Page Six

THE JEWISH NEWS

Fr deb May 7, 1943

The Nazi Reign of Terror.

by WILLIAM L. SHIRER

Against the background of the years that went into his "Berlin Diary," its author traces the new
documentation of mass murder at Nazi hands—from firing squads to murder camps and death
trains; from Poles, Serbs and other conquered peoples to the planned extermination of the Jews.

William L.
Shirer

Y

U MAY HAVE NOTICED
it the other day, the little item in the papers that
said the ghetto in Warsaw was empty. A year ago
this dismal quarter, surrounded by an 8-foot brick
wall, housed a half million Jews. They weren't
happy. They were being forced to live like cattle.
They were being slowly starved. But they were
alive. Today they are dead. That is why the little
piece in the papers said the Warsaw ghetto was
empty.

They didn't die, really. They were murdered. As
our State Department, which is not easily moved to
strong words or even pity as it contemplates the
evils and the sorrows of this world, put it: "They
were taken away . . . never heard of again . . . the
able-bodied worked to death in labor camps . . . the
infirm left to die of exposure and starvation . • . or
deliberately massacred in mass executions."

So it was that, last December, eleven of the
United Nations, including our own, announced that
the reports from the continent indicated that the
Nazis were "carrying out Hitler's oft-repeated in-
tention to exterminate the Jewish people in Eu-
rope." It was about that time we began to hear that
the Nazis were emptying the ghettos. It was then
that the latest of Hitler's proud organizations estab-
lished itself. The official title was the Juden Ver-
nichtungs Kolonnen --- the "Jew Extermination
Squads." From all reports, they seem to have done
their job with typical Teutonic thoroughness. Alto-
gether' Hitler is believed to have slaughtered two
million Jews. Only the other day he said the war's
end would find all of Europe's Jews put out of the
way—the remaining five million, that is.

Other Doomed Peoples

But the Jews, we know, are not the only ones
who are being put out of the way. It was common
knowledge in party circles even before I left Berlin
that Hitler's program called for the wiping out of
the Polish people as a nation. It would be difficult,
some of the more gentle Nazis admitted, to murder
all twenty-two million of the Poles. But the best
ones could be eliminated, the intellectuals, the edu-
cated, the talented, the sturdy, so that the remaining
Poles could be made into suitable slaves for the
master race. This elimination is now taking place.
We do not know its exact rate of progress. But
nearly a million Poles, not counting the. Polish
Jews, are believed to have been liquidated by the
Germans since October 1939. This does not include
the fifty thousand civilians killed in the siege of
Warsaw in September of that year.

Now and then we get an inkling of how the
slaughtering is going in Poland. On March 7, offi-
cials of the Polish government in London reported
that 250 Poles were dying daily in a "murder camp"
at Oswiecim. Death came by "executions, inhuman
treatment, hunger and epidemics." This is just one
"murder camp."

Perhaps you've heard of one of the others—the
one for the doomed Poles of Warsaw. The Nazis
used to bump off the Warsaw people right in the

Children and Their Prejudices

Form the central theme of the important
feature article to appear in next week's issue
of The Jewish News.

A Fascinating Chapter of
Michigan Jewish History

Has been written by Dr. Leo M. Franklin for
publication in our issue of May 21.

BE SURE TO READ ALL THE IMPORTANT
FEATURES TO APPEAR IN FORTHCOMING
ISSUES OF THE JEWISH NEWS

middle of town, in the gardens of the Sejm, the
lower House of the Polish parliament as it once
was. It's a small garden, I remember, not nearly
large enough for the appetite for blood of Himm-
ler's men. So for some time now, the Nazis have
been using a more suitable spot, Palmiry by name,
outside of Warsaw in the forest of Kampinos. It's
a fairly spacious place and allows for the exercise of
the new Nazi technique of mass executions about
which I shall give some evidence. That is to say,
there is space at Palmiry for the mass graves the
Poles topple into when the crack of the firing-squad
comes. Such an arrangement saves Nazi manpower
in which at the moment the Nazis are somewhat
lacking.

Poles Describe Process

Poles who have been at Palmiry and lived and
escaped to tell the tale describe the macabre process
there. Jewish labor battalions are made to dig
trenches. The measurements are all prescribed by
the meticulous German mind—two yards wide, two
yards deep, twenty yards long. The Nazis line up
twenty Poles and just for a little reminder make
them face the open grave. The bullets come in the
back of the head and very conveniently the victims
fall over into the trench. There is only a little
shoveling to be done.

Recently a document fell into the hands of the
British which outlines the new Nazi technique as
applied in Yugoslavia. It differs little from that
used in Poland or occupied Russia. The document
consists of the latest instructions signed by a Ger-
man general in Serbia. He orders the execution of
Serbs to be carried out "in a regimental manner"
and he goes on to explain that "when a large num-
ber of persons have to be dealt with they are to be
distributed for shooting among the units." The
burning of bodies is discouraged in this order. So
is unnecessary contact with the victims.

"In order to avoid unnecessary contact with the
bodies, those to be shot are to be led directly to the
edges of their graves," says the order. "In case of
mass executions it is permitted to cause the hostages
to kneel with their faces toward the grave"—always
this last little act of Nazi refinement.

One could go on, for the documentation of mass
murder unprecedented in history is piling up. There
is the nightmarish description brought back by one
who was there of Belzec in Poland where a goodly
number of Jews are now being liquidated by the
New Order. Many of the victims are dead by the
time they get to Belzec, for they have been deprived
of food for many days and they have spent a week
or two pressed together in box-cars like sardines (if
you could imagine sardines standing up)-140 per-
sons squeezed into a car designed for eight horses
or 40 human beings. Those that are alive are quick-
ly dispatched at Belzec.

What Are We to Do?

Thus it is in the Nazi enslaved lands and, as Anne
O'Hare McCormick reminded us in The New York
Times the other day, we are pretty callous about it
all because we have become drugged by horror.
What are we to do about it—now and after the
war? What can we do?

The American Jewish Congress urges the United
Nations governments to approach Hitler and ar-
range for the release of the remaining five million
Jews within his ugly reach. Everyone can under-
stand the anguish of the British and American Jews,
for it is everyone's anguish. If these five million
Jews can be snatched somehow from Hitler's angry
jaws, no effort should be spared to achieve this re-
sult. That is the least that the English and Ameri-
cans can do for humanity.

I have noticed recently in the press
and at the mass meetings a tendency
of some of our most thoughtful people
to shift the blame on ourselves for
the fact that these five million Jews
have not yet been saved. Dorothy
Moulton Mayer writes to The New
York Times: "The suffering of these
persecuted innocent people . . . is
removable; it should be faced and
overcome. When the story of these
years comes to be told in its hideous
entirety we shall be face to face with
the record of our inhumanity." Our
inhumanity? Is this not confusing the

greatest moral problem of our times. Should we
forget that, tragic though it is, the success or
failure of the effort to save these people depends
exclusively on one man—Hitler.

And even if the five million Jews are saved, what
about the twenty million Poles, the fifty million
Russians in occupied Russia, the ten million Yugo-
slays, and all the rest—the Norwegians, Dutch, Bel-
gians, French? The terrible problem remains as
long as Hitler is alive and eighty million Germans
slavishly do his bidding.

I myself once thought that if the Allied govern-
ments served proper notice on Germany that every
crime against the occupied peoples and Jews would
be repaid with uncompromising justice, that the
Nazis mass murders would at least decrease. I was
wrong. For the Allied governments did serve no-
tice. It had no effect whatsoever. Those of us who
thought we knew the Germans underestimated
something in them—their brutality or the extent of
their diseased minds and souls.

Can't Appeal to Them

At the same time we overestimated the compas-
sion of what some of us like to call "good Ger-
mans"—if there are any. Good people over here
say: "But surely the 'good Germans' resent these
bestialities. Can't we appeal to them?" The answer,
I'm afraid, is that you can't because they wouldn't
hear or they wouldn't listen. One of the great
shocks that we who remained in Germany during
the first part of the war received was the obscene
spectacle of complete indifference which the Ger-
man people, almost without exception, showed to
all the crimes they were inflicting upon the occu-
pied peoples.

Did they know of these crimes? Of course they
did. They knew of the civilian slaughter in War-
saw and Rotterdam, on the roads in Belgium and
France, in London and Coventry. It left them com-
pletely cold. There was one set of rules of life and
death for the master race. There were no values, for
the others. And this was not a Nazi thing, as so
many Americans believe. It was a German thing.*
This was the behavior of the Teuton in our time.

In my opinion, and it is only one man's opinion,
this murderous behavior of the German will con-
tinue regardless of our righteous wails and our in-
dignant protests until the day dawns on which he is
convinced that his great war of conquest has failed.
It may well be that the Nazi leaders themselves,
like the gods in their pagan world, will prefer to go
down to destruction carrying the rest of the Euro-
pean peoples with them in an orgy of slaughter. It
is an end that has a strange and terrible attraction
for the Germanic soul. I think that is a possibility
we have to face. But it may be, too, that when de-
feat becomes certain the bulk of the German people
will endeavor to save themselves by a quick—if su-
perficial — repentance. Then the great German
slaughter of the civilians they've enslaved will cease.

For how long, depends upon the kind of a peace
we make—upon its firmness, upon its effectiveness
in convincing the Germans that their conquering
days are forever over.

Reprinted from Survey Graphic by special
arrangement with its editors.

*Mr. Shiner's sobering call to Americans to see things for what
they are, springs from a deep conviction that otherwise we may
compound and protract the tragedy of Europe. Nonetheless he
knows that I do not follow him when he makes the whole German
people party to the Nazi massacres.

In breaking with such a competent witness at this point, I can
only • lean on my faith in Germans I have known abroad no lesS
than. .here. However incessant the coercion and indoctrination uns=..
der Hitlerism, look to find their like in recoil against both its
dogma and its fury. My faith is not without support from fugitives:
who have cleared the border, from the testimony of refugees, from
the glimpses of rebel daring that leak out through the under-
ground. These support the living wisdom from Burke to Madame
Chiang Kai-shek—that you cannot indict a whole people.

To °say this is not to minimize or extenuate by one whit the
bloody record of these months.— The Editor of Survey Graphic.