HOLOCAUST

Intro: Up to a million people were involved in the extermination of Jews in Hitler’s death camps, yet only a paltry 6,600 were convicted

THE recent publication of Reckonings, Mary Fulbrook’s monumental account of the attempt to bring the perpetrators of the Holocaust to justice, is propitious in its timing. It coincides with the rise in anti-Semitism.

The British historian has already won acclaim for her earlier work, A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis And The Holocaust. This latest volume deserves awards, too.

As with all detailed work related to the Nazis’ programme of exterminating the entire European Jewish population, a prospective reader should be warned: the depravity described is almost impossible to read. It is disturbing.

But it is a sense of deep injustice, as well as horror, that will eventually overcome readers of Reckonings. Its main theme is how the overwhelming majority of those involved in the murder of an estimated six million men, women and children were either never brought to justice or were dealt with so leniently that it amounted to the victims being gravely insulted.

Fulbrook estimates that “perhaps 200,000 people, and possibly closer to a million, were at one point or another actively involved in killing Jewish civilians. And the ranks of those who made this possible were far wider”.

The solitary name of Auschwitz has become almost synonymous with the Holocaust and the mass murder of Jews, but there were around another 1,200 “sub-camps” spread across the Reich.

Yet, out of a total of 172,294 participants prosecuted, only 6,656 were convicted. And the overwhelming majority of those actually found guilty received sentences of less than two years’ imprisonment.

One reason for that was the astonishing efficiency of the Nazis’ methods. As Fullbrook duly observes, the West German courts, originally charged with bringing the perpetrators to justice, needed witnesses but “the more perfect the extermination machinery, the less likely the murderers were to be found guilty”.

For example, there were only two known survivors of the Belzec extermination camp, where an estimated half a million people had been gassed – and one of those survivors was killed in suspicious circumstances before he could give evidence.

Only one person, Josef Oberhauser, was convicted, in Munich in 1965, in connection with this mass slaughter.

THIRTEEN of the 14 witnesses called to testify in court were former SS personnel. But as Fulbrook writes, were “hardly likely to want to incriminate their former colleagues and in the process risk incriminating themselves”.

In general, the West German courts would acquit those who could make a case that they had little choice but to perform their role in the mass murder (though there are no records of anyone who was punished for refusing to participate).

Claims by many of the perpetrators that they had done their best to make the victims’ final moments more bearable were also treated as a mitigating factor.

The 1966 trial of Walter Thormeyer, a former SS Hauptscharfuhrer, provides a vivid and grotesque example. His deputy, Rudi Zimmermann, one of the miniscule number to display remorse and who actually turned himself in, told the court that, on the occasion of mass killings: “Thormeyer appeared to prefer shooting the female Jews personally… with a certain relish.”

In fact, Thormeyer had a Jewish mistress, but when he feared that this (a crime under Nazi law) would be discovered, he took her for a walk in some woods… and shot her in the back of the neck.

The judge declared that this was a token of Thormeyer’s “consideration”, and the act “humane” – because his mistress had been spared the knowledge that he was going to kill her.

Thormeyer was, at the time of his trial, an official in the West German court system and, as Fulbrook observes, one reason for the general lenience of the sentencing (Thormeyer himself got 12 years) was that the entire German legal bureaucracy was riddled with ex-Nazis.

The idea that the extermination camps were killing Jews “humanely”, by using gas, rather than bullets, was invariably suggested by those put-on trial afterwards, most notably Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz.

In his memoir, he wrote how “humane” this was: “I was relieved that we would be spared all these bloodbaths, and that the victims too would be spared suffering until their last moment came.” Such concern for the victims. Pah.

It was solely out of concern for the killers that mass shootings were supplanted by gassing. The splattering of the brains of women and children was said to have had a deleterious effect on the morale of all but the most depraved German (and, indeed, Austrian) executioners. And it was anything but a humane killing: the very use of the word in connection with mass extermination is itself utterly repulsive.

DURING one of her – thankfully rare – accounts of what actually happened, Fulbrook provides citation from one involved in the gassings at Treblinka, Chil Rajchman (whose main job was extracting gold fillings from the dead): “During their death agonies from asphyxiation the bodies also became swollen, so the corpses form literally a single mass.”

He observed that there were differences between the bodies recovered from the smaller and larger gas chambers: in the smaller chamber, death took 20 minutes, whereas in the larger chambers, it took three-quarters of an hour.

Corpses from the larger chambers “were horribly deformed, their faces all black as if burned, the bodies swollen and blue, the teeth so tightly clenched that it was impossible to open them”.

Which, as Rajchman observed, made his job of pulling out all those gold crowns even more difficult.

This is the process whose vast majority of active participants the post-war German courts exonerated on the basis that they were “only obeying orders”.

Yet, as Fulbrook summarises it, “obeying orders” was only one element.

There were also “varying combinations of careerism, cowardice, conformity, fear, lust, brutalisation, hopelessness”.

She adds to that list “desire for reward”. For yes, there were takings to be had from the desperate Jews, before exterminating them.

Obviously, modern-day Germany is not that of the immediate post-war period, when self-preservation and shame combined to hide and conceal the truth.

Yet, during 2018, the head of the increasingly popular Alternative for Deutschland party (AfD), Alexander Gauland, declared the crimes of Hitler and the Nazis to be just “a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of glorious German history”.

Mary Fulbrook, or any reader who is repulsed at such comments, should send him a copy of her book.

. Reckonings by Mary Fulbrook is published by OUP for £25, 672pp