The League of Night and Fog (2 page)

The Night of Broken Glass represents the start of Germany’s undisguised state-directed pogrom against the Jews. Though many foreign governments—and even some executives within the Nazi party—objected to the atrocities committed on
Kristallnacht
, no one did anything to stop them or to ensure that they weren’t repeated and in much worse degree.

T
he
Nacht und Nebel Erlass
or Night and Fog Decree, one of Hitler’s personal edicts, was issued on December 7, 1941, the same day Japan attacked America’s naval base at Pearl Harbor. Directed against “persons endangering German security” and specifically against members of resistance groups in German-occupied territories, it proposed that execution was not itself a sufficient deterrent against anti-German threats. Psychological as well as physical force was necessary. Thus, not all agitators would be killed upon discovery; many instead would be transported to an unknown location, their destiny never to be learned by outsiders. Friends and family members would forever be kept in suspense. As the edict stipulated, “The intimidating effect of these measures lies (a) in the disappearance without trace of the guilty person, (b) in the fact that no kind of information must be given about the person’s whereabouts and his fate.” Those tempted to participate in anti-German activity would fear that they, like their loved ones, would disappear within the night and fog.

An example of how this decree was carried out occurred in 1942: the fate of the village of Lidice, in Czechoslovakia. In reprisal for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, Nazi soldiers surrounded the village and shot every male within it, ten at
a time. It took all day before the executions ended. The women of the village were transported to the concentration camp at Ravensbrück in Germany, where they died from weakness or were gassed. But the children of the village, ninety of them, simply vanished into the night and fog. Relatives in other villages could not find a trace of them.

O
n January 20, 1942, six weeks after the Night and Fog Decree, Hitler ordered his senior SS officers to attend a special conference in Berlin for the purpose of organizing the Final Solution to what the Führer called “the Jewish question.” Anti-Semitic riots and laws, intended to force the Jews to leave German territory of their own accord, had been only partially successful—most Jews had been reluctant to leave their homes and businesses. Massive deportations too had been only partially successful—the process took too much time and was too expensive. But now the ultimate extension of Crystal Night was set in motion. Extermination.

Mass executions by firing squad were uneconomical due to the cost of ammunition. A cheaper method, that of cramming victims into trucks and killing them with engine exhaust, was judged unsatisfactory because not enough victims could be asphyxiated at one time. But asphyxiation itself was not at fault. The problem was how to do it efficiently. In the spring of 1942, the death camps began.

These were not the same as concentration camps, where huge numbers of people were squeezed together into squalid barracks from which they were marched each day to factories to work for
the German war effort. As a consequence of brutal workloads, insufficient food, and unsanitary conditions, most occupants of the concentration camps did indeed die, but death was not the primary purpose for which prisoners had been sent to these work camps. Slavery was.

The death camps, however, had no other function than to kill with the utmost speed and efficiency. There were killing centers at some concentration camps, Auschwitz and Maidanek for example, but the exclusive death camps numbered only four. All were situated in Poland: Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno, and Treblinka.

As Treblinka’s commandant, Franz Stangl, confessed,

In the fifteen months of its existence, from July of 1942 to September of 1943, the camp at Treblinka exterminated one million Jews—a sixth of all Jews murdered in the Holocaust. When the camp was at its most efficient, twenty thousand people were killed each day, a statistic that becomes even more horrible when one realizes that all of these executions occurred in the morning. The rest of the day was devoted to disposing of the bodies by burning them in huge open pits. At night, the flames were allowed to die out, the nauseating smoke to drift away, so the next morning’s victims would not be alarmed by the unmistakable stench of incinerated corpses.

T
he victims tumbled from overcrowded cattle cars, relieved to be off the train that had brought them from the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw. Some with whom they’d traveled had smothered or been crushed to death. The survivors tried not to look at the bodies. Instead they squinted at the painful but renewing sunlight, finally able to free their lungs of the poisonous fumes of vomit and excrement.

Signs said
TREBLINKA, CASHIER, AND TRANSFER HERE FOR EAST-BOUND TRAINS
. Fear was offset by hope:
this wasn’t a camp
. The SS soldiers, with their twin lightning-bolt insignia, were to be expected—though another insignia, a death’s head on their caps, aroused apprehension. The clock on the station had hands that were painted on and didn’t move. Soldiers blurted commands to enter the railway station, to strip, to proceed to the showers. A shower would be welcome, but the victims wondered why such a luxury was being granted. A guard seemed to read their thoughts: “We can’t stand your filthy stench!”

Herded into the station, they took off their clothes and surrendered their valuables. “To protect your keepsakes while you’re in the shower,” they were told. They were given haircuts, down to the scalp, and this too made them fearful. Guards burst into the station, lashing their victims with whips, chasing them out the back where naked they were urged along a path, which the SS had nicknamed “the Road to Heaven.” Other guards struck them with clubs. “Faster! Run
faster
!
”

The victims stumbled over fallen companions. At the end of the path, there was only one direction in which to go—to the right, up five concrete steps, through a huge open door. When the last of the group of five hundred had been squeezed inside the chamber, the door was slammed shut and locked. Instead of shower nozzles, there were vents. Outside, an engine roared. Exhaust filled the room. As the victims struggled not to inhale, they didn’t realize that they’d been chased so that their lungs would
rebel against the attempt not to breathe. They didn’t realize that their clothes and valuables would help the Germans fight the war, that their hair would be stuffed inside military mattresses and pillows, that the gold fillings in their teeth would be extracted to pay for guns and ammunition. All they knew was that they couldn’t hold their breath any longer. They died standing up.

I
n the pit of brutality, the human spirit managed to triumph. During August of 1943, Jews who’d been forced to do work at Treblinka that even the SS and their Ukrainian assistants couldn’t endure—dragging corpses from the gas chambers, arranging them on railway ties in trenches, and setting fire to them—revolted. Using makeshift weapons, they killed their guards and raced toward the nearby forest. Many were strafed by machine guns, but others, possibly as many as fifty, reached the cover of the trees and escaped.

The Nazis abandoned the camp. With the Russians approaching from the east and most of the Jews in Poland already exterminated, the SS hurriedly destroyed the evidence of their obscenities. Treblinka’s phony railway station, its Road to Heaven, its gas chambers and incineration pits were all plowed beneath the earth.

A farmer and his cattle were positioned over them. But despite the flames that had charred one million corpses, the victims insisted on bearing witness even in death. The gases from so much decay made the earth heave five feet into the air. The gases dispersed. The earth settled—five feet below its former level. More gases heaved the earth. Again it sank. And rose again.

The cattle fled. So did the farmer.