Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [103]
Not only Jews went to the camps. Thousands upon thousands of Slavs died, the Gypsies were virtually wiped out in Europe, the retarded, the insane, the senile, all went down the via dolorosa to the camps. Rumors of what was happening reached western Europe in 1942, but most people in the West regarded them as nothing more than war propaganda. It was too horrible to be true, there were no words to describe it, and eventually a new one had to be coined: genocide, the murder of whole peoples.
No one knows how many people actually died in the camps, on their way to them, or as a result of having been in them. The official figure for the Jews is usually put at six million, in the camps themselves. Those are the best documented, as a result of the thoroughness with which the Germans kept their records, records which Himmler boasted, “have written a glorious page in our history.” But there is little doubt that nearly that many more died outside the camps, and the end product was very near what the Germans wanted, the wiping out of European Jewry. Before the war there were four million Jews in Poland; today there are seven thousand.
The fact that some Jews and Slavs survived at all is mainly the result of the contradictions of German policy. If the Jews were gassed, the Poles shot, the Russians starved to death, who would be left to do the work? The answer was no one, and eventually the policies had to be modified; from a quick death for everyone, the Germans moved to a policy of imposing a slow death by malnutrition while making prisoners work as long and as hard as possible. Had it not been for the demands of industry, the death toll would have gone even higher.
How much the German people, as a people, knew of all this remains problematical. The domestic opposition to the Nazis was weak, usually short-lived, and in the main ineffectual. If in the occupied countries German policies sparked the flames of resistance even while attempting to liquidate it, at home little was done. Only those who have never had to fear the knock on the door in the middle of the night can afford the luxury of criticism, and as the Nazi tentacles fastened ever more firmly on civilization, occupied Europe became what Churchill, as he so often did, summed it up: “a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime.”
17. The Japanese Offensives in the Pacific
AS THE JAPANESE carrier pilots returned triumphantly to their ships on the morning of December 7, exciting vistas of conquest opened before them. Behind them on the mud of Pearl, in the midst of the fires, the wreckage, and the oil, lay the one instrument capable of impeding their advance. With one sudden blow they had altered the balance of power in the Pacific for the foreseeable future. They were now to embark on a string of victories that would carry them to the doorsteps of Australia and India. By the only means worthy of a race of warriors, the Japanese were going to claim their place in the sun.
Coinciding with the Pearl Harbor strike, the Japanese launched simultaneous offensives on all fronts. The first stage of their plan was the taking of the Southern Resources Area. Stage two was to be the establishment of a wide-ranging defensive perimeter. The Japanese high command calculated that it would take the United States at least eighteen months to recover sufficiently to reply. By then the defensive perimeter would be secure. They moved forward confidently to the conquest of the southern regions.
Their initial offensive was composed of two main thrusts, plus several subsidiary ones. The main thrusts were a southwestern one into Southeast Asia, which would advance down the Malayan Peninsula and branch both left and right into Burma and into the Dutch East Indies; and a southeastern one from Formosa down through the Philippines to meet the western thrust in the