Why did the Jews walk to their deaths?

Introduction

When Adolf Hitler became the Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, it was around that time that I was conceived. In April 30th 1945 at 3:30 in the afternoon when Hitler killed himself at the age of fifty-six while he was in a bunker under the Chancellery in Berlin, I was twelve and a half years of age and was still asleep in my bed in Wells, British Columbia at 6:30 in the morning of April 29th.

During the war years, I only knew what every other schoolboy knew what was going on in Europe by what we learned from the news given to us in Canada, based on what we seen as newsreels shown in the movie houses. We weren’t told anything in school about the events. What we didn’t know until sometime after the war ended, was the truth about the terrible atrocities committed against the Jews in Europe.

Over the years, I became a student of the Second World War and in my large library in my study, I have thirty-five volumes detailing the events of that terrible war.

One of the most puzzling aspects of those horrific events in Europe during that terrible time in history has haunted me for years. The puzzle being; ‘Why did million of Jews walk to their deaths?’

In my research, I read of many incidents where the Jews were marched to an open field or to a forest and all the time they knew that they were going to be shot to death and despite that, they offered no resistance at all, even though they often outnumbered their executioners. They were not cowards because cowards don’t walk to their deaths. They accepted their pending deaths with the resolve that their deaths were inevitable. I would be remiss if I didn’t state that the same thing has happened again long after that war. For example, the July 1995 killing of an estimated 8,000 Bosniak men and boys which was the largest mass murder in Europe since World War II, was no different; for they too, walked to their deaths.

In this four-part series, I will try to explain why this phenomenon can happened to ordinary people and why the Jews did not offer resistance to those who were going to murder them.

I will use what happened in eastern Europe and especially in Germany that brought about the war in Europe and the massacre of so many innocent persons as a means to illustrate my views on this subject.

In the first part, I will deal with Germany with its struggle to keep afloat, and Germany’s need for a strong leader and why they were willing to follow Hitler like the children of Hamelin who followed the Pied Piper.

The second part will deal with Hitler himself and the kind of individual he was and what prompted him to give his approval that all the Jews remaining in Europe were to be annihilated.

The third part will deal with the Jews and the initial sanctions against them in Germany.

The fourth part will deal with the slaughter of the Jews and why they didn’t for the most part; offer any resistance as to what was going to be their fate and why they didn’t resist.

( PART I )

Germany before the Second World War

The nineteen twenties was a bad time for everyone world-wide but in Germany, it was far worse than it was in Canada or the United States. The German mark (our dollar) was next to being worthless prior to Hitler coming to power in 1933. A million German marks would only buy you one postage stamp. I read once about a famous violinist who gave a concert in Berlin and at the end of the concert, as his payment for his performance, he was given a suitcase packed full of German marks of various denominations and with it, he was only able to buy his supper and nothing more. Savings accounts were wiped out. Anyone in Germany who wanted to buy a dollar in January of 1923 had to pay over 17,000 marks but by July of that year, he would have to pay as much as 353,000 marks, and then by December of that year, the cost was as high as 4,200,000,000,000. ( Four trillion marks for one dollar )

Money in Germany lost its meaning almost completely. Government printing presses were unable to keep up with the demand to print more money. Employees collected their wages in shopping bags or wheelbarrows, depending on how much they were paid for the week’s work. The inflation of the German mark increased so quickly that workers who had just been paid, rushed to the food stores to buy what they needed for themselves and their families for the week before the price of the food went up in a matter of hours. In the shops, the prices of goods were typed up several times during the day to meet the new inflationary rate. Unable to afford even the cheapest of foodstuffs, crowds began to riot and loot the food stores. Gangs of unemployed miners sallied forth into the countryside to steal food from the farmer’s fields. The threat of starvation was ever present and malnutrition caused an immediate rise in deaths from tuberculosis. The collapse of the German mark made it difficult and in many cases, impossible to import supplies from abroad.

Later, the revaluation of the German mark restored a small portion of their savings but for the most part, the middle class suffered irreparable damages to their assets. The poor of course had nothing to recover so they remained poor and destitute.

As many as 6 million employable Germans were out of work. That was a large number considering that Germany at that time only had 60 million people with a total labour force of 20 million. Thirty percent unemployment rate is disastrous to any nation. In the industrial city of Berlin, only about forty percent of the jobs were available to the unemployed. Unemployment insurance in Germany at that time amounted to what would be equivalent to $4.25 a week nowadays for a family consisting of the breadwinner, his wife and two children. That money had to pay the rent, utilities and food. Considering how low the German mark was and how many German marks had to be used to buy even a loaf of bread; gives you some idea just how desperate the Germans were in finding a solution out of their dilemma.

Germany was grinding to a halt. Businesses and municipalities could no longer afford to pay the wages of their employees so they were in effect, non existent as going concerns.

This all came about because of the Treaty of Versailles which was an overly harsh treaty offered to the vanquished Germans after World War I that provided for amongst other things; the payment by Germany of heavy reparations, in money and in kind, such payments being justified in the Allied view by the War Guilt clause. Germany had lost economically important territory in Europe along with its colonies and in admitting to sole responsibility for the war, had agreed to pay a huge reparations bill totaling 132 billion German marks.

Fortunately for Germany, after the Second World War, the Allies in their wisdom decided not to punish Germany for that war by making Germany pay reparations and instead the Allied victors went out of their way to help Germany rebuild itself.

Unfortunately, the Allies in the First Word War didn’t have the collective common sense necessary when they drew up the Treaty and in my opinion, the suffering of the Germans in the later years, made Germany a pitri dish for a virus that was to spread not only beyond the pitri dish but all over Europe; that virus being; the National Socialism Worker’s Party, which we all know by its abbreviated name, Nazis, a group of Germans led by the dictator, Adolf Hitler who almost destroyed Germany before he finally shot himself to death on April 30, 1945.

( PART II )

Hitler as a child

Adolf Hitler was born at the Gasthof zum Pommer, an inn in Braunau am Inn, Austria–Hungary, the fourth child of Alois and Klara Hitler's six children. His father was a minor customs official in the local government but was a brute as a husband and a brute as a father. This was not an uncommon trait with husbands and fathers in Austria in that era but with Hitler’s father, he was probably worse than most. He beat his children unmercifully. On one occasion, he beat Adolf’s older brother, Alois into a state of unconsciousness. On another occasion, he beat Adolf so severely, he left him for dead. He was a drunkard who would have to be brought home from the tavern by his children and when he got home, he would beat his wife, his children and their dog.

It does seem reasonably fair to arrive at the conclusion, considering the circumstances of his life at home, that he later found some need to vent his pent-up immeasurable anger and hatred on others as he matured into adulthood. I believe that in some instances, the acorn does not fall far from the tree. He did however adore his mother who always came to his aid and when she died, he was terribly heartbroken.

Hitler as a young adult

From 1905 on until the 1920s, Hitler lived a bohemian life style in Vienna on an orphan's pension (his father died) and support from his mother. He was rejected twice by the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (1907–1908), citing "unfitness for painting", and was told his abilities lay instead in the field of architecture. His memoirs reflect a fascination with the subject. Unfortunately, he wasn’t accepted into the School of Architecture because he quit school before he graduated.

It is ironic when you think about it. Had he been accepted by either of these schools, he may have dedicated his life towards painting or alternatively, as an architect, and that being so, history would have taken a different turn and 50 million people may not have died so needlessly. Further, he also seriously considered becoming a priest as he was quite religious. But he decided against that vocation. He supported himself by buying postcards and then painting pictures he saw on the postcards and selling his pictures to tourists.

Hitler as a mature adult

Then came the First World War. Hitler was twice decorated for bravery. He received the Iron Cross, Second Class, in 1914 and Iron Cross, First Class, in 1918, an honour rarely given to a corporal.

After World War I, Hitler remained in the army and returned to Munich. In July 1919, Hitler was appointed a Verbindungsmann (police spy) of an Aufklärungskommando (Intelligence Commando) of the Reichswehr, (army) both to influence other soldiers and to infiltrate a small political party, the German Workers' Party which had been forming in Germany around that time.

During his spying on party, Hitler was impressed with its founder Anton Drexler's anti-semitic, nationalist, anti-capitalist and anti-Marxist ideas, which favoured a strong active government, a ‘non-Jewish’ version of socialism and mutual solidarity of all members of society. Drexler was impressed with Hitler's oratory skills and invited him to join as the party's 55th member. He was also made the seventh member of the executive committee.

There is no doubt whatsoever that as an orator, Hitler was surely one of the best. His ability to move the emotions of those who heard him speak was the deciding factor that propelled him into the leadership of the very organization he was originally paid to spy on.

This brings me to mind when many years ago, a local politician running for office in Toronto asked me to spy on the man competing against him and report back to him. I attended one of his opponent’s meetings and concluded that the opponent was so good, he would win. I was right. He did win the election. Years later, the opponent became world famous as a United Nations advisor on human rights whereas the other man lost the election and sank into oblivion never to be heard from again.

Hitler was discharged from the army in March 1920 and with his former superiors' continued encouragement, he began participating full time in the party's activities. By early 1921, Hitler was becoming highly effective at speaking in front of large crowds. In February of that year, Hitler spoke before a crowd of nearly six thousand in Munich. Hitler gained notoriety outside of the party for his rowdy, polemic speeches against the Treaty of Versailles, rival politicians (including monarchists, nationalists and other non-internationalist socialists) and especially against Marxists and Jews.

The NSDAP was centered in Munich, a hotbed of German nationalists who included Army officers determined to crush Marxism and undermine the Weimar Republic. Gradually they noticed Hitler and his growing movement as a suitable vehicle for their goals. Hitler traveled to Berlin to visit nationalist groups during the summer of 1921, and in his absence, there was a revolt among the DAP leadership in Munich.

The party was run by an executive committee whose original members considered Hitler to be an overbearing individual. They were right of course but then leaders generally are overbearing in nature. Hitler rushed back to Munich and countered them by tendering his resignation from the party on the 11th of July, 1921. The executive committee of the NSDAP eventually backed down and Hitler's demands were put to a vote of the party members. Hitler received 543 votes for and only one against. At the next gathering on 29th of July 1921, Adolf Hitler was introduced as the Führer (leader) of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, marking it the first time this title was publicly used. As said earlier, its abbreviated form is NAZI, a term that was used thereafter.

Hitler's beer hall oratory, attacking Jews, social democrats, liberals, reactionary monarchists, capitalists and communists, began attracting adherents. Later, thousands of Germans wanted to be Nazis. Encouraged by this early support, Hitler decided to use retired General Ludendorff as a front in an attempted coup later known as the Beer Hall Putsch. The Putsch failed and he and others were arrested and he was sent to prison for 18 months.

While at Landsberg Prison, he dictated most of the first volume of Mein Kampf (My Struggle) originally entitled 'Four and a Half Years of Struggle against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice' to his deputy Rudolf Hess. The book, dedicated to Thule Society member Dietrich Eckart, was Hitler’s autobiography and an exposition of his ideology. It was later published in two volumes in 1925 and 1926, selling about 240,000 copies between 1925 and 1934. By the end of the war, about 10 million copies had been sold or distributed (newlyweds and soldiers received free copies). It was in this book, that the world began to realize what his real purpose was; to conquer all of Europe and it warned the world of his hatred for all Jews. Hitler spent years dodging taxes on the royalties of his book and had accumulated a tax debt of about 405,500 Reichsmarks (6 million euros in today's money) by the time he became chancellor (at which time his debt was waived). Obviously the man was a deadbeat.

Having failed in overthrowing the Republic by a coup, Hitler pursued a ‘strategy of legality’: this meant formally adhering to the rules of the Weimar Republic until he had legally gained power. He would then use the institutions of the Weimar Republic to destroy it and establish himself as dictator of Germany.

The political turning point for Hitler came when the Great Depression hit Germany in 1930. The Weimar Republic had never been firmly rooted and was openly opposed by right-wing conservatives (including monarchists), communists and the Nazis.

I am now going to go directly to 1932. The Nazis achieved their biggest success yet in elections and won 230 seats in 1932, becoming the largest party in the Reichstag. Knowing that it was not possible to form a stable government without Nazi support, Chancellor Papen tried to persuade Hitler to become Vice-Chancellor and enter a new government with a parliamentary basis. Hitler, however, would settle for nothing less than the chancellorship of Germany for himself.

Many prominent businessmen financially supported the Nazi Party, which had been brought to the brink of bankruptcy by the cost of heavy campaigning. They wrote letters to President Hindenburg, urging him to appoint Hitler as leader of a government that would be independent from parliamentary parties which could then turn into a movement that would enrapture millions of people in Germany.

Hindenburg was not well at this time so be buckled under the pressure and Hitler was appointed as the Chancellor of Germany on January 30th 1933.

Having become Chancellor, Hitler foiled all attempts by his opponents to gain a majority in parliament. Because no single party could gain a majority, Hitler persuaded President Hindenburg to dissolve the Reichstag again. Elections were scheduled for early March, but on 27th of February 1933, the Reichstag building was set on fire. It later was established that the Nazis had set it on fire under the direction of Goring, one of Hitler’s henchmen. Hitler’s government reacted with the Reichstag Fire Decree of 28 February which suspended basic rights of all Germans, including the right of habeas corpus.

On election day, the 6th of March, the NSDAP increased its result to 43.9% of the vote, remaining the largest party, but its victory was marred by its failure to secure an absolute majority, necessitating maintaining a coalition with the DNVP. On March, 31st, the new Reichstag was constituted with an opening ceremony held at Potsdam's garrison church. Because of the Nazis' failure to obtain a majority on their own, Hitler's government confronted the newly elected Reichstag with the Enabling Act that would have vested the cabinet with legislative powers for a period of four years. Though such a bill was not unprecedented, this act was different since it allowed for deviations from the constitution.

President Paul von Hindenburg died on the 2nd of August 1934. Rather than holding new presidential elections, Hitler's cabinet passed a law proclaiming the presidency dormant and transferred the role and powers of the head of state to Hitler as Führer und Reichskanzler (leader and chancellor). As head of state, Hitler now became supreme commander of the armed forces. When it came time for the soldiers and sailors to swear the traditional loyalty oath, it had been altered into an oath of personal loyalty to Hitler. Hitler had become the dictator of Germany. They had to swear the following; “I swear by God this sacred oath that I shall render unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the German Reich and people, supreme commander of the armed forces, and that I shall at all times be ready, as a brave soldier, to give my life for this oath.” A similar oath was administered to all public servants. It was as follows; “I swear: I will be faithful and obedient to Adolf Hitler, Führer of the German Reich and people, to observe the law, and to conscientiously fulfil my official duties, so help me God.”

Hitler made it clear to those who heard him speak that he had the unmistakable conviction that his Third Reich would be the master of all of Europe. In the latter part of the 1930s he began to wreak havoc on all the nations surrounding him except Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland and Finland. The Germans knew what their fate would eventually be because in 1934 when Hitler spoke in Rauschning, he said in part; “Even if we should not conquer, we shall drag half the world into destruction with us and leave no one to triumph over Germany. We shall never capitulate. We may be destroyed, but if we are, we shall drag the world (down) with us.”

Strangely enough, Hitler’s willingness to destroy the world finally resulted in him attempting to destroy Germany. When he realized that he could no longer stop the invaders from reaching him, he began to even hate the Germans (remember he was really an Austrian by birth) and he didn’t hesitate to give his ‘scorched earth’ order that was to destroy all industrial plants, public utilities, post offices, railways, telephone facilities, radio transmitters, food supplies, cattle, farms, churches, theatres---everything that could give the Germans a chance to survive the horror they had suffered from.

Despite the fact that Hitler was brilliant man and very intelligent and well conversed in many things and who was able to solve the financial problems that Germans had suffered from for so long and make Germany into one of the most powerful countries in the world, he was in reality, a madman. He was a sociopath.

For example, in a speech in 1941 in which he was criticizing President Roosevelt about the president’s brain trust, (group of great thinkers) he said, “I have no experts at all. In my case, my own head alone is always enough. I need no brain trust to help me. Therefore, if there is really to be a change anywhere, then the change will be created in my brain.”

That kind of thinking was to eventually doom him and Germany to defeat since he constantly refused to listen to his generals on how to conduct the war. He refused to make use of information given to him by his generals by claiming that he would act on his own inspirations. Even in his last year of life while behind the steel doors of his underground bunker, he lived in a mad world of his dreams thinking that his armies would prevail, even when the Russians were approaching him less than a kilometre from his bunker.

The presence of sadism and the destructive tendencies in Hitler’s character is too obvious to require much discussion. The love for the powerful and the hatred for the powerless was typical for the sado-masochist character of Hitler. For example, when he confronted his desire to kill all the Jews of Europe, he was a sadist. But when it came to having sex with women, he was a masochist. He had an affair with his niece, 23-year-old Geli Raubal who was 29 years younger than her uncle and to say that he indulged in normal sex with her is a joke. Before she committed suicide by shooting herself in the head with Hitler’s gun while he was away giving a speech, she confided with a friend about this weird sex act he performed with her. He demanded that she squat over his face while she urinated on him. He later had beautiful women beat him while he and they were both naked. These acts were very secretive and only became public after the war had ended.

The limitless of Hitler’s hatred in general was known by all his close followers. Whoever had curried his disfavour, was lost forever. It was never possible to return to Hitler’s good graces. In fact when generals who plotted against him were hanged with piano wire, he had the movies of their death struggles shown to him that night. By the time he realized that the war was lost, he couldn’t even forgive the German people whom he claimed had deserted him.

For eleven years from 1923 until 1934, he always carried with him a riding whip. It was a symbol to him and others as a means of humiliating and subduing other men. It was one of his fetishes.

There is no doubt that he was also a necrophile. Such persons are people who love to talk about sickness and death. They actually get quite excited when the discussions moved in those directions. He was fascinated by destruction and the smell of death was sweet to him. Although the death of the Jews and others might have been sweet to him, his ultimate goal was to preside over a vast empire that covered all of Europe. The murder of Jews was to him simply a measure of removing the stones that he thought would clutter up his envisioned fields of endeavor.

The necrophiliac is a person who is attracted to darkness and night. This was definitely one of Hitler’s characteristics. That characteristic actually made the invasion of Normandy a success. When the Allies began landing on the shores of Normandy, the German generals wanted Hitler to send reinforcements but because Hitler always slept until eleven every morning with orders that no one was to disturb him until then, the reinforcements weren’t sent until after eleven in the morning when he was awakened. By then, it was too late for them to have any affect in stopping the invasion.

Near the end of the war, Hitler would often hold conferences until almost midnight. Then he would have supper and he never left his after-supper party before two in the morning. Although many guests originally considered it an honour to break bread with Der Fuhrer, they soon learned that the experience would cause them to suffer from numbing boredom as Hitler ranted hour after hour in his monologues about his life and goals. Keeping one’s eyelids open during his monologues was considered by many to be a super human achievement. He would then go to bed and sleep until eleven the next morning whereas the others had to be at work by seven in the morning. Sometimes he would work all through the early hours of the morning until eight before he went to bed.

His secretary later stated that Hitler shunned the light of day, and preferred to be indoors as much as he could.

His narcissism made him prone to making horrendous mistakes. His under-evaluation of the Soviet Union and the United States of America resulted in him stupidly attacking the Soviet Union and declaring war on the United States. That stupidity brought Germany to its knees and Hitler to his end. Even when it came to minor matters, his narcissism distorted his judgment to the effect that his decisions became acts of utter folly.

In summing up this man’s psychic, I think it is safe to say that Hitler was totally necrophilious, narcissistic and a sexual deviate to boot. Anyone suffering from these syndromes can indeed become evil since he betrays the concept of life and growth and is a devotee of death and destruction.

Germany and later most of Europe was to suffer at the hands of a man whose mind was malignant and devoid of the concept of any form of mercy or passion. Millions upon millions of Europeans and especially much of the Jewry of Europe perished because of this man’s fantasies and egomania.

But what drove him to such lengths as to murder as many Jews as his minions could get their hands on?

It is in his book, Mein Kampf that we find the answer to that question.

Hitler himself established the time and place of his earliest hatred of the Jews. It was during his life in Vienna from 1909 until 1913 that Hitler became a conscious and violent anti-semite. It is impossible to say with certainty what influenced Hitler’s hatred for the Jews at that time but he read a lot of the writings of a deranged racial mythologist named Adolf Lanz whose central idea of a blond, blue-eyed master race enthralled the then twenty-year-old Hitler who had previously been smitten with early Nordic legends of gods and heros. Hitler gradually began to believe that there was a biological necessity to destroy the Jews and the Slavs in order that the Aryan race could be pure. And after the war began, he went out of his way to destroy all Jewry in Europe. Even Jewish unborn babies lived with an unconditional death sentence waiting for them.

Of course it was utter nonsense but to Hitler, he became addicted to the concept that the Jews had to go and for that, in his opinion, the world would be better off without them. Of course as a young man in his twenties, he was in no position to realize his dream of eradicating Jewry in Europe. That wouldn’t come about until many years later.

It is a sad commentary on the Germans in that era that many of them agreed with that madman’s view that the German world was slowly being destroyed because of the Jews and for this reason, they didn’t care that the Jews were being mistreated and those that knew of the extermination camps, cared even less that the Jews were being murdered en masse.


( PART III )

Jewry in Europe

Judaism in Europe has a long history, beginning in the Roman Empire period as Jews displaced after the Bar Kokhba revolt were dispersed throughout the Empire. The persecution of Jews in Europe began in the High Middle Ages in the context of the Crusades. In the First Crusade (1096) flourishing communities on the Rhine and the Danube were utterly destroyed; In the Second Crusade (1147) the Jews in France were subject to frequent massacres. Then along came, Martin Luther in the Sixteenth Century, the protestant reformist. Despite his complaints against the Catholic Church for its abuses, (and there were many) he was a Jew hater whose pamphlet against the Jews in 1542 was disgusting to say the least. In one of his pamphlets he wrote;

“The Jews, being foreigners, should truly and certainly own nothing and what they do own must certainly be ours. When a Jew, through his usury, steals and robs ten tons of gold, he thinks he’s better than God. They are a heavy burden on us, like a plague, pestilence, and a sheer misfortune in our country.”

This Jew hater even advocating burning down synagogues and Jewish schools, destroying their businesses and expelling them from Germany.

A great part of the population of Germany at that time was quite happy to accept Luther’s ravings as gospel and for this reason, the Jews for the most part were ostracized by the rest of the population.

History has shown us that there are always groups of people who suffer at the hands of the majority and as fate would have it, the Jews in Europe (the chosen people) were actually chosen to be the scapegoats as a balm for the misery of others. I suppose it is easier to feel superior if there is a race one considers lower on the race scale than one’s own. To the non-Jews, the Jews whom the non-Jews believed murdered Jesus Christ, fit the role they set for them. Humans have always felt better when they know that there is someone suffering more than they are and to the non-Jews, the Jews were suffering more than the rest of the populace was; or at least so they thought.

Even more modern writers such as Fyodor Dostoevsky developed fervent anti-semitic views that were explicitly revealed in his popular diary but also in his later masterpieces such as the House of the Dead and The Brothers Karamazov. These works drew upon negative stereotypes of Jews as moneylenders, opportunists and deceivers.

By the time Hitler had come to power, nothing had really changed when it came to the attitudes of non-Jews towards the Jews in Germany.They were still looked down by the non-Jews despite the fact that there were many Jews who were highly respected in the arts and sciences and as accomplished and respected writers.

The German people needed a scapegoat to blame for all its suffering they were enduring in the 1920s and 1930s and their scapegoat was already there living amongst them, ready to be sacrificed for the betterment of the Aryan race.

As it turned out, Hitler, their leader Der Furher was ready and willing to lead the Jews of Germany out of their country like the Pied Piper led the children out of Hamelin. However, it wasn’t Hitler’s intention at this point in history to murder them. What he wanted to do was shove them out of Germany and into the Slav countries where they could mingle with those whom Hitler considered were also sub-humans. But to do this, he had to convince the Jews in Germany that they no longer had a future in Germany.

When Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933, some 525,000 Jews were living within the borders of Germany. Over 160,000 of them congregated in the capital city of Berlin alone. Of this community in Germany, between 250,000 and 300,000 either chose or were forced to emigrate by 1939. But 250,000 remained behind. Many of them escaped in the final months before the start of World War II, but nearly one in four German Jews (or over 120,000) did not make it out. Indeed, as late as the spring of 1942, at a time when the coldly efficient machinery of the Final Solution was running at high gear, as many as 40,000 Jews were still carrying on their daily lives as best they could in the capital of a regime that was bent on annihilating them. The Jews who remained behind were, in some restricted sense, able to continue with their lives under Hitler because at least, they had a roof over their heads and food in their bellies. Perhaps they felt that if they waited it out long enough, things would change for the better. Sadly as it turned out, their hopes were naïve and foolish. Since the abuses thrust upon them by the Nazi regime over the years was steadily getting worse, they should have suspected that they might not survive. It was like they were squinting in the glaring sun hoping that it would eventually set but as history was to show us later, they were consumed by it.

Even before Hitler had become the Chancellor of Germany, the Jew was cast as a defiler of German purity in the earliest formulations of the Nazi program. Hitler proposed that no more Jews be permitted to immigrate to Germany and those Jews who had immigrated to Germany since 1914, were to be compelled to leave the country. The Nazis were relentless in their persecution of the Jews in Germany though their attacks in the press, public speeches and in action. In 1931, truckloads of blackshirts (Nazis) fell upon their Jewish victims screaming "Heil Hitler", assaulting them and smashing the windows of their businesses. In 1932, 400,000 Nazi inspired troops in terror squads roamed the streets of many cities in Germany hunting for Jews.

The first official act of the Nazi government against the Jews in 1933 was to boycott their goods. In November 1938, the Nazi government wiped out the remaining Jewish businesses. Jewish retail stores and shops were liquidated. Industrial enterprises owned by Jews were sold or liquidated and taken over by government-appointed trustees. Jewish doctors could only treat Jewish patients and Jewish lawyers could no longer practice in the courts. This scandalous behavior on the part of the Germans in that era was probably no more than surface motivation for the rise of the deep-seated ingrained anti-semitism that existed at that time.

I would be remiss however if I didn’t add that anti-semitism existed in other countries also at that time such as in the United States and Canada. I remember for example when I booked into a hotel in Vancouver in the early 1950s; being asked if I was a member of those who are of the Hebrew faith. If I said, "yes", I would not have been given a room.

During the early 1930s, Nazis laws prohibited marriage or even sex between Aryans and imprisonment was the sentence if a Jew was guilty of breaking this law but after the war began, the punishment was death.

Paradoxically, these pogroms were the last occasions for violence against the Jews in the streets for the rest of the Nazi regime. Thereafter, individual Jews were not singled out for further molestation nor were selected groups of them. The subsequent lull in physical violence deceived many of them into thinking that the worst was over. Unfortunately for millions of Jews in Europe, the worst was soon to overwhelm them after the war in Europe began.

One is forced to ask, how could this abuse have happened in that era?

It happened because after more than 2000 years of persecution, the Jews had learned that appeasement, bending with the wind and not actively resisting, was the best policy. After all, life would still go on. The Jews always had their losses but as a people, they had never been destroyed.

It is not my intention at this stage of this piece to deal with the extermination camps because in those camps, the Jews for the most part didn’t know that when they were walking into the gas chambers, they would be gassed.

Instead, I will go directly to the year when Hitler and his minions decided that the Jews were to be annihilated as a race.

( Part IV )

The Final Solution

The Nazis, under the cover of the war, had decided to murder millions of Jews. The details of the Final Solution were worked out at the Wannsee Conference which was held just outside of Berlin on January 20th, 1942.

On the directions of Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich (Himmler's deputy) chaired a meeting to consider what to do with the large number of inmates in Germany's concentration camps. Heydrich had invited 14 people to Wannsee, including seven ministers of state, they being: the minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, the Interior minister, the minister of the Office of the Four-Year Plan, the minister of Justice, the Minister of the General Government (controlling - central - southern Poland ) the Minister of the Foreign Ministry, the Party Chancellery Minister and the Reich Chancellery Minister. Those in attendance also included, Heinrich Muller ( head of the Gestapo ), Adolf Eichmann ( overseer of the transportation of Jews to the camps ) and Roland Friesler, ( head of the People's Court ) along with four other high ranking SS officers.

Those at the meeting eventually decided on what was to became known as the 'Final Solution'. From that date the extermination of the Jews became a systematically organized operation. It was decided to establish extermination camps in the east that had the capacity to kill large numbers each day including Belzec (15,000), Sobibor (20,000), Treblinka (25,000) and Majdanek (25,000). All Jews in Germany and the occupied countries were to be deported to sealed ghettos as a holding area. Many were then to be shipped in cattle cars to labor camps where they lived under brutally inhuman conditions. Hundreds of thousands were to be sent directly to the gas chambers in the aforementioned death camps. Auschwitz came later.

But before the death camps came the Einsatzgruppen or Special Action Squads. Specially trained units of the S.S. followed the first wave of German army troops in the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Their orders were to execute on the spot all Communist leaders, Gypsies and Jews. Their victims were led to ditches in fields and/or open spaces in forests to be shot to death.

Six of the 15 Einsatzgruppenfuhrers (leaders) held doctoral degrees; 16 of the 69 Einsatzkommandofuhrers ( smaller extermination commando squad ) groups held doctoral degrees. For example, Dr.Franz Alfred Six, the leader of Vorkommando Moskau of Einsatzgruppe B received his doctorate of philosophy in 1936 from the University of Heidelberg. He taught political science at the University of Konigsberg in 1937 and held the chair of foreign political science at the University of Berlin in 1939. Even these professional men then had no scruples.

It is estimated that by the end of 1942, the Einsatzgruppen had killed more than a million Soviet Jews. Over 400,000 were killed also by S.S. units, anti-semitic native civilians, police units, and soldiers in the German army.

The Jews of Kiev were rounded up by the Einsatzgruppen for ‘resettlement’ in late September 1941. Thousands of Jews were brought to a ravine called Babi Yar on the outskirts of Kiev and mowed down by machine guns. Many who were not wounded, including thousands of children, were thrown into the pit of bodies and were buried alive. The records of the Einsatzgruppen unit which participated in the executions recorded 33,771 Jews killed at Babi Yar on September 29-30. In all, more than 100,000 persons, most of them Jews, were shot at Babi Yar between 1941-1943 by the Nazis.

During the Nuremberg War Crime Trials after the war, a witness (Herman Friedrich Graebe) gave evidence about such a slaughter which took place in a forest in the Ukraine in 1942. In his testimony he said,

"My foreman and I went directly to the pits. Nobody bothered us. Now I heard rifle shots in quick succession from behind one of the earth mounds. The people who had got off the trucks --- men, women and children of all ages --- had to undress upon the order of an SS man who carried a riding or dog whip. They had to put down their clothes in fixed places, sorted according to shoes, top clothing and undergarments. I saw heaps of shoes of about 800 to 1000 pairs, great piles of under-linen and clothing. Without screaming or weeping these people undressed, stood around in family groups, kissed each other, said farewells, and waited for a sign from another SS man, who stood near the pit, also with a whip in his hand. During the fifteen minutes I stood near, I heard no complaint or plea for mercy. I watched a family of about eight persons, a man and a woman both of about fifty, with their children of about twenty to twenty-four, and two grown-up daughters about twenty-eight or twenty-nine. An old woman with snow white hair was holding a one year old child in her arms and singing to it and tickling it. The child was cooing with delight. The parents were looking on with tears in their eyes. The father was holding the hand of a boy about ten years old and speaking to him softly; the boy was fighting his tears. The father pointed to the sky, stroked his head and seemed to explain something to him. At that moment the SS man at the pit started shouting something to his comrade. The latter counted off about twenty persons and instructed them to go behind the earth mound. Among them was the family I have just mentioned. I well remember a girl, slim with black hair, who, as she passed me, pointed to herself and said, "twenty-three years old." I walked around the mound and found myself confronted by a tremendous grave. People were closely wedged together and lying on top of each other so that only their heads were visible. Nearly all had blood running over their shoulders from their heads. Some of the people shot were still moving. Some were lifting their arms and turning their heads to show that they were still alive. The pit was nearly two-thirds full. I estimated that it already contained about a thousand people. I looked for the man who did the shooting. He was an SS man, who sat at the edge of the narrow end of the pit, his feet dangling into the pit. He had a Tommy-gun on his knees and was smoking a cigarette. The people, completely naked, went down some steps which were cut in the clay wall of the pit and clambered over the heads of the people lying there to the place to which the SS man directed them. They lay down in front of the dead or wounded people; some caressed those who were still alive and spoke to them in a low voice. Then I heard a series of shots. I looked into the pit and saw that the bodies were twitching or the heads lying already motionless on top of the bodies that lay beneath them. Blood was running from their necks. The next batch was approaching already. They went down into the pit, lined themselves up against the previous victims and were shot."

Now I have arrived at that most important part of this essay. ‘Why did the Jews walk to their deaths?’

The Jews had few options and made the best of what was an increasingly hopeless dilemma. As the Jews were being led to their deaths, they finally realized that bargaining with their executioners would be ineffective, besides they had nothing to bargain with since they were being led to the execution pits with nothing, not even the clothes on their backs.

Active resistance was useless except perhaps to saving Jewish pride and honour.

Humans are presumably the only living creatures who realize that they will die some day. At one end of the attitude-toward-death continuum, is accepting and even welcoming death as a passage to a more blissful state of being. The role of religious conviction and belief in an afterlife is a powerful means of lessening the fear of death for many people.

The Jews had been stripped of all their belongings including their homes so from the material sense, they had nothing else to live for in their present world. Obviously the Jews after being treated in such a horrible manner while they were alive, definitely felt that there would be something better for them as resurrected beings after they were murdered.

Further, many of them were already cognizant of friends and relatives preceding them in death so such familiarity with death did not necessarily breed a fear of it, but rather it promoted a kind of anesthesia to it and lead them to cope with the prospects of it in a much easier manner than normally would be expected under other circumstances.

The Jews looked at events around them in a rational, logical manner. Jews, though still a distinct minority within their community; pondered two pivotal lessons in life and drew the same conclusions: Jewish values and identity were their lot in life and they had nothing to be ashamed of. Indeed, Jewishness was a deep source of strength, pride, and purpose, counterbalancing the disappointment and frustration they felt living in an ungrateful and hostile homeland. They could face death without being ashamed for being a Jew.

But what did prompt them from not running away from their executioners? The answer is quite simple. It was being with their families during their final moments of life.

Nora Levin in her book, The Holocaust said in part on page 365;

“The strong family ties of most Jews tied them to the ghettos. Even young people who had the best chance to survive, refused to leave their parents or their fellow Jews in the ghettos. A fearful sense of isolation which was more fearful, it seems than death, gripped many Jews who clung to the ghettos in order to not be alone.” unquote

The closeness of living ties among eastern European Jews made it possible for over one million of them to wait their turns to be shot by the SS and others of their ilk as they stood at the edges of the execution pits with resignation believing that there was nothing they could do to save themselves or their families.

The fear of being left alone continued to exist in them when the Jews were standing naked next to the edges of the execution pits with their executioners at their backs. If they tried to run away, they would be shot and perhaps not die quickly. Further, if their families joined them in the rush for freedom and some fell, would the others stop to help them? Probably they would and that would then mean that they would all die anyway. Even if they managed to escape the fuselage of rifle fire, how far would they get while running away naked before being captured? There was no hiding place anywhere near them and even if they got beyond the rifle fire, they would be for the most part, denounced by the local peasants and or killed by anti-Semite partisan units. If they had to die, it was better that they die as a family since they couldn’t be closer together as a family than in death.There must have been some comfort in believing that not only would they have died together, they would also be together in the afterlife.

The Jews up to then had been abused much of their lives to the extent that there really wasn’t that much to live for anymore. Is there really that big a step from appeasement to readily accepting death? We must however, never mistake resignation for acceptance.

What I have said does not mean that the Jews per se didn’t have a will to live. Many Jews upon learning that they would be taken away from the ghettos by the Nazis, fled them and did so knowing that their chances of survival might be as slim as one to a hundred. Many Jews fought their oppressors and they fought bravely in ghettos, the forests and the marshes but there is a difference between dying on a battlefield as a soldier than there is when being led to one’s execution at the edge of a ditch. Despite that difference, all the Jews that died so unjustly and so needlessly; died bravely. May God bless them all.