Throughout 1943-44 enormous resources continued to be
allocated to the deportation of Jews to the camps; elaborate plans to further
this primary aim of the war were devised and executed throughout all areas
under German control. In all territories slave labour camps had been used for
the production of weaponry and other materials needed for the army and the home
front. As the Soviet army moved westward some industries were dismantled and
moved closer to Germany along with essential personnel. Many of those
previously used as labour were, however, sent to the death camps or were
“liquidated” on site. Others who had been kept in concentration camps as an
on-going supply for the labour camps were also sent to be gassed. Extra workers
had always been in demand as the insufficient diets, close quarters, lack of
hygiene, and brutality of their guards had kept death rates of these prisoners
high. The revolts and resistance mentioned above also continued to occur,
mostly resulting in death for the participants though allowing some few to
escape the net. Gilbert outlines many of these revolts in detail, giving the
names of the leaders as well as their outcomes.
In the concentration camps death rates had from the
beginning been very high as conditions were like those of the labour camps,
though even more appalling as camp officials had less motivation to sustain
their inmates. Food supplies sent to the camps were at times withheld from the
prisoners and sold on the black market to locals. Brutality and atrocities were
common throughout the system. At Auschwitz the infamous Dr Mengele selected
twins and others to be put aside for his “medical experiments.” Surgeries were
conducted without benefit of anesthesia, a resource kept for German patients
only, leading to the deaths of hundreds. Many who did survive were maimed for
life by sterilization and other experiments. Some prisoners were murdered to
allow a study of their bone structures.
Documentation of another criminal enterprise survived the war though its
products were eliminated: In 1942 Himmler supported a plan to create a
collection of Jewish skulls and skeletons for the Reich Anatomical Institute in
Strasbourg. In June 1943, 73 Jewish men and 30 women were sent from Auschwitz
to Natzweiler, a labour and death camp near Strasbourg where they were
examined, weighed and measured, and then gassed. Their skeletons were harvested
from the corpses and sent to the Institute. As the Allies approach Strasbourg
in 1944 Himmler ordered the skeletons and skulls to be destroyed.
In fact from mid-1943 to early 1945, even as the
destruction of Europe’s Jews continued, efforts, spearheaded by Himmler, were
organized to obliterate evidence of the atrocities. With the Soviet armies
converging from the east, units collectively known as “Unit 1005,” were
employed to dig up, burn, and scatter the ashes of over 2,000,000 people who
had been murdered and left in mass graves. Babi Yar was a prime example, though
by no means the only one, of these operations. Near Ponary over 58,000 bodies
were exhumed and cremated; at Plaszow, 9,000. To prevent any record of their
activities, the members of the units were themselves put to death as their work
in any given area was completed. Some did escape, however, to bear witness to
their ghoulish tasks. At Babi Yar, for example, the 325 Jewish and Soviet
prisoners who had been forced, working in chains, to eradicate evidence of its
massacre, resisted when they were about to be killed. The SS guards open fire
with machine guns and grenades. Fourteen of the prisoners managed to survive
and escape.
The split between Himmler’s clear awareness that
Germany would not win the war and that there would be an eventual accounting
for war crimes and Hitler’s refusal to countenance defeat and his fanatic drive
to destroy the Jews, is evident in the seemingly contradictory efforts made
during 1943-44. Even as Himmler tried to erase evidence of their atrocities, the
transportation of Jews to labour and death camps continued from all territories
under German control. Deportations from Eastern
and Western Europe had regularly brought Jews from countries held from the
beginning of the war and these continued apace. In some western countries up
until 1943 the Jewish populations had been restricted but not targeted in ways
commonplace in the eastern territories. As the Soviet forces moved westward and
the Allies forced their way up the Italian peninsula, SS groups pursued their
deadly tasks of murder and deportation.
When Italy sued for peace with the Allies in mid-1943,
Germany invaded its northern provinces. Over 8,000 Jews were summarily taken
and deported to Auschwitz. Sheltered in Catholic homes, thousands of others
escaped detection; some fled into Switzerland or to Dalmatia where they joined
Yugoslav partisan groups. Jews living in areas previously held by Italian
troops in, for example, Albania and along the Dalmatian coast, now came under
German control and were murdered on site or transported into Poland for
extermination.
In Denmark a mass deportation of previously less
restricted Jews was thwarted when Danes organized a massive sea transfer of
thousands to neutral Sweden before the orders could be filled. Many Jews from
Holland, including large transportations of children were taken to
Bergen-Belsen, Theresienstadt, and Auschwitz. In January and February, 1943
records kept in Auschwitz revealed the arrival of 13 trains bringing over
10,000 people to the death chambers from Paris, Milan, and Trieste, from
Holland, Belgium, and ports on the Baltic.
Early in the war, Hungary had profited by its alliance
with Germany by annexing territories from Czechoslovakia, Rumania, and Yugoslavia.
Within this enlarged Hungary lived about 800,000 Jews. Their treatment by the
Hungarian government, despite pressures from Berlin, was relatively benign.
About 10,000 whose Hungarian citizenship was unclear had been deported in 1941,
however, and had been sent to a death camp in Poland. In 1943 as the Soviets
battled westward, 50,000 Jewish men were forced to serve in labour battalions
on the eastern front. Less than 10,000 survived the brutal struggle with the
Soviet forces. In March 1944 German troops occupied Hungary. Beforehand SS
strategists had planned for the complete elimination of the Hungarian Jews.
Tens of thousands were forced into ghettoes and camps. Within two months close
to 300,000 Hungarian Jews had been deported to Auschwitz and gassed.
During 1944 the SS also began the murder and
deportation of Jews from Greece and Crete. Only 7 Cretan Jews survived the war.
In June most of the small Jewish population, about 300, were placed on board a
ship at Heraklion, together with 400 Greek hostages, and 300 Italian
prisoners-of-war. Off the island of Santorini the ship was deliberately sunk,
drowning all on board. That month all 1,800 Jews on the island of Corfu were
seized and transported to Auschwitz. Two hundred were sent to the labour camp, the
remainder to the gas chambers.
Even after the Allies’ Normandy invasion in June, 1944
transportations of Jews continued from Paris, Holland, and Italy. At the same
time slave labourers were withdrawn from Birkenau and other areas in the east
as new factories were set up in the west. A concentration camp at Stutthof
which had been in place from 1939 became a centre for about 60 new labour camps
to replace those already overrun by the Soviets. Before the Soviet army reached
these camps, efforts had been made to evacuate equipment and supplies as well
as essential personnel. Most labourers were summarily put to death before the
Nazi retreat, however. At Stutthof conditions were brutal. Many thousands died
of dysentery, typhus or starvation; many were clubbed to death. Of the 52,000
Jews sent to the area to work about 3,000 survived the war.
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