M Friday, April 4, 1980
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
Remembering the Six Million We Dare Not Forget
note: the troops who fought the
(Editor's
Holocaust Remembrance Jewish combatants.
A prime piece of evidence
Day — Yom Hashoa —
will be observed April 13. for the prosecution because
The following material is it exemplified the program
from the final chapters of of deliberate and total an-
"About the Holocaust . . . nihilation, the Stroop report
What We Know and How was also memorable for its
We Know It," written by inadvertent rendering of
Dorothy Rabinowitz and Jewish heroism and Ger-
published by the Insti- man savagery. Torn be-
tute of Human Relations tween the need to demean
Press of the American the Jewish combatants and
the need to explain to his
Jewish Committee.)
From the earliest years of Berlin superiors why his
the postwar era, the ques- forces could not break their
tion of Jewish resistance to resistance for almost a
the Nazis has been debated. month, Stroop's report
At the end of the war, as moves tortuously between
well as for a time thereafter, citations of SS heroics and
it was assumed that the examples of the tenacity of
Jews had mounted no resis- the Jews.
Stroop describes Jews
tance at all except in the
battle of the Warsaw who fell into German hands
Ghetto. This assumption re- shouting imprecations and
sulted from lack of informa- curses at Germany, the
tion concerning the Jewish Furehrer and the German
response to the Nazis — soldiers, and recounts what
from the fact that what was happened when he decided
known about the Holocaust to break the resistance by
at that time was derived setting the ghetto on fire:
mostly from German
U. . . Not infrequently, the
sources.
The German records and Jews stayed in the burning
accounts were devastat- buildings until, because of
the heat and the fear of
ingly reliable in document- being
burned aliVe, they
ing the destruction of Euro- preferred to jump down
pean Jewry. But they were from the upper stories after
incomplete and unreliable having thrown mattresses
where the response of the and other upholstered arti-
Jews was concerned; for cles into the street from the
German propaganda goals
burning buildings. With
_required that the Jews be their bones broken, they
seen as cowards who failed
tried to crawl across the
to fight back. Jewish still
street
into blocks of build-
sources, hardly available
until much later, and far ings which had not yet been
fewer in number, were the set on fire or were only par-
in flames."
first to throw light on the tially
Though the Germans
extent of Jewish resistance.
What the Germans con- were expert propagandists,
particularly in the use of
cealed or did not know was photographs, the prop-
gradually revealed as the
aganda effect of both the
Jewish records emerged, written report and the pic-
documenting the resistance
which had taken place not tures that accompanied it
was undone by the truths
only in the ghetto of War- which they revealed. One
saw, but also in those of photograph shows women
Bialystok, Vilna_and Czes- and children marching,
tochowa, in the Polish for-
their hands raised in sur-
ests, in the death camps of render; the caption beneath
Treblinka and Sobibor, and states that Jewish "bandits"
in Auschwitz itself.
the Nazis' word for
Little was known of these —
Jewish
resistance fighters
and innumerable more
were driven from their
obscure episodes of resis- —
tance because, in most hiding places.
* * *
cases, none of those who
took part lived to tell of
The. Statistics
them.
of Genocide
The Warsaw Ghetto up-
As
a witness at Nurem-
rising of 1943, unlike all
others, is well documented berg, Rudolf Hoess provided
in the Nuremberg proceed- a detailed accounting of the
ings. The Nazis had re- destruction process at Au-
corded this event with what schwitz, the largest of the
the American prosecutor death centers. Like so much
described as "Teutonic of the record-keeping of the
thoroushness as to detail, perpetrators, his report is
illustrated with photo- rich in the statistics of mur-
graphs to authenticate its der.
At Auschwitz alone,
almost incredible text." The
report — entitled "The Hoess testified, 21/2 million
Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw Is victims had been gassed and
No More" — was written by burned during his tenure,
SS Major General Jurgen . and at least another half-
Stroop, the commander of million had been killed by
deliberate starvation and
disease. Those three million
dead, estimated Hoess, re-
presented 70 to 80 percent of
all persons sent to Au-
schwitz as prisoners. Many
of them had first been sub-
jected to medical "experi-
ments," others exploited for
slave labor.
"We executed about
400,000 Hungarian Jews
alone at Auschwitz in the
summer of 1944 .. .
"The 'final solution' of the
Jewish question meant the
complete extermination of
all Jews in Europe. I was or-
dered to establish extermi-
nation facilities at Au-
schwitz in June 1941. At
that time there were al-
ready three other extermi-
nation camps in the Gov-
ernment General .. .
"I visited Treblinka to
find out how they carried
out their extermination.
The Camp Commandant at
Treblinka told me that he
had liquidated 80,000 in the
course of one-half year. He
was principally concerned
with liquidating all the
Jews from the Warsaw
Ghetto. He used monoxide
gas and I did not think that
his methods were very effi-
cient. So when I set up the
extermination building at
Auschwitz, I used Cyclon B,
which was a crystallized
Prussic Acid which we
dropped into the death
chamber from a small open-
ing . . ."
By such means the death
camps finished what the
Einsatzgruppen had begun.
In all, the "Final Solution"
wiped out approximately
three million Jews in Po-
land (90 percent of the coun-
try's Jewish population),
and approximately 228,000
in the Baltic countries:
Lithuania, Latvia and Es-
tonia (also 90 percent). In
Soviet White Russia,
245,000 Jews (65 percent)
were massacred by the Ein-
satzgruppen _ and their
non-German collaborators,
in the Soviet Ukraine
900,000 (60 percent), and in
Russia proper 107,000 (11
percent).
Jewish losses in Hungary
totaled 450,000 (70 per-
cent); in Romania 300,000
(50 percent); in Germany
and Austria 210,000 (90
percent); in the Nether-
lands 105,000 (75 percent).
France lost 90,000 (26 per-
cent) of its Jews, the Bohe-
mian and Moravian regions
of Czechoslovakia 80,000
(89 percent), the rest of
Czechoslovakia 75,000 (83
percent).
As for Jews from Greece,
54,000 (77 percent) were
killed; from Belgium,
40,000 (60 percent); from
Yugoslavia, 26,000 (60 per-
144*
cent); from Bulgaria, 14,000
(22 percent); from Italy,
8,000 (20 percent); from
Luxembourg, 1,000 (also 20
percent). Norway's small
Jewish population was re-
duced by 900 — one-half of
the total.
By 1945, the effort to ex-
terminate the Jews of
Europe had very nearly suc-
ceeded. Approximately six
million had been murdered,
the religious and cultural
life of East European Jewry
extinguished forever. The
figures tell what happened
and to whom; but the
human agony they repre-
sent cannot be communi-
cated in numbers.
As the American pro-
secutor, Justice Jackson,
continually reminded the
court, for proof that the
Germans had engaged in a
war of extermination
against the Jews, one had
only to take the word of the
Germans themselves. The
cold, stark facts and figures,
drawn from the defendants'
own records, defied rebut-
tal. _
RevieWing all the evi-
dence, the judges at the trial
of the Major War Criminals
pointed out that "Adolf
Eichmann, who had been
put in charge of this pro-
gram by Hitler, has esti-
mated that the policy pur-
sued resulted in the killing
of six million Jews . . . The
persecution of the Jews at
the hands of the Nazi gov-
ernment has been proved in
the greatest detail before
the Tribunal," the judges
declared.
In the mass of evidence
which led so inexorably to
this judgment, two pieces of
testimony stand out. One is
from a speech by SS Chief
Heinrich Himmler before
SS leaders in Poznan in
1943:
"I want to tell you about a
very grave matter in all
frankness. We can talk
about it quite openly here,
but we must never talk
about it publicly . . . I mean
the evacuation of the Jews,
the extermination of the
Jewish people .. .
"Most of you will know
what it means to see 100
corpses piled up, or 400 or
1,000. To have gone through
this and — except for in-
stances of human weakness
— to have remained decent,
that has made us tough.
This is an unwritten, never
to be written, glorious page widespread sympathetic re-
sponse, the destruction of
of our history."
The other piece of evi- the Jews was virtually to-
dence, from Hans Frank, tal..
For years, the majority of
gorvenor-general of occu-
pied Poland, is worth noting people preferred not to
because it is a judgment know the details of the
rendered not by the accus- Holocaust; and in recent
ers, but by the accused. Re- years, as interest in the sub-
ferring to the annihilation ject has grown, there have
of the Jews, he told the even been — precisely as
court: "A thousand years General Eisenhower pre-
will pass and still this guilt dicted — some clumsy ef-
of Germany shall not have forts by old and new Nazis
and self-styled historical
been erased."
He was in a position to theorists to deny that the
know: As the chief occupa- crimes really happened.
While mostly ignored, as
tion officer of Poland, he had
presided over the murder of they deserve to be, such ef-
three million men, women forts to rewrite history
and children — the largest have, on some occasions,
Jewish population in any produced eloquent rejoin-
ders — among them one,
country in Europe.
printed in the New York
* * *
Times in December 1977, by
Why We Must
the late Walter J. Fellanz,
colonel, U.S. Army, who led
Never Forget
the combat infantry troops
If, as Hans Frank ac- that overran the Dachau
knowledged, the guilt for concentration camp in
inventing, organizing and Germany on April 29, 1945:
carrying out the Holocaust
"I was the first American
lies with Germany, it must camp commander of this
also be acknowledged that death mill . . . Now, 321/2
the world permitted the years later, I am still
Holocaust to happen. For shocked by what I saw dur-
the Nazis succeeded in ing my 16 hours at the lib-
murdering the Jews of eration of this shameful
Europe not only because of place. To me, the Holocaust
their fanatic commitment to was one of the most shame-
the "Final Solution," or be- ful crimes since man walked
cause their advanced kil- this earth.
ling technology enabled
"More shameful, how-
them to do so; they suc- ever, is the fact that the
ceeded because no nation in forces of evil are trying to
the civilized world inter- deny that this Holocaust
vened, heeded the threats ever took place . . . What are
that Jews were about to be the real motives of these
slaughtered, or provided people? Are they possessed
refuge from the slaughter- by evil? Sadly, I truly think
ers when the threats be- so . . . No, I am not a Jew; I
came reality.
am but an old soldier . . ."
That this witness to the
They succeeded, in short,
because they were allowed Nazi crimes expected some
to succeed. "The bystanders people not to believe hir^
to cruelty," concluded Ar- they thought he was Je
thur D. Morse, the suggests how prevalent sk
chronicler of American is the idea that th.
apathy, "became bystan- Holocaust is solely a Jewish,—_\
ders to genocide."
matter. It is well, in the -
The Holocaust stands of such belief, to recall
both as history and as a warning of the anti-Nazi
warning. As history, it German philosopher, Karl
shows us how easily atti- Jaspers, that what hap-
tudes and ideas are trans- pened must be remembered —\
lated into moral action or because it can happen again
lack of it, and how that at any minute.
Implicit in this reminder
translation determines
whether human beings live is another: What happened
or die. As the record shows, to one people can happen to
where the non-Jewish popu- any.
The Holocaust was and
lation opposed the Nazis'
racist ideology and offered remains a tragedy of uni-
help to the Jews, Jewish los- versal implication, and one
ses were relatively loW; whose warnings we ignore
where anti-Semitism met a at our peril.
, _,/