The Holocaust: A Warning From History

In 1931, Heinrich Himmler began setting up a counterintelligence division of the SS. Acting on the advice of his associate Karl von Eberstein, Himmler agreed to interview Reinhard Heydrich, but cancelled their appointment at the last minute. Heydrich's wife ignored the cancellation message, packed Heydrich's suitcase, and sent him to Munich. Eberstein met Heydrich at the railway station and took him to see Himmler. Himmler asked Heydrich to convey his ideas for developing an SS intelligence service. Himmler was so impressed that he hired Heydrich immediately. Heydrich decided to take the job because his wife's family supported the Nazi movement, and the quasi-military and revolutionary nature of the post appealed to him. On 1 August 1931, Heydrich began his job as chief of the new 'Ic Service' (intelligence service). He set up office at the Brown House, the Nazi Party headquarters in Munich. By October he had created a network of spies and informers for intelligence

The eighteenth century Austro-Hungarian town of Theresienstadt, part of Czechoslovakia since 1918, was known as Terezin in Czech. In October 1941, the 3,700 Czech inhabitants of the town were ordered to leave by the Germans, who turned it into a ghetto. More than 96,000 Jews were brought there from all over Europe. Conditions were harsh, dominated by overcrowding and hunger. More than 33,000 Jews died in the ghetto, mostly of starvation. Among those deported to Theresienstadt were artists, writers, musicians, scholars and teachers. Under Jewish leadership, several orchestras were founded there, as well as an operatic and theatrical troupe. Lectures were organized, and a library of 60,000 volumes opened. Jewish studies played a major part in cultural activities. Classes were held for the children, who had to carry their benches into the classroom under the protective eye of Jewish guardians, who, like all adults in the ghetto, were obliged to wear the yellow star. From January 1942, the

Heinrich  Himmler insisted that he abhorred acts of sadism, but he had scientific interests that led to similar tortures in medical experiments. An ambitious doctor named Sigmund Rascher wished to assist the Luftwaffe by researching the effects of extremely high altitudes on fliers. Unfortunately, the physician reported, "no tests with human material had yet been possible as such experiments are very dangerous and nobody volunteers for them." When Himmler found out about the doctor's problem, he offered a supply of prisoners. Rascher set up a decompression chamber and began his tests. When the atmosphere in the chamber became thin, the prisoners' eardrums would burst and, according to an assistant, the prisoners "would tear their heads and faces with their fingernails in an attempt to maim themselves in their madness." The tests generally ended in the deaths of the subjects. On receiving the doctor's report describing the prisoners' agonies in one fa

The task of processing the property of the deceased Jews went on continuously in an immense operation called Action Reinhard. Large staffs of prisoners, occupying warehouses at the camps, were put to work sorting, cataloging and distributing the goods -- mountains of shoes, shirts, watches, eyeglasses, gold teeth and other effects. Most of the possessions were turned over to the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office, known by its German initials WVHA. The German paper money collected by the WVHA was bundled off directly to the Reichsbank. Dental gold, jewelry precious stones, pearls and foreign currency were inventoried by the WVHA, then deposited at the Reichsbank. The bank credited all the value to on Max Heiliger, a code name for the WVHA account. Soon the bank's vaults were filled to overflowing. Though a bank director sniffed, "the Reichsbank is not a dealer in secondhand goods," trading specialists for the bank began selling the loot through Berlin pawnshops an

The assembly-line extermination of Jews had begun by the summer of 1942. Except for the choice of gas the procedure was much the same at all six death camps. A train of boxcars arrived at the camp station. "Special commandos" -- Jews who had been lured into service with bounties of food and promises that their lives would be spared -- opened the doors, urged the new arrivals onto the platform and carefully instructed them to leave their luggage on the train. The newcomers obeyed, reassured by the fact that the special commandos spoke their own language. Often, many Jews had died on the trains before their arrival. Kurt Gerstein, in his visit to Belzec, noted that 1,450 of the 6,000 arriving Jews were already dead. As the new arrivals walked forward along the platform, they passed the camp doctor or an SS officer, who signaled each to step either to the left or to the right with a wave of his finger. Those who were sent to the right -- the healthy looking ones -- were taken to

"At the very moment [December 7, 1941] Hitler was rejoicing at Japan's entry into the war . . . the long planned gassings of the Final Solution began to be put into effect, when seven hundred Jews from the small Polish town of Kolo, situated two hundred miles south-west of Rastenburg, were taken in trucks to the nearby village of Chelmno. There, on the following morning, eighty of the Jews were transferred to a special van, which set off towards a small clearing inside the nearby woods. By the time the journey was over, the eighty Jews were dead, gassed by exhaust fumes which had been channeled back into the van. The bodies were then thrown out into a specially dug pit, and the van returned to the village. After eight or nine journeys, all seven hundred Jews had been killed. "Henceforth, day after day, Jews from all the surrounding towns and villages were to be brought to Chelmno and killed. Told that they were being taken to 'the East' for agricultural labor, or