Holocaust – Part IV
Jewish Resistance and The Aftermath
As a rule, full-scale uprisings occurred only at the end, when Jews realized the inevitability of impending death. On April 19, 1943, nine months after the massive deportations of Warsaw’s Jews to Treblinka had begun, the Jewish resistance, led by 24-year-old Mordecai Anielewicz, mounted the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In Vilna partisan leader Abba Kovner, recognizing the full intent of Nazi policy toward the Jews, called for resistance in December 1941 and organized an armed force that fought the Germans in September 1943.
At Treblinka and Sobibor uprisings occurred just as the extermination camps were being dismantled and their remaining prisoners were soon to be killed. This was also true at Auschwitz, where the Sonderkommando (“Special Commando”), the prisoner unit that worked in the vicinity of the gas chambers, destroyed a crematorium just as the killing was coming to an end in 1944.
By the winter of 1944–45, with Allied armies closing in, desperate SS officials tried frantically to evacuate the camps and conceal what had taken place. They wanted no eyewitnesses remaining. Prisoners were moved westward, forced to march toward the heartland of Germany. There were over 50 different marches from Nazi concentration and extermination camps during this final winter of Nazi domination, some covering hundreds of miles. The prisoners were given little or no food and water, and almost no time to rest or take care of bodily needs. Those who paused or fell behind were shot. In January 1945, just hours before the Red Army arrived at Auschwitz, the Nazis marched some 60,000 prisoners to Wodzislaw and put them on freight trains to the camps at Bergen-Belsen, Gross-Rosen, Buchenwald, Dachau, and Mauthausen. Nearly one in four died en route.
The Allies, who had early and accurate information on the murder of the Jews, made no special military efforts to rescue them or to bomb the camps or the railroad tracks leading to them. They felt that only after victory could something be done about the Jewish situation. Warnings were issued, condemnations were made, plans proceeded to try the guilty after the war, but no concrete action was undertaken specifically to halt the genocide. An internal memo to U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., from his general counsel in January 1944 characterized U.S. State Department policy as “acquiescence to the murder of the European Jews.” In response Morgenthau helped spur the creation of the War Refugee Board, which made a late and limited effort to rescue endangered Jews, mainly through diplomacy and subterfuge.
******
The most famous of the postwar trials occurred in 1945–46 at Nürnberg, the former site of Nazi Party rallies. There, the International Military Tribunal tried 22 major Nazi officials for war crimes, crimes against the peace, and a new category of crimes: crimes against humanity. This new category encompassed “murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population…persecution on political, racial, or religious grounds…whether or not in violation of the domestic laws of the country where perpetrated.” After the first trials, 185 defendants were divided into 12 groups, including physicians responsible for medical experimentation (but not so-called euthanasia), judges who preserved the facade of legality for Nazi crimes, Einsatzgruppe leaders, commandants of concentration camps, German generals, and business leaders who profited from slave labour. The defendants made up, however, a miniscule fraction of those who had perpetrated the crimes. In the eyes of many, their trials were a desperate, inadequate, but necessary effort to restore a semblance of justice in the aftermath of so great a crime. The Nürnberg trials established the precedent, later enshrined by international convention, that crimes against humanity are punishable by an international tribunal.
Over the ensuing half-century, additional trials further documented the nature of the crimes and had a public as well as a judicial impact. The 1961 trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, who supervised the deportations of Jews to the death camps, not only brought him to justice but made a new generation of Israelis keenly aware of the Holocaust. The Auschwitz trials held in Frankfurt am Main, West Germany, between 1963 and 1976 increased the German public’s knowledge of the killing and its pervasiveness. The trials in France of Klaus Barbie (1987) and Maurice Papon (1996–98).
These trials also became precedents as world leaders considered responses to other crimes against humanity in places such as Bosnia and Rwanda.
Today the Holocaust is viewed as the emblematic manifestation of absolute evil. Its revelation of the depths of human nature and the power of malevolent social and governmental structures has made it an essential topic of ethical discourse in fields as diverse as law, medicine, religion, government, and the military.
“Remember! Do not let the world forget.” To this responsibility to those they left behind, survivors have added a plea of their own: “Never again.” Never for the Jewish people. Never for any people.
credit: Encyclopædia Britannica
Thank you for the article.