“Holocaust Centers”

When Sean Spicer talked of “Holocaust Centers” though not knowing it, because he seems to know little, he was within striking distance of historic fact.

Spicer, apparently as incurious a man as his boss, no doubt has yet to research the Holocaust notwithstanding that his comments about it became another cause célèbre in the exercise of parsing the Trump administration.

In fact there were killing centers during the Holocaust – not concentration camps but killing camps.

There were five, all in Poland because half of all Jews killed by the Germans and Austrians lived in Poland.

Do not distinguish the Holocaust as a Nazi crime. It is of no consequence that almost all Nazis were Germans or Austrians, even though that not all Germans and Austrians were Nazis. In any analysis of the final solution every adult German of that time (inclusive of Austrians who very willingly incorporated into Germany through the 1938 Anschluss) had some responsibility, as the overwhelming majority had knowledge of the great crime even as it took place.

Various analyses of deployment of German forces and German casualties during the war suggest well more than 6 million German men served in the east, where Germany had at least 1 million dead and more than 1 million captured or missing men by war’s end. That is a lot of witnesses.

It is hard, maybe impossible to believe that any in Germany who had a son, a father, a nephew, or a grandson fighting on the Eastern front had deniability. The German armed forces in the east saw it, took direct part in it. They came home on leave or to convalesce from wounds. They wrote letters home. They talked about what they had seen done, what they had done.

Nor could the Germans have done it by themselves nor did they. Soviet prisoners of war interned at a special POW camp called Trawniki, who volunteered, were trained there as camp guards and auxiliary police. These went on to man the worst places, the killing camps. The majority from Trawniki were Ukrainians.

Many historians subscribe now to a conclusion that the Holocaust was not a result of Germany’s war but a cause of it, which is to say that killing all the Jews in Europe — and the world if they could get to them — was a primary German war aim.

On Sept. 1, 1939, the first day of the war in Europe, the worldwide Jewish population was 16.6 million, some may place it a bit higher, some a trifle lower, but that is an accepted figure.

On May 8, 1945, the day the war in Europe ended, there were 11 million Jews left in the world. There is some agreement among historians of the Holocaust that the number killed is between 5.6 million and 5.8 million, hence the usually stated 6 million.

What makes the Holocaust different from every other horror in human history? Different from Spain killing 2 million Indians in the Caribbean and Central and South America in the 16^th, 17^th and 18^th Centuries; from Turkish genocide in 1915-1916 that killed one million Armenians and 250,000 Assyrians; different from the fact that 4 million African Americans were held in slavery in 1860; different  from Japan’s “rape of Nanking” that killed 200,000 Chinese, from the Soviet government’s deliberate starvation of as many as 5 million in Ukraine in the early 1930s? What makes it different no matter the scale or horror is this:

Germany, the leading, largest and greatest nation on the continent of Europe, for centuries a source of intellectual enlightenment, art, culture, invention, science and purposeful industry put all that aside.

Instead with relentless merciless design and tooled precision it made the industrialization of murder a national policy: An industry to collect, transport and murder millions of people solely because they were Jews. The program incorporated plunder of the victims’ worldly goods, property and possessions, plunder even of their bodies (removing gold fillings from their teeth, using their shorn hair to stuff mattresses and still more).

The first concentration camp at Dachau, outside Munich, opened in the spring of 1933, within months of Hitler’s ascension to power. It became the first in an archipelago of hundreds of camps and satellite camps across Europe.

The most famous, the names you will recognize, were all within the borders of pre-war Germany, including Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Flossenburg and Ravensbruck, the latter a special camp for women. At all of them tens and hundreds of thousands died in terrible ways, including hundreds of thousands of Jews. Ann Frank and her sister Margot died in August 1944 at Belsen in a typhus epidemic.

 

In all there are estimates that 12 million died throughout the camp system including other targeted groups including Jehovas Witnesses, Romani (Gypsies), Gay people, Communists, Socialists, resistance fighters and untold numbers of people who were just caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But though they were the most terrible places ever invented by man, the concentration camps were different from five even more terrible places.

It is certain that by late 1941 Adolph Hitler had ordered “the final solution” and charged two men, SS Reischfuhrer Heinrich Himmler and his chief deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, with carrying it out.

In January 1942 at a villa in the upscale Berlin district of Wannsee that had become an SS guest house; Heydrich convened a meeting of 15 representatives of various agencies and departments of the government and the Nazi Party.

There is an excellent and chilling film directed by Kenneth Branaugh titled “Wannsee”. Most of its script is based on a surviving copy of the minutes of the conference kept by Heydrich’s efficient deputy for Jewish affairs, Adolph Eichman.

From the minutes found in German files after the war we know what transpired as the participants sorted out the routine bureaucratic details of their plan to murder millions with industrial precision.

On the day of the conference there were still nearly 3 million Jews in what the Germans called the General Government of Poland – the core of Polish territory less parts of Poland that had been directly annexed and incorporated into Germany. Most were contained in the walled and closely guarded ghettos the Germans had ordered Jews into in 1940 after they conquered Poland in 1939. The most famous in Poland were in Warsaw, Cracow, Lublin, Lodz and Lvov (formerly Lemburg).

The Germans had already carried out and were continuing within Germany a program of systematic murder of mentally ill and developmentally disabled people, using gas as well as lethal injections. Historians estimate that took 200,000 German lives. So, Mr. Spicer had it wrong. Hitler did use gas to kill his own people before he used it to kill other people.

In late 1941, approximately coterminous with the Final Solution order, the Germans opened a camp at Chelmno, 31 miles from Lodz, where they began to test gas as a means of mass extermination. At first they crammed victims into sealed trucks, reversed the exhaust and killed them with carbon monoxide.

This proved messy and inefficient. It is estimated between 150,000 and 180,000 died at Chelmno. The main point is this was not a concentration camp – not a camp at which to concentrate prisoners in brutal conditions, make them slaves and terrorize them with absolute brutality. No, Chelmno was not made to confine victims in a regime of terror. It was designed for mass murder.

There followed in quick succession  four more killing camps: Sobibor in southern Poland where an estimated 200,000 to 250,000 died; Majdanek, in southeast Poland where 200,000 died, including 20,000 shot over a few days by Ukrainian guards in a final mop up; Belzec, outside Cracow where estimates place the dead between 430,000 and 500,000, and Treblinka.

At Treblinka, at the height of “Operation Reinhard”, the campaign to eradicate Polish Jewry named for its architect, Heydrich – the man Hitler probably intended to be his successor as Fuhrer except that Heydrich was assassinated in May 1942 by Czech military agents sent from London — at Treblinka between July 1942 and October 1943, it is estimated 700,000 to 900,000 were killed, including over 300,000 from the Warsaw ghetto extinguished between July and October 1942.

At Treblinka the Germans perfected Zyklon-B gas, and crematoria as a means of disposal of the victims.

Then came Auschwitz, again in southern Poland, a name that has become a universal expression for the worst people can do to other people. There the record estimates 1.1 million died of whom 1 million were Jews. Part of it operated as a traditional slave labor concentration camp. The main part served as a killing center.

So in all it is likely that 4 million died in the camps, including perhaps 3 million in the killing camps. Another 1 million perished when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Germany then spread its forces from north to south into Army Groups, A, B and C. Behind each came battalions of special police battalions called Einsatzgruppen that like locusts swept through every village, town and city in the path of the invasion, rounding up and murdering Jews by machine gunning them en masse.

The most famous such event occurred at a ravine outside Kiev called Babi Yar. There on Sept. 29 and 30, 1941, 33,000 died in this manner. This is principally how the Holocaust was carried out in the Baltic nations during their invasion by Army Group A.

Besides Ukrainians among other nations in which the Germans found willing accomplices were Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Croatia, Romania and Hungary. At the same time there were among those nationalities others who risked all to save Jews. Nothing is as simple — or more complicated – than hate.

Outside the killing camps and killing fields of the east, the rest of the victims died all over Europe in camps and ghettos by deliberate execution, from disease and on several occasions in uprisings like the rising of the Warsaw ghetto’s last survivors in the spring of 1943. Germany conquered Poland in 26 days in 1939. It took 43 days for the Germans to put down entirely the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

In sum with some irony, there is historic substance to the term “Holocaust Centers” misused by Sean Spicer in his incredibly hapless analogy of Bashar al-Assad’s use of a chemical weapon two weeks ago to what Adolph Hitler did.

Terrible as the recent event in Syria is, it is not comparable to the Holocaust, which necessarily remains historically distinguishable from all else.

It should not be invoked by either side in our present fractured political life, or in attempting to understand the so far unknowable but deeply troubling dimensions of the historic accident of the Trump presidency.

It is more than ironic that in Europe, largely reconstituted by the United States after all this, after the war, where Germany stands now as a powerful model for democracy, enlightenment and tolerance,  President Trump could barley bring himself to shake the hand of Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has done so much to redeem her nation.

All of this is something from which Mr. Spicer might try to learn.