Download The Final Solution

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Hitler was obsessively focused on the goal of
eliminating all Jews from the planet.
by Rabbi Ken Spiro
By the beginning of 1942 the Germans had close to 9 million Jews under
their control (out of a total of 11 million Jews living in Europe and the
Soviet Union). And, of course, it was their plan to murder them all.
Already, the Einsatzgruppen killing squads had machine-gunned 1.5 million
Jews, (as we saw in the previous class) but this was not an efficient way of
killing so many more millions of people – it was too messy, too slow, and it
wasted too many bullets.
So the Germans embarked on a policy called the “Final Solution” which was
decided upon at a conference held in Wannsee, near Berlin, on January 20,
1942:
1
“Instead of immigration there is now a further possible solution to
which
the
Fuhrer
has
already
signified
his
consent.
Namely
deportation to the East. Although this should be regarded merely as
an interim measure, it will provide us with the practical experience
which will be especially valuable in connection with the future final
solution. In the course of the practical implementation of the final
solution Europe will be combed from West to East.”1
The Final Solution – the systematic gassing of millions of Jews – was put
into place primarily by the top Gestapo brass, namely Adolph Eichmann and
Reinhardt Heidrich.
Of the 24 concentration camps (besides countless labor camps), six specific
death camps were set up. They were:
• Auschwitz-Birkenau – 1,500,000 murdered
• Chelmno – 320,000 murdered
• Treblinka – 870,000 murdered
• Sobibor – 250,000 murdered
• Maidenek – 360,000 murdered
• Belzec – 600,000 murdered2
Auschwitz is the most famous because there the killing machine was the
most efficient. There, between the end of 1941 and 1944, as many as
12,000 Jews a day could be gassed to death and cremated. In addition to
the Jews, hundreds of thousands of others deemed threats to the Nazi
regime, or considered racially inferior, or socially deviant, were also
murdered.
As if cold-blooded murder of millions of Jews was not enough, it was done
with extreme, perverse cruelty. To bring the victims to the death camps,
the Nazis packed them into cattle trains with standing-room only and
without food or water, without heat in the winter, and without toilet
facilities. Many did not arrive alive. Those who did arrive at their destination
1
Mendes-Flohr, Paul, and Reinharz, Yehuda, (editors) The Jew in the Modern World, p. 663.
2
Estimated number of victims killed in these concentration camps taken from Yad Vashem’s website:
www.yadvashem.org
2
had their heads shaved: the hair was to be used for stuffing mattresses.
Stripped of all clothing, most were herded naked into the gas chambers.
Dr. Johann Kremer, a German SS surgeon, described the gassing of a group
of French Jews including 150 boys and girls under the age of 15:
These mass murders took place in small cottages situated outside the
Birkenau camp in the woods... All the SS physicians on duty in the
camp took turns to participate in the gassing, which were called
Sonderaction (“Special Action”)... When the transport with the people
who were destined to be gassed arrived at the railway ramp, the SS
officer selected, from among the new arrivals, persons fit to work,
while the rest – old people, all children, women with children in their
arms and other persons not deemed fit to work – were loaded onto
lorries and driven to the gas-chamber.
There people were first driven into the barracks huts where the
victims undressed and then went naked into the gas-chambers. Very
often no incident occurred, as the SS men kept people quiet,
maintaining that they were to bathe and be deloused. After driving all
the victims into the gas-chamber, the door was closed and an SS
man in a gas-mask threw contents of a Zyklon-B (cyanide gas) tin
through an opening in the side wall. The shouting and screaming of
the victims could be heard through the opening, and it was clear that
they were fighting for their lives.3
Bizarre and sadistic “medical experiments” were done on many victims
without the use of anesthetics. Some people were sewn together to make
artificial Siamese twins. Others were submerged in freezing water to test
the limits of human endurance.
Some of those deemed strong enough were used as slave labor for the Nazi
war effort. On starvation rations, they were pushed to their physical limits
and then killed or sent to the death camps.
The Jews were even debased in death. Gold fillings were torn from the
mouths of the corpses. In some instances soap was made from their
rendered bodies and lampshades from their skins.
3
Quoted by Martin Gilbert in The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War, p. 438.
3
Resistance Efforts
Any attempt at escape or resistance was met with brutal reprisals. For
example, on March 14, 1942, a number of Jews escaped from a work detail
in Ilja, Ukraine, and joined the partisans. In revenge, all old and sick Jews
were shot in the street and 900 more herded into a building and burned
alive.
Sam Halpern, a survivor of the Kamionka labor
camp explained: “I would never consider escaping. I
will not have others killed because of my decision.”4
Nevertheless, in at least five camps and 20 ghettos,
there were uprisings. The most famous attempt was
the Warsaw Ghetto rebellion. On April 19, 1943, the Nazis began the
liquidation of the ghetto – that is, shipping off Jews to Auschwitz – and were
met with armed resistance.
Mordechai Anielewicz, who was 23 years old and one of the leaders of the
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, wrote in his last letter (dated April 23, 1943):
“What happened is beyond our wildest dreams. Twice the Germans
fled from our ghetto. One of our companies held out for 40 minutes
and the other, for over six hours... I have no words to describe to
you the conditions in which Jews are living. Only a few chosen ones
will hold out; all the rest will perish sooner or later. The die is cast. In
the bunkers in which our comrades are hiding, no candle can be lit
for lack of air... The main thing is: My life’s dream has come true; I
have lived to see Jewish resistance in the ghetto in all its greatness
and glory.”5
But in the end, the Jews were no match for the artillery, machine guns, and
troops of the Germans. (Compare 1,358 German rifles against 17 guns
among the Jews). The end result was that the entire ghetto was destroyed
with those hiding in bunkers burned alive.
4
5
Sam, Halpern, Darkness and Hope, New York: Shengold, 1996.
Mendes-Flohr, Paul, and Reinharz, Yehuda, (editors) The Jew in the Modern World, p. 675.
4
Unprecedented Slaughter
The Nazi attempt to deliberately, systematically eliminate an entire people
from the planet was unprecedented in human history.
Hitler targeted the Jews for a specific reason,
which was not just racial. The elimination of the
Jews had a unique “status” in Hitler’s master
plan. While he certainly killed millions of others
(gypsies, communists, homosexuals, etc.) he
made exceptions for all these groups. The only
group for which no exception was made was
the Jews – they all had to die. Writes Lucy
Dawidowicz in The War Against the Jews:
The final solution transcended the bounds of modern historical
experience. Never before in modern history had one people made the
killing of another the fulfillment of an ideology, in whose pursuit
means were identical with ends. History has, to be sure, recorded
terrible massacres and destructions that one people perpetrated
against another. But all, however cruel and unjustifiable, were
intended to achieve an instrumental ends, being means to ends and
not ends in and of themselves.6
In other words, the elimination of the Jews was not the means to an end. It
was an end in itself. What that end was Hitler explained himself in his
writings and speeches.
Hitler believed that before monotheism and the Jewish ethical vision came
along, the world operated according to the laws of nature and evolution:
survival of the fittest. The strong survived and the weak perished. When the
lion hunts the herd, the young, the sick and weak are always the first
victims. Nature is brutal but nature is balanced. There is no mercy. So, too,
in antiquity – the great empires, the Babylonians, Greeks and Romans –
conquered, subjugated and destroyed other peoples; they respected no
6
Dawidowicz, Lucy S., The War Against the Jews 1933-1945, New York: Bantam Books, 1975. p. xxiii.
5
borders and showed no mercy. This Hitler viewed as natural and correct.
But in a world operating according to a Divinely-dictated ethical system –
where a God-given standard applies and not anyone’s power and might –
the weak did not need to fear the strong. As Hitler saw it, the strong were
emasculated – this was neither normal nor natural, and in Hitler’s eyes, the
Jews were to blame.
His plan was to take over the world, set up a pagan master race and return
the planet to what he viewed was its ideal natural state – “unpolluted” by
Jewish ideas and Jewish off-shoots such as Christianity. The words of the
Hitler Youth song make this very clear:
We are the joyous Hitler Youth.
We do not need any Christian virtue
Our leader is our savior
The pope and rabbi shall be gone
We want to be pagans once again.
But to implement his plan, he had to first get rid of the Jews. As he said:
“The Ten Commandments have lost their validity... Conscience is a
Jewish invention. It is a blemish like circumcision... The struggle for
world domination is fought entirely between us, between the
Germans and the Jews.”7
Everything in his war machine was set up for this purpose. At the very end,
when the Allies were destroying the German Army, he was not as much
bothered by this as he was by the fact that there were Jews still alive.
One of the clearest examples of Hitler’s single-minded (and seemingly
suicidal) desire to rid the world of the Jews can be seen in the
extermination of the Jews of Hungary. Until March of 1944, the Hungarian
government had refused to allow the deportation of Hungarian Jews. Then
the Germans occupied Hungary, and by mid-May (two weeks before D-Day
when the Allied forces invaded France), the mass deportations to Auschwitz
7
Rauschning, Hermann, Voice of Destruction (Hitler Speaks), pp. 220, 242.
6
began. The Nazi leadership worked with particular intensity. The Soviet
army was rapidly approaching Hungary and the Germans knew that they
were going to lose the war. But there was no way that Hitler could allow
such a large Jewish community to survive. He diverted trains that were
badly needed to transport supplies and more soldiers to the Russian front
just to send more Jews to Auschwitz. To him, the greater enemy was the
Jew.
Between May 15th and July 8th, approximately 400,000 Hungarian Jews were
sent to their deaths in Auschwitz which was working at peak capacity.
Hitler’s obsession with the Jews was his primary focus even in the last
moments of his life. Just before he committed suicide in his bunker on April
30, 1945, he urged on the fight against the enemy of all humanity – the
Jews. His last dispatch read:
“Above all, I enjoin the leaders of the nation and those under them to
uphold the racial laws to their full extent and to oppose mercilessly
the universal poisoner of all peoples: International Jewry.”8
Historical Context
It is important to note here that the anti-Semitism which drove the Nazis to
understate the unthinkable did not exist in isolation. It was not even Hitler’s
personal philosophy.
We might recall (from class #53) that it was one of Germany’s biggest
thinkers of the 19th century – Wilhelm Marr – who coined the term “antiSemitism.” In so doing he wanted to distinguish hatred of the Jews as
members of a religion (anti-Judaism) from hatred of the Jews as members
of a race/nation (anti-Semitism). In 1879, he wrote a book called The
Victory of Judaism over Germandom, a runaway best-seller in which he
warned:
8
Mendes-Flohr, Paul, and Reinharz, Yehuda, (editors), The Jew in the Modern World, p. 699.
7
There is no stopping them [the Jews]. Are there no clear signs that
the twilight of the Jews is setting in? No. Jewry’s control of society
and politics as well as its domination of religious and ecclesiastical
thought is still in the prime of its development. Yes, through the
Jewish nation Germany will become a world power, a western new
Palestine. And this will happen not through violent revolution but
through the compliance of the people. We should not reproach the
Jewish nation. It fought against the Western world for 1,800 years
and finally conquered it. We were vanquished. The Jews were late in
their assault on Germany but once started there was no stopping
them...
I am marshalling my last remaining strength in order to die
peacefully as one who will not surrender and who will not ask for
forgiveness. The historical fact that Israel became the leading social
political superpower in the 19th century lies before us. We have
amongst us a flexible, tenacious, intelligent foreign tribe that knows
how to bring abstract reality into play in many different ways. Not
individual Jews but the Jewish spirit and Jewish consciousness have
overpowered the world. All this is the consequence of a cultural
history so unique in its way, so grand that every day polemic can
achieve nothing against it. With the entire force of its armies the
proud Roman Empire did not achieve that which Semitism has
achieved in the West and particularly in Germany.9
Keep in mind that when Marr wrote these words, the State of Israel did not
exist, nor was there even a hint in the geo-political situation that it might
come into being anytime soon. Marr, in speaking of the Jewish national
threat, was speaking about the great ideological struggle of Jewish
worldview versus paganism, which had been playing out throughout history.
We saw it between the Greeks and the Jews (class #27) and between the
Romans and the Jews (class #33). Hitler saw it as continuing between the
Germans and the Jews.
9
The Jew in the Modern World, pp. 331-332.
8
Hitler’s understanding of the role of the Jews in the world was not warped.
His was, in fact, the traditional Jewish understanding. When the Jews
accepted the Torah at Mount Sinai, they became the chosen people whose
role and responsibility was to bring a God-given code of morality to the
world. They were to be “the light unto the nations”, in the words of Prophet
Isaiah.
And this is what Hitler wanted to bring to an end because, as long as there
were even a few Jews left on earth, they were going to continue that Godgiven mission. As Robert Wistrich explained in Hitler’s Apocalypse:
If only one country, for whatever reason, tolerates a Jewish family in
it, that family will become the germ center for fresh sedition. If one
little Jewish boy survives without any Jewish education, with no
synagogue and no Hebrew school, it [Judaism] is in his soul. Even if
there had never been a synagogue or a Jewish school or an Old
Testament, the Jewish spirit would still exist and exert its influence.
It has been there from the beginning and there is no Jew, not a
single one, who does not personify it.10
When we look at it from that perspective, we get a completely different
view of what the Holocaust was about. Traditional Judaism says that it is
part of the ultimate struggle between good and evil which had been going
on since the beginning of time. Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin
summed it up as follows:
From its earliest days, the raison d’etre of Judaism has been to
change the world for the better... This attempt to change the world,
to challenge the gods, religious or secular, of the societies around
them, and to make moral demands upon others... has constantly
been a source of tension between Jews and non Jews... We now
understand why so many non-Jews have regarded the mere
existence of Jews – no matter how few – as terribly threatening. The
mere existence of Jews, with their different values and allegiances,
constituted a threat to the prevailing order.”
10
11
11
Wistrich, Robert, Hitler’s Apocalypse, Philadelphia: St. Martin’s Press, 1986, p. 122.
Prager, Dennis, and Telushkin, Joseph, Why the Jews? p. 23
9
Liberation
In the end, Hitler did not succeed in his plan to completely eliminate the
Jews. He succeeded, however, in murdering a significant portion of the
world’s Jewish population and teaching the world the meaning of evil.
When the Allied armies (Russians from the east and the Americans and
British from the west) liberated the camps at the close of the war, they
were met with scenes of unspeakable horror. The films made by the Allied
forces upon entering the camps were so horrible that they were not publicly
shown for many years.
The post-Holocaust death total in Europe was unimaginable. Intentionally
using minimum figures and probable underestimates, Sir Martin Gilbert (in
his work The Holocaust) finds that at least 5,950,000 Jews were murdered
between 1939 and 1945. This figure represents 69% of the entire Jewish
population of Europe. Hundreds of communities, some of which were a
thousand years old were completely obliterated. Eastern European Jewry
had been virtually wiped out.
And they continued to die. The end of Nazi Germany did not end the deaths
of Jews. In spite of Allied efforts to save them, many victims perished after
liberation from weakness and illness. In the Belsen camp, 13,000 died after
the British liberators arrived. Some who did survive met death at the hands
of partisans or peasants when they left
the camps. Some tried to reach their old
homes, but found nothing left or that
they now had new inhabitants who were
very opposed to the return of the
original owners.
The worst example was what happened in the town of Kielce in Poland on
July 4, 1946. When the 200 surviving Jews returned to their village, the
local Poles, who were upset to see that any Jews had survived, instigated a
blood libel, accusing the Jews of the kidnap and ritual murder of a Polish
child. In the ensuing violence, 40 of the Jews, all Holocaust survivors, were
murdered by the Polish town’s people.
Unable to return to their previous homes, Jews sat for years in refugee
camps waiting for some country that would have them. Many sought to
enter the Land of Israel – then in the hands of the British and called the
Palestine Mandate – but the British barred them entry. They tried to enter
illegally and many perished in the effort as we shall see in class #65.
10