The Holocaust Part IV

1. The Holocaust Part IV Daniel W. Blackmon IB HL History Coral Gables Sr. High

2. Erntefest (Harvest Festival): The Destruction of the Jews, 1943 • In the immediate aftermath of the terrible defeat at Stalingrad, Hitler stated in a message to the Party on February 24, 1943:

3. Erntefest (Harvest Festival): The Destruction of the Jews, 1943 • )“The German army, which has again fought in outstanding fashion this winter, is conducting a bitter struggle against the global threat that was devised by the banks of New York and London in conjunction with the Bolshevik Jews in Moscow. . . . .

4. Erntefest (Harvest Festival): The Destruction of the Jews, 1943 • Truly this struggle will not end, as they intend, in the destruction of Aryan humanity but in the liquidation [Ausrottung] of Jewry in Europe . . . .

5. Erntefest (Harvest Festival): The Destruction of the Jews, 1943 • “This war will prove beyond any doubt that plutocracy and Bolshevism are the same that the eternal objective of all Jews is to plunder all nations and to subjugate them as the slaves of their international guild of criminals.” (Yahil 405)

6. Erntefest (Harvest Festival): The Destruction of the Jews, 1943 • All remaining Jews in Germany were rounded up beginning February 27, 1943 and deported. • Next were Jews in Greece and Italy.

7. Erntefest (Harvest Festival): The Destruction of the Jews, 1943 • The Italians in particular tended to resist German directives. A higher percentage of Italian Jews survived the war than did French Jews. • .Other countries were systematically swept.

8. Heinrich Himmler, Speech to SS Officers in Posen: • “I also want to talk to you quite frankly about a very grave matter. We can talk about it quite frankly among ourselves and yet we will never speak of it publicly.

9. Heinrich Himmler, Speech to SS Officers in Posen: • Just as we did not hesitate on 30 June 1934 [the Night of the Long Knives] to do our duty as we were bidden, and to stand comrades who had lapsed up against the wall and shoot them,

10. Heinrich Himmler, Speech to SS Officers in Posen: • “so we have never spoken about it and will never speak of it. It was that tact which is a matter of course, and which I am glad to say is inherent in us, that made us never discuss it among ourselves, never speak of it.

11. Heinrich Himmler, Speech to SS Officers in Posen: • “It appalled everyone, and yet everyone was certain that he would do it the next time if such orders should be issued and it should be necessary.

12. Heinrich Himmler, Speech to SS Officers in Posen: • “I am referring to the Jewish evacuation programme, the extermination of the Jewish people. It is one of those things which are easy to talk about.

13. Heinrich Himmler, Speech to SS Officers in Posen: • “ ‘The Jewish people will be exterminated*, says every party comrade, ‘It*s clear, it*s in our programme. Elimination of the Jews, extermination and we*ll do it.* And then they come along, the worthy eighty million Germans, and each one of them produces his decent Jew.

14. Heinrich Himmler, Speech to SS Officers in Posen: • “It*s clear the others are swine, but this one is a fine Jew. Not one of those who talk like that has watched it happening, not one of them has been through it.

15. Heinrich Himmler, Speech to SS Officers in Posen: • “Most of you will know what it means when a hundred corpses are lying side by side, or five hundred or a thousand are lying there. To have stuck it out and—a p art from a few exceptions due to human weakness—to have remained decent, that is what has made us tough.

16. Heinrich Himmler, Speech to SS Officers in Posen: • This is a glorious page in our history and one that has never been written and can never be written.

17. Heinrich Himmler, Speech to SS Officers in Posen: • “For we know how difficult we would have made it for ourselves if, on top of the bombing raids, the burdens and the deprivations of war, we still had Jews today in every town as secret saboteurs, agitators and troublemakers.

18. Heinrich Himmler, Speech to SS Officers in Posen: • “We would now probably have reached the 1916—17 stage when the Jews were still part of the body of the German nation.

19. Heinrich Himmler, Speech to SS Officers in Posen: • “We have taken from them what wealth they had. I have issued a strict order, which SS Obergruppenfuhrer Pohi has carried out, that this wealth should, as a matter of course, be handed over to the Reich without reserve.

20. Heinrich Himmler, Speech to SS Officers in Posen: • “We have taken none of it for ourselves. Individual men who have lapsed will be punished in accordance with an order I issued at the beginning which gave this warning:

21. Heinrich Himmler, Speech to SS Officers in Posen: • “Whoever takes so much as a mark of it is a dead man. A number of SS men—there are not very many of them—have fallen short, and they will die, without mercy.

22. Heinrich Himmler, Speech to SS Officers in Posen: • “We had the moral right, we had the duty to our people, to destroy this people which wanted to destroy us. But we have not the right to enrich ourselves with so much as a fur, a watch, a mark, a cigarette or anything else.

23. Heinrich Himmler, Speech to SS Officers in Posen: • “We have exterminated a bacterium because we do not want in the end to be infected by the bacterium and die of it. I will not see so much as a small area of sepsis appear here or gain a hold. Wherever it may form, we will cauterize it.

24. Heinrich Himmler, Speech to SS Officers in Posen: • “All in all, we can say that we have fulfilled this most difficult duty for the love of our people. And our spirit. our soul, our character has not suffered injury from it. “ (Pridham and Noakes 1199-1200)

25. Himmler Speech • At the same time, Standartenführer Paul Blobel was ordered to find ways to obliterate traces of the mass murders. (Yahil 449-450)

26. Paul Blobel

27. Shipment to Maidanek Arrived from scattered cities, several lands, intact from sea land, mountain land, and plain, Item: six surgeons, slightly mangled hands, Items: three poets, hopelessly insane.

28. Shipment to Maidanek Item: a Russian mother and her child, the former with five gold teeth and usable shoes, The latter with seven dresses, peasant-styled. Item: another hundred thousand Jews.

29. Shipment to Maidanek Item: a crippled Czech with a handmade crutch. Item: a Spaniard with a subversive laugh; Seventeen dozen Danes, nine gross of Dutch. Total: precisely a million and a half.

30. Shipment to Maidanek They are sorted and marked–the method is up to you. The books must be balanced, the disposition stated.

31. Shipment to Maidanek • Take care that all accounts are neat and true. • Make sure that they are thoroughly cremated. • Ephraim Fogel

32. Resistance • Uprisings in large ghettoes • Despite the odds, Jews did not always submit quietly. • Although weapons were extremely scarce, there were instances of armed resistance in Vilna, Kovno, Bialystok, and Krakow.

33. Warsaw Ghetto Uprising • The most famous revolt was that of the Warsaw Ghetto.

34. Warsaw Ghetto Uprising • .The leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising was Mordekhai Anielewicz. • .Most of the weapons smuggled into the Ghetto were revolvers (not effective in modern war) a few rifles, several submachine guns, one machine gun, plus hand grenades and home-made bombs.

35. Mordekhai Anielewicz

36. Warsaw Ghetto Uprising • .One survivor told me how women would slip out of the Ghetto and return with rounds of ammunition hidden in their vaginas.

37. Warsaw Ghetto Uprising • The average life expectancy of such a courier was two trips. She herself was captured and interrogated by the Gestapo, but convinced them that she was Polish.

38. Warsaw Ghetto Uprising • .The uprising broke out on April 19, 1943, when the Germans began a new Aktion on the first day of Passover. 2,000 SS and police under the command of SS General Jürgen Stroop entered the ghetto, only to meet fierce resistence.

39. Warsaw Ghetto Uprising • . The Germans began to systematically destroy the ghetto one block at a time. It took weeks for the Germans to crush all resistence.

40. Warsaw Ghetto Uprising • ..The survivor I spoke with told me that she was injured when the building she was in collapsed from German fire. She was later ordered to break out through the sewers because she could pass as a Pole.

41. Warsaw Ghetto Uprising • She escaped and joined the Polish Underground, where she fought in the Polish Home Army uprising in 1944, surviving that as well.

42. Warsaw Ghetto Uprising • Prisoners from the uprising were marched directly to the transit center and sent to Treblinka

43. Prisoner Interrogation

44. Warsaw Ghetto Prisoners

45. Warsaw Ghetto Prisoners

46. Partisans • Jews who fled to partisan units were not always welcome

47. Partisans • .The most successful partisan operations were in the East, where the terrain provided forest and swamp as cover.

48. Partisans • .Most Jews in the East lived in cities, which made it harder for them to reach the partisans.

49. Partisans • .Although the experiences varied, there were thousands of Jewish partisans in the Soviet Union (which did not distinguish between Jewish and non-Jewish partisans, or, for that matter, between Jewish and non-Jewish citizens murdered by the Nazis).

50. Partisans • .Belarus was a particular hotbed of partisan activity.