The Great Unsolved Crime

Harvest Of Hate: The Nazi Program For The Destruction Of The Jews Of Europe.
by Leon Poliakov.
Syracuse University Press. 338 pp. $3.75.

The Final Solution: The Attempt To Exterminate The Jews Of Europe, 1939-1945.
by Gerald Reitlinger.
Beechhurst Press. 622 pp. $6.00.

Tyranny On Trial: The Evidence At Nuremberg.
by Whitney R. Harris.
Southern Methodist University Press. 608 pp. $6.00.

The Scourge Of The Swastika: A Short History of Nazi War Crimes.
by Lord Russell.
Philosophical Library. 259 pp. $4.50.

It is the Jewish tradition to treat death soberly. The quick burial—usually the day following death—the participation of women and children in the funeral service, the plain wooden casket, the throwing in of the first sod by the closest relatives—such rituals underline the view that death must be faced, and out-faced.

It is now a decade since the Second World War ended, with the destruction of nearly all European Jews, and American Jewry has yet to square itself with that event. The Hebrew and Yiddish presses have been pouring out scores of histories, memoirs, and documentary works, in New York, in Israel, and in Latin America. Not a single general work in English by an American has yet appeared. The Jewish community in the United States promotes a plethora of social researches. It is obsessed by scientific projects and investigations but has yet to discover the most fateful subject in the modern history of the Jews, and perhaps in their whole long history.

France and England have done better, and what has been the American experience of their products? Four years ago L é on Poliakov published in Paris Bréviaire de la haine, the first scholarly treatment of the Jewish catastrophe as a whole. He was in a strategic position to write such a book, since he headed the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine in Paris, an organization that collects and publishes material in this field. In reviewing his book for COMMENTARY (March 1952), Hannah Arendt wrote that “anyone who wants to know ‘what really happened’ and ‘how it really happened’—the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ being not only the most terrible experience of our generation, but probably the most significant too—cannot afford to overlook this study, and would perhaps do best to begin with it. (Unhappily, it has not yet interested any American publisher.)”

Unhappily, this last has remained true until recently. Finally, under the sponsorship of the American Jewish Committee, and through the subvention of one of its “friends,” the book was translated and brought out in October 1954. It does not bear the imprint of a commercial publisher but that of the modest and dignified Syracuse University Press. The American title is Harvest of Hate: The Nazi Program for the Destruction of the Jews of Europe.

A similar experience befell the only book to attempt a comprehensive account of the Jewish tragedy, Gerald Reitlinger’s The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939-1945. (The title refers to the Nazi euphemism for destruction, Endlösung.) The book was published in England in 1952 and, again, the American publisher was a small house, the Beechhurst Press. It was so little publicized, advertised, or reviewed that few people are even yet aware of its existence. In England, Reitlinger’s book was not only noticed but discussed at length.

It is true that the literature of extermination may acquire, in the reader’s mind, a touch of morbidity. It is true also that in the United States death is—how shall we put it?—unpopular. Who has not noticed the elaborate attempts to gloss over or even to prettify the stark and impenetrable fact? There are rituals in which the distinction between death and life is lost, and with it a large slice of the sense of reality. Must we say that American Jewry has applied the Hollywood treatment to the great catastrophe? One begins to understand the psychological phenomenon of rejection exemplified in the attitude of so many decent Germans during the war. Dimly aware of the Eastern “death camps,” they were yet able to close their minds to them.

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At any rate, it will be impossible to say henceforth that there are no objective books on the subject. Messrs. Poliakov and Reitlinger have not produced—even between them—a definitive work. But they are pioneers who have made a substantial beginning in assembling, arranging, and analyzing much of the essential material now available. Their books are carefully documented and their approach is consciously scientific. They have allowed the eyewitnesses and the deafening facts to speak largely for themselves. They have made it impossible for any responsible person to remain in ignorance or in doubt about the outlines and structure of the conspiracy against the European Jews and its effective accomplishment.

When M. Poliakov’s book was published in 1951, Mr. Reitlinger’s was three-quarters done. The effect of the two works is therefore parallel and complementary rather than cumulative. Harvest of Hate is shorter and more tightly organized than The Final Solution. It concerns itself primarily with official policy, decisions at a high political level, and diplomatic negotiations. Tracing carefully the steps in the evolution of Nazi policy towards the Jews, M. Poliakov discusses the attitude of the German people, of their military chiefs, and of the non-German peoples and governments of Europe. Although he sticks close to the record, he does not hesitate to deliver the judgment of an informed and restrained observer and student.

The Final Solution concerns itself far more with the process of extermination, the techniques and instrumentalities of the murderers, their bureaucratic intrigues and devious maneuvers, and the play of character and personality. Mr. Reitlinger (who is not Jewish) has curiosity, and a good journalistic eye for color, circumstance, and incident. His style is direct and unrhetorical—an important consideration in dealing with a subject of high emotional tension. It is characteristic of him that he rejects the new term “genocide,” regarding it as “a hybrid combination of a Greek and a Roman word” that is “no asset to the English language as it says nothing which cannot be conveyed in plain speech.” Although he allows himself occasionally to be overwhelmed by the riches of his material, and scatters his effects, the total impression he creates is coherent and powerful.

In the first part of his book, “The Search for the Final Solution,” Mr. Reitlinger guides the reader from the pogroms of 1939 through the deportations, the establishment of ghettos in the East, the decision to get rid of the Jews by exterminating them, the experiments with the most economical and convenient methods of doing so, and the evolution of mass homicide by gas. In the second part of his book, “The Final Solution in Practice,” he proceeds systematically from country to country, beginning with the Soviet Union and Poland, and ending with Hungary and the Third Reich itself. He tells us what fate the Jews of each country met, and how. Such an organization involves repetition, and cross-reference, but it has the virtue of preventing any significant event from slipping through the mesh.

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Perhaps Mr. Reitlinger’s most notable contribution is his painstaking account of the operations of the four Einsatzgruppen—plainly, extermination squads—which followed the Nazi armies into Russian Poland and Russia proper in the fall of 1941, and in the brief space of four months slaughtered 350,000 persons of every age and both sexes. These mass shootings and burials form the most gruesome chapter of the whole drama. The statistics of the Einsatzgruppen were surpassed “in Poland and at Auschwitz in the summers of 1942 and 1944, but not the naked savagery of the methods.”

Another contribution is a veritable gallery of the principal criminals from Heinrich Himmler and Reinhardt Heydrich—“the real engineer of the Final Solution”—who pushed the buttons from the remote elevation of their exalted offices, to the gang chiefs who organized and supervised the work in the field. There are pen sketches which confront the reader with the varied functions and initiatives, the degrees of activity and involvement of the leading participants.

There is Karl Adolf Eichmann, head of the Jewish Office of the Gestapo throughout the war, who boasted that “he would leap into his grave laughing because the feeling that he had five million people on his conscience would be for him a source of extraordinary satisfaction.” Eichmann’s responsibility was actually linked to the fate of a fifth of that number, but it is characteristic of these creatures that they were more inclined to boastfulness and exaggeration than to caution and reserve. Eichmann disappeared in the final months of the war, somewhere in Hungary, and his whereabouts is still unknown.

There is Odilo Globocnik (or Globocnek), an Austrian like Adolf Hitler and, like him again, “probably as much Slav as German.” Globocnik was in charge of “the entire massacre program” in the “General Government” of Poland. He amassed a fortune from the belongings of his victims, and thus aroused the envy of other Nazi commanders. He is said—though this has not been authenticated—to have delighted Hitler, when an official called attention to “the danger of future discoveries of the mass burials,” by assuring him that he would like “to bury bronze tablets proclaiming . . . his authorship of the deed.” This wretch is said to have met his end by suicide.

There is SS Major General Otto Ohlendorf, who boasted before the International Tribunal at Nuremberg that he had ordered the murder of 90,000 persons behind the Russian front. He justified himself by citing historical and literary evidence of “precedents,” on Jonathan Swift’s ironical theory that whatever had been done before could with impunity be done again. But none of the predecessors in crime cited by Ohlendorf could match his own success in organized destruction.

At Nuremberg the following were among the questions that were put to Ohlendorf by the prosecution:

Q: In your testimony you said that the Einsatz group had the object of annihilating the Jews and the commissars, is that correct?

A: Yes.

Q: And in what category did you consider the children? For what reasons were the children massacred?

A: The order was that the Jewish population should be totally exterminated.

Q: Including the children?

A: Yes.

Q: Were all the children murdered?

A: Yes.

Ohlendorf was condemned to death and hanged in Landsberg prison in 1951. There is, finally—for our space is limited—SS Major General Artur Nebe, whose heart was divided between mass murder and sympathy for the anti-Hitler underground. Between his nervous breakdowns and pains of shock at his own deeds, he managed bravely to consign thousands of Jews and Gypsies to immediate death or fatal “scientific” experiments. His friends among the anti-Hitler political conspirators were embarrassed when a film showing the operation of a gas chamber was found in Nebe’s former apartment in Berlin. Nebe himself is reported to have been executed by Hitler for his complicity in the July 20, 1944 plot, but there is no independent confirmation of this.

In an elaborate statistical appendix, Mr. Reitlinger attempts a revision of the estimate of the victims. He hovers between a low number of 4,194,200 and a high one of 4,581,200 persons. To this inconceivable hecatomb, Polish Jewry contributed two and a half million victims.

Reitlinger’s figures are considerably below the estimate of 5,721,800 victims made just after the war by the Anglo-American Committee. But the author notes that his own estimates are conjectural “owing to the lack of reliable information at the time of writing.”

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Most of the important evidence used by Messrs. Reitlinger and Poliakov is quarried from the mass of documents and depositions assembled by the prosecution staffs of the various trials of war criminals conducted after the war. The Department of State alone has published sixty-odd large volumes of materials. One has the impression that this huge mine conceals even more ore than has been extracted so far. The attempts to survey it have been feeble up to now.

Whitney R. Harris, who was a member of the American prosecution staff, has assembled copious extracts in his bulky Tyranny on Trial: The Evidence at Nuremberg. In the section of the book entitled “Crimes Against Humanity,” several chapters deal with crimes against Jews. Mr. Harris quotes at length from affidavits and testimony at the trial. His material is presented, however, in “raw” form, and there is no attempt to write a connected history. He has summarized essentially a lawyer’s brief.

Another, and different, product of the trials is The Scourge of the Swastika: A Short History of Nazi War Crimes, by Lord Russell of Liverpool. As Deputy General of the British Army of the Rhine in 1945, Lord Russell was legal adviser at the trial of criminals in the British Zone of occupation. He has written a concise and concentrated account that forms perhaps the best introduction to the subject in print.

Although The Scourge of the Swastika is a responsible and sober account, Lord Russell was compelled to resign his postwar legal position in the British army when he refused to drop its publication. So the jacket of the book reports. Its last chapter deals with “the final solution,” and closes with these words: “The murder by the Germans of over five million European Jews constitutes the greatest crime in world history. That the total Jewish population of Europe was not exterminated was due solely to the fact that the Nazis lost the war before they could bring their ‘final solution of the Jewish question’ to its conclusion.”

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One reads, and rereads, these melancholy books with a growing sense of incredulity. The facts are incontrovertible. Yet it is easier to believe that these things have happened than that they could have happened. The senses cry truth, but the mind hesitates, for it can see only through understanding. The key that would unlock this tremendous freight has not been found. That is perhaps why the American mind—and the Jewish American mind—which rise to every challenge of concrete and palpable problems, would rather not dwell on this matter. But no mind will in the end evade the mandate to penetrate, and to account for, this extraordinary crime. The figures, the documents, the eyewitness accounts are only the elements of the history of the tragedy. The history itself has yet to be written.

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