The Holocaust: A Warning From History

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 ...

Sometime in 1941, after witnessing executions at Minsk, Heinrich Himmler summoned Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of the largest concentration camp in Poland, and gave him secret oral instructions. "He told me," testified Hoess, "something to the effect -- I do not remember the exact words -- that the Fuehrer had given the order for a final solution of the Jewish question. We, the SS, must carry out that order. If it is not carried out now the Jews will later on destroy the German people." Himmler said he had chosen Hoess's camp since Auschwitz, strategically located near the border of Germany, afforded space for measures requiring isolation. Hoess was warned that this operation was to be treated as a secret Reich matter, and he was forbidden to discuss the matter with his immediate superior. Hoess returned to Poland and, behind the back of the inspector of concentration camps, quietly began to expand his grounds with the intent of turning them into the greatest ki...

Hitler's concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for the Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild West; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America's extermination -- by starvation and uneven combat -- of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity. Until now he had scrupulously integrated his own general policy with that of Germany, since both led in the same general direction. The resurgence of German honor and military might, the seizure of lost Germanic territories, and even Lebensraum in the East were approved heartily by most of his countrymen. But at last had come the crossroads where Hitler must take his personal detour and solve, once and for all, the Jewish question. While many Germans were willing to join this racist crusade, the great majority merely wanted a continuation of the limited J...

As the full-scale program of annihilation got under way, it brought to the fore a 35-year-old SS lieutenant colonel who had attended the Wannsee conference but who, with deference appropriate to his position as recording secretary for the meeting, had spoken not a word. He was an industrious functionary named Adolf Eichmann, and he was lucky enough to have as his mentor Reinhard Heydrich himself. Eichamann had joined the SS in 1932 while pursuing an indifferent career as an Austria-based traveling salesman. In 1933, following Hitler's rise to power, he had moved to Germany and begun a year of training in two SS camps in Bavaria. He applied for a job in the counterintelligence branch of the SS, which Heydrich had recently set up. Eichmann's first assignment was to collect information on the Freemasons and other groups the Nazis considered potentially subversive. But he soon became fascinated by the Jews, and to study them in depth he went so far as to learn a smattering of Hebre...

With the "success" of both the killing squads in the east and the starvation in the ghettos in German-occupied Poland, a new prospect presented itself to Hitler, Himmler and the SS: blood need not be shed in any German street, or risk taken of local protests at violence done to the Jews of Germany. Instead, those German Jews who had not managed to emigrate before the outbreak of war would be deported to the east: either to the ghettos on Polish soil, where they would be left to suffer and starve with the local population, or to killing sites in the east. Tens of thousands of Jews had been murdered between June and October 1941 in the Ratomskaya ravine on the outskirts of Minsk, in the Rumbula forest outside Riga, and in the nineteenth century Tsarist forts surrounding the city of Kovno -- principally the Ninth Fort. German Jews would be sent to these destinations: they would never be seen again in the streets of Greater Germany, and their distant fate could be kept a secret. ...