Beginning in January 1944, the Soviets undertook their winter offensive against the Germans on several fronts. In the north they were finally able to completely break the ninehundred-day siege of Leningrad, during which three-quarters of a million people had starved, and to open the railroad link to Moscow. Soon ancient cities like Novgorod, which the Germans had taken such delight in capturing in 1941, fell to the Red Army. At the same time, to the south, the Soviets launched a major assault in the Ukraine, and by early February their troops reached the line from which the Germans began Operation Barbarossa in 1941. The Soviet offensives progressed unrelentingly during the next several months. By mid-April Soviet troops were approaching the Czechoslovak frontier. May brought the liberation of the Ukraine and the penetration of Romania, Poland, and Czechoslovakia; the entire Crimea also passed into Soviet hands that month. But this advance was merely the prelude to the great summer offensive (Operation Bagration), commenced, appropriately enough, on 23 June. This offensive, designed in part to relieve pressure on the Western Allies, who had landed in France on 6 June, focused on the German Army Group Center and on the area around Minsk in White Russia. In a victory on a scale with Kursk the year before, the Soviets virtually destroyed the German army group. Twenty-eight of its forty divisions were encircled; 400,000 German soldiers were killed and huge amounts of materiel captured. Although by early August the Germans were temporarily able to contain the advance, largely because the Red Army had moved 450 miles and was ahead of its supply lines, it was clear that the Germans had been dealt a deadly blow. The Soviets were approaching the eastern borders of Germany itself; they were threatening Warsaw and had already penetrated the Baltic states. Hitler's stubborn refusal to abandon untenable positions had put much of what remained of his army at risk. Germany's increasing impotence did not go unnoticed by its now-reluctant allies. By fall they were dropping out of the war one by one. The Finns sued for armistice; the Bulgarians capitulated and declared war on Germany as did the Romanians. The Soviets entered Hungary and Yugoslavia in their drive into the heart of Europe. On the last day of the year, even as a dramatic battle was underway for Budapest, Hungary declared war on its former ally, Nazi Germany. The growing awareness on the part of Germany's allies that German defeat was indeed inevitable was an important factor in determining how the leadership of each of these countries treated their indigenous Jews and how they viewed the Holocaust. This observation is particularly true of Hungary, where the last large national community of Jews survived into 1944. Once again, the progress of the war and the ongoing process of the Holocaust were closely related. One point of conflict between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies had been the issue of a "second front." Dur ing 1942 and 1943, when the Soviets were most hardpressed, they had repeatedly asked the West to mount an invasion of western Europe to relieve the pressure. This had been twice promised and twice postponed. Churchill, who had to bring the bad news to Stalin the second time, likened his task to carrying a very large lump of ice to the North Pole. Stalin harbored the suspicion that the Western Allies were content to let the Soviet Union exhaust itself in the struggle with Hitler. To be sure, the Allies did invade North Africa and then Italy, but these offensives were not the bold, dramatic actions the Soviets expected. Finally, however, in the early morning hours of 6 June, Allied troops, under the overall command of General Dwight David Eisenhower, landed on the beaches of Normandy in a gigantic operation known as Overlord. Eisenhower had three million troops under his command and had assembled the largest armada in history, with fifty-three hundred ships of all kinds, including five battleships and 104 destroyers.4 The Germans' only hope of thwarting the establishment of the long-awaited second front was to move immediately before the Allies got a foothold on the continent. In fact, the Germans had been expecting a cross-channel invasion for months, and General Erwin Rommel had been reinforcing the Atlantic Wall to meet it. However, Hitler and many of his generals made the fatal mistake (encouraged by Allied intelligence) of thinking that the invasion would come on the French channel coast (Pas de Calais) closest to England. Anything else, they thought, would be a diversion. Accordingly, the very troops which might have driven the Allies off the beaches that first day were not stationed in Normandy, but held in reserve. Once he heard of the invasion, Hitler did order Rommel to throw it back into the sea, but, still thinking in terms of a diversion, refused to commit the necessary reserves. Thus, the Western Allies at last established a second front, and, although the Germans put up stiff resistance and the Allies did not for some time reach the goals they had set for themselves, the Allied bridgehead in France had been established, providing a conduit for the transmission into western Europe of massive reinforcements of troops and materiel. On 6 June alone, the Allies landed more than 130,000 men on the beaches of France. They went on to construct a huge, ingenious floating harbor (Mulberry) that would permit the landing of an additional 920,000 men and 177,000 vehicles by 1 July. The continent was now open to fullscale invasion by the French and Anglo-American forces. German resistance was fierce but costly. By mid-July the Wehrmacht had sustained nearly 100,000 casualties, and Rommel reported: "The enemy is on the point of smashing our weak front line and penetrating deep into the interior of France." The Soviet offensive near Minsk, launched on 23 June, helped to prevent the Germans from transferring large-scale forces to the west to counter the Allied landings. The summer months with their good campaign weather witnessed the advance of Allied forces across northern France and corresponding disaster for the Germans, who, on top of everything else, lost their commander, Rommel, to Allied strafing on 17 July. On 25 August Paris was liberated to the great jubilation of its citizens. Allied forces penetrated the Low Countries; on 3 September Brussels fell to Allied troops, and the next day they entered Antwerp. By mid-September Belgium and Luxemburg had been freed, and on 12 September Allied troops invaded German soil for the first time near Aachen. In the meantime, on 15 August another Allied army landed in southern France and began to advance northward. Two days later, Hitler, realizing that the Normandy peninsula would have to be abandoned, angrily fired his commander in France, Field Marshal von Kluge. The following day von Kluge committed suicide, but not before he sent a letter to Hitler that expressed what many Germans might have felt, but few dared to say. He hoped, von Kluge wrote, that his successor might restore the German position and that the new wonder weapons would bring success. If not, Hitler should end the war: "The German people have suffered such unspeakable ills that the time has come to put an end to these horrors." Unfortunately, the horrors, not the least those perpetrated by the Nazi regime against its own people and others, would continue for another nine months. As autumn 1944 approached, the Allies, with their overwhelming materiel superiority, pushed relentlessly forward toward Germany. There were, to be sure, some military setbacks, such as the unsuccessful British attempt in mid-September to land paratroopers behind German lines near Arnhem in Holland in order to secure a bridge over the Rhine. Nonetheless, by late October Eisenhower was already laying plans for a major offensive to overrun the main German strongholds in the Rhineland and then to penetrate deep into the heart of the Reich. But Hitler, always the gambler, had one more card up his sleeve. Hoping to repeat the glorious victory of 1940, Hitler envisioned once again a surprise thrust through the Ardennes Forest at the weakest point in the Allied line. His hope was to drive through to Antwerp, the vital port for Allied shipping, divide the Allied forces, and stop their assault. Having done this, the Führer planned to turn to the east again and launch an attack on the Red Army. It was an impossible gamble, and the German generals, once they finally heard of it, requested a watered-down plan at most. But Hitler insisted. Successfully preserving complete secrecy, Hitler denuded the other fronts of troops, assembling without detection thirty divisions and one thousand tanks for his operation, called Autumn Mist (Herbstnebel). On 16 December Hitler launched his assault against the American troops, who were caught completely by surprise, Smelser with the result that the Germans were able to score initial successes. The Americans' confusion was compounded by the sudden presence in their midst of specially trained SS commandos speaking fluent American English. The Germans were aided, moreover, by heavy cloud cover, which prevented the Allies from bringing their air superiority to bear. After early gains, however, the German offensive broke down. The Germans failed to capture the key town of Bastogne, "the logistic center of the Ardennes"; 7 the cloud cover broke up; and the Allies seized the initiative. By Christmas the Battle of the Bulge had been lost by the Germans and they found themselves once again on the defensive. Hitler's gamble had failed—and at tremendous cost. One hundred thousand German troops were lost, along with eight hundred tanks. The Americans had suffered heavy losses, too, but were able to make them up in two weeks; German soldiers and materiel were irreplaceable. It was in the context of this battle that the Germans committed one of their more notorious war crimes: the massacre by an SS unit of 125 U.S. prisoners of war at Malmédy, Belgium. The front on which the Allies enjoyed perhaps the least success was in Italy. Once a German ally, Italy had joined the war effort against Germany in 1943 after the overthrow of Mussolini's regime. Now northern Italy was basically a German-occupied country, much of its former army interned; Mussolini, kidnapped by Germans units, set up a puppet regime in the north, known as the Salò Republic. This transformation of Italy from German ally to German enemy would have additional tragic consequences for Europe's Jews within the context of the Holocaust. As 1944 began, Allied troops were slowly slogging their way up the Italian peninsula with Salerno and Naples behind them, the prize of Rome ahead. On 22 January, in an effort to turn the German flank, American forces landed practically unopposed at Anzio on the west coast (Operation Shingle). It was the perfect opportunity as the unsuspecting Germans had been taken by surprise. But the Americans were too cautious and failed to exploit their advantage. The Germans regrouped at the Gustav defensive line, which Hitler ordered held at all costs. Behind the Gustav line, the Germans constructed other lines across the peninsula, including the Hitler, Caesar, and Gothic lines, each of which the Wehrmacht would defend tenaciously. The campaign in Italy was now reduced to rugged, plodding, bloody fighting with the Allies grinding slowly forward; by April they had advanced only seventy miles in eight months. Having missed one opportunity at Anzio, the Americans missed another in early June. General Mark Clark, faced with the choice of outflanking and destroying the German Tenth Army, or going for the glory of occupying Rome, chose Rome. On 4 June the U.S. Fifth Army occupied Rome. Ironically, Clark's triumph was overshadowed by the landing at Normandy two days later. Winston Churchill's wife expressed the thought best when she wrote her husband on 5 June: “I feel so much for you at this agonizing moment so full of suspense, which prevents one from rejoicing over Rome." And thus, the slow advance northward continued. On 12 August Florence fell. Nevertheless, at year's end the Germans still held much of northern Italy and were able to operate with impunity in the territory under their control, including roundups, shootings, and the transport of victims. Clearly, the progress of the war at this stage on all fronts, particularly the relative speeds of Allied advances, had an important impact on the ongoing program of genocide. Genocide By the beginning of 1944, the ruthless Nazi machinery of genocide had already consumed victims on a massive scale, including the vast majority of what had been the Jewish population of Poland, the Baltic states, and Soviet territory under German occupation. Moreover, the Jewish populations of other parts of Nazi-occupied Europe had also been rounded up in west-to-east and south-to-north combing operations and transported to their deaths in the killing centers and concentration camps. 8 Despite the fact that Germany was exposed to enormous and increasing pressure on all military fronts during 1944, the Nazis relentlessly carried out their "Final Solution". And they continued to give voice to their goals. Hans Frank, Nazi ruler of the General Government (occupied Poland), said privately on 4 March 1944: "The Jews are a race which must be wiped out. Whenever we catch one-he will be exterminated." In the neighboring Warthegau, the Gauleiter, Arthur Greiser, was able to report to Hitler just three days later that the Jews in his province were "down to a very insignificant remnant," the implication being that soon even that small number would disappear. 10 The Final Solution was an operation carried out with all the resources of a war-indeed, it was a war. After all, two years earlier Hitler had stipulated that "duty in Auschwitz is front-line duty." Hence, although challenged by overwhelming force on all other battle fronts, the Nazis still gave priority to their killing operations. In the concentration camps and killing centers, the apparatus of murder, having claimed millions already, kept adding more victims. From western Europe deportations continued on a monthly-quota basis. Every week nearly one thousand Jews were deported from France eastward, usually from the transit center of Drancy near Paris. In early March 3,791 Czech Jews, who had been deported the previous year from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz, were sent to the gas chambers, many of them singing both the Czech national anthem and the Hebrew song "Hatikvah" (Hope). Later in the month, all surviving children in the Kovno ghetto were rounded up, put into trucks, and transported to their deaths. On 6 April, in a notorious incident, German troops and their French collaborators, having heard that Jewish chil dren were hiding in a school in the isolated village of IzieuAin, raided the school and carried off forty-four children, along with their teachers. All were deported, most to Auschwitz; only one teacher survived. The leader of the expedition, SS Lieutenant Klaus Barbie, later known as the Butcher of Lyon, described the action in a laconic telegram: This morning the Jewish children's home (colonie That same month transports left from every corner of occupied Europe for the killing centers with hundreds, and occasionally thousands, of victims. From Belgium and Holland, hundreds were transported to Auschwitz. From the camp at Fossoli in Italy, hundreds were conveyed eastward after the Germans took over the camp in February. The process continued through the spring and into the summer. Never satisfied, the Nazis redoubled their efforts, offering rewards to those who would betray potential victims. The strategy worked. For example, during the first months of 1944, more Jews were arrested in France than in any comparable time period the year before, thanks largely to the fanatic zeal of Alois Brunner, one of Adolf Eichmann's colleagues, who had experience in implementing deportations with local support. 13 On 6 June, the day of the Normandy landing, eighteen hundred Jews were rounded up on Corfu, an island in Greece; more than fifteen hundred arrived in Auschwitz later that month. "When they arrived at Auschwitz's unloading platform," recalled a camp physician later, "the doors were unlocked, but no one got out and lined up for the selection. Half of them were already dead, and the other half in a coma. The entire convoy, without exception, was sent to number two crematorium." 14 These victims were shortly followed by twelve hundred Jews from the island of Rhodes and 120 from the island of Kos, also in Greece. It is in this context-of the Germans scouring every village and hamlet, every hospital and asylum for victims, aided by collaborators—that the capture of Anne Frank, perhaps the best-known victim of the Holocaust, must be seen. On 4 August, in Amsterdam, betrayed in their place of long concealment, she and her family were apprehended, sent initially to the internment camp of Westerbork, and then deported on 3 September to Auschwitz. (It was the last transport from Westerbork.) She and her sister would later be transferred westward, to Bergen-Belsen, near Hanover, where they died of typhus on the eve of liberation by the British in 1945. These few examples are representative of hundreds of similar incidents, not as a litany of death, but as illustrations of a pattern typical for 1944: steady, although occasionally erratic, transports of victims, often rounded up in small-scale operations, were processed from a dozen corners of Europe via the railroads leading eastward into the machinery of death. By 1944 the major Jewish population centers of eastern Europe had been largely wiped out. The Nazis were busy combing the rest of occupied Europe for any Jews they could still find or whomever their collaborators would allow them to seize. But two relatively large Jewish settlements still remained in the east: the Lodz ghetto, southwest of Warsaw, and the sizable Jewish community in Hungary. The approximately seventy thousand Jews in Lodz harbored some hope of survival-even if starvation increasingly stalked them-because of their presumed labor value to the Germans. The Germans in turn, using deliberate deceit as a strategy, did not disabuse the Jews of that false hope. It was, indeed, the Jewish leader of the Lodz ghetto, Chaim Rumkowski, who acceded to a German request for people to work outside the ghetto, signing a proclamation on 16 June 1944 that men and women (including married people) may Any reservations Rumkowski might have had were alleviated by reassurances from the German Commissioner for Jewish Affairs SS Obersturmführer (SS First Lieutenant) Günther Fuchs, who promised "that this labor transport is in no danger, and that what is involved is the clearing away of debris in cities that have been bombed." Fuchs's guarantee somewhat alleviated "the terror occasioned by every other previous resettlement." 15 Deportations began on 23 June and lasted until 14 July. Several thousand left, ostensibly to work outside the ghetto. In reality, the deportations were just the first step in the dismantling of the ghetto; the deportees were transported to their deaths at Chelmno. The deception within Lodz, however, continued. On 25 July Rumkowski announced “glad tidings" to the remaining ghetto inhabitants: The ghetto has received its first messages from peo- In August "resettlements" from Lodz resumed. The remaining sixty-seven thousand Jews were deported that month, again not to labor in Germany, but to death in AuschwitzBirkenau. The leader Rumkowski and his family, in one of the last transports, also perished in the gas chambers. The other example of a remaining Jewish population to which the Nazis would turn their murderous attention in 1944 was that of Hungary: 762,000 Hungarian Jews still survived relatively unscathed. They were the last sizable Jewish community left in Europe. We shall discuss their fate in 1944 later in this essay. As the year progressed, the big killing centers in the east continued to be closed, or their operations were at least curtailed-in part as a concealment measure in the face of the advancing Soviets. For instance, the last shipment to Birkenau occurred on 28 November, after which the gas chambers were dismantled. In the meantime, there had developed two parallel efforts on the part of the Germans that characterized the last phase of the Holocaust. The first might be considered a decentralized version of the Holocaust, a killing in situ, as the final stages of the war prevented the Germans from any further large-scale transports across Europe. The other, created by the exigencies of the collapsing Nazi war effort, entailed the widespread use of slave labor. Killing "on the spot" had always been part of the Germans' modus operandi. Before developing the killing centers and transporting the victims to their deaths, the Germans had murdered large numbers of people where they lived. That was, after all, the method involved in the massacres by the notorious Einsatzgruppen earlier in the war. Nor had the Nazis ever avoided such localized killing on a smaller scale when it suited their needs. One dramatic example of it, of course, was reprisal killings, usually in response to resistance activities, occasionally simply to intimidate. Most of them involved the roundup of groups from the general population, but Jews were often included, sometimes by accident, sometimes with intent. Several dramatic episodes in 1944 illustrate the point. On 24 March the Germans drove 335 men and boys to the Ardeatine caves in Rome and shot them in groups of three. The murders were in reprisal for the killing of thirtythree German SS and police by partisans the day before in the Via Rasella; the Germans had vowed that ten hostages would die for each SS man. The victims were taken from prison where they had been incarcerated, mainly for political offenses. To make the quota, the Germans also included Jewish prisoners; seventy of them were killed. The pattern would continue for months, as partisan activities increased in Italy. On 22 August the SS murdered 560 people in the village of Saint Anna di Stazzema. On 29 September, in a remote plateau region of Italy called Marzabotto, SS units under Walter Reder killed 1,830 civilians for allegedly harboring partisans. All in all, the Germans would kill ten thousand Italians in this manner, including 170 priests. In May, in France, ten thousand German troops began an extensive reprisal campaign against the French resistance. On 10 June, in a particularly barbarous operation, the Germans rounded up the entire population of the tiny French village of Oradour-sur-Glane, 642 people in all. The hostages were then either machine-gunned in the public square or herded into the church and burned to death in reprisal for activities by French partisans. Several Jews, who had been living undetected in the village, were among the victims. No numbers were too small and no territory too big for such shootings. At the beginning of the year in the village of Saint-Claire-à-Caluire, a Jewish couple were shot as reprisal for the assassination of a French collaborator by French partisans. On the corpse of the husband, the Germans put a sign that read: "Terror against terror. The Jew pays with his life for the death of a National.” 17 As the major killing centers in the east shut down and transports became more difficult, the Germans either created new small-scale camps in western and central Europe or transformed labor camps into transport camps for lastminute removal of victims to their destruction. For instance, in Trieste, territory that the Germans had seized from their former Italian allies and annexed, the Nazis set up a concentration camp complete with gas chamber and crematorium in what had been an old rice-processing factory, called La Risiera di San Sabba. The prison, often referred to as San Sabba, became notorious, not the least because of the reputation of those who ran it. Erwin Lambert, crematorium expert at Treblinka and Sobibor, handled the transformation of the camp into a kind of Auschwitz-inminiature. The commandant was also an old hand at mass murder: Odilo Globocnik, who had personal roots in nearby Slovenia and had accumulated experience heading the Operation Reinhard program for Himmler. (The goal of Operation Reinhard had been the physical destruction of the Jews in central, occupied Poland.) Accompanying Globocnik were several of Eichmann's colleagues from the infamous Operation Reinhard, whose murderous experience extended back through Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka to the German euthanasia campaign at the beginning of the war. They included Franz Stangl, former commandant at Sobibor and Treblinka, and Christian Wirth, whose nickname was the Technocrat of Destruction. Tens of thousands passed through Risiera, mostly captured partisans, but several thousand were Jews. The crematorium had a capacity of fifty to seventy corpses per day. 18 An example of a labor camp converted to a transit camp was Sered in Slovakia. After the abortive Slovak uprising (late summer 1944), a new puppet government, anxious to blame the insurrection on alien forces, allowed the Germans to take control at Sered. They quickly dubbed it a concentration camp and assigned Alois Brunner to run it. Brunner, who had been stationed at Drancy prior to his move to Slovakia, promptly announced that he "wouldn't work at his desk, but in the field." Despite his stated intention, however, Brunner did operate largely from Sered, conducting witch hunts for Jews in every corner of Slovakia. At Sered, from which Brunner transported eleven to twelve thousand people to Auschwitz (in addition to those who had already perished in the camp), the SS was particularly brutal in their treatment of prisoners. 19 Brunner himself had already demonstrated a single-minded fanaticism about rounding up the last remnants of Jews. In August, as he and his unit fled Paris in the face of the advancing Allies, he managed to procure three railroad cars and load fifty-one special Jewish prisoners on them for deportation to the east. Bergen-Belsen, near Hanover, was another example of a transformed camp. Originally a detention camp, it became a full-fledged concentration camp during the summer of 1944. Thousands of prisoners from labor camps who could no longer work were sent to Bergen-Belsen. It was no surprise that when Auschwitz ceased killing operations in November, the commandant, Josef Kramer, was transferred to Bergen-Belsen. The euthanasia program perhaps best exemplifies both the persistence of the Nazis and the ever-expanding range of their victims. Inaugurated in October 1939 on Hitler's orders, this program (called T-4 after the Berlin address of its headquarters, Tiergartenstrasse 4) had originally been directed at mentally ill and physically handicapped Germans. Technically, it was terminated in August 1941 as a result of public protests, after eighty thousand to one hundred thousand Germans had been killed (including several thousand Jews). But in reality the program continued secretly, albeit in a reduced and decentralized fashion. During 1944 it was expanded and accelerated. The euthanasia program in 1944 illustrates the decentralization of the Holocaust and its transformation during the year from assembly-line killing to murder as a "cottage industry." It also demonstrates that the Germans not only chose “racial" victims, such as the Jews and Gypsies; but also focused on the mentally ill, congenitally deformed, terminally ill, and even the handicapped, as part of their eugenic agenda of cleansing their society. In such out-of-the-way places as Niedernhart, Kaufbeuern (Bavaria), Klagenfurt (Austria), Sachsenberg near Schwerin, Eichberg near Eltville, and Hadamar, the killing of so-called euthanasia victims proceeded. Each site represented a limited enterprise, but taken together, the victims added up to mass murder. They were killed for who and what they were, but also ostensibly to provide beds for wounded soldiers. In Kaufbeuern-Irsee so many were killed that the local cemetery filled up. A crematorium was put into operation, built in November; and at other sites plans were underway for more furnaces, despite the desperate shortage of raw materials. 20 In the end, the Germans were reduced to shuffling their victims from one place to another, with prisoner shipments often rejected because of overcrowding. When on 3 No |