Raul Hilberg
Transcript
- (film slating)
- Well, Raul Hilberg , I would like to know why studying
- the Holocaust, you took such a deep interest
- in the transportation problem.
- Because as a matter of fact, we know what happened.
- We have the result. We know that the six million
- Jews were killed by the Nazi.
- We know that at least 2/3 or more than 2/3
- of this 6 millions had been shipped with the railroads,
- with trains, in order to be killed when they were shipped
- in the killing centers.
- It seems that result is enough important in itself,
- I would like to know--
- as a matter of fact it is a question that you
- asked to yourself when you start your beautiful articulate
- answer--
- railroad problem, why should one be interested in this?
- Well, from the start, that is to say, 30 years ago when
- I began the work, I was interested
- not merely in the result that everyone knew,
- but in how that result came about.
- And for this reason I set myself the task
- of finding out the various means that
- were employed by the Germans for the destruction of the Jews.
- In those days, the only thing to do
- was to look at documents coming through Nuremberg,
- and I did do that.
- But after a while, even after being in Alexandria, Virginia,
- which at that time held the largest
- collection of German documents, I
- became aware of a very peculiar gap in the picture.
- There was nothing, almost nothing, about the railroads.
- And the very fact that this material
- was missing in such large collections that contained
- a great deal of information about the party,
- about industry, about the army even, about many other sectors
- of German life, that very fact made
- me a stubborn searcher for material about the railroads.
- And after I began this search, it occurred to me more and more
- that there was indeed a great deal of significance
- in the operation of the railroads themselves
- in this particular process.
- Because everywhere and everyone had emphasized--
- the emphasis was on, quite simply,
- the people that were shooting--
- the SS, the Einsatzgruppen, the personnel of the camps,
- the Gestapo.
- And very little emphasis, very little light
- was shed on the people behind the scenes who
- did 90% of the work that led to the final result.
- And it occurred to me that the railroads had been involved
- to a very considerable extent because transport was not
- a simple thing.
- And then it occurred to me that the railroads, insulated
- as they were from ideological activity,
- isolated as they were from the rest of the bureaucracy
- by the very fact that they were a corporate entity
- within a ministry, that if the railroads were
- involved to the same extent and with the same effectiveness
- and with the same relentlessness as other agencies,
- that that was very significant.
- Because then we would have a new view of a totalitarian system.
- And that is what led me to searching over three
- decades for railroad material.
- Yes, but I understand what you mean,
- but one could say is that after all these were merely
- technical problems.
- As you say there is no ideology behind.
- But this was a technique.
- And how does this technique can give deep insight
- in what is a totalitarian apparatus.
- In actual fact, if you look at the operations
- of any other agency, including even the Foreign Office, if you
- look at the Interior Ministry, if you look at the Finance
- Ministry, if you look at the banks,
- if you look at the armies which were pushing into Russia,
- they were, all of them, solving technical problems.
- The destruction of the Jews occurred
- in the process of technical problems being solved.
- This was not only the property of the railroads.
- Everyone was approaching the destruction
- from the same vantage point-- a problem that had to be solved.
- This specific technical problem.
- This specific-- the substance of the result
- emerged out of the individual tiny solutions
- to individual tiny problems.
- So there is no difference between the railroads,
- in that respect, and the most extreme SS units in action.
- Yes.
- And could you elaborate more?
- Could you say-- could you go into the details
- and explain what you have found?
- About the railroads?
- Yes.
- Well, let me say to start with that I
- wish I had found out more.
- Because something quite unique, or maybe quite unique
- but remarkable about the railroads
- is that the documentation of the railroads
- is not to be found in the Federal Archives of Germany,
- just as it was not included in the Alexandria document
- pile or the Nuremberg document pile
- or any other collection that was accessible.
- So that to start with one must say that all we
- have from the railroads are miscellaneous
- materials, some of which--
- most of which come from Poland or the Soviet Union.
- And looking at these handful of materials,
- one must figure out what happened,
- which is a very difficult task.
- Because all my work, quite frankly,
- is very, very simply the solution of a gigantic jigsaw
- puzzle.
- What it comes to is if you can imagine a jigsaw
- puzzle with many thousands of pieces,
- if one has the pieces then one or two missing,
- one can still see the totality, one can see the gestalt.
- But what do you do with a segment of the jigsaw
- puzzle in which you have only three or four pieces,
- and you must somehow draw the total picture
- from that small handful.
- And that's the problem with the railroads you see.
- But even so, I think we have made a major start
- towards unlocking the mechanisms which operated there
- and which were ultimately being employed against the Jews
- in terms of the two major components--
- the financial one and the operational--
- the traffic and the operations.
- And to that extent, I think we now
- have certain basic principles, which I believe we know.
- One of them is, of course, that Jews were transported
- as any other person or cargo.
- OK.
- (film slating)
- The two components, financial and operational,
- represent two segments of the structure of the Reichsbahn
- the traffic division which was staffed
- by accountants and jurists, the operational division which
- was almost entirely composed of engineers.
- The significance of the financial
- and the basic principle of the financial operation
- was that, in principle, the Reichsbahn
- would ship any cargo, whether it was inanimate cargo or people,
- in return for payment.
- They were ready to ship.
- They were ready to ship, in principle, any cargo
- whatsoever if they were paid.
- Now to be sure there were priorities.
- But in principle, they would ship people--
- whether from concentration camps,
- whether to concentration camps, whether Hitler
- Youth going on vacation, whether German soldiers
- with the munitions, or whether industrial cargo--
- if they were paid.
- This was a service organization.
- And therefore the basic key, price controlled key,
- was the Jews were going to be shipped to Treblinka,
- we're going to be shipped to Auschwitz Sobibor,
- or any other destination, so long as the railroads were
- paid by the track kilometer--
- so many pfennigs per mile.
- And the basic rate was the same throughout the war.
- As everybody's-- it was--
- Everyone.
- No details.
- No difference with children under 10
- going at 1/2 fare, children under 4 going free.
- And the payment had to be made for only one way.
- [INAUDIBLE], of correspondence.
- It originated correspondence which
- went on for more than a year between various representatives
- of various agencies, including military, railroads,
- and Foreign Office--
- a most incredible correspondence which
- has been preserved in the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz.
- These documents exist?
- These documents exist because they
- have been found in the records of the Finance Ministry.
- And they didn't yield for one year.
- No, they would not yield because, after the fact,
- after their Jews had been shipped out,
- they couldn't see any good reason for paying.
- The SS you mean?
- Yeah, well not only the SS, see one
- couldn't see any good reason for making available the currency.
- So therefore, one simply wrote it off.
- It was an intra-office transaction.
- But the interesting thing is that each budget,
- railroad budget or any other agency budget,
- was nevertheless kept separately.
- So it is like one agency having dealings with another, payment
- has to be made from the army to the railroads.
- In this case, it wasn't.
- Why was it the army which was involved in Saloniki, directly?
- The army was involved directly.
- It was involved in Saloniki and it was involved in France.
- Because the German army itself administered these territories.
- These were territories under military rule
- as opposed to several of other forms of government--
- civilian, reichskommissariat, and so forth.
- So this was direct really by the military.
- So they had the ultimate responsibility
- for making payments because any SS man there
- was under the military commander,
- at least for purposes of such things--
- payments jurisdiction.
- Yes, it's fantastic.
- But were they not aware or astonished
- because it seems that there was another a problem too.
- As a matter of fact, most of the Jews
- were shipped in the freight cars, no.
- The most amazing thing about it is
- that, notwithstanding the fact that Jews were shipped
- in freight cars, the railroads still
- billed the SS as though the shipment had
- been taking place in regular passenger cars third class.
- In other words, there was no difference in the payment.
- Indeed there was no difference in the various offices.
- The offices that ship the Jews were civilian traffic.
- So the key principle was that if people
- were being shipped by whatever means,
- then passenger traffic sections of the railroads
- were responsible for the shipment.
- And they billed the SS accordingly.
- The substitution of freight cars was done only
- because of the shortage of passenger cars,
- and because, quite obviously, no one would insist
- that Jews, of all people, should be shipped in passenger cars
- when on arrival they would be gassed anyway.
- Yes.
- This means they were even ready to earn some money.
- That's correct.
- In other words, one can see it in one of the key documents,
- [INAUDIBLE] Auschwitz was engaged
- in the actual scheduling of the trains.
- And there you'll see the scheduling people involved
- were those that dealt with passenger traffic,
- rather than with freight traffic.
- It was the same man who was in charge.
- Absolutely.
- Always passenger traffic, always passenger traffic.
- So even if the Jews were--
- The basic conclusion then is that whereas the Jews were
- being booked as people for purposes of payment,
- they were then shipped as cattle to get to their destinations.
- Even though all of the people that
- were involved in the operation were passenger traffic people,
- yet eventually this made no difference,
- they were shipped in the cattle cars
- to Auschwitz, to Treblinka, and to other camps.
- Of course no one of them was, after that war, went on trial.
- No there is no one at all who was actually placed on trial.
- Although various proceedings were initiated,
- none ever were concluded to my knowledge.
- Nor do I think any of them will be.
- Yes.
- It's because they say that the transportation were only
- a means to an end.
- Everyone insists upon this very point.
- Even someone I was talking to in Frankfurt who, as it happens,
- was involved in putting up some signals, equipment
- in Auschwitz.
- But I did not come to see him because
- of any awareness of his past.
- Indeed, I only went there because I
- was looking for some materials that I thought he might have--
- extraordinarily kind, helpful, considerate, person
- now in his 60s.
- We went to a discussion of Auschwitz.
- We went to a discussion of the role of the railroads
- in that operation.
- And he was in no sense trying to hide anything at all.
- He was giving me instruction on how to read documents.
- But at one point he said, the railroads
- are but a means to an end.
- It is the uniform comment which runs
- like a refrain throughout the system.
- And nobody has to tell them to say this.
- It is a spontaneous statement.
- But when they say that--
- this will lead us to the second aspect to the operation.
- I mean did this Jewish trains, these trains which
- were carrying Jews to extermination camps,
- did they have a name?
- How were they called?
- Well, the astonishing thing is that when
- you deal with the operation of the system itself,
- you now come to grips with the most substantive aspect
- of the entire operation--
- two of them-- putting together the cars,
- that is to say the mobilization of equipment itself.
- The wagons.
- The wagons.
- And secondly, making available the time on the track which is
- called scheduling.
- Now both were scarce.
- Cars were scarce, and time was scarce.
- I thus thought for many, many years
- that there must have been a priority
- system into which these particular trains would fit.
- And I was looking for such a priority system.
- But whenever I saw one, I didn't see any designation
- of Jewish trains anywhere.
- And of course, that was my feeling.
- How would a German administration
- place these particular death trains
- into a category of trains without admitting on paper
- that this is what they were doing?
- Thus we find the most paradoxical situation of all.
- Jewish trains, that is to say death trains,
- were leaving for their destinations without priority,
- for the most part--
- without priority-- there are certain exceptions,
- especially at the end of the war--
- and yet, this does not mean that these trains were left behind.
- The one conclusion that I drew--
- and this is perhaps the most significant of them all--
- no Jew was left alive for lack of transport.
- Somehow or other these people managed
- to find time, special time, or to find cars
- wherever they could get them to get the job done.
- And no one in this system failed in that task.
- We have talked with at least two men-- one is Speer
- who was Armament Minister.
- And of course, he was in charge of the transportations,
- at least of the Wehrmacht.
- And the other one was a man with the Reichsbahn, Schelp.
- And they say with a kind of contempt
- when one asked this precise question, how did you do this?
- Was there a shortage of cars?
- And there were bombings.
- Just lift their shoulders and they say this was not
- important-- hundreds Jewish trains or thousands--
- we had such an apparatus of operations
- that this didn't count.
- This was their answer.
- From a certain perspective, they are of course right.
- Whenever you ask any person who is in charge of a very, very
- large operation how to account for something happening
- in one sector of it, he will say look
- I'm in charge of so much, why are you asking me
- about so little.
- This is not important.
- However, it is not that person, it is not Ganzenmúller himself,
- except on one or two occasions, who was asked to approve
- of these transports.
- No.
- The request always came from an SS captain, or somebody
- of that rank, to his opposite number in the railroad system--
- little people, comparatively little people,
- dealing with other comparatively little people.
- And it is these little people who
- had to obtain the transports from the bigger ones.
- And to the little people it was important.
- And as in any organization, when somebody comes forward
- and says, I want so much.
- I want this and that.
- The question is why do you want it.
- Is your request more important than another request?
- Should it receive priority?
- And the significance is that in every case,
- these people did succeed.
- And of course, on one or two occasions Ganzenmúller himself
- had to help out.
- And that means that the issue was important
- enough so that when, for example, traffic was tied up,
- he was called upon by none other than Wolff,
- the chief of the personal staff of Heinrich Himmler's office,
- to make possible the transport of people to death camps.
- Ganzenmúller was a technician.
- He was a secretary with the transport.
- Yes.
- He was he was the state secretary.
- He was the highest ranking civil servant
- in the administration of the railroads, quite obviously.
- And he would, I'm sure, regard his task
- as having been the technical one.
- But what a technical task it is to fight a war,
- to destroy a people, and to do all this under bombs,
- with sabotage, with shortages.
- What a technical task.
- Here again, we find that history itself
- as a whole mess of technical tasks.
- And they fulfilled it.
- They certainly did.
- Yes.
- But now to come back to the denomination of these trains.
- How did they do it?
- Because these trains, they must have been--
- That's right.
- You are saying that they had no very special name.
- And the fact of the matter is that--
- and here I must go into some detail.
- Yes.
- The civilian trains, in general, were of two kinds.
- There were those that went at specified times
- whether or not there were any passengers.
- This is the usual experience any traveler
- has when he wants to go from one place to the other.
- He is trained to travel on a regularly scheduled train.
- But there were other trains which
- would not travel at all unless there were enough requests--
- in this case, the request would come from the Gestapo--
- unless there were enough passengers
- to justify the dispatch of a train.
- Such a train was called a special train-- a sonderzug.
- It is still a special train.
- To this very day the Deustch at Bundesbahn
- uses this designation for such trains.
- The designation is not limited to wartime or the Nazi regime.
- It's a general, customary, and usual term that
- is being used to this very day.
- Today still there are sonderzus.
- So a sonderzug is any train which
- travels between regularly scheduled trains
- on a special schedule.
- That's the definition.
- So a sonderzug-- Hitler's own personal train was a sonderzug.
- The death train was also a sonderzug.
- There were all kinds of sonderzugs.
- It was a train which is smuggled in--
- It is interpolated.
- That's correct.
- It is allotted time between regularly scheduled trains.
- And the problem is to find the time.
- This is the problem the railroad people call the tempo.
- Because of course, there must be a certain mileage or kilometers
- between trains going in the same direction
- so that one doesn't slam into the other.
- And this means one has to find time,
- which is a technical task again, but a rather difficult one.
- Most especially when you consider
- that time tables were set for each Reichsbahndirektion
- for each sector.
- And that these various timetables
- had to be glued together so that a train could go over
- a long distance from one point to the other.
- And that took a great deal of discussion,
- a great deal of coordination, a great deal of thought.
- It's a very difficult task as a matter of fact.
- Well, it isn't a very simple task.
- No, it isn't.
- It's complicated.
- If not terribly difficult, it is certainly complicated.
- And they did that.
- So in both scheduling and car allocation
- and locomotive allocation they had to make a lot of decisions.
- This was not a one simple decision, OK go.
- This was a lot of decisions.
- On the-- I have another question.
- Who decided to ship, let's say, a transport of Jews
- coming from--
- [TONE]
- (film slating)
- Yes, I would like to know.
- Because it's a problems that I had when I was in Poland.
- Who decided to-- who took the decision
- to ship a train of Jews?
- Let's take Polish Jews.
- Because I think it's clearer, because it
- was more concentrated.
- Either to Treblinka, or to Sobibor, or even
- sometimes to Auschwitz.
- Because I had the feeling that sometimes,
- the decision was taken at the very last moment.
- That they shipped the train, but they
- didn't know exactly which camp, which
- extermination camp to send it.
- Well, here again, the decision flow
- begins in Berlin, where the substantive matter
- is how many Jews are going to be shipped from where
- in a certain direction.
- We have, for example right here, the record,
- one of the documents of the [GERMAN]..
- There were three regional offices
- of the Reichsbahn for purposes of making schedules.
- Depending upon the direction in which the train was going,
- the decision would be made in between Generalbetreibsteitung
- ost or [GERMAN] or sud.
- Now, this is an ost betreibsteilung.
- So here, we see a document dated the 16th of January, 1943.
- And if we turn the page, we will see that here are already
- certain transports being scheduled
- for the end of the month, and later on February,
- with precise date of departure and precise destination listed.
- So that, for example, a transport
- leaving Berlin on the 2nd of February to Auschwitz,
- or leaving Bialystok for Treblinka
- on the 9th of February is already
- on the list as a result of a discussion that was
- held on the 16th of January.
- 16 of January and they foresee already for--
- And they already foresee through--
- --how long in advance for?
- How many?
- Well, actually, I would say an entire month.
- Yes.
- An entire month.
- And sometimes, it would take longer.
- This does not mean that this schedule, which was not really
- a final schedule, was to be treated
- as though it were locked in.
- You will notice, for example, that in some cases,
- the time of departure is listed, in other cases it is not.
- Because they simply haven't figured out at this
- point how they are going to push these special trains
- through between regular schedules.
- And they were going to have to do it
- in some subsequent meeting yet.
- This had to be flexible.
- They had to be very flexible.
- And as the war went on, the flexibility
- became a greater requirement.
- For example, there might be bombings, or more often,
- railroad repairs or expansions.
- As a consequence of which, at the very last moment,
- trains might be shifted, let's say, from Sobibor
- to Treblinka or wherever.
- And this might be done within days
- of the final transport leaving.
- Thus flexibility was a key to--
- I go right to--
- --the operation.
- --this flexibility.
- Can one imagine that the final decision
- would have been made in some cases
- not by Berlin, but by the people of the--
- Absolutely, well--
- --of the railway themselves on the spot.
- Oh, yes.
- Now, you must remember this.
- Even though General betreibsleitung ost
- located in Berlin, one should not
- refer to that particular office as, quote, "Berlin,"
- because General Betreibstleitung west
- was not located in Berlin and sud was not located in Berlin.
- So it's coincidental that ost is in Berlin.
- It's because Berlin itself is facing east.
- Yes
- So in short, here, we are already
- dealing at a regional level with transport.
- And finally, we may be dealing with transport
- at a subregional level, or even at the local level, where
- the final scheduling orders, Fahrplananordnung, are being
- drafted, pursuant always to the basic structure laid down
- in the basic directive.
- Yes.
- So we are dealing here with a decision
- first within the transport ministry
- itself to deputize one of the three General betreibstleitung
- depending upon where the category of transports
- are going, whether it shall be sent west, south, or east.
- All right.
- This one is obviously east, so there it goes.
- That's the first decision.
- The second decision is taken right here.
- Where, when, and at what time, perhaps,
- are these transports going to leave.
- To which camps?
- And may I say, these are not only Jewish transports,
- there are a whole list of transports here.
- They're not dealing with only Jewish transports.
- And now, we can tell the purpose, or rather
- the nature of the passengers from the designation
- of the transport, which is in a column right here.
- And we can see that, for example, DA--
- and this comes to the question that you asked earlier--
- refers to Jews who are quite definitely outside of Poland.
- And Jewish transports outside of Poland
- are called DA transports.
- DA.
- What is the meaning of DA?
- Does one know?
- There is only speculation about it.
- And I've heard the speculation, David,
- but I have had no confirmation of it from any German document.
- David?
- It might be.
- But this is speculative.
- And even those people in the railroads are just speculating.
- It's astonishing that people who could
- have been using this designation all of the while
- are now unsure what its origin is.
- But notice that DA is about the only designation which
- is not immediately obvious.
- VD, Volksdeutsche, that's very clear.
- RM are Romanians, that's pretty clear.
- PO are Poles, that's very clear.
- And later on, we even see PJ, which
- I believe to be Polish Jews, Polnisch Juden
- But DA, which is one of the original--
- PJ is Bialystok, Auschwitz, yes.
- Yes, yes.
- Probably is.
- Yes.
- Now, we always see that PJ, or in some cases,
- we see another designation, which is less clear, especially
- later on--
- well, we just don't know what it means.
- Or rather, we do know what it means,
- but we don't know why it is that particular designation.
- There is here a very rudimentary attempt
- to disguise the nature of the transport.
- But it's extremely--
- Very rudimentary.
- Very rudimentary.
- It's basically not hard to figure out, even
- if just by process of elimination,
- that these are Jewish transports.
- DA is a Jewish transport.
- Berlin to Auschwitz.
- There are no Germans going to Auschwitz.
- So obviously, it's a Jewish transport.
- DA15, February the 2nd, 1943, going to Auschwitz,
- very clearly.
- And how did you yourself come to these findings?
- I found the document, which is dated the 16th of January,
- for the first time in 1968, when I was visiting Germany,
- in a folder, which had been sent there from the Soviet Union.
- Indeed, this item and others, aggregating
- about 100 pages or more, came from a railroad station
- in Minsk.
- This itself is fascinating, because here, we
- see the extent to which the information was spread
- throughout occupied Europe.
- The very fact that this particular document,
- which is the Rosetta Stone from which we learned all about
- the operation of the railroads could have reached a point
- as far east as Minsk, which is farther than most
- of the transports went-- they only went to Auschwitz,
- or Treblinka, or Sobibor--
- is indication of the way in which the circulatory system
- of this railroads worked.
- That everybody got to know everything,
- almost of necessity.
- Because trains move, they are not stationary.
- You're not operating a school system here,
- you're operating a moving system.
- Yes.
- So we found this, or I discovered it, in Germany.
- And that it not to say that I knew
- what it meant at that point.
- Most particularly because right on top,
- I could see a designation, PW, which mystified me.
- PW would mean?
- Well, now I know it means Personenwagen.
- But this is just precisely the point that we made before.
- I could not believe, at the beginning,
- that a person in charge of Personenwagen in the General
- betreibstleitung ost would be signing such a document,
- when everybody, after all, knew that these people were
- being shipped in cattle cars.
- So the very fact, you see, that I had known beforehand
- that the transports were actually organized
- in cattle cars stopped to me, for a long time,
- from realizing that people in charge of Personenwagen
- passenger cars, were going about their usual business
- of scheduling these trains.
- So it took me for a while to realize this.
- And we don't have ready-made organization charts, either.
- They have to be put together from the documents.
- So we finally, or I finally discovered,
- in this case, who [? Jacobi ?] was, what his role was.
- And he is one of the decision-makers
- in General betreibsleitung ost
- He decides the matter of car allocation in point of fact.
- That is to say, how many cars are needed,
- for how long they are needed.
- He is not the scheduling man.
- That is somebody else.
- That's a man called [Personal name]
- in that particular General betreichstleistung.
- Nor is he still another man, who is
- dealing with the coordination of all transports insofar
- as they require coordination with the military.
- And that's [Personal name] that's a third person.
- Now, all of these are bureaucrats in a single office.
- They get together, they have a long discussion,
- they have their own Jewish expert.
- And finally, they come out with a document like this,
- which is hammered out.
- Incidentally, the special Jewish expert in General
- betreibsleitung ost is a man called Klemm,
- spelled K-L-E-double M.
- Bruno?
- I believe it is Bruno.
- I spent a lot of time disentangling
- three different Klemms until I decided on him.
- He is missing.
- And it is almost impossible now to even know
- which precise office he held within the betreibsleitung.
- That itself, however, is significant, because the man,
- even though he chaired conferences
- to hammer out timetables like this,
- was not sufficiently high ranking
- to be listed in the railway directory,
- which is a pretty thick publication,
- and which has a lot of names in it.
- You mean the railway directory of today?
- No, I'm speaking of the one in 1942 or 1943,
- which is a very, very rare document these days.
- Very few copies remain.
- One can see one in Frankfurt.
- And one can see one in Ludwigsburg.
- And there is allegedly a third one in the hands of one
- of the railway people.
- And that's it.
- That's just a list of the important official
- and, you know, officials in the various posts
- that they held at that time.
- Not a secret document at all, but very scarce.
- Yes.
- And Klein is not listed.
- He's not.
- Not listed in any organization chart,
- which would make it possible to figure out
- whether he worked in the context of the military division
- L, which by the way, stands for [GERMAN],, I believe,
- or whether he perhaps was in one of the other two
- that might also qualify.
- But you have to remember that there
- was a system of flexibility also organizationally
- that one person would take the place of another
- if need be to do the job.
- And tell me about your breakthrough.
- My breakthrough was entirely intellectual.
- I had this particular Rosetta Stone for quite a while.
- Rosetta Stone, yes.
- And I studied it, still not knowing
- what to make of some of the items of information in it.
- And then I observed a [GERMAN],, that is to say,
- a scheduling order issued by a local [GERMAN],,
- or [GERMAN] with the same number that I found here.
- And then it occurred to me--
- that is to say the same number of a particular train
- that I found here.
- And then it occurred to me that, of course,
- this is a preliminary document.
- This is a preliminary order.
- It is a general framework.
- And that the process doesn't stop there.
- Because this specific train must be routed through a scheduling
- order to its destination, making sure that it would traverse
- a certain route, that it will pass through certain railway
- stations.
- And every station and route has to be notified
- of the train passing through and the approximate time when
- it will do so.
- So here, you have another information flow,
- which is illustrated in this Fahrplananordnung, which
- is from the General betreibsleitung ost the railway
- system contained in the [GERMAN],,
- those districts of Krakow, Radom, Warsaw, Galicia,
- and Lublin.
- This one is dated 15 September, 1942.
- So that's not the one on which the breakthrough was made.
- But here, we see another puzzle.
- Even though this is not a new find,
- the Polish government has had this for a while.
- Some of these things were published many years ago.
- Yet I suspect that they were not completely understood.
- I was puzzled by the number 33, which
- is in the upper left-hand corner of the document,
- and the letter H that follows it.
- I just did not know what to make of that.
- And since I did have organization charts
- of the transport ministry itself,
- I was looking for a number 33 in these organization charts,
- not realizing that that was a futile endeavor.
- Leaving aside the history of the Reichsbahn, which
- accounts for the numbers, 33 is the number
- used by Reichsbahn [GERMAN] in the field
- for that office, which is in charge of scheduling trains.
- So whenever the number 33 appears,
- that is to say that somebody there is scheduling a train.
- If the letter H appears next to it,
- it means that the person normally doing the job
- is not doing it this time, but that somebody
- is doing it for him.
- And if we look at this--
- H is the first letter for which name?
- [GERMAN],, which is an auxiliary, an auxiliary.
- But in this case, it's not a low ranking proposition.
- And here, we see that the scheduling experts
- [Personal name] and [Personal name]
- of the Reichsbahn [GERMAN],, the [GERMAN],,
- the [GERMAN] are involved in a few transports.
- These particular ones are called [GERMAN]..
- Now, that's the district Radom, that's not the city of Radom.
- The district.
- And we see here the number of the order.
- This is number 587.
- That just goes to show you how many of them there were.
- Underneath the very interesting designation, [GERMAN],,
- only for internal use, it's just very regular traffic.
- This traffic?
- Death traffic, of course.
- How do you know that PKR means this train?
- Well, here, again, of course, the only way
- that we know this kind of information for sure
- is that we know that the destination is Treblinka.
- And that the train does not go further.
- So when we consider that an entire train is
- going to Treblinka.
- And there were, after all, several, or rather, many
- of them.
- Then we say to ourselves, this was not
- a train carrying German soldiers on furlough.
- This was not a train carrying Polish workers to a labor camp.
- This was a train carrying people to a particular place,
- the object of which overwhelmingly, primarily,
- in 99% of all cases--
- Whoa.
- --was death.
- And it is by these means that we identify the lettering.
- We do not have a document that says, KR means such and such.
- We have the explanations by Richter,
- who tells us that, indeed, this was a death
- train, thus confirming what we believe and what we know.
- But you don't think that the fact that the secrecy was
- so primitive, so rudimentary doesn't come from the fact
- that, after all, it took place in Poland.
- And in Poland, it's enough to go there today
- to discover that everybody knew.
- Lots of people of the Poles, over the railway,
- that everybody knew.
- (film slating)
- OK.
- Looking at Fahrplananordnung number 587,
- a rather amazing amount of information is packed into it.
- This is the typical order for a [GERMAN],,
- that means one which is especially
- requested for special trains.
- And here, we see that, starting out
- in one ghetto, which obviously is being empty,
- the train leaves for Treblinka.
- We note the time that it takes to get there.
- It leaves on the 30th of September,
- 1942, 18 minutes after 4 o'clock, by schedule, at least.
- Arrives there at 11:24 on the next morning.
- Now, this is within the Radom district,
- going to the neighboring district of Treblinka.
- That is an extremely long ride for such a short distance.
- And you have to keep in mind that a great many transports
- took much longer to arrive at their destination point,
- since when they came from Paris or wherever.
- This is also a very long train, which
- may be the reason that it takes so slow,
- it takes such a long time to.
- There is a number of the cars?
- It says here, well, it's says 50G.
- That's [GERMAN],, 50 of those [GERMAN],,
- freight cars, filled with people.
- That's an exceptionally heavy transport.
- Thousands of people in it.
- According to the people of Treblinka
- today, it was not exceptional at all.
- Well, it may well be that, especially from Radom,
- from near points, they loaded them up as much as 3,000
- on a train.
- Yes.
- You can figure out that if 50, 75--
- They said sometimes even more.
- 100 people, even would be loaded on one single car.
- Multiply it by 50, and that's a very large number of victims.
- Now, once the train has been unloaded at Treblinka--
- and you notice there are two numbers here.
- 11:24, that's in the morning.
- And 15:59, which is to say, almost 4 o'clock
- in the afternoon.
- In that interval of time the train has to be unloaded,
- cleaned, and--
- Actual artifact.
- All right.
- so.
- The real thing.
- It is the real thing.
- Yes.
- Those numbers mean something.
- The signatures mean something.
- It's not a piece of paper.
- It's an order.
- And by virtue of the fact that the order was
- sent from one office to another, the trains
- enumerated here actually left with their victims.
- Actually went.
- Yes, all this was true.
- Yes.
- Again true.
- (film logistics - cut) OK.
- (film logistics)
There is no transcript available for this track
- (film slating)
- The deportation trains were slow, generally speaking,
- or fast?
- Slow by any standard.
- Of course all traffic was slowed down in wartime Germany,
- because trains were being overloaded with cargo which
- automatically required them to travel a little bit more
- slowly.
- And as the war progressed, freight trains
- were limited to approximately 45 miles an hour.
- But Jewish trains, I suspect, had a maximum speed
- of little more than 30 miles an hour.
- And that would be even slower around the bends
- and the curves.
- Furthermore, the priority system insofar as it
- did exist, required that Jewish trains insofar as they
- had priority to [SPEAKING GERMAN]
- to be moving not only slowly but to stop
- when a priority one train had to pass.
- So they would be put on the siding
- while another train would move ahead.
- And this I think accounts for the fact
- that the journey took so long.
- When the people in the sealed cars were suffering so much,
- especially during winters or very hot summer.
- It seemed that from Athens, I remember the Corfu Jews told me
- they were shipped first by sea from Corfu to Piraeus.
- And afterwards by train from Athens to Auschwitz,
- it took nine days, nine nights.
- Or eight nights.
- That may have been the longest train journey.
- The Greek Jews being farthest away from Auschwitz.
- And I would imagine the same for the Jews of Rhodes
- and from Athens itself, and so on.
- This is a bit unusual.
- It was not a problem for the Germans, the slowness of the--
- No.
- The Jewish trains.
- No this was not the problem.
- So long as the Jews were being shipped out in that sense,
- Europe could become free of Jews.
- Their arrival even with 5% or 10% of the passengers
- dying on the way, was not a matter of high priority
- so long as they got there and trains could be unloaded
- and the victims cast.
- They knew they were doomed.
- Yes.
- With that, I talked with a Polish train driver.
- He conducted Jewish trains from Bialystok from Warsaw
- to Treblinka.
- I asked him, did you go fast or slow?
- He told me very fast, as fast as we could.
- And I think it was a projection of his own bad consciousness.
- Well we've all seen the schedules
- which themselves allowed for pretty slow traffic.
- And it's hardly likely that particular train or trains
- that he was driving would have arrived earlier.
- In fact, they couldn't very well have because as you'll notice,
- each segment of the journey had been charted out in advance.
- Yes and if you could summarize in one
- of two formulas what we have said up till now,
- how would you do it?
- What would you say?
- I would say that for me in particular,
- the railroads are a conspicuous and significant element
- in the machinery of destruction.
- That the railroads illustrate that there
- is great destructive potential in an organization that
- operates efficiently and which is
- ready to move with other organizations
- in the same direction.
- Which understands the latent structure of the undertaking,
- and which does not have to be either ordered or even informed
- of precise goals or purposes or aims.
- It is significant to me that the railroads insofar
- as we can now see were not especially indoctrinated
- in Nazism.
- Many of its leading personalities
- would have described themselves as good
- practicing Christian moral men.
- And in their individual home lives, quite probably were.
- In fact, the conspicuous element in the entire operation
- is the sheer absence of Jews becoming
- a special category of operations within this network.
- [Personal name] at the center, Clem in General Betreibsleitung
- ost Schteer in Krakow are examples
- of people who were by nature of the operation beginning
- to specialize in Jewish transports.
- But even they have no special background
- that one can discover.
- And so once again, we see perhaps more
- crassly than in other cases that ordinary men were
- performing extraordinary tasks.
- And that to me is a conclusion that transcends
- the railroads themselves.
- Yes.
- What happened to them?
- Again, I think most of them died a normal death after having
- lived out their lives.
- A few were caught by the Russians.
- I'm not entirely sure whether the Soviets realized
- who they were, but some did disappear
- from Generalbetreibsleitung ost which was apparently
- overrun by the Red Army.
- Still others were being investigated
- by German prosecutors into the 1960s and even 70s.
- But for the most part insofar as we can find them,
- these officials were continuing their careers
- in the post-war world.
- And here I think it may be interesting to note
- that whereas most other organizations
- or agencies of Nazi Germany came to a halt in May 1945,
- whereas ministries were virtually disbanded
- and industries were stopped.
- The railroads reconstituted themselves within a week
- or within at most two weeks after the occupation
- of territory by British or American or French troops.
- They were already at work as though nothing had happened
- in a new postwar world.
- And so these men pursued their normal careers
- and were promoted as they might have been expected to
- and are now well perhaps retired.
- And in a few cases still finishing the careers that
- they had begun then.
- But some of them I think even gain--
- how do you say?
- [SPEAKING FRENCH]
- Oh absolutely.
- The most conspicuous case would be
- Geitmann, who was in charge at one
- time of the reichsbahndirektion in [INAUDIBLE]
- and whose jurisdiction was Auschwitz itself.
- And who became a member of a four man directorate
- that ran the bundesbahn for some years.
- 20 years.
- Not the reichsbahn, the bundesbahn.
- Yeah, the bundesbahn.
- But it's the same organization, the same people.
- The same tradition, the same procedure.
- Only now, a sonderzug is really a train
- carrying a youth to vacation.
- Why did they try to make a secrecy of their involvement
- in the destruction of the Jews?
- Do you have an explanation for this?
- Well I think first of all, they had the opportunity
- for [MUTED].
- Right from the beginning, when the allied
- powers were looking for important persons in the regime
- and tried them at Nuremberg.
- I'm quite convinced that no one was even
- thinking about the railroads as an integral part of the machine
- or of railroad men as possible war criminals.
- And therefore also no documentation
- was being collected either.
- Now the effect of this quite obviously
- was that many of these documents disappeared.
- Granting that the allied air raids had destroyed some,
- but so many of the crucial fahrplananordnung
- were prepared in multiple copies that it
- is impossible to believe that every one of them became
- burned in the course of the war.
- Thus many of the railroad people could continue incognito
- as it were without anyone realizing what they had done.
- No one suspecting it.
- Not for war crimes trials, nor for days
- denouncification proceedings, nor for anything else.
- It is precisely this fact that made some of the SS
- so very angry because they were always being put before trials
- in front of tribunals as though they alone had done everything.
- As [SPEAKING GERMAN].
- Yes.
- But now, gradually it became clear that also the railroads
- had such a function.
- And there were now two reasons for not
- publicizing this material.
- The first is quite obviously that some of these people
- could still be liable for their deeds
- and could still be placed on trial.
- And the second and I think, increasingly more important,
- reason is that the railroads want to hide the fact,
- as an institution, they were involved in this operation.
- They don't want the reputation of having been the conveyors
- of victims to death camps.
- They don't want to be known in posterity as having done that.
- So they are amongst themselves quiet about it.
- Although increasingly they begin to talk
- about their forgotten role in the mobilization.
- Barbarossa, the mounting of the attack upon the Soviet Union.
- But they are proud of this.
- They are quite proud of that achievement.
- And yet when it comes, of course,
- to the final solution of the Jewish question,
- any material whatsoever that even touches upon it
- is handled with very great care.
- And any official history, such as most especially Kreidler's
- history of the role of the railroads would not in one word
- mention Jews as having been one of the items being transported
- in these trains.
- And even when one or another railroad official
- would talk about the matter, and that is rare,
- he would do so on the basis of published reports.
- Never revealing new information which
- obviously is not available to the general public.
- Yes, but the very fact is that the allied powers after Germany
- was defeated never thought of prosecuting such people is
- meaningful, I think.
- It's very meaningful.
- It means that the full implication
- of what is meant by a totalitarian
- system, the full meaning of what was meant by mobilized Germany
- was not understood.
- Yes.
- Or maybe they did, but it means that it
- would have been necessary to prosecute the whole of Germany.
- Well it would have been necessary to prosecute
- individuals from every segment of organized society.
- It would have been necessary to prosecute
- not the whole of Germany but that sampling of it.
- That cross section of it that became involved.
- Because as a matter of fact, what was done
- was exactly the other way around.
- They decided to choose a, let's say
- a sample of individuals and to concentrate all the guilt.
- Yes they chose leaders.
- And not even all of those, and then
- they chose the people, as it were,
- caught with the machine guns in hand or the gas canisters.
- These were the people.
- The actual killers.
- The actual killers who said we are after all
- only the end product of a long process.
- But I think that what you have found, which is really
- a reason why your book is a master book,
- you've succeed to show really the inside implications.
- I mean, how the destruction of the Jews had been possible.
- And so which step, what were the things which
- had to enter into play in order to make
- this destruction possible?
- Thank you.
- I ask you to talk really about this, because in which respect
- such a thing has been possible?
- Because as a matter of fact, antisemitism is not new.
- We can talk about the Nazi antisemitism
- and about what was specific in the Nazi antisemitism, that's
- for sure.
- But I don't think it's necessary to enter in this,
- it is for my taste too much ideological.
- Yes.
- I am much more interested in the how.
- How the things could have happened,
- how did they actually happen.
- And the drive to kill always existed.
- Not only in Germany, but how is it then
- these barriers could fall in order
- to permit this gigantic extermination,
- this mass extermination?
- What were the prerequisites for such an achievement?
- It's a very difficult question.
- Well, I think you are driving at the--
- I agree completely with you.
- My question was not--
- Yes.
- It was a practical one.
- I think you are driving at a deeper
- penetration of that question, how it was done.
- And I can tell you just how I ask myself the question
- and how I proceeded to answer it for myself.
- And in that way perhaps come closer
- to what you want to hear.
- As I began that work, I was very young,
- perhaps it should be pointed out.
- Yes, I would like to know the beginning as a matter of fact.
- Perhaps it should be pointed out that I
- was all of 22 years of age.
- And when I say that I began, I do
- mean to imply that I already had the ambition, if that
- is the word, to describe the process as a whole.
- Though I had neither the knowledge or experience
- to estimate what it would take.
- I did need an ordering principle.
- I did need an outline.
- I did need something that would enable
- me to go into piles of documents that were not indexed.
- And thus looking at one item pertaining
- to 1943 and the Justice Ministry,
- and another item pertaining to 1935 and the banks,
- and yet another item talking about the SS in 1944,
- be able to put these documents all of which are out of context
- into an order, into a definite pattern that would make sense.
- And I had to use some tools of analysis for this purpose,
- and I obtained them.
- I obtained them, I didn't make them up myself.
- And in particular, I obtained the notion
- of a process of a destruction process
- from one man who wrote an affidavit immediately
- after the war and almost casually and incidentally
- gave me the clue, if you'd like the key.
- This was, of course, Kesnar.
- Kesnar.
- Absolutely.
- (film slating)
- What did they get from the past, the Nazi?
- They got the actual content of measures which they took.
- For example, the barring of Jews from office.
- The prohibition of inter-marriages, the employment
- in Jewish homes of female persons under the age of 45.
- What struck me so much--
- because everybody talks even now about the German
- are known, the German orderly way of killing.
- And everybody is thinking about the factory
- process of Auschwitz.
- But Auschwitz came very late as a matter of fact.
- When you read what happened at the beginnings
- with the first extermination camps,
- Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor.
- It was complete disorder.
- Absolutely.
- People were being dumped along the route.
- There was a tendency you'll see on the part of the bureaucracy
- to take steps before one realized where these steps were
- actually going to end.
- So people were being transported.
- Let us say to Łódż.
- Let us say to Riga.
- Let us say to Kaunus from Germany.
- And within Poland, they were being shifted from one place
- to the other all in quote preparation.
- Without there being clarity as to what
- it is that was being prepared.
- Certainly not to the extent that one would know at the beginning
- where these Jews were going to die.
- And why this tendency-- this general tendency
- of the German bureaucracy to act without even preparation
- in what way?
- I now believe that is the only way in which one can
- act at all in such a matter.
- That when one talks about such a thing beforehand,
- one cannot possibly do it.
- And if one is going to do it, one cannot possibly talk about
- it.
- And this I think is an essential requisite
- and an essential attribute of such drastic activities
- as those we are talking about.
- And I now do believe as I did believe for some years,
- that with the Germans, as Himmler said,
- it was a matter of inborn tact.
- One does not talk about these things.
- But this also means, you see, that one does not outline them.
- One does not plan them.
- The plan, the outline, the goal emerges from the steps
- as they are being taken.
- There is a sense of direction, you'll see.
- There is a sense that what is going
- in ever more drastic steps towards something
- unprecedented.
- There is a sense of meeting history and of making history.
- That is pervasive in the entire bureaucracy.
- And every one, however remote he may
- be from the center of the action, is somehow aware of it.
- And can sense the need for his contribution.
- Yes.
- For instance, one of the very striking facts
- you talk about this in your book when
- one reads about the first deportation, the shipping
- to the East in 1940, 1941.
- In the Polish ghettos when they start
- to ship the Jews from the Reich, for instance,
- or Czechoslovakia, the entourage.
- Nothing is prepared to welcome them, to save them.
- And the Nazis who are already in Poland in charge of the ghetto,
- let's take Łódż, for instance, complain.
- They're appalled by this influx of 20,000 people.
- Yes, complain to Berlin.
- What shall we do with all these Jews?
- These new Jews?
- If you take the Law for the Protection of German Blood
- and Honor, which was enacted on September 15, 1935,
- you will find that this provision that
- outlaws intermarriage and sexual intercourse between Germans
- and Jews goes back to the Synod of Elvira of the years 306.
- If you look at the law for the re-establishment
- of the professional civil service of April 7, 1933,
- you will find that Jews were barred
- from holding public office by the Synod of Clermont, 535.
- If you would look at a decree of July 25, 1938,
- whereby Aryans are not supposed to be seeing Jewish doctors,
- that particular provision goes back
- to synod all the way, again, to the Middle Ages.
- Even this?
- Even this.
- It's the Trullanic Synod of the year 692 in this case.
- If you look at such a decree as a Sozialausgleichsabgabe
- which provided the Jews had to pay a special income
- tax for the support of eleemonsynary organizations
- and so on, then you'll find that that goes back
- to the Synod of Gerona from the year 1078.
- Added to that, of course, are the more famous measures,
- marking the Jews with a star, compulsory ghettoization,
- all of which have origins in canon law
- and synods and decisions of the Church.
- There is thus a great reservoir of experience to draw upon
- and the remarkable thing about bureaucracy
- everywhere is that they invent as little as possible
- and use as much of the past as they can.
- And that's illustrated in this case, especially--
- You said there was propaganda too.
- The same is true of propaganda, because the German version
- in the years of the 1930s, alleging that the Jews are
- world conquerors, would go out to conquer the world if they
- could, that the Jews are criminals,
- that the Jews are parasites, all these themes
- can be found in the writings of Martin Luther, Von den Juden
- und Ihren Lugen, published in 1535.
- Matter of fact, I might interpolate a personal story.
- When I was in Munich as a young soldier,
- immediately after the capture of the city--
- You mean it's American Army.
- In the American army, as if it's necessary to add that,
- and as the American army that captured Munich
- I found a book by Luther published by the Nazi party.
- I could not of course, believe that this really was Luther,
- you see.
- I couldn't believe my eyes when I read it.
- But subsequently I went to the New York Public Library
- and found the original book, and could
- verify that the Nazi Party version, except for spellings,
- was entirely the same as Luther's original book.
- So once again, you see, even the propaganda
- could rest upon earlier conceptions and writings going
- back in this case to the 16th century.
- Nothing new here.
- The newness came with the Final Solution
- itself, because all of these measures
- supported church policy, which was
- in the first instance of conversion of the Jews,
- to make their life miserable sufficiently so that they
- would see the light and become Christians.
- But the church could not go further than that.
- The church would not kill for it, then
- would lose its basic objective, and that's the reason
- that when it came to the Final Solution,
- the Germans had to become inventors and innovators
- on their own.
- The church that not the same course.
- No, of course not.
- More
- (film slating)
- What seems to me remarkable, and I
- would like to have you comment on this point,
- is how the Germans have stolen the Jews--
- during all the steps of the process of this friction,
- and at all levels--
- how they started with expropriations
- of the Jewish enterprises and industries.
- To go at the end with the looting in the ghettos,
- and even with robbery of the belongings of the Jews
- in front of the gas chambers, and even the
- pulling out of the golden teeth, and I
- see it's really astonishing.
- Our modern state, highly industrialized state,
- the state of Krupp, IG Farben, could
- think of pulling the golden teeth out,
- and it seems that it's an ideology of antiproductiveness,
- of non-productivity, completely the other way around,
- real ideology of destruction.
- The process of taking away property
- is a parallel one with the destruction of the Jews,
- because it accompanies every step that is being taken.
- In actual fact, we see it going on from 1933
- until the very end, because it doesn't even
- stop when the Jews have been gassed.
- The personal belongings have to be shuffled through the system,
- and thus we see it even being interrupted,
- as it were, when the Allies capture the various camps,
- and capture Berlin, and capture the Reichsbank.
- The very first step taken was the dismissal
- of Jewish civil servants, and that is 1933.
- It is the first step of economic destruction.
- Next come the Aryanizations which pit German firms
- against Jewish enterprises.
- The process, of course, is being controlled
- by the economy ministry, which is trying
- to avoid a situation in which there is too much bidding
- for what the German firms and German banks
- were calling objects, Objekte, because here you
- see is the last stage during which Jews
- are capable of bargaining.
- And that bargaining has to be suppressed.
- So we have here the stage of what
- is called a voluntary Aryanization,
- with banks always acting as middlemen in the process,
- taking some commissions.
- This is where the Dresdner bank was involved
- to a very great degree.
- And in the main, in this Aryanization process,
- German industry is more concentrated.
- It becomes even larger.
- That is to say, the relationship between large enterprises
- and small enterprises has now changed
- in favor of the larger enterprises,
- because it is the larger ones that
- tend to acquire Jewish properties,
- insofar as they are industrial undertakings of any sort.
- The larger one who has the money which--
- Will have the money and will have the know-how, and who
- have the means and billable funds with which to operate
- quickly and efficiently.
- But you must remember that in Germany the cartelization
- law in general favored larger enterprises and Aryanizations
- fit into this general process.
- Now by 1938 we see the voluntary Aryanizations
- becoming compulsory.
- Now after Kristallnacht that is the big step.
- There are to be no more Jewish enterprises,
- and those that are not worthy of being continued,
- that is to say the small ones, are to be liquidated
- and the stocks are to be acquired.
- The inventories are to be acquired by German trade
- associations.
- So we have now even fewer enterprises in operation,
- because you must remember, most of them
- are liquidated rather than Aryanized.
- They're not even being continued.
- It is very interesting to see what
- happens after Aryanization.
- There is a lot of conversation about the retention
- of Jewish firm names.
- And now you find, all of a sudden,
- that for example Rosenthal Porzellan, a Jewish enterprise
- but acquired by Germans, should have of course a new name.
- The extirpation of the Jewish name, of course,
- was part of the destruction process.
- One is supposed to change street names,
- one is supposed to change all kinds of names insofar
- as they are Jewish.
- But they knew possessors of these enterprises
- resist this particular demand.
- Because it was intended as a good label?
- Well, it was a very good label.
- It was a property, you know?
- After the war, what was going to sell Rosenthal china
- all over the world.
- So you see, it paid off.
- And this was not the only enterprise of its kind.
- There was a great deal of correspondence
- about simply retaining Jewish names.
- Even that was a problem.
- Now after the Jews have lost property
- and particularly after the German armies
- are marching into Poland and into other countries, where
- this whole process is being repeated in Poland and France,
- and of course, especially in Holland and so on.
- In the same way.
- In the same way, the entire destruction process
- gets repeated as soon as the Germans arrived somewhere.
- And that means one has to define what
- is meant by a Jewish enterprise, and then one
- has to set maximum limits to the price that
- may be paid for a Jewish enterprise,
- and then one has to specify what is
- to happen to liquidated enterprises, what
- is to happen to securities, what is to happen to other papers.
- This is a rather elaborate and complex process.
- It is a difficult one.
- It is a very difficult one.
- It involves the stock exchanges, it
- involves everything that is part and parcel
- of the commercial and financial world.
- But the Jews are now left in a position of having to labor.
- We have to change.
- It was not completely full.
- After the outbreak of war, the expropriation process
- is aimed at taking from the Jews their labor
- or their personal belongings.
- That is to say, there is now much less
- to be gotten from any economic measures against the Jews
- than there was before.
- This is no longer the period when
- coal mines or other major enterprises can be obtained.
- There is no more major property, such as that
- of the Petscheks or the Rothschilds,
- or the Weinmanns to be taken.
- Instead one is now looking at very poor people.
- One is exploiting them.
- One is exploiting their labor.
- And one is trying to get the last ounce of whatever there
- is to be gotten.
- And what is sometimes astonishing to me
- is the fact that here again, we see the relentlessness
- of the destruction process.
- We see all of the expertise, we see all of the specialists,
- we see all of the procedures being employed
- to take the little things.
- Just as much energy is poured into the process at this point
- than there was before.
- So they are meeting in the labor ministry, for example,
- to try to figure out how to tax these very small Jewish wages.
- And this is how they come up with
- the Sozialausgleichsabgabe, which was also
- incidentally imposed on Poles.
- Or they are trying to have various wage regulations.
- Interestingly enough in Poland, very often
- Jews were employed without any salary, any pay whatsoever.
- But the situation was so chaotic, the situation was
- so absolutely out of hand, that finally
- the German administration decided
- that Jews were in principle to receive 80% of the Polish wage.
- Whereupon, in one Kreis, the Wehrmacht immediately
- dismissed all of its Jews because they were not
- going to pay 80%.
- And the Stadthauptmann in Czestochowa
- says, well, I assume that such a regulation, like several others
- I have received, can safely be thrown away,
- and I have done so accordingly.
- He is not going to obey any directive that forces him
- to pay even 80% of the wage.
- So we find here that basically the process goes on
- in the labor field.
- Later on, of course, when the Jews
- are sent to various concentration camps,
- and particularly also Auschwitz, we
- find that now the companies are required
- to pay the wages to the SS, who own the Jews as slaves.
- And there they are.
- The very same companies that were employed
- in the expropriation process.
- The ones that we're looking for Objekte., now,
- the employers of Jewish labor, IG Farben or Krupp
- as an example.
- And just as efficiently as they had done those other things,
- they now also use Jewish labor for production.
- Sometimes when the Jews are being shipped out of Germany,
- questions arise as to what is to happen to their pensions.
- What is to happen to the payments that were being made
- to retired Jewish employees?
- And here we find a very crass example indeed.
- In 1942, after the first transports
- had left with Jews to the East--
- Of German Jews.
- German Jews now.
- The Oberfinanzpresident in Berlin,
- that is the chief representative of the finance
- ministry in the Berlin district, is
- trying to collect from companies that had been paying pensions
- to Jewish employees who were now retired
- the sums that, up to then, had been paid to these employees.
- He says, now we, the German Reich under the 11th ordinance
- of the bank citizenship law, the Elfte Verordnung,
- we have now the legal right to these pensions,
- because we are by law the successors of the Jews
- and furthermore it is a basic principle
- that only the Reich profits from the destruction of the Jews.
- There's not supposed to be a private profit from it.
- And what do we find?
- We find here a letter from the Berliner Handelsgesellschaft,
- which is an employer in this case, and which as one
- of the more forward looking employers
- had been having a pension system,
- although not one that was vested in the pensioner.
- They have an Old Age security and assistance
- society, which paid these pensions to former employees.
- And now they are saying that, and this
- is July 20, 1942, a rather early time,
- and this is the legal division of the Berliner
- Handelsgesellschaft writing to the economy
- group of the German bankers.
- It is entirely out of the question
- that they would hand over pensions heretofore paid
- to Jewish employees to the German Reich.
- And now they are so crude as to refer to Jews
- who had been shoved off, abgeschoben.
- And the reason, they say, is that there
- isn't even any indication that the Jews in question
- are still alive.
- Are still alive.
- This is being written as early as July 1942,
- and quite obviously one doesn't pay pensions to dead people,
- and quite obviously there can be no question of transferring
- these pensions to the Reich because you cannot receive
- a pension when you are dead.
- This however, does not apply to the personal belongings
- of people.
- Those personal belongings certainly
- can be acquired by the Reich and--
- May I just get you repeat the same story,
- as a matter of fact, that the insurance
- won after the Kristallnacht.
- Absolutely.
- Except that here, of course, the question was more complicated.
- In Kristallnacht, you will remember,
- the party organized certain violence
- against Jewish establishments, and it's called Kristallnacht
- because rocks were thrown into windows of Jewish shops.
- What was not calculated, of course,
- was that the buildings in which these shops were located
- belonged to Aryans.
- The owners of these buildings were not Jews.
- Therefore the windows that were broken
- were windows that were the property of Germans.
- These windows were insured with the German insurance companies.
- The insurance company had to pay the German owners
- for the damage done.
- Furthermore, the difficulty now was
- that the glass that was being broken
- had been manufactured in Belgium,
- so that foreign currency would have to be used at a time
- when it was badly needed for other purposes
- to restore the street appearance.
- And the only thing that Goering could do for these poor people
- was to make sure that the Jews would
- pay for the restoration of the street appearance,
- thus giving the insurance company, for once, something
- that they really were not entitled to.
- They were not, you see, entitled to being off the hook here.
- But Goering took pity on the guys
- who represented the insurance companies,
- and even joked about it at a meeting.
- And he said, here I am an angel, in somewhat corpulent form,
- rescuing you from your legal obligations,
- and thought that the insurance company
- should be grateful for that.
- He convinced them that he helped them to earn money.
- That's right, well, yes of course.
- But as the destruction process proceeded and went
- on its course, the last vestige of what the Jews owned
- was taken away.
- When Jewish apartments were closed,
- the furniture was taken over and was
- distributed after bombings began, to the bombed
- out Germans.
- The furniture of Jews in Belgium and the Netherlands
- and in France, was taken, hauled off
- by Einsatzstab Rosenberg, which he operated in the West,
- and was shipped to deserving German families,
- bombed out, et cetera.
- Incidentally, some portion of this furniture
- went to railroad employees in recognition of the services
- that the railroads were rendering
- in transporting the Jews under these difficult conditions.
- And, interestingly enough, very little furniture
- was used from Poland because it was in such horrible condition
- that it wasn't fit for Germans, quite obviously.
- So we find that, and also the mere fact of an apartment
- shortage in Germany, that apartment shortage
- had a tremendous effect on the desire
- of the various regional people to evacuate Jews,
- to shove them off, as they would say, as quickly as possible.
- Indeed, the apartment shortage was
- given as one of the main reasons for starting the deportations
- in Germany itself.
- And that's why they begin there, in the fall of 1941,
- before there even is any killing center, before there
- is any place to which these people can be sent.
- But the apartment shortage here looms
- as an important motivation, and is
- used as a reason to shove these people off, as they say.
- Because they need badly the flats.
- Yeah, they need the flats, and this is before any bombing.
- Well actually what they need is, they
- need space for people who have been waiting for better
- apartments, because the construction program
- was severely curtailed anyway.
- There wasn't normal replacing of housing in the Hitler years.
- And therefore these few Jewish apartments
- were badly desired by people who wanted to move up in the world
- and use their influence to get those places.
- There's a lot of correspondence on that alone
- in a city like Munich, for instance.
- Now of course, once the Jews arrive in the death camps,
- they just come with their few kilograms
- of personal belongings, but they may have gold.
- They may have foreign currency.
- They may have other things.
- And in that last search, those things
- are taken and are funneled through elaborately
- through the mechanism of banks and various other institutions
- for final utilization.
- And it gets so that the long hair of women
- is cut off for purposes of making
- the cross hairs necessary in submarines, you see,
- for firing torpedoes.
- And it gets so that gold teeth are pulled,
- because gold is very valuable.
- And it's still a foreign exchange earner.
- And here we see the--
- As much as we see the efficiency of the Germans
- in the appropriation of Jewish property,
- it is interesting to note also that one basic principle
- throughout the process, most particularly when
- the Final Solution began, was that economic considerations
- were not to interfere with the progress of the destruction
- process, and most particularly so with the deportations, which
- very frequently were cutting into the ghettos,
- cutting into the armament plants,
- by taking away the labor literally overnight.
- Now there are remarkable inefficiencies
- which are not immediately apparent in particularly
- the ghetto system.
- It's to be observed that whereas some of the ghettos in Poland
- were established as early as the end of 1939, others not
- until the end of 1940 or even later
- than that in the case of Upper Silesia.
- And the reason is that in each case when a ghetto was being
- established, a large price was paid, in production,
- in upsetting the entire economy of a region,
- in the very rerouting of the traffic flow,
- non-collection of rents, all kinds of upsetting,
- upheaval phenomena.
- You mean because of the ghettoization?
- The ghettoization itself.
- And then you'll see that with each ghetto,
- the economy of the Jews has to be re-established.
- If you look inside Warsaw, you observe
- that in a population of more than 400,000
- ghetto inhabitants, not more than 10% were employed.
- Now at 90% unemployment, that is to say 90% of the people not
- working, although this would include children and people not
- capable of working, you do see a gross inefficiency.
- You can't take from people that which they are not producing.
- And even when, in Warsaw for example,
- the peak of efficiency at the middle of 1942
- is roughly 100,000, or barely 100,000 who are working.
- And that still means that at least another 100,000 capable
- of working are not working.
- It is at that peak that the Germans empty out the ghetto.
- Now clearly--
- People were working for the German army?
- Even including that.
- Now Himmler said repeatedly that he would not recognize
- the argument of war production.
- He says this in a variety of contexts, whenever
- it is alleged that the frequent movements interfere
- with production in one way or another.
- And he says he will not recognize
- the argument of war production in the Final Solution
- of the Jewish question.
- He regards it as an excuse.
- However, it really was a cost in the destruction process
- offsetting the gains which accrue to the Germans
- from various expropriation and labor exploitations
- and confiscations.
- And ultimately the cost was greater
- than the sum total of gains which
- could be registered from these various Aryanizations.
- The cost was greater because the relinquishment of labor
- in a situation of extreme labor shortage, the foregoing
- of the opportunity to train and employ, most especially
- in Eastern Europe, people who in any case
- were heavily concentrated in the skilled or semi-skilled labor
- area.
- That foregoing was a cost factor.
- It belongs at the liability column.
- The Jews were the skilled workers.
- The Jews were skilled or semi-skilled workers.
- As soon as you enter Poland and all the way to the Ukraine,
- the same situation of occupational structure
- shows up.
- So that the Germans were here making quite a sacrifice, one
- which doesn't appear in the books
- because while they would enter meticulously
- every receipt in their budget, they would not
- enter the foregoing of labor.
- This is now an estimate which one can hardly make,
- because how do you calculate that which was not produced?
- And yet we know it.
- Interestingly enough, the Jews themselves
- did not believe that the Germans would
- take going production disrupt it,
- and simply forego the benefits of it.
- And that's why the Jews believed that so long as they were
- working, they might be safe.
- And that was a critical error.
- That was ideology of rescue through work.
- Rescue through work, which would apply only on the assumption
- that the Germans were completely rational
- in the original economic sense of the word.
- Rationality means, I maximize my gains and I minimize my losses.
- And the Jews thought that the Germans were completely
- rational in this economic sense, and of course they were not.
- Which means that the Jews made a grievous error
- in making that assumption in the first place.
- This is a very important point because they
- wanted to steal everything from the Jews--
- And yet this country, which was completely
- organized per production, which was to the nth degree prepared
- to maximize output, would nevertheless
- forego clear advantages, and would do so consistently
- in the Jewish sector, most especially when the labor
- shortage would become critical.
- There might be compromises.
- In other words, there would be a situation
- of saving the Jews capable of labor until the last moment.
- One would make these distinctions
- between productive and non-productive elements.
- But in the end, and this is the crucial thing,
- Jewish labor, the labor of Jews, was not labor.
- In the end it was just Jews.
- And this classification, the classification
- that a Jew is a Jew, took precedence
- over economic considerations, and that
- is a crucial point throughout the destruction process,
- and one of its main characteristics.
- Yes, and you think that this was the most dangerous error
- of the Jews themselves.
- Yes, it was, because it applies, of course, to 1941, to 1942,
- '43, even 1944.
- In Łódż?
- Yes, absolutely, and in other places.
- It's always the most difficult thing to understand,
- because in one way, what they said of Germany,
- was a highly industrialized country.
- And they had the Krupp and they had the gold teeth of the Jews.
- Still, you see when you look at Krupp the gold teeth,
- well it is very difficult to see the acquisition of enterprises
- and the acquisition of the gold from the teeth
- as in being in the same category.
- It is.
- Because although it seems to us now bizarre,
- the fact of the matter is, to the Germans
- both were Jewish property.
- The coal mines belonging to the Petscheks in the Sudetenland
- or in Silesia, and the gold teeth
- extracted from Jewish corpses in Auschwitz,
- those were Jewish properties, properly,
- in their view, taken and booked as receipts.
- So in that sense for the Germans it's a plus column.
- These are assets.
- These are gains.
- These are acquisitions.
- The relinquishment of Jewish labor on the other hand,
- is a minus column.
- These are liabilities.
- These are losses.
- And it is admittedly very, very difficult
- for a normal human being to see this accounting system
- for what it was, to see the plus and the minus clearly.
- To recognize that to these people, even a radio that
- was barely working, even a pair of binoculars
- that had had better days, even spectacles,
- even shoes, worn clothing, would still be utilized.
- It would be cleaned, it would be disinfected,
- it would be distributed.
- Everything was used, however small.
- Yes, this is what I mean, this is an ideology for death.
- This is an ideology that is in conformity with death,
- and this is what these two plus and minus
- have in common, because both have the object, finally,
- to eliminate Jewry altogether, with its property disappearing
- entirely.
- But when you see for instance in Auschwitz,
- when they gathered the--
- there were crippled Jews, where they gather all the
- [INAUDIBLE].
- Of course.
- Why not?
- You see, in this regard they are totally rational.
- They are rational to the point of bizarreness.
- You are taking what ordinarily would not be taken.
- You regard even what is in the body
- as the property of the German Reich in accordance
- with the 11th to the 13th ordinance of the Reich
- citizenship law.
- And indeed when we notice the arguments in the war crimes
- trials, one of these dentist, he's being asked, now,
- aren't you participant in murder by pulling these teeth?
- He said no, no, I mean from the legal standpoint,
- the corpse floats in no man's land.
- The teeth, the gold teeth belong to the Reich.
- He pulls them, and he doesn't even
- consider that this is particularly wrong.
- Yes.
- But it is still so contrary to what is today a modern consumer
- society.
- That's the American one, where everything is thrown away.
- Oh, yes, of course, but the United States
- is a society of waste and the Germans were not.
- Now you have to remember that very heavy emphasis was placed
- throughout the Hitler years upon saving everything
- that could be saved, because it was a shortage economy.
- Well, I would like that we talk about what is, for me,
- a crucial issue about the beginnings of the extermination
- as such because I'm very much against ideas that one can give
- birth [SPEAKING FRENCH] from--
- when starting with Germany's story,
- with psychoanalysis, with Marxism, with economic reasons,
- with anti-Semitism in general, I think
- that there is a gap as there comes
- a moment one has to kill and to decide about the killings.
- And the best proof of this is that,
- when one goes to Poland, for instance,
- and when one talks to the former guards of the extermination
- camps, to the killers--
- at the very beginning they were not ready.
- If you take Belzec or Sobibor or even Treblinka,
- one has the feeling that they had to go at such a speed
- not to miss the moment and everything was
- made in a complete disorder at the time.
- I was asking your ideas on this, but it's very difficult.
- I, as you know, share the view that you just
- expressed because the one question most frequently asked
- of me is, why, why, why European Jews were killed.
- This is a question.
- It's the question most frequently asked, also,
- because up to the point when the Jews are being concentrated,
- you can say that the measures produced
- certain economic benefits to Germany, but quite clearly
- beyond that point, the costs exceed any possible gains.
- So the why becomes even more insistent because, even
- in the context of an aggressive and highly self-centered,
- destructive machine, one cannot fully understand why this
- should be done.
- And I also would say that the fact that there
- may have been an ideology of propaganda
- does not in the least explain anything about what
- transpired now, and I would say this for three reasons.
- First of all, we find in the machinery of destruction--
- now, at that point, the diverse segments of German society,
- not all of whom were in the very center of that ideology
- or highly propagandized in Nazi thought,
- even assuming that the SS was-- and that's
- a big assumption to make.
- But in addition to that consideration,
- there were two others.
- One of them is that the blueprint is missing.
- The plan is missing.
- The goal is not in view, although it inevitably
- springs up out of the actions.
- And third, there is a hesitation.
- There is almost a year when there
- is great uncertainty, when one considers
- last-minute possibilities of sending the Jews here, there,
- or the other place.
- And then the territorial solution
- emerges inevitably as the consequence
- of everything else either having failed
- or the point having been reached where this is
- the only possible continuation.
- It is in that interim period, the period extending
- from the second half of 1940 to the second half of 1941,
- that we face the deep unfathomable
- mystery of the emergence of the Final Solution, which is not
- the product of a single brain, which is not
- the product of a plan, which is not the product,
- as a matter of fact, of any agency or any one agency.
- Which is not even the product of an order.
- No, it is not.
- And we see here what has sometimes
- been called a meeting of minds.
- We see it in the Final Solution Conference of January 20, 1942.
- We see people gathering who, without even saying things
- all that explicitly, seem to know.
- Each knows what the other is talking about.
- Each comes to this meeting with great expectation.
- The tension is revealed, even in the many drafts
- that this final summary must have
- gone through in that final version of the talks as
- prepared by Eichmann.
- And the tension shows through.
- This was a moment of history, and the participants knew it.
- They knew it in the field, and they knew it in Berlin.
- And they knew it whenever they corresponded or talked
- to one another about it.
- And they moved into it with a certain confusion at first,
- with even chaos in the field, but, soon enough,
- with the goal very clearly outlined in their minds.
- And now everything dovetailed, and everything
- produced a well-oiled process on the assembly line.
- But there are many steps that one had
- to go through to reach this.
- Is it possible to say two apparently contradictory
- things, that the examination is included in the first
- anti-Jewish bureaucratic step which is taken, let's say,
- in 1933--
- how is the examination included in the first step,
- and how is the examination not included?
- I will say.
- This it is not included in the sense
- that there was then no blueprint,
- no plan, no articulated goal.
- It was still the old goal of expulsion, of emigration,
- and so on.
- But it was included because the momentum and the inertia
- of this process, its expansion all over Europe,
- the fact of the German march east and west, north and south
- would make it impossible for the traditional route, that
- of emigration, to be followed.
- Therefore, there was inchoate at the very beginning
- in the relentlessness, in the intensity of these rather
- draconian measures, to use a term that the Nazis used,
- the inevitable consequence that they themselves would not
- have identified with, that they themselves would not have
- talked about in 1933 but which was, in a sense,
- built into the process from the beginning
- because if one is going to move in that direction,
- if one is going to occupy or Europe,
- if one is going to have a World War,
- and if one is going to do all of these things
- in a single space of time, 10 years, 12 years,
- what are you going to do with the Jewish population?
- As one German as major said in the Łódż ghetto in the middle
- of 1941, we can't very well spend another winter here
- and let them starve to death.
- That would not be angenehm.
- We would have to find some device that would be humane
- and that would do the job.
- And it is in that sense, in the words of this one major,
- that one sees the inevitability of the process reaching
- that conclusion.
- You mean it became easier for them?
- It became inevitable because there were no other ways.
- You see, the only thing they then could have done in 1941
- was to stop altogether, and that's
- just the one thing they could not do, for they were--
- What do you mean altogether?
- Well, take, for example, the situation
- of ghettos having been formed in Poland.
- Take that situation.
- Take it to June 22, 1941, the day of Barbarossa,
- the day of the march into the Soviet Union,
- which is the beginning of the active killing phase.
- Up to June 21, you might say there
- was one option, the option to go ahead or the option to stop.
- But consider for a minute what this movement, this philosophy,
- if you like, really was, what it called itself.
- It called itself the vegung It was the opposite of something
- that would be stationary.
- It couldn't.
- Were it to stop, it wouldn't be Nazi.
- It would not be that.
- It could not visualize itself as stopping.
- That isn't to say that it could easily visualize going ahead
- either, and the contradiction in that sense is built in.
- I refer again, and again, and again to the point
- that, if one were to have talked about it openly,
- it would have been impossible to do,
- and if one was going to do it, one couldn't talk about it.
- Yes.
- But it's very interesting.
- You mean that it's because they conquered all Europe that there
- was no possibility for them to let
- the Jews emigrate because there was no territory anymore?
- Well, there was no territory as they saw it.
- Certainly when they look in the Soviet Union--
- the whole idea in Barbarossa, for that matter,
- is as vague as to what to do with the Soviet Union
- as it is when they begin the assault upon Jewry in 1933.
- There's this similar vagueness and this similar lack
- of any compromise.
- In the attack on the Soviet Union,
- there's a remarkable similarity here,
- in the very nature Barbarossa, an open-ended assault.
- Not only is there no ultimatum to the Soviets, no warning,
- no condition, but there isn't any definite plan
- as to where the German army was going to stop.
- There's no envisaging of any peace treaty.
- There's no clear-cut view of what
- is to be done with that population
- once it is conquered, and it is in that context
- that the first killings began.
- And the Final Solution cannot be divorced from the war.
- It took place in the midst of war,
- and actually, it begins on the very day
- that the German armies cross into Russia, on June 22, 1941.
- There are a number of factors to be considered in this attack
- because, curiously, there are strong resemblances
- between the German planning against the Soviet Union
- and their measures against the Jews and the Final Solution.
- In both cases, they don't really come to grips at the outset
- with what it is that they're going to do at the end.
- Barbarossa, which is the code name for the German assault
- upon the Soviet Union, appears in German records very early.
- Amazingly enough, I've traced it in the diary of Colonel General
- Halder, July 22, 1940, at the time when they were still
- bombing England.
- They're already then talking about the assault
- upon the Soviet Union, a country with which they had
- good relations at that moment.
- They are preparing this assault without any indication of where
- it was going to take them.
- There is no ultimatum.
- There are no conditions.
- The attack is a surprise attack.
- There is no indication of where the German army were going
- to stop, whether on the Ural mountains,
- or somewhat farther west, or wherever.
- Further east?
- Perhaps east.
- There is absolutely no planning, really,
- at that moment as to what is to be done with the population--
- that is to say, the Russian population, the White Russian
- population and so on--
- but there is one thing which already one
- can notice in the correspondence going back
- to march, certainly, of 1941.
- Now, March is a month during which the planning is already
- far advanced.
- One has already got a clear picture
- of Army Group North, Army Group Center, Army Group South,
- the Allied forces that are going to be employed,
- the 11th Army Stationed in the extreme south.
- And it is inside this planning mechanism,
- in the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht,
- which is the high command of the armed forces,
- in the Wehrmacht [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH],,
- which is the main center for planning wars at that moment,
- and within that, [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH],,
- [INAUDIBLE],, which is, of course,
- the operational staff of the armed forces,
- that we see the first indication that special units of the SS
- and police, that is to say, of the security police
- and security service, are going to operate on their own
- responsibility within the context of the invasion.
- They're going to move with the army there
- to undertake certain measures.
- And here we begin with the Einsatzgruppen.
- These, of course, are the units in the field,
- moving, mobile, of one main office of the SS
- and police, the Reich Security Main Office,
- Reichssicherheitshauptamt, at that time under Reinhard
- Heydrich.
- So already in March, provision is
- made by the armed forces for the operation of Einsatzgruppen.
- With those armed forces, they are to move with them.
- They are to move in the same direction,
- and they're going to carry out certain tasks.
- The tasks, in a nutshell, consists
- of the killing of the Jews, as many as possible,
- as rapidly as possible in order that the maximum surprise
- should be utilized in the course of this, presumably
- rapid, advance that was going to begin.
- Now, June 22 is the day, and within a few days thereafter,
- Jews are dying in front of German guns fired
- by the Einsatzgruppen, and the final solution now
- has begun for the area east of German-dominated Europe as
- of June 22.
- East of Poland?
- East of Poland.
- Well, within Poland so far as Bialystok and Lvov
- and certain other cities are concerned.
- And by July we see these Einsatzgruppen moving northward
- into the Baltic States.
- We see them fanning out even as the German armies fan out.
- We see them moving on the road to Minsk, to Smolensk.
- We see them moving into Kiev.
- We see them moving in the extreme south,
- towards the Crimea, where they already operate by December.
- By Christmas, they are shooting the Jews of the Crimean capital
- so that Christmas may be celebrated there without Jews.
- And this operation, which, in a few months,
- resulted in the deaths of at least a half a million Jews,
- was the opening.
- At this point, however, there is as yet
- no clear, clear idea of what to do with the Jews
- in the rest of Europe.
- Now, as of June 22, 1941, there simply
- is no document that can fairly be described an order
- to annihilate the Jews of Europe.
- But when one talks with the people of the Einsatzgruppen--
- I did this-- they all refer to--
- with the chiefs, I mean, of the Einsatzgruppen, of the units.
- They all refer to a so-called "Führer befiehl,"
- which means Führer order.
- When one asks, what was this Führer order,
- what was the content of this, they seem to be unable
- to answer really.
- They seem to be unable to answer it because, unlike--
- Excuse me.
- It was not a written one.
- Ah, yes, because I was just going
- to say, unlike the orders of Adolf Hitler with respect
- to the invasion of the Soviet Union,
- Directives weisungen which were in writing, what we do not
- have for the Final Solution is a written document signed
- by Hitler himself.
- So all of these Führer directives, Führer wishes,
- Führer orders are inferred from things that he must have said.
- Perhaps he said them to Goering.
- Perhaps he said them to Himmler.
- Perhaps he said them to someone else.
- Evidently, he said them several times and in several contexts
- but not necessarily clearly.
- So here we are in this situation which
- is so typical of the Nazi regime but is not
- well understood outside the narrow participants who
- know it well.
- And that is that so much of what is assumed
- to be a basic directive and a basic structure
- is rather amorphous and that words
- are spoken, and interpreted, and used,
- and employed in accordance with the understanding
- of these words by those who listen
- or even those who are one step removed from those
- who have listened to them.
- And this is the reason that historians to this very day
- are asking everyone, what was your understanding of this
- or that other conversation?
- And we know that the so-called "befiehl,"
- the so-called "order," under which the Einsatzgruppen moved
- out, was, to say the least, vague.
- What document, any document can you
- point to that would say, all right, the primary objective
- of these Einsatzgruppen was the onset of the final solution?
- We see this from what they did.
- We could not infer it from written documents written
- before they moved into Russia, so here we
- have an example, perhaps a very crucial example,
- that the system operated on understanding,
- not on prescriptions.
- We now know that prescriptions can be written and ignored.
- Prescriptions are useless if they are not followed,
- but understandings, once they exist,
- can utilize any words, spoken or even unspoken,
- to achieve a goal.
- And those people had an understanding
- of what they were supposed to do.
- Yes.
- You have used the world Führer wishes,
- and I think it's very important, no?
- Yes, it is important because we see so many letters.
- So just think of the letters that were sent out by Bormann--
- the Führer wishes.
- Now, that's the language that he uses, but why does he use it?
- Because probably he heard the Führer say it,
- in some context or other, in a conversation.
- And the Führer may have said something offhandedly,
- but whatever he may have said is now a Führer wish.
- Yes.
- But this leads to what I call myself the general activism
- of these people.
- They're active.
- They're active.
- They're moving.
- They understand.
- Once, of course, the operations in the east have begun,
- there is a very important document.
- Well, one could say--
- excuse me.
- One could say that the Final Solution
- was the product of everybody.
- It is the product of everybody, and it could not possibly
- have been manufactured by a single person.
- Imagine anyone, even Hitler, saying,
- there shall now be a final solution,
- and it shall consist of such and such?
- Quite apart from the impossibility of such things
- being put into words.
- Can you imagine a normal society, one in which people
- are used to ordinary things and will
- do those things which are moral and not
- those things that are immoral, taking such a letter
- and taking it seriously?
- No, that's impossible, and for that reason,
- such a letter doesn't exist, such an order doesn't exist,
- such a directive isn't spelled out.
- Instead, it's the inferred business, the notion
- that something is now ripe.
- It's a Hegelian notion.
- Something is ripe for the time, only these
- are not world historical leaders of the kind that Hegel is--
- we don't need Hegel anyway.
- Please, not at all.
- We don't need Hegel anyway in here.
- When we deal with the period of 1940 to '41,
- we observe a great many bureaucrats
- beginning to innovate and experiment,
- at least in thought, with what was to be done.
- It is as though each was, in a Hegelian sense,
- an interpreter of history and trying
- to do that which was ripe for the time, thus
- they all became improvisers, and innovators.
- Pioneers?
- And pioneers.
- I think that some of the results were built into the ghetto
- system because when you look at the winter from 1940
- to '41, which is the first winter when ghettos are
- established, except in a few spaces in Poland,
- where, in short, they are cut off from a food supply
- and where the rationing system decided is such that people
- don't have enough to eat, the average being, perhaps, 1,100
- or 1,200 calories.
- There we see that it's the beginning
- of the end inside the walls or fences of those ghettos
- because even the black market trade is ultimately not
- going to provide for the survival of those inside.
- They are trading, after all, possessions,
- and once these possessions are gone,
- they have nothing more to trade with.
- So you find a very significant letter
- by an SS major whose name is Rolf-Heinz Hoppner.
- It was sent on July 16, 1941, that
- is to say, less than a month after the assault
- upon the Soviet Union and the Einsatzgruppen operations
- had begun.
- And it was addressed to his comrade
- in Berlin, Eichmann, which is especially significant.
- Here is a letter from one SS major to another,
- two people that knew each other, and thus it
- is a very candid document.
- And he's writing more or less informally but including
- a memorandum of the same date of discussions that were held
- inside Łódż pertaining to a solution of the Jewish
- question, a losung.
- Here's that word, losung, solution.
- Now, what was it the solution to?
- The answer was, in the first instance,
- the conditions inside the Łódż ghetto and other surrounding
- [INAUDIBLE] of the so-called [INAUDIBLE],,
- which was the province in which the second-largest ghetto
- of Poland was located and the conditions of starvation which
- were beginning to emerge, which already had emerged in the last
- winter.
- And now he addresses himself in one point,
- point four of the memorandum, to the following.
- This winter, meaning the winter coming up from 1941 to 1942,
- there is a danger that not all of the Jews can be fed anymore.
- Now, let us stop right here and consider this sentence.
- It is the Germans in the first place who
- institute the rationing system.
- They can always increase it, but it
- is now a given that the rationing system will not
- be increased because the Germans never regress.
- The Germans, once having tightened the screw,
- are not going to untighten it.
- So there is now, quote, a "danger"
- that not all of the Jews can be fed anymore.
- One should weigh honestly if the most humane solution might not
- be to finish off those of the Jews
- who are not employable by means of some quick-working device.
- At any rate, that would be more pleasant, angenehm,
- than to let them starve to death.
- The Final Solution in this man's mind
- or in the conferees who met and which
- produced this particular document
- was that it would be more humane to use a gas van,
- at least for those Jews who were not capable of working
- and therefore not deserving of any food whatsoever,
- that it was really the only logical, rational,
- and in that context, expectable thing to do.
- And he writes this letter on July 16,
- which happens to be just two weeks before Goering sends
- his Final Solution directive or authorization to Heydrich That
- is how close in point of time these two documents appear,
- as if minds were working in the same direction in Poznan
- and in Berlin.
- And indeed, this is what is happening.
- They are working in the same direction.
- They all look--
- They work together.
- They work not necessarily together,
- but they work on the same premises.
- And they come to the same conclusion.
- And so it is that when Goering sends his letter to Heinrich
- authorizing him to start the preparations for a final
- solution that, quite naturally, the first thought is,
- let us take the Jews first of the Reich,
- of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia,
- and let us ship them out into the area which is now the scene
- of operations of Einsatzgruppen because there we have
- our [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] Einsatzgruppen who already know
- what to do.
- And that which they have done to the Lithuanian
- Jews, the Russian Jews they can also
- do to the new transports, which we shall send them.
- So the first thought, indeed, is to send Jews to Riga, to Minsk,
- and to Kaunas.
- --where the Einsatzgruppen we already operating.
- --where the Einsatzgruppen were operating,
- where they already operate and most especially so because they
- have the experience.
- They have the know how, and they'll do it.
- And that's at the point at which the transports begin
- to roll in the fall of 1941, before there
- is a single camp in existence.
- And it is what actually happened because they killed the German
- Jews in Kovno.
- Yes, yes.
- As a matter of fact, we have, of course,
- an extremely rare document, a report from the field
- of Einsatzkommando 3, which was commanded by Standartenführer
- Jager, and here we have in this extraordinary report
- the numbers of Jews killed in each locality that that
- particular commander was operating in for several
- months.
- And significantly, we see with regard to one entry
- that for Kovno Fort Nine, Kaunas Fort Nine, the 25th of November
- and the 29th of November, 1941 these
- are the first killings of Jews outside of Russia,
- the first Jews coming from Germany,
- settlers from Berlin, Munich, and Frankfurt am Main.
- The total killed on the 25th from those three cities--
- 2,934.
- Then settlers from Vienna and from Breslau--
- the total killed, obviously a rounded figure, 2,000,
- together, 5,000 Jews killed in November.
- November 1941, Jews from the Reich?
- These are Jews from the Reich, so therefore the Final Solution
- has now encompassed not only Jews found in the territories
- east of the line, which existed on June 22,
- but already it has become European.
- Already, it has taken victims from the west,
- and this is the beginning of--
- in November, at the end of November.
- But it is not yet the point at which this idea
- is accepted or acceptable.
- The people in the east, the [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
- or the Stadt kommissar the people in charge of these
- ruined cities, cannot understand what is happening,
- and they have a vision of tens of thousands of Jews,
- of hundreds of thousands of Jews arriving in these ruins
- for them to do the job.
- And they protested.
- They protested from White Russia and they protested, perhaps,
- from other places.
- We know they--
- Then they protest from Poland.
- They protest from everywhere, not because they are opposed
- to killing but because they are uncertain as
- to how many Jews they will receive.
- And they are afraid of the epidemics.
- They are afraid of the overflow.
- They are afraid of what is going to happen
- to the general population, including even
- German occupation personnel.
- They're surprised by this sudden influx.
- They don't know how to handle it.
- They haven't made provision for it.
- And significantly enough, from Hitler's own headquarters,
- we see a line, a single line written
- by Heinrich Himmler in his own handwriting
- on the 30th of November, that is to say,
- after these initial killings have taken place,
- with regard to yet another transport that has left Berlin
- or is about to leave Berlin.
- And the two words are [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH],,
- no liquidation of this particular transport.
- How remarkable for Hitler himself
- to have made such a concession.
- Clearly, the bureaucracy is now [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]..
- The bureaucracy now cannot absorb, cannot carry out,
- cannot cope with a sudden movement which may be hundreds
- of thousands, which could be millions,
- and which obviously is going to burden a few thousand people
- in the field.
- And from that moment--
- They have to invent something else.
- --they have to invent something else.
- And the first thing, of course, that they invent
- is still provided by that same office, the Reich Security Main
- Office, the Reichssicherheitshauptamt.
- That's the gas van, the gas van, which
- is a simple van holding 70 people at a maximum
- with a carbon monoxide exhaust inside the van and in which--
- they already have produced some for the Einsatzgruppen--
- the women and the children are being killed so that
- the sensibilities of the Einsatzgruppen personnel, who--
- it must be remembered-- were a little--
- [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
- OK, so the madness.
- There was a period in 1940, at the end of 1940,
- the beginning of 1941, of virtual chaos inside Poland.
- Despite the outward appearance of calm
- and a structure in being, the fact
- is that quite a few, especially of the Stadthauptmanner,
- the German commanders of cities, thought
- that the time had come for their particular areas
- to be judenrein, free of Jews.
- And they began ejecting them.
- From their--
- From their own area.
- Krakow is the most famous example,
- because Frank himself, the Generalgouverneur,
- wanted Krakow to be free of Jews.
- But there were other areas which had miniature deportations,
- short distances from city into the countryside, not just
- the other way around.
- And there might be unannounced transports coming in,
- in one small town or another, and frantic telephone
- calls and Fernschreiben of various kinds
- from the Kreishauptmann on the scene,
- asking, what do you think this?
- This is a small town.
- Are you solving your welfare problems
- by dumping these people on our doorstep?
- We already have a density of six per room,
- or more than that, in one case 20 per room.
- Jews?
- Jews, of course.
- And the constant danger of the epidemics coming about,
- especially in wintertime without controllability,
- no medical services, especially in the countryside,
- was being emphasized.
- But of course, from the standpoint
- of the higher up Germans and Gouverneur, Generalgouverneur,
- somebody in Berlin, these were not urgently critical things.
- This means that everyone was trying to solve--
- You see, there was a tendency in Poland, and it is obvious to me
- now after studying the monthly reports of Kreishauptmanner,
- which is a task which at the beginning I thought
- wasn't going to be very fruitful,
- but now reading these reports, I can
- see there was a tendency within a number of places,
- uncoordinated activity resulting in miniature solutions.
- Not of killing people as yet, for there was no organized
- killing, but of pushing them out.
- Now, what you've got there is a limited space,
- with people being pushed this way and that.
- This was of course--
- Turning in circle.
- Well, virtually.
- As you push people from one direction from here to there,
- they are denser here than they were there.
- Then they might be pushed back.
- Indeed, this whole business of first making
- the incorporated territories free of Jews,
- and then making the Reich itself free of Jews, always clothed
- in language indicating that this was temporary.
- Indeed, the ghettos themselves were temporary.
- All of this led to an expectancy and anticipation
- that there had to be a final solution.
- Because clearly a temporary solution
- required yet another solution.
- And it wasn't going to lead to anything,
- whether you have of a Reservat or whether you have
- some other kind of arrangement.
- And this is also why you'll see, for example,
- in the Łódż ghetto a particular problem,
- and similarly so in Minsk.
- Very, very great protests in those two cities
- once the Reich Jews are being sent out,
- beginning of course in the very early fall of 1941
- to these places.
- And the protest is, what are you doing?
- The vision is of tens of thousands
- and of hundreds of thousands of people arriving.
- In already overcrowded--
- In already overcrowded ghettos.
- And this is why you find in the collection,
- in the Library of Congress, the Himmler file it's so-called,
- an extensive correspondence by the Regierungspresident
- Uebelhoer and the German Oberbürgermeister there,
- Ventzki, protesting the projected arrival of a very
- large number of Reich Jews.
- Now, you have to keep in mind that when Himmler, for example,
- is talking about 60,000 or so Jews being sent to this one
- ghetto, he's in effect thinking about sending about 20%,
- 25% of the entire Jewish population of the Reich just
- to this one place.
- Now, this is a place in which already there
- are some 200,000 Jews in 4 square kilometers, which
- is a rather small territory.
- Now, as soon as Uebelhoer is aware of this, hears about it,
- he says, why don't you send them to Warsaw?
- My information based on the illustrated newspapers
- that I read is that they still have entertainment
- in the Warsaw ghetto, that that means they certainly
- have room over there.
- Well, the Warsaw ghetto housed 400,000 Jews
- in 1 and 1/2 square miles.
- In other words, a territory no larger than the Łódż ghetto
- with already twice the population.
- Well, the upshot of it is that a compromise is being made,
- and 20,000 Jews and 5,000 gypsies
- arrive, with the promise--
- Excuse me, but in the idea of the bureaucrats of Berlin,
- the ghettos were like a transit.
- Absolutely, absolutely.
- In other words, the promises, in a sense,
- exacted by the Regierungsprasident
- or by the mayor, the promises exacted
- that this is not going to be a permanent state of affairs.
- Because there's a danger of epidemics, flies,
- all kinds of things happening from the sudden influx
- of people with waste disposal problems.
- You have to remember, these are cities.
- There are municipal officials.
- There are health officials.
- There are sanitation officials.
- There are traffic officials who say we can't handle this.
- They are now thinking in terms of operational problems.
- We cannot guarantee the safety, the health of the people
- if so many suddenly arrive in the midst of what is already
- a strained situation.
- Not only of the people of the ghetto
- but of the general population.
- You can't separate it out, because of course,
- once you have an epidemic, the bugs that
- cause it are not asking are you Polish, German, or Jewish.
- And this they know, and this they act upon,
- and this they resent and object to.
- And therefore they exact a promise and get it that those
- Jews who will be arriving in Łódż will be there only for one
- winter.
- And then they'll move farther to the East,
- which is that very, very vague, vague term that
- begins to show up more and more and more, the [? Ostlander, ?]
- and nach dem Osten.
- And it's unclear of course what the East is.
- It's not specified, and for the very simple reason
- that nobody knows.
- Now, nobody knows in September what the East means
- the following spring.
- Nobody has the faintest idea of what the East really means.
- It is a place of an absolute undetermination.
- Completely undetermined.
- Now, as it happened, as it happened,
- Łódż got its relief very quickly.
- By December, we have the first real killing
- center in operation.
- The gas van operated Kulmhof.
- Chelmno.
- Chelmno death camp.
- And from there, the Jews are being--
- Jews are being sent from Łódż, from the surrounding Warthegau
- ghetto to this one camp to be gassed,
- so that by spring there are already many dead.
- This means that there is an extraordinary acceleration
- of the process.
- The acceleration of history is such
- that we sit here many decades afterwards,
- talking about each month, each week, and each day as pivotal,
- as a turning point.
- Because very seldom are there events of such magnitude
- that happen in such a short space of time.
- This was such a time.
- They happened then.
- Yes, but I was so struck when I was Chelmno to think,
- when I started to think that between the Evian Conference
- in 1938 and the first gassing, gassing with the gas
- vans in Chelmno, there is hardly three years which have passed.
- Three years.
- There were hardly three years.
- And one may add to that by 1944, when the Germans enter Hungary,
- still finding a Jewish population intact,
- the Hungarian Jews begin to be gassed barely three months
- afterwards.
- So the period elapsing from almost complete normalcy
- to death is not even 90 days.
- And that is yet another acceleration,
- and shows the manner in which the destruction process not
- only picks up speed, but also how efficiency is growing
- as the structure is in place and expectations are firmed up,