I NEVER THOUGHT I’D LIVE to see a day the President of the
United States couldn’t come out and denounce Nazis and white supremacists. Of course, I never imagined this nation would elevate such a
despicable individual as Donald J. Trump to high office.
In my opinion, the man has been a menace to fundamental American
values from the first moment he descended the elevator in Trump Tower and
started blasting entire groups of human beings. But you’d
think anyone with even a precarious grasp of history would realize Nazis (and
their kindred spirits, neo-Nazis today), are a separate category,
not to be confused with any other kind of protesters.
So here’s a refresher on who the Nazis were—and what
kind of ideology the alt-right was celebrating last weekend in Charlottesville.
***
WHAT FOLLOWS IS A READING I used to pass out to students in
my seventh and eighth grade history classes. It was always a tough read. I
knew, every year, many would cry. When I read about children being
slaughtered, I sometimes cried myself.
I believed my students needed to confront evil and
consider ways to combat its spread. Today it seems we need to remind GOP leaders
and many avid Trump supporters exactly who the Nazis were.
The reading I prepared for students follows. If there are
any teachers who might want to use it, feel free:
Hitler’s Black Harvest
Most students today have heard about
the Holocaust. They know
gas chambers were disguised as showers. They realize Jews had to wear yellow six-pointed
stars. Some know six million Jews died. Only a few understand that non-Jewish victims
totaled an additional ten million.
In the end, it seems impossible to
come to grips with the horror. To understand the truth we must focus on the broken
human heart. We must go beneath the surface of the printed page.
We must dive into an ocean of blood.
We must watch as German troops arrest Israel Lewi. We must
see his tearful daughter rush up to say goodbye to her beloved father. We must
see a soldier’s anger as he orders the poor girl to open her mouth. Then gasp
as he fires his pistol down Liebe Lewi’s throat.
We must see Icek Bekerman steal a piece of leather to
make into a pair of shoelaces, from the shop where he works as a Nazi slave.
See him caught. Then see him hanged.
We must see Sophie Scholl and brother Hans, not Jews but
“good Germans,” protest Nazi rule. See them paint: “Freedom!” and “Down
with Hitler!” on building walls. We must shudder as they are arrested, placed
on trial, sentenced to death, and beheaded.
It is not easy to watch what we must watch. And
sometimes we must listen. Hear the cries of a nameless Polish prisoner. His
head has been caved in and his legs broken when police torture him to make him
talk. His battered body makes a thump when he is thrown into a wood coffin and
sent to the ovens to be burned. Listen with care. Listen as he regains
consciousness at the last second, screaming: “Open up! Open up! I am still
alive!”
Listen. Let his terrified shouts enter your soul. Then
you may be ready to understand.
*
From the moment they rose to power,
Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party[1]
were clear about what they planned to do. Above all, the “race purity”
of the Aryan blood must be
upheld. Human progress depended on nothing less. Progress would be determined
by the success of superior races.
Jews, Russians and Poles, homosexuals, the retarded and the handicapped “reproduced
like vermin.” These inferior types “polluted” the
human race. But the Nazis dreamed of a world in which they had no place. In the
twisted Nazi mind it was simple. “Nature is cruel,” Hitler argued. “Therefore,
we, too, may be cruel.” The weaker races must die—or live to serve the
Aryan race as slaves. One Nazi leader explained their whole plan calmly and
clearly. Killing Jews would be like destroying bugs.
It would be the same as “getting rid of lice...a
matter of cleanliness.”
“Force
is the first law,” Hitler once said. Force was the tool he preferred for
governing. Long before he came to power,
he organized the “Sturmabteilung” or “SA,” his own private army. These
brown-shirted “storm troopers,” as they were called, were assigned one task. They
must beat, silence and even kill Hitler’s political opponents. An even more
powerful tool for evil came later with creation of the “Schutzstaffel” or
“SS.” Dressed in crisp black uniforms,
with a “death’s head” symbol on their caps, and lightning bolts on their collars,
SS forces were given the job of eliminating millions of human beings. An important
branch of the SS was the Gestapo, a secret police force with unlimited power
and unmatched skill at torture.
German Jews were the first to suffer
when Hitler rose to power.[2] First came
“legal” moves, like the Law against the Overcrowding of German Schools. Under
strict guidelines college admissions were closed to Jews. Soon they were
removed from all government service. Next, they were prevented from entering
theaters or public pools. Sexual relations and marriage between Aryans and Jews
were outlawed.[3]
There were special seats on buses. Then laws were passed forbidding Jews to work
as teachers, lawyers or doctors.
Ernst Meier was only a boy when he
had his first brush with hate. It came on a day his school had scheduled a
field trip. When his teacher read a list of those allowed to go his name was
missing. Sadly, Meier, a Jew, began to walk away. With a shout the teacher
called on the class to attack: “Boys, get him and knock out of him any idea
he may have about coming to school anymore!”
Widespread
violence exploded in November 1938 after a Jewish student attacked and killed a
German official in Paris. In the dark hours of November 9-10, known since as
Kristillnacht, or “Night of Glass,” German mobs attacked Jewish homes, shops
and synagogues. Thousands
of businesses were looted [robbed].
Two hundred homes were destroyed. Every synagogue in Germany was vandalized. Dozens
of Jews were murdered, including one young boy who was thrown from a
third-story window. In days to come the Gestapo arrested 26,000 Jewish men,
women and children and carted them away to prison.
Slowly but surely, Nazi control clamped
down tighter and tighter. New rules required all teachers, no matter what their
beliefs, to swear obedience to the “Fuhrer” (that is: to Hitler, the “leader”).
Government officials took control of newspapers and radio. SS censors now
decided what books might be printed. Bonfires were fueled with those deemed unacceptable.
All political parties, except the Nazi Party, were outlawed. Bernard
Licthenberg, a Catholic politician, spoke out against the attacks on Kristillnacht.
So Gestapo agents dragged him away, beat him up, and jailed him for two years. After
1936 a special law freed the SS police from all legal controls, except the will
of Adolf Hitler.
Soon no one was safe, whether Jew or
not. The mentally ill were granted “mercy deaths” under a secret plan
known as T-4. Handicapped German children[4]
were also marked for destruction. One SS doctor preferred to slowly starve such
children to death. Most were taken from families and sent to government
“hospitals.” There they were secretly gassed and their bodies buried. Homosexuals
were also among the victims. Arrested and sent to prison, they wore pink
triangles on their uniforms, just as Jews wore yellow stars. Terrible medical experiments
were tried to “cure” them. Many died as a result. Most were simply eliminated. One
victim was SS Commander Heinrich Himmler’s gay nephew.
He was gassed by order of his own uncle.
*
Mass race murder, or genocide, began once Germany invaded Poland in
1939. Now Hitler turned attention to the East, to lands he dreamed of settling
with waves of German pioneers. First
he would seize Polish soil. Later he would take over great stretches of Russia.
But the soil was already occupied. Existing populations must give way. The
Poles, Russians and others were Untermenschen,
or “under men,” useful only for slave labor. Let them have education enough to
understand simple orders, the Nazis said.
Teach them enough to read basic traffic signs. Let them reproduce only
to serve their masters.
And if they died off?
So much the better.
During World War II, ten million
slaves labored under the Nazis’ iron fist. Thousands dug underground factories
to protect German industry from U. S. and British air attack. Others mined
coal, picked crops or assembled grenades. They built highways and made roofing
tile. Primo Levi, a Jewish slave, survived because his training as a chemist
made him valuable to a German drug manufacturer. Mordecai Wulkan lived because
his jeweler’s skills were in demand. One task he was given involved sorting a
suitcase full of blood-smeared gold teeth—removed from the mouths of countless gassing
victims. Other slave workers made beautiful desk sets and bookends from green
marble. Some of the most educated wrote college papers for German medical
students too lazy to do their own work.
Thousands died every month from
starvation and mistreatment. If a slave was caught loafing or refused to follow
orders they were marked for “special treatment.” That is: they were shot. Those
who forced themselves to go on, who did not give up amid the horrors, survived on
a diet of 1,000 calories per day. Karl Peterik got by because he ate oats meant
for a horse he was tending. Medical care was nonexistent. Slave women who
became pregnant were sent to the gas chambers. Prisoners were packed into
barracks, three, four, and even six to a bunk, sleeping on filthy straw. Many
were covered with lice until “their clothing looked as if it had been
sprinkled with poppy seeds.” In the labor camp at Birkenau huge rats
scuttled about, gnawing corpses [dead bodies], and attacking those too weak to
fight them off.
*
Naturally, Jews came in for special
attention. With most of the modern world at war, Hitler felt the time was right
for “The Final Solution.” This
would mean the elimination of all Jewish population.
Mass death.
When Nazi armies conquered new
territory, Jews were herded into neighborhoods called ghettoes. Here, especially
in Poland, only Jews were allowed to live. And here they must remain, penned up
like cattle. In Vilna Ghetto a doctor saw people squeezed into tiny rooms, each
person’s living space “narrow as the grave.” In Warsaw 500,000 people crammed
into a few square miles. The Jewish sector of the city was walled off from the
outside world. At every entrance the Germans posted signs which read: “Warning:
Epidemic Zone.” Jews caught outside the ghetto faced almost certain
execution.
Living conditions were terrible. Food was scarce. Nights were
filled with the cries of hungry children. When one Jewish mother broke the
rules and bought an egg she and the Polish man who sold it to her were shot. Another
desperate family boiled straw for “soup.” In Lublin Ghetto families lived in
cattle stalls. The water supply was filthy. There was nothing to eat “but
potato broth and stale, black bread.” Guards shot passers-by without reason,
because they could. Bodies littered the streets. The living stumbled along like
people going to a funeral.
Again and again, the Nazis entered
Jewish ghettos and rounded up victims to be “shipped to the East for
resettlement.”[5]
No one knew what this meant. Those who moved too slowly did not live to find
out. When SS troops entered the hospital in Cracow and ordered patients out,
Dr. Rosalia Blau protested. Many of the children under her care had scarlet fever
and were too ill to move. A German drew his pistol and shot her in the head. Then
the patients were murdered in a blast of automatic weapons fire.
Death might come at any moment. The
unthinkable became routine. During one raid, guards dragged an old woman down a
flight of steps. Her thin leg slipped between the railings and stuck. SS men
kept jerking until the bones cracked with a snap. In Lodz Ghetto soldiers threw
newborn babies out of high windows into streets. When the first tiny body fell,
witnesses could not credit [trust] their senses. “At first few of us
believed it was actually a live, newborn baby,” said one. “We thought it
was an object of some kind until we saw another and another being hurled out
the window and into the waiting truck.”
In the end, he explained sadly, “We had no more
tears left. Our eyes had dried out.”
*
It is hard to read about such crimes,
hard to believe humans could be guilty of such cruelty. Yet worse horrors lay
ahead when Hitler invaded Russia in 1941. Now, special army units were sent out
to round up Jews, Russian civilians, and other “sub humans.” Long, deep ditches
were dug. Victims were gathered by the hundreds, even the thousands, made to
strip—and then the shooting began. It was “hard work” for the SS men, this mowing
down of human beings! “All we did was shoot Jews, shoot Jews all the time,”
one soldier said in a letter to his wife. “My arm hurt from shooting.”
And well it should: for the
slaughter was immense.
Hermann Graebe witnessed one mass
killing. Even though he took no part, what he saw turned his soul to ice. Trucks
were bringing in victims. Guards were hustling them off. Whips cracked in the
air as prisoners undressed: shoes in one pile, coats in another, underwear in a
third. Graebe was surprised by how little crying he heard. People “stood
about in family groups, kissed each other, said farewells and waited for a
sign.” Then they moved to the edge of the pit where they would be
shot.
A family caught his eye:
An old woman with snow-white hair was holding a
one-year-old child in her arms and singing to it and tickling it. The child was
cooing with delight. The parents were looking on with tears in their eyes. The
father was holding the hand of a boy about ten years old and speaking to him
softly; the boy was fighting his tears. The father pointed to the sky, stroked
his head and seemed to explain something to him.
Then a
guard counted off twenty prisoners, including the old woman and her family. They
stepped closer to the pits and were cut down in a storm of bullets.
All over Europe the massacre
commenced. In September 1941, the Jews of Kiev, in Russia, were rounded up by
SS units and driven to a nearby valley. Here at a place called Babi Yar, 33,771
human beings were shot down in great heaps until their bodies filled a deep
ravine. Dina Pronicheva was meant to rest among them. But the shot which struck
her did not kill her. Still, she fell into the bloody valley, among the piles
of the dead and dying:
All around and beneath her she could hear strange
submerged sounds, groaning, choking and sobbing: many of the people were not
dead yet. The whole mass of bodies kept moving slightly as they settled down
and were pressed tighter and tighter by the movements of the ones who were
still living.
When
the killing ended, workers began throwing dirt atop the bodies. The young girl
fought back her fear of being buried alive, knowing she might be shot again if
she showed any signs of life. By nightfall the killers were “tired” and wanted
to go home. Pronicheva waited until they were gone, then managed to claw her
way to the surface and survive.
In a sense she had crawled from the mouth of Hell.
Only the awful details vary from
place to place. At one execution site a beautiful girl stood in line, dazed and
knowing she faced death. “She had wonderful eyes,” one witness recalled.
A German officer looked her over. Then he called for her to step forward. “What
a pity to bury such beauty under the earth,” he said. He told her she could
go. Follow the road by which she had come. Go! Don’t look back! Slowly the young
woman took a step. Edged away. Then another. Perhaps she might find some path
to safety! Without warning now, the officer pulled his revolver and shot
her in the back.
Another time two little girls, two friends, held each
other and begged for mercy. They were shot and “fell together in their
embrace.” Always the bodies crumpled
until they filled the pits and the dirt covered them forever. At one site, a
German officer admitted seeing “a kind of spring of blood gushing from the
earth.”
*
The special SS units made good
progress “cleansing” wide stretches of Eastern Europe. But it was hard
to shoot so many people and a better “system” was needed. Out of this need
arose gas chambers and death camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka. Here victims
arrived by the trainload, to be gassed in large chambers disguised as showers. Sometimes
guards told new arrivals to tie their shoes together so they could find them
after their “bath.” There were numbered hooks for hanging clothes and signs in
many languages saying: “Showers.” One guard encouraged victims to move faster. “Hurry,”
he lied. “Coffee is waiting. Coffee is ready in camp.” At another camp
flowers were planted round the gas chambers. Meanwhile a band of pretty Jewish
girls in white blouses and navy-blue skirts entertained those about to die. The
music they were ordered to play was always merry.
As the war dragged on more and more
people came to understand the truth. But what choice did anyone have when
madmen ran the madhouse? At Treblinka guards beat and shot people the moment they
stepped from the rail cars. The rest were herded like cattle to the slaughterhouse.
One witness watched an SS officer order a bigger boy to sit down on the ground,
taking a smaller boy on his knee: “Then he shot them both with one bullet.”
Vera Kriegel remembered similar scenes at Auschwitz: “Children
were having their heads beaten in...by SS men with their gun butts, and some
were being thrown into a smoking pit. I was confused: I thought this was some
sort of animal kingdom or perhaps I was already in Hell.”
Then by the hundreds it was into the showers. Whole
families. Whole villages. And yet, even in these last moments, people had faint
hope. For who could imagine murder on such a scale? Who could believe it was
going to happen?
All too soon, Zyklon B, a gas
designed as a pesticide [bug killer], came pouring through the vents.
With their final breathes a group of Polish prisoners could be heard singing
their national anthem. Other victims were so tightly packed they died standing.
Kurt Gerstein reported that it was easy to recognize families among the dead. “They
were still holding hands, stiffened in death,” he noted, “so that it was
difficult to tear them apart in order to clear the chamber for the next load.”
This task fell to slave laborers. For
in every death camp a few prisoners were allowed to live to perform tasks for
which the SS had no stomach. Whipped to keep moving, half-starved, these poor men
and women appeared to be nothing more than “corpse-colored skeletons.” Yet—as
long as they could carry on—they avoided a journey to the gas chamber. Workers
at
one death camp were under strict orders to carry the bodies of small children
over both shoulders.
This
was done to save time.
Disposing of millions of bodies was
a problem. At first, most were burned in large pits. Later special ovens called
crematoria were designed. Still, it was no easy task. A camp like Auschwitz could
exterminate 6,000 human beings every day. Their ashes alone filled a rail car.
Human fat built up inside smokestacks, a foot thick, until prisoners scraped it
free. At one camp ash was used as insulation between the walls of buildings. At
another it was spread to make pathways between buildings. It was not unusual to
see teeth and vertebrae underfoot.
Nothing of “value” was wasted.
Prison workers checked the mouths of the dead and knocked out any gold teeth. The
long hair of women was shaved and saved to be made into felt boots. One camp
commander salvaged [saved; recovered] 22,000 pairs of children’s shoes. Another
gathered mittens and stocking caps. On his first day in camp Rudolf Vrba, a
slave at Auschwitz, noticed hundreds of baby carriages, “but still I did not
wonder where the babies were.” Later he would see prisoners sitting at
tables, squeezing out tube after tube of toothpaste. At first he wondered why
the Germans wasted the time. Then he realized workers were looking for hidden
diamonds.
*
Much of what we know about the camps
comes from those lucky enough to survive. At Birkenau, female inmates had one
large enamel pot. At meal time it was used to carry soup. By day it served as
wash basin, on rare occasions when anyone was allowed to clean up. At night,
when prisoners were forbidden to go outside to the toilet, the pot served to
contain bodily wastes. At Buchenwald prisoners were tied to a heavy wagon full
of stone and sand and forced to pull it, singing as they went. SS guards
laughed and called them “singing horses.”
The entire Nazi “system” was designed
to seem senseless. Guards urinated on prisoners, wetting them from head to toe.
They forced Jewish girls to clean bathrooms with their blouses. Men with
diarrhea were refused permission to go, so “their own pants had to serve as
toilets.” At Buchenwald, violation of orders led to a beating with a heavy
cane on the bare buttocks. Victims were whipped in front of rows of assembled
prisoners, “until flesh fell off in scraps.” On one occasion a camp inmate
was scheduled for beating. His brother stepped forward and begged to take his
place. The SS officer laughed and ordered both brothers whipped instead.
Guards sometimes tied prisoners’
hands behind their backs. Then they ran a rope around their wrists and dangled
them from trees. One victim was hung up because SS men wanted him to reveal the
names of inmates involved in forbidden activities. A witness explained what
happened next:
...he
would have talked, but he does not know them [the names]. His hands are tied
behind his back and he is hung from a pulley by his wrists. After a few seconds
his arms come out of their sockets and remain twisted upward, vertical behind
his back.
Others suffered “interrogation until
confession.” That is: they were tortured until they talked. One 19-year-old
Czech prisoner refused to cooperate despite every kind of abuse.
Police tried a fresh approach. The boy’s mother was in
custody. But she had committed suicide to end her miseries. Gestapo agents cut
off her head and brought it to her son’s cell to break his will.
If guards had any feelings of
kindness most lost them quickly amid the horrors.[6]
One camp commander and his wife looked for prisoners with tattoos and had them
gassed. Then the skin was used to make lamp shades and handbags. In Buchenwald,
slave laborers worked in a stone quarry with armed SS troops high above. When
guards were bored they bet cigarettes or a beer that they could kill a prisoner
below with one toss of a stone. Other victims were thrown into a long deep
trench that served as the camp latrine [toilet] and left to drown.
Terrible medical experiments were carried
out by SS personnel. (“Black murderers in white doctors’ coats,” as one
survivor labeled them.) There were tests to see how much cold a man could stand,
so the German air force might design better jackets for pilots. Naked Russian
prisoners were left outside in bitter cold. Others were submerged in icy water
to see how long they survived. When body temperatures fell to 82.5 F, one doctor
reported, death was certain, “despite all rescue attempts.” Other experiments measured the effects of
flying at high altitude. Careful notes show what happened to one Jew. Tested,
without oxygen, at the equal of 29,400 feet, he “began to perspire and roll
his head” after four minutes. After five minutes spasms began. Ten minutes:
unconsciousness.
Thirteen. Death.
In fact, madness had no limits. SS
doctors attempted bone transplants on prisoners, hoping new techniques might
save wounded German soldiers’ lives. Jews were infected with malaria to test
experimental drugs. Dr. Josef Mengele, known as “The Angel of Death,” was
interested in blood transfusions. Often he used twins in his experiments. Once
he sewed two together, connected their veins, and studied their combined
circulation. Others used x-rays and drugs to cause sterilization of prisoners. Such methods, one researcher
claimed, might provide Germany with “a new and extremely effective weapon”
in the battle against “inferior peoples.”
So it was. Horror on horror. Terror
layered in terror.
Madness over all.
Our horrible story is ended; but
even now we have exposed only fragments of an awful picture. It is a truth so terrible
it remains almost beyond our imagination. As Primo Levi once explained, “We,
the survivors, are not the true witnesses.”
Only the dead could tell us everything.
It would require 64,000 pages like the ones you have
just read to list the names of those who died in Hitler’s black harvest.
Your work:
1.
Find definitions for:
a)
Holocaust
b)
synagogue
c)
storm troopers
d)
genocide
e)
Aryan
f)
superior
g)
inferior
h)
vermin
i)
ghetto
2.
What was the role of the SA under Hitler? The role of the SS?
3.
What was the Gestapo? How was it different from police in most countries?
4.
What was “The Final Solution?”
5. On
June 6, 1942, a Jewish historian wrote in his diary, “We want our suffering
to remain on record for future generations and for the whole world.” Why do
you think he believed it was important for us to know what happened?
6.
Describe what a person would see and experience as they approached and entered
a gas chamber.
7. As
one Jewish girl was about to be shot she turned to face her murderer. “Look
straight into these eyes, you coward, and shoot! These eyes will pursue you and
haunt you all your life!” Why do you think she did this?
8.
List as many groups and types of individuals as you can who suffered at the
hands of the Nazi killers.
 |
| I was surprised the first time I used this reading: Many of my young students did not recognize this man. |
[1] The
word Nazi comes from the name of
Hitler’s political party, the “Nazional” or National Party.
[2] Remember:
Adolf Hitler was elected.
[3]
Hitler warned that children of mixed race were “halfway between man and
ape.”
[4] Nazi
leaders referred to such individuals as “useless eaters.”
[5] Thousands
of Jews were tricked in this way and loaded on rail cars. They were told they were
being sent to Russia to work on farms. Instead the trains headed straight for
death camps like Belzec and Sobibor.
[6] There
were some who tried. Oswald Bosko, an SS man, smuggled children out of camp in
cardboard boxes. When he was discovered he too was executed.
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