The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [139]
On the morning of 10 June 1942, units from the SD and Wehrmacht Field Police surrounded the mining village of Lidice, outside Prague. The entire population was rounded up. The 173 men and boys over the age of fifteen were shot there and then, and the 198 women and 98 children were taken off to extermination camps for subsequent execution. All the buildings in the village were burnt to the ground, and the village’s name was erased from all records. Thirteen children were allowed to survive because they had blond hair; they were taken to Germany to be brought up as Aryans. In another village, Ležáky, seventeen men and sixteen women were shot and fourteen children gassed. An official statement was made to the effect that Lidice had been punished ‘to teach the Czechs a final lesson of subservience and humility’.
At 06.00 hours on Monday, 19 April 1943, some 850 soldiers of the Waffen-SS entered the Warsaw Ghetto, intending first to ‘evacuate’ the remaining Jewish population there, and then to destroy it, under orders from Himmler. The Jews had been warned by the arrival of Ukrainian, Latvian and Lithuanian auxiliaries of what was about to happen, and the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa (ZOB, or Jewish combat organization) took up positions around the Ghetto, ready to make the SS pay as dearly as possible. The Ghetto Uprising came as a surprise to the Germans. On the first day they lost twelve killed as the ZOB threw grenades and Molotov cocktails at their attackers, managing to set one tank alight. So serious a reverse was it that the chief of the SS in Warsaw was replaced, and SS-General Jürgen Stroop took over. ‘The Jews and bandits defended themselves from one defence point to the next,’ Stroop reported of one attack soon afterwards, ‘and at the last minute escaped via attics or underground passages.’67 It was to continue like that for nearly four weeks, as the SS and their auxiliary allies, as well as the German police and Wehrmacht and even the Jewish Ghetto police, had to fight hand to hand and street by street.
Vastly outnumbered in terms of fighters and outgunned in equipment, the Jews fought with a furious determination born of utter desperation, as Stroop slowly made his way into the centre of the Ghetto. ‘One saw constant examples of how, despite the threat of fire, the Jews and bandits preferred to return into the flames than to fall into our hands,’ Stroop reported to SS-Obergruppenführer Krüger in Kraków on 27 April. ‘Yelling abuse at Germany and the Führer and cursing German soldiers, Jews hurl themselves from burning windows and balconies.’68 The leader of the Uprising, Mordechai Anielewicz, and his closest comrades refused to surrender to the SS, which surrounded them in a bunker at 18 Mila Street; instead he and his comrades committed suicide on 8 May. Eight days later the Uprising reached its terrible denouement when at 8.15 p.m. on Sunday, 16 May Stroop blew up the Warsaw synagogue. By then he had captured or killed 55,065 Jews, and those Poles (‘bandits’) who had fought alongside them, who were executed on capture. Stroop had lost only sixteen men killed and eighty-four wounded, but Warsaw was a signal for Jewish resistance in Lvov, Częstochowa, Białystok and, on 2 August, even Treblinka and then twelve days later at Sobibór. With the huge preponderance of armaments enjoyed by the Germans, little useful militarily could be achieved, but much was won in terms of the pride of the Jewish people.
The deportation of Hungary’s Jews to Auschwitz began in March 1944. SS-Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant-Colonel) Adolf Eichmann led the special task force that deported 437,000 of them there over eight weeks. He later boasted to a crony that he would ‘jump laughing into his grave’ for his part in the deaths of four million Jews.69 In a 1961 diary entry after his conviction in Israel of genocide, Eichmann wrote:
I saw the eeriness of the death machinery; wheel turning on wheel, like the mechanisms of a watch. And I saw those who maintained the machinery, who kept it going. I saw