, 1225
Celler, Emanuel 1236 Chvalkovskv, Frantisek Karel 118
Cemeteries 233, 240, 375,816, 1134 Ciano, Galeazzo 663n, 690-91, 703, 705,
Center of Organizations of Holocaust Sur­ 709-10,760, 1093n
vivors in Israel 1274 Ciechanow 243
Ccntral-Vcrcm deutscher Staatsbürger jüdi­ Cimon (Einsatzkommando, Luxembourg)
schen Glaubens 47 634n
Centmi Vnrin Zeitung 47n,48 Clahes, Dietrich 495
Ccntrala Flvreilor din Romania 834, 835n, Claims Conference. See Conference on Jewish
836-37,842 Material Claims against Germany
Centre de D«x:umentation Juive Contcmpo- Class (Krcishauptmann, Sanok) 51 On
raine 1133n Clauberg,Carl 1008-9, lOlOn, 1163, 1176
Cematescu, Constantin 838n Clay, Lucias 1159

INDEX
Clejan, Hermann 838n gold, jewelry, watches 251,377, 586,629,
Clermont-Ferrand 665n, 1124 689, 714, 1015,1019, 1022-26, 1042
Clinton, William 1296 pensions and insurance policies 492-93
Clodius, Karl 580, 863 real estate 493-94,641,706, 832
Cluj 892,902η, 903 Conolly,Tom 1229
Coelln, Karl-Giinther von 130, 583n Consistoire Central des Israélites de France
Coha-Bank 104 657-58,680,682
Cohen, David 611-12,619,625 Constantinescu, C. Al. Atta 815
Cohn, Conrad 187 Constanta 853
Cohn, lise 187 Conti, Leonardo
Collective guilt 1136-37 food rations 152
Colli, Carlo 735 Dr. Hagen 548
Colmar 651 Jewish mental patients 467
Cologne 156, 215,473,486 policy toward Poles 1069
Colombo, Francesco 717n position 53, 56, 1003
Comité dAssistence aux Réfugiés (CAR) 668 sterilizations 437n
Commerzbank 93n, 494 suicide 1156,1176
Communists 309, 314, 397, 521, 525n, 530- Continentale Bank637-37
31,534,538,922-23 Continentale Wasserwerkgcsellschaft 946
Compagnie des Mines de Bor 867n Converts to Christianity 619. See also “Jews”
Compïègne 671 -73 defined
Compliance (as strategy) 24-25 Bulgaria 796-97, 803
Concentration camps 472,922-30,964-81, Germany and Austria 62,482n
984n, 985. See also under names of indi­ Hungary 857-60, 888n, 889,918
vidual camps Italy 707n, 708
Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Netherlands 619,623
Germany 1242η, 1260n, 1266-67, Poland 236
1272-74,1287 Romania 811-12
Confiscations (geographic) Slovakia 781-83
Belgium 639,641 Copenhagen 1123-24
Bulgaria 801 Coradello, Aldo 1123
Croatia 764 Corfu 575, 725-26, 752-53
France 701-2 Comides, Wilhelm 103 In
Germany 490-501 Corruption 251, 259, 322,406-7,971-73,
Greece and Rhodes 745, 750-51 1017
Hungary 886,919 Cosauçi 82In, 823
Italy 706-7 Cosenza (camp) 709
Luxembourg 633 Coulon, Albert Karl 230n
Netherlands 629-31 Cowles, Gardner 1140n
Norway 585, 586 Cramer, Hans 356n, 374
Poland 242-51, 550, 570-71 Craushaar, Harry von 548n, 637
Romania 831-32 Creditanstalt (Vienna). See Österreichische
Serbia 727 Creditanstalt
Slovakia 771-72 Credit Suisse Group 1275,1277,1279n
Tunisia 689 Cremasto 754
USSR (occupied) 374-80 Cremese, Cesare 692
Confiscations (nature of) Crete 575, 725-26, 752,754
agricultural property 706-8, 771, 831, 862, Cretzianu, Alexandre 813n, 815,835n
865 Crimea 330, 387,1074
“abandoned property” 244, 570-71,629- Crimea-Tauria (Generalbczirk) 358
31,722,746,831-32,1078-79 Croatia 463,674, 736, 756-66,1074, 1261
art objects 629, 701 Cronç, Gheorghe 815
bank deposits 377,493,629,801 Cropp, Fritz 62, 1003
claims and credits 490-91, 728 Crvenkovic (Croatian Government) 756,
in death camps 1013-27, 1049 764n
distribution of property 245-48,494-500, Csaky, Istvan 868n
639,641, 702, 728, 732, 750, 865, Csatay, Lajos 879
1015-27 Cservenka 867n
furniture 248,499-500,630,639, 702 Cuba 1197
furs 250,64In, 772, 1014, 1018,1026 Cuenca (Jewish physician, Salonika) 743

1342 INDEX
Cukierman, Yitzchak 525n, 531,532, 536n, Hungary 582, 882
539n Italy 582,711,717
Cuptor, I. (Romania) 838n Security' Police 414n
Curfews 171,615,642,671,889,914 Danulescu, Constantin 815
Cvanamid Corporation 952 Danzig 192, 195,247η, 1321
Cyprus 2 In, 1234 Darda 890n
Cyrenaica 21 n, 709n Dardel, Gustav von 597
Czechoslovakia. See also Carpatho-Ukraine; Dargel, Paul 58,402
Prague; Prorcktorat; Slovakia; and un­ Dargs (East Ministry') 870n
der individual cities Darlan, Francois 646,658n, 668n, 684n
Jewish population statistics 1128, 1240, Darquier de Pcllepoix, I^ouis 646-47,670n,
1321 678,680-81,1176
restitution 1246-47 Darre, Walter 53, 82,95
war crimes trials 1163, 1176, 1178, 1180, Daugavpils 294n, 298, 392, 1073
1185,1188, 1192, 1194 Davidescu, Gheorghe 839
Czcmiakow, Adam Davidescu, Radu 313n, 315n
administrative problems 236,240 Davis, Elmer 1140n, 1202n
anxiety 1114 DAW (Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke) 559,
budget and finance in ghetto 239n, 240-41, 561,563n-64n, 566-68,925,943,
250 986, 1023, 1282n
deportations 522-24 Deat, Marcel 646
food and health in ghetto 266, 269-70, 273 Debevoise, Dickinson 1286
formation of Warsaw ghetto 226-27 Dublin 936
Jewish resistance 521 De Bono, Emilio 706
labor 252n, 255, 257n Debrecen 902n
petitioning 1107, 1108n DEGESCH (Deutsche Gesellschaft für
position 193,219,231 Schädlingsbekämpfung mbH.) 952-57
suicide 524 DEGUSSA (Deutsche Gold- und Silber-
Czestochowa 223, 249n, 255, 544,554, 566, Scheideanstalt) 953,1285-86
1064 Dej 892
Czortkdw 320 Dejaco, Walter 944n, 1043n, 1176
DELASEM (Dclegazione Assistenza Emi­
Dachau 38n,988,923, 1001, 1005, 1022, grant! Ebrei) 713
1050-52,1054n Delbrück, Emst 585n, 586n
DAF (Deutsche Arbeitsfront) 37n, 95, 177n, Delius, Hans Conrad 106, 109n
23In, 358,415,435,1148 Dellbrügge, Hans 1150n
DAG (Deutsche Ansiedlungsgesellschaft) 247 Dellschow, Fritz 605n, 606n, 607n, 608n,
Daimler-Benz (limn) 375n, 1260n, 1285 630n
Da ko vo 760 Deloncle, Eugene 671
Dalla Costa, Elia Cardinal 618 Delta Flugzeughallen- und Barackenbau
Dallaire, Romeo 1295 GmbH 566
Dalmatia 757 Dengcl, Oskar Rudolf 231 n
Dalnik 314-15, 389n Denmark 422, 589-99, 1128, 1163, 1174
Dalucgc, Kurt Dentists 85-86,96, 124η
fate 1176 Denunciations. See Hiding
1st Infantry' Brigade 303n Department stores 92n, 93,603
pogrom of 1938 42 Dcppner, Erich 622
position 201 Descoeudrcs, Pierre 662n
"special trains” 484n DcSola Pool, David 1153n
Schutzmannschaft 383, 1068n Dcssaucr Werke für Zucker und Chemische In­
strength reports to Wollt 203n, 383n, 384n, dustrie 952,954-55
505n, 61 On, 676n, 690n Dcssel, van (Belgium) 641
Danckelmann, Heinrich 726-27 DEST (Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke) 624,
Danckwerts, Justus 870n 925,986
Danica 759 Dcttmer (War Administration Councillor)
Danncckcr, Theodor 390n
Bulgaria 582, 794-95,804 Deutsche Asbest Zement A.G. 638
fate 1176 Deutsche Bank 93n, 94,99, 104,492,605,
France 582,650,652n, 658n, 666,671-76, 1260n, 1285
678-79,681,70In Deutsche Ukraine Zeitung 667

INDEX 1343
Dewey, Thomas 40 Donau (ship) 587
Dexter, Robert C. 1211 n Donauzeitunff 1332
Dey 892 Donncly, Walter Joseph 1135n
Diamant (Jewish War Veterans, Vienna) 450n, Dora (camp) 1049
452n,453n,454 Döring, Wilhelm. See Wilhelm Döring (firm)
Dibeiius, Otto 89 Dörnberg, Alexander von 578
Dieckhof, Hans 40,463n Domdorf (Oberscharführer, Krakow) 564n
Diehm, Christoph 204 Dorner (RSHA) 285
Diels, Rudolf 281,922 Doroghi-Farkas, Äkos 894n
Diesselberg, Paul 603n Dorohoi (district) 818,822-23,849-51
Dietrich, Hugo 117n Dorohucza 563
Dietz, Alfred 969n Dorpmiiller, Julius 53,166n, 427,676n,
Diewerge, Wolfgang 1094n 1177
Diez, Federico 748 Dorr, Max 365
Dijon 675 Dorsch, Xaver 253n, 1000,1177
Dilli, Gustav 428 Dösen 177n
Dinerstein, Robert C. 1279n Doussinague, Jose Maria 747
Dirksen, Herbert von 142n Dragalina, Cornel 815,848,850-51
Dirlewanger, Oskar 258n, 1032,1081, 1176 Drago§, Titus 389n, 815-16
Dischner, Josef Hugo 622 Drahos, Janos 897
Dismissals Drancy (camp) 665n, 666,671,678,695,
Belgium 637 697-98
Bulgaria 797-98 Drechsel, Hans 217,228
under church rule 3n, 7 Drechsler, Otto-Heinrich 358, 364
Croatia 757 Drescher, Heinz 973
France 662 Dresdner Bank
Hungary 862, 884-85 Germany 93n, 94,98-99,102,104,109-
Italy 706-7 10,112,115,119,493-94
Netherlands 601-2 indemnification 1285
Reich 81-92 Netherlands 604-6,608
Romania 811-13, 833-34 Poland 247
Serbia 788 salvage in killing operations 1022n
Slovakia 773 Drexler, Anton 30n
Displaced persons 1228-37. See also Survivors Drivers’ licenses 171
Displaced Persons Act 1235-36 Drohobycz 371, 566,1126
Dittel, Paul 285 Dronke, Wolfgang 55 3n
Divorce 168,445-47,623, 1124n Dror (Zionist youth group) 530n, 531
Dix, Rudolf 1157 Düben 289
Djerba 689 Dubno 406
Djurin (Transnistria) 829 Dubnow, Simon 365n
DKW (Deutsche Kraftwagen werke) 41 DuBois, Josiah 1158,1206n, 121 In
Dnepropetrovsk (city) 296,299, 303-304, Duckart, Wolfgang 62
401 Duckwitz, Georg Ferdinand 592, 594, 597
Dnepropetrovsk (Generalbezirk) 358 Dulnig (lieutenant colonel) 347n
Dobberke, Walter 480 Dumanovca 389
Dobre, Gheorghe 815 Dunant, Paul 1056n
Dobrudja 793, 808, 811 Dunn, James Clement 1206n
Doctors. See Physicians DuPont (firm) 89
Documents in printed compendia 1328-29 Öurcansky, Ferdinand 766-77
Doenitz, Karl 54, 278,1148, 1149n, 1151 Durholz, Otto 1236
Dogs 963-64,968,979 Dürrfeld, Emst 526n, 106ln, 1177
Dohary (Bucharest) 809n Dürrfeld, Walter 992-94,995n, 996n, 1047,
Dohmen, Arnold 1002, 1004n 1159,1172, 1177
Dohrmann-Schiitte (firm) 830 Durst, Karl 81
Doll, Adalbert 950n Düsseldorf 215,485n
Dollmann, Eugen 710 DUT (Deutsche Um-
Dolp, Hermann 107In siedlungstreuhandgescllschatf) 247
Domanevka. See Dumanovca Dvinsk. See Daugavpils
Domasik (prelate) 549n Dwory 994n
Donati, Angelo 693-94 Dynamit Nobel A.G. 1177, 1260n

INDEX
Dzhankoy 311 France 671 -72,674-79,694,697n
Dzialdowo. See Soldau Germany 464-65,473,494n
Dzinuda, Gertrud 1089 Greece 749
Gypsies 1072n
Eagleburger, Lawrence 1284-85 Hungary 582, 881 -84,903-4,906,912,
EAM (Greek resistance organization) 751 915,1064, 1226n
East Prussia 504,960 Lodz 215
Eastern Occupied Territories, Ministry lor (or­ Luxembourg 632n
ganization) 357-58 medical experiments 1013
Ebensec (camp) 1052 Monaco 697n
Ebcling, Friedrich 428 Netherlands 615,623,627-28
Eberhardt, Karl 551n-52n position and personality 285,425
Eberl, Irmfricd 935,962-63, 1177 ransom negotiations 1218-20
Eberl, Sebastian 1002n representatives (list of) 582
Ebert (Economy Ministry) 118 Romania 828,83In, 839n, 840-41,843
Ebner, Gregor 494n Serbia 730
Ebner, Karl 476-77 Slovakia 787-88
Ebrecht, Georg 541 statistics 1197n, 1305-6
Eckert (Stadtkommissar,Tarn6w) 253n transports 428n, 433, 106 In
Economy Minisrr\’ war production 458-59
Aryanizations 99, 108-9, 112, 125, 128, Eicke, Theodor 923
131 Eigl, Johann 43In, 745n
confiscations 138-39 Einsatzgruppen and Einsatzkommandos of SS
foreign currency 140 France 693n
organization 53, 80 Hungary 881,890-91,906,914
purchase of valuables for taxes 135 as institution 204, 282
Edelman, Marek 536, 539n Italy 711-12
Edelstein, Jakub 455,612n Luxembourg 633-34
Eden, Anthony 1142, 1207-8, 1216, 1223- Poland (1939) 192-93
25 reporting of statistics 1303-4, 1314-16
EDES (Greek resistance organization) 751 Salonika 740n
Edincp 823-24,826 Serbia 727
Edinger, Georges 669 Slovakia 790-91
Education Ministry 53, 589 Tunisia 688
Egen, Friedrich 199 USSR (1941-43) 282-83, 287-301, 337,
Egerländer Bergbau A.G. 119 820-21,870-71,1314-16
Egersdorf, Karl 1162n Eirenschmalz, Franz 928, 1177
Flgerseki 901 Eisenerz 1051
Eggert, Albert 428 Eisenlohr, Georg 199
Eggert, Gustav 928 Eisenwerke Trzvnietz 552
Flglfing-Haar 467n Eisfeld, Kurt 993-95, 1177
Ehlers, Ernst 285,637,642n, 1029n Eisler (Jewish war veterans, Vienna) 450
Ehlers, Hermann 1160n, 1177 Eissfeldt, Kurt 197
Ehlich, Hans 284, 768n, 789n Eizenstat, Stuart 1275, 1277, 1286-88
Ehrenslcitner, Ludwig 394n Elbogcn, Ismar 47n
Ehrich 8c Graetz A.G. 177n Elsinore. See Helsingor
Ehrlich, Henryk 114In Elting, Howard 120ln
Ehrlingcr, Erich 290, 32In, 1176 Emerson, H. W. 1247n
Eibncr, Max 394 Emigration 413, 708, 1197
Eichler (physician, Leipzig) 177n Emmerich, Walter 197,238,249n, 260
Eichlcr (Gau Cologne-Aachen) 500n Emrich, Emst 428, 1056
Eichler, Johannes 471n Emrich, Wilhelm 428
Eichmann, Adolf Endre, LasJo 880, 884n, 885n, 893n, 909,
Auschwitz 941 -42 911-12,1177
Belgium 642n Enescu, I. D. 815
Bergen-Belscn 1053n Enge, Edgar 736
estimate of Jews killed 1055-56, 1301-2 Engel, Friedrich 53, 75, 146
fate 1056, 1176,1177 Engel, Gerhard 415n, 419n, 739n, 1305n
“Final Solution” 416,418-19,421,423n, Engel, Hans 53, 81
437,441,490n, 1063n Engert, Georg 162

INDEX
Engert, Karl 63, 1067η Expulsions from
Engler, Wilhelm 199 Alsace-Lorraine 651
Entzian, Joachim 605n, 607n, 608n Baden-Saarpfalz 414,651
Epidemics Belgium 636
typhus 211,225-28, 271-72,520, 709, Bratislava 775
829, 1054, 1056,1071,1073-74, Bukovina-Bcssarabia 819-27
1075n Krakow 209-11
various 167, 271, 311, 322n, 340, 510,976 Morawska Ostrava 413
Eppstein, Paul 178n, 187,455,466n,478, Polish areas and cities 192, 206-16,991
479n, 481,486 Prague 413
Epstein, Johanna 191 Romanian frontier zone 817
Erbe, Ernst. See Ernst Erbe (firm) Sofia 800-801
Erdmann, Fritz 582,637,644n Stettin 413
Erdmannsdorff, Otto von Vienna 413
apartment 495n
Bulgaria 802n Fabricä de Cauciuc (firm) 833n
Danzig 195n Fabrizius, Wilhelm 582
Denmark 594n Fagan, Edward D. 1276, 1281n, 1282n,
France 656n 1285n
Greece 747n Fähnrich, Fritz 432
hostages 735n Fahrzeuge Gaubschat (firm) 345
Hungary 582, 856n Falange 747
Lichtenbergs death 489n, 1088n Falck. See Karl Falck (firm)
position 577, 579 Falco, Robert 1147n
Romania 844 Falkenhahn, Günther 995n
Erfurt 25n Falkenhausen, Alexander von 637,1163,1177
Erhardt, Karl 1008 Falkenhorst, Nikolaus von 584, 1100-1101
Ermert (Military Administration, France) 648 Fänger (admiral) 551
Ernst Erbe (firm) 552 Fanslau, Heinz Karl 928,967,972n, 1159n,
Ernst, Karl 922 1177
Erren, Gerhard 394,405 Faramond, Melchior de 646
Ertl, Fritz 945n, 1028 Farinacci, Roberto 705
Endeben (major) 388n FasickJ. K. 1172n
Escapes 502, 567-68, 597-98,698,1089, Fassbinder, Reiner Werner 1135n
1110,1126, 1213. See also Flight, Fatgen, Rudolf 507
Resistance Faulhaber, Michael Cardinal 1192
Essen 182 Faust, Max 940n, 994
Esteva, Jean Pierre 663,688 Fay, von (Hungarian official) 873-74. See also
Estonia 322, 358, 395n, 1073-74, 1128, Fay-Halasz, Gedeon, and Vay, Laszlo
1321 Fay-Halasz, Gedeon 874n. See also Vay, Laszlo
Ethnic Germans Federal Council of Churches 1152
as displaced persons 1235-36 Federer, Oskar 102,106n
German citizenship 1067 Federzoni, Luigi 706
Poland 207-208,258,511 Federenko, Feodor 964n
as recipients of confiscated property 246- Fegelein, Hermann 302
48, 371, 374, 380n, 633, 727,1021, Fehling, Wilhelm 950n
1023,1026 Fehlis, Heinrich 585, 587
Serbia 728 Fehringer, Franz 1007
Slovakia 779, 786 Feilchenfeld (Böhmische Escompte Bank) 95
in SS 969 Feine, Gerhard 579, 880,914n
USSR (occupied) 323, 380n, 390 Feis, Herbert 1208
Eupatoria 38In, 388n Feix, Stanislaw 509n
Eupen 574n, 635 Feketehalmy-Czeydner, Ferenc 871
Eupen, Theodor van 935n Felber, Gustav Hans 725-26, 750
Euthanasia program 467-68,930- 32, 1066. Feldberg, Rudolf 375n
See also Mental patients Feldmühle Nobel. See Dynamit Nobel A.G.
Evans, Gregory T. 1171 n Feldscher, Werner 437,441
Evers (Wehrmacht sanitation) 957 Felicin, Johann 377n, 1124n
Ewing, Homer H. 89n Fellgiebel, Erich 278, 1177
Exodus (ship) 1334 Felmy, Helmuth 726, 1177

INDEX
Fcndler, Lothar 290, 1177 Flight (cn masse) 24-25, 295, 299,632,636,
Fenz, Friedrich 393n 651,697, 781,840,900
Feodosiya 318n, 326n, 380n Flir, Erich 925
Ferber, Karl Josef 162, 163n Florence 711-12, 718, 722
Ferdinand (Ostland) 366n, 955n Florstedt, Hermann 965
Ferenezv, László 880,906n, 914, 1176 Flossenbiirg 569n, 1051
Ferrara 718n, 720n Floto, Werner 928
Ferrum A.G./Werk Laurahütte 552 Flugzcugmotorcnwerk Reichshof 566
Fertig, Maldwin 1204n Foa, Jolc 705
Fettmilch, Vinzent 25 Foa, Ugo 713
Fiala, Fritz 787 Focker (firm) 613
Fichtingcr, Wilhelm 925 Fog, Johannes 598
Ficker, Hans 64,417n Fohl, Walter 256n, 259n
Fiebig (Finance Ministry) 80 Foley, Mark 1284n
Fie hier, Karl 495 Fcxxi
Fikentscher-Emden (OKW) 459n in camps 258,975-76,995
Filbert, Alfred 285, 290 in ghettos 263-70
Filderman, Wilhelm 826-27,836-38, 841 rationing 148-53, 264, 367,893
Filipovic-Majstorovic, Miroslav 759n starvation 265, 270-72
Filov, Rogdan 795,803, 806n, 1177 Food and Agriculture Ministry 53,82,148-52
"Final Solution" 275-76, 338,418-24,437, Foot marches 388, 389n, 916-17
441, 1102 Ford Motor Company 41,1286
Finaly brothers 1241η Foreign currency 97, 102-4, 109, 111, 115,
Finance Ministry 137-42,608, 785, 853. See also
Aryanizations 112,115,117-20, 125 Blocked funds
Auschwitz 939n Foreign Jews in
blocked accounts 140-41 France and Tunisia 663-64,673-74,685-
confiscations 490-94,496-500, 586n, 86,688,694
1023n, 1025 Italy 707-8
dismissals 83 Netherlands 616n
organization 53, 80 Poland 230
taxes 135-36,669 Reich 44, 126, 134-35,411,462-65
transport costs 486-87,684-85, 746 Saloniki 744
Warsaw Ghetto ruins 539, 1079 Foreign Office (jurisdiction and organization)
Finch, George A. 1290n 575-83
Fineman, Havim 1130 Forli 720n
Finger (OKW) 956 Forster, Albert 195-96, 208, 1178
Finland 463, 584 Forster (colonel) 556
Fintescu,I.N. 815,835η Fortner, Hans 759n
Finzi, Aldo 721 Fortsch, Hermann 726n
First, Izrael 250n, 532 Four-Year Plan, Office of 55, 80, 106, 113n,
Fischbock, Hans 55,601 116,242-43, 370,437,441, 1100
Fischer, Fritz Ernst 1005 Fournier, Pierre-Eugene 646-47,654
Fischer, Ludwig 199, 226, 227n, 231-32, Fossoli di Carpi 722
238, 248n, 249n, 261,265-66, 271, France
519n, 1177 developments in 645-703
Fischer, Werner 1012 Gypsies 1074
Fischer (adjutant, Himmlers office) 1007 indemnification 1261
Fischer (Gau Vienna) 1150n statistics 664n, 666,699-700, 1128, 1321
Fischer (Labor Ministry) 353n war crimes trials 1163, 1173, 1175, 1182,
Fischer, Johannes Sebastian 563n 1184, 1186-87, 1192-93
Fischmann, Josef484-85 Francois, Jean 646
Fisher, Adrian 1290n Frank, August 928,966n, 999, 1014, 1019,
Flandin, Pierre-Etienne 646 1021-22, 1027n, 1055, 1096n, 1178
Fleischmann, Gisi 780, 1114n, 1202n Frank, Hans
Flensburg 1055, 1179 Auschwitz 1030-31
Flesch, Gerhard 586 boycott 95
Flick, Friedrich 97n, 98, 100η, 113-19, 144, confiscations 243-44, 570-71
1156, 1159, 1171, 1178, 1260n deportation methods 519n
expulsions 206-13

INDEX 1347
täte 1148, 1151, 1178 Friedman, Zishic 525n
"Final Solution” 416,420, 501-3,670η Fritsch, Werner von 54
food supply 265, 569-70 Fritzen, Karl-Robert 621 η
ghettos 226-227, 237, 249n Fritzsch, Karl 941
and Himmler 251,511 Fritzsche, Hans 1148, 1150-51
on involvement 549, 1087, 1136 Frkovic, Ivica 756
Jewish councils 220-22 Fröhlich, Wilhelm 428
on Jews 19, 263, 556-57, 1097 Fromm, Friedrich 19In, 199, 278, 332, 593n,
labor utilization 253, 553n 1305
Maydanek (Lublin camp) 1030, 1046 Fromm, Werner 541
Polish policy 548n Friindt, Theodor 366n
positions and personality 34, 56, 196-98 Fuchs, Günter 265n, 268n, 1043n
records destroyed 1323n Fuchs, Erich 937n
star identification measure 217 Fuchs, Wilhelm 383, 397, 727,736, 1178
Frank, Karl Hermann 106, 177,1072η, 1163, Fuglesang, Rolf 586n
1072n,1178 Fuglsang, Damgaard H. 596
Frank (Fräulein) 251 Führer Chancellery. See Nazi Part)'
Franke (Warsaw District) 227n Fünfbrunnen 633-34
Franken (Gau) 127 Funk, Walter
Frankfurt am Main 156,215,474-75 Aryanizations 109,12 In, 122n, 125
Frankfurt an der Oder 702 confiscations 1022,1024
Frankfurter, David 37n fate 1148-49,1151,1152n, 1178
Franssen, Udo 642 pogrom of 1938 39,42
Franz, Hermann 302 position 39, 53,81,1023
Franz, Kurt 962-63 property taxes 135n
Fränzl, Karl 72 war production estimate 1080n
Frauendorfer, Max 197, 254n, 255, 502, Fünten, Ferdinand aus der 610,616-17,626,
552n,1178 628η, 1178
Frauenfeld, Alfred 358, 1169,1178 Fürst, Paula 187
Frederic, Vsevolod 545-46 Fürstengrube 995
Frederiks, Karl Johannes 601,61 On Fürth (city) 127
Freisler, Roland 45, 53,421,440n, 470, Fürth (Vienna Jewish War Veterans) 450n,
1178 451,453η
Freja Berkwerks Aktiebolaget 102-104,106- Fyfe, David Maxwell 1144n, 1145η, 1146
107
Frenkel, Pawel 530, 536 Gabel, Oskar 81,109n, 739,864n
Frenzel, Ernst 578 G abolde, Maurice 696
Freter, Wilhelm 526n, 533 Gabrovski, Petar 795,800, 802-4
Frey, Richard 382 Gaecks, Walter 507
Freytag, Reinhold 463n, 580,656 Gajewski, Fritz 992
Freytagh-Loringhoven, Axel Freiherr von Galen, Clemens August von 1066
142n-43n Galicia
Frick, Wilhelm deportations from 504-6, 510, 517-20,
Aryanizations 12 In, 123-26 540
dismissals 83-84,87n, 88 German administration 204, 299, 361
eviction decree 170 labor utilization 552-53, 556n, 557-58,
fate 1148,1151,1152η, 1178 566-67
foreign Jews 31 n resistance 520, 1106
Jewish council in Germany 185 shootings 299,517,870-71
judicial proceedings 47In statistics 1310n
Luxembourg 632n Galien, Pierre 646,678
Nazi party actions 35 Galke, Bruno 246
Nuremberg laws 66, 157 Galleiske (Devisenschutzkommando, France)
passports 174n 701n
pensions 492n Galzow, Georg 285
position 53,62,281,496 Gancwajch, Abraham 236n
public relief 144n Gans & Hochberger (firm) 253n
school decree 165n Ganzenmüller, Albert 53,427, 512-13, 557,
Fricke, Helmut 925 1178
Fricke, Kurt 54, 278 Garfinkiel, Mieczvslaw 514

INDEX
Ganzenmüller, Albert 53,427, 512-13, 557, Gerlich (Wartheland) 1014
1178 Gerlier, Pierre Cardinal 683
Garfinkiel, Mieczvslaw 514 German Labor Front. See DAF
Gargzdai 341 German Red Cross 1027
Garnier (French official, Seine departement) Germany (Democratic Republic of) 1270-71
678 Germany (Federal Republic of)
Gas chambers 936-37,944-49 indemnification 1251-58, 1272-73
Gas supplv 936,938n, 951 -57,959-60 postwar Jewish population 1238-39
Gas vans 344-46, 736-38,927,929, 1144n psychological reactions 1134-38, 1270-71
Gasch (Secret Field Police) 386n reparations 1266-72
Gasset, Eduardo 747-48 trials 1163-70
Garer, Rudolf 238-39 Germany (Jewish population statistics) 1128,
Gaubschat. See Fahrzeuge Gaubschat (firm) 1197, 1321
Gaus, Friedrich 41 ln, 439n, 459n, 578, 580 Geron, Josef 802
Gava 454n Gerson, Martin 187
Gayl, Wilhelm 32 Gerstein, Kurt 955,957,959-60, 1029-30
Gazeta Zydowska 1332 Gerteis, Adolf 197, 200,507, 512, 553
Geber (SS Haushalt und Rauten) 925 Gerzon, Jules and family 608. See also Gebr.
Gebhardt, Joseph 113n, 115n, 119, 1178 Gerzon Modemagazijnen, N.V.
Gebhardt, Karl 1003-4, 1008, 1178 Geschke, Hans-Ulrich 882
Gebr. Gerzon Modemagazijnen, N.V. 603n Gestapo. See Police: German (Security)
Geheime Feldpolizci. See Army Secret Field Gewecke, Hans 377, 391
Police Ghettos. See also under names of individual
Geib, Theodor 726 cities
Geibcl, Paul Otto 204 administration 230-42
Geiger, Emil 578, 747n formation 210,222-30, 315, 362, 742,
Geiringer, Ernest 1 lOn 828-29,917
Geisslcr, Georg 650,696 medieval 8-11, 704
Geissler, Franz 336n Ghineraru, Nicolae 314n
Geissmann, Raymond 669 Giado 709
Geitel&Co. 178 Gicnanth, Kurt Freiherr von 199, 554, 555n
Geitmann, Hans 948, 1178 Giesche. See Georg von Giesches Erben (firm)
Geitner, Kurt von 727, 752n Gigumi, Ion 811-12
Geier, Eliezer 536 Gildemeistcr, Eugen 1003
Gelich, Fernando 663 Gilleleje 598
Gemeinnützige Kranken-Transport-GmbH Gingold, Nandor 836-37,847,85In
467n, 96 ln Ginsberg, Karl 607
Gemlich, Adolf 46n Girbeau, Jean 1121
Gemmeker, Albert Konrad 622,624n, 1178 Girzick, Ernst 476
Genealogische Afdesling 611 Giurgiu 814
Geneva 1201 Glaisc-Horstenau, Edmund von 726
Gengenbach, Karl 284,441 Glas, Alfons 1178
Genicke 333n Glebokie district 404n, 1311
Genoa 711 Globke, Hans 32,62, 175-76, 1063, 1172-
Genocide Convention 1290-91 73, 1178
Gens, Jacob 397-98, 1117 Globocnik, Odilo
Gentz (Office of Hauptkommissar, Bar- camp construction 423,937, 1062
anowicze) 393n camp personnel 961-64, 1062
Genzken, Karl 1003, 1178 confiscations 57 In, 1015-17, 102 In, 1026
Georg von Giesches Erben (firm) 1201 deportations 506, 541
George V (King of England) 33 fate 1178
Gcorgcscu, Comeliu 815 and gas 957
Georgians 351 labor utilization 258n, 533, 559, 564, 565n
Gerckc, Achim 95 positions and reflections 204, 251,549,
Gercke, Rudolf 278,427,429 562-63,712, 723
Gerdcs, Bcrtus 130 secrecy 1030
Gerechter, Erich 187 SS industries 560, 562,564,986
Gerhardt, Harrison 1217 statistics of killings 1306
Gerlach, Helmut von 62 Ukrainian auxiliaries 383n
Gerland, Karl 1007 Glogojanu, loan 313

INDEX 1349
Glootz, Walter 51 In Jewish leaders received by 182
Glucks, Richard labor utilization 371-72,459,99In
Auschwitz 939n, 969,999 party program 31
concentration camp management 97In, pogrom of ] 938 39
974n, 978n, 979n, 980, 1030 positions 53-55,278, 281, 368, 370
confiscations 1014, 1020n Slovakia 766
fate 1179 star identification 177-78
labor utilization 945n, 983 taxes 134-35, 136n, 147
medical experiments 1004, 1008 travel regulations 165-66
position 923,928 Gorlovka 387
Gliicksberg, Henryk 236n Gömnert, Fritz 728n
Gmeinder (economy office, Koblenz) 459n Gorsky, Arthur 815
Gmeiner, Josef 305n, 333n, 356n Gossel, Karl 539n, 1025n
Goebbels, Josef Gossett, Ed 1234
on annihilation of Jews 412,423,438 Gotenland (ship) 588
on Austrians 601 Gottberg, Curt von 358, 395-96,1312
Berlin 419,447-48,460,465,482 Gotthardt, Hermann 99,118,122n
dismissals 88 Gottong, Heinrich 217
emigration 415n Gottschalk, M. (American Jewish Committee)
fate 1179 1217n
Grynzpan trial 1094n Gottschalk (lieutenant) 1074n
pogrom of 1938 38-40,42,46 Götz, Carl 104n, 107,122n
positions 38,40, 53, 56 Götz, Josef 1309n
records ordered destroyed 1324n Göx, Emst 1103
resorts 166 Grabner, Maximilian 965,1038,1041,1179,
trademarks 129-30 1212
travel regulations 165-66 Graetz (firm) 998
Goebel (police captain) 55In Graevenitz, Hans von 278, 348, 352,662n
Goga, Octavian 811 Gräfe, Heinz 285
Golddiskontbank 1023n, 1024,1027 Grafenberger, Theodor 164n
Goldenbaum, Ernst 127In Grafeneck 931
Goldflus, Norbert 667 Gramm, Hans470n
Goldmann, Nahum 1224n, 1252n, 1266n Gramsch, Friedrich 80,151n,603n
Goldschmidt A.G. 953 Grands Moulins de Bruxelles 638n
Goldschmidt, Theo 1179 Grant, G. W. P. 1216
Goldstein, Israel 1132 Grassier, Franz 232
Goldwater, Monroe 1248n Grau, Fritz 160n, 469n
Gollert, Friedrich 1069 Grauert, Ludwig 62, 281
Golopen^ia, Anton 818n Grawitz, Ernst 337, 386n, 932,1002n-5,
Golta (prefecture) 315, 388-89, 850,1074 1008, lOlOn, 1015,1179
Gomel 296, 299 Great Britain 609n, 840n, 905n, 910,1194n,
Gordonia (Jewish Youth Organization) 531 1196,1199-1200,1204n, 1208-9,
Gorgon, Herbert 553n 1215-16,1222,1232
Goring, Hermann. See also Hermann Goring Greece 575, 725-26, 738-55,1128,1185-6,
Works 1238,1240,1321
on annihilation of Jews 423 Greenaway, Joseph A. 1286n
art objects 629, 701 Greenberg, Irving 114In
Aryanizations 100-101,113n, 115-16, Greifelt, Ulrich 201, 246, 248,420n, 1015,
119,121n, 122,126-29 1179
concentration camps 922 Greiser, Arthur
confiscations 39-40, 242-43 confiscations 1014
dismissals 84-85 expulsions 208,213,215,419
emigration 413 fate 1163,1179
expulsions 208 killings 416,503-4,927,929,1045
fate 1151,1152n, 1179 Lodz ghetto enterprises 564
'‘Final Solution” 418, 572, 1062 Lodz ghetto establishment 224n, 237
foreign currency 142 position 195-96, 231
foreign Jews 44 star identification measure 217
on ghettos 167 tubercular Poles 546, 1066-67
housing 168-69

INDEX
Grese, Irma 970, 1162, 1179 Slovakia 777
GHbctz, Judah 1279, 1281 Gura Humorului 823,824n
Griese, Bernhard 690 Gurs 665-66, 700
Griesinger, Wilhelm lOOln Gürtner, Franz 35, 53,63
Grinberg, Zalman 1130 dismissals and Aryanizations 87n, 121 n,
Gntzbach, Erich 80 123-25
Grodno 297, 355n, 570,1088, 1119, 1125 eviction decree 170
Grohmann, Joseph 438 name decree 175
Gros, André 1147n Nuremberg laws 157n
Groscurth, Helmut 347n party actions 35
Gross, Walter 56,65-66,435-36 pogrom of 1938 45
Gross (lieutenant colonel, Vienna) 796n position 53,63
Gross Rosen 1049-51 Gustaf Adolf V (King of Sweden) 596
Grossbetscherek 728n Gustloft', Wilhelm 37n, 147
Grosse ( Reich Chamber of Commerce) 130 Gutmann, Baron Willi 102
Grossmann, Klaus 587 Gutmann industrial interests 102-103
Grossmann (colonel, Jewish war veteran) Gütt, Arthur 62
451 Gutterer, Leopold 53, 178,420n
Grosulovo 849 Gutwasser, Richard 178n, 425,466,486
Grosz, Bandi904, 1221-22 Gwardia Ludowa 534, 568
Grotcfend, Ulrich 61 In Györ 905
Groth, Karl 80,498n Gypsies
Groupements de travclleurs etrangers 665 defined 1069-71
Groza, Petre 1181 expelled, deported 207, 214-15,651 n,
Grudacker (Vienna city administration) 168n 792,1071-72
G run, ELse 788 gassed 1071, 1073
Gninberg-Willman, Matai (Mathias) 842n indemnified 128 In
Grundherr, Werner von 463n, 579, 589, medical ex peri men ts on 1005, 1007,
592n, 1172, 1179 1012
Grünewald, Adam 622n shooting of 336, 362, 381 n, 386n, 731,
Gnininger, Haas 777n 733,1073-74
Grünkorn (army war administration coun­
selor) 377n Haarde, Johann 726, 740
Gmnwald, Haas-Dietrich 204, 560 Haase (Gebietskommissar, Wilejka) 131 In
Grynzpan, Herschel 37, 1094 Haavara Agreement 139-40
Gudcnan, Heinz 54,278, 1179 Haberland, Ulrich 992, 100ln, 1179
Guenter (Reich Office of Economic Recon­ Habsburg, Albrecht von 875
struction) 100 In Hackbarth (Stadtkommissar,Tarnow) 550n
Guenther (prison warden) 399n Hackenholt, Lorenz 1028, 1040
G uibert, Auguste 695n Hackmann, Hermann 965,972
Guidot (French police) 678,695n Hadamar 931
Gumpel, Ludwig 75 Haenickc, Siegfried 983n
Gumpert, Gerhard 715n Haensch, Walter 290, 328, 1179
Guaskirchen 917, 1052 Hafkc, Kurt 284
Gunther, Christian 596 Haffigcr, Paul 94n
Gunther, Franklin Mott 814n Hafranek (police major) 750-51
Gunther, Rolf Hagclin, Adalbert Viljam 586n, 587n
Belzec 957 Hagen, Herbert 650,682n, 685n, 693n, 695,
Biah-stok 541 696, 1179
Croatia 762 Hagen, Wilhelm 228, 547-48
Denmark 594 Hague, The 623
fate 1179 Hahn, Fritz-Gebhardt von 58In
“Final Solution" 441 Hahn, Ludwig 1179
Germany 73n, 473n Hahn (Office of the Four-Year Plan) 80, 113,
medical experiments 1007n, 1009n 117
Netherlands 623,628n, 1063 Hahncnbruch, Erich 285
Norway 587-88 Haidlen, Richard 488n, 579, 735n, 1088n
position 425-26 Haiti 735
Salonika 740 Haider, Franz 190, 191n, 193n, 278,287,
secrecy 1029n 1179

INDEX
Halifax, Edward (Earl of) 1140,1207,1208n Heerdt, Walter. See Heerdt und Linglcr
Halisz 380 GmbH
Hall, George Henry 1216, 1223n, 1224 Heerdt und Lingler GmbH 953
Hallbauer, Wilhelm 223n Hees, Hans-Heinrich van 633n
Haller (Lublin district) 256 Heess, Walter 285, 345
Hallwachs, Robert 121n Heidegger, Martin 87n, 1964n
Halpem (Jewish War Veterans, Vienna) 453 Heilesen, Claus 598
Hamann, Joachim 299n, 322n, 391 Heim, Franz 959n
Hambro, Carl Joachim 584 Heim, Willi 1157n
Hamburg 156,215,494-95,702 Heimann (Office of Military Commander, Ser­
Hammer, Walter 285 bia) 729n
Hand, Learned 1139n Hein, Karl 594
Handelstrust West 604-8 Heinburg, Kurt 463n, 579,745n, 776,1180
Handloser, Siegfried 278,1003,1005,1179 Heine (war administration counselor) 387n
Hanke, Karl 195 Heinemann (Food Ministry) 130
Hanneken, Hermann von 81, 109n, 589, Heinemann (Göring’s assistant) 629
591-93,990 Heines, Edmund 922
Hanoar Hazioni (General Zionists, i.e. centr­ Heinkel Flugzeugwerk, Budzvri 566,567n
ist) 397, 530n, 531 Heinrich (DEGESCH) 957n
Hans Vermehren Import-Fabrikation-Export Heissmeyer, August 201
864n Heitzinger, Hans 517n
Hansabank 636 Heia 1052
Hansen, Georg 278 Helbronner, Jacques 658,680,682
Hansmeyer, Herbert 1282n Held, Adolph 1204n
Hansson, Per Albin 592n HELI (Heerdt und Lingler GmbH ) 952-54
Hanweg, Hermann 1312n Hellenthal, Walter von 582,697n, 1180
Harders, Georg 441,651 n Hellwig, Otto 541
Harku 1074 Helm, Hans 764n, 765
Harrison, Leland684n, 1204n, 1205n, 1206 Helmstedt 1192
Harster, Wilhelm 610,623n, 628,711, Helsingor 593n
1063n, 1179 Hemburg613
Hartheim 932 Hencke, Andor
Hartjenstein, Fritz 965-66,1180 Denmark 592n, 596n
Hartl, Albert 285,406,425,1099 fate 1156
Hartmann, Fritz 634 France 65 ln, 697n
Hartmann, Hanns 489n Greece 747,749n
Hartmann, Richard 425 Hungary 87 ln, 903n, 91 On
Hartmann (major) 701 n Italy 719n, 720n, 747
Harttmann, Emst 428 Monaco 697n
HASAG (Hugo Schneider A.G.), Skarzysko- Norway 588n
Kamienna 566, 568n, 569 position 579
Hashomer Hatzair (Zionist-Socialist youth Slovakia 79ln
group) 397, 530-31 Henlein, Konrad 112
Hassik, Stefan 767 Hennequin, Emile 646,678
Hauffe, Arthur 36ln, 821-22 Hennicke, Karl 337
Haug (Military Administration, France) 669n Hennyey, Gustav 913n
Hauser, Otto 1236 Henriques, C. B. 591,594
Hausfeld, Michael 1276n, 1279n Henschel, Moritz 187,466n, 478-81,1117
Hatzinger, Franz 1048n Hentig, Georg Werner Otto 579
Hayler, Franz 53, 55, 81, 865n Herbeck, Otto 105n
Hearst, Randolph 40 Herbig, Gustav 118
Heath, James 1158 Herder (administration, Lodz) 257n
Heberlein, Erich 579 HerfF, Maximilian von 201,395n, 961 n, 96/
Hebert, Paul Macarius 1159n Hering, Gottlieb 961 -63, 1180
Hechalutz (Zionist youth organization) 521, Hering, Hans-Georg 508n
829n Hering, Hermann 62, 158n, 490n
Hecker, Robert 471 n Heimann Goring Works 100-119,461
Hedding, Otto 80, 133n, 135n, 147n, 237 Hermann Hirt Nachf. (firm) 946
Hedtoft, Hans 594 Hermann, Richard 302
Hermann Tietz (department store) 93

INDEX
Hermann (Hast Ministry) 396η, 400η France 667,683,698-99, 1123
Herrgort, Adolf'349 Germany and Austria 482-83
Herrmann, Gunther 290 Hungary 900,919
Herrmann (SS) 779n, 78In Italy 716-18
Herja 818 Netherlands 627
Hertie. See Hermann Tietz (department store) Poland 510,517, 520, 540, 1126
s-Hertogenbosch 620-21,623n. See also postwar indemnification for 1253
Wight Protektorat 1124
Herzogenbusch. See ’s-Hertogenbosch; Wight Sloyakia 781
Hess, Rudolf Ukraine 317, 387,401
Aryanizations 12 In, 122n, 123-24, 126n Hiege, Ferdinand 82
bova>tt 96 Hierthes, Heinrich 302
eviction decree 170 Higgins, Fremont A. 1251n
fate 1148, 1150-51 Hildebrandt, Richard 201,203, 589n, 734,
Jewish council in Germany 185 1023, 1095n, 1180
Nuremberg laws 157n, 158n Hilgard, Eduard 42-44
pogrom of 1938 44n Hilgcr, Gustav 578, 580, 719, 871n, 1172,
Hesse (Justice Ministry) 63, 501 1180
Hessen 83n Hilldring, John H. 1217n, 1229n, 1231
Heuser, Georg 485n Hilleke (Propaganda Ministry) 131n
Heves 900-901 Hiller (Aluerz firm) 864, 865n
Hevesi, Alan 1278 Hilversum 613-14
Hewel, Walter417n, 578, 87In Himmler, Heinrich
Hevde, Werner 932n on accounting 1081-82
Hevdcbrand und der Lasa, Ernst von 31 on annihilation of Jews 1081, 1093, 1095,
Heydrich, Reinhard 1104
Arvanizations 122n anti-partisan operations 385-86
Auschwitz 939n Auschwitz 939n, 940-42,980,991,1029,
Canaris agreement 384 1062
Einsatzgruppcn 191-92, 287-89,292-93, background and upbringing 32n, 200-202
330n Belgium 642
emigration 141-42, 1197n Bialystok 511
expulsions 191-92, 206, 207n, 213-14 boycott 95
fate 1180 concentration camps 472,923,927,945n,
“Final Solution' 365n,418-23, 504, 572, 979,983,985,997-98,1055, 1077
672, 1060, 1062, 1197n confiscations 246, 377-78, 562, 570-71,
France 672-73 1015,1018-19,1021,1023n, 1024
ghettos 167, 190 on conscience 1098
Gypsies 107 In, 1072 on corruption 18-19, 1017, 1081-82
Jewish councils 186, 191 Croatia 75 7n
Mischlingc and mixed marriages 440n, death camps in Generalgouvernement 937n,
446n 961
movement restrictions 171-72 emigration 138n, 1194n, 1197n
pogrom οΠ938 37,42-43 expulsions 209, 213-16
police attaches 795n fate 1055, 1180
positions 34, 201,277, 281 -82, 284,413, “Final Solution" 419, 503n, 513, 515n
425 France 685n, 686,689n, 690, 700
prisoners of war 346-48, 351 and Generalgouverneur Frank 205-206,
race pollution cases 158 1046
resorts 166 ghettos 400
secrecy 334n-35n, 406 on glory 1084
Serbia 731 Gypsies 471, 1070, 1071n
star identiheation 177 Hungary 867, 875-76, 887,903,906,
Theresieivstadt 454 917n
war prod uaion 459 Italy 709-10
Hezinger, Adolf880, 893 on jews 18-19, 1101
Hiding and Kube 400
Belgium 643-44 labor utilization 256,402,461, 551, 553-
Byelorussia 384, 386, 394-95 56, 559n, 561-62, 564, 565n, 945n,
Denmark 596 983, 1000-1001, 1079

INDEX 1353
and law making 171, 382, 1062 apartment allocation 494-95
Lodz Ghetto 214-15 appeal to (by Jewish leaders) 181-82
medical experiments 1002n, 1004-10, art objects 701
101 In, 1012 Aryanizations 124,126
in Minsk 343-44,1098 Auschwitz 948, 1031
Mischlinge 441 Bialystok 36 In
mixed marriages 447 Buchenwald 1055
name regulation 175 Bulgaria 795
Netherlands 608n, 609n, 619n, 620-21, complaints to 519, 1089
622n, 624,629 Croatia 763
Pinsk 405 Denmark 591-92, 594
pogrom of 1938 38-39 deportations from Reich 363-64,494-95
Poles 546, 1067n dismissals 83-84,87n
police attaches 795n and Einsatzgruppen 283, 287
positions 34,53,56,62,202,278,30 In, 923 on emigration 412
Przemysl incident 554n eviction decree 170
propaganda 1096 euthanasia order 930-31
ransoming of Jews 608n, 609n expulsions 208n, 212-13
Ribbentrop 577 fate 1057,1180
Romania 814, 847 on "fate” 1104
Salonika 739 fine of 1938 39
Schutzmannschaft 383 foreign Jews 126
secrecy 1029-32 France 649,652n, 670
Security Police 282 ghettos 511
shooting operations 283, 287, 292, 294, Hungary 417,871, 875-76,880n, 912
301-2, 342-44, 365n, 405-7, 1080 on "influence” of Jews 17-18,81-82
soap rumor 1033η, 1203n intermarriage prohibited 66-67, 157n,
Slovakia 768n, 776, 786, 790-91 158-59
Sobibor 986, 1028 Italy 715,721
Sosnowiec 506n Katzenberger case 163
statistical reports to 188n, 202n, 323n, lawyers 124
583n, 1197n, 1303n,1305,1312n labor utilization 459,461, 569n, 1000,
on tactfulness 1090 1218,1305
Theresienstadt 456-57 Luftglas case 469
Thierack agreement 471 -72 Luxembourg 632n
Warsaw Ghetto 533, 539, 561-62 Mischlinge 67, 75, 76,88,159,436n,
on "weakness” 1082, 1084 440n, 442
Hindenburg, Oskar von 349,1180 mixed marriages 447
Hindenburg, Paul von 33, 83-85, 87n name regulation 175
Hinkel, Hans 88 Nazi Party program 31
Hingst, Hans 378n Netherlands 630n
Hinkler, Paul 281 Nuremberg laws 66-67
Hippke, Erich 1002n, 1003, 1005-6 passports 174n
Hird (Norwegian organization) 587 on physicians 123
Hirsch, N. V. & Co. 603n pogroms 38, 39,46n
Hirsch, Otto 181-82, 185,478η Poles 547,1067
Hirschfeld, G. von 458n, 1086n positions 53-54,56, 278,726
Hirschfeld, Hans Max 602 prophecies 424, 1093
Hirschfeld (police colonel, Bialystok) 541 on Reichenau order 331
Hirschland, Georg 182-83 Salonika 739n
Hirschmann, Ira A. 121 In, 1224, 1229n, schools 165n
1230n against "sentimentality” 1089
Hirszman, Chaim 1037n Slovakia 789, 791
Hirt, August 1012-13 star identification decree 177-78
Hirtreiter, Josef 1029, 1090 statistical reports to 407-408,1305m
Hitler, Adolf 1312n
annihilation decisions 410,415-19,424, tax on income 147
800, 1062 testament 1057-58,1083
anti-partisan operations 385 on veterans 84,450n
on anti-Semitism 46n-47n Yugoslavia 756

1354 INDEX
Hitler Youth 42,434,633 Hoppe (Reichsbahn) 82In
Hlinka Guard 767, 773, 779, 790 Höppner, Rolf-Heinz 416, 1063n
Hnilitschek (Jewish War Veterans, Vienna) Horelli, Toivo 584n
450n, 453n Höring, Emil 204
Hobirk, Robert 605n, 608n Horn, Max 563-64, 57ln, 1126n
Hochberg, Karel 780 Horneck, Karl 1012
Hoche, Alfred 930n Horodenka 553
Hoche, Werner 62 Horst Jiissen (construction firm) 830
Höchst (tirni) 1285 Horten, Helmut 608
Hodmezovasarhelv 914 Horthv, Mildos 855, 857, 861,875-76, 887,
Hodonin 1072 *901,909-15
Hody^, Eleonore 973 Horthy, Mildos Jr. 914
Hoelk (Labor Ministry) 353n Hossbach, Friedrich 82n, 88n
Hoepner, Erich 305, 1180 Höss, Rudolf
Holer, Franz 712 Auschwitz 939-42,944n, 950, 957,960,
Hort, Troels 595 965-66,968n, 973-74,983, 1028n,
Hortmann, Günther 579 1030, 1039, 1043, 1076, 1090
Hortmann, Heinz Hugo 162, 162n biography 966-67
Hortmann, Karl 794, 804n, 805-7 fate 1055, 1148, 1163, 1180
HortVnann, Karl Heinz 593n ""Final Solution" 940-42
Hortmann, Kurt 939n in Polish underground report 1212
Hortmann, Sandor 913n positions 916, 929,939
Hortmann, Ulrich 993 onTreblinka 1037
Hortmann (Economy Ministry) 144n Hossfeld, Johannes 80
Hortmann (Interior Ministry') 238n, 939n Hössler, Franz 966, 1038, 1040, 1048, 1162,
Hortmann, Walter 304n 1180
Hortmeyer, Horst 380n, 102In Hostages 257, 310,465,670n, 671, 721, 731,
Hörte, Hermann (Higher SS and Police 735, 743. See also Reprisals
Leader, Slovakia) 790n, 1180 Hoth, Hermann 298n, 1180
Hörte, Hermann (Lublin) 506, 523, 549,936, Hotin 297,819n
959n, 1014, 1026, 1180 Höttl, Wilhelm 879n, 1148, 1180, 1301-2
Hörter, Heinrich 1160 Houdremont, Eduard 552n, 1180
Horter, Wolfgang 1092 Housing. See also Expulsions; Ghettos
Hofmann, Franz Johann 966 (formation)
Hofmann, Otto 201,375n, 420n, 421,437, apartment al location 170-71,212,494-97,
440n,446n, 1002, 1180 511,894
Hofmann, Wilhelm 403n evictions 168-70,801, 832, 1125
Hofmann (SS statistician) 1306n in ghettos 214, 229-230,249, 356, 363,
Hohberg, Hans 1180 454
Höhmann, Gottlieb 523 leases 123, 170
Höhn (professor, medical experiments) 1006 marking 14, 179,634-35,742,801,918
Holcinger, Robert 643 rents 249
Holfelder, Albert 1008 restrictions 801, 894
Holkeskamp, Walter 998 Hoven, Waldemar 972, 1181
Hollandsche Draad- en Kabelfabrik 613 Hrubieszöw 259,515
Holler, Egon 21 In Hruby (Protektorat Land Ministry) 153n
Holz, Karl 127 Huber, Franz Josef476-77, 1016n
Holz (Reichskreditgesellschaft) 605,629n Hubrich, Georg 62,85
Holzlöhner, Ernst 1005 Hudal, Alois 715, 1191, 1193
Holzschuher, Wilhelm von 939n Hugcnberg, Alfred 53,82
Homcnau 781 Hugo Kaufmanns Bank603n
Homosexuals 1141, 128 In Huhnhauser (Education Ministry) 589n
Honeck (office of Stadthautpmann, Lvov) Hühnlein, Adolf 95
540n Hull, Cordell 683n, 684, 814n, 1142, 1204n,
Hoover, Herbert 40 1205n, 1207, 1211
Hoover, J. Edgar 1202n Hull, John Edwin 1217
Hopchet (Registry's Office, Brussels, 1947) Hummel, Herbert 199, 261, 502, 1181
64 In Hungary
Hopkins, Harry 1207,1208n developments in 853-919
Hoppe, Gunther 100 In Hitler's prediction 417

INDEX 1355
Hungarian Jews in other countries 463-64, war crimes trial 1156
686,803, 1140-41 Zyklon 952,954
postwar migrations 1238, 1240 Ignor, Peter 568n
ransom negotiations 1218-24 Ihn, Max Otto 462n, 1181
refugees from Croatia and Slovakia 781, Ihnen (German legation, Bucharest) 313n
789-90 llges, Walter 34n
restitution and indemnification 1243, Ilgner, Max 93,990, 1181
1261-62, 1272-73, 1288 Uiescu, Mihai 390n
statistics 1128, 1321 Illgner, Hans 81
war crimes trials 1174, 1177, 1181, 1192 Impulevicius, Antanas 392n, 1098n
Hunke, Heinrich 13In Imredy, Bda 856,861,879, 887,1181
Hunsche, Otto 425,441, 582,623,882, Indemnification 1249-64,1285-88
884n, 891,907,1181 Independent Committee of Eminent Persons
Huntziger, Charles 646,651 1274,1277
Huppenkothen, Walter 284,285 Industrie-Bau A.G. 946
Husseini, Amin el (Mufti of Jerusalem) 846, Inheritance 500-501
1153 Institut fur Deutsche Ostarbeit 569n
Huta Hoch- und Tiefbau (firm) 946 Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage 1092n
H liter, Adolf999n Institute of Jewish Affairs 1302
Huth (major, Vienna) 864n Insurance policies and payments 492,493,
Hiittig, Hans 622 629,1255,1282-85
Hutu (tribe) 1294-96 Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees
1247n
Iacobici, Iasif 313n- 14n, 815 Interior Ministry
Iampol. See Yampol Aryanizations 120-25
Ia§i 817-18, 851 Auschwitz 903n
Iasinschi, Vasile 812, 815 boycott 96
Identification. See also Lists; Registration dismissals 64
apartments 12, 179,634-35, 742, 801, 894 identification cards 173
armbands, badges, patches, tattoos inheritance 501
Auschwitz 979 mental institutions 467
Belgium 642 name changes 175-76
Bulgaria 798,801,803 Nuremberg laws 66-67,157n-158n
Croatia 757 organization 53,62
France 673-74 wages and relief 144-46
Hungary 888 Intermarriage prohibitions 7,66,158-59,
Luxembourg 633 362, 799,888. See also Mixed marriages
medieval 8 International Commission on Holocaust Era
Netherlands 615 Insurance Claims 1284
Poland 217-18 International Red Cross 596,662n, 846,909,
Reich 176-79 1055-56,1202n, 1226
Romania 838, 851 Ioannina 750-51
Salonika 741-42 Iranian Jews 694
Serbia 728 Irgens, Kjeld Stub 586n-87n
Slovakia 774 Irgun Zwai Leumi (Jewish nationalist military
USSR (occupied) 362 organization) 52In, 1221
business enterprises 655, 741,757,801 IRO (International Refugee Organization)
cards 173, 585,690, 774 1232n, 1233,1236n, 1247n, 1264-65
flags, greetings, insignia, medals 176-77 Iron Guard (Romania) 811-14
passports 12,173-75 Isaacs, George 1234n
ration cards 149,175 Isopescu, Modest 388-89, 1181
I. G. Farben Ispert, Wolfgang 611 n
Aryanizations 93-94, 115, 117, 144n, 248 Israel 1132,1137,1265-72
Auschwitz 940,942-43,984,994,1046, Israelowicz, Leo 1029n, 1106n-7n
1048-49 Isselhorst, Erich 290, 352n
dismissals 89 Istanbul 830,1221-22
indemnification payments 1260 Italy
Leverkusen 992, 1001 and Bulgaria 803
medical experiments 1002, 1004 and Croatia 762-65
organization 988-93 developments in 703-23

INDEX
and France 686-94 Jewish Anti-Defamation League 113In
and Greece 745-49 Jewish Brigade 1228
indemnification 1258n, 1261 Jewish councils (strategy and role) 611-12,
Italian Jews in Germany 463-65 1111-12
and Rhodes 575 Jewish councils and community organizations
statistics 704, 708, 722-23, 1128, 1321 (geographic). See also under the names
and Tunisia 663 of individual cities and ghettos
Ivano-Frankovsk. See Stanislawow Austria 466,475-77,487
Iwacewicze 31 On Belgium 641-43
Iwanski, Henryk 538 Bulgaria 802
Izeu-Ain 697 Croatia 762
Denmark 594
]yaccuse 695n France 657-58,668-70,679-82,694,699
Jacldein, Josef 518n Germany 173n, 180-87,466,473-74,
Jackson, Robert 1139, 1144, 1145n, 1146, 478-82,486-87,490n, 494,497
1148n, 1154 Hungary 881 -84,889,900-901,917,
Jacob, Fritz402n, 109In 1117,1220
Jacobi, Karl 428,432,1181 Italy 713
Jacobi, Kurt 636n Netherlands 611 -12,616-17,619,622-
Jacobi, Ludwig 187 26
Jacobsen (OKW) 813n Poland 192-93, 210, 218-22, 258n, 552
Jadovno 759-60 Prague 474,487
Jagendorf, Siegfried 829 Rhodes 754
Jager, Emil 726, 752-53 Romania and Transnistria 816n, 825, 828,
Jager, Karl 290,293,299n, 327n, 366n, 377n, 834n,835n, 836-37
391 -92, 393n, 1115n, 1181,1303n Salonika 741, 744, 751
Jagow, Dietrich von 582, 878n Slovakia 773-75, 779-80
Jagusch, Walter 378 USSR (occupied) 355-56, 362
Jagwitz, Eberhard von 81,603n, 638n JeuHslj Frontier (wartime report) 1202
Jahne, Fncdrich 992 Jewish Restitution Successor Organization
Jahrrcis, Hermann 1147n 1247n, 1248n
Janctzkc, Wilhelm 367 Jewish Telegraphic Agency' (wartime report)
Janinagmbe 995 1202
Janisch, Josef950n Jewish Trust Corporation 1247n
Janiszow 568 Jewish War Veterans (United States) 1131
Jannicot (French administration) 107 "‘Jews” defined. See also Mischlinge
Janov 405 Belgium 637
Jans (Audit Generals office, Brussels) 64 In Bulgaria 796-97
Jaassen, Friedrich 999n Croatia 757-58
Japan 65, 1198n France 653
larke, Alfred 228 Germany 61-77
Jamicu, Pierre Chomel de 659-60 Hungary 856-60
Jamss, Andor 880,900,911,913,1181 Italy 706
Jasenovac 759n, 760-61,764, 1074 Netherlands 602
Jaskielewicz, Hipolit 1122n Norway 585
Jaskiclewicz, Maria 1122n Poland 217
Jaslo 21 In, 415 Romania 811-12
Javits, Jacob J. 125 In Salonika 741
JDC. See American Jewish Joint Distribution Serbia 728
Committee Slovakia 768-70, 782-83
Jcckeln, Friedrich 294, 302-304, 365, 375n, USSR (occupied) 362, 38In, 382
383n, 870, 1163, 1181 Jodi, Alfred 278, 283,287, 539n, 555n, 593,
Jedamzik, Eduard 229 1148-49, 1151, 1181
Jçdrzcjow4l6 Joel, Gunther, 45, 127n
Jedwabne 320 Joint Emergency Committee on European
Jehova s Witnesses 923,1067, 128 In Jewish AJFairs 1207
Jelgava 297, 298 Jokes 198, 564,905,937,938,964, 1001,
Jerusalem 1221,1224 1033,1135n
Jcschonnck, Hans 54,278 Jonava 298
Jewish Agency (Palestine) 139-40, 1221 Jones, Melvin 1328

INDEX 1357
Ionic, Vladimir 765n statistics 583n
Joodschc Weekblad 612 Theresienstadt 456-57
Jordan (Krakow District) 324n Warsaw Ghetto 539n
Jörg, Frieda 1029 Kamenka 324-25
Josef Ketz (firm) 253n Kamenets-Podolsky 303, 372-73,402,870,
Josef Kluge (firm) 947 1091
Josephthal, Giora 1267 Kaminski, Hannah 187
Josephus, Titus Flavius 26 Kammerl (Generalgouvernement) 438
Jost, Heinz 285, 287n, 290, 383, 393,1181 Kammler, Hans 539,915,928,940,944,948,
Jothann, Werner 939n, 1048n 985-86,996, 1000,1044n, 1181
Jovanovic, Dragomir-Dragi 736 Kanal, Israel 532, 536
Jowitt, William Allen 1147 Kanstein, Käthe 145n
Judicial procedings. See also War crimes trials Kanstein, Paul Ernst 592, 596
civil 8,62-63,90-91,150,171,470-71, Kanstein, Salomon 145n
1086 Kantor (Böhmische Escompte Bank) 95
criminal 44-45, 145,161-63,468-72, Kanzler, Emst 98n
502,1122η Kap, Horst 441
Jüdische Rundschau 48 Kaplan, Jacob 659-60,665, 1106
Jüdisches NaclmchtenblcUt 185, 187n, 1332 Kappeier, Franz 174n
Juhl, Hans 593n Kappler, Herbert 711-12,714-15,716n,
Jung, Franz 863n 721,1181
Jung, Moses 1217n Karaites 380
Jungclaus, Richard 637 Karalius, Vincas 322n
Jungfemhof 373n Karasubar 388n
Jüngling, Martin 874n Kareski, Georg 47n
Jurcic, Milutin 756 Karger, Walter von 629n
Jurcsek, Bela 879 Karl Diehl (firm) 1260n
Jurk (police major, Protektorat) 496n Karl Falck (firm) 947
Justice Ministry 53,63,96, 173 Karmasin, Franz 767n, 786n, 1032-33
Jüttner, Hans 201,622, 887,916,968n, Karpathen-Öl, Drohobycz (firm) 566-67
1045n, 1181 Karpenstein, Wilhelm 922
Karsava 322
Kabelwerk (firm, Krakow) 566 Karstadt A. G. See Rudolf Karstadt A. G.
Kabiljo, Aaron 766 Kaschau. See Kosice
Kadow, Walter 966 Kasche, Siegfried 581-82, 761-65,1163,
Kaganovich, Lazar 1093 1182
Kahlert (Reich Association Iron) 462n Kassel 145
Kahn, Frieda 467n Kästner, Rudolf (Kasztner, Rezsö) 881,901,
Kaindl, Anton 929 903-5,907,1133,1225
Kaiser, Fritz 144n, 146n Katowice 195,209,243
Kaiser (captain) 319n Katyn Forest 396n
Kakhovka 323n Katz, Delwin 34
Kaldenberg, Emst von 131 Katzenberger, Lehmann 161-63,468
Kalfus, Josef 105 Katzenstein, Ernst 1260n
Kalisch (Foreign Office) 118 Katzmann, Fritz 204, 510, 517n, 520n, 556n,
Kaliwerke A. G. 952,954 558n, 567n, 1106,1182,1310
Källay, Miklos 856, 865n, 871-74, 876-79, Kaufering 1052
1085 Kauifmann, Arthur 475n
Kallenbach, Richard 487, 585n, 630n, 685n Kaufmann, Karl 494-95
Kallmayer, Helmut 933-34, 1181 Kaufmanns. See Hugo Kaufmanns Bank
Kakenbrunner, Emst Kaul, Curt 494n
Bulgaria 807-8 Kaunas 296-98, 319, 321-22n, 356, 366,
confiscations 1016n 374, 392, 397,400, 700,1115
fate 1148-51, 1181 Kaupisch, I^eonhard 589
Hungary 879n, 905,91 In, 917n Kausch, Hans-Joachim 358n, 406n, 815
International Red Cross 1055 Kayser, Hermann 485n
Kulmhof personnel 960n Kedainiai 298
position 201,284,425 Keesing, Isaak 608n
propaganda 1095-96 Keesing, Leonard 102, 104n, 105,608n
relations of Germans and Jews 400

1358 INDEX
Kehrl, Hans 55, 81, 102, 104, 109n, 115, Kirszcnbaum, Menachem 531
1182 Kishinev. See Chisinau
Keiper, Wilhelm 726 Kislovodsk 1109, 1315
Keitel, Wilhelm Kistarcsa 894,912
Bialvstok 361 n KK. See zydowski Komitet Koordynacji
deportations 363 Klaas, Paul 130n
Einsatzgruppen operations 283, 287n KJadovo 733
late 1148-49, 1151 Klaipeda 341
France 649, 701 n Klebe (Navy) 957n
hostages 731 n Kleemann, Ulrich 726, 754, 755n
Hungary 856n KJeemann, Wilhelm 181
labor utilization 372n Klehr, Josef955n
Mischlinge 88 Klein, Alexander 711
Netherlands 631 n Klein, Fritz 969, 1037, 1053, 1162, 1182
position 54, 278, 726 Klein, Horst 925
Serbia 73ln Kleine, Hans 992
Warsaw 533 Kleinmann, Wilhelm 53,209,427
Kempncr, Robert M. W 1100, 1157 Kleist, Ewald von 1182
Kcnnan, George F. 1172n Klemm, Bruno 432, 844, 1057, 1182
Keppler, Wilhelm 94n, 116, 578, 580n, 1100, Klemm, Herbert 63, 1158n, 1182
1182 Klemm, Kurt 358
Kerch 381 n, 388n Klemm, Werner 71
Keri, Kalman 868 Klemt (Nazi Party') 41 ln
Kermcl, Wilhelm. See Wilhelm Kermel (firm) KJessheim meetings 875-76, 879
Kerri, Hanns 53, 176n, 185 KJetsk 310
Kcrsten (1. G. Farben trustee) 144n KJimaitis (Klimavicius), Jonas 319
Kessel, Albrecht von 1102 Klimovichi 376n
Kesselring, Albert 687, 712, 715, 721, 1162, Klingelhofcr, Woldemar 290, 291, 1182
1182 Klingenfuss, Karl Otto 441,583n, 694n,
Kessler, J. (Jewish physician, Mogilev- 764n, 80ln, 804, 839, 84ln, 845,
Podolsky) 829n 1182
Keuck, Walter Rudolf 225n Kliniki 310
Ke wisch, Erich 737n KJocke, von (XXI Mountain Corps) 752n
Kcves, Geoffrev 1170n Klooga 401
Kharkov 296, 300,310, 1315 Klopfer, Gerhard 56, 121 n, 151 n, 420n, 421,
Khazars 380 440n,446n, 1182
Khemelnik 330 Klotzei (Foreign Office) 869n
Kherson 296, 300, 309n Klotzsche, Johannes 179n
Khorol 347 Klucki, Ludwig 81
Khotin. See Hotin Kluge, Günther von 662n, 1182
Kiefe, Robert 682 Kluge, Josef. See Josef Kluge (firm)
Kiefer, Max 928,1159n, 1182 KJünder (Lublin District) 1108
Kiel 1053, 1103 Knecht, Karl Friedrich 1073n
Kicke 211 n, 223,228, 566 Knoblauch, Kurt 520n
Kiesewetter, Anton 99n Knobloch, Herbert 606n, 607n, 608n
Kiev (citv) 296, 297, 300, 303, 308n, 326n, Knochen, Helmut
332,339, 354,401,1085 France 650,669n, 671 -79n, 682n, 685-
Kiev (Gcneralbezirk) 358 86n, 690n-691,693,695n-99, 710,
Kigali 1295-96 839n, 1029n
Killinger, Manfred von 581-82, 768,818, täte 1182
836n, 839n, 842-46,852-53,913, positions 285,650
1107n,1182 Knorth, Hans 635n
Killy, Leo 64, 75-76, 144n, 146n Knoth (lieutenant) 394n
Kimmich, Karl 99, 104n Köberlein (WVHA) 925,928
Kinder, Christian 179n Koblenz 459,468
Kipper, Paul 179n Kobryn 406
Kirchfeld (Economy Ministry') 81 Koch, Erich 196,208,213, 358, 361, 379,
Kirov, Sava 795 540,1182
Kirovograd 296 Koch, Günther 507
Kirschncck, Hans 947n, 999n Koch, Hans 332

INDEX 1359
Koch, Hellmuth 309n Kosice 892,906, 1216
Koch, Karl-Otto 965, 972,986 Koslovichisna 394n
Koch, Pietro 717n Kosow 553
Koch-Erpach, Rudolf 981 Köster, Arnold 99n
Kody ma 308 Köster (Ostland) 378n
Koegel, Max 965,972n, 1009n Kotthaus (naval captain) 372η, 376η
Koehler (SS, Buchenwald) 972 Kovalevka 1074
Koesters, Friedrich 777 Κονηο. See Kaunas
Kogard, Rudolf 737n Kowel 406
Kogon, Eugen 1156 Kovdanov 310
Kohl, Helmut 1138 Kozower, Philipp 187,465,478-81
Kohl, Otto 648,673, 1137-38, 1183 Krakauer Zeitung 332
Kohle, Julius 507 Krakow (city) 197, 209-10, 219, 243, 253n,
Köhler, Robert. See Robert Köhler (firm) 254,255n, 415,743
Köhnlein, Friedrich 698n Krakow (district) 199, 204, 504,554
Kolisch, Siegfried 450-53, 1108n-9n, 1116n Krakow (ghetto) 223
Kolo. See Warthbrücken Krallert, Wilfried 285, 879n
Kolomea 518, 552 Kramarz, Hans 578
Kolomyja. See Kolomea Kramatorskaya 397n
Kommando “ 1005” 406, 1043, 1143 Kramer, Josef966, 1053, 1162, 1183
Komolv, Otto 901 Kramer (Secret Field Police) 308
König, Hans Wilhelm 1037 Krane, Jay B. 1229η, 1330n
König, Karl 1004n Kranebitter, Fritz 711
König (lieutenant, Corfii) 752n Kranefuss, Fritz 996n, 999
Königsberg 1123 Krasnystaw415
Königshaus, Franz 348, 352 Krauch, Carl 55,989,991,994,996n, 999,
Konka, Gejza 767 1030n, 1159, 1183
Kontinentale Öl A. G. 395 Krause (Finance Ministry) 115n, 118
Kopecki, Jaromir 1213, 1214n Krause, Johannes 174n, 284
Kopkow, Horst 284 Krause, Kurt 373n
Koppe, Wilhelm 197, 203, 213n, 504, 569n, Krauss, Clemens 496
570η, 960,1018η, 1046,1183 Krautsdorfer, Anton 885n
Koppelmann, Isidor 1201 Krayer, Georg 1274, 1275n
Koprivnica 759 Krebs, Friedrich 156n, 448n, 1183
Kopyl 404n Krebs, Hans 569n
Korber, Willy 95 Kreditanstalt der Deutschen 99
Korczak, Janusz 525-26 Kreidler, Eugen 1324η
Kordt, Erich 578 Kreipe, Werner 54
Koretz, Zvi (Sewy) 740-45, 1107 Kreklow, Arnold 284
Korherr, Richard Kremenchug 296, 299n, 308, 316
Emigration rejx>rt 1197n Kremenets. See Krzemieniec
“Final Solution” report (genesis and Krenzki, Curt von 726, 739
sources) 1304-6,1310 Kressendorf 1048
“Final Solution” report (statistics) 168n, Kretschmann, Max 1023n
188η, 274n, 444n, 472n, 487-78, Krichbaum, Wilhelm 278, 284
558n, 559n, 62ln, 695n, 745n, 764n, Kriebel, Hermann 578
785n,805n,1197n, 1315-16 Krimchaks 380-81
Generalgouvernement report (1943) 1309n Kris (Jewish War Veterans, Vienna) 450n
SS personnel statistics 202n Kristaponis, Juozas 1098n
Korman, Edward 1278-79,1281n, 1282 Kritzinger, Friedrich Wilhelm 64, 124,420n,
Körner, Hellmut 197, 264 421,1183
Körner, Paul 55, 80, 109n, 146, 368, 370, Kröger, Erhard 290
994n, 1030n, 1183 Kröger (I. G. Farben) 995n
Kornienko (rayon chief, Ukraine) 323n Krohn, Johannes 170
Korschan, Heinrich 183 Krohn (pastor) 598
Korsemann, Gerret 383n Krol, John Cardinal 1141 n
Korten, Günther 54, 278 Kroll, Hans 579
Korzecka, Stanislawa 1122n Krone-Presswerk, Berlin 998
Kos 725,754, 755n Kroner, Hayes 1202η
KoSak, Vladimir 756, 764 Kröning (Foreign Office) 174n

INDEX
Kropp (Reich Main Treasury) 1023n Kühne, Walter Heinrich Karsten 147n, 500n
Krosigk, Ernst Anton von 870n Kühnemann, Herbert 130
Krosigk, Lutz Schwerin von 1183 Külinen, Harald 607n
apartments 496 Kul m hof
Arvan izations 122 arrival priKedure 1035-37
confiscations 401 η confiscations 1014, 1017-18, 1026
dismissals 83 creation 416,929
fate 1156, 1183 as destination of transports 504, 508n, 958
Lodz Ghetto 237n estimated dead 958, 1320
Nazi Party actions 35 Gypsies 1071
pogrom of 1938 42,43n liquidation of camp 1043, 1045
position 53, 80 location 920
public relief 144 personnel 980
taxes 136n secrecy, rumors, and reports 513, 54In,
Warsaw Ghetto 539 Γ202
Krug von Nidda, Roland Hans 650,689n for tu here ul ar Poles 1066-67
Kruger, Felix 76 Kulturbund 89
Kruger, Friedrich Wilhelm Kummer, Karl 82
confiscations 1015, 1017n Kumming, E. (Sonderführer) 328n
expulsions 206 Kunder, Antal 880
fue 1183 Kundt, Ernst 199, 502,519η
“Final Solution” 420n, 515n, 1305n Kunska (office of General kommissar, Latvia)
forced labor 252, 254, 553-57, 565n 374n, 378n
Galicia (Katzmann report) 510n, 517n, Künstler, Karl 972n
520n, 540n, 558n, 567n Kuntze, Walter 726, 1159n, 1183
Lublin (camp) 969n Kunze, Friedrich 526n, 106In
movemenr restrictions 218 Kiinzel (Order Police, Lodz) 215
Ostindustrie GmbH 562 Kupaygorod 830n
Polish policy 548n Kurhessen 38
position 197, 203,205 Kursk (city) 868
transports 512-13 Kursk, Emil 403n
Warsaw Ghetto battle (Stroop report) 230n, Kurth (Reichsbank) 140η
506η, 527η, 533η, 537η, 538n, 1105n Kusche, Heinz 939n
Knigcr, Kurt 94n Küster, Otto 1267-68
Krumey, Hermann 582, 765, 882,906, 1183 Kutschera, Franz 204
Krummer, Ewald 465η, 1094η Kvatemik, Eugen 756, 760,1183
Krupp, Alfried 1159, 1183 Kvaternik, Slavko 417, 756, 1184
Krupp, Gustav von Bohlen und Haibach Kysak 907
1148n,1159, 1285 Kyustendil 805
Krupp A. G. 41,462n, 551,608,638,655,
942,998-99, 1001, 1156, 1260 La Guardia, Fiorello 1228
Kruseica 759-60 La Laurencie, Benoit Leon Foumel de 646-
Kryschak, Werner 425, 594 47,65 3n
Krzemieniec 320 La Vcmet 666
Kube, Wilhelm Labes (Stabshauptamr) 499n
Amswaldc incident 36 Labor. See also Wages
deportations to Minsk 366-67 in armament industry 457-59, 550-58,
fate 400, 1183 560, 564-69,619
Jewish labor 373n, 374n, 393, 397 camps 254-59,665, 773-74, 833, 834η,
killing operations 304n, 391-92, 394n, 983-87
1099, 1102, 1311 columns 252-54, 370-72,916
positions 36, 358 ghetto 259-63,402, 828
Strauch controversy 398, 1088 projects 255-57,609,642,665,688, 709,
Kubis, Robert 779n 739-40,830, 1051
Kubowitsky, Ixron 1140n service 665, 798-99, 833, 866-69, 888,
Kuchendort, Flügen 950n 916, 1140-41
Kuchler, Georg von 1183 skilled 460, 552,624,640, 759
Kuhn, Adolf 582,605 statistics (partial) 257,553,560, 564-65,
Kuhn, Locb 8c Co. 104 834
Kühne, Hans 992 Labor Ministry 81, 258n

INDEX
Labs, Walter 436n, 870n Lautz, Emst 489n
Lachmann, Karl 591 Lauxmann, Richard 197
Lackenbach 1007, 1071 Laval, Pierre 646,677-85,696-97, 1163,
Lagardelle, Hubert 646 1184
Lages, Willy 610,612, 1184 Law, Richard 1216
Lago Maggiore 711 Lawyers (Jewish) 87, 123,470, 769,812,
Lahousen von Vivremont, Erwin 278, 326n- 838, 860
28η, 330n, 332n, 343n, 348, 350-51, Leach, James 1281
1085η, 1087n Leavit, Moses A. 1267
Lakatos, Geza 856,913-15 Lebensbom e. V 494, 57ln, 1023
Lambert, Raymond-Raoul 668-69,680,695 Lecca, Radu 815,826,836,842-43,848-49,
Lambrecht, Arnold 228 85 ln, 852-53,1075n
Lambsdorff, Otto Graf 1287 Lechler, Fritz 928,929
Lammers, Hans Heinrich Lechthaler, Franz 392n, 1184
Aryanizations 12 ln, 124n, 126 Lederer, Emst 1126n
Berlin apartments 495n Leeb, Emil 278
Bialystok District 36ln Leeb, Luitpold 738n
corruption talks 251 Leeb, Wilhelm von 1184
expulsions 208η, 212 Leese, Emst 494n
fate 1159η, 1184 Leghorn. See Livorno
“Final Solution” 417,420 Leguay, Jean 646-47,678,680-81,695,1184
foreign Jews 31 Lehideux, François 646-47,658n
foreign labor 1080n Lehmann, Arthur 622n
Katzenberger case 163n Lehmann, Hans 1089
liaison (East Ministry) 358n Lehmann, Rudolf 278
Luxembourg 632n Lehner, Otto 1055n
Mischlinge and mixed marriages 76,159n, Leibbrandt, Max 428,432n, 675
435-36,446,447n Leibbrandt, Georg 357, 364, 392,396,421,
name changes 175 1168-69,1184
pensions 86 Leideritz, Peter 553
position 64 Leimer, Karl 45n
Reichsbank 1023η Leipzig 35,145,156,189n
star identification 177 Leiss (judge) 127
taxes 147n Leist, Ludwig 226, 228n, 23ln, 24ln, 252n,
wages 145n, 146n 255n, lllln, 1184
Länderbank Wien A. G. 99,101-2 Leitner (SS, Haushalt und Bauten) 926
Landfried, Friedrich 53, 81, 192n, 1023n, Lejkin, Jakub 524, 532
1184 Lemberg. See Lvov
Lange, Herbert 960 Lemkin, Raphael 1290
Lange, Kurt 53, 1023 Lern mer, Ernst 1200
Lange, Rudolf Erwin 290, 364,421,1184 Lendschner (Race Political Office) 441
Lange (East Ministry) 40In Leningrad 296, 298
Lange (SS, Haushalt und Bauten) 926 Lenzer, Wilhelm 928
Langenfeld (Polish General Staff, London) Leo Baeck Institute 1327
1213n Leon, Gh. N. (Romanian Economy Ministry )
Langenschwalbach 35 813n, 815
Langer, William (Office of Strategie Services) Leonhard Tietz (department store) 93n
1212,1213n Leros 725, 754
Langer, William (senator) 1235 I^erouville 698
Langleist, Walter 965 Les Milles 666
Langmann, Otto 41 n Leszcynski, Jakob 1302
Lantos, Tom 1172n Letsch, Walter 353n, 461 n
Lanz, Hubert 750n, 1184 Lety 1072
Larisa 75ln Letz, Rudolf 63
Lasch, Karl 199, 251,254n, 1184 Levi, Renzo 713-14
Latvia 299n, 322, 358, 372, 395,407,1120, Lévy, Albert 668-69,680
1128,1321 Lewartowski-Finkclstein, Jozef 525n
Laub (lieutenant colonel) 1074η Lewin, Ignacy 236n
Läufer, Feiwel 829n Lewinski, Karl von 104n
Lautenschläger, Karl 992 Lewis, Geoffrey 1251 n

1362 INDEX
Ley, Robert 95,415,1148 Litter, Fritz 685
Leyba, Edward 694 Litzenbcrg, Willy 284
Leyers, Hans 722n Litzmann, Karl 358
Leykauf, Hans 401-402 Livorno 663
Libya 709 Ljubljana 757
Licht (captain) 451 Lob (Bohmische Escompte Bank) 95
Lichtenbaum, Marek 232,524, 527n, 532 Lobbes, Hans 285
Lichtenberg, Bernhard 488-49, 1087-88 Loborgrad 760
Lichtheim, Richard 1214n Lodz (city) 208,229, 237, 244n, 245, 255n,
Lida 31 On, 400, 1312 1119, 1310n
Lie, Jonas 585 Lodz (ghetto)
Liebehenschel, Arthur 928-29,955n, 965- conditions 230,259, 262, 264-69, 273-74
66,968n, 974n-75n, 1013n, 1017, deportations from 514, 541-45, 1045,
1053n, 1184 1309
Lieberose 1051 deportations to 213-16, 271,634
Liechtenstein 607, 1063 formation 223-25, 229
Liège 636,642 German superv ision 225, 231,237-38,
Liegener, Eberhard 437,441 498, 1014, 1016-19, 1126
Liepàja 297, 298, 392 Gypsies 1071
Likus, Rudolf 578 Jewish administration in 233-35,506
Lilienthal, Arthur 187 labor 257, 564
Lille 647 rumors and reports about 1202
Lillehammer 586 Logemann, Wilhelm 485n
Lindemann (East Ministry) 381 Lohmann, Johann Georg 578, 763n
Linden, Herbert 62, 1003, 1042 Lohner-Beda, Fritz 995-96
Lindow, Kurt 284,285, 348, 352, 1184 Lohr, Alexander 725-26, 738,750, 754,
Lingens-Reiner, Ella 978-79 1163, 1184
Lintl, Hans 118 Lohse, Hinrich
Lippkc, Georg 247n confiscations 377-79
Lippmann (Generalbezirk Latvia) 373n definition of Jew 381 n
Lippmann, Rosenthal, & Co. 603n, 605-7, deportations to Ostland 364, 366-67,933n
629n,641n fate 1166, 1168, 1184
Lipslu, Jozef412 food rations 369
Lipski (German army) 190n ghettoization 361
Lipskv, Louis 1204n, 1242n Gypsies 1073
Lisbon 1200 killings 391, 395n-96n, 131 In
Lischka, Kurt 650,671,672n-74n, 676n, and Kube 1088n
678n, 682n, 685n, 695n, 1184 labor utilization 395n-96n
Liska, Walter 349, 353n position 358
List, Wilhelm 190n, 725-26, 732n, 1159n, Lolling, Enno929, 1007
1184 Lorn 805
List (SS, Haushalt und Bauten) 925 Lombard, Gustav 302
Lists and card indexes. See also Registration Long, Brcckcnridgc 1208, 1210
France 653,666 Looting 10, 38,42,45, 322, 375,511, 570,
Hungary 903,905 746,825-26, 1045, 1125
Italy 707, 713-14 Lopud Island 764
Netherlands 622 Lorenz, Erwin 82
Norway 586 Lorenz, Werner 201, 1021 n, 1185
Poland 254, 523 Lorkovic, M laden 756, 764, 1185
Reich-Protektorat area 450-53,473-75, Lomer, Georg 539n, 545n, 562,928,929,
478,480-81,486n 1159n, 1185
Romania 819n, 825 Lomer, Hans 925,927n, 928,939n, 1185
Theresienstadt 456 Lorraine 574
Lithuania. See also Police (Lithuanian) Losacker, Ludwig 197, 199, 21 In, 416n,
confiscations 377 1185
German administration 358, 363 Loscncr, Bernhard
local population 319, 1222 confiscations 583n
mental patients 341 conscience 1088
shootings 298-99,321-22, 339, 391 fate 1185
statistics 392, 395,407, 1128, 1321 Jewish council in Germany 184

INDEX
labor 146,458-59 Denmark 422, 589η, 590η
Mischlinge 440-41 fate 1185
Nuremberg laws 66-69, 381 "Final Solution” 421-22,439n, 440n,
position 62 446n, 459n, 58In, 584
star identification 178 foreign Jews 463n-65n
Loser, Ewald 1185 France 652n, 655n, 663n, 671 -72,686,
Lo Spinoso, Guido 692-93 701n
Louisenthal, Max de Lassale von 309n Hungary 872-73, 874n, 1085n
Low, Albert 950n Italy 663n, 707n, 709n
Löwenherz, Josef 186,451 -52,465n, 466, Jewish star 178n
473,475n, 476-77,487n, 892, 1114 Madagascar plan 414n
Löwenstadt 257 Netherlands 604n, 614,616
Löwenstein, Victor 187 Norway 422
Lowrie, Donald 683 position and jurisdiction 576-78, 1076,
Lubartow 547 1087
Lublin (city) 211, 226n, 229, 255n, 546-47, propaganda activities 1092, 1094n
1119 Romania 828n, 839,841,844-45
Lublin (concentration camp) Salonika 740n
capture by Red Army 1045-46 Serbia 730-31,735
confiscations 1016, 1021-22 Slovakia 768n, 772, 775n, 776, 785n
construction and installations 937-38,974 Liitkenhus, Erich 485n
as destination of transports 472, 504, 538, Lutsk 297, 372n, 405
700, 785,958 Lurterloh (Justice Ministry ) 470
estimated Jewish dead 958, 1320 Liittwitz, Smilo Freiherr von 569n
inmates 940 Lutze, Viktor 56
killings 560-61 Luxembourg 215, 574,632-35,1128,1321
personnel 964-65,969 Lvov (city) 296, 301, 319, 505-6,522,1119
reports about 1030, 1045-46, 1211 Lvov (ghetto) 223, 540,1310n
SS industries 986-87 Lvov (labor camp) 559, 563n, 564n
Lublin (district) 199, 204,207-208, 222, Lyon 691,697-98
255n, 256-57,259,504,958
Lublin (ghetto) 217,510,522, 545 Maass (Finance Ministry) 80,247n
Lublin (labor camp) 554, 559, 561, 563,987 McCall, Elizabeth 1277
Luburic, Vjekoslav 759n McCall, H. Carl 1277-78
Luceri, Tommaso 693 McClelland, Roswell 121 In, 1213,1217,
Luchterhandt, Otto 1014n 1226
Ludin, Hanns Elard 582-83, 768, 776-77, McCloy, John J. 1142-44,1160-61,1216-
783-84, 786-89, 791,874n, 907n, 17,1223n, 1226, 1249
1163,1185 Macedonia 793-94, 804-5,958
Lüdinghausen, Reinhold Freiherr von 99n, Mach, Alexander (Sano) 767, 778-79,782,
1lln, 368n 1185
Lüdke, Erich 589 Macici, Nicolae 315
Ludwiger (colonel) 896n Mackensen, Eberhard von 712, 721,1185
Ludwigshütte (firm) 566 Mackensen, Hans Georg von 53, 174n, 578,
Ludza 1073n 582,690,691η, 692,710,748
Luftglas, Markus 467 McKittrick, Thomas M. 1201
Luftwaffenbetrieb Vereinigte Ostwerke McLaughlin, Joseph T. 1279
GmbH 566 MacLeish, Archibald 1140n
Lukács, Bela 875 Madagascar plan 207, 212, 227,414-15
Lullay, Laszlo 896 Madaus, Gerhard 1006-7
Lustig, Walter 187 Maedel, Walter 80,486-87,494,498, 585n,
Lustiger, Jean-Marie Cardinal 124ln 641n, 1025
Lüters, Rudolf 926 Maertius (Generalkommissariat Vollwnia-
Luth (navy) 1055 Podolia) 869n
Luther, Martin (church leader) 3-4, 13-15, Magdeburg-Anhalt 38
409,1150 Magill, Franz 302, 303
Luther, Martin (Foreign Office) Maglione, Luigi Cardinal 682, 760η, 762η,
Belgium 644 769n, 778n, 782n, 783, 787, 1204
Bulgaria 801-2, 803n Magnus (navy) 753
Croatia 76ln, 762n, 763n Maguire, Robert F. 1102

INDEX
Magunia, Waldemar 358, 540 in camps 373,942,949, 1042-43
Magyar Szo 899 escapes from 392,405
Mahler (forest service) 385n exhumations 406,942, 1042-43
Maier (Lt. Oil.) 1315n Ia§i pogrom 817
Mainz 21 in shooting operations 328-29,403-5
Maison de Honneterie 603n Massfeller, Franz 441
Majdan-Sopocki 515 Massute, Erwin 507, 1185
Majdanek. See Lublin (concentration camp) Maurach, Reinhard 1158n
Makevevka 387 Maurer, Gerhard 46 In, 925,929,974,983-
Maktos, John 1291 n 84,987,997
Malfatti di Montetretto, Francesco 693 Mauthausen 35In, 614,620,628,917,987,
Malines 642 997, 1050-52
Malkinia. See Treblinka May, Kurt 929, 986n
M aimed y 635 Mayer, Josef Leonhard 70 In
Malzan (Justice Ministry) 19n Mayer, Kurt 56
Mälzer, Kurt 712, 721 ’ Mayer, Rene 668, 1192
Mandel, Maria 1212 Mayer, Saly 905n
Mandic, Nikola 756 Mayer-Falk (SS, France) 650,675n
Manecufa, loan 824n Mayr, Karl 46n
Manfred Weiss Stahl- und Metallwerke A.G. Maywald, Gerhard 373n
886 Mazarini, Nicolae 313n, 833n
Mangold, Philipp 428 Meader, George 1229n, 1231
Maniu, luliu 842 Mecheln. See Malines
Mann, Wilhelm R. 953 Meek (Economy Ministry) 608n
Mannheim (city) 156 Meculescu, Teodor 820
Mannheim, Bruno 169n, 478n, 480n Medeazza, von (Generalgouvernement) 24In
Mannl, Walter 950n Medical experiments 831,1002-13, 1156
Manowski, Paul von 752 Medicus, Franz Albrecht 62,66
Mansfeld, Werner 353η Medricky, Gejza 767
Manstein, Erich von 332, 1162, 1185 Meerwald, Willy 64
Manstein, Ernst von 75n Megeve 693
Mantcufcl, Hans-Karl Freiherr von 82 Mehrbach, Hans 969
Manteufel, Joachim von 80 Meier, August 290
Mantua 722 Meine, August 375n, 1304n
Maps for roundups 481,522, 891-92 Meinecke (Labor Ministry) 353n
Marazzani, Mario 693n Meinhof, Carl Gerhard 63
Marburg 1125n Meisen, Franz Adolf 260
Marcinkance 1088, 1089n Meisinger, Josef 1185
Marcone, Giuseppe 760, 762 Meiss, Leon 658
Marcule$ti 823-24 Mcisslein, Johann 1083n
Marder, Karl 229n, 231,257n, 27In Meissner, Otto Lebrecht 442n, 469n
Maribor 762 Melbourne, Roy Malcolm 1212n
Marijampole 298 Melchers, Wilhelm 579
Marinescu, Ion 389n, 815 Melhado, Rebecca 124In
Margraf (jewelry store) 42 Melitopol 300, 358n
Mariupol 300 Melmer, Bruno 928, 1024, 1027n
Markl, Hermann 162, 1185 Melzer, Martin 965
Markstadt 257, 551 Memel. See Klaipeda
Marotzke, Wilhelm 80, 107n Memorialization 1133-34
Marseille 669,693,695,698n, 1119 Menetrel, Bernard 696
Marshall, George 1234 Mengele, Josef 1011, 1037, 1049, 1185
Martel, Rene. See Frederic, Vsevolod Mental patients 326n, 341, 344-45,467-68,
Marthinsen, Karl 586 65 In, 931-32,960-63, 1004, 1066
Marti, Roland 662n Menton 690
Martin, Friedrich 425, 895, 1114n Merci, Lucilo 745
Martin, Victor 1032η, 1114n Mercedes. See Daimler-Benz
Martin (Kharkov) 1069n Merin, Moses (Moszck) 256n, 516, 787
Marx, Arthur 608n Merkatz, Hans von 1160n
Marx, Hanns 63 Merkel, Hans 603n
Mass graves. See also Kommando “ 1005'’ Merkel (armament official) 259n, 263n

INDEX 1305
Merten, Max 740-43, 744η, 1107η, 1185 Mitteldeutsche Stahlwerke 113, 115-16. See
Mertens, Georg 1004η also Flick, Friedrich
Messe, Giovanni 687 Mittendorf (judge) 443n
Messersmith, George 33n Mixed marriages. See also Intermarriage
Metrawatt A. G. 567 prohibitions
Metz 673 Austria 487-88
Metzner, Alfred 394n Belgium 636,644
Meurer, Fritz 662n Bulgaria 799, 803
Mexico 735 Croatia 765
Mev, Siegfried 579 Denmark 598
Meyer, Albert 1018n France 665n, 698
Meyer, Alfred 53, 357, 385n, 400,420n, 421, Germany 88,168-70, 178,443-47,487-
423,440n,446n, 1186 88, 500-501,1124
Meyer, Eugen 507-8, 778 Greece 742,750
Meyer, J. H. 1236 Hungary 889
Meyer, Martin 633n Italy 704, 707,720, 722
Meyerheim, Paul 187 Mogilev 1124n
Meyszner, August 727,1186 Netherlands 619-20,623-24
Michalsen, Georg 541 Norway 588
Michel, Elmar 648,653,656,657n, 669, Romania 838n-39n
1186 Slovakia 783
Mielec 522, 550n, 566n Mociulschi, Teodor 815, 833
Mierzinsky, Kurt 387n Möckel, Karl 925,950n, 965,967, 1014,
Mihai (King of Romania) 913 1025-26,1186
Milan 709, 711, 718n, 721-22 Modena 720n
Milch, Erhard 887,994n, 1000, 1006,1082n, Moder, Paul 204
1156,1159n, 1186 Modreanu, Rodrig 809n
Mildner, Rudolf 592 Moellhausen, Eitel Friedrich 714-15
Milgrom, David 1212n Moes, Ernst 425,455
Milos, Ljubo 759n Mogilev 294n, 302, 339, 376-77, 386,945,
Minsk 948,1124n
deportations from 400,958,982 Mogilev-Podolsky 820, 827-29,850
deportations to 364, 366-67,419,473, Möhl, Kurt 648,672n, 673n, 675n
485 Mohns, Otto 241,111 In
Einsatzgruppen traversal 298 Mohr, Robert 290
Himmler visit 343-44, 1098 Mojert, Paul 605
Jewish population 296,400 Moldavia 851
killings in 302, 339, 343-45, 399 Moldenhauer (Lodz) 257n
Mirre, Ludwig 80 Molestations 33, 34,178-79
Mischke, Alfred 929 Moll, Otto 965,970-71,1044
Mischlinge. See also “Jews” defined Monaco 697n
in armed forces 87-88 Monsky, Henry' 1205, 1242n
defined 68-77 Montenegro 575, 725, 749
dismissals 84-89 Montua, Max 293n, 342
“Final Solution” 434-44,472n Moran, Frederick 1159,1160n
forced labor 443 Morävek, Augustin 767, 78In, 782n, 784
Gypsie-German 1071-72 Moravska Ostrava 101, 207,413
Jewish-Croatian 765 Morawski (Berlin food office) 480
Jewish-Dutch 611,619-20 Morgan, Edmund Μ. 1144n
Jewish-Italian 723 Morgan, Frederick 1228
marriages of 159-61,435-37 Morgen, Georg Konrad 972
name changes 176n Morgenthau, Henry' J. 1131,1142η, 1206n,
in schools 165n, 442 1210-11,1216-17
sexual relations 159 Morgenthau, Henry Sr. 1147n
taxes 147-48 Moritz, Alfons 82, 15 ln, 975n, 11 S7n
Miskolc 902n Moritz, August 693n
Mitakov, Vasili 795 Morocco 663
MITROPA (Mitteleuropäisches Reisebüro) Morris, James 1158
429 Morrison, Herbert 1140
Mitrovica 736 Moscow 296

1366 INDEX
Moscow Conference on War Criminals 1142 Murgescu, I. (Commander of Vapniarca camp)
Moscow Declaration of 1943 1139-40, 1143, 831n
1147n, 1163 Murmelstein, Benjamin 450-51,455,457,
Moser, Hilmar 547n, 983n 466,476, 1056
Moser, Walter 223, 229n, 231, 257n, 264 Mussgay, Friedrich 159n
Moser (Baurat, Krcishauptmannschatt Chelm) Mussolini, Benito
935 Croatia 763
Moslems 351 France 691 -92
Mosse, Martha 478-79,482 Greece 749
Mostar 762-63 Italy 705-6, 708-10,712
Mostovoye 340 and pogrom of 1938 40n
Motschall (Stadtkommissar, Ostrowiec) 520n and Ribbentrop 1093, 194n
Moyne, Walter Edward Guinness, Lord 904, Muszyna 566
1226n Mutschmann, Martin 700
Mrugowski, Joachim 955-56, 1003, 1186
Muchow, Reinhold 95
Mucgge (Krcishauptmannschaft, No\v\' S^cz) Nachtmann, Otto von 770n
21 In Nagel, Hans (General) 104n, 369
Mühldorf 1052, 1089n Nagel, Hans (SS, Slovakia) 79In
Muhler, Rolf693,698n NAGLJ (Niederländische Aktiengesellschaft
Mühlmann, Kajetan 629 für die Abwicklung von Unter­
Muhs, Hermann 53 nehmungen) 606
Mukachevo 900 Nagybánya 906n
Mulcrt, Botho 991 NAIC. See National Association of Insurance
Mulhouse 65 In Commissioners
Muller, Bruno 290 Nal^zów 785
Müller, Erich (Einsatzgruppen) 290 Names and name changes
Muller, Ench (Krupp) 462n, 55In, 999n of firms 93, 129-31
Muller, Eugen 278, 305n, 1186 personal 12, 31, 175-76, 707,812
Muller, Heinrich of streets 90
Auchwitz 997 Nance, James W. 1172n
Bulgaria 801 Nancy 675-76
Einsatzgruppen 288 Naples 703
emigration of Jews 413 Narten, Georg 149n-50n, 175n-76n
exchange of Jews for Germans 1208n Nasielsk 191
fate 1150, 1186 Nasjonal Sämling (National Union, Norway)
"Final Solution" 419,421 584
France 677,691,696n Nasse, Albert 1 lOn, 113n, 114n
Hungary 869n Nastura$, Constantin 829
Mischlinge 472n Nathow, Hans 109n
Netherlands 615 National Association of Insurance Commis­
position 284,425-26 sioners (NAIC) 1283
prisoners of war 348, 350-51,353 National Bank of Switzerland 1276
Romania 841,847 Natzweiler 1013
rumors and secrecy 477, 1042, 1203n Naumann, Erich 290, 346n, 609,610, 1161,
Muller, Herbert ( Foreign Office) 382 1186
Muller, Herbert ( RSHA) 285 Naumann, Karl 197, 266, 569
Muller, Hermann 125In Nazi party
Muller, Johannes Hermann 549, 1186 Aryanizations 121-22
Muller (Finance Ministry) 113n, 115n, 117 Family Office (Sippenamt) 71
Muller (judge) 443n Führer Chancellery 56, 75,960-62
Muller-Cunradi, Martin 992, 1007 organization 56
Müller-Teuslcr, Hans 361n Party Chancellen' 56, 131,157n-58n, 440,
Mummcnthcv, Karl 925,929,986n, 987, 470,487, 1087
1186 Political Division 32
Mumuianu, luliu 847 pogrom of1938 37-39
Mundt, Friedrich 109n program and policy 30-31,66
Munich 156,352,495-96, 1135n Ncagu, Alexandru 815, 835n
Munkacs906n Ncbc, Artur 285,290, 343-44, 1004,1070,
Münzer, Hans 648 1186

INDEX 1367
Nebola (Ukrainian police lieutenant, Lvov) Nitsche, Paul 177n
506n Nockcmann, Heinrich 284, 1013n
Nederlandsche Handels Mij 104 Noé 666
Ncdic, Milan 727, 738n, 87ln, 1186 Noell (WVHA) 928
NEEP (Nord Europeesche Erts- en Pyriet Nogués, Charles 663
Matschappij N. V.) 607 Non-Aryans. See “Jews” defined; Mischlinge
Nehring, Walter 687-88 Norden, Albert 1271
Neifeind, Kurt 284, 382,441 Normandy 700
Neikrug, Lewis 1235n Normann, Hans H. 583n
Neofit of Vidin (Grand Vicar) 796n Norway 352,422, 584-89,958,991, 1128,
Netherlands 1321
statistics 1128, 1321 Nosske, Gustav 290,1186
war crimes trials 1178-79, 1184,1188, Notz (Weapons Committee) 462n
1190 Novak, Franz 425-26,429,431, 582,675,
wartime developments 600-32,674 778,882,884n, 891,895,1034n,
Netherlands Insurance Association 1284 1186
Neubacher, Hermann 582, 749-50,1186 Nováky 773,780,79 In
Neubome, Burt 1276n Novara 711
Neuendorff (Generalbezirk Latvia) 365, 375n, Novi Sad 871
378 Novomoskovsk 387n
Neuengamme 1053n Novoukrainka 339
Neuhausen, Franz 727-28,736 Nowy Sa^z 21 In
Neuhäusler, Johannes 1161 NSB (Dutch Nazi party) 612-13,620
Neumann, Erich 192n, 368,420n, 421,440n, NSDAP. See Nazi party
446n, 459 NSV (Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt)
Neumann, Franz von 835, 842 375n, 435,498,733,1018,1026
Neumann, Oskar 774, 780 Nuremberg 156,161, 352,483
Neumann (Jewish War Veterans, Vienna) 454 Nuremberg trials 1143-61,1327-28,1330
Neumann-Reppert, Ekkehardt 61 In
Neurath, Konstantin von 33, 53,67n, 106n, Oberembt (Protektorat Land Ministry) 153n
126n, 578,1148,1150-51,1152n, Oberg, Carl-Albrecht 204,650,672,674n,
1186 676-77,685n, 686,689,695n, 1186
Neustadt 1053 Oberhäuser, Josef936n, 1187
Neutra 791 Oberlindober, Hans 95
Nevel 340 Oberschlesische Bauuntemehmung Wolfgang
Never, Ludwig 648,675n Dronke 553n
New York Times (wartime reports) 1202-3 Obstfelder, Hans von 347n
Newman, Steven 1278 Oceakov 849
Newsweek (wartime reports) 1202 Odessa 296,297,313-15, 388-90,828,
Nice 690,692,697 1316
Nicolai, Helmut 31 O’Dwyer, William 121 In
NicuJescu, G. (Romanian investigation com­ Oels, Arnold 963n
mission) 819n, 822n Oerzen, von (military administration, France)
NicuJescu, Mihai 390n 648
Niedermayer, Ferdinand 702 Oeschey, Rudolf 1158n
NiehofF, Heinrich 647 Oever, D. J. J. van der 609n
Niemann, Johann 982 Office of Strategic Services. See United States
Niemann, Karl 925 Oheimb, Ulrich von 867n
Niemann (I. G. Farben) 993 Oherr (major) 568n, 569n
Niemeyer, Christian 140n Ohlenbusch, Wilhelm 197
Niemöller, Martin 89,1136 Ohlendorf, Otto 1161
Nietzsche, Friedrich 32n fate 1148,1156-58,1187
Nikitchenko, I. T. 1147n, 1148n field operations in occupied USSR 292,
Niklas, Johann 675 305n, 328-29, 356n, 375n, 819n
Nikolaev (city) 296, 300, 376n jx)sitions 81, 284, 289, 290
Nikolaev (Generalbezirk) 358, 828 Ohnesorge, Wilhelm 53, 86,492
Nikolai, Hellmuth von 461 OKH (Oberkommando des Heeres) 54, 277-
Niksic, Ante 756 79
Nîmes 1121 OKL (Oberkommando der Luftwaffe) 54,
Nisko413n 277-79

INDEX
OKM (Oberkommando der Kriegsmarine) 54, Ostrowiecer Hochöfen 566
277-79 Oswald, Alfons 229n
OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht) 54, Oswald (lieutenant colonel) 33ln
277-79 Ott, Adolf 290, 1187
Olbricht, Friedrich 278 Otter, Baron Göran von 1030
Olmcr, David 668 Otto, Helmuth 23ln
Old people 422,447-48,456-57,517,633, Otto, Kurt 969
644,699, 1036. See also Theresienstadt OUN (Ukrainian nationalist organization) 312
Olsen, IvcrC 121 ln Overbeck, Joachim 638n
Olshanka 308 Ovruch 1200
Opatow 1047
Opole Lubelskie 262 Pabianice 257, 1014, 1016, 1017
Oppeln 291,432n, 461,607, 848,950 Padua 718
Oppenheimer, Alfred 633 Paetfgen, Theodor 285
Oppenheimer, Karl 443n Paersch, Fritz 197, 238, 1187
Opperbeck, Josef 559n, 929,987 Pag Island 759
Oppermann, Ewald 358 Pälängeanu, Nicolae 821
Oradea 892,899-900,902n Palciauskas, Kazis 356n, 1171
Oranczyce 507n Palestine (mandate) 139-40, 142,414,812,
Oranienburg 1055 840, 845-46,903,919, 1196-98,
Oranjekrant 626 1206, 1227
Orezeanu, T. C. (Romanian railways) 850 Paffinger, Alexander 231, 255n, 264n, 266
Organisation Todt Palitzsch, Gerhard 965,973
Audinghen 642 Pallmann (lieutenant) 388n
Bor 867 Palm (I.G. Farben) 993
Channel Islands 665 Palssewsky, Eugen 747
France 443,642,698 Pamberg, Bernhard 636n
Hungarian Jews 867, 1000 Panevézys 298
Reich 443,551, 1001n-2n Pantazi, Constantin 815, 833n
Saloniki 740 Panzinger, Friedrich 284, 285n, 348, 352,
Scmlin 736 383,1187
USSR (occupied) 356, 386n, 401, 830, Papen, Franz von 33, 722n, 1148, 1151
1083n Paraguay 694
Warsaw 252-53 Paralysis 25
Orlandini, Gustavo 686 Paris 646,667,669-70,675-79,699, 702,
Orleans 676,683n 1120,1122-24
Orssich, Philip64ln Paris Soir 1202
Orthodox Jews. Sec Agudath Parma 720n
Orzech, Maurycv 525n Parpatt, Friedrich 493n
Osiander, Wilhelm 589,61 ln Partov, Konstantin 795, 803
Osijck 759 Parry Chancellery'. See Nazi Party
Oslo 584,586-87 Paschlcben, Walter 740
OSS. See Office of Strategie Serv ices Passermann Füllfeder-Reparatur, Sosnowiec
Osservatore Romano 716 260n
Ostelbisches Braunkohle-Syndikat 118 Patras 752
Osten, Fritz-Wcdig von der 31 On Pâtrà$canu, Lucrcçiu 1176, 1181
Osten, von den (Armaments Ministry) 999 Patronka 780
Oster, Hans 278 Patzer (Finance Ministry) 80, 70ln, 1025n
Osterkamp, Herbert 278 Paulsen (Hauptkommissar, Minsk) 404n
Ostermann, Anton 1089 PaiLsch, Walter 846
Österreich, Kurt von 347n Pavelic, Ante 756, 760, 1187
Österreichische Creditanstalt 93-94, 1 lOn, Pavlograd 387n
128 ln Pavolini, Alessandro 718
Österreichische Kontrollbank für Industrie Pawashop ( Pfand lei hanst alt, Berlin) 498,
und Handel 128n 1023n,1024-26
Ostervvind, Heinz 99n Pazicky, Andreas 781
Osti (OstindustrieGmbH) 562-64, 566, 571 Pechersky, Alexander 982
Ostland 358, 361, 363-64, 366, 373, 377, Peciora (camp) 830-31
396 Pfcck, David 1159, 1160n
Ost row kx 566 Regler, Konrad 437
Pehle, John 1208, 1211, 1213, 1216,1216n Picot, Werner 578,581 n
Peicher, Karl 507 Pieche, Giuseppe 764
Pell, Herbert 1213 Pieckenbrock, Hans 278
Pemsel, Max 727, 732n, 1187 Pietzsch, Albert 55
Pensions Pifrader. See Achamcr-Pifrader
of German bureaucracy and military 1165 Pinsk 297, 339, 369-70,403,405
of Jewish victims 86,91,492-93 Pionki 566, 568
Perlasca, G iorgio 918 Piorkowski, Alex 972n
Perlzweig, Maurice, L. 1209 Piotrkow-Trybunalski 217, 24ln, 1108n,
Pernutz (KreishauptmannschaftTamow) 51 On 1122n
Persterer, Alois 290, 329 Piraeus 752
Peshev, Dimitar 805 Pirath, Wilhelm 948
Petain, Henri Philippe 646-47,652,658n, Pi rot 805
660,664n, 668n, 680n, 686,696 Pisk, Arthur 622-23
Peter, Johann 485n Pithiviers 666,675,678
Peters, Gerhard Friedrich 95In, 954,956, Pituley, Volodimir 505 n
957n,1168 Pius XI 705-6,1093
Petersen, Walter 404n Pius XII 489n, 714-17,877,1204-5
Petraschka (Sofia) 796n Plank, Wilhelm 537
Petrenko, Vasily 1049n Plaszow 256,559,569n, 1050
Petrescu, $tefan 815 Plate, Roderich 1306n
Petrikau. See Piotkrow Trybunalski Platon, Charles 658n
Petrovgrad. See Grossbetscherek Pleiger, Paul 55,80, 104,106,108n, 109n,
Petrovicescu, Constantin 812 116,461,888n, 1187
Petrovs, Janis 1073n Pleske (Grodno) 51 In
Petschek, Ignaz 116 Plodeck, Oskar Friedrich 243
Petschek, Ignaz enterprises 113-19,144n Ploetz, Achim 284, 765n
Petschek, Julius enterprises 113-16 Ploetz, Dietrich von 1089n
Petschek, Karl 117 Ploie$ti 807,814
Petzel, Walter 190 Plovdiv 805
Peyrouton, Marcel 646-47,664n Poalei Zion (L^bor Zionist organization) 521,
Pfannenstiel, Wilhelm 1040-41, 1187 530n, 531
Pfannmiiller, Hermann 467n Poalei Zion Z. S. (Labor Zionist organization)
Pfeifer (Reichskommissariat Netherlands) 530n, 531
605n Podul Iloaiei 817
Pfeifle (Justice Ministry) 382 Pogroms
Pfundtner, Hans 53,62,65n-66, 82n-83n, Bialystok District 320
85,88n,96n, 123-124n,157n-59n, as concept 318
175,417n, 1187 Galicia 319-20
Philo 26 Lama 319
Phillips (firm) 603,613 Lithuania 319
Photographing 262, 334,406, 733n, 1053 medieval 10
Physicians (German). See Euthanasia program; Netherlands 613
Medical experiments; and under names policy 318,689
of individual physicians Romania 814, 817
Physicians (Jewish) November 1938 37-46
Auschwitz 976, 1001 Pohl, Oswald
Bulgaria 805 Aryanizations 98n, 887
under church rule 7,9 camps 622n, 939n, 974,979n-81,986n,
Hungary 860, 885, 890,892,895,906 996-98,1000-1001,1028,1053
Poland 273n confiscations 1015, 1017, 1019, 102 In,
Reich 86-87,96,123-24,144-45, 172 1022-24
Romania 829, 834 corruption 972
Salonika 742n fate 1148,1187
Slovakia 769 labor utilization 472n, 555n, 559n, 561 -
Piacenza 720n 62, 564n, 983,996-1001, 1126n
Piazza, Adeodato Giovanni Cardinal 718 medical experiments 1004, 1009, lOlOn
Picasso, Pablo 1122 position 201, 887, 888n, 924-26,928
Pichier (Kriegsverwaltungsrat, Belgium) 638- Warsaw ghetto 539n, 562
39 Pohle, Walter 99n

1370 INDEX
Poitivin, Jean 390n, 823(1,824n Pollack, Isidor 94
Pokomy, Adolf 1006, 1187 Poltava 296,299n, 1066
Poland. See also Poles Pomser (OKU) 688n
government of 411 -12, 1163, 1170, 1213n Poniatowa 559, 561,564,566,938
population statistics 139, 1119, 1128, Pool, DeSola. See DeSola Pool, David
1240, 1308-12,1321 Pook, Hermann 1157, 1187
postwar trials 1163, 1170, 1174-75, 1178- Popa, Alexandru 815
80, 1182, 1184-85,1190-92 Popescu, Christodor 831 n
wartime developments 188-274, 501-71, Popescu, Dumitru 815, 853
674 Popcscu, Ion 838n
Polenskv & Zöllner (firm) 1001 Popescu (Romanian gendarmerie) 390n
Poles 227-28,246, 317n, 320,509-11,520, Popitz, Johannes 83
538, 540,546-48,93In, 991, 1005, Popov, Ivan Vladimir 795, 798-800,803
1067-68, 1122, 1125 Popovici, Traian 825
Police. See also Einsatzgruppen; and under Portugal 463,918-19, 1265
names of individual police officers Portuguese Jews 629
Danish 596-97 Posen. See Poznan
Dutch 618,625-26 Posse, Hans (Economy Ministry) 81, 116-17
Estonian 386 Posse, Hans (art expert) 629
Ethnic German 258, 323, 390, 505, 779, Possehl, L. & Co. 98
1316 Postal Ministry 53, 172,629
French 677,679,692,695,697 Potopcanu, Gheorghe 815
German (Order) Poznan 190, 192,243, 1018, 1072n
Denmark 593, 596 Pozner, Chaim 1201
France 676,689-90 PPR (Polska Parti ja Robotnicza) 521, 530-31
Greece 750-51 PPS (Polska Partija Socjalistyczna) 52In
Hungary 890,907 Pradel, Friedrich 346η, 737η, 738n, 1187
Italy 715, 721 Prager, Alfred 1251 n
Netherlands 610,625-26 Prague 172, 186, 207, 215,413,474,496-
Poland 203-5, 225, 228,502, 505-6, 97
517, 537-39n, 561 Prcbichl (mountain) 1051
Reich 172,475,484-85 Preckwinkel, Heinrich 1312n
Serbia 727, 737 Preiss, Jaroslav 102
USSR (occupied) 302, 310, 342, 383- Prelle, Kurt 96
85, 391 -93,403-4n, 1200 Prentzel (I. G. Farben trustee) 144n
German (Security) 163-64, 185,202-205, President's Commission on the Holocaust
281-82,609 1133,1141
Greek 750-51 Presov 1216
Hungarian 890-91,906-8,916 Pretzsch 289, 293
Italian 692,717-18 Preusch, Hermann 438,441
Jewish Preussischc Staatsmünze 1025-26
Berlin and Vienna 473-74,476,481 Preysing, Konrad von 489n, 1205n
France (Drancv) 695n Preziosi, Giovanni 705
German-held Poland and USSR 219, Pribuzhye. See Acmecetca
228, 233, 235-36, 362, 393n, 523- Prienai 322n
24, 526-28, 542, 552, 568n Prictzel, Kurt 284,925, 928
Netherlands (Westcrbork) 622,626 Priluki 387
Saloniki 744 Pripct Marshes 302
Slovakia 775 Prison inmates 471-72
Transnistria 829-30 Prisoners of war (Jewish) 346-53,661-62,
Iatnan 299n, 322,331,384n, 403,506,524 1319n
Lithuanian 321-22, 384n, 391, 392n, Priitina 751
830n, 969n, 1083, 1098-99 Prominent Jews 24, 85, 183, 192, 218,430,
Norwegian 586 457,465,627-29,805,903
Polish 203, 228, 505, 537, 1126n Propaganda Ministry 46, 53,96
Russian 386 Proskaucr, Joseph 1207, 1210, 1226
Serbian 727 Protektorat 177,444,455,488, 1197. See also
Slovak 772, 779 Czechoslovakia; Prague
Ukrainian 203, 228, 322-23, 340n, 385, Protestant churches 69n, 179, 587,619n, 782,
505-6,516n, 537,567-68, 1068n 860, 899, 1136

INDEX 1371
Prüfer, Curt (ambassador) 579, 846n Rademacher, Hcllmuth 80
Prüfer, Franz Wilhelm 178n, 478-81,499 Radcmachcr (military administration, France)
Prüfer, Kurt (Topf firm) 943n, 947 648-49
Prussia 83, 172, 189. See also East Prussia Radctzky, Waldemar 1188
Prützmann, Hans Adolf 302, 304, 323n, 377, Radom (city) 211,226n, 511, 1119
383n, 405n, 541, 1021n, 1187, 1312n Radom (distria) 199, 204,504,958
Pruzinsky, Mikulas 767 Radom (labor camp) 559, 563, 564n, 566
Prytz, Frederik 586n Radomysl 323n, 340
Przcmysl 297, 371, 512, 554n Rádulescu (Romanian colonel) 848
Przemvslany 126 In Radzins, Nikolai 375n
Pucheu, Pierre 646-47,658n, 664n, 668n Radzyn 218,1108n
Pugliese, Emanuele 708 Raeder, Erich 54, 278, 1148, 1151
Puhl, Emil Johann 53, 1023-24, 1027, 1088, Rahm, Karl 454, 1053-54, 1056, 1188
1187 Rahn, Rudolf 1188
Puk, Mirko 756 fate 1056, 1188
Pulawy 21 In, 255, 1064 France 650,679-80,688-89
Pulitzer, Joseph 1152 Hungary 914
Pulverfabrik Pionki 566, 567n, 569 Italy 582, 711-12, 715, 719
Pulverfabrik Skodawerke-Wetzler A. G. 93 Tunisia 582
Pulz, Josef 99n Railways (functions)
Puskas, Stefan 782 cars, locomotives 428-29,432,507-9,
Puttkammer, Alfred von 303n 673-74, 777-78,896,1076
Pütz, Georg 444n confiscated furniture 375n, 702
Pütz, Karl 403n financing of transports 427-29,486-87,
Puy-de-Dome 665n 508,673-74,684-85, 746,778, 792
Pyatigorsk 1315 forced labor 461, 553, 740
guards on trains 484-85,676,698,745
Quakers. See American Friends Service jumpers from trains 518,698
Committee loading and unloading 483-84,906
Quassowski, Leo 63, 130n organization 200,427-33,507-8,648
Querner, Rudolf402n, 109In scheduling 428,432-33,484-85, 762,
Quisling, Vidkun 574, 584-86 1076
Railways (geographic)
Raab, Julius 1135n, 1180 Auschwitz 943,948,950-51
Raabe, Hans 106 Belgium 430,615
Rab Island 764 Belzec 512,1035
Rabe, Karl 290 Croatia 430, 762
Rabeneck, Friedrich 929,987 Denmark, Danish Jews 430, 594
Rabsch (Luxembourg) 634n France 430,615,648,671,672-75,684
Racism 20,65-66 Germany and Austria 483-86
Racziriski, Edward 114In Greece 430, 745-46
Rademacher, Franz Hungary 895-96,906
apartment 495n Italy 430
Belgium 642n Kulmhof 508n, 1035-36
Bulgaria 802n Minsk 432n, 485
Croatia 76In Netherlands 430,615,621
Denmark 589 Norway 430
fate 1168, 1187 Poland 200,209,431, 507-8,512-13,
“Final Solution” 437n, 439n, 459n 529,553
France 655n, 67 In, 672 Protektorat 430
Greece 749 Riga 432n, 375,485n
Hungary 874n Romania 834n, 844
Italy 707n, 709n Serbia 430,431 n
Liechtenstein 1063n Slovakia 430, 777-78
Madagascar plan 414n Sobibor484, 512, 1035
Netherlands 604n, 615-16 Transnistria 390n
position 577, 578 Treblinka 509n, 512, 1035
Romania 82In, 828,843, 846 USSR (occupied) 390,430
Serbia 730,735n, 736 Vienna 43 In, 745n, 895-96
Slovakia 772n, 775, 777n Rainer, Fritz 574, 712

1372 INDEX
Rajakowitsch, Erich 494n, 617n Reichskulturkammer 88-89
Rail (WVHA) 928 Reichsrechnungshof 1024, 1025n
Rang, Fritz 285 Reichsvercinigung der Juden in Deutschland.
Ranncr, Sebastian 633n See Jewish councils (Germany)
Ransoming 23, 101-4,608-9, 739, 790-91, Reichswerke A. G. für Erzbergbau und
903-6, 1218-24 Eisenhütten “Hermann Goring.” See
Raphael, Moris (Maurice?) 742n Hermann Goring Works
Rapp, Albert 290, 1188 Reimer, Georg 619n
Rasch, Otto 290, 294, 337, 383, 1188 Reinebeck, Otto 580, 79In
Rasche, Karl 99n, 102, 104-107, 109n, 111- Reinecke, Hermann 278, 346, 348, 351,353,
12, 115n, 118n, 368n, 604n, 607n, 1159n, 1188
1156, 1188 Reinecke (Economy Ministry) 121n, 147n
Rascher, Sigmund 1004n, 1005-6, 1188 Rcinecke (Sturmbannführer) 557
Raschwitz, Wilhelm 349 Reinhard, Gustav Helmuth 585, 587
Raseiniai 298 Reinhardt, Fritz 44n, 53, 80, 123-24, 132,
Rath, Ernst vom 37,40n, 133, 147, 1094 147n, 148n, 174n
Rathenau, Walther 1134 Reinhardt, Hans 308, 1188
Rath je, Hans Ulrich 232 Reinhold, Paul 994
Rarvang912 Reischauer, Herbert 382,438
Ratz, Paul 1157 Reivvtis, Vitautas 322n
Rau, Werner 428, 746n Reiwinkcl K. G. 604,607n
Rauca, Helmut 1171 n Rekowskv[i], Carl 880, 887
Randies, Herbert 441 Relief 24^ 144, 156,658,837, 847, 849,918,
Rauft, Walter 284, 285, 345n, 346n, 688, 1231
711,738n, 1188 Remeny-Schneller, Lajos 879
Rausch, Gunter 290 Rendel, Sir George 1232, 1265
Ranter, Hanns Albin 601,609n, 610,613, Rcndulic, Lothar 725-26, 1188
618-21, 1188 Renken, Walter Heinrich 284, 285
Ravenna 720n Renteln, Theodor Adrian von 95, 358, 363,
Ravensbnick 145n, 1005, 1008, 1009n, 1018, 400n
1020, 1026, 1049-50 Renthe-Fink, Cecil von 589
Rawa Ruska 506, 510,517-18, 1031, 1211 Rcntsch (captain, Serbia) 728n
Rawack 8c Grunfeld 97n, 98 Reparations 1247n-48n, 1264-72
Reagan, Ronald 1138 Reprisals 313-15, 319-020, 365,613,670,
Reccbedon 666 721, 729. See also Hostages
Reckmann, Richard. See Richard Reckmann Resistance (Jewish)
(Hrm) incidents of
Red Army. See Army units (Soviet) in camps 567n, 79In, 981-82, 1039,
Redcr, Rudolf 1037n 1047-48
Redicvs, Wilhelm 203, 585,960n in ghettos 395-98, 528-38,541
Reeder, Eggert 637,642, 1188 individual or small group 328n, 465,483,
Regensburg 352 613,643
Reggio Nell'Emilia 720n in partisan units 387n, 394-95, 397,
Registration. See also Identification (cards); 519-20,766,790-91
lasts as strategy 20-22, 526-28,567,977,
persons 300, 355-56, 362, 586,610-11, 1104-6, 1111
642,653, 707, 750,838,979, 1304 Resnais, Alain 114 In
properrv 120-21, 126, 244, 365, 379,497, Restitution 1242-48, 1273-85
653,757, 771-72,885 Rcuss, Alexandru 815
Reich Chancellery 64, 75 Reuter, Fritz 936
Rcichardt, Konrad 485n Rcveillon (firm) 607
Reichart, Georg 32 5n Revisionists (nationalist Zionists) 397, 521,
Reichenau, Walter von 303, 331, 350, 1188 524, 525n, 530, 532. See also Irgun
Reichert, Leo 499n Zwai Lcumi; ZZN
Rekhlcirncr, Franz 962-63, 1045 Rcxroth, Ernst Ludwig 63
Reichsbank 35,629, 1019-21, 1023-24, Rczckne 331
1026-27 Rczina 823
Rctchsbund Jüdischer Frontsoldaten 47 Rhallis, Joannis 744
Rcichshauptkassc 498 Rhein (admiral) 551n
ReK'hskrcditgtselischair 605 Rheinland-Pfalz 1250n

INDEX 1373
Rheinmetall Borsig604, 1261 Ringclblum, Emmanuel 521,527-78
Rheinthaler, Anton Friedrich 82 Ringelmann, Richard 1250
Rhodes 725,754-55 Rinn, Hans W. 604n, 633
Ribbe, Friedrich Wilhelm 231, 506n, 510n, Rinsche (army physician) 390
1017n,1043 Rintelen, Emil von 363, 578-79,70In, 763n,
Ribbentrop, Joachim 80In, 84In, 1094n, 1188
Aryanizations 122n, 126 Rio§anu, Alexandru 815
Bulgaria 799-802, 806 Ritter, Karl
Croatia 756n, 763 Croatia 763
Denmark 590n, 592, 593n, 594n, 593 Denmark 593n
Einsatzgruppen 581 fate 1188
emigration policy 143,413n France 670n, 671 n, 690n
exchange of Jews for Germans 1208n Hungary 860n, 890n, 896n, 898n-900n,
fate 1148,1149n, 1151,1152n, 1188 902n, 905n, 908n, 91 On-11 η, 1095n,
foreign Jews 126,412n, 464n 1224n
France 649,655-56,667,686,690n, 691, position 578-79
701n Riva 711
Greece 740n, 748-49 Rivesaltes 666
Hungary 856, 872, 874-77,887,903n, Rizescu, Hariton 815
905n,910-12,915,918n,1095n Roatta, Mario 763
Italy 710, 714,719,1093,1094n Robert Koehler (firm) 947
Norway 588 Robert Koch Institute 956,1003
police attaches 795n Roberts, F. J. (American Military Govern­
position 53, 576-78 ment) 1025n
Romania 828n, 839n, 841,846n, 852 Rocco, Carmine 682
Serbia 730 Röchling, Hermann 55
Slovakia 766n, 788, 791 Rödiger, Conrad 174-75, 580
Ribiere, Marcel 690 Rödiger, Gustav 174n, 580
Ricci, Renato 717 Rodler, Erich 313n-15 η, 1316n
Richard Reckmann (firm) 951 Roey, Cardinal Joseph-Emst 641
Richert, Arvid 588,595,614 Rogachev 294n
Richter, Alfred 25 In Rohde (Flick concern) 97n
Richter, Erich 508,1188 Rohden (Sonderfiihrer) 667n
Richter, Gustav 582-83,818n, 826n, 831n, Rohm, Ernst 34, 202n
836,837n, 840-41,842n, 843,845n, Rohmer, Georg 778
852,1188 Rokiskis 298
Richter, Heinz 284, 290 Romania. See also Transnistria
Richter, Werner Ludwig Wilhelm 607n attempted rescue of Jews in 1206n
Richter, Wolfgang 109n developments in 808-53,910,913
Richter (Sudeten) 112 flight from Hungary 900
Richthofen, Herbert von 795n Gypsies 1074-75
Rickert (Reichstag deputy) 16 indemnification and restitution 1243,
Rickmers (DAF-German Labor Front) 23In 1248n-49n, 1261, 1272-73, 1288
Riecke, Hans Joachim 82, 152n, 175,444n killings in occupied USSR 312-15, 334
Riedel, W. und Sohn (firm) 946 postwar migration 1238
Riege, Paul 204 Romanian Jews in Germany and France
Riegner, Gerhart 1201-2,1205, 1216n 463,674,686,839
Riehle, Joachim 81 Romanian protests 839, 872
BJenecker, Georg 604n, 605n statistics 810-11,818,822-23,1128,
Riga 1240,1321
confiscations 375, 378-79 war crimes trials 1173,1176, 1181
as destination of transports 364-65,419, Rome 6, 709,711-16, 721, 1119, 1124
485n, 933 Römer (Economy Ministry) 991
killings 297,298, 304, 319, 365 Rommel, Erwin 687
labor utilization 372n, 373 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 793, 1139, 1142,
population 296,1119n, 1120n, 1121 1144,1204,1210-11
resistance 396 Roques, Karl von 30In, 303n, 309n, 348n,
rumors about 1088 361n,372n,376n, 1188
Riisnaes, Sverre 586 Rosé, Alma 977n
Rindfieisch, Heinrich 977 Rose, Gerhard 956, 1188

1374 INDEX
Rosenbaum (Krupp) 551η Rumkowski, Chaim 220,231,262, 54In,
Rosenberg, Alfred 542n, 544, 1043
confiscations in occupied USSR 377-78, Rumors and underground reports in
379n Allied countries 299, 1199-1205, 1211-14
deportations to occupied USSR 363, 501, Belgium 644
670,933n Croatia 762
Einsatzstab 498,630,639, 701-2 Finland 584n
täte 1148, 1151, 1152η, 1189 France 695
housing 168η Italy 714, 717,722
killings 392, 395n-96n Hungary 734n, 873, 881,901 -2,907
Minsk 36 7 Netherlands 617,626-28, 1034-35
Norway 584n Poland 320, 513-15, 519,521-23, 542-
positions 53, 56, 357, 368 43,547-48,1031,1034-35
propaganda activities 1092n Reich 477,489, 1034, 1087
Wetzel memorandum 933n Rhodos 755
Rosenheim, Jacob 1216n Romania 842
Rosenkranz, David 834n, 837 Slovakia 778-79, 786-88
Rosenman, Samuel 1142 Theresienstadt 1115
Rosenthal, Ernst 450n USSR (occupied) 330-32
Rosenthal, Moritz 183n Rundstedt, Karl von 331, 336n, 689,690n,
Rosenthal, Philipp 129 1162, 1189
Rosenthal-Porzellan A. G. 129-30 Rusch, Paul 1135n
Rosier, Karl 332-33 Ruse (city) 805
Rosier, Oswald 99n Ruses 326, 744, 894-95
Rossbach, Martin 994 RuSHA (Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt-Race
Rossum, Fritz 537, 1170, 1189 and Resettlement Main Office) 201,
Rostoki 824n 61 In, 1019, 1023, 1026
Rosto\- 296, 1315 Russenheim (Reich Chancellery) 70In
Roth, Emil 905 Russians 317, 1068
Roth, Erich 285 Rust, Bernhard 35, 53, 185, 1189
Rothaug, Oswald 162-63,468, 1158n, 1189 Rutkowski, Genowefa 1122n
Rothenberg, Franz 94 Rutkowski, Wladyslaw 1122n
Rothenberger, Kurt 53,63,471, 1189 Rwanda 1294-96
Rothke, Heinz 582,650,669n, 676n-79, Ryan, Allan 1171
681 -82n, 686n, 693,694n-97n, 1189 Rybnitsa 823
Rothmund, Heinrich 173-74 Rzeszovv 550n, 566, 1122n
Rothschild, Alphons 101-2
Rothschild, F,douard de 657-58 SA 33, 34, 37-38,94,95, 202n, 474,922
Rothschild, Baron Eugene 101-3, 107 Saager, Gerhard 638n
Rothschild, Baron Louis 101, 104, 107 Saar 82n, 172
Rothschild, Sigmund 474 Saarpfalz 651,665
Rothschild enterprises 93-94, 101 -108,655n Sabac (camp) 729-31
Rotmann, Wolfgang 96n Sachs (Jewish War Veterans, Vienna) 450n,
Rotta, Angelo 778, 896 453n, 454
Rotterdam 515 Sachsenhausen 38n, 465, 972, 1012, 1049-51
Rouen 675-76 Sadism 190-91,399,404,969-71, 1082
Rovno 296, 304, 328, 1312 Sagalowitz, Benjamin 1201
Rowne. See Rov no St. Gervais 693
RSHA (Rcichssicherheitshauptamt) 201-2, Sakiai 322n
282-88,425-27,582. See also Ein­ Salamander A.G. 35, 1186
satzgruppen and Einsatzkommandos; Salaspils (camp) 364, 373
Police (German Security) Salat (police, Vienna) 484n
Rubcrg, Bernhard 46n Salerno (camp) 709
Rübesamen, Friedrich-Wilhelm 310η Saliegc, Jules Gerard 683n
Rublee, George 1093 Salin, Edgar 1201
Rückcrl, Adalbert 1169 Salitter, Paul 485n
Rudensk 31 On, 1098 Salmuth, Hans von 336n, 1189
Rudniki (forest) 397 Salonika 575, 582, 738-48, 1117, 1120
Rudolf Karstadt A. G. 93n Salpeter, Walter 925,928,929
Ruehl, Felix 1189 Salzwedel 15n

INDEX 1375
Salzwedel 15η Schermer, Martin 352n
Sambol, Wolf 517-18 Schemer, Julian 204, 553n, 969n
Sambor 1126 Scheuer (Munitions Committee) 462n
Sammem-Frankenegg, Ferdinand von 204, Schickert, Klaus 1092n
526n, 535, 562-63,571n, 1015n, Schicketanz, Rudolf 99n, 112
1061n, 1189 Schieber, Walter L. 996n, 997
Samos 725,754 Schiedermair, Rolf 185
Samuel, Maximilian 1011 Schiffer, August 349
San Sabba 723 Schiffer (Stadthauptmann, Lodz) 231,262n
Sandberger, Martin 290, 1189 Schilling, Janos 896
Sander, Heinrich 950n Schillingen Josef 1039n
Sandomierz 557n Schimana, Walter 750,1189
Sanok 51On Schimke (Foreign Office) 147n
Santo, Camill 994 Schindhelm, Hans-Gerhard 190
Sanz Briz, Angel 918 Schindler, Max 199, 533n, 553,560, 565n,
Sapieha, Adam 546n, 548n 569n
$araga, Fred 390n, 828n, 847, 1317n Schiper, lzak. See Sziper, Izak
Sarajevo 759 Schirach, Baldur von 212,495,1089-90,
Sardinia 703 1149-51,1189
Sarter, Adolf 428 Schlageter, Leo 966
Sattler, Bruno 736 Schlegelberger, Franz
Sarter, Adolf 428 boycott 96n
Sauckel, Fritz 55, 116, 152,460, 550,674, fate 1158n, 1189
999,1080n, 1148,1151,1189 “Final Solution” 420n
Saur, Helmut 403n Franken Aryanizations 127
Saur, Karl-Otto 996-97, 1000 and Jewish lawyers 124
Saurmann, Friedrich 226n, 229 judicial proceedings 469-71, 194n
Saxony 83n Mischlinge 440
Scavenius, Harald Eric von 589 mixed marriages 446
Schacht, Hjalmar 35-37,53,81, 142-43, passports 174n
411,1149-51,1189 pogrom of 1938 44n
Schäfer, Emanuel 727, 736-37, 738n, 1169, position 53,63
1189 Schleicher, Robert 366n
Schäfer, Emst 63 Schleier, Rudolf650,655n, 658,666n-67n,
Schäfer, Johannes 224,231, 244n, 246n 671-73n, 682n, 685n-86n, 689n-
Schäfer, Oswald 290 9In, 694n, 70In
Schäfer (Kreishauptmann, Busko) 21 ln Schleif, Hans 928
Schärfer, Fritz 1268 Schlempp, Walter 1000
Schapira, David 450n, 452n, 453n Schlesinger, Kurt 622-23,627
Schapira (Miss, Jewish War Veterans, Vienna) Schleswig-Holstein 1177, 1193
450n Schliep, Martin 579
Scharrer, Franz 507, 778 Schütter, Oskar 579
Schatzberger (Jewish War Veterans, Vienna) Schlotterer, Gustav 638n
450n, 452n, 453,454 Schlumprecht, Karl 603n
Schaub, Julius 163n Schlüter, Ernst 199
Schaumburg, Emst 648-49 Schlüter, Walter 487n, 492n, 497n, 498n
Scheer (Order Police, Upper Silesia) 209n Schmalz, Otto 633n
Scheide, Rudolf928,980, 1189 Schmauser, Ernst Heinrich 203, 551,942,
Scheidemann, Karl Friedrich 112n 980,1048
Schellenberg, Walter 202n, 285, 287n, 288, Schmelt, Albrecht 255-56, 551
292,417n, 747n, 757n, 802-3,1156, Schmelter, Fritz 1000-1001, 1190
1189 Schmid, Carlo 1160n
Schellin, Erich 563, 1026 Schmid, Jonathan 648,655
Schelp, Fritz 427, 1189 Schmid, Theodor 433n, 508, 509n, 1190
Schern mel, Alfred 969 Schmid, Josef 210, 253n
Schemmerl (Treblinka commander) 962 Schmid-Burgh (Propaganda Ministry) 438,
Schenk (WVHA) 928 441
Schenkendorrf, Max von 31 On Schmidt, Friedrich (Einsatzgruppe C) 290
Schepmann, Wilhelm 56 Schmidt, Friedrich (Gouverneur, Lublin) 199
Schering A. G. 604 Schmidt, Helmut 75

1376 INDEX
Schmidt, Paul Karl 580, 788,909,1097, Schubert, Heinz Hermann 329, 1190
1190 Schubert, Wilhelm 368, 370
Schmidt, Paul Otto 578, 767n, 875 Schuh- und Lederfabrik A. G., Chmelnek 975
Schmidt, Waldemar. See Waldemar Schmidt Schülc, Erwin 1169
(firm) Schulenburg (Food Ministry) 82
Schmidt, Walter 1260n Schuler, Erwin 972
Schmidt von Altenstädt, Hans Georg 301 n, Schulte, Eduard 1201
870n Schulte-Mimberg (Stalowa-Wola works) 567n
Schmidt-Klevenow, Kurt 74 Schulte-Nocllc, Henning 1282
Schmidt-Leonhardt, Hans 130n Schulte-Wissermann, Fritz 26ln
Schmidt-Rohr (interested in Manfred Weiss Schultheiss Brauerei 638
works) 888η Schultz, Johannes 428
Schmidt 8c Munstermann, Tiefbaugesellschaft Schultz, Walther 179n
GmbH 250,935 Schultz (Staatsrat, Hamburg) 85n
Schmidtke, Fritz 656n Schultz & Co., GmbH. 260, 526n, 533, 566
Schmige, Fritz 199, 218n, 1108n Schultze, Günther 1008
Schmitt, Walter 201,972n Schultze-Schlutius, Karl-Gisbert 638n, 796n
Schmitz, Hermann 988, 1190 Schulz, Erwin 284, 290, 294, 1190
Schmolz (major) 567n Schulz, Franz 285
Schmundt, Hubert 55ln Schulz, Paul 290
Schmundt, Rudolf 278 Schulze, Richard 285
Schnabel (Rothschild enterprises) 102 Sch ulze-Fiel itz, Günther 53
Schneider, Christian 992 Schumann, Horst 1010, 1190
Schneider, J. und C. A. (firm) 144n Schumburg, Hans-Emil 578
Schneider, Tilo 928 Schürmann, Kurt 655n
Schneider (Economy Office, Wiesbaden) 459n Schwalb, Nathan 1213, 1214n
Schnell, Paul 428,431,594,675n Schwandt (Finance Ministry) 80
Schneller, Otto 63 Schwarcz, Heinrich. See Schwanz, Heinrich
Schniewmd, Otto 54, 278 Schwanz, Heinrich 774
Schnicwindt, Rudolf 322 Schwanz (captain) 999
Schnitzler, Georg von 94n, 989-90, 1190 Schwarz & Co. 561,564n
Schobert, Eugen Ritter von 336n, 820, 1190 Schwarz, Franz Xaver 56, 202n
Scholrz, Robert 70ln Schwarz, Heinrich 966,984,999, 1212
Scholz (otfice of Rcgiemngsprasident, Ka­ Schwarz (Foreign Organization of the Nazi
towice) 950n Part)') 603n
Schon, Waldemar 226-27, 228n, 231,239 Schwarzheide 1051
Schonberg, Fritz 582, 740, 747, 1107n Schwarzhuber, Johann 966
Schonbrunn (firm) 935 Schwarzmann, Hans655n
Schone, Heinrich 358 Schweblin, Jacques 646-47
Schongarth, Karl Eberhard 204, 301,421, Sch weder, Alfred 284
502,609,610, 1190 Schwcdler, Hans 204
Schools 164-65, 172, 180, 187,442, 866. See Schwcfclbcrg, Arnold 837
also Universities Schw cinoch, Werner 1190
Schoppe, Karl 537 Sdolbunow' 403n
Schornstein (Jewish War Veterans, Vienna) Scbcstycn, Arpad 774, 779-80
450n, 452n, 453n Secrecy 330, 374n, 479,679,683, 1018,
Schramm, Helmut 1095 1027-33. See also Rumors
Schreiber, Walter 956, 1003, 1190 Securcni 823-24
Schrcnk, Haas 483 Scdivy (pastor) 782
Schricver & Co. 1043 Sccbohm (enterprises) 119
Schröder, Gerhard 1285 Seel, Hans 66, 83
Schröder, Hans 578, 70ln, 843 Seetzen, Heinz 290, 309n, 312
Schröder, Johannes 655n Segclken (Justice Ministry) 63
Schröder, Kurt FreiherT von 202n, 887 Segnitz, Konrad. See Baugeschäft Konrad
Schroder, Ludwig von 726-27 Segnitz
Schroder, Oskar 1190 Selben, Wilhelm 284, 318n, 340n, 1190
Schröder (ReK'hskommissariat Netherlands) Seidel (Finance Ministry) 151n
607n,608n,6l0 Scidl, Alfred 1136
Schroter (Sondcrführer) 325n Seidl, Siegfried 454-55,582, 882, 1190
Schuh, Hans 254 Seifen, Franz 1014, 1017, 1026

INDEX 1377
Seiler, Irene 162-63 Silverman, Sidney 1140, 1201-2
Seldte, Franz 53, 81, 144, 146n Sima, Horia 812* 814, 1191
Seletzkv, Bruno 144n Simferopol 300, 309n, 311,329, 387
Seligsohn, Julius 187 Simon, Alfred 428
Seile, Herbert 31 On Simon, Gustav 574,632-33, 1191
Selzner, Klaus 358 Simonides, Vasilis 746
Semlin 736-37, 757 Singer, Israel 1275n, 1276, 1279n, 1288
Senkowsky, Hermann 197 Siosnovy (Kharkov municipality) 1069n
Senulis, Stasys 377 Six, Franz 285, 290, 580, 1191
Seraphim, Peter-Heinz 401-402, 571 Skalat 255n
Serbia 575, 725-38, 1073 Skarzysko-Kamienna. See HASAG (Hugo
Sered 773 Schneider A.G.)
Seredi, Jusztinian Cardinal 889, 896-98 Skidel 1089
Serenyi, Miklos 874 Skopje 805
Service du controle 646-47,654 Skorzeny, Otto 285,914
Sesemann, Karl 925 Slavyansk 387n
Sethe, Eduard 580 Slivina 849
Sevastopol 388n Slonim 394
Seyss-Inquart, Artur Slottke, Genrud 619n, 626n
fate 1148,1151,1152, 1190 Slovakia 256,463,609n, 674, 766-92,893,
on Jews 567 900,910,958-59, 1114,1261
Netherlands 574,601,609n, 610,623-24, Slovenia 574-75, 757
628,630 Slutsk 310,391-92,403,405n
Poland 196 Smilovichi 310
Slovakia 767n Smolensk 299, 386
Shanghai 1197,1198n, 1235, 1236n, 1253, Smolevichi 310
1262n Smuggling 141, 225,667. See also Black
Sharett, Moshe. See Shertok, Moshe market
Shargorod 828-29, 830n Sniatyn 553
Sharp, William Graves 1147n Snigerevka 323n
Shavli. See §iauliai Snouk Hurgronje, A. M. 601-2
Shertok, Moshe 1115,1223-24,1269η, Snovsk 387n
1302η Snow, Conrad E. 1159,1160n
Sherwood, Robert 1140n Soap rumor 547, 779,786-87,1032-33,
Shinnar, Felix E. 1267 1203
Short, Dewey 1152 Sobel (I. G. Farben) 995n
Shoskes, Henry 1200 Sobibor
Shultz, George 1137-38 arrival procedure 1035-37
Shumachi 1066 confiscations 1016
Siauliai 298,299n, 377,391-92,1116 construction and layout 934-37
Sicily 703 as destination of transports 398,484, 504,
Sidor, Karel 768,769n, 782n 512,625,628,700,785,958
Siebert, Friedrich Wilhelm 197,519n, 936, estimated dead 958, 1320
1190 gassings and bodies 1037,1043
Siebert, Ludwig 34 personnel 960,962,980,1062
Siegelt, Rudolf284,685 projected armament plant 986
Siegert (German finance administration, revolt 560,982
1946)128n secrecy, rumors, and reports 522, 54In,
Siemens (firm) 178,461,544,638,999, 1200,1203
1261,1285-86 Society for the Prevention of World War III
Siena 717 1131n, 1152
Sieradz 1018n SOEG. See Sudosteuropa-Gesellschalt e. V.
Sievers, Wolfram 1012, 1013n, 1191 Sofia 799-801, 806-7
Siewers (Lutheran Church) 179n Soldau 960n
Sighet 892, 1125 Sollmann, Max 494n, 1191
Siklos 890n Sommer, Artur 1200-1201
Silberschein, Adolf 780n, 1114n, 1202n Sommer, Karl 564n, 983,999, 1159n, 1191
Silesia 195. See also Upper Silesia Sommer, Walter 66
Silimbani, Giacomo 688n Sommerlatte (Gcneralbezirk I>atvia) 1062n
SilJich, Kun 507 Sonderdicnst 258n, 505

1378 INDEX
Sönnecken (Hauptfeldwebel) 327n, 330n 1st SS Infantry Brigade 302, 339
Sonnenstein 932 2nd SS Infantry Brigade 302
Sonnleithner, Franz von 414n, 578, 590n, 1st SS Cavalry Regiment 294n, 302-303
592n, 597n, 65ln, 715n, 730n, 749n, 2nd SS Cavalry regiment 294n, 302-303
763, 788n 8th SS Infantry Regiment 302, 347n
Sönsken, Hans 992 10th SS Infantry Regiment 302
Sonsten, Walther von 517n, 1126n 14th SS Infantry Regiment 292n
Sorani, Settimio 713 Dutch SS Guard Battalion Northwest 622
Sosnowiec 256n, 506, 1038-39 Totenkopf garrisons in concentration camps
Saspello 692 923,968n
Sossenheimer, Heinrich 951 n Staats, Elmer 1171n
Sova, Nicolac 852-53 Stabler, Otto 950
Spain 463,689,697, 747-48, 803,910,918- Stabshauptamt für die Festigung des deut­
19, 1176, 1187, 1191, 1193 schen Volkstums 263
Spalcke, Karl 809n, 826n Staden, Hans Adolf von 992
Spanier, F. (Westerbork) 622-23 Stahel, Rainer 712, 715
Spanner, Rudolf 1033n Stahl, Heinrich 181, 183n, 185, 187
Speer, Albert Stahleckcr, Franz Walter 290, 297-30ln, 305,
apartments in Berlin 495 318n-19, 34ln, 365n, 383, 1072,
Auschwitz 994n, 998 1097, 1191
Bialvstok 511 Stahlwerke Braunschweig GmbH/Werk Sta-
fue 1148-49, 1151,1152n, 1191 lowa Wola 550n, 566, 567n
labor utilization 460,462, 867,985n, 996, Stahlwerke Braunschweig GmbH/Werk Star-
1000, 1305 achowice 566
positions 53, 55, 356n Staiger (Propaganda Ministrv) 498
supplies to concentration camps 943,997- Stalin, Josef 1093, 1139, 1142
98, 1077 Stalino 387
Speidel, Hans 1191 Stalowa-Wola. See Stahlwerke Braunschweig
Speidel, Wilhelm 284, 726, 750, 1191 GmbH/Werk Stalowa Wola
Spengler, Oswald 1104 Stanculescu (Romanian colonel) 314n
Spengler, Wilhelm 284 Standtke, Julius 373n
Speyer 21 Stange, Otto 428,429n, 431, 594n, 684n
Spick (Hermann Goring Works) 10ln Stangi, Franz 485,962-63, 1062, 1111, 1191
Spiekermann (Einsatzgruppe D) 333n Stanislav. See Stanislawow
Spindlcr, Alfred 238 Stanislawow 255n, 296, 517, 869-70
Sporrenberg, Jakob 203, 204, 560, 566,960n, Stankevich, Adam J. 376n
1025n, 1191 Stanley, Oliver 1223
Sprenger, Jakob 95 Stano, Julius 767, 777
Spreti, Rudolf von 90n Stapf, Otto 370
Springmann, Samuel 901 Stara Gradiska 760, 764
Springorum, Walther 255, 256n Starace, Achille 706, 708
SS 56,95,202n,506, 1164 Starachowice. See Stahlwerke Braunschweig
SS industries 560 GmbH/Werk Starachowice
SS units Starokonstantinov 303, 339
V SS Mountain Corps 752n Statistics
1st SS Panzer Division “Leibstandarte Adolf Aryanization 123,605-6,640,633,657
Hitler” 482, 1023 concentration camps 958-59, 1052n,
2nd SS Panzer Division “Das Reich” 1023 1054n
3rd SS Panzer Division “Totenkopf” 1023 emigration 708, 1197-98, 1237
7th SS Volunteer Mountain Division “Prinz German casualties 533n, 538, 1105-6
Eugen” 960 Jewish business and occupational 123,
8th SS Cavalry Division “Florian Gever” 124n, 144,769,834,860
1220 Jewish population and losses (geographic)
21st SS Mountain Division “Skanderbeg” Austria 156,487-88, 1128, 1321
751 Belgium 636,645, 1128, 1321
22nd SS Volunteer Division “Maria There­ Bulgaria 1240, 1128
sia” 1220 Croatia 761, 766
“Gcrmanskc SS Norgc” Division 586-87 Czechoslovakia 1128, 1240, 1321. See
Polizeidivision 1023 also Protektorat, Slovakia
SS Cavalry Brigade 302 Danzig 1321

INDEX
Denmark 590, 596, 598,1128 Sternagel (Armament Comm and, Lvov) 556n,
Estonia 407, 1321 56 In
France 664n, 666,699-700, 1128, 1321 Stemfcld, David 236n
Germany 82n, 144, 156, 188,444,462- Stettinius, Edward R. 1210, 1223n
63,487-88,1128, 1238-39,1321 Stettin 207, 208,413
Greece 738, 745,805,1128, 1240,1321 Steyr-Daimler-Puch A. G. 511,566, 568,980
Hungary 857,860, 868, 1128,1240, Stier, Günther 441
1321 Stier, Walther 507, 509,1191
Italy 704, 708, 723, 1128,1321 Stiewe, August 497n
Latvia 407, 1321 Stiller, Georg 106η, 107η, 607n, 608n, 638n
Lithuania 407,1321 Stimson, Henry 1142, 1147n, 1211
Luxembourg 634-35,1128, 1321 Stitz (Böhmische Escompte Bank) 98n
Netherlands 628-29, 1128, 1321 Stock, Walter 478,481
Norway 588, 1128,1321 Stockburger (Handelstrust West) 604n
Poland'189,230,273-74,295-97, Stockies en Zoonen, Amsterdam 40
1128,1240,1308-13,1321 Stoenescu, Nicolae 815, 816n
Protektorat 444,455,487-88 Stoicescu, Constantin 389n, 815,816n, 833n
Romania 295-96, 810-11,818,834, Stolze, Erwin 326η, 332n, 337n, 1085n,
847-48,851,1128,1240,1321 1087n
Serbia 725, 735, 737 Stomonjakow, Christo 795
Slovakia 769, 785, 792 Stora, Marcel 669
USSR 295-96, 303-4, 370, 395,407-8, Storfer, Berthold 632n
1128,1240,1313-19,1321 Storojine^ 824
Yugoslavia 805,1128,1240,1321 Straaten, Raymond van den 995
Jewish population losses (by cause) 1320 Strack, Hans67ln, 70ln
Jewish population losses (by year) 1321 Strang, William 1208n
Stauning, Thorwald 589 Strasbourg 65 ln
Stavrescu, Gheorge 817 Strassburg GmbH 1022n
Steengracht van Moyland, Gustav Adolf von Straub, Franz Ludwig 637
Denmark 592n, 595, 597 Strauch, Eduard 290, 398-400,403,1088,
fate 1148,1191 1160n, 1191
France 697n Strauss, Adolf 1162,1191
Greece 747, 749 Strauss, Franz Josef 1160n
Hungary 871η, 877n, 880n, 903n, 909, Strauss, Wilhelm 375n
910n, 918 Streckenbach, Bruno 204,220-22, 254n,
Italy 720n, 722n 284,293,471,1192
Monaco 697n Streibel, Karl 964n
Norway 588n Streicher, Julius 17-18, 35-37,95,127,
position 53, 578 1093,1095,1145,1148-52,1192
propaganda activities 1092n Streimer, Leonore 72
Romania 846n Streitmann, Henry 836
Slovakia 788n, 79In Strong, Tracy 683η
Stefan (metropolitan of Sofia) 803,806n Stroop, Jürgen 204,230η, 506n, 527n, 533n,
Steffen (Armament Ministry) 996 535,537-38, 563,1105n, 1163,1192
Steffler, Wilhelm 994n, 1030n Struma 840,853
§teflea, Ilie 815 Struss, Emst A. 989
Steimle, Eugen 285,1191 Struve, Wilhelm 197
Stein, Walter 655n Stry 1126
Steinbrinck, Otto 97n, 114n, 116n, 117-18, Stübbs, Gerhard 478-79,481
119n, 1191 Stuckart, Wilhelm
Steiner, Fanny 1106n apartments 496
Steinhardt, Lawrence 1221 Aryanizations 12 ln
Stephanus (major) 387 boycott 96n
Stephany, Werner 848n career 67
Sterilization 437-41, 515,623-24,645, confiscations 248η
1006-11 conscience 1088
Stem, Heinrich 183n fate 1168,1192
Stem, Samuel 881 “Final Solution” 417n, 420n, 421
Stemagel, Ewald 537 Mischlinge 437-440
mixed marriages 445,446n

INDEX
name decree 175 Synagogues 8, 38,4In, 73-74,613,671,
Nuremberg laws 66-67,417n 1239
pogrom of 1938 44n Syrup, Friedrich 53,81, 144, 146,46In
Polish territories 192n, 248n Szalasi, Ferenc 856,915-19, 1192
position 53,62 Szarva 912
star identification 177 Szasz, Lajos 880
taxes 147n, 148 Szczcbrzeszvn 505n, 1125, 1126n
wages 145n Szeged 892,902n, 914
Stucki, Walter 684 Szcntmiklossy, Andor 875n
Stud, Erich 667n Szepticki, Andreas 545-46
Studnitz, Bogislav von 726 Szerynski, Jozef Andrzej (Szynkman) 236,
Stulpnagcl, Carl-Hcinrich von 308n, 309n, 250n, 524, 526, 532
648,690n, 1192 Szolnok 902n
Stulpnagcl, Otto von 417n, 648-55,670, Szpilfogcl, Maurycy 248n
674n, 1095n, 1192 Sztojay, Dome 856,872-74,876-77,
Stumm (Krakow District) 199 884,888n, 889,909-12, 1163,
Sturdza, Mihai 812 1192
Stunner 1150 Szwarcbart, Ignacy 1203
Stutterheim, Hermann von 64 Szydlowiec 229n
Stuttgart 159n Szyper, Izak 525n
Stutthof 399, 1033n, 1050, 1052-53
Stutz, Gretl 979 Tallinn 297,419
SUBAG. See Sudetenlandische Bergbau A. G. Tamburini, Tullio 712, 720
Suchomehl, Franz 962n Tanzmann, Hellmut 12ln
Sudeten 172 Targu Jiu 849
Sudetenlandische Bergbau A. G. 109, 112, Targu Murc$ 892, 899
115 Tamopol 72, 305, 320,870
Sudosteuropa-Gesellschaft e. V. 832n, 863n Tarnow 253, 254n, 510n, 550
Suhr, Friedrich 284, 382,425,441,486n, Tartu 297
736n, 777n, 1063n Tassef, Jordan 796n
Sunner (conference on names of firms) 131 n Tataranu, Nicolae 314n, 36In, 815,821
Surv ivors 1133, 1226-28. See also Displaced Tati 381 n
Persons Tauboeck, Karl 1007
Susie, Mirko 756 Taxes
Sussdorf (Military Administration, France) Aryanization 128, 1078
648 per capita 270,670
Siisskind, Richard 622n “fines" 11,39-40, 133-37,614,669,688,
Svcncionys 32 In 728n, 1078
Svcnningsen, Nils 594-97 flight 132-33, 137
Svilpa, Antanas 322n on illegitimate births of Poles proposed
Sweden 463, 587-88, 592n, 596-98, 614, 1069
909-10,918-19, 1030, 1054, 1227, income 7, 147-48, 835-36
1265 by Jewish Community 180, 184n, 240, 255,
Swift, Robert 1279n 370,486n, 670, 774,834
Swint, Wendell R. 89n property 132-37, 773, 798,835-36,1078
Swiss Bankers Association 1274-75, restitution after the war 1254
1276n Taylor, Myron 1203
Swiss Banking Corporation 1275 Taylor, Telford 1155, 1158
Switzerland Teich, Meyer 829n
art sales by German agencies 629 Teicher (Economy Ministry) 864n, 865n
bank accounts held by Jews 1274-82 Teichmann (major) 31 In
as base of rescue agencies 1201, 1213 Teitgc, Heinrich 197, 57In
as a haven 173-75,684,697, 1054, 1227 Tcleki, Pal 856,861
interventions and protests by 684,909-10, Telephones 173, 228, 351, 363,633, 742,
918 890
as relief channel 670n, 1209 Tenenbaum, Joseph 1129
reparations from German assets 1265 Tenjc 759-60
restitution of hcirlcss property 1248n Teplik 830n
Swiss Jews in Reich 463,465 Ter Meer, Fritz 989,991-92,996n, 1159,
Swoboda, Heinrich 947n 1161, 1172,1192

INDEX 1381
Terboven, Josef 574, 584, 588n, 1101 Tilsit 301,341
Terespol 405n Timisoara 840-41
Tesch, Bruno 953-54,1162 Timm, Max 81,353n, 459n
Tesch, Günther 494n Tippelskirch, Werner von (Armv) 363,
Tesin 766 555n
TESTA (Tesch und Stabenow, Internationale Tippelskirch, Werner von (Foreign Office)
Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung 1103
mbH.) 952-55,1162 Tiraspol 849
Teuber (armament construction) 103η, 104η Tiso, Jozef 767,779,788-89,1163, 1192
Textilia Aradana (firm) 842 Tiso, Stefan 767,791
Thadden, Eberhard von Tiszabogdäny 900
Bergen-Belsen 1053 Titho, Karl 722n
Croatia 765n Tito, Marshal (Josip Broz) 765
Denmark 590n Tittmann, Harold H. 1204
emigration 1208η Tbbbens, Walther C. 533-34,562. See also
exchange of Jews for Germans 1208n Walther Többens (firm)
fate 1192 Tobescu, Constantin 388n, 847n, 85In
foreign Jews 464-65 Todt, Fritz 53,252, 356n
France 607n Tomaszow Lubelski 514
Greece 747n, 748n Tomaszow Mazowiecki 568n
Hungary 869η, 880η, 891n, 892n, 895n, Tomescu, Petre 389n, 815, 833n
908n, 909 Tomitschek (AEG) 947n
Italy 712n, 715n Topf und Söhne (firm) 945η, 946-47
Monaco 697n Topola 731, 894
Norway 588n Topor, loan 823η, 824η
position 578, 580 Toulouse 682
Romania 846n Torök, Sandor 898n
Slovakia 787, 788n Trabucci, Alessandro 692
Theas, Pierre Marie 683n Trademarks 129-30
Thedieck, Franz 644 Trainin, A. N. 1147n, 1154
Theodorescu, Dem. M. 815 Trampedach, Karl Friedrich 358, 364, 392-
Theresienstadt 93,1073n
deportations from 455-57,958-59,983 Transavia (firm) 526n
deportations to 422,446-55,473,48In, Transnistria 361,380n, 388-91,821,826-
595-96,628,792,1115 31,847-51,1074-75
establishment 454 Transport Ministry 53, 166,172
film 1085 Transylvania 808,811
German administration 454, 1053-54 Trapp, Wilhelm 1099
Jewish council 454-55,457,1056 Trawniki (labor camp) 539n, 559, 561, 563-
statistics 455-56,488n 64,566,938
Thiel (Security Police) 568n Trawniki (town) 473n, 936
Thier, Theobald 204 Trawniki (training camp) 537,545n, 964
Thierack, Otto 19, 53,63,150,471-72, Treblinka I (labor camp) 935n, 986n, 987
1030,1076-77,1192 Treblinka II (death camp)
Thilo, Heinz 1037 arrival procedure 1035-38
Thito, Heinz 722n confiscations 1016, 1017η
Thomalla, Richard 935,962 construction and layout 936-37
Thomas, Georg 199, 278, 368, 370,402, as destination of transports 504,509n, 512,
1192 538,805,958,1304,1309
Thomas, Max 290, 383,406,650, 1192 estimated dead 958, 1320
Thompson, Tyler 683n gassingsand bodies 1040, 1043
Thoms, Albert 1024-25 Gypies 1073
Thrace 793-94, 804-5,958 liquidation of camp 1045
Thuman, Anton 965 personnel 960,962, 980
Tidow, Walter 253n revolt 981-82
Tiefbauunternehmen “TRITON” 946 secrecy, rumors, and reports 526, 533,
Tietz. See Hermann Tietz; Leonhard Tietz 54 In, 1203, 1211
Tighina 297,819 Treibe, Paul 427,428n
Tighina Agreement 36In, 821-22,828 Trencin 778
Tijn, Gertrude van 626n Trcndtcl (physician, Dosen) 177n

1382 INDEX
Trestioreanu, Constantin 313-14 involvement in Jewish claims 1244, 1247n,
Trianda 754 1251,1258,1265, 1274-84,1286-88
Trichat i. See Trikhaty Joint Chiefs of Staff 1153, 1244
Trier 634 protests 655,683-84,910
Trieste 704,712,723 Office of Strategic Services 1200, 1212-13,
Trikhatv 830, 1074 1218
Trikkala 751 President's Commission on the Holocaust
Tripoli 709 1133
Triska, Helmut 880, 1316n trials 1143-47, 1171
TRITON. Tietbauuntemehmen War Refugee Board 1211,1216
“TRITON" Universities 3n, 70, 87, 165, 173, 862. See also
Trondheim 584, 586-88 Schools
Triihe, Heinz 346n UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Re­
Truman, Harry 1144n, 1146, 1154n, 1230, habilitation Administration) 1228,
1234,1291 1331-33
Trustees. See Business Enteq>rises (Jewish) Unruh, Walter von 265n
Trzvnietz Iron Works 552 Upper Silesia 195-96, 504, 516,958
Tschentscher, Erwin 928,975n, 1192 Urban (RSHA) 879n
Tuck, H. Pinkney 684n Urbantkc, Wilhelm 779n, 78In
Tuka, Vojtcch 767, 783-84, 786-89, 1192 Uruguay 41 n
Tulard, André 646-47,678 USSR (Genocide Convention) 1290-91,
Tulchin 828n, 830,850 1294
Tulp, Sybren 618 USSR (Jewish population statistics) 407,
Tungstram A.G. 864 1128, 1238, 1240, 1313-19, 1321
Tunisia 582,663,687-89 USSR (war crimes trials) 1163
Turda 841 Ustasha (Ustasa) 756-57, 759
Turek 190 Utena 298
Turin 711 Utikal, Gerhart 702n
Turk, Richard 936 Utrecht 430,613
Turkey 463,465,694n, 840,910, 1206n Uzhorod 892
Turner, Harald 648-49, 70In, 727, 732, 734,
735n, 736, 738, 1073n, 1095n, 1192 Vaadat Ezra v'Hazalah (Jewish organization)
Tutsi (tribe) 1294-96 901
Twardowski, Fritz yon 580 Vaerst, Gustav von 687
Vajna, Gabor 915,917n, 918n
UBS A.G. 1275, 1277, 1279n Valcanu (Romanian Legation, Berlin) 839
Uebelhoer, Friedrich 214-16, 217n, 223-24, Vallat, Xavier 646-47,659,661-62,664,
230n, 231,267,271, 1079n 1106,1192
Ufer (firm) 830 Vandziogala 298
Uhlich, Martin 80 Vapniarca 827, 831, 847, 849
Uiberreither, Siegfried 574 Vapnyarka. See Vapniarca
Uj Elet 1131 Varena 321 n
Ukmerge 298 Varna 805
Ukraine 295, 354, 358, 367n, 401-402 Vasek, Anton 767, 781 n, 784
Ukrainians 317, 351,371,520, 545,964, Vasiliu, Constantin 815, 847n, 848-51
97 In, 980, 1017, 1068, 1126 Vatican (diplomacy). See also Catholic Church;
Ulrt ingen 633 Pius XI; Pius XII
Ullmann, Salomon 641,643 Croatia 759n, 760
Uman 296 France 660,682-83
Union. See Wcichscl Metall Union-Werkc Germany 488-89
(firm) Hungary 896-97,909,918
United Continental Corporation 115 Italy 706-7, 714-17
United Kingdom. See Great Britain Serbia 735
United Restitution Office 1267n Slovakia 769, 782n, 783-84, 786-87, 791
United Stares Vatican (in German considerations) 445
Genocide Convention 1290-94, 1296 VAW (Vereinigte Al um ini um werke) 864
Holocaust Memorial Council 1133, 1138 Vay, Liszlö 874n. See also Fay, and Fay-Halasz,
immigration 1110-11,1113, 1194-96, Gedeon
1237 Vayer, Scott 1283n
information about killing 1201-2, 1213 Vayna,Gabor915,917n

INDEX 1383
VEDAG Vereinigte Dachpappen A. G. Visser, Lodewijk Ernst 611-12
946 La Vita Italiana 705
Veesenmayer, Edmund Vitebsk 296, 299, 340
Croatia 756 Vitenberg. See Witenberg, Yitzhak
fate 1157,1159n, 1192-93 Vladescu, Ovidiu 815
Hungary 582, 860n, 878-80, 884-90n, Vogel, Heinrich 925,929
892n-96n, 898n-900,902,905n, Vogt, Josef (RSHA) 284, 348, 352
907n-919n,1095n, 1224n Vogt, Josef (WVHA) 928
Serbia 529, 729, 730n Voiculescu, Constantin 389n, 815
Slovakia 767, 78ln, 788-89 Volhynia-Podolia 358, 372,405, 869n, 1311 —
Veltjens, Josef 620 12
Venice 712, 717 Volk, Leo 564n, 1193
Ventzki, Werner 214, 230n, 267, 268 Volker, Paul A. 1275,1281-82
Verbeck, Franz Heinrich 507,1193 Volkmann, Klaus 553n
Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus 47n Volkssturm 1051
Vereinigte Finanzkontore 99n Volkswagen (firm) 1285
Vereinigte Papierfabriken 604 Volos 75 In
Vereinigte Stahlwerke 117 Volz, Paul 179n
Vermehren. See Hans Vermehren Import- VOMI (Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle) 201,263,
Fabrikation-Export 380n,813n, 1020-22,1026,1316
Verona 430, 718n, 72ln, 722 Voznesensk 828
Vershovsky, Senitsa 316 Vrba, Rudolf (Rosenberg, Walter) 1213
Vertujeni 823-24 Vrij Nederland 618
Veszprem 898 Vught 620-22,624-26,987, 102In. See also
Veterans (German) 494,638 VHertogenbosch
Veterans (Hungarian) 865 Vulcanescu, Mircea 389n
Veterans (Jewish) Vyazma 386n
Bulgarian army 797 Vyhne 773
French army 661,664
German and Austro-Hungarian armies 35- Wächter, Otto 197n, 199,222, 519n, 711-12,
36,47, 83-84, 87-88,90n, 366, 373, 1193
447-54,628, 861,888,1115 Wächter, Werner 173n
Hungarian army 861, 888-89 Wages 145-47,240, 254-58, 260, 362, 373-
Italian army 707 74, 773. See also Labor
Romanian army 812, 832 Wagner, Adolf 34-36
Vetter, Helmut 1004n Wagner, Eduard 191-92,278,287-88, 292,
Vialon, Friedrich Karl 376n, 379, 1193 331n,555n,1193
Vichy 645-47 Wagner, Gerhard 56,66,95,123,437n
Victor Emanuel III (Vittorio Emanuele, King Wagner, Hans 982n-83n
of Italy) 708 Wagner Horst
Vienna. See also Austria Bulgaria 805n, 807-8
abortions 1116n Croatia 765n
deportations from 207,211 n, 212-13, 215, Denmark 594n
413,466,484-85,495,1116 emigration 1208n
emigration from 141-42, 173,413 exchange of Jews for Germans 1208n
ghettoization plan 167-68 fate 1193
Hungarian Jews 905-6 Germany 448n, 465n
Jewish community organization 153,466 Greece 747n, 748n, 749
pogrom of 1406 10 Hungary 877,892n, 903n, 909n, 910,
pogrom of 1938 38n 91 In, 918n
railway conference of 1944 896n Italy 719
rumors and inquiries 1086,1114 Norway 588n
statistics 156, 1119 position 577, 578
transit through 745, 805 Slovakia 788n, 79In
Viik, Jan 1074n Wagner, Josef 208
Villanovo 754 Wagner, Robert 413, 574,647,651,1193
Vilna 296, 298, 322, 357, 372n, 378n, 380, Wagner, Rudolf968n, 974n
393n, 397-98,111 In,1117,1311 Wagner, Wilhelm 585-86
Vilnius. See Vilna Wagner (major) 870n
Vinnitsa 297, 326, 350, 849-50 Waiscnegger, Erich 271

INDEX
Walbaum, Jost 197,225n, 227, 501, 1193 Weigand, Wolfgang 106, 376n
Waldemar Schmidt (firm) 260 Weigert, Julius B. 1251n
Waldman, Morris 1210 Weihe (Wartheland) 246n
Wallenberg, Raoul 918 Weihenmaier, Helmut 258n
Walter, Alexander 82 Wcihs (Jewish War Veterans, Vienna) 450n
Walter, Gerhard 349, 353n Weil, Alfred 475n
Walther, Hans Dietrich 733 Weil, Bruno 125In
Walther C Tobbens (firm) 260, 526n, 533, Weill, Albert 669
566 Weill, Julien 652
Wandesleben, Otto-Wilhelm 285 Weimar 1055
War Crimes Commission 1213 Weinbachcr, Karl 955n, 1162n
War Refugee Board. See United States Weinberg, Arthur von 90n
Warburg, Max 1100 Weinberg, Karl von 89-90
Warburg & Co. 140n,603n Weinhold (Knipp, Auschwitz) 999n
Warenhaus Helmut Horten K. G. See Horten, Weinmann enterprises 109-13
Helmut Weinmann, Flrwin 285, 290, 291
Warlimont, Walter 82, 278, 282, 283, 287, Weinmann, Fritz 109, 111-12
363, 1159n, 1193 Weinmann, Hans 109, 111-12
Warnecke (I. G. Farben) 100In Weir, John 1144n
Warsaw (citv) 218, 219, 226-29, 1119, Weirauch, Lothar441, 547-48
1124 Weiss, Manfred family 886-87,910
Warsaw (distria) 204, 257, 504, 554,958 Weiss, Martin 965
Warsaw (ghetto) Weiss, Melvin J. 1279n
battle 528-38, 1105 Weiss, Peter 114In
conditions 262-63, 269-74 Weitnauer (East Ministry) 381,436n
confiscations 250, 563 Weizmann. Chaim 1215-16, 1221, 1223-24,
deportations from 506-7, 512, 523-28, 1242n
1116 Weizsácker, Ernst von
formation 217, 223, 226-28 anti-Semitism 33n, 137n
German supervision of 228 Belgium 636n
Gypsies 1073 Bulgaria 795n, 800n, 801-2
Jewish administration in 235-36, 241 Croatia 761 n
labor 257n Danzig 195n
ruins 539, 1077, 1079 Denmark 589n, 590n
rumors and reports 522-23, 1211 emigration policy 137n, 142n, 143n, 414n,
smuggling and black market 236, 242, 260, 1093n
269-70 fate 1156, 1193
Wartenberg (colonel) 999n "'Final Solution” 439n, 448n, 459n
Warthbnicken 1036 foreign Jews 126,41 In, 412,464n-65n
Wartheland (Warthegau) 193, 196,217,416, France 649,651 n, 656n, 663n, 667,672,
461,504, 506,958, 1014, 1063, 1309 686n, 701
Warthcnau 552 Great Britain 1093n
Warthewerk 566 Greece 740n, 749n
Wasikowski (lieutenant) 82In Hungary 872n, 874, 875n
Wasilewski, A. (Mayor of Biala Podlaska) 570n Italy 663n, 709n, 716-17
Watzke, Adolf 187 Madagascar plan 414n
Weber, Julius 1004n Netherlands 616n
Weber, Walter 579 Norway 588
Wcckmann, Alfons 648 police attaches 795n
Weckwerth, Erich 376n positions 33n, 53,578,580, 582
Wedel, Hasso von 278 postwar reflections in diary 1103
VVeggcl, Andreas 925,928 propaganda 1094n
Weh, Albert 519n Romania 818n, 839n, 841, 844n
VVehner, Bernhard 972 Salonika 740n
Weichs, Maximilian von 725-26, 750, 867n, Serbia 730n, 731,734-35
1193 Slovakia 766n, 775-76, 784n, 785n
Weichsel Metal! Union-Werke 544,999 star identification 178n
Weidmann, Frantisek 186 Vatican 489n, 1088n
Weidmann (Security Police, Belgium) 637 Welck, Wolfgang Freiherr von 67In
Weigand (captain) 36ln Welles, Sumner 1202, 1205-6, 1208

INDEX
Welungen 570n Winkelmann, Otto 358n, 882, 884, 896n,
Wendler, Richard 199, 223n, 249n, 255n, 913,915η, 1193
519n, 1193 Winkler, Gerhard 204
Weneck (RSHA) 879n Winkler, Max 55,237n, 243, 246,939n,
Werkmeister, Karl 87ln, 1193 1168, 1193
Werkverruiming 609,620-21 Winkler, N. (physician, Mogilev-Podolsk)
Werner, Alfons 623n, 1063n 829η
Werner, Paul 285 Winter, August 867η
Werner, Re inhold 99n Winterfeld, von (Oberkriegsvcrwaltungsrat)
Werner (Gebietskommissar, Baranowicze) 294n
394 Winterschall A. G. 115
Werner (Untersturmführer, Warsaw) 191 Winterthur Versicherungs-Gesellschaft
Werth, Henrik 866 1284
Westbank (firm) 638 Wippern, Georg 508n, 1014n, 1025-26
Westböhmischer Bergbau Aktienverein 110, Wirth, Christian 932,957,959-62,1045,
112n 1076
Westdeutscher Kaufhof 93n Wirth (Office of Plenipotentiary for Chemical
Westerbork 619n, 620-23,625-27 Industry) 991η
Westerkamp, Eberhard 197, 1193 Wirths, Eduard 965,974,1011
Westermann, Albert 507n, 517n, 518n- 19n Wirtschafts-Rüstungsamt (OKW/WiRü) 278,
Westrick, Ludger 864, 865n 279η, 330η, 331η, 368
Westring, Claus 1101 Wirtschaftsführungsstab Ost 368, 370
Wetter, Karl 737 Wirtschaftsstab Ost 368-70, 376
Wetter, Sune 106 Wirtz (WVHA) 945n
Wetzel, Eberhard 357, 36ln, 367, 381,436n, Wise, Stephen 1201-3,1206,1207n, 1208-9
437,441,828,933,1193 Wisliceny, Dieter
Wetzler, Alfred 1213 on Baeck 466n, 892
Wever, Karl 80 and Eichmann 426n
Weygand, Maxime 663 fate 1148,1163,1194
White Russia 295, 310, 358, 373-74,393, Hungary 582,873-74,882,891-92,903
395-96, 398,407 Romania 844n
White Russians 330, 351, 391 Salonika 582, 740-42, 744,1107n
Widmann, Albert 345 Slovakia 256n, 582, 768, 777n, 780, 783-
Widmer, Peter 1279n 84,788-89
Wiebens, Wilhelm 290 Witenberg, Yitzhak 397-98
Wied, Heinz 972 Witiska, Josef 790-91
Wiehl, Emil Karl Josef 134n, 463n-64n, 580, Witkowitz Bergbau- und Eisenhüttem
603n Gewerkschaft 101-108
Wielan (munitions committee) 999n Witten, Roger 1277
Wieluh. See Welungen Wittje, Kurt 201
Wiesel, Elie 1138 Wittgenstein, Friedrich Theodor Prince zu
Wieser (Berlin pawnshop) 1025 Sayn und 324-25
Wieser (OKW) 956 Wittrock, Hugo 365n, 378n
Wigand, Arpad 204,1015 WJRO. See World Jewish Restitution
Wilbertz, Julius 720n Organization
Wilejka 1311 Wöhler, Otto 297η, 305n, 334n, 820n, 851-
Wilhelm Döring (firm) 526n 52,1194
Wilhelm, Karl Friedrich 603n, 1023n, 1024, Wohl that, Helmut 80,114n, 117,411,413,
1027,1088,1099 603n, 82 ln, 1194
Wilhelm Kermel (firm) 943n Wöhm, Fritz 425
Wilkendorf (Lutheran Church) 179n Wolf, M. (physician, Mogilev-Podolsk) 829η
Wille, Kurt Friedrich Theodor 197 Wölfel, R. (Dresdner Bank) 494n
Willikens, Werner 82 Wolff, Albert 462
Wi 11stätter, Richard 183 Wolff, Günther von 1008
Willuhn, Franz 64, 15ln Wolff, Karl
Wilno. See Vilna Daluege's police strength reports 203η,
Wilshaus (Krupp, Essen) 100ln 383η, 384η, 505η, 610η, 676η, 690η
Wimmer, Friedrich 601 fate 1168, 1194
Winchcll, Walter 1131 France 690η
Windecker, Adolf 1091 Italy 711-12, 716η

INDEX
labor utilization 555n, 562n Wrangcl, Freiherr von (Oberkriegsver­
medical experiments 1002n, 1006 waltungsrat) 334n
in Minsk 344 Wucher, Theodor 80,493n
pogrom of 1938 38 Wiihlisch, Johann von 230n, 324n
position 201 Wulff, Karl 992
Romania 847n Wunder, Gerd 70n
Rothschild arrest 105 Wünnenberg, Alfred 201
Soldau 960n Würfel, Ritter von (colonel) 387n
transport problems 508n, 512 Wurm, Theophil 1136
Wolff, Leo 181 Wurster, Karl 992, 1194
Wolkowysk 485n Württemberg 83n, 180, 1250n
VVollisch (captain, Jewish war veteran, Vienna) Württembergische Metallwarenfabrik 1002
451 Würzburg 483-84
Wolsegger, Ferdinand 199 WVHA (Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt)
Wolstayn (Belzec escapee) 514 201,624,928-30, 1016, 1026
Wolter, Fritz 947n
Wolzt, Leonhard 102 Yad Vashem 1133n
Women. See also Divorce; Intermarriage; Yampol 819n, 820, 823,850
Mixed Marriages; Sterilization Yanovichi 340
abortions 469, 1069, 1116 Yessentuki 1315
arrest of husbands 667, 1124 YIVO Institute 1133n
blood, hair collected 1020, 1022, 1037, Young Men's Christian Association 683
1042 Yugoslavia 1128, 1178, 1182, 1184, 1186,
in camps 736-37, 759-60,966,976n, 1192, 1238, 1240, 1321. See also Al­
1037-40, 1047-48, 1052 bania; Croatia; Macedonia; Novi Sad;
as domestic servants 157 Serbia
food rations during pregnancy and nursing
152 Zaandam 614
forced labor 916, 1000-1001 Zabel, Martin 507, 1194
medical experiments 1005, 1008-11 Zabludowski, Benjamin 236
sadism and sexual acts against 45,403, 191, Zacke, Friedrich 778n
826,970-71 Zagore 328n
statistics 144, 273n, 678,699 Zagreb 756, 759, 762
transports 625 Zahn, Albrecht 507, 509n, 1194
World Jewish Congress 1274-76 Zamboni, Guelfo 747n
World Jewish Restitution Organization 1274- Zamosc 258, 514,935-36
76, 1279n Zangen, Wilhelm 55
Worlein, Karl 616 Zante 754
Wormann, Ernst Zapp, Paul 290, 356n, 819n
Bulgaria 801-2 Zawercie. See Warthenau
Danzig 195n Zb^szvri 411
emigration 142n, 174n, 1093n Zech, Karl 204
fate 1156, 1194 Zee-Heraus, Carl Bernhard 648
"Final Solution" 439n, 459n Zeitschcl, Carltheo 650,652 n, 658,666n,
foreign Jews42,44, 230n, 41 In, 464n 667,674n, 679, 70In, 710-11
France 656n, 672,686n Zeitzier, Kurt 54, 278
Great Britain 1093n Zemun. See Semlin
Greece 747n Zentrale Stelle (Ludwigsburg) 1169-70
Hungary 867n Zcntralhandelsgesellschaft Ost 404n
Netherlands 614n Zentralkomitee zur Abwehr der jüdischen
position 577, 579 Greuel- und Hetzpropaganda 95-96
Romania 839n, 841,844n Zentralstellen für jüdische Auswanderung 186,
Serbia 730n, 735n 609-10
Slovakia 766n, 775-76 Zhdanov. See Mariupol
taxes 136n Zhitomir (city) 296-97, 300, 308, 311, 332,
Vatican 489n, 1088n 374n ‘
Worms 21 Zhitomir (district) 323, 358
Worst (Netherlands) 608n ¿idowske Listy ( Prague). See Jüdisdxs
Worstcr, Heinrich 965 Nachrichtenblatt
Worthotf, Hermann 523 Ziegler (general) 402n

INDEX 1387
!
I

Ziereis, Franz 105ln Zoppke (Foreign Office) 107n


¿ilina 779n, 780,1213 Zomer, Ernst 199,211,222,223n, 244n-
Zimmermann, Herbert 508n, 541,1194 45n, 519,520n
Zionists 48, 183, 397, 521, 525n, 530-32, Zomer (Army Group South) 917n
611,901,1210 Zschimmer, Gerhard 81,492n
Zirpins, Walter 225n, 25 ln, 1194 Zschintzsch, Werner 53
Zissu, Abraham Leib 853 Zschoppe (8th SS Infantry Regiment) 347n
Zivnostenska Banka 102 Zucker, Otto 455n
ZKK (Zydowski Komitet Koordynaczji) 530- Zukowski (Chairman, Skalat District, Galicia)
31 255n
ZKN (Zydowski Komitet Narodowy) 530-31 Ziilow, Kurt 147n, 148n
ZOB (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa) 530- Zurich Financial Services Group (Insurance
34, 536, 538 Company) 1284
Zoepf, Wilhelm 610,619,623n, 625-29, Zwiedeneck, Eugen 809n, 815-16
1029,1056,1063n, 1194 Zyklon. See Gas chambers; Gas supply
Zolkiewka 1034 ZZW (Zydowski Zwiazek Wojskowski) 530,
Zolli, Israel (Eugenio) 713 532,534,536,538
Zöllner, Otto 130n

You might also like