Auschwitz and the Allies

A Devastating Account of How the Allies Responded to the News of Hitler's Mass Murder

Martin Gilbert

• Publisher: RosettaBooks
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780795346712
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: History

A thorough analysis of Allied actions after learning about the horrors of Nazi concentration camps—includes survivors' firsthand accounts. Why did they wait so long? Among the myriad questions of what the Allies could have done differently in World War II, understanding why it took them so long to respond to the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps—specifically Auschwitz—remains vital today. In Auschwitz and the Allies, Martin Gilbert presents a comprehensive look into the series of decisions that helped shape this particular course of the war, and the fate of millions of people, through his eminent blend of exhaustive devotion to the facts and accessible, graceful writing. Featuring twenty maps prepared specifically for this history and thirty-four photographs, along with firsthand accounts by escaped Auschwitz prisoners, Gilbert reconstructs the span of time between Allied awareness and definitive action in the face of overwhelming evidence of Nazi atrocities. "An unforgettable contribution to the history of the last war." — Jewish Chronicle

PART ONE: THE FINAL SOLUTION

Prelude

Hitler’s pledge:
‘The complete annihilation of the Jews’

Adolf Hitler had written and spoken against the Jews without respite, from the end of the First World War until the beginning of the Second. In his book Mein Kampf and in his speeches, he had portrayed the Jew as a parasite, a bacillus and a vampire, bleeding all nations to death and corrupting all that was noble and healthy in ‘Aryan’ and German life.

In Mein Kampf Hitler blamed the defeat of Germany in the First World War on the ‘marxist leaders’, and he argued that if, at the beginning of the war, or even during it, ‘twelve or fifteen thousand of these Jews who were corrupting the nation had been forced to submit to poison gas’, then the millions of deaths at the front ‘would not have been in vain’. Indeed, Hitler added, ‘If twelve thousand of these malefactors had been eliminated in proper time probably the lives of a million decent men, who would be of value to Germany in the future, might have been saved’.¹

Immediately on coming to power in 1933, Hitler’s laws began to deprive German Jews systematically of all their rights of citizenship. These rights were finally taken away in 1935 by the Nuremberg Laws. At the same time a brutal, crude, daily anti-semitism drove more than 250,000 Jews, half of German Jewry, into exile. In every town and village, public slogans declared: ‘The Jew is our misfortune’, ‘Jews not wanted here’, and ‘Let Judah Perish!’

Threats against the Jews were the stock-in-trade of Nazism. So too was open violence, culminating in November 1938 in the destruction of hundreds of synagogues. And on 30 January 1939, six years after the Nazis had come to power, Hitler declared publicly that in the event of war, ‘the result will not be the bolshevisation of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.’²

Within a few weeks of the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, many hundreds of Jews had been murdered in the streets of a dozen towns, and thousands more had been savagely beaten up throughout German-occupied Poland. Jewish shops were looted, homes ransacked, and synagogues destroyed by the SS. Yet an even worse fate it seemed, was planned for the two million Polish Jews who were now under German rule, for on 16 December 1939 The Times published an article which included the headline:

A STONY ROAD TO EXTERMINATION

This article told of the establishment inside German-occupied Poland of a special ‘remainder State’, which was to be set aside ‘as a Jewish reserve’.

According to The Times, the Germans intended to deport more than a million Jews into this ‘concentration area’. These Jews would be brought from every country then under German rule: all 180,000 Jews who were still living in Germany itself, all 65,000 from Austria, all 75,000 from the Czech Protectorate, and all 450,000 from the western provinces of Poland, now annexed to Germany. In addition, nearly one and a half million Jews from Poland itself would be uprooted from their homes, and sent to this special area. It was ‘clear’, The Times added, that the aim of the scheme was to set up ‘a place for gradual extermination, and not what the Germans would describe as a Lebensraum or living space’.

The article in The Times pinpointed the area concerned as ‘the barren district around Lublin’, and included a map. The whole programme, it stated, ‘amounts to a mass massacre such as Nazi imagination can conceive but even Nazi practice can hardly carry through in full.’

The deportations to this ‘Lublinland’ had already begun. As many as ten thousand Jews had already been taken there by train from the former Czech town of Moravska Ostrava. An escapee, who had reached the west through Russia, had told the story of this early deportation, and The Times reported it fully. Even those who were seriously ill had not been exempted from deportation.³

At the same time, hundreds of thousands of Jews remained in the newly created ghettoes of Poland, or were sent to labour camps on the Soviet border, to build fortifications, while hundreds of thousands more Jews came under Nazi rule as the German armies conquered Denmark and Norway in April 1940, France, Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg in June 1940, and Greece and Yugoslavia in April 1941.

Meanwhile, the ‘Lublinland’ scheme had been abandoned, and nearly three million Jews throughout Poland, central Europe, and western Europe, lived in their homes and ghettoes. Gradually, throughout 1940, they had been isolated from the communities around them, of which they had for so long been a part. In country after country they were forced to wear the yellow badge, were turned out of the schools, were forbidden to practise as doctors, teachers or lawyers, and were made to suffer the daily indignities of prejudice and scorn.

Another feature of Nazi rule was the concentration camp; by the summer of 1941 there were more than a dozen of these camps, and hundreds of smaller labour camps and prison centres, scattered throughout the Reich. These camps were filled with German opponents of Nazism, with homosexuals and others judged to be enemies of the new social order, with Polish intellectuals and political prisoners, and, but to a lesser extent, with Jews. Brutality ruled supreme in these camps, where death from savage beatings was a daily event.

On 3 May 1941 the Polish Government-in-Exile sent a formal Note to the Governments of all the Allied and neutral powers, describing how ‘tens of thousands’ of Polish citizens had been ‘incarcerated in concentration or internment camps’, and it went on to refer specifically to four such camps, ‘Oswiecim (Auschwitz), Oranienburg,⁴ Mauthausen and Dachau’ as camps whose names ‘will mark the most horrible pages in the annals of German bestiality’.

In a series of appendices the Polish Note contained nearly two hundred eye-witness reports of ill-treatment and torture in several dozen concentration camps and detention centres. Appendix 168A was a three-page summary of ‘testimonials and reports’ about Auschwitz. This summary referred to events at Auschwitz up to November 1940, at a time when Poles, not Jews, constituted the majority of the prisoners there. It described, for example, how, as a reprisal for the killing of two guards, ‘a large group of prisoners were taken out into a field, ordered to run about, and machine-gunned by the Germans’. The dead were then ‘burned in the local crematorium’.

On another occasion a man who had been shot in the stomach for the ‘crime’ of obtaining a double ration was thrown into the crematorium while still alive. At one prolonged roll-call, eighty-six prisoners had died ‘from exposure and beatings’.

The report on Auschwitz ended with a summary which contained its only reference to the Jews. The summary read:

At the end of November, 1940, 8,000 Poles were at the Oswiecim camps. Theoretically, the prisoners were divided into three groups: (1) political prisoners; (2) criminals; (3) priests and Jews. This last group was persecuted most of all. Scarcely any of them came out alive.

In the first days of December, Warsaw post offices despatched several hundred death notices relating to Oswiecim prisoners. In the Warsaw district of Zoliborz alone, 84 such notifications were received. About December 20, 260 more of them were sent. Some 200 bodies of prisoners are being burned in the crematorium each week.⁵

Although by 1941 Hitler had been fulminating against the Jews for eight years, the persecution of Jews was still not thought of as a specially important propaganda theme in Allied broadcasts and articles. Indeed, on 25 July 1941, a Ministry of Information document had warned British policymakers that to make the Nazi danger ‘credible’ to the British people, it should not be ‘too extreme’, as concentration camp stories ‘repel the normal mind’. A certain amount of horror was needed, the document conceded, ‘but it must be used very sparingly and must deal always with treatment of indisputably innocent people. Not with violent political opponents. And not with Jews’.⁶

But Hitler’s threat to ‘annihilate’ the Jews of Europe had not been mere rhetoric. All Hitler lacked was opportunity, and that opportunity came in June 1941, as the German armies, already masters of western Europe, invaded the Soviet Union. From the very first days of the German invasion of Russia, special Nazi killing squads, or Einsatzgruppen, had moved eastwards behind the German army, using the terror and confusion of war as a cover under which to round up hundreds of thousands of Jews in town after town and village after village, and to shoot them down on the spot. The systematic mass murder of the Jews had begun.

The slaughter of as many as half a million Jews in the newly conquered territories of western Russia and the Baltic States did not satisfy the Nazi desire to eliminate Jewish life from Europe. Instead, it stimulated the search for a ‘final solution’. In the autumn of 1941 experiments had been made in seizing Jews in German-occupied Yugoslavia, and in killing them in specially sealed vans, where the exhaust pipe had been turned back into the interior of the van.

In September 1941 a further experiment had been made on non-Jews, when seven hundred Soviet prisoners-of-war and three hundred Poles at Auschwitz were forced at gunpoint into a hermetically sealed cellar into which poison gas was then pumped. Throughout the night their screams had sounded throughout the camp. But by morning, all had been killed and other prisoners made to carry the bodies from the cellar to the camp crematorium.

News of this particular experiment did not become known in the west for more than six months.

Continuing with the experiments, in November 1941 the Gestapo selected some 1,200 Jewish slave labourers who were then in Buchenwald concentration camp, inside Germany itself, certified them as ‘insane’, took them by train to the Euthanasia Institute at Bernburg, near Berlin, and gassed them in rooms specially prepared for the experiment.

The ‘success’ of these various experiments suggested to the Nazi leaders a possible means of murdering hundreds of thousands, and indeed millions of people.

In the late autumn of 1941, as the war entered its third year, there were still as many as two million Jews living in German-occupied Poland alone. Smaller but once flourishing Jewish communities were to be found throughout the confines of German-dominated Europe, bringing to more than four million the number of Jews living in areas ruled or dominated by Germany.

In Poland, the Jews had been confined to crowded ghettoes since the beginning of the war. They had already suffered terribly from forced labour, hunger and disease. At the same time, tens of thousands of Jews had been deported from Germany and Austria to these eastern ghettoes. During 1941, more than 15,000 Jews died of starvation in the Lodz ghetto, and more than 40,000 in the Warsaw ghetto, as a result of deliberate German policy.

These facts were not entirely unknown to the western Allies. On 16 November 1941 the British Minister to Sweden, Victor Mallet, spoke at length to a Swedish economic negotiator who had just returned from Germany. The Swede told the Englishman, who at once reported it back to London, that many Germans were ‘disgusted at the way in which Jews are being deported from German cities to Ghettoes in Poland’. The fate of those deported, the Swede had been told, was ‘a fingering death’.⁷

On November 19, only three days after this meeting in Sweden, a member of the British Legation in Switzerland, David Kelly, reported from Berne on a conversation with a Polish diplomat, responsible now to the Polish Government-in-Exile in London, who told him ‘that about 1½ million Jews who were living in Eastern (recently Russian) Poland have simply disappeared altogether; nobody knows how or where’. At the same time, the Dutch Minister in Berne had told Kelly, ‘that 50 per cent of the Dutch Jews sent to camps are now dead’.⁸

On November 22 a junior Brazilian diplomat, Carlos Buarque de Macedo, who was then Second Secretary at the Brazilian Embassy in Berlin, arrived in Lisbon for an eight-day visit to Portugal. During his visit, he and his wife spoke to a member of the British Embassy in Lisbon, who noted down their remarks and sent them to the Foreign Office in London. ‘The treatment of Jews,’ the Brazilian reported, ‘is getting more appalling every day. Thousands are being packed into open lorries and sent off to Poland without food or water or stops at night.’ The Brazilian added: ‘So bad is the treatment of Jews now that even pro-German Portuguese diplomats are so horrified that they have helped to organize the marriage of six Jews with money to Portuguese, to enable them to be got out of Germany’.⁹

The Jews living outside Nazi-dominated Europe had no access to these diplomatic reports. But the Zionist movement, once so strong in central and eastern Europe, did have its own listening-posts, in both Switzerland and Turkey, to which information was continually being smuggled. In Geneva, the World Jewish Congress, a body set up shortly before the war to keep a special watch on anti-Jewish activities, was likewise the recipient of news and reports. In Jerusalem, the Jewish Agency for Palestine, the Zionist body which had been set up twenty years earlier by the British Government as its liaison with the Jews of Palestine, likewise received reports on an almost weekly basis, from Switzerland, and from Istanbul.

One such report was sent from Gerhart Riegner, the World Jewish Congress representative in Geneva, to his superiors in New York, in a letter dated 27 October 1941. It told of renewed deportations from Germany and Czechoslovakia to Poland, of the ‘horror of deportation’, and of the terrible conditions inside Poland itself. ‘An eye-witness told me recently’, Riegner reported, ‘that there are currently 2,000 cases of typhus in the Warsaw ghetto…’

Riegner urged the dispatch from neutral governments of a ‘humanitarian mission’ of Protestant leaders to the deportation regions, as well as Protestant intervention with the Red Cross, and a ‘solemn declaration’ by the many Governments in exile in London, declaring all anti-Jewish laws passed by the occupying powers and their collaborators as ‘null and void’.¹⁰

A month later, on November 27, a second report from Geneva was sent to Istanbul by the Jewish Agency representatives, and then forwarded from Istanbul to Jerusalem. The subject of this further report was Hitler’s ‘new order’ in Europe. The message was brief but succinct. ‘With regard to the Jews,’ Jerusalem was informed, ‘it seems that no place whatever has been allotted to them in Hitler’s Europe, and the remnants who escaped the massacres, starvation and oppression of the ghettoes are no doubt intended to be sent somewhere overseas.’¹¹

But according to the evolving Nazi intentions not even the ‘remnants’ were to be spared. The massive death tolls of the ghettoes were no longer sufficient for the now triumphant Nazis, as they pondered the twin success of their eastern killing squads, and Germany’s military dominance in Europ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• List of maps
• Part One: The Final Solution
• Part Two: Hope and Hopelessness
• Part Three: Auschwitz Revealed
• Epilogue
• Biographical Notes
• Other Books by Martin Gilbert
• Endnotes