All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [315]
In one area in Serbia two villages have been reduced to ashes, 1,700 men and 240 women have been executed. This is the ‘punishment’ for an attack on three German soldiers. In Greece 220 men of one village have been shot. The village was burnt down, women and children were left there to weep for their husbands and fathers and homes. In France there are extensive shootings while I write. Certainly more than a thousand people are murdered in this way every day and another thousand German men are habituated to murder. All this is child’s play compared with what is happening in Poland and Russia. May I know this and yet sit at my table in my heated flat and have tea? Don’t I thereby become guilty too? What shall I say when I am asked: ‘And what did you do during that time?’ Since Saturday, the Berlin Jews are being rounded up.
The Holocaust is today often discussed in isolation. In one sense, this is logical, because the Jews were singled out for genocide, but the records of Auschwitz-Birkenau, most notorious of the death camp complexes, emphasise the numbers from other racial groups who shared the fate of Jewish deportees. The best available statistics show that a total of 1.1 million Jews arrived at the camp, of whom 100,000 survived; among 140,000 non-Jewish Poles, half survived; of 23,000 gypsies, all but 2,000 perished; all of 15,000 Soviet PoWs died; about half of 25,000 others – mostly political prisoners – were killed. In addition to almost six million Jews murdered by the Nazis, over three million Russians died in German captivity, while huge numbers of non-Jewish civilians were massacred in Russia, Poland, Yugoslavia, Greece and other occupied countries.
It thus seems important to assess the Holocaust against the background of Hitler’s governance of his empire. One of the most moving and enlightened advocates of pursuing such context was Ruth Maier. As a twenty-two-year-old refugee in Oslo, barely a month before her own deportation and murder in Auschwitz, she wrote in her diary: ‘If you shut yourself away and look at this persecution and torture of Jews only from the viewpoint of a Jew, then you’ll develop some sort of complex which is bound to lead to a slow but certain psychological collapse. The only solution is to see the Jewish question from a broader perspective … within the framework of the oppressed Czechs and Norwegians, the oppressed workers … We’ll only be rich when we understand that it’s not just we who are a race of martyrs. That beside us there are countless others suffering, who will suffer like us until the end of time … if we don’t … if we don’t fight for a better …’ She broke off to express exasperation about the persistence of her own instinct to see the Jewish tragedy as unique, but her mental confusion does not diminish the nobility and unselfishness of this very young woman’s words from the threshold of the grave.
One of Hitler’s greatest mistakes, from the viewpoint of his own interests, was that he attempted to reshape the eastern lands that fell under his suzerainty in accordance with Nazi ideology, while still fighting the war. Almost all comparisons between Hitler and Churchill are otiose, but one seems significant: Britain’s leader provoked the exasperation of his ministers, as well as that of humbler fellow countrymen, by his refusal seriously to address domestic social reform until victory was achieved. Germany’s leader, in contrast, launched a drastic reordering of conquered societies in the east within weeks of their occupation. He conducted wholesale expulsions of indigenous populations to make way for German colonists, and slaughtered large numbers of people, notably Jews and social and political activists, heedless of whether they offered resistance to his hegemony. Ignoring the human horror – as of course did the Nazis – these policies