A woman in a small town near Minsk saw a young German soldier walking down the street with a year-old baby impaled on his bayonet. “The baby was still crying weakly,” she would remember. “And the German was singing. He was so engrossed in what he was doing that he did not notice me.”
MASTERS OF DEATH
By Richard Rhodes
For Jews in the Reich, Kristallnacht was the event that finally extinguished any hope that they could stay put in Germany. The time for patience had passed. Their countrymen were not going to overthrow Hitler and bring back the age of tolerance. Rosenberg’s diatribes and Goebbels’s speeches could no longer be dismissed as empty words. The Nazis wanted the Jews gone, and if they were not willing to leave on their own, they would be run out of their homes by force. Over the next ten months, more than one hundred thousand Jews would flee the country. Twice as many would be left behind.
THE DEVIL’S DIARY
By Robert K. Wittman & David Kinney
Emaciated corpses of children in Warsaw Ghetto.
“On January 18, 1945, they took us on a death march. We were 3,800 prisoners. We walked three days and three nights. There was snow and it was very cold. It is very cold in that part of Poland. The majority of the prisoners were left behind. Those who couldn’t go on were machine-gunned. All five of us friends ended up being wounded. I wasn’t wounded badly, but some of my friends were – one got a bullet in the lung, another in his neck, but I had better luck. We ended up surviving. Out of thirty-eight hundred prisoners, eighteen of us survived.”
WHAT WE KNEW
By Eric A. Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband
[Testimony of Dr. Franz Blaha, Czech prisoner ordered to perform autopsies at Dachau]:
“In 1942 and 1943 experiments on human beings were conducted [at Dachau] by Dr. Sigmund Rascher to determine the effects of changing air pressure. As many as 25 persons were put at one time into a specially constructed van in which pressure could be increased or decreased as required…Most of the prisoners used died from these experiments, from internal hemorrhage of the lungs or brain. The survivors coughed blood when taken out. It was my job to take the bodies out and as soon as they were found to be dead to send the internal organs to Munich for study. About 400 to 500 prisoners were experimented on. The survivors were sent to invalid blocks and liquidated shortly afterwards.
THE NUREMBERG TRIALS: THE NAZIS BROUGHT TO JUSTICE
By Alexander MacDonald
“At the end of June 1943, we were deported from Berlin. After approximately two days and a night in a freight care, we reached Auschwitz. The stench in these cars, the hysterical screaming and so on, were terrible. Having arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau, we were driven out of the cars by shouting guards. Our luggage was left behind, and we never saw it again. Next we had to file past a checkpoint, where the SS officers asked our age and occupation. I made myself two years older than I was and told them I was a mechanic. I’d estimate that of us 300 men – there were also 50 to 60 women – maybe 100 were admitted to the camp. The rest were given ‘special treatment.’ In other words, they were gassed. When married couples with children arrived, the man would not even be asked; he automatically went along to be gassed with his family. In practical terms, humans were a commodity, and there was so much of this commodity that they didn’t know what to do with it all. That was the horror of it. Those SS men who worked at Auschwitz were more or less forced to keep enlarging its capacity for annihilation because the transports were arriving from everywhere.”
VOICES FROM THE THIRD REICH
Steinhoff, Pechel and Showalter
In the early afternoon, a column of trucks drove a contingent of Jews from the camp to an empty school building on the northern edge of Hamburg. It contained twenty-two children between the ages of four and twelve, two women and twenty-six men. All had been used for medical experiments. They were taken to the school’s gymnasium and hanged so that none should bear witness to Nazi atrocities.
ENDGAME, 1945
By David Stafford
They chose to walk into a hospital [at Josefow, Poland], a house of healing and to shoot the sick, who must have been cowering, begging, and screaming for mercy. They killed babies. None of the Germans has seen fit to recount details of such killings. In all probability, a killer either shot a baby in its mother’s arms, and perhaps the mother for good measure, or, as was sometimes the habit during these years, held it at arm’s length by the leg, shooting it with a pistol. Perhaps the mother looked on in horror. The tiny corpse was then dropped like so much trash and left to rot. A life extinguished.
HITLER’S WILLING EXECUTIONERS
By Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
By 1943, the Nazis had decided that no Jew was to be spared, and Zeiler’s mother was picked up and sent to Theresienstadt. Soon after, Zeiler, at the age of twenty, was arrested too, for harboring Jews – that is to say, his own mother. He was sent to Buchenwald. Before long, he weighed only ninety pounds.
THE WAGES OF GUILT
By Ian Buruma
By the spring and summer of 1942, the area around the Chelmno was filled with the stench of rotting bodies. German officials ordered ovens brought in so that the mass graves could be opened and bodies exhumed and burned. Of course they delegated this gruesome job to members of the Jewish Sonderkommando. Mordechai Podchlebnik, a man assigned to the task, found the bodies of his wife and two children in a mass grave. He begged the SS guards to shoot him. When they refused, he tried to commit suicide. This time his comrades stopped him. Eventually he escaped. One of very few survivors of the killing center at Chelmno, Podchlebnik later served as a central witness at the postwar Chelmno trial.
THE HOLOCAUST: A CONCISE HISTORY
By Doris L. Bergen
After the end of the Babi Yar massacre, a few elderly Jews returned to Kiev and sat by the Old Synagogue. Nobody dared to approach or leave food or water for them, as this could mean immediate execution. One after the other, the Jews died until only two remained. A passerby went to the German sentry standing at the corner of the street and suggested shooting the two old Jews instead of letting them starve to death. “The guard thought for a moment and did it.”
NAZI GERMANY AND THE JEWS 1933-1945
By Saul Friedlander
The Jews in the first row were ordered forward to the tables [Uman area, Russia], made to surrender their valuables and belongings, made to undress and pile their clothes to one side. Whereupon the troops menaced the row of naked people to the brink of one of the pits:
“The commandos then marched in behind the line and began to perform the inhuman acts…with automatic pistols…these men mowed down the line with such zealous intent that one could have supposed this activity to have been their life work.
“Even women carrying children a fortnight to three weeks old, sucking at their breasts, were not spared this horrible ordeal. Nor were mothers spared the terrible sight of their children being gripped by their little legs and put to death with one stroke of a pistol butt or club, thereafter to be thrown on the heap of human bodies in the ditch, some of which were not quite dead. Not before these mothers had been exposed to this worst of all tortures did they receive the bullet that released them from this sight.
“The people in the first row thus having been killed in the most inhuman manner, those of the second row were now ordered to step forward. The men in this row were ordered to step out and were handed shovels with which to heap quicklime upon the still partly moving bodies in the ditch…
“The air resounded with the cries of the children and the tortured. With senses numbed by what had happened, one could not help thinking of wives and children back home who believed they had good reason to be proud of their husbands and fathers.”
All day, relentlessly, the killing went on, row after row of human beings shot or smashed into the filling pits and dusted with quicklime glaring white in the September sun.
MASTERS OF DEATH
By Richard Rhodes
On November 7, 1941, the police rousted the entire population of the Minsk ghetto out onto the street. “The howls of mortal fear and horror, the cries of desperation, the weeping of children, the sobbing of women…could be heard throughout the city.”…The Nazis ordered some of the Jews to don their finest clothes and then, led by a man hoisting a red banner, march through the streets singing patriotic songs. When the parade was over, all the Jews were pushed into trucks and driven off to a nearby camp, where they were herded into granaries to await the end. Over the next few days, they were dragged out to trenches and, one by one by one, shot down. The operation killed twelve thousand people.
Two weeks later, another seven thousand were rounded up and shot. A Jewish barber named Levin, known to some of the Nazi officers and protected as a skilled laborer, frantically begged the commander to also spare his wife and daughter. Instead the German agreed to save one or the other; the man would have to choose. “Levin took his daughter.”
THE DEVIL’S DIARY
By Robert K. Wittman & David Kinney
German soldier from an army mobile killing unit shooting a Jewish woman with a child in her arms.
“He told me that…they had rounded up all the people in a Polish village, women and children, locked them up in a church and then shot at them from the church’s gallery before setting the church on fire. ‘We then lay around the church in radiant sunlight while the church burned. Those who had not gotten out were screaming, and then the door suddenly opened and a small child came out. One guy then got up, rat-a-tat-tat, dead.’…He even told me about things that were still worse. I don’t want to talk about them here. They are that dreadful.”
WHAT WE KNEW
By Eric A. Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband
They brought an aged woman with her daughter to this building. The latter was in the last stage of pregnancy. She was brought to the “Lazarett,” was put on a grass plot, and several Germans came to watch the delivery. This spectacle lasted two hours. When the child was born, Menz asked the grandmother – that is the mother of this woman – whom she preferred to see killed first. The grandmother begged to be killed. But, of course, they did the opposite; the newborn baby was killed first, then the child’s mother and finally the grandmother.
THE NUREMBERG TRIALS: THE NAZIS BROUGHT TO JUSTICE
By Alexander MacDonald
On 4 February 1943, the day of the third massacre, all the Jews remaining in the ghetto of Novogrodek at Peresika were killed. The ghetto ceased to exist and only the labor camp in the court buildings remained, with a little over 500 Jews, all that was left of a community of 10,000 Jews from Novogrodek, Karelitz, Lubcz and surrounding areas.
SURVIVING THE HOLOCAUST WITH THE RUSSIAN JEWISH PARTISANS
By Jack Kagan and Dov Cohen
“I couldn’t pick up a German newspaper anymore. Jews…Jews. It seemed as if there were no other subjects. They exceeded themselves in insults, threats, ridicule.”
THE GESTAPO: THE MYTH AND REALITY OF HITLER’S SECRET POLICE
By Frank McDonough
A prisoner would be brought in for ‘questioning,’ stripped naked and handcuffed onto a meter-long iron bar that was linked by chains from the ceiling…A guard at one side would shove him – or her – off in a slow arc, while Boger would ask questions, at first quietly, then barking them out loud, or at least bellowing. At each return [as the prisoner swung around on the bar], another guard, armed with a crow bar, would smash the victim across the buttocks. As the swinging went on, and the wailing victim fainted, was then revived, only to faint howling again, the blows continued – until only a mass of bleeding pulp hung before their eyes. Most perished from this ordeal, some sooner, some later; in the end a sack of bones and flayed flesh and fat was swept along the shambles of that concrete floor and dragged away.
THE GESTAPO: THE MYTH AND REALITY OF HITLER’S SECRET POLICE
By Frank McDonough
“The third day after the execution we were taken back to the execution area [Babi Yar, Kiev]. On our arrival we saw a woman sitting by a bush who had apparently survived the execution unscathed. This woman was shot by the SD man who was accompanying us. I do not know his name. We also saw someone waving their hand from among the pile of bodies. I don’t know whether it was a man or a woman. I should think that this person was finished off by the SD man as well, though I did not actually see it.”
“THE GOOD OLD DAYS”
By Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen, and Volker Riess
Those driven together at the collection point were encircled by the SS and the police. Older people who could not walk were shot on the spot. Screaming women were beaten with rifle butts, and children standing in the way were shot. Only a few Jews had suitcases, blankets, or coats. Watching the moving lips of some, one knew that they were saying their last prayer.
The time at the collection point was our last moment together. Each of us knew that the road to Treblinka led to the gas chambers. We looked into each other’s eyes for the last time. There was not hysteria and hardly anyone cried; the pain seemed to silence our speech. Our quiet glances said everything…That day marked the end of the Jews of Radzyn. It was also the end of my world. Like all others, I had lost my family, my beloved parents, my second and last sister and my brother-in-law.
THE DEAD YEARS: HOLOCAUST MEMOIRS
By Joseph Schupack
A prominent member of the Jewish population in Iasi remembered, “I saw the crowd flee in total chaos, fired on from rifles and machine guns. I fell onto the pavement after two bullets hit me. I lay there for several hours, seeing people I knew and strangers dying around me…I saw an old Jewish man, disabled after the war of 1916-1918 and wearing the Barbatie si Credinta [Manhood and Faith] decoration on his chest; he also carried with him papers that officially exempted him from anti-Sematic restrictions. However, bullets had shattered his thorax, and he lived his last moments on a garbage can like a dog.” Further along the street lay the son of a leather merchant who “was dying and sobbing, ‘Mother, Father, where are you? Give me some water, I’m thirsty’…Soldiers…stabbed [the dying] with their bayonets to finish them off.”
When Vlad Marievici of the city’s sanitation department arrived at police headquarters on the morning of 30 June, he found “a pile of corpses stacked high like logs” that made it difficult for his truck to enter the courtyard. So many Jews had been murdered the previous night that “the floor was awash with blood that reached the gate; the blood came up to the soles of my shoes.”
THE HOLOCAUST: A NEW HISTORY
By Laurence Rees
“I saw them do the killing. At 5:00 p.m. they gave the command, ‘Fill in the pits.’ Screams and groans were coming from the pits. Suddenly I saw my neighbor Ruderman rise under the soil…His eyes were bloody and he was screaming: ‘Finish meoff!’…A murdered woman lay at my feet. A boy of five years crawled out from under her body and began to scream desperately. ‘Mommy!’ That was all I saw, since I fell unconscious.”
DEBUNKING HOLOCAUST DENIAL THEORIES
By James and Lance Morcan
“There was a young couple among the hundred Jews in the hiding place. The woman was a pretty, blond haired lady named Malka. They had a baby that was only a few weeks old. The baby’s grandmother was the woman who let my daughter and me stay in her apartment our first night in the ghetto. During the first night in hiding the baby cried often. Every time the baby cried the other people would tell the parents to keep the baby quiet, but the parents could not keep it quiet for long. The more the baby cried the angrier the other people grew and the more frantic the parents became. We knew that the SS would be prowling the streets and buildings looking for the hiding places. We all had to walk slowly and talk only in whispers. The baby’s crying put all of us in danger of being found. In the morning the noise outside got louder. The SS had come back into the ghetto. This time they had tanks, and the shooting started once again. The noise started the baby crying and the parents just could not stop it. A group of men told the young couple that they had to either leave the hiding place, give them the baby, or put it to sleep themselves. They couldn’t leave the hiding place. We were all sure that going out into the ghetto meant certain death, either from being shot on the street or from being sent to Treblinka. They also couldn’t kill the baby themselves. The couple talked quietly together for a while. Then the husband took the baby from his wife and gave it to one of the other men. The husband sat back down next to his wife, and they started to cry. The men took the baby to the other side of the room. The group of men stood around the baby so the parents could not see what was happening. They laid the baby on a table. One of the men held a pillow over the baby’s face. There was no sound in the room except the muffled crying of the baby’s parents. In a few minutes it was over, and the baby’s body was wrapped in a white tablecloth. By the next morning the baby’s body was gone. I don’t know what was done with it, and nobody talked about it again.”
THE BLEEDING SKY: MY MOTHER’S JOURNEY THROUGH THE FIRE
By Louis Brandsdorfer
Corpses of gas victims waiting to be burned at Auschwitz. This could be the only photo of the endless cremation at the death camps.
In August 1942, 15,000 women were the first to be transferred to the camp. The appearance of these inmates has been described by Desire Haffner: “Their skeletal appearance, their shaved skulls, their blood-streaked bodies, their scaly skin – all this made it hard for an observer to recognize them as women. The lack of any hygiene was even more perceptible among them than in the men’s camp because of the pungent odor that came from their blocks, the smell of thousands of women who had not been able to wash for months. Their work is as hard as the men’s, and as a rule they are even worse dressed. They are usually seen bareheaded and barefoot, and sometimes they are naked.”
PEOPLE IN AUSCHWITZ
By Hermann Langbein
“Jews who thought they were welcome in Germany, Jews who were Germans themselves, couldn’t comprehend what was happening to them. They refused to believe it. Once, the best-known gynecologist in Berlin, a good friend of my mother’s, called to ask her to visit him and his wife so they could say good-bye. My mother assumed they had received permission to leave the country. They said their farewells, and two days later the doctor and his wife were found dead. They had committed suicide. That sort of thing was not uncommon.”
VOICES FROM THE THIRD REICH
Steinhoff, Pechel and Showalter
Even more remarkable than the fact that the Nazis went on killing people after the end of the war was that this was not discovered until early July, when American medical personnel finally entered the hospital. “What met their eyes was beyond belief,” writes one historian. “Some 1,500 disease-riddled patients confined to the most squalid conditions…and a stifling morgue filled with bodies that had not been buried and that could not be disposed of quickly, as the shining new crematorium, finished in November 1944, had been closed down.…The mortuary, it noted, contained bodies of men and women who had died between twelve and thirty-six hours beforehand and weighed as little as sixty pounds. Among the children still alive was a ten-year-old boy weighing just twenty-two pounds, with calves only two and a half inches in diameter.”
ENDGAME, 1945
By David Stafford
The fact is that the German personnel’s beating of the prisoners was so routine that a survivor, when describing one of the more outstanding tortures in camp can remark upon the camp’s routine cruelty in passing, as if it had been an ordinary expectation: “Wagner was a sadist. He would not only beat the women; that was done by all the SS men.” Elsewhere, she provides a fuller description of Wagner’s singularity: “He was active not with a gun, but with a whip, and he frequently beat women so terribly that they died of the effects.”
HITLER’S WILLING EXECUTIONERS
By Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
When you drive into Furstenberg, you are greeted by two signs. One reads: “Furstenberg greets its visitors.” The other shows the way to the town’s main attraction, the former Ravensbruck concentration camp, where 130,000 people, mostly women and children, were imprisoned between 1939 and 1945. Half of them died.
THE WAGES OF GUILT
By Ian Buruma
In the summer of 1942, Adam Czerniakow was head of the Jewish Council in Warsaw. When the Germans ordered him to hand over the children of the ghetto, he knew that they would be killed. Powerless to stop the slaughter, Czerniakow took the only way out still left to him: he committed suicide.
THE HOLOCAUST: A CONCISE HISTORY
By Doris L. Bergen
