Zanis Lipke Memorial, Riga, Latvia: Honoring a Man Who Hid Jews from the Nazis

Zanis Lipke during World War II

Since 2017, I have visited ten death camps and many Holocaust memorials across Europe and in Israel. Before those visits I read three books by Timothy Snyder on the Holocaust and tyranny.  One of those books, "Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning" came back to me today on a visit to the Zanis Lipke Memorial.  

Snyder says the Holocaust was the worst, by number of killed of the entire population, in the countries conquered by both the Soviets and the Nazis.  Of the approximately 70,000 Jews who lived in Latvia in the summer of 1941, fewer than a thousand survived the war. Just 200 Jews survived the war in Latvia, the rest were concentration camp survivors. One-fifth of those were the Jews who were hidden in several different places by Zanis Lipke.  

Zanis Lipke Memorial, completed in 2014. Designed by architect Zaiga Gaile to have the appearance of an (inverted) ark--a refuge from Nazi murder.

Lipke witnessed the terrible treatment of the Jews in Riga beginning on 1 July 1941 when the Nazis entered the city. The Nazis conquered and completely occupied Latvia by 8 July 1941.  Later in the year, he decided he must rescue Jews. He got a job in a Luftwaffe warehouse in Riga and used his position to smuggle Jews out of the ghetto. 

According to Museum Researcher and Curator of Pedagogical Programs Maija Meiere-Osa, who gave me a tour of the Memorial, Lipke created a network of hiding places for small groups of Jews around the city. 

Maija Meiere-Ost, Museum Researcher and 

Curator of Pedagogical Programs, Zanis Lipke Memorial

Meiere-Osa said Lipke was the only one who knew where all the Jews were hidden and who was caring for them in hiding. Lipke was a veteran of the Latvian Army and had done some smuggling while working on the shipping docks in Riga, so he was able to create an intricate plan and keep it secret.

"He was the spider," she said. "Only he knew the entire extent of the web he created."

The entrance to the museum. The entire museum is dark and close 

and has the feeling of an underground shelter.

By the winter, hiding Jews in houses became more difficult, so Lipke began digging a bunker under a shed on his property.  Despite the frozen ground, they completed the underground shelter. His wife Johanna cared for eight Jews in that bunker. 

Many people who hid Jews offered shelter for weeks, some for more than a year, but Lipke and his wife agreed they would shelter the Jews for a decade if needed. 

Zanis Lipke was honored by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations on 28 June 1966. The Soviet government would not allow Lipke to travel to Jerusalem, but the wily smuggler was able to get to Australia to visit his son several years later and was himself smuggled into Israel to visit Yad Vashem and was able to visit in 1977.

The Soviet government decided they could live with the award, redefining it as an award for "saving Soviet citizens from fascist enemies." 

The Death Camp Next Door: The Sites Where the Holocaust Happened

Auschwitz Barracks

 

Auschwitz rail siding where prisoners were sorted

 for slave labor or extermination

In March I will be speaking to a group at my synagogue about visiting death camps. More specifically, I will be talking about why I visited eight different death camps between 2017 and last year. Actually nine visits since I went to Auschwitz/Birkenau in both 2017 and 2021. 

Auschwitz Gate

It was not my original intention to visit so many death camps. In 2017, I wanted to see the worst death camp, the place where the Holocaust was the worst outside of a death camp, and a place where Jews left and did not return.  That year I rode from Belgrade, a place that once had a large Jewish community but now has none, to Auschwitz, the largest death camp, to Lviv, Ukraine, where the Jews were completely wiped out by their neighbors. The Nazis did not have to do anything.

The fence at Birkenau

Until 2017, I had never visited a Holocaust Memorial or a Holocaust Museum or a Death Camp. I lived in Germany from 1976-79, so I certainly had the opportunity, but I grew up in a very non-religious home, so the Holocaust was something that happened that no one I knew talked about.  

Then in 2016, Steve Bannon was named Co-Chief-of-Staff in the White House. He owned Brietbart.com, the host of Nazi and fascist web sites.  

In early 2017 I planned a trip that would take me to the worst of the Holocaust.  After riding from Belgrade to Lviv by way of Auschwitz, I visited the first concentration camp. It was a warehouse in the state of Hesse, Germany, put in service to Hitler in February 1933.  It was not a death camp. Anti-Nazi journalists and academics were the first inmates.

Less than a month after I returned from my 2017 trip, Nazis with torches marched in Charlottesville and the President said there were "fine people" on both sides of the protest. He was wrong. Nazis are evil. Nazi sympathizers are evil. I knew I should visit more death camps and be ready to fight Nazis wherever they crawled out from under rocks. Especially now that they had a friend in the American President.

In 2019, just months before the beginning of the COVID epidemic, I was in Germany again. My friend Cliff and I visited the Buchenwald and Dachau death camps. 

After visiting four death camps, it became clear that every camp was very different, built where it was for very different reasons and carrying out its mission of murder in its own way. 

On my first visit, I was stunned to see the Auschwitz camp was right in the town of Oswiecim, Poland, right near the Catholic Church. The Nazis need a rail junction and barracks to make the biggest death camp. Oswiecim in southern Poland offered both. And the town now lives with the legacy of horror. 

Buchenwald was built on a hill above Weimar, where the government was before the Nazis.  Hitler built Buchenwald on a hill above Weimar as a raised middle finger to Germans who hated the Nazis. They camp was visible and the smell of death floated down from the camp on the hill.

Dachau, was built early in the Nazi regime. It is first facility built as a concentration camp (Hesse was a converted warehouse) and remained in operation until the end of the war, in part as a "School of Violence." It is right on the edge of the town and, like Buchenwald, not hidden in any way. Dachau is in Bavaria, the most pro-Nazi region of Germany, so the hate was on display.

In 2021 I was vaccinated and returned to Germany.  Cliff and I visited the Flossenburg death camp in Bavaria, Auschwitz/Birkenau and Terezin.  Later in the same trip, I went to Berlin and visited Sachsenhausen. 

Last year on the way to Denmark, Cliff and I visited the Bergen Belsen and Mittlebau-Dora death camps.

Each camp shows another dimension of the Holocaust. I plan to visit more of the camps on future trips to Europe.

I wrote about most of the visits. I will write about the Belsen, Mittlebau-Dora and Sachsenhausen camps by the beginning of March. 

My first visit to Auschwitz is here.  

The Hesse camp is here.

Buchenwald is here.

Dachau is here.

Preview of the 2021 trip is here.

The 2021 visit to Auschwitz is here.

Flossenburg is here.

Terezin is here.

The Genius of Judaism by Bernard-Henri Levy Book 42 of 2022

 

When I began my Jewish journey after torch-carrying Nazis marched in Charlottesville. In my search after that horrible night, Bernard-Henri Levy in his book The Genius of Judaism was one of the first writers to show me I really am a Jew.  

Jews themselves fight over who is a Jew. My family and Jews I knew growing up said I was not a Jew.  I do not have a Jewish mother. When I joined a Synagogue, it had to be a Reform Synagogue. To be Conservative, especially to be Orthodox, I would have to convert.  

For non-Jews, my Jewish Dad means I am a Jew, the same way that having an Italian Dad would make me Italian.  Of course, every white supremacist and Nazi in America hates me even if my mother is not Jewish.  

Levy went showed me what an amazing tribe I am a part of.  To be a Jew is to have a unique place in the world in so many ways. Who loses their country and gets it back after two millennia? And keeps its culture together during that entire two thousand years.

I wrote this about my first reading of the book in 2018:  

The book explicitly on faith that moved me the most was The Genius of Judaism by Bernard-Henri Levy. This book looks at the history of the Jewish people and Israel through the lens of the Book of Jonah.  Levy shows us Judaism and his view of the Jewish world by his interactions with “Nineveh” in the form of modern-day enemies of Jews and Israel.  One modern Nineveh he visits is Lviv, Ukraine.   

I knew my trip last summer was to visit Holocaust sites would center on Auschwitz, But this book led me to pair Lviv with Auschwitz as two sad extremes of the Holocaust.  Auschwitz is the most industrial site of slaughter, Lviv is the most personal.  At Auschwitz, the Nazis built a place of extermination. In Lviv they simply allowed the local population to act out their own anti-Semitism.   

Lviv was the most personal of the sites of Holocaust slaughter.  Neighbors killed neighbors and dumped their bodies in ditches.  Levy went to Lviv to make peace with this site of unbridled hate.  He seems to have succeeded.  I did not.  Ukraine tried to kill my grandparents. Ukraine remains a cauldron of anti-Semitism. 

Which brings up another aspect of Judaism which Levy makes so simple and beautiful. We Jews, at our best, are committed to Justice, to repairing the world.

Until this year, I was ambivalent about Ukraine as was Levy.  From the beginning of the war, I have volunteered for Ukraine, sometimes three or four days a week making combat medical kits.  Levy made a documentary backing the fight to keep Ukraine free.   

When the Russians invaded, Ukraine needed all free people to rally to her defense.  Whatever problems I had with Ukraine before February 24 are insignificant compared to the unjust attack on an innocent country.

Glory to Ukraine.

The book is a celebration of Jewish history and life and is beautifully written.

First 41 Books of 2022:

C.S.Lewis: A Very Short Introduction by James Como

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding drama by C.S. Lewis

Le veritable histoire des petits cochons by Erik Belgard

The Iliad or the Poem of Force by Simone Weil

Game of Thrones, Book 5 by George R.R. Martin

Irony and Sarcasm by Roger Kreutz

Essential Elements by Matt Tweed

Les horloges marines de M. Berthoud 

The Red Wheelbarrow and Other Poems by William Carlos Williams

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Cochrane by David Cordingly 

QED by Richard Feynman

Spirits in Bondage by C.S. Lewis

Reflections on the Psalms by  C.S. Lewis

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David I. Kertzer

The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Hannah Arendt

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton

If This Isn't Nice, What Is? by Kurt Vonnegut

The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium by Barry S. Strauss. 

Civil Rights Baby by Nita Wiggins

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

"Jewish Politics" by Hannah Arendt. Published in 1942. So Relevant Now.

 

Hannah Arendt

In 1942 Hannah Arendt, philosopher, historian and refugee of Nazi Germany wrote the following essay.  As I read it, I felt myself sitting up straighter to pay better attention to what Arendt was saying about the Jewish people in the midst of World War II and why we need democracy and now always.  

I love Hannah Arendt's writing and thought.  This essay is among the best 900 words in all the millions of words she wrote.

Jewish Politics 

If the horrible catastrophe of European Jewry and the difficult, sad struggle to form a Jewish army and to gain recognition of the Jews as an ally of the United Nations result in our finally realizing that despite our millionaires and philanthropists we Jews are among the oppressed peoples of this earth, and that our Rothschilds have a better chance of becoming beggars or peddlers than our beggars and peddlers of becoming Rothschilds-if in other words this war politicizes us and pounds it into our heads that the struggle for freedom is tantamount to the struggle for existence, then and only then will our grandchildren be able to remember and mourn the dead and to live without shame. 

Those peoples who do not make history, but simply suffer it, tend to see themselves as the victims of meaningless, overpowering, inhuman events, tend to lay their hands in their laps and wait for miracles that never happen. If in the course of this war we do not awaken from this apathy, there will be no place for us in tomorrow's world-perhaps our enemies will not have succeeded in annihilating us totally, but those of us who are left will be little more than living corpses. 

The only political ideals an oppressed people can have are freedom and justice. Democracy can be their only form of organization. One of the most serious impediments to Jewish-and not just Jewish-politics is the fact that in our current intellectual world those ideals and that form of organization have been corrupted and dragged through the mud by an uprooted bohemianism. For almost fifty years now one generation after the next has declared their disdain for "abstract" ideas and their admiration for bestiality. Freedom and justice are considered concepts for feeble old men. The French Revolution's egalite, liberte, and fraternite are taken as signs of impotence, of an anemic will to power, and at best a pretext for better deals to be made. The so-called young generation--which ranges in age from twenty to seventy--demands cunning of their politicians but not character, opportunism but not principles, propaganda but not policies. It is a generation that has fallen into the habit of constructing its weltanschauung out of a vague trust in great men, out of blood and soil and horoscopes. The politics that grows out of this mentality is called realpolitik. Its central figures are the businessman who winds up being a politician convinced that politics is just a huge, oversized business deal with huge, oversized wins and losses, and the gangster who declares, "When I hear the word culture I reach for my revolver." Once "abstract" ideas had been replaced by "concrete" stock market speculation, it was easy for abstract justice to give way before concrete revolvers. What looked like a rebellion against all moral values has led to a kind of collective idiocy: anyone who can see farther than the tip of his own nose is said to live in a fantasy world. What looked like a rebellion against intellect has led to organized turpitude-might makes right. 

Disdain for democracy and the worship of dictatorial forms of organization are especially fatal for small, oppressed peoples, who depend on the firm commitment of each individual. They least of all can forgo a democratic frame of mind, by which, as Clemenceau put it during the Dreyfus affair, the affairs of each individual are the affairs of all. In a dictatorship the individual has no political meaning-no matter how many of them wear uniforms because the individual no longer has any sense of responsibility for anything beyond staying alive himself. Once the order from "higher up" is given, any number of SA men marching in ranks can be shot on the spot without bringing the parade to a halt. Each man is ready and willing to step over the corpse of his neighbor and march on. And once the businessman's opportunism has suffocated peoples and nations by atomizing them in a politics of cliques and clans, despotism takes this atomization to its logical conclusion, until finally sons denounce their own fathers, neighbors and friends denounce one another, for the sake of their careers or personal security. 

Almost across the board, Jewish politics, to the extent that it exists at all, is run by people who have likewise grown up-without ever growing powerful!-worshipping power and opportunistic success. Their abhorrence for principles, their fear of betting on the wrong horse, their admiration of those who hold power on this earth, and their reluctance to mobilize the energies of their own people have cost us the deployment of a Jewish army. In the midst of the monstrous turmoil the world now finds itself in, those who are unwilling to take any risks are certain to lose everything. The time for compromises is past. Those who think they can live on their knees will learn that it is better to live and die standing up. We do not need any opportunistic practitioners of realpolitik, but we certainly do not need any "Fuhrers" either. The trouble is, first, that a great many organizations and bureaucracies are working to prevent radical democrats from speaking to our people; and second, that our people-those who are not yet behind barbed wire-are so demoralized by having been ruled by philanthropists for 150 years that they find it very difficult to begin to relearn the language of freedom and justice.

From the book The Jewish Writings, pp 241-3

Axl Rose T-Shirt Leads (Naturally) to a Discussion of the World War II and the Holocaust

Three fans of Axl Rose meet at a history of science conference

On the first day of a history of science conference, I met the author working on a book about Le Résidence Palace, the revolving door of history of a building that is now home to The Europa building, the seat of the European Council and Council of the European Union, located on the Rue de la Loi/Wetstraat in the European Quarter of Brussels, Belgium--the follow up to a book she wrote about her father's escape from Nazi-occupied Europe and service in the American Army.  

The conversation began with an Axl Rose t-shirt. Neither I nor Nina Wolff was wearing the t-shirt. We were at the registration desk for the conference.  One of the graduate students registering attendees, Noemie Taforeau, was wearing Axl Rose.  I asked if she was a fan or just like the shirt. She said, "A fan. Definitely."

Nina said she met Axl Rose in a movie theater on Long Island. Then the conversation went from Guns and Roses and "Welcome to the Jungle" to the Army, to her father and war.

Walter C. Wolff, U.S. Army Intelligence

We talked more at the evening reception. Late in his life Nina's father, Walter C. Wolff, handed her a box of letters which turned out to be a trove of information about a part of his life he had spoken very little about. Walter Wolff came to America as a young refugee. He volunteered to serve. He and other young immigrants worked in Army Intelligence.  They became known as the Ritchie Boys:

The Ritchie Boys^[1] were a special collection of soldiers, primarily German-Austrian units, of Military Intelligence Service officers and enlisted men of World War II who were trained at Camp Ritchie in Washington County, Maryland. Many of them were German-speaking immigrants to the United States, often Jews who fled Nazi persecution.^[2][3] They were used primarily for interrogation of prisoners on the front lines and counter-intelligence in Europe because of their knowledge of the German language and culture. They were also involved in the Nuremberg trials as prosecutors and translators.^[4] 

A documentary film was made in 2004 about the Ritchie Boys. I will order the book about Nina's father Walter "Someday You Will Understand" when I return to America.  

A Holocaust Memorial in Darmstadt Attacked Twice and Still Standing

Near the central station of Darmstadt, Germany, there is a memorial to the deportation of Jews and Gypsys (Roma) during 1942 and 1943. This memorial is located on the corner of Bismarckstrasse and Kirschenallee. 

The monument was designed in 2004 by the artist couple Ritula Fränkel and Nicholas Morris. It represents a glass cube filled with shards of glass, on which 450 names are engraved. These names represent 3400 persons from Darmstadt and the surrounding area who were deported to various concentration camps.

Three sides of the glass cube were destroyed by vandals on the night of July 9-10, 2006. In 2014 the damage was repaired but six weeks later it was destroyed again. The monument will not be removed but will remain in this historic place.

This memorial was the last place I visited before boarding a train to return to Paris and then home.  My friend Cliff said this memorial was the other end of the tracks that lead to the rail sidings in Auschwitz we visited in July.  Darmstadt was a well-known as being very Nazi as soon as Hitler rose to power.  

A Cathedral and a Holocaust Memorial Share the East End of an Island in Paris

The most famous Cathedral in Paris, Notre Dame, sits the east end of the most famous island in the Seine River, il de la cite. 

The grand cathedral is currently in the midst of a many millions of Euros makeover. It will be closed for years.  

Behind the soaring cathedral on the very eastern tip of the island is the Holocaust Deportation Memorial. The entire memorial to the 200,000 Jews deported to death camps is underground. 

The entrance is a steep stone staircase down to an open area with a barred opening looking east along the Seine.  East is, of course, the direction of transport the victims took to their death.

For me, the beautiful view of the Seine through iron bars is what deportation would look like--passing through a beautiful countryside in a cage.

In the summer when the setting sun is north of west the shadow of the cathedral falls on the Holocaust memorial, not for long, just minutes.  I was overcome with sadness the first time I visited this memorial in 2017. I was in Paris in late June and early July and saw the shadow fall on the memorial after 9pm near sunset. During the Nazi era, 400 million Christian labeled people were either participants, complicit in or ignored the Holocaust. 

Inside the memorial is a map with the number of  Jews from each department deported to death camps.

The death camps are listed in blood red.

The barred opening seen from the north bank of the river is just a dark rectangle on a gray wall.

Another map shows all the Nazi camps to which people were sent to die.

IN the midst of the memorial is a flame of remembrance.

The view to the east up the Seine River is lovely.

The open courtyard of the memorial feels very vertical and forbidding.

Inside is a long tunnel with names of the victims.

Each time I visit Paris I visit the memorial to those deported. Usually there are just a few people inside.  

A few hundred meters away thousands are usually visiting Notre Dame.  Even now dozens of people were looking at the posters on the walls enclosing the cathedral during its restoration.  

 

Every Day, All Day Humiliation at Auschwitz

 

Auschwitz-Birkenau latrine

On my return visit Auschwitz in July of this year, I saw things I missed or forgot I saw on my first visit in 2017.  

In 2017 I was overwhelmed by the scale of the camp--so many people murdered, so many German soldiers and civilians running the camp.  

One of the horrible sights was the latrine in a barracks at Birkenau.  The guards herded the inmates to the latrine. They used the latrine together, dozens at a time. The guards used a stopwatch.  When time was up, the inmate had to get up or be beaten.  

When I try to imagine how horrible life truly was I think of times when I lived and worked in close quarters large groups of men--the Army and Teamsters loading docks.  One lament common to both places was, "Can't I take a shit in peace?"  

No one wants to be rushed in a latrine.  

And even men I have known who care little for privacy would occasionally want "to shit in a latrine with a door."

When I was on German gunnery ranges in the 1970s, some of the ranges had a place we called a "Make A Buddy" Shitter.  It was an outhouse with two boards with three holes connected by a narrow floor space.  When it was full, three men sat on each side facing each other with interlaced knees.  The inside guys had to wait until the outside guys were done to get out.  Sometimes men would wear their gas masks to use that latrine.  

And yet, these laments of dock workers and soldiers hardly touch the deep humiliation of prisoners in Auschwitz and other concentration camps forced to use latrines on a stop watch.  

The Nazis who marched in Charlottesville represent the very same things as the guards at Auschwitz. They see me and everyone who is not in their tribe as less than human. Nazis are never "fine people." We can never have peace with a government that tolerates Nazis. We are fortunate to be delivered from a government that numbers all American Nazis among its voters.

Nazi and rebel flags together at Charlottesville, 

both flags represent the losers in racist wars.

 

Terezin: "Model" Concentration Camp and Death Camp for "Mosaic" Christians

The ironic lie at the gate of many concentration camps, including Terezin

Two weeks ago I visited the Terezin concentration camp west of Prague in the Czech Republic. Terezin is variously classed as a ghetto or a concentration camp.  Tens of thousands died in the camp both from execution and disease, but it was not an extermination camp with gas chambers.  

Dozens of people slept in these bunks

Terezin was used a "model" camp. It was the camp the Red Cross was allowed to visit in February 1944 to show that the camps were not as bad as the reports coming out as the Nazi Army retreated.  The Nazis gave the Jews in the camp some autonomy. Many Jewish children were sent to Terezin and not made into slave laborers or murdered, at least for a while.  

A memorial to Jews tortured and murdered in the small fortress at Terezin

Another group sent to Terzin was professing German Christians who had even one Jewish great-grandparent.  Christians with Jewish backgrounds were removed from Church leadership in 1933. All Jewish or "Mosaic" Christians were expelled from Churches in 1935. Many were sent there to be enslaved and eventually murdered at Terezin or sent to Auschwitz to be enslaved or murdered.

A memorial near the fortress wall that served as an execution site

After my first visit to Auschwitz in 2017, I began to see the area controlled by the Nazis, between the Pyrenees and the Ural mountains, as a place where 400 million people with a Christian identity lived and possibly one in a thousand acted like Jesus. All those Christians were living normal lives until the Nazis took over, then the trial came and 999 of 1,000 murdered and dispossessed their Jewish neighbors or averted their eyes.

The history of Terezin and the attempt to make it a "model" camp makes clear that even the worst of the Nazis knew that their actions were evil. 

Visiting Auschwitz Again It Is Even More Horrible

 

Auschwitz I

The second death camp I visited on this trip was the Auschwitz concentration camp. I was here in 2017. It was the first death camp I had ever visited. In fact, before that Auschwitz visit, I had never been to a Holocaust museum. 

The Nazi lie at the gate of every death camp

On this second visit I was more aware of the terrible scale of the slaughter and of the
camp itself. Auschwitz began as a Polish army camp taken over by the Nazis shortly after their victory in 1939. The camp is on the edge of the small city of Oswiecim. 

The little Polish town of Oswiecim became the center of death as Auschwitz-Birkenau

To Nazis expanded the camp by using slave labor to add second stories to existing barracks and added other buildings. The brick construction in Auschwitz is still solid today, unlike in many camps where wooden and hastily built brick buildings have long since fallen or crumbled. As Auschwitz became the center of Nazi genocide, the huge Birkenau camp was built two kilometers away. Acres of barracks and workshops cover a large field just outside the town of Oswiecim. 

The vast facility at Birkenau was where most Jews were murdered

In between acres of barracks is the rail siding where Jews were unloaded from box cars and separated to either work as slaves or be immediately killed by gas. Cliff and I walked for hours between and in the two camps trying to take in the full scale of place where more than million Jews were murdered.

Life or immediate death at the whim of a malignant Nazi

Entrepreneurs of Violence: Money and Hate Drove SS Innovations in Horror

 

Jewish slave labor in the Flossenburg quarry

The Flossenburg concentration camp was a working quarry site before it became a death camp. When the SS took over operations in the late 1930s prisoners became free slave labor to deliver quarry stones to the Nazi war effort. Later in the war, when there was little demand for stone and much need for Messerschmidt fighter planes, the underground halls in rural Bavaria became manufacturing sites for airplane parts. Innovations by the SS and Gestapo made the horrors of the Holocaust far worse than they might have been. 

In the mid 1930s, Hitler had vague plans to send Jews to Siberia once he conquered Russia or to Madagascar. The possibility of killing all the Jews in Nazi-controlled territories became possible as the SS developed more efficient methods of mass murder. At the beginning of the war Jews were killed primarily by shooting. Tens of thousands of German police and soldiers murdered Jews across Eastern Europe by shooting them over slaughter pits such as those in Kiev and Lviv in what is now Ukraine. 

Camps such as Auschwtiz and Treblinka began mass murder by gas only in the 1940s. Then rather than millions of individual murders, Jews were killed by the thousands and cremated. The death camps led to the particular horror created by Adolph Eichmann—putting three million Jews in rail cars and shipping them to their death, primarily in Poland. 

Less than a year before the war ended, hundreds of thousands of Jews were stuffed in rail cars and murdered on arrival or after being used as slave labor. As the war neared its end, slave labor lost its value and death became the sole business of the camps. The final spasms of slaughter were the worst of all. 

The crematorium at Flossenburg

At Flossenburg and Auschwitz, those who survived slave labor were marched west ahead of the Soviet Army. Tens of thousands of prisoners starved and froze to death and were buried along the roads during the cruel winter of 1945.

A diorama made by a camp survivor