A CALCULATED RESTRAINT: WHAT ALLIED LEADERS SAID ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST by Richard Breitman

(Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin at Yalta 2/1945)

The most frequent question concerning the Holocaust centers on what allied leaders knew about the genocide against the Jews and what they spoke about it in public and private. In previous monographs, FDR AND THE JEWS and OFFICIAL SECRETS: WHAT THE NAZIS PLANNED AND WHAT THE BRITISH AND AMERICAN KNEW Holocaust historian Richard Breitman addresses when these men knew what was occurring in the death camps. In his latest work, A CALCULATED RESTRAINT: WHAT ALLIED LEADERS SAID ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST Breitman shifts his focus as it took until December 1942 for allied leaders to issue a joint statement concerning Nazi Germany’s policy of eradicating Jews from Europe. It would take President Franklin D. Roosevelt until March 1944 to publicly comment on what was occurring in the extermination camps. In his new book, Breitman asks why these leaders did not speak up earlier. Further he explores the character of each leader and concludes that the Holocaust must be understood in light of the political and military conditions exhibited during the war that drove their decision-making and commentary.

Breitman begins his account by introducing Miles Taylor, a Steel magnate turned diplomat representing Franklin Roosevelt in a September 22, 1942, meeting with the Pope. Taylor described the Nazi genocide against the Jews and plans to exterminate millions. He pressured the Pontiff to employ his moral responsibility and authority against Hitler and his minions. In the weeks that followed Taylor conveyed further evidence of Nazi plans to the White House.

(Anthony Eden, British Foreign Secretary) in 1942

The Papacy’s response was much less than could be hoped for. Monsignor Dell’Acqua warned the Pope that any negative commentary concerning Nazi actions could be quite detrimental to the church, ultimately producing a Papal reaction that it was impossible to confirm Nazi actions, and the Vatican had no “practical suggestions to make,” apparently believing that only military action, not moral condemnation could end Nazi atrocities. It would take until 2020 for the Vatican to open records of Pius XII’s tenure to outside researchers.

Breitman states his goal in preparing his monograph was to discern what “Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin knew about the Holocaust to what they said about it in their most important statements on the subject.” The author’s approach rests on two key avenues of research and analysis. First, the extent to which allied leaders sought to create and mobilize the international community based on a common morality. Second, how allied leaders understood the relationship between the Holocaust and the war itself during different stages of the conflict. Breitman’s account relies on thorough research based on years of archival work, in addition to correspondence among allied leaders, numerous biographies and secondary works on the subject.

Despite the release of most allied documents pertaining to the war, except for Russia which has become more forthcoming since the fall of the Soviet Union there is a paucity of material relating to allied leaders. Further, there is little, if any record of allied leaders themselves addressing the Holocaust in any of their private conversations, though Stalin’s public commentary does allude to Nazi atrocities more so than Roosevelt and Churchill.

It is clear from Breitman’s account that with Hitler’s January 30, 1939, speech to the Reichstag that the Fuhrer was bent on the total annihilation of the Jews, not just pressuring them to leave Germany and immigrate elsewhere. It is also clear that Churchill and Roosevelt were fully aware of the threat Hitler posed to the international order, but were limited in their public reaction to the sensitive issue that a war against Germany to save Jews was not politically acceptable, particularly as it related to communism at a time when anti-Semitism was pervasive worldwide. Fearing Nazi propaganda responses, allied leaders generalized the threat of Nazi atrocities, thereby subsuming Nazi policies to exterminate Jews among a broader range of barbaric behaviors, thereby limiting explicit attacks on the growing Holocaust.

Breckinridge Long (1881–1958). Long was an Assistant Secretary in the US State Department during World War II, from 1940-1944.

(Breckinridge Long, anti-Semitic State Department official did his best to block Jewish immigration to the United States during the Holocaust)

The author is correct in arguing that had allied leaders spoken out and confronted Nazi behavior earlier it might have galvanized more Jews to flee and go into hiding and perhaps encourage gentiles to take serious steps to assist Jews. No matter what the result it would have confirmed the rumors and stories concerning Nazi “resettlement in the east,” and possibly encouraged neutral governments to speak out and do more.

Breitman’s overall thesis is correct pertaining to why allied leaders did not speak out publicly about the Holocaust, though they did comment on the barbarity of the Nazis. The reasons have been presented by many historians that Roosevelt was very concerned about providing the Nazis a propaganda tool because any comments would be used to reinforce the view that the Roosevelt administration was controlled by Jews and it would anger anti-Semites, particularly those in his own State Department, and isolationists in Congress. FDR reasoned the best way to approach the Holocaust was not to single out Jews and concentrate on the larger issue of winning the war. The faster victory could be achieved, the more Jews that could be saved. This opinion was similar to Winston Churchill’s beliefs.

The author spends the first third of the book focusing on the “Big Three,” and their early views as to what policies the Nazis were implementing in Eastern Europe. Breitman will focus on four examples of public commentary which he analyzes in detail. On August 24, 1941, Winston Churchill made a speech denouncing Nazi executions in the east. He singled out what the Germans were doing to the Russians on Soviet soil, with no mention of the Jews as victims. However, his last sentence read; “we are in the presence of a crime without a name.” Was Churchill referring to the Holocaust? Was he trying to satisfy Stalin? It is difficult to discern, but British intelligence released in the 1990s and early 2000s provide an important picture of what the SS and police units were doing behind battle lines in the Soviet Union in July and August 1941 – mass executions of Jews, Bolsheviks, and other civilian targets. Churchill’s rationale for maintaining public silence regarding the Holocaust was his fear that the Luftwaffe’s Enigma codes that had been broken by cartographers at Bletchley Park would be compromised should he make statements based on British intelligence. It is interesting according to Breitman that after August 1941, Churchill no longer favored receiving “execution numbers” from MI6, fearing that the information could become public. Churchill’s overriding goal was to strengthen ties with the US and USSR and would worry about moral questions later.

In Stalin’s case he made a speech on November 6, 1941, the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 at the Mayakovsky Metro Station. According to Alexander Werth, a British journalist who was present it was “a strange mixture of black gloom and complete confidence.” Aware of Nazi mass murder of Jews, Stalin mentioned the subject directly only once, saying the Germans were carrying out medieval pogroms just as eagerly as the Tsarist regime had done. In a follow up speech the next day, Stalin said nothing about the killing of Jews. Stalin generalized the threat of extermination so all Soviet people would feel the threat facing their country, but at least he mentioned it signaling that subject could now be openly discussed, but Stalin’s overriding concern was to focus on the Nazi threat to the state and people of the USSR and believed that references to the Nazi war against the Jews could only distract from that. After his November remarks he made no further public comments about the killing of Jews for the rest of the war.

(Jan Karski (born Jan Kozielewski, 24 June 1914^[a] – 13 July 2000) was a Polish soldier, resistance-fighter, and diplomat during World War II. He is known for having acted as a courier in 1940–1943 to the Polish government-in-exile and to Poland’s Western Allies about the situation in German-occupied Poland. He reported about the state of Poland, its many competing resistance factions, and also about Germany’s destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and its operation of extermination camps on Polish soil that were murdering Jews, Poles, and others)

FDR’s approach was to prepare for war and his comments were designed to do so and not say anything that could rile up anti-New Dealers who opposed war preparation. At press conferences on July 31 and February 1, 1941, FDR did not raise the subject of Hitler’s threat to annihilate the Jews of Europe and was not questioned about it. Roosevelt feared any publicity surrounding saving Jews would create greater opposition to aiding the democracies of Europe to fight the Nazis. It took Roosevelt until August 21, 1942, for the president to denounce barbaric crimes against innocent civilians in Europe and Asia and threatened those responsible with trials after the war. He would reaffirm these comments in a statement on October 7, 1942, but in both instances he was unwilling to denounce the Nazi war against the Jews. However, if we fast forward to FDR’s March 24, 1944, press conference, shortly after the Nazis occupied Hungary, the president called attention to Hungarian Jews as part of the Nazi campaign to destroy the Jews of Europe, accusing the Nazis of the “wholesale systematic murder of the Jews in Europe.” Articles written by the White House press corps and government broadcasts were disseminated to a large audience in the United States and abroad.

Nazi camps in occupied Poland, 1939-1945 [LCID: pol72110]

Breitman dissects a fourth speech given on January 30, 1939, where Adolf Hitler lays out his plans in front of the Reichstag. The speech recounted the usual Nazi accusations against the west, praise for Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, virulent comments and threat against the Jews, and fear of the Bolshevik menace. He was careful not to attack Roosevelt as he wanted to limit American aid. According to Chief AP correspondent Louis Lochner who was present at the speech Hitler reserved his most poisonous verbiage for the Jews as he would welcome the complete annihilation of European Jewry.

The title of the book, A CALCULATED RESTRAINT is somewhat misleading as Breitman focuses a great deal on events and personalities that may tendentiously conform to the title, but do not zero in exactly on that subject matter. The author details the negotiations leading up to the Nazi-Soviet Pact and its implications for Poland and Eastern Europe in General. Further, he comments on the American and British about faces in dealing with communism. Breitman focuses on the “Palestine question” and its role in Nazi strategy and how the British sought to protect its Arab “possessions,” – oil! Operation Torch, as a substitute for a second in Europe is discussed; the battle of El Alamein and the role of General Erwin Rommel. Other prominent individuals are covered including Reinhard Heydrich who chaired the Wannsee Conference outlining the Holocaust and the Lidice massacre after he was assassinated. Breitman does deal with the Holocaust, not commentary by the “Big Three” as he introduces Gerhart M. Riegner, a representative of the World Jewish Congress and Polish diplomat Jan Karski, who met with Roosevelt, and Peter Bergson who did his best to publicize the Holocaust and convince the leaders to focus more on containing it through his Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe. Another important American official that Breitman spends a great deal of time on is Oscar Cox, general counsel of the Foreign Economic Administration, which included the Lend-Lease Administration who tried to enlist others in the battle against anti-Semites, like Breckinridge Long inside the State Department. Both men played an integral role in making the Holocaust public and trying to convince Churchill and Roosevelt to be more forthcoming about educating the public about the annihilation of the Jews. This would lead to the Bermuda Conference and the War Refugee Board in the United States, neither of which greatly impacted the plight of the Jews. Breitman also includes a well thought out and incisive analysis of the murder of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews at Auschwitz toward the end of the war.

SS chief Heinrich Himmler (right) during a visit to the Auschwitz camp. [LCID: 50742]

(SS chief Heinrich Himmler (right) during a visit to the Auschwitz camp. Poland, July 18, 1942)

Perhaps, Breitman’s best chapter is entitled, “The Allied Declaration” in which he points out that by the second half of 1942 there was enough credible information that reached allied governments and media that affirmed the genocide of the Jews. However, as Breitman argues, the atmosphere surrounding this period and the risks of going public were too much for allied leaders.

It is clear the book overly focuses on the course of the war, rather than on its stated title. The non-Holocaust material has mostly been mined by other historians, and in many cases Breitman reviews material he has presented in his previous books. Much of the sourcing is based on secondary materials, but a wide variety of documentary evidence is consulted. In a sense if one follows the end notes it provides an excellent bibliography, but the stated purpose of the book does not receive the coverage that is warranted.

In summary, Breitman’s book is a concise and incisive look at his subject and sheds some new light on the topic. We must accept the conclusion that the allied leader’s responses and why they chose what to say about the Holocaust must be understood in light of the political and military demands that existed in the war and drove their decision making. I agree with historian Richard Overy that Breitman spends much more time discussing what was known about the murder of Jews, how it was communicated and its effect on lower-level officials and ministers, rather than discussing the response of the Allied big three, which again reveals a generally ambivalent, even skeptical response to the claims of people who presented evidence as to what was occurring.

(Joseph Stalin, Franklin Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill at the Tehran Conference, November, 1943)

IN THE MIDST OF CIVILIZED EUROPE: THE POGROMS OF 1918-1921 AND THE ONSET OF THE HOLOCAUST by Jeffrey Veidlinger

March 20, 2025szfreiberger German History, Holocaust, Nazi Germany, Russian History Leave a comment

(Victims of a pogrom perpetrated by Ukrainian forces in Khodorkiv, 1919)

According to Webster’s dictionary a “pogrom” is an organized massacre of a particular ethnic group, in particular that of Jewish people in Russia or eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is a Russian word meaning to “wreak havoc, to demolish violently.” Historically, the term refers to violent attacks by local non-Jewish populations on Jews in the Russian Empire and in other countries. The first such incident to be labeled a pogrom is believed to be anti-Jewish rioting in Odessa in 1821. As a descriptive term, “pogrom” came into common usage with extensive anti-Jewish riots that swept the southern and western provinces of the Russian Empire in 1881–1884, following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II.

One of the most impactful pogroms took place in Kishinev located in the southwest corner of Imperial Russia in April 1903. It resulted in the death of 49 Jews, an untold number of Jewish women were raped, and 1,500 Jewish homes were damaged. This sudden rush of hoodlum violence — prompted by accusatory rumors of Jewish ritual murder — quickly became a talisman of imperial Russian brutality against its Jews. More than that, the incident brought the word pogrom to the world stage and set off reverberations that changed the course of Jewish history for the next century.

Pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe at the end of the 19^th and early 20^th century became the impetus for Jewish immigration to the United States. Between 1880 and 1924 over 2,000,000 Jews immigrated to the United States to escape persecution and poverty. My own grandparents left their small village north of Kyiv in 1905 on arriving at Ellis Island and settling in the New York area.

(A funeral held for desecrated Torah scrolls following the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, in which 49 Jews were murdered and hundreds of women raped)

For those who have difficulty imagining what a pogrom is or looks like I refer them to the film “The Fixer” based on the novel of the same name by Bernard Malamud. THE FIXER was based on an infamous case known as the “Beilis case” or the “Beilis trial” of 1913, in which the mutilated corpse of a Christian boy was found in a cave outside Kiev in 1911, and it became the cause célèbre for myriad virulent antisemitic groups to propagate widespread persecution of Jews. A Jewish laborer named Menahem Mendel Beilis (Yacov Bok in the film and novel) was arrested on ludicrous trumped-up charges for ritualistically extracting the child’s blood to be used in Passover matzos and it led to his imprisonment and torture –a prelude to further pogroms and the coming Bolshevik Revolution. In a highly publicized trial akin to the Russian version of the Dreyfus affair, Beilis was ultimately acquitted by an all-Christian jury.

The latest use of the term pogrom has sparked controversy when it was applied to the devastating actions of Hamas terrorists perpetrated on October 7, 2024, against Israel. The end result was 1,180 people killed, of which 797 were civilians, including 36 children and 379 security forces. A further, 3,400 civilians and soldiers were wounded, and 251 civilians and soldiers were taken captive (74 later died in captivity or were confirmed dead). Hamas’ savagery fits the definition of the term “pogrom” with all the elements of violence, sexual attack, and antisemitism.

(Symon Petliura, a 1920s Ukrainian statesman blamed for the murder of 50,000 Jewish compatriots)

In his latest book IN THE MIDST OF CIVILIZED EUROPE: THE POGROMS OF 1918-1921 AND THE ONSET OF THE HOLOCAUST Jeffrey Veidlinger tackles the pogrom-like violence in western Belorussia (Belarus) and Poland’s Galicia province (now West Ukraine), that resulted in the murder of over a hundred thousand Jews between 1918 and 1921. According to Veidlinger, apart from murders, “approximately 600,000 Jewish refugees were forced to flee across international borders, and millions more were displaced internally. About two-thirds of all Jewish houses and over half of all Jewish businesses in the region were looted or destroyed. The pogroms traumatized the affected communities for at least a generation and set off alarm bells around the world.”

The perpetrators of pogroms organized locally, sometimes with government and police encouragement. They raped, murdered their Jewish victims, and looted their property. During the civil war that followed the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Ukrainian nationalists, Polish officials, and Red Army soldiers perpetrated these massacres blaming the Jews for the turmoil and destruction of World War I and the ensuing Russian Revolution. At the time reports of this violence were published in the press and many warned that the Jews were in danger of extermination – a prediction that would come to fruition in the Nazi imposed Holocaust between 1939-1945.

Veidlinger relies on long-neglected materials that include recently discovered eyewitness accounts, trial records, and government orders concluding that the genocidal violence created the conditions for the Holocaust. He explains how and why so many groups believed that the murder of Jews was a suitable reaction to their perceived problems, allowing “pogroms” to be seen as one of the defining moments of the 20th century.

(Professor Jeffrey Veidlinger)

The development of pogroms as a threat to the existence of Jews came to a stage. First, the reaction to the assassination of Alexander II which Russian newspapers and right-wing Christians blamed the Jews. Next is the results of the Russo-Japanese war which set off a wave of pogroms as the Russian people could not accept defeat. The situation was further exacerbated by the 1905 Revolution allowing the Black Hundreds and individuals within the Tsarist police to unleash devastating pogroms. It took until 1906 for the pogroms to subside. The pogroms unleashed between 1903-1906 helped model behavioral patterns that were further refined with each wave of unrest. Tensions were heightened with the appearance of THE PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION, first circulated by the Black Hundreds in 1903 it would be widely disseminated across Russia (and Europe) accusing the Jews of a global conspiracy to take control of world finances and manipulate government leaders. The next stage in the development and implementation of pogroms was a result of World War I where Jews were accused of financing the German war machine and supporting Russia’s arch enemy, Germany. Rumors of Jewish betrayal throughout the war led to their removal by Russian troops from front line areas leading to thousands of Jews imprisoned and others becoming refugees forced out of their homes and sent to other parts of the empire or forced to emigrate elsewhere when possible to eradicate what was perceived as a world Jewish revolutionary movement.

One of Veidlinger’s most important themes revolves around what happened to Jews in Ukraine during World War II, having its roots in what happened to Jews in the same geographic area in the post-World War I era. The massacres established violence against Jews as an acceptable response to the excesses of Bolshevism due to the unrelenting exposure to bloodshed which habituated local populations to bloodshed and barbarism. When the Germans arrived in 1941 they found a decades-old killing ground where the mass murder of innocent Jews was an acceptable reality.

Veidlinger correctly points out how Jews could not escape victimhood as after the Treaty of Brest Litovsk was signed in March 1918 by the Bolsheviks and Germans, the Jews would once again found themselves as victims. As the Germans occupied Ukraine the Bolsheviks accused them of collaboration with the enemy as well as being members of the bourgeois class. The Germans accused them of being Bolshevik sympathizers and engaging in violent attacks against German officials. The Jews were victims of attacks from both sides further reinforcing the concept that it was acceptable to beat up and kill Jews. Things grew worse when the Bolsheviks created the “Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution, Profiteering and Corruption” (Cheka) under Felix Dzerzhinsky which employed torture and terror to root out the opposition. Interestingly, with so many Bolshevik leaders with Jewish backgrounds it was easy to spread lies pertaining to them by opposition to the new Soviet regime. The remnants of the central powers, the White Army, the Black Hundreds all developed strong rationalizations to unleash further pogroms.

(Leon Trotsky)

With the collapse of the German and Austro-Hungarian empire the nationalist goals of the Poles for their own nation ensued. Joseph Pilsudski, a Polish military figure and statesman called for a multi-ethnic Polish state and became the first Chief of State for the new country. However, for Jews the situation was complex as they once again were caught in the middle of divergent forces and soon became victims of pogramatic violence as Poles, Ukranians, and others fought for control of cities within the new Ukrainian and Polish republics. Violence in Lviv set a new pattern as soldiers deliberately targeted Jews in their homes and businesses with no apparent military objective. This seemed different as now soldiers were added to gangs of ruffians and local discontented types who openly attacked Jews. This spread across Poland and Galicia resulting in over 130 pogroms against Jews by soldiers with the general population participating in the violence as crowds cheered them on. Once again Jews were caught in the middle as a Ukrainian Republic had been proclaimed that seemed to be more tolerant of Jews when compared to the new Polish state.

The author does an excellent job exploring in insightful detail four of the 85 attacks on Jewish life and property between January and March 1919. The four include pogroms in Ovruch, two in Zhytomyr, and Proskuriv. What set them apart from previous pogroms was that they were not necessarily an unprompted spree committed spontaneously by unruly soldiers rampaging through civilian neighborhoods, but part of a protracted reign of terror perpetrated by officers, or leaders who achieved some military control acting under the authority of the state military. They became a watershed for Jews because the Ukrainian government when it came to pass was predicated on the principle of minority rights and national autonomy and their lack of action showed they could not protect them. For Jews targeted for supporting Bolsheviks it betrayed the trust Jews had in their government.

(A 1934 edition by the Patriotic Publishing Company of Chicago)

The problem that emerges in all four pogroms is that the high minded ideals of the Ukrainian cabinet and intellectual elites were not shared by the rest of the military leadership. Instead, the officers and soldiers, many of whom had been poisoned by the anti-Semitic rhetoric of the Imperial Russian army which they had served and by prejudices learned in their villages, continued to view Jews as speculators stealing the wealth of the Ukrainian people, as enemies of the church, and the agents of Bolshevism. It was a belief system that reverberated throughout the region to the detriment and of the well-being of Jews. This would continue in the battles for Kyiv, Fastiv and other areas as the White army with their Cossacks entered the picture.

Fastiv is another example of the horrors Jews faced in September and October 1919 as the White army entered the fray resulting in the death of over 8000 Jews, some the result of outright murder and the rest the effects of hunger, exposure and the lack of any medical care. The Whites wanted to eradicate the Jewish population anywhere they could find them. The Whites were made up of former Tsarist officers and soldiers, along with the Cossacks just enhanced the terror Jews faced under the leadership of Anton Denikin, a former peasant and disgruntled Tsarist officer. The former Tsarist officers saw the Jews as the progenitors of Bolshevism and as an internal enemy whose perfidy had led to Russia’s defeat in the Great War. Their goal was to restore the Tsarist empire sans Jews.

(Anton Denikin)

As previously mentioned the Jews were once again caught in the crossfire between the Red army, the White army, the Ukrainian People’s Republic, and the new Polish nation. With the settlement at the Versailles conference unclear when it came to borders and the fate of Ukraine, it left an opening for these disparate elements to continue to fight and for Jews who grew confused as to whom to support as the political situation was a minefield. The battlefield consisted of Whites fighting Reds, the Red Army fighting Poland, Poland fighting the Ukrainian People’s Republic, and sorted warlords seizing property and randomly killing Jews as opportunities presented themselves. Throughout Ukraine and border areas with the new nation of Poland, government control of territory was always tenuous giving anti-Semites the perfect opportunity to engage in pogroms. Fueled by conspiracy theories and past learning under the Tsar and the fact that Bolshevik leaders had Jewish backgrounds the plight of Jews seemed preordained. As Veidlinger describes the many pogroms with its executions, shootings, rapes, seizures of property, and outright torture physically and psychologically one has to wonder how depraved the perpetrators of these atrocities were.

Veidlinger sums up the plight of the Jews very clearly: “Jewish civilians were singled out for persecution by virtually everyone. The Bolsheviks despised them as bourgeois nationalist; the bourgeois nationalists branded them Bolsheviks; Ukrainians saw them as agents of Russia; Russians suspected them of being German sympathizers; and Poles doubted their loyalty to the newly founded Polish Republic. Dispersed in urban pockets and insufficiently concentrated in any one contiguous territory, Jews were unable to make a credible claim to sovereignty, no party trusted them. Regardless of one’s political inclination, there was always a Jew to blame.”

The concept of scapegoating stands out. If one follows the plight of Jews in Europe since the Middle Ages , the Jew was the perfect target. No matter what century we are speaking about pogroms would draw local people, at times the victim’s neighbors in what the author describes as a “carnivalesque atmosphere” of inebriated singing and dancing. The perpetrators were often young peasants who had suffered greatly during World War I, who lacked any guidance from their elders who also participated in the bloodshed.

POSTPONED – Pogroms and the Origins of the European Genocide of the Jews

(1919 map of Ukraine)

As the Nazis rose to power and consolidated their rule in Germany in the 1930s the situation for Jews grew untenable. The Nazi invasion of Poland and the Soviet Union created an invitation for “liberated peoples” to take out their frustrations against Jews. The Nazis encouraged anti-Semitism in the Ukraine taking advantage of its previous history of persecuting Jews. In 1941, Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Main Office, told subordinates “not to hinder attempts of local anti-communist and anti-Jewish circles to the newly occupies territories to engage in cleansing activities. On the contrary, they should be carried out and intensified, if necessary, and channeled in the right direction, but without leaving a trace.” Heydrich would organize the Wannsee Conference where the decision labeled the ‘Final Solution” was reached.

Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SD (Security Service) and Nazi governor of Bohemia and Moravia. [LCID: 91199]

(Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SD (Security Service) and Nazi governor of Bohemia and Moravia.. Place uncertain, 1942)

Pogroms broke out throughout the Ukraine in 1941 as the Nazis were aided by those who had participated in the horrors that took place between 1918 and 1921, and the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police. The Germans would incite the Ukrainians by equating Jews with Bolsheviks, drawing upon the same language which peasants and Cossack militias had massacred Jews twenty years earlier. The most deadly massacre took place in Kyiv on September 26, 1941, when Jews were marched to an open meadow, part of the Babyn Yar system were 33, 771 Jews were killed over thirty-six hours. By the spring of 1942, the genocide of the Jews of Ukraine was complete, with over 500,000 Jews, , one-third of the prewar population murdered. The pogroms Veidlinger describes in his deeply researched monograph had been mostly spontaneous and scattered, but once the Nazis crossed into Poland, the Ukraine, and the Soviet Union the Holocaust became increasingly systematic. The intellectual preparation lingered from twenty years before, became a reality. The precedent of1918-1921 came to fruition. The script of twenty years before was reenacted.

In the end Veidlinger’s scholarly presentation concluded that few of the perpetrators of the Holocaust were punished when compared to their victims. Some higher ups escaped, some were convicted, and many lesser accomplices had been sentenced to death by tribunals or vigilantes, but the reality is clear, as Veidlinger states, “the value of Jewish life had been debased.”

(Bodies of the Jewish victims of the pogrom in Orvuch, Ukraine, in February of 1919)

COLD CREMATORIUM: REPORTING FROM THE LAND OF AUSCHWITZ by Josef Debreczeni

February 4, 2024szfreiberger Holocaust, World War II Leave a comment

(Rail line leading into Auschwitz)

At a time when anti-Semitism is on the rise worldwide, supposedly due to the war in Gaza, which is erroneous as the phenomenon was increasing long before Hamas’ brutal attack on October 7^th. At the same time, we recognize Holocaust Remembrance day which commemorates the annihilation of Jews during World War II. It is fitting that at this time Josef Debreczeni’s memoir of his time in “the land of Auschwitz,” COLD CREMATORIUM: REPORTING FROM THE LAND OF AUSCHWITZ has been rereleased.

Originally published in 1950 it was never translated because of the rise of McCarthyism which rejected any pro-Soviet literature; Cold War hostilities as Stalinists refused to accept the Jews as “victims of fascism” singled out for extinction; and the rise of anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe. However, its appearance has made an important contribution to the great works of Holocaust literature as its author points out many things that have either been forgotten or overlooked.

Jonathan Freedland writes in the Forward to the book, referring to Debreczeni as a “witness, survivor, victim, and also an analyst, offering ruminations on some of the enduring questions raised by the Holocaust among them the puzzle of how arguably the most cultured nation in Europe could have led the continent’s descent into the most brutal savagery.” Other vital insights provided by Debreczeni include a reminder that the victims of Nazi brutality did not know their imminent fate, a crucial fact in trying to comprehend how the Final Solution was possible, and that so many others certainly did. Debreczeni reminds us that the Holocaust may have been developed in Berlin, it relied on accomplices throughout Europe – from liberal France to anti-Semitic Poland. Many of these individuals may have suffered from “willful blindness,” as they would later deny seeing or participating in atrocities. The author’s account of the actions perpetrated by Kapos, many of which were Jews is disturbing and for most beyond the capacity to imagine. In a diabolical Nazi system “the best slave driver is a slave accorded a privileged position” is an accurate and scary proposition.

(They came with the things most valuable to them unaware that everything would be taken including many of their lives)

For Debreczeni many chroniclers of the Shoah do not emphasize the economic function of Auschwitz enough. The author describes the German corporations involved to the point that many victims would have company names printed on their striped pajama type uniforms. The brutal conditions that victims faced were laid bare. The illicit trade between prisoners, kitchen workers, guards is ever prevalent – a life for people denied the fundamentals needed for survival – to eat, drink, bathe are all missing with disease and lice everywhere caused by a total lack of sanitation. People were treated like animals, and for a chance at survival the same people morphed into animalistic behavior as they completely lost their identity, self-respect, and will to love. The end result is a slow descent into madness and suicide for many who Debreczeni comes in contact with. For those who deny the Holocaust this memoir is a stark response.

Debreczeni has written a haunting memoir, conveyed in the precise and unsentimental style of a professional journalist whose eyewitness account is of unmatched literary quality. The author’s writing is evocative, employing irony, sarcasm, and an acerbic humor as he prods the reader into the “the Land of Auschwitz,” a place that is intellectually incomprehensible. What sets the book apart is the reporting that the German guards were largely absent or stayed in the background. Instead, it is the prisoners themselves who rule over each other depending on their status which forms a window into the complex organization of the camps.

The memoir begins in January 1944 with a prisoner transport where victims are oblivious as to their location and what the immediate future might bring, ending with liberation by Soviet forces in early May 1945. Debreczeni provides precise details of who certain prisoners were and what they experienced. For example, Mr. Mandel, a carpenter who always had a cigarette in his hand, but once they were taken away he still raises his empty fingers to his lips – he will be the first to die on the transport or the TB riddled Frenchman, a lower level Kapo in Auschwitz who developed a semblance of humanity as he warned prisoners as to what was about to happen to them. Debreczeni holds nothing back in describing how people of varying backgrounds cooperated with the Nazis, including Jews. A prime example is Weisz, a low brow salesclerk from Hungary, “a low-life Jew” who wielded a truncheon. He was “power crazed, malicious, a wild beast,” who was the epitome of the Nazi system that “the best slave driver is a slave accorded a privileged position.” Most of these types of slave drivers came from the “lower rungs” of Jewish society before the war. Those who came from the highest levels of Jewish society were found to be helpless in the Nazi camp hierarchy. Another is Herman, an SS guard who had been a bartender before the war and was one of the few guards who exhibited a degree of empathy as opposed to his murderous compatriots as he would drop a half smoked cigarette to the ground for a prisoner to find. A typical power hungry individual was Sanyi Roth, a room commander for tent #28, a notorious repeat offender, serial burglar who was put in charge of the worst tent which housed murderers, robbers, and other “creatures.” Interestingly, after Debreczeni flatters him he begins to take him under his wing. Perhaps the most despicable person was Moric, the foremost Kapo of all camps, whose nickname was the Fuhrer of the death camps – the sole Jew who held as much power as Nazi officials. Another individual who stands out, but in a positive fashion is Dr. Farkas, a Jewish physician who was forced to cooperate with the SS. But at the same time was able to display compassion and medical knowledge to treat many inmates. In fact, without his care Debreczeni would not have survived.

(The bunks at Auschwitz II-Birkenau)

The author provides an understanding of the evil the Nazis perpetrated aside from annihilation. He describes the genius of those who developed the Final Solution. To achieve mass death a killing infrastructure needed to be created. A key aspect of which was the hierarchy of power which the Nazis implemented providing certain prisoners a key role in the genocide. The Germans kept themselves invisible behind the barbed wire as “the allocation of food, the discipline, the direct supervision of work, and the first degree of terror – in sum, executive power – were in fact entrusted to slave drivers chosen randomly from among the deportees.” For their hideous work they received certain benefits including more food, clothing, the opportunity to steal, and power over their fellow prisoners – power over life and death, which for many was intoxicating. They all played a role in the vertical structure that resembled a military command where each person from the highest to the lowest Kapo knew their job and what would happen to them if they didn’t carry it out. This structure also was apparent in camp hospitals like Dornhau where Doctors, medics, nurses, and other workers had specific roles in the Nazi hierarchy.

Debreczeni offers an exceptional description of the “Land of Auschwitz” which consisted of many sub-camps in addition to the more famous areas like Birkenau or lesser labor camps like Furstenstein which the author experienced personally which was typical of other work camps who held the same characteristics. This area consisted of a castle complex which the Nazis destroyed in order to create an underground complex for a new headquarters for Hitler, should retreat be necessary and an arms factory on the site.

German corporations do not escape Debreczeni’s withering description as they paid the Nazi regime to rent slave labor and profited immensely. Many books have been written about this subject. For a complete list one can be found at https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/german-firms-that-used-slave-labor-during-nazi-era#google_vignette. In Debreczeni’s case it was Sanger and Laninger who enslaved him as a tunnel digger.

There are many other elements that the author describes from the use of cigarettes as a medium of exchange which became its own underground industry. Another medium of exchange was extracted gold crowns which many inmates did themselves to trade for food – the going rate was one crown for a weeks’ worth of soup. The concept of the “will to live” is explored in detail with harrowing examples. For the author, the will grew and like others he was willing to steal, fake jobs, and other strategies as a means of survival. Debreczeni’s commentary concerning prisoner roundups is very disconcerting as prisoners were asked to volunteer for certain jobs and transport. Many prisoners were willing to play Russian roulette to survive, most who did died, but a few would escape.

Each chapter seems more disturbing than the next and ranking the most horrifying material presented is very difficult. Perhaps the chapters that stand out are those involving the Dornhau camp hospital which describes the Nazi approach to medical care and its sadistic treatment techniques carried out by most medical professionals. It is this hospital that the term “cold crematorium” refers to. Debreczeni’s recounting of the plight of his bunkmates is indescribable especially as typhus became rampant.

As Menachem Kaiser writes in his New York Times review, “How To Talk About Auschwitz,” “Debreczeni recounts his deportation to Auschwitz, and from there to a series of camps. This isn’t the sort of book you can get a sense of from a plot outline. Debreczeni suffers; he survives (or, more accurately, he does not die); he observes. His powers of observation are extraordinary. Everything he encounters in what he calls the Land of Auschwitz — the work sites, the barracks, the bodies, the corpses, the hunger, the roll call, the labor, the insanity, the fear, the despair, the strangeness, the hope, the cruelty — is captured in terrifyingly sharp detail.”

In conclusion, Debreczeni has written haunting conformation of the terror of that was the Holocaust, and the will to survive.

(Entrance to Auschwitz I)

ELIE WIESEL: CONFRONTING THE SILENCE by Joseph Berger

June 21, 2023szfreiberger Holocaust, Intellectual History Leave a comment

(Elie Wiesel)

Before I turn to my review of Joseph Berger’s latest work, ELIE WIESEL: CONFRONTING THE SILENCE I must put forth a disclaimer concerning the subject. First, my father’s side of the family lived north of Krakow, Poland before World War II about two hours from Auschwitz. Some were fortunate and left before the war and went to Palestine, France, and the United States. The majority did not and perished in the gas chambers. This has always brought me to an uncomfortable place having been educated in an orthodox Yeshiva in Brooklyn and grown up with children of survivors. Where was God? How could he allow his people to be slaughtered? Why didn’t he answer their prayers? After the Holocaust how could I remain a believer? In the 1970s I turned to the works of Elie Wiesel, beginning with NIGHT and continuing through most of his novels and his memoirs as they were published availing myself of the opportunity to be exposed to Wiesel’s wisdom, commentary on the horrors of the Holocaust, elements of Hasidic mysticism, Biblical portraits and other subject matter and came away with a deeper understanding of my emotions and values from a voice that was like no other. I sought answers, but to be honest on an intellectual level I remain in a quandary as to my belief system.

I consider myself very fortunate to have witnessed remarks by Wiesel in person two times during his quest to educate the American public on the dangers of racism, antisemitism, and the plight of refugees and persecuted people worldwide. First, at the Washington Hebrew Congregation in 1978, and later in 2008 at Boston University. After a twenty year gap in listening to Wiesel in public it appeared the man who the Nobel Prize Committee referred to as “a messenger to mankind,” had grown more pessimistic about the future.

Prewar view of the Transylvanian town of Sighet.

(Main square in the village of Sighet, Romania before WWII)

Berger has written a powerful biography of Wiesel exploring his tortuous experiences as a victim of the Nazi Final Solution. He delves deep into a myriad of topics within the larger scope of Wiesel’s life story and intellectual journey integrating excerpts of his memoirs, novels, works of non-fiction, speeches, articles, teaching, and countless interviews from his boyhood in Sighet, Romania to evolving into the messenger or conscience of the Holocaust. The volume is not a traditional biography as once Wiesel is liberated from Buchenwald and makes his way to France the sense of chronology largely disappears, and Berger presents a series of chapters which in part can stand alone as separate essays. The volume includes important experiences apart from Auschwitz and Buchenwald to include becoming the voice of Soviet Jewry; his involvement and key role in the creation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, taking “Hollywood” to task for its representation of the Holocaust; confronting the Reagan administration over its visit to the Bitburg cemetery where 49 members of the SS were buried, his work championing the plight of refugees, speaking out against apartheid; the plight of the Cambodian and Vietnamese people; and indigenous people in Central America; his approach to the academic classroom and teaching; and being awarded the Nobel Prize.

Berger’s work is more of an intellectual journey that Wiesel has undertaken his entire life. He has authored a penetrating portrait which focuses on a “frail, soft-spoken writer from a village in the Carpathian Mountains” who “became such an influential presence on the world stage.” Wiesel’s writing forms the back story for themes, arguments, and inner conflict as he tries to understand God’s role in the Holocaust, anger at the allies for doing nothing in terms of refugees and bombing the camps, along with his personal struggles to come to terms with what has happened to his family and the Jewish people. What comes across is a man who pulls no punches in educating all, including American presidents, Soviet government officials over its Babi Yar Memorial and refusal to allow Jews to emigrate, Hollywood moguls for its film representation of the Holocaust, his co-religionists, leaders of other faiths and almost anyone who he came in contact with.

Elie Wiesel (right) with his wife and son during the Faith in Humankind conference, held before the opening of the USHMM, on September 18–19, 1984, in Washington, DC.

(Elie Wiesel (right) with his wife and son during the Faith in Humankind conference, held several years before the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. September 18–19, 1984, in Washington, DC.)

Berger presents Wiesel’s honesty based on a deeply emotional and evocative intellect which is present for all to see and cherish. Many of Wiesel’s feelings stand out that he dealt with his entire life; from his anger at his father’s naivete in remaining in their Romanian village, and wrestling with his relationship to God concluding, “I have never renounced my faith in God. I have risen against His justice protested His silence, and sometimes His absence, but my anger rises up within faith and not outside it,” to a life-long bitterness at western allies for their lack of action to assist victims of the Holocaust during the war.

Berger presents numerous poignant scenes particularly how the son became the father of the in the camps as Elie tried to avoid death, or Wiesel’s own relationship with his son Elisha. Further, Wiesel’s issues with the fledgling Israeli government in the late 1940s and their negative attitude toward Holocaust survivors, his frustration with the publishing world over accepting NIGHT for publication as they argued that there was no market for the Holocaust after the war, and lecturing President Jimmy Carter about aspects of faith and how it related to survivors.

At times Berger is able to unmask the lyrical nature of Wiesel’s writing particularly when speaking of visiting a Moscow Synagogue while pressuring the Kremlin over its treatment of Jews. His book, JEWS OF SILENCE went a long way in obtaining the emigration of over 250,000 Soviet Jews in the 1970s. Another event that catapulted Wiesel on the world stage was the Six Day War and the resulting Israeli victory which created a new Jewish self-concept and a proliferation of new histories, novels, and films dealing with the Holocaust. It is at this time that Wiesel began to acquire the role of spokesman for his brethren. Applying his Talmudic education, his knowledge of Hasidic mysticism, and his biblical knowledge he was perfect for the task.

(President Bill Clinton (center), Elie Wiesel (right), and Harvey Meyerhoff (left) light the eternal flame outside on the Eisenhower Plaza during the dedication ceremony of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. April 22, 1993)

Perhaps one of the most important questions people have asked Wiesel concerns his writing. When asked, Why do I write? He responds, “Perhaps in order not to go mad. Or, on the contrary, to touch the bottom of madness….Not to transmit an experience is to betray it. I owe them [the dead] my roots and my memory. I am duty-bound to serve as their emissary, transmitting the history of their disappearance, even if it disturbs, even if it brings pain. Not to do so would be to betray them, and thus myself….To wrench those victims from oblivion. To help the dead vanquish death.”

Berger’s perceptive biography presents the humanity of Wiesel as he hid a lifetime of suicidal bouts, depression, agonizing cries tinged with haunted memories of the evisceration of his home village. Miraculously, Wiesel was able to overcome these issues with the help of his wife, Marion, who was a partner in his work to educate the world and create as Diane Cole writes in her recent Wall Street Journal review of Berger’s work, “a legacy that compels us to bear witness in his absence and continue to confront the silence.”

THE ESCAPE ARTIST: THE MAN WHO BROKE OUT OF AUSCHWITZ TO WARN THE WORLD by Jonathan Freedland

July 1, 2022szfreiberger Holocaust, Nazi Germany, World War II Leave a comment

Two words dominate Jonathan Freedland’s new book, THE ESCAPE ARTIST: THE MAN WHO BROKE OUT OF AUSCHWITZ TO WARN THE WORLD; trust and escape. These terms would dominate the life of Walter Rosenberg, a Slovakian Jew who along with three others would escape from Auschwitz in 1944. Only seventeen in February 1942, Rosenberg was rounded up by the Nazis which would begin a horrible journey that would culminate in being deported with his family to Poland. Passing through Novaky, a Slovak transit camp, he would wind up in Majdanek and then on to Auschwitz by June 1942 where he would remain until April 1944 when he and his compatriot, Fred Wetzler would become the first Jews to escape “the crowning achievement of Nazi extermination.”

From that point on Walter Rosenberg, who would change his name to Rudi Vrba would dedicate his existence to gathering evidence of Nazi atrocities in order to warn Jews of what they could expect once they were deported to Auschwitz. It was his hope that once warned, Jews would put up as much resistance as possible apart from marching docilly to their deaths.

Freedland’s gripping book sets out to bring Vrba to prominence as a name to be mentioned in the same category as Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Oskar Schindler, and Anne Frank. In telling his story Freedland focuses on Vrba’s prodigious memory as he mentally catalogued what he witnessed each day in the camp. At the outset he may not have realized it but thanks to a series of arbitrary events and lucky breaks Vrba had acquired an unusually comprehensive expertise in the workings of Auschwitz. Freedland writes that “he had lived or worked in the main camp, at Birkenau and at Bu8na; Auschwitz I, II, III. He had worked in the gravel pits, the DAW factory, and in Kanada. He had been an intimate witness of the selection process that preceded the organized murder of thousands….He knew the precise layout of the camp and believed he had a good idea as to how many had entered Auschwitz by train, and how many left via chimney. And he had committed it all to memory.”

Freeland describes Vrba’s experiences with a keen eye and his ability to process what he experienced as preparation for his escape to warn his fellow Jews. Freeland relies on the work of two prominent Holocaust historians, David Cesarini and Nikolaus Wachsmann in his retelling of the Final Solution and integrating those events into Vrba’s story. Freeland’s chapter entitled, “Kanada,” provides insights into Vrba’s methodology as he was assigned to an area where he would separate and quantify the possessions of prisoners upon their arrival at the camp. Later, he would be assigned to greet and assist in separating arrivals as they exited the cattle cars. Freeland’s detail is remarkable as even toothpaste tubes were used to hide diamonds. These experiences helped him master the numbers that Nazi extermination produced.

Freeland’s overriding theme rests on Vrba’s obsessive drive to escape. No matter where he found himself or what condition he was in he was always thinking and plotting. Once Freeland turns to April 1944 and Vrba’s tortuous journey out of the camp we see a young man wise beyond his years realize his dream of warning Jews that deportation to Auschwitz meant death. He had watched the SS decide who was to live and die with a flick of the finger, now after witnessing so much he decided he could sound the warning that obviated the process.

Freeland describes how observant Vrba was and focuses on the idea that no one could be trusted, even the few he felt comfortable with. He partnered with Fred Wetzler, another Slovakian Jew and two others in planning and carrying out their departure and what emerges is an amazing story that provides many insights into the resistance to the Holocaust and how difficult it became to educate Jews as to what their fate would become.

Interestingly, Vrba took a course in “escapology” from Dimitri Volkov, a Russian POW who had escaped from Sachsenhausen, another Nazi concentration camp. The key was to carry no money or food and live off the land. Further, a watch was needed, as was a knife which could be used for suicide because capture meant torture and death. Salt and matches were also needed and most importantly, trust no one.

As Vrba’s journey evolved he develops a deep resentment towards the Jewish Councils that had cooperated with the Nazis and facilitated their methodology in deporting Jews to the death camps. Freeland notes that Vrba would carry these feelings for the rest of his life particularly involving the actions of Rezso Kasztner, the controversial head of the Budapest Jewish Council who blocked the dissemination of Vrba and Wetzler’s report of what transpired in Auschwitz.

Once the escape proved successful Vrba’s mission was to prepare a report that would support newspaper and eyewitness accounts of what transpired in the death camps. This discussion is one of the most important aspects of the book as the report is retyped, translated, and printed and eventually reaches the desks of Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and a series of high Vatican officials. Freeland analyzes this process as to why little or nothing was done, concluding that politics, anti-Semitism, and years of denigrating Jews by church officials was responsible.

Freeland’s rendering of Vrba’s life continues after the war as he lived in Israel, London, and eventually settled in Vancouver. He became a successful research scientist, married twice, and had two daughters. Despite professional success following the war he was haunted by bouts of paranoia, anger, lack of trust, and an inability to gain true acceptancefor what he tried to achieve during the war. As the years passed on he never wavered in his belief that the Jews knew nothing of Auschwitz, despite evidence to the contrary. Despite this in the end his report was pivotal in saving 200,000 Budapest Jews from extermination as President Roosevelt warned the Hungarian government in late 1944 as to the consequences if more jews were slaughtered. But this only occurred after a frustrated Vrba and Wetzler decides to print and disseminate their report by themselves when others would not cooperate.

According to Blake Morrison in his The Guardian review of 8 June 2022, “Vrba had three core beliefs about Auschwitz: that the outside world didn’t know about the “final solution”; that once they did know, the allies would intervene; and that once Jews knew, they would refuse to board those fateful trains. Without in the least diminishing Vrba, Freedland disproves all three. Word of the Nazis’ “cold-blooded extermination” had got out at least 18 months before his escape. Allied policy was inhibited by inertia and antisemitism (“In my opinion a disproportionate amount of time of the Office is wasted on dealing with these wailing Jews”, wrote someone in the Foreign Office in London). And whereas younger Jews believed Vrba, the majority were with philosopher Raymond Aron, who said: “I knew but I didn’t believe it. And because I didn’t believe it, I didn’t know.”

Freedland has written a remarkable account combining the history of the Holocaust with the life experiences of a young man, who will emerge emotionally damaged from the war suffering from PTSD. Despite Vrba’s flaws as a person his commitment to warn Hungary’s Jews stands as a tremendous accomplishment despite the negative opinions of a number of Holocaust historians toward his work. The book is well written, an absorbing read, and an important contribution to the literature of the Holocaust.

No photo description available. — (Rudi Vrba)

THE POPE AT WAR: THE SECRET HISTORY OF PIUS XII, MUSSOLINI, AND HITLER by David I. Kertzer

June 24, 2022June 24, 2022szfreiberger Holocaust, Nazi Germany, World War II Leave a comment

For many, one of the most polarizing figures of the Second World War was Pope Pius XII. Up until 2019 the Vatican archives did not allow access to most of the documents related to Pius XII’s actions before and during the war. Under the current leadership of Pope Francis, the archive has been made available to historians and has brought about a reassessment of Pius XII’s relationship with Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in addition to his attitude toward the Holocaust.

Until the opening of the archive, historians were of two minds; either Pius XII was too close to Mussolini and Hitler and did not confront them publicly concerning their murderous atrocities and said and did little in relation to the genocide of European Jewry or he did as much as he could in balancing the protection of the Catholic clergy in Germany and working behind the scenes to assist Europe’s Jews. It is understood that Pius XII was in a very difficult position and Pulitzer Prize winning historian, David I. Kertzer, the author of THE POPE AND MUSSOLINI: THE SECRET HISTORY OF PIUS XI AND THE RISE OF FASCISM IN EUROPE has availed himself of the opportunity to consult newly released documentation and has written what should be considered the definitive source in dealing with Pius XII in his latest work, THE POPE AT WAR: THE SECRET HISTORY OF PIUS XII, MUSSOLINI, AND HITLER. Kertzer’s book documents the private decision-making that led Pope Pius XII to stay essentially silent about Hitler’s genocide and argues that the Pope’s impact on the war is underestimated – and not in a positive fashion. As David M. Shribman writes in the Boston Globe, for Pius XII “silence was easier, safer, more prudent. Silence was deadly.”*

Kertzer’s presentation is excellent as it is grounded in his previous research and his recent access to the newly opened Vatican archive. The book is clearly written and tells a story that many have heard before, however it is cogently argued, and he has unearthed new material which may change or reinforce deeply held opinions by many when it comes to Pius XII. Kertzer makes the case that Pius XII’s obsessive fear of Communism, his belief that the Germans would win the war, and his goal of protecting church interests motivated him to avoid angering Mussolini and Hitler. The Pope was also concerned as the book highlights, that opposing Hitler would alienate millions of German Catholics.

Kertzer does an excellent job tracing Pius XII’s relationship with Mussolini; the evolution of Italy’s military failures which negatively impacted Hitler’s plans, i.e.; Italy’s failed invasion of Greece; and Hitler’s growing dissatisfaction with Mussolini. Kertzer relies heavily on the comments and diaries associated with foreign ambassadors to the Vatican, particularly those of England and France and their negative commentary related to the Papacy. The descriptions of these ambassadors focused on Pius XII’s lack of action, periodic support for the war effort in Italy, and obsession with German power. Further, Kertzer focuses on Pius XI’s opposition to Mussolini’s adoption of racial laws targeting Italian Jews. Despite this opposition, Pius XII would not comment on the increase in Italy’s oppression of Jews and racial laws in general.

(Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler)

Pius XII’s predecessor, Pius XI had been somewhat of a thorn in the side of fascist dictators. He saw Mussolini as a “buffoon,” and believed that Hitler was a danger to all of Europe. Both dictators feared he was preparing an encyclical denouncing Nazi racism and anti-Semitism and feared that the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli who would succeed him as Pontiff would try and talk him out of it, as well as any other anti-fascist comments. When he died a few days before he could release his encyclical, Mussolini and Hitler experienced a great deal of relief.

Kertzer correctly points out that Mussolini never felt comfortable around priests and complained bitterly about Pius XI barbs. He was worried as he was aware that Hitler viewed him as a role model and did not want the Pope’s commentary to ruin their relationship. Once Pius XI died and was replaced by Cardinal Pacelli criticism was reduced and if any were made it was done in private. Hitler’s main complaint concerned articles in the Vatican’s daily newspaper, Osservatore Romano that focused on Nazi anti-Catholic policies from arresting and beating Catholic priests to closing Catholic schools in Germany. Pius XII immediately made overtures to Hitler to relax the pressure on German Catholicism and refused to comment publicly on Hitler’s seizure of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, in addition to remaining quiet as Hitler’s pressure on Catholic Poland over Danzig escalated.

Mussolini resented Pius XII’s diplomacy as his ego would not allow anyone to detract from his role as the dominant figure in Italian politics. Kertzer’s comments concerning Mussolini, his son-in-law Count Galeazzo Ciano, the Italian Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Nazi Foreign Minister, and countless other figures is insightful and at times entertaining, but it does not detract from the danger and derangement of these individuals.

In a very important chapter, Kertzer provides details of secret meetings between the Papacy and Germany before and after the war began. The conduit for Germany was Prince Philip von Hessen whose goal was to bring about an accommodation with the Papacy and keep the Pope out of politics. Hitler resented the clergy’s meddling in German domestic politics and wanted the Pope to refrain from comments on Nazi racial policy. Pius XII’s, his main goal was to protect the German clergy and Catholicism in general, but he expressed the belief that an honorable religious peace was achievable, and in all instances talks should be held in secret.

Mussolini Speaking in Public — (Benito Mussolini)

Once the war began Pius XII refused to break his silence concerning Nazi aggression arguing he would not endanger the church’s situation in Germany. This argument was repeated throughout the war, but he promised he would pray for the Polish people or whatever nationality was endangered by a Nazi onslaught. Morality, rights, honor, justice were always met with methods, practicality, tradition, and statistics on the part of the Vatican. When priests were sent to concentration camps Pius XII did nothing, no statements, no audiences with the Pope in Rome etc. The only diplomacy Pius II seemed to engage in was to try and talk Mussolini out of following in Hitler’s footsteps as it was clear, even to Il Duce, that Italy was totally unprepared for war.

One could argue that Pope Pius XII evolved in his approach toward fascism and the war. At first, at least up to 1943 he waffled between neutrality and making general statements structured “as not to be offensive by either side.” At first the Papacy believed the Germans would win the war and once it was concluded Pius XII was convinced that in a few years the anti-Catholic policies would dissipate and fade away. As the war progressed and when it was clear that the Russians had broken out of Stalingrad and made their way westward, and that the United States and England would invade Italy, Pius XII’s attitude shifted. Pius XII priority was to prevent allied bombing of Rome and Vatican City (particularly as England was bombing Turin, Milan, and Genoa) which led to messages to President Franklin D. Roosevelt who responded with a demand that Mussolini be replaced, and Italy should drop out of the war. Pius XII’s other priority was to warn allied leaders (apart from Stalin) that Communism was as large a threat to Europe as Nazism, and he worked to manufacture a peace agreement with the US and England and organize in response to the Soviet threat to all European Catholics.

Count Gian Galeazzo Ciano, (1903 11 January 1944), Foreign Minister of Fascist Italy — (Italian Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano)

As to the Holocaust, Pius XII received increasing numbers of reports of Nazi atrocities and extermination camps. This information came from reliable sources and churchmen like Father Scavini, an Italian military chaplain that the Pope had great faith in. However, Pius XII refused to publish details contained in these reports to stay on the good side of Hitler and Mussolini. The only area that the Pope did complain about to the German and Italian governments was the application of racial laws to those he considered Catholics – baptized Jews and the children of mixed marriages. Pius XII accepted advice that there was no confirmation of Nazi atrocities and was told not to even use the word, “Jew.” In relation to the Vatican’s attitude toward the roundup of Italian Jews right under their noses provoked little response as Kertzer quotes Lutz Klinkhammer, the foremost historian of Germany’s military occupation of Italy, “it is more than clear that all their efforts were aimed above all at saving the baptized or the ‘half-born’ from mixed marriages,” the Jews who did not fit this category would wind up dying at Auschwitz.

Pius XII’s actions are clear even when he was approached to try and mitigate the actions of Roman Catholic priest Jozef Tiso, the head of the Slovakian government who was about to send 20,000 Jews to Polish concentration camps. When a move was made to try and send 1000 Jewish children to Palestine, Pius XII did little to facilitate this plan as he was anti-Zionist and he argued that he held little sway with the Nazis and their minions and any Papal criticism risked provoking a backlash against the church in German occupied Europe. No matter the circumstances Kertzer’s conclusions that Pius XII’s messaging was always weak and vague to protect the church’s interests.

Pius XII’s silence and overall inaction emerges as the dominant theme of Kertzer’s work. It is clear that any other conclusion is a result of Church propaganda, obfuscation, and analysis that conveniently avoids the facts. Kertzer’s work is to be commended as it should put to bed once and for all the truth concerning Pius XII’s role during World War II.

*David M. Shribman, “A Deadly Silence: Assessing the Moral Failings of Pope Pius XII during World War II,” Boston Globe,” May 26, 2022.

Pope Pius XII (Courtesy of PerlePress Productions)

THE BETRAYAL OF ANNE FRANK: A COLD CASE INVESTIGATION by Rosemary Sullivan

May 29, 2022szfreiberger Genocide, Holocaust, Nazi Germany Leave a comment

annefrank1-800x605 — (Ann Frank House, Amsterdam, the Netherlands)

For decades, the most famous work of Holocaust literature, THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK was required reading for many children. It is an important contribution to Holocaust literature in that it is one of the few primary sources that exists for a family’s day to day existence hiding from the Nazis. Anne Frank’s papers were discovered after World War II and were edited by her father Otto, the only family member to survive extermination and published the diary in Dutch in 1947, and later in English in 1952. There are many aspects of Anne Frank’s story that are shrouded in mystery, among them is the exact date of her death in Bergen-Belsen, probably some time with only weeks remaining in the war in Europe.

Another of the unknowns is how Nazi authorities came to learn the Frank family was in hiding. The question of who led Karl Josef Silberbauer, an SS Sergeant and two Dutch detectives on August 4, 1944, to Prinsengracht 263, a narrow building along one of Amsterdam’s canals to the Franks where the family was in hiding. Rosemary Sullivan’s latest book, THE BETRAYAL OF ANNE FRANK: A COLD CASE INVESTIGATION attempts to answer the questions surrounding the seizure and deportation of the Frank family resulting in the death of all except Otto Frank.

In 2016 Dutch filmmaker Thijs Bayens, and journalist Pieter van Twisk opened a further investigation with a team of Dutch investigators, historians, and researchers that included 27 year FBI veteran, Vince Pankoke. The team would be headed by Pankoke who treated the Anne Frank house as a crime scene, not a museum. “With the help of newly designed software that used artificial intelligence to seek out data, patterns humans might miss, Pankoke and his ‘Cold Case Team’ spent several years combing through historical records, and police files interviewing witnesses and their descendants and analyzing theories.”*

The results of the investigation coincided with the release of Sullivan’s monograph and created quite a stir resulting in the Dutch publisher suspending further dissemination of the book. One might ask what is gained by questioning how Anne Frank and her family were seized accomplishes. In a world where many argue that “it cannot happen here” all one has to look at is the increasing ideological divisiveness and the growing popularity of authoritarianism in the world today to see that it can occur and may be well on the way to doing so at present.

One of the main reasons for the creation of the Cold Case Team is that the Netherlands had a reputation of tolerance whereby Jews could seek shelter after the rise of Adolf Hitler. Despite this reputation the Netherlands transported more Jews to the death camps in the east than any other western European country. Of the 140,000 Jews living in the Netherlands 107,000 were deported, and only 5,500 returned. One of the questions Pieter van Twisk asks was why was the number so high?

Sullivan has authored a book that can be divided into two parts. The first, encompassing about one-third of the narrative focuses on rehashing the history of the Frank family and those involved in keeping the family safe in the annex behind the business at Prinsengracht 263, and the plight of Dutch Jewry upon the arrival of the Nazis. The role of a Dutch Judenrat (Jewish Councils), deportations to Buchenwald, the role of the SD Jewish Affairs squad known as unit IV B4 which centered on collaboration, and Kopgeld, bounty hunters, and executions are all explored. Any attempt by the Franks to emigrate to the United States ran into the wall constructed by the State Department led by Breckenridge Long, an anti-Semite who did all he could to thwart the entrance of European Jewish refugees into the United States. By 1943, Amsterdam was declared Jew free. There is little that is new or surprising, but it forms a useful lead into the second section which focuses on the organization, make-up, and implementation of strategies to try and figure out who turned in the Franks to the Nazis or was there another explanation as to how the Nazis came upon the annex.

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Sullivan describes how the Cold Case team implemented modern law enforcement techniques that were not available after the war. Strategies such as behavioral science or profiling, forensic testing, artificial intelligence defined as computer systems able to perform such tasks as visual perception, speech recognition, translation between languages, and decision making were all employed. Scientists from Xomnia, an Amsterdam based data company that offered to provide the foundation for artificial intelligence that Microsoft agreed to develop further, stated that at some point the program algorithms should be able to predict what or who was likely a suspect.

Perhaps Sullivan’s most useful chapters center around the details of the investigation. The team was amazingly thorough in its approach. It investigated numerous theories and concluded that of the 27,000 Jews in hiding in the Netherlands, one-third had been betrayed. By the end of the investigation more than 66 gigabytes of data in the form of more than 7500 files was created. In so doing Sullivan concludes that suspects such as Job Jansen, who in the early on had denounced Otto Frank to the Nazis and is convinced his Jewish wife is having an affair with Otto Frank was innocent. Then there is Nelly Voskuijl, a Nazi whose sister was helping to hide the Franks. Another is Willem van Maaren, the warehouse manager who might have been after bounty money. Anton “Tanny” Ahlers, a currier for the NSB was a committed Nazi and bounty hunter but he like the others was not responsible for the seizure of the Frank family. Lastly, there is the case of Anna van Dijk, who from 1943 on laid traps to uncover where Jews were hiding, but there is little evidence that she turned the Franks in – but she was executed at the end of the war for turning in at a minimum 68 Jews and possibly over 200.

In the end the Cold Case Team singles out a Jewish notary Arnold van den Bergh and member of Amsterdam’s Jewish Council may have passed information about the Franks to the SS in order to save his own family. Sullivan’s exploration into the Cold Case spends the most time analyzing the role of van den Bergh and his relationship with Otto Frank and argues that the most logical culprit was the former notary for the Dutch Judenrat, but Vince Pankoke is not so certain, so we must conclude that the investigation was less of an unsolved mystery and more of a well kept secret on the part of Otto Frank.

As Ruth Franklin points out, “those who went into hiding were perhaps even more at the mercy of others. Anne was unusual in having a stable hiding place together with her family; most Dutch Jewish children were sent into hiding alone, since they were easier to hide than adults. There are many stories of abuse and exploitation of these children by their hosts, in addition to the larger risks that hiding entailed. Picture all those dots on the map: any one of those people could potentially have betrayed the Franks.” Or as journalist Kathryn Hughes concludes, Regardless, what Sullivan does manage to do is assemble a compelling picture of what it was like to live in Amsterdam under Nazi occupation: here is a collection of increasingly isolated individuals, hungry, terrified and daily faced with impossible choices about whether to save themselves, their loved ones, or the nice family that lives next door. And it is this moral vacuum that follows in the wake of antisemitism, rather than any particular “perp,” that betrayed Anne Frank.**

*Ruth Franklin, “Beyond Betrayal,” New York Review of Books, May 5, 2022, 20.

** Kathryn Hughes, “The Betrayal of Anne Frank by Rosemary Sullivan review – who tipped off the Nazis? The Guardian, 2 February 2022.

For an excellent discussion for the subject at hand consult Jane Eisner, “Searching for Anne Frank’s betrayer, finding a moral dilemma,” Washington Post, January 21, 2022.

Otto Frank’s business premises, Prinsengracht 263 (in the middle), around 1947. — (Anne Frank House, Amsterdam, the Netherlands)

THE LIGHT OF DAYS: THE UNTOLD STORY OF WOMEN RESISTANCE FIGHTERS IN HITLER’S GHETTOS by Judy Batalion

April 20, 2021April 20, 2021szfreiberger Holocaust, Nazi Germany, World War II Leave a comment

(Crowds of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, Poland, 1942)

The role of women during the Holocaust be it their experiences in the death camps, participants in the resistance, and the effect of Nazi atrocities on the families of victims has not received the attention it should. Five years ago, Sarah Helms’ Ravensbruck: Life and Death in Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women was published and provided numerous insights into what women experienced in the camps, but their role in the resistance has not received the serious treatment that needed to be afforded until now with the publication of Judy Batalion’s THE LIGHT OF DAYS: THE UNTOLD STORY OF WOMEN RESISTANCE FIGHTERS IN HITLER’S GHETTOS. In her remarkable book Batalion has created a narrative that follows the exploits of a number of women who fought back against the Nazi genocide. Batalion focuses on Renia Kuklieka, who was a courier for the Zionist youth organization; “Freedom,” Zivia Lubetkin, a “Freedom” leader in the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB) and the Warsaw Ghetto uprising; Frumka Plotnicka, a “Freedom” comrade who led the fighting organization in Bedzin, Poland; and Vladka Meed, who rescued countless people from the Warsaw Ghetto and other acts of bravery and genius. There are numerous other courageous women that Batalion brings to the reader’s attention and they all exhibit an unimaginable degree of courage, tenacity, and empathy as they confronted their situation on a daily basis.

Batalion tells her story through the eyes of numerous women through their personal experiences, first trying to maintain a degree of normalcy once the Nazis invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. They would continue their work with Zionist Youth organizations working to gain passage to Palestine, trying and manipulate the Judenrat, and training their members for what appeared to be a dismal and dangerous future. Batalion examines the lives and personalities of these women and explores their character as they evolved into strategists, leaders, and carrying out dangerous missions. Their bravery was unquestioned, and their work was rewarding in that they chose to return to Poland rather than emigrate to Palestine in order to contribute as much as possible to derail the Nazi machine.

(Renia Kukiełka in Budapest, 1944)

The origin of the book stems from Batalion’s research into the life of Hannah Senesh, one of the few female resisters in World War II not lost to history. While examining material in London’s British Library she came across a book written in Yiddish, FREUEN IN DI GHETTOS (WOMEN IIN THE GHETTOS) published in New York in 1946. Up until that time Batalion and numerous others were unaware how many women were involved in the resistance effort, nor to what degree. The stories recounted in the book speaks of women who engaged in violence, smuggling, gathering intelligence, committing sabotage, and engaging in combat. This exposure to the heroism of these women led Batalion to pursue her narrative that resulted in LIGHT OF DAYS.

The core of female exploits originated from “female ghetto fighters”: underground operatives who emerged from Jewish youth group movements and worked in the ghettos. These young women were combatants, editors of underground bulletins, and social activists. The role that stands out is the contribution women made as “couriers,” disguised as non-Jews who traveled between locked ghettos and towns all across Poland smuggling people, cash, documents, information, and weapons, many of which they obtained themselves. In addition, women fled into the forests and enlisted in partisan units, carrying out sabotage and intelligence missions.

Batalion has the uncanny ability to tell the personal stories of her protagonists uncovering their emotions, strengths, and private thoughts. She presents the horrors of ghetto and camp life that the Nazis perpetrated very clearly. She traces European anti-Semitism dating to the 19^th century that culminated in Nazi atrocities. German malice and sadism are on full display as they carried out Hitler’s Final Solution which made Renia and her compatriots sick and haunted from what they witnessed. For Jews anything they did or said at any moment could result in execution of themselves and their families. Jews faced a dilemma even if they escaped the ghetto as their families would be eliminated in retaliation. The options women faced were limited; stay and try to protect the community, run, fight, or flight.

Batalion accurately and poignantly describes life in the Warsaw, Bedzin, and Vilna Ghettos. She examines people’s fears and coping strategies that were developed in order to survive from soup kitchens, autobiographical writings and meetings to share experiences, including medical care and cultural activities. Batalion presents a vivid portrait of the role women played in the preparation for the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. She delves into the acquisition of weapons, explosives, and other necessities including the training that women had undergone. The end result was a disaster from a military point of view, but it provided Jews with self-respect as they achieved revenge against the Germans as they killed over 300 Nazi soldiers suffering over 13,000 deaths of their own. Renia and others escaped to continue their goal of revenge against the Germans.

The resistance organizations that women were a part of were not uniform in their beliefs and strategies. Batalion explains their differences from the left wing Zionist groups to the more religious Akiva organization. The key for these groups was that they were led by individuals mostly in their late teens and late twenties who were committed to seeking vengeance against the Nazis. Batalion’s presentation allows the reader to get to know Renia who by 1944 was only 19 years old and her compatriots on a personal level in addition to their exploits on the battlefield.

Perhaps Batalion’s most powerful chapter, “The Courier Girls” offers a description that humanizes the women in a world of atrocities and genocide. Her details of their preparation and missions are eye opening and for them life affirming. Another important chapter, “Freedom in the Forests – Partisans” is well thought out as life in the forest was extremely difficult but the partisans accomplished a great deal. They set up a village of underground huts which included printing and weapons capabilities, medical attention, a communication network, the accumulation of clothing and food, in addition to the work of the couriers.

Forged papers of Zivia Lubetkin. (Courtesy Agnes Grunwald-Spier) — (Zivia Lubetkin)

At times reading Batalion’s account is literary torture as she describes the use of sex as a means of exchange for survival, torture, rape and other perversions fostered by the Nazis. This material is difficult to digest unless you realize the perpetrators were a version of animals. How Renia and others did not lose their minds is beyond my comprehension.

Batalion’s narrative is somewhat bifurcated as she relates the actions of couriers, events in the ghettos, partisans in the forest, and preparation by all groups in seeking revolt and revenge against the Nazis. On the other hand, her story is one of endurance and survival as she probes the daily travails women faced under the most ominous conditions including imprisonment, torture, and the constant fear of death. A case in point is Renia’s capture resulting in constant torture and deportation to Auschwitz. Her story is one of amazement as she would survive the camp by escaping, traveling across Slovakia, Hungary and Turkey and eventually arriving in Haifa, Palestine on March 3, 1944.

Batalion’s epilogue is important as she delves into why women were left out of the “history of resistance” for so long. She focuses on the politics of the newly created state of Israel, how their role was viewed by American historians, the image of women needed to fit the policy and personal goals of the survivors, and why so many women “self-silenced.” It is clear that an incalculable number of women suffered from survival guilt, nightmares, and post-traumatic stress syndrome after the war, and Battalion’s recounting of their role is important to set the historical record straight, but also to clarify the emotions the survivors felt and how the next generation views what they accomplished. I agree with Sonia Purnell’s comments in her April 6, 2021 New York Times book review that a simpler narrative with fewer subjects might have been even more powerful.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (public domain photo) — (Warsaw Ghetto, 1942)

THE RATLINE: LOVE, LIES, AND JUSTICE ON THE TRAIL OF A NAZI FUGITIVE by Philippe Sands

August 10, 2020August 10, 2020szfreiberger Biography, Genocide, Holocaust, Nazi Germany, World War II Leave a comment

The twisting tale of the career and flight of Otto von Wächter sounds like something that would make a superb film or a TV box set. Photo / Horst Wächter

(Otto Wachter)

Who was Otto Wachter?

According to the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal at the conclusion of World War II he served as Hans Frank, the Governor-General of occupied Poland’s deputy, the Governor-General of Krakow, and a number of other positions in the SS and SD in Austria. He was indicted for mass murder of at least 100,000 people, if not thousands upon thousands more. Wachter is the subject of Philippe Sands latest book, THE RATLINE: LOVE, LIES, AND JUSTICE ON THE TRAIL OF A NAZI FUGITIVE, the “Ratline” was an organization that Wachter and the likes of Adolf Eichmann, Joseph Mengele, Klaus Barbie, and countless others used as an escape route out of Europe as the war ground to a close. Sands builds upon his previous book EAST WEST STREET: ON THE ORIGINS OF ‘GENOCIDE’ AND ‘CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” were he wove together the story of his quest to uncover family secrets in the Ukrainian city of Lviv in the 1940s and the Nuremberg tribunal after World War II. The route Sands describes, known as the “Ratline” was popularized in Frederick Forsyth’s THE ODESSA FILE, and thoroughly researched by Uki Goni, an Argentinian researcher in his book, THE REAL ODESSA and other monographs exploring how Nazis were able to avoid justice, the most important of which was Gerald Steinacher’s NAZIS ON THE RUN. These works among many other titles uncover the role of the Vatican, the governments of Argentina, the United States, Switzerland among a host of countries each for its own reasons assisted former Nazis in their attempts to avoid prosecution.

Sands, a British and French lawyer, and Professor of Laws at the University College London is the author of seventeen books dealing with international law, many of which focus on the concept of genocide. In his latest effort Sands traces the life of Otto Wachter, with special emphasis on his marriage to Charlotte Wachter, as he rose through the Nazi Party ranks, first in Vienna and later in Germany landing in his positions in occupied Poland. After recounting his subjects’ Nazi career, he follows his attempts to avoid justice as he meanders his way employing the Ratline from 1945 to 1949. Sands research is noteworthy as one of his main sources was through the relationship, he established with Wachter’s fourth child, Horst. Through a series of interviews that resulted in a 2013 article for the Financial Times, Sands was able to extract a great deal of documentation dealing with the family from his mother’s diary, copiously kept from 1925, except at times when it came to the atrocities her husband was involved in. But what must be kept in mind during Sands’ quest to decipher the life of a man on the run, and his wife’s attempts to help him; can be described as some sort of a “Nazi love story!”

(Philippe Sands, author)

Horst was adamant during their many conversations that his father had done nothing wrong. Horst argued that “his father was not responsible for any crimes…Rather, he was an ‘endangered heretic’ in the National Socialist system, opposed to racial and discriminatory actions applied in the German-occupied territories of Poland and Ukraine.” His father was “an individual, a mere cog in a powerful system, part of a larger criminal group.” Horst did not deny the horrors of the Holocaust and saw the process as criminal, but he did not think his father’s actions were criminal.

Sands does a remarkable job piecing together Wachter’s personal life and SS/SD career. He takes the reader through the important events in Europe culminating with the Anschluss (union) between Austria and Germany and the role played by Horst’s god father Arthur Seyss-Inquart who served as Chancellor of Austria after it was taken over by Hitler’s forces. Following the Anschluss, Wachter’s career advanced rapidly as he starts out as a lawyer in the Criminal Division of the SD ending up as Governor of Krakow were he implemented the creation of the Jewish ghetto for the city, the execution of numerous Poles, and advanced the process of Jewish deportation to the concentration camps.

Sands interest in Wachter is deeply personal as his grandfather, Leon Bucholz who lived in Lemberg, Galicia was deported from the city to his death during the Holocaust. Between 1942 and 1944 Wachter was installed as Governor of the District of Galicia and supervised the city of Lemberg and probably signed the death warrant of Sands’ grandfather.

Horst Wächter: ‘I do not return the objects for me, but for the sake of my mother.’

The most important aspect of the book revolves around the 1945-1949 period. This period comes to light once Horst agreed to make available his mother’s archive. After the material was digitized Sands had access to “8677 pages of letters, post cards, diaries, photographs, news clippings, and official documents.” This required a painstaking act of reconstruction and interpretation that evolved over a number of years. The result was detailed information how Charlotte Wachter assisted her husband even though she believed she was under surveillance. Charlotte Wachter was the only reason Otto survived along with the vast network that supported him in the Austrian mountains in the Lower Tauerin area.

What becomes clear as the narrative unfolds is no matter how much documentation to the contrary concerning his father’s culpability in the death of thousands, Horst refuses to accept his guilt. No matter how many interviews with people who were involved, scholars etc., Horst remained adamant. As Otto Wachter came down out of the mountains and left for Rome in late April 1949, he took on the identity of Alfredo Reinhardt and would make his way to a monastery in Rome called Vigna Pia where Catherine Wachter sent money, clothes, and other survival necessities. After living in the monastery for three months, Otto Wachter would die of a liver ailment leading to Sands’ investigation of how he died. Horst was convinced that he was poisoned, probably by the Soviet Union, or perhaps by the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, or even the Americans.

The last third of the book is spent analyzing Otto’s death. What emerges is documentation of the role of a number of individuals, two of which stand out, Bishop Alois Hudal and SS Major Karl Hass. It is clear from the evidence that Hudal was a focal figure in the escape of a number of important Nazis employing the “Ratline” and contacts within the Vatican. Hass is an example of former Nazis that were used by the United States after the war in the developing Cold War with the Soviet Union. Interestingly, he would escape and turn up working for the United States Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) on Project Los Angeles in Rome recruiting spies to be used against the Italian Communist Party. It is clear from the evidence that Otto was in contact with Hass right before he died. Horst was certain that Hass might have been the double agent who murdered his father.

(Alois Hudal)

As Sands investigates the last three months of Otto’s life, he pieces together his movements and who assisted him with life’s necessities and the forged documents to survive. What cannot be questioned is that Charlotte Wachter, Nazi acquaintances, and others from the Vatican were Otto’s prime enablers, many of which facilitated the “Ratline” for others like Walter Rauff, Joseph Mengele, Franz Stangl, Erich Priebke, Karl Hass, and others. In effect Otto Wachter walked in the footsteps of his “old Nazi comrades.”

Sands has composed a remarkable historical detective story, bordering on a “thriller.” Through the life of the Wachters, the Nazi “Ratline” comes into full focus, in addition to how Otto Wachter’s actions, a man who oversaw numerous atrocities during the war was not accepted by his son Horst. As a result, the book has a great deal to offer about the mindset of a Nazi murderer, but also the lengths people went to, to allow him to maintain his freedom.

(Otto and Charlotte Wachter and their children))

HITLER: A GLOBAL BIOGRAPHY by Brendan Simms

January 18, 2020January 18, 2020szfreiberger Biography, European History, Holocaust, Nazi Germany, World War II Leave a comment

(Adolf Hitler)

At the outset of his new biography of Adolf Hitler, Brendan Simms points out that by 2000 over 120,000 books and articles have been written about the Nazi dictator. The question then must be asked, why another? Simms states in his introduction to HITLER: A GLOBAL BIOGRAPHY that conjecture concerning Hitler’s motivations that resulted in his rise to power, reorienting Germany toward Nazi domestic and foreign policy, and his ultimate defeat that have been examined since the 1950s by the likes of Alan Bullock, Joachim Fest, Ian Kershaw, and more recently by Volker Ulrich and Peter Longerich and others needs to be reexamined. Simms seeks to build on the works of others, integrating many of their viewpoints as he puts forth his own revisionist interpretation of his subject in the tradition of A.J.P. Taylor.

Simms is a political scientist and professor of international relations and his newest book is his first attempt at biography and though it is a comprehensive look at Hitler from World War One onward it does lack coverage and interpretation of his life before that period. What Simms is concerned with are three interrelated new claims. First, Hitler was primarily obsessed throughout his career with Anglo-American and global capitalism, not the Soviet Union and Bolshevism. Second, Hitler held a negative view of the German people arguing that even when purged of Jews and other “Untermenschen” he reflected a sense of inferiority in comparing the “volk” with “Anglo-Saxons.” Thirdly, historians have focused too much on Hitler’s negative view of eugenics regarding the Jews and other undesirables and not enough on what he saw as positive eugenics, which was designed to elevate the German people to that of his British and American rivals. According to Simms, historians “have missed the extent to which Hitler was locked in a worldwide struggle not just against “world Jewry” but with the Anglo-Saxons.” These claims or themes are hammered home by Simms on each and every page no matter the topic he is engaged in and it comes across as quite repetitive. The book is extremely detailed and well thought out but could have been written in a more concise manner.

To Simms’s credit he offers a great deal for the reader and other historians to consider and analyze and ultimately question. One of Hitler’s core beliefs according to the author is that the reason the United States developed into superpower status was because of “living space.” America had almost an entire continent to settle and when Native-Americans got in the way they were removed. This large area provided an enormous supply of natural resources and areas to resettle millions of immigrants who arrived from Europe in the 19^th and early 20^th century. For Hitler, it was German emigrants leaving the Fatherland who arrived in the United States who were greatly responsible for the American dream. They brought skills that were needed ranging from farming, industrial labor, and their intellect. By leaving Germany and emigrating across the Atlantic they left a void at home and an inferior population. During World War One, Hitler became impressed with American soldiers in large part because they were made up of a significant number of Germans. For Hitler, it became a civil war, German emigrants fighting against Germans who remained in the Fatherland which explains as the reason Germany lost the war. This argument is carried forth throughout the 1920s and 30s leading to and including World War Two.

Image result for photo of allied bombing of germany during wwii

(Results of Alloied fire bombing of Dresden)

Simms provides documentary evidence of Hitler’s beliefs through speeches, private conversations, and an analysis of MEIN KAMPF and THE SECOND BOOK which Hitler authored. Simms provides numerous examples to support his claims as Hitler constantly worried about the power of the United States and during the late 1930s he wondered what approach Franklin D. Roosevelt would take as appeasers dominated English and French foreign policy. In developing his strategy during World War Two, Simms argues that Hitler at the outset was not concerned with race and viewed the Jews as hostages to keep the United States out of the war and it was only after Washington signed the Atlantic Charter in 1941 that Hitler decided he needed a quick victory in the east and the implementation of the Final Solution. Hitler feared that the Charter was similar to Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points during World War I which he believed was a propaganda victory that resulted in the Germany agreeing to end the fighting. Further, to argue that race had little impact up until 1941 in the plight of European Jewry is a bit specious at best. All one has to do is look at Hitler’s speeches and writings to realize that race was the core of his attitude toward Jews. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws, Hitler’s constant comparison of the treatment of Jews and black colonial soldiers, Kristallnacht, Einsatzgruppen in Russia, and numerous other examples reflect the Hitler’s obsession with race.

Simms’s argument that the entrance of the United States into the spelled the death knell for Jews as he no longer needed them as hostages is hard to accept. All one has to do explore the evolution of Hitler’s views on Jews from the writing of MEIN KAMPF throughout the 1930s to the unwritten order to eradicate European Jewry surrounding the Wannsee Conference, and further events to see that argument that if the United States had not entered the war, Jews might have lived is fallacious at best.

As far as the British are concerned, Simms’s Hitler fawns over the empire, its colonial policy, and the sturdiness and bravery of its people. Hitler repeatedly tried to make peace or ally with England throughout the 1930s, the years leading up to World War Two, and the war itself. His strategy as is argued by many was to invade the Soviet Union as a means of pressuring London into making peace. This is not really new, but it is interesting to explore Simms’s presentation as he has culled an enormous amount of primary and secondary materials which are part of an exceptional compendium of sources and footnotes in presenting his arguments.

(Allied bombing of Romanian oil fields)

Simms does present all of the salient facts regarding Hitler’s life and the course of German history between World War I and II. The author presents a detailed account of Nazi Party politics from the 1920s through the assumption of power in 1933 and beyond, Hitler’s impact on German federalism and Bavaria in particular, German culture, the removal of any threats to Hitler’s power, i.e., Night of the Long Knives, Hitler’s fears of the restoration of the Habsburg Monarchy, the machinations of Nazi foreign policy using the excuse of self-determination, and many other issues. The difference is his approach. He seems to enjoy exploring Hitler’s thought patterns and how he reached his conclusions. A good example is how he believed England would switch sides after being defeated and support the Nazis as the Austrian Empire had done with Prussia in 1866 after the Battle of Sadowa. Another example is how Hitler viewed the Slavs in relation to Germany, much in the same way that the United States viewed Native-Americans. Slavs were to be moved out of the Ukraine to create Lebensraum for Hitler and provide Germany with the breadbasket of the Soviet Union as well as natural resources as the removal of Native-Americans had for Washington.

Historians seem overly concerned with watershed dates. For Simms it is the May, 1938 crisis over Czechoslovakia as anti-appeasement factions in the British Foreign Office and in MI6, aided by Czech and German social democrat exiles triggered a crisis in order to torpedo Neville Chamberlain’s policy of conciliation toward Germany and to mobilize resistance to Hitler. It was claimed that Hitler had mobilized German forces and was planning an imminent attack. This was not the case as an embarrassed Hitler retreated – the result would be the Munich Crisis and the ceding of the Sudetenland in September 1938 to assuage Hitler’s ego. As a result of the crisis Hitler began to realize that a rapprochement with England was not likely and he would rush the Czechs completely by March 1939. Hitler did make another attempt to seek a deal with London over a “rump” Poland after the Danzig crisis and the German invasion in September 1939, but they turned him down. According to Simms, Hitler never forgave them, and the “blitz” or Battle of Britain was a direct result as was the invasion of Russian in June 1941 as a means of showing Churchill he was isolated and should make peace, not because they were Bolshevik as many have argued. In fact, according to Simms, Hitler held a certain admiration for Stalin for the way he ruled and how his troops fought so fiercely against the Nazis.

(Allied liberation of Auschwitz)

As to the idea that Nazism was socialism as Simms proports one must realize Hitler’s coopting of German “big business” for rearmament was designed as a drive to war, resulting in increased profits for Krupp and Thyssen and other industrialists rather than improving working conditions and wages for workers – this is not socialism. According to Richard J. Evans in his review in The Guardian, on September 27, 2019, a great deal of what Simms argues is untenable, and though I agree with this assessment I would not go as far as his statement that Simms’s work should be ignored by serious students of the Nazi era as it is provocative and in parts interesting. I would say though that what Simms argues should be taken with a grain of salt, but his work should not be dismissed out of hand.

Evans review article follows as it appeared in The Guardian, September 27, 2019.

Hitler by Brendan Simms and Hitler by Peter Longerich review – problematic portraits

Was Hitler obsessed with destroying capitalism? Did he drive policy ‘even down to the smallest detail’? Two new biographies fall into different traps

Richard J Evans

“Hitler was a socialist,” has become a mantra for the “alt-right” in the US as it seeks to discredit Democratic politicians such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. Dinesh D’Souza’s book The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left expounded this claim at length in 2017, comparing points of the Nazi party’s 1920 programme with policies put forward by modern Democrats. So, anyone who claims to be a socialist is really a Nazi who wants to set the country on the road to totalitarianism, war and genocide. Obamacare is only the start; enslavement and death will be the end. It’s a claim that has spread through the Republican party and has been echoed by Donald Trump Jr.

Now it has found its way across the Atlantic in the form of Brendan Simms’s new book, the central argument of which is that “Hitler’s principal preoccupation throughout his career was Anglo-America and global capitalism, rather than the Soviet Union and Bolshevism”. Everything in his life can be traced back to this obsession. “Hitler wanted to establish what he considered racial unity in Germany by overcoming the capitalist order and working for the construction of a new classless society.” Throughout his career, “Hitler’s rhetoric” was “far more anti-capitalist than anti-communist”. Simms asserts “the centrality of the British Empire and the United States in the gestation of Mein Kampf”, just as he claims of Hitler’s long unpublished Second Book that “the main focus of the text was the overwhelming power of Anglo-America, and especially of the United States”.

Hitler has been the subject of a string of major biographies, from those by Alan Bullock and Joachim Fest to, most recently, Ian Kershaw and Volker Ullrich. But they have all, Simms writes, got him wrong: “The extent to which he was fighting a war against ‘international high finance’ and ‘plutocracy’ from start to finish has not been understood at all.” Now he has come along to set us all right.

There are good reasons, however, why the overwhelming consensus of historical scholarship has rejected any idea that Hitler was a socialist. Simms emphasises the violence of Nazi stormtroopers in the early 1930s against German conservatives rather than socialists and communists, but in fact the latter made up the overwhelming majority of the 200,000 or so opponents of Nazism who were thrown into concentration camps during Hitler’s first year in power. As for Mein Kampf, it was the threat of communism and socialism that dominated the political part of the text, in which Hitler expounded his belief that “the Bolshevisation of Germany … means the complete annihilation of the entire Christian-western culture”. In similar fashion the main focus of the Second Book was not the US, which is mentioned only on a handful of pages, but the need for “living-space” in eastern Europe and German claims to Italian South Tyrol.

The central planks in the socialist platform have always been the belief that capitalism oppresses the mass of the people and needs to be overthrown, or at least moderated and regulated in their interest. Simms claims that “what Hitler did very effectively” was “to nationalise German industrialists by making them instruments of his political will”. But this was not economic or financial control exercised in the interests of the people, nor did Hitler nationalise industry or the banks in any meaningful sense of the word. Rather, he set a political course for rearmament as part of his drive to war that pushed industrialists such as Thyssen and Krupp to devote ever more resources to arms production in the interests of increasing their profits. The result was heightened exploitation of the workers, as the overheating of war production forced them even before 1939 to work longer hours without extra pay. This was not socialism, whatever else it was.

Simms’s reduction of virtually all the major events in the history of the Third Reich to a product of anti-Americanism even extends to episodes such as the nationwide pogrom of the Reichskristallnacht in November 1938, when thousands of Jewish businesses and synagogues were destroyed and 30,000 Jewish men put into concentration camps. Apparently this was caused by “Roosevelt’s hostility to Hitler and his defence of the Jews”. The invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 was launched in order “to strike at Britain, and to deter the United States … Barbarossa was to be a campaign of conquest and annihilation, for reasons more to do with Anglo-America than the Soviet Union itself”. Even the Holocaust, we should not be surprised to learn, was “primarily driven … by his fear of Britain and the United States”.

All this is nonsense, and indeed, Simms is forced to contradict himself by the sheer weight of the evidence against his thesis. The invasion of the Soviet Union was, he concedes, “part of a much broader ideological war against Bolshevism”: “a struggle between two world views”, as Hitler put it. He admits that Hitler “was not completely opposed to all forms of capitalism”, only “unproductive” ones: in other words Jewish-owned capital, as with, for example, department store chains – he forced Jewish owners out but did not close them down. Interviewed by the Daily Express correspondent Sefton Delmer in 1931, Hitler said: “My job is to prevent the millions of German unemployed from coming under communist influence.” He did not even mention America in outlining his foreign policy aims to the journalist.

Time and again, Simms uses rhetorical sleight of hand to underscore his claim that the US was the main focus of Hitler’s foreign policy by referring to “Anglo-America” when he is in fact just talking about Britain. He quotes a proclamation from Hitler saying on New Year’s Day 1944 that the war was being fought against the “Bolshevik-plutocratic world conspirators and their Jewish wire-pullers”; a few lines later this has become in Simms’s words a struggle against “Anglo-American imperialism”, and all mention of the Bolsheviks has disappeared. Yet Hitler was quite clear about the issue: “Everything I do is directed against Russia,” he said.

Simms claims that Hitler was engaged in “a war of annihilation against Anglo-Saxons, the Jews and their Bolshevik puppets”. But there was no war of annihilation against “Anglo-Saxons”; indeed, it was striking that when in 1944-45 the camps were emptied as the Red Army advanced, British, American and French prisoners were relatively well treated, while the evacuation of Slavs and the few remaining Jews turned into death marches in which tens of thousands were murdered.

The military conduct of the war in Simms’s view was also directed against the US: even “the drive on Stalingrad, like the entire war, was primarily driven by the contest against Anglo-America”. But contrary to Simms’s denial of the fact, Stalingrad held a special significance for Hitler because of its name. Pursuing his claim to the centrality of “Anglo-America” in the Nazi war effort, Simms declares that the capitulation of axis forces in Tunisia in May 1943 “was a much greater disaster than Stalingrad, with well in excess of 130,000 Wehrmacht personnel taken prisoner, many more than had entered captivity” at Stalingrad. But these are phoney statistics. In fact, about the same number of German and allied troops were captured on both occasions (around 235,000). The real difference was in the numbers killed – some 50,000 or so in Tunisia, anything up to 750,000, more than 10 times as many, at Stalingrad. It was north Africa that was the sideshow, not Stalingrad, the effects of which on the strategy and morale of the Germans were shattering.

Hitler’s genocidal antisemitism was based on the paranoid belief that Jews were racially pre-programmed to engage in subversion and conspiracy, whether from the communist and socialist left or from capitalist “profiteering”. In the end, Simms hasn’t written a biography in any meaningful sense of the word, he’s written a tract that instrumentalises the past for present-day political purposes. As such, his book can be safely ignored by serious students of the Nazi era.

For a real biography by a genuine specialist on Nazi Germany, we have to turn to Peter Longerich’s book, ably translated from the German by Jeremy Noakes and Lesley Sharpe. He makes it clear that Hitler was politicised by the “Jewish-Bolshevik” revolution in Munich in 1918-19, and from early on in his career courted business in search of funds; his 1932 speech to industrialists in Düsseldorf, which Simms dismisses as unimportant, was a turning point in this respect. As for socialism, Hitler simply defined it as “love for one’s nation” and used anticapitalist rhetoric cynically in an effort to win over the working classes to his cause. Longerich dismisses the idea, currently fashionable among German historians, that Hitler created a classless “People’s Community” after he came to power, rightly stressing that social divisions and inequalities continued unabated during the Third Reich. It was communism that he was obsessed with destroying, not the US, which is mentioned only once in the book before we get to page 700.

Longerich delivers some penetrating analyses of the documentary record and takes good account of such recent publications as the diaries of Alfred Rosenberg and Joseph Goebbels. Unfortunately, however, in focusing relentlessly on Hitler himself – his politics and his decision-making – he falls into the trap of ascribing virtually everything that happened in Nazi Germany to his will, portraying him as an all-powerful dictator who drove policy “even down to the smallest detail”. This is not new, of course; it’s a reversion to the historical perspectives of the 1950s, and it’s not borne out by the evidence.

Even according to Longerich’s own narrative, Goebbels, with a very few exceptions, was the driving force in cultural policy, Hjalmar Schacht in economics (at least until 1937), Heinrich Himmler in coercion and repression, Robert Ley in the creation of the “Strength Through Joy” scheme for workers’ leisure, and so on. Given Hitler’s chaotic working habits as described by Longerich, one should not expect otherwise. And on occasions such as the formulation of the Nuremberg race laws, Hitler is described in this book as reacting to events rather than shaping them. You don’t have to go to the opposite extreme of regarding Hitler’s policies as the product of structural pressures in the regime to realise that Longerich’s bold claims for Hitler’s responsibility for everything are overdone. He claims, for example, that Hitler’s willpower kept the Germans going to the bitter end of the war, but a mass of recent research shows there were many other reasons, from fear of the Gestapo and terror of the Red Army to strong allegiance to German national identity. In the end, therefore, neither of these books comes close to supplanting the standard modern biographies by Kershaw and Ullrich.

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