Jewish resistance in the holocaust - Custom Essay

Jewish resistance in the holocaust

Jews were reluctant to resist the Nazis for fear of their

-           Family

-           Fear of death (or fear in general)

-           “Can’t get any worse”

-           History of persecution

-           Lying/deception

Nazi Deception

Best example of deception working in its most successful way is at Treblinka

-           Nazi’s attempted to conceal true purpose of death camps/ chambers to maintain order and prevent chaos

-           Treblinka train station had timetables, flowers, a painted clock, made to look pretty and quaint etc

-           Gas chambers had shower heads, a cloak room for belongings. Nothing came out of the shower heads, gas came from the ceiling.

-           Sonderkommando would of tried to calm down the Jews as they entered the gas chamber by making jokes and repeating his speech etc “Don’t lose a shoe you’ll need it when you come out” etc

-Scared of Western Jews (Intelligent) thought they may have fought back / caused chaos

-           Not bothered with Eastern Jews, evidence of horse whips being used, shouting, not bothered about the possibility of uprising

Resistance in the ghettos

Many Jews believed continuing a normal life was a form of resistance – Schools, soup kitchens set up etc – low level

Dramatic uprisings – Warsaw Ghetto Rising

-           January 1943 – Starting to prepare the uprising (Guns, bullets etc)

-           Came as a surprise to the SS, the Jewish fighters did quite well

-           80% of ghetto had already been sent to Treblinka death camp

-           First attempt to crush rising failed

-           Only in May 1943 was finally crushed – 2k Ger troops, heavy weaponry and air strikes + tanks

-           Timed the rising for Hitler’s birthday, 20th of April

Mordecai Anielewicz  letter – “Jewish self-defense of the Warsaw Ghetto has become a fact

Jewish armed resistance and retaliation have become a reality

I have been witness to the magnificent heroic struggle of the Jewish fighters”

A Zionist? Extreme beliefs. This was found in the resistance fighters – believed they should be fighting back and taking a stand for their people.

Mordecai was young – early 20’s – more likely to get involved in the rising thinking of his future

-           Can actually fight, physically fit

-           Doesn’t have family / children ties

Partisans

-           People in the occupied territories of Eastern Europe, part of armies?

-           Fled into the forest and established camps

-           Large number of Jewish people became Partisans

-           A sabotage campaign against the Nazi’s

-           Blew up railway lines / fell trees to block roads but also assassinated Heydrich

-           10,000 Jewish partisans living in Lithuania in 1942

-           Poland – Large security forces set up to deal with 20 different partisans groups

-           1941 + Belarus – Bielski brothers ran a community of more than 1,200 partisans

Camp Resistance

           

Sobibor Oct 14th 1943

-           300 prisoners broke out of the camp killing several German personnel in process

-           Around 100 were caught by Gers and killed

-           Only a handful survived the entire war

-           Women were involved, not just men (Women important in resistance movement as they had better access to the leaders of the camps as they worked in sorting areas / kitchens of the camp)

           

Treblinka, August 1943 rising

-           Stole weapons from the SS storeroom, set fire to the camp

-           300 escaped

-           Only around 100 survived the Nazi manhunt

-           Most of instigators died in the revolt, such as Zelo Bloch

           

Auschwitz Oct 7 1944 rising

-           Jewish women working on munitions factories had been smuggling gunpowder into resistance in Auschwitz

-           Passed onto the Sonderkommando

-           Blew up crematoria 4, set fire to other parts of camp, killed Kapos and other officials

-           Several hundred escapes, almost all caught and executed

The Sonderkommando

-           “We send you photographs from Birkenau – people have been gassed” – Zalman Gradowski – Sonnerkommando

-           Some wrote notes and buried them in the sand/rubble of crematoria 4

Warsaw ghetto rising – Laurence Reed: Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution

-           Early 1943 Himmler toured Treblinka and Sobibor – observed the work of his killers.

-           Operation Reinhard camps had murdered 1.65m (97% of eventual total 1.7m in the camps)

-           Because of this “success” – Himmler ordered Warsaw ghetto to be liquidated on 16 Feb – no need for the ghetto to exist. In April the ghetto started fighting back.

-           Initial deportation from the ghetto (largest the Nazis had established, had gone ahead without incident during summer 1942.

-           300,000 Jews had been deported to Treblinka, leaving the ghetto pop at 60k.

-           The Jews knew the Nazis intended to murder them all, with this knowledge most joined the “Jewish Fighting Organisation” which was established in July 1942

-           With the Jewish Military Union they planned to resist attempts at deportation

-           Ahron Karmi, then 21, was a Jew in the ghetto planning to resist

-           Karmi and the fighters scoured for weapons and furniture to construct makeshift defensive positions. – Others dug underground bunkers/hide-outs – None of them believed the Germans could be defeated however

-           Rising on Hitlers birthday.

-           Gers realized they were facing tougher resistance than expected.

-           Tens of thousands of Jews were in hiding, most underground

-           Resorted to burning the Jews out, setting fire to the ghetto

-           Jews retreated to the sewers

-           According to Stroop’s report of the action – 56,065 Jews captured, 7k killed, and 20 German soldiers lost – Clearly exaggerated the Jewish dead and minimized the German losses.

-           The reality of the uprising did not escape Himmler- ghettos uncontrollable- led him to believe that the future of the final solution lay elsewhere, specifically Auschwitz.

Intensification of policy in “total war” - last few years of the war can be described as “Total War”

-           A total war is a war in which every single aspect of the country, the economy, the government, the political system etc, is diverted to winning the war and put on a “war front”

-           WW2 best example of this, conscription in Britain, women conscripted to factories, children evacuated etc, everybody’s life changed

-           In ger they tried to put off having this situation, don’t want their pop to be distracted by the war, wanted a normal population as a “superior” nation does

-           As the war begins to go badly in 1942-43, Gers are forced to put their whole economy on a war footing

-           The total war campaign is launched by Goebbels in a speech he makes in February 1943 in Berlin Sportspalast

Impact on race policy (it steps up a little)

Despite negative situation in war there was no slackening of policy to exterminate the Jews, complete opposite happens

Resources continued to be used to kill Jews at a higher pace, some historians argue killing Jews became a bigger priority, they gave more focus to that than the actual military effort

During this war phase anti-sem propaganda increases, war is hardening up the German people, becomes worse

Acceleration in mass killings (Evidence of step up)

Jews of France, Italy, Greece and Slovakia deported to east, mid 1942 onwards

Fifth crematorium ready for use at Auschwitz, April 1943

Liquidation of many ghettos – Warsaw April 1943, Lodz June 1944

Feb 1944 – Jews of Amsterdam deported

Summer 1944 – Hungarian Jews (420k) deported to Auscwhitz

Use of forced labour

A further dev in “Total war” was to increase the use of Jews as forced labour

Handout –

Profitable industry at Auschwitz – recycling the valuables seized from victims

Camp labor utilized in the factory at Monowitz

Jewish prisoners with special skills employed on indie projects – Operation Bernhard

-           Example of forced labor being exploited by the Nazis

-           SS believed it might be possible to destabilize the Brit economy by printing vast quantities of forged £5 notes that would be circulated through Europe

-           From 1942, HQ forgeries were made my Jew prisoners, hand-picked for their special skills as printers or exp criminals

-           Secrecy guaranteed by keeping production in Auschwitz-Birkenau

-           Peculiar features of the plan – notes to be “laundered” through Salon Kitty, the large SS-run brothel in Berlin

-           Did not achieve significant success, Jewish craftsmen were capable of producing perfect forgeries but it took time (they knew they would be killed once their work was finished)

-           They delayed project by inventing technical hitches etc

-           Even if the forged notes had gone into mass production, it was unrealistic to hope that it would have had more than a nuisance effect on Brits war economy by that stage of the war

-           Project abandoned in 1944

-           Money hidden in the mountains of the southern Alps

Eco importance of Auschwitz extended far beyond the camp

Many smaller SS camps were situated within easy reach of Auschwitz

More than 100 private industrial enterprises that depended on the labour provided by Auschwitz prisoners

Nearly 30% of the Nazi war economy depended upon forced labor

SS became an economic empire as well as police and security empire

Soviet POWs also exploited for their labor – postponed their fate

Camp Dora – significant example of importance of forced labor to the SS

1943 – Nazi engineers employed a mass army of forced laborers to build top-secret factory installations deep underground safe from allied bombing raids for the v2 and v3 rocket missile programmer in the Harz mountains. – Appalling conditions, death rate extremely high.

-          Symbolised the irrationality of Nazi policies. Work carried out there was vital, yet the logic of the SS operations was racist and destructive and wasted a valuable source of labour.

-          Otto Brautugum and Albert Speer (munitions minister) complained to Himmler about the slave laborers dying. Showed that winning war less important than killing the Jews.

-          Albert Speer 1905-81 – Munitions minister early 1942. The time when Ger had to be geared up ready for “total war”. Speer successful in doing so. Boosted war production by 400% Relying extensively on forced labor. Always claims he knew nothing about the conditions of the camps run by the SS.

End of the war and end of the Nazis “Final Solution”

By the end of 1944 defeat in war inevitable – Ger forces started to pull back from eastern territory

End of 1944 – Auschwitz closed down

January 1945 – Sov forces liberated Auschwitz

In West – US forces liberated Dachau and Mauthausen – april/may 1945

In North – Brit forces liberated Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald – april 1945

Death Marches

Historians have suggested a number of reasons why the Nazis forced prisoners on evacuation marches at end of 1944-45 =

Awareness that they were losing  the war and the Russians were advancing

Needed prisoners as forced labor.

Concerns that the Russians would use the prisoners as forced labor

Lack of guards and fear of revolt in camps

Sadism

Ann Frank died on a death march in Amsterdam.