In a few weeks it will be International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death-camp on January 27, 1945, by the Soviet army.    There are many things that continue to disturb me when I think about this period in time again, in addition to the unimaginable evil of it: a state run people extermination program …

There continue to be folks today – imbeciles would be a good name for them – who deny that anything like the Holocaust actually happened. Typically, they will have their own demented ideological agendas that will prevent them from acknowledging the sickening truth of this event, but the well-documented fact remains that on January 20, 1942,  in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, 15 high-ranking Nazi Party and German government officials  got together under the leadership of Reinhardt Heydrich, chief of the Reich Main Security Office (including the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), Gestapo, and Kripo) to discuss and coordinate of what they called the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question“.

While the official minutes of this this meeting did not reflect the actual ways and means of the implementation of this state sanctioned policy – we know from actual testimony provided by Adolf Eichmann who was present at the meeting that an agreement was reached to pursue the annihilation of all Jewish people, and that this strategy was subsequently implemented with deadly efficiency, resulting in the murder of perhaps as many as 6 million Jewish people. This includes approximately 1 million Jews just  in the Auschwitz complex alone (including Birkenau, Monowitz, and subcamps).

And so it happened that – while Nazi Germany was at war –  at the outset life went on more or less as normal for the majority of the German population,  but some of their neighbours were forced from their warm beds in the very early morning hours, given 15 minutes to get ready, fathers, mothers, their little children, grandparents, entire families, generations, standing there in front of their homes, in the gray morning light, shivering, frightened, crying, a small bag of belongings clutched under their arms, to be trucked away to local railway stations, then transported in unheated goods trains in the middle of winter – packed so tightly together – there was no room to sit down during a journey lasting often several days. Pitch dark inside, with a bucket or hole in the floor for a toilet, men, women, young and elderly, children, babies, women expecting, giving birth, and all this indescribably suffering had to be endured by thousands of people just so they could be gassed to death at a distant location.

From a 1943 secret report by a German army officer that was smuggled to the Dutch Resistance, for further distribution:

The trains with the victims arrive from all the occupied territories of Europe. They are made up of cattle wagons whose windows are barred with barbed wire, in each of the wagons there are 120 people. Depending on the weather, about 90 % arrive alive, although more than once last summer, 50 % were already dead from lack of water. After the wagons arrive at the camp, the people are whipped out and into the surrounding barracks, and locked in. The next day or several days later, depending on arrivals, 700 to 800 people are pushed together in to a courtyard. They are told to undress completely, the clothes must be put carefully in piles and the shoes lined up. Completely naked, men, women, children are pushed along a passage between two dividers of barbed wire. Then Ukrainian criminals begin to cut and shave the women’s and men’s hair. The hair is collected carefully because it is used to seal the joints [Dichtungen] of the submarines [U-Boot]. For long hours, the poor people must stand in the biting cold or the burning heat. As soon as some fall, worn out by the harsh cold or the burning heat, the henchmen lash the naked bodies of these poor people with the whips. The pain and the suffering that takes place in these corridors defy description. Mothers try to warm their infants against their own naked bodies. There is hardly any talking, only the eyes of the poor people express a nameless suffering and dulled resignation. This corridor leads to an iron door of a stone building. The door is opened and the 700-800 people destined for death are whipped inside until they are squeezed like herring in a barrel and unable to move. A three years old boy who tries to run away is caught and whipped back inside. Then the doors are hermetically closed. Outside the building, a large tractor is turned on, its exhaust fumes are pumped inside the building by a small window, I could see the effects on the victims inside. Packed in, the poor people were standing and waiting for their last moment, there was no panic, no cries, only a low murmur that could be heard from outside, as though a collective prayer rose towards the sky. One hour later, all were dead. Sliding windows were opened from the outside for the carbon monoxide to be evacuated. A half hour later, some Jews came – they owe their life to this dismal work which follows – to open a door in the back wall and drag out the bodies of the gassed people outside, before carrying them to the pits full of lime prepared for this task. They must remove rings from the fingers and open mouths to pull out gold teeth if there are any. Each installation keeps statistics of the number of killings [Tötungen]. Every day, in other words, every 24 hours, three or four killings[Tötungen] take place. This means that for the four installations [Anstalten], 8 000 to 9 000 deaths per day. In all, 6 million and a half people have already been killed in this way, including 4 million Jews and 2 and 1/2 “institutionalized individuals” or so-called “Deutschfeindlichen”. The program includes 16 million and a half people, in other words, all the Jews in the occupied territories and all the Polish and Czech intellectuals. In high places, there is currently an emphasis on rapidity and it is planned to use a more efficient method of killing. Cyanide gas has been suggested but apparently it has not been used yet, so the killing continues to take place in the cynical manner described above.
(March 25, 1943)

The ultimate indignity to human life – but there really are no words in any  language  that could capture in any  way the degree of terror, horror and pain that was inflicted on so many innocent men, women and children by the relatively handful of truly murderous individuals that made up the Nazi upper hierarchy.

Most disturbing to me  is the fact that this unbelievable sick and demented  initiative was perpetrated by the leadership of a nation steeped in cultural significance as far as western civilization is concerned.  And here we have Reinhard Heydrich – the Chair of the 1942 Wannsee conference – himself  a talented classical violinist and son of a composer and professional opera singer, born into a family of social standing and substantial financial means, and often described as the main author of the Holocaust and the darkest figure within the Nazi elite. Hitler christened him “The Man with the Iron Heart”(*)

Oh – and before I forget – the Holocaust  happened to certain people only because they were Jewish – but that seems hardly relevant, does it? I mean, how could such a factor be relevant? Unless, perhaps, you were in a country ruled by  a mentally deranged homicidal megalomaniac who used its powerful army to act out his sick and deadly fantasies. No, it is the fact that this could have happened at all – where it happened, when it happened and how it happened – these the only things that matter here. How this could have happened – I don’t think I will ever be able to figure this out at all.

August 1945 -A boy averts his eyes while walking by the starved and emaciated corpses being extracted from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp following the defeat of the Nazi empire.

(*)  It is perhaps worth mentioning that Mr. Heydrich’s iron heart stopped beating at the occasion of his death a few months after the Wannsee conference as the result of an attempt on his life on 27 May 1942 by a British-trained team of Czech and Slovak soldiers who had been sent on behalf of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile to assassinate him in an operation named Operation Anthropoid.

Memorial at Palmnicken, Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia

Warning: This, sadly, is a true story of incredible cruelty that you will not be able to get easily out of your mind once you have read it. It is one of many similar  acts of unimaginable savagery making up the holocaust and perpetrated by the criminal leadership of the German Nazi Reich during its dying days. Once they realized that their game was up and that the end of the Reich was in sight, they embarked on a desperate attempt to erase the evidence of their state run genocide directed against the Jews of Europe. This would include closing existing concentration camps, by evacuating prisoners to other areas, to be killed  and their bodies disposed of.

It was this approach to the Final Solution – Endlösung – that saw approximately 7,000 people, mostly Jewish women – begin their death march on 26 January 1945 from their Königsberg prison in East Prussia towards the town of Palmnicken in the Samland region on the Baltic coast. They had been gathered from various areas in Eastern Europe, and their death march to Palmnicken would be one of many similar marches by Jewish prisoners in East Prussia from January 1945 onwards.

Palmnicken was approximately 50 kilometers away. Once they arrived there, the plan was to drive the prisoners into a disused mine shaft in the large amber mine complex at the shore front, and then to seal up the entrance.

The march started the late morning of January 26 under the most atrocious conditions. It was the midst of a very cold winter, and the prisoners went without food or warm clothes. One survivor, Maria Blitz (née Salz) (1), recalled:

We were wrapped in dirty, threadbare blankets and on our feet we wore crude wooden clogs, which made moving forward on the snow and ice—in addition to our constant mortal terror—pure torture. Our clothing consisted of rags and paper, which we had tied together with wires to protect ourselves from the cold. Anyone who could not go on or fell over was shot immediately or beaten with a rifle butt. My sister Gita could not go any further—she had violent diarrhea and collapsed. We tried to get her back on her feet, but she asked us to leave her lying there, she wanted to go to her mother—whom we had already lost in Auschwitz. She was shot.

A Königsberg resident who witnessed the start of the march, Rose-Marie Blask, remembered the following:

I was 14-years-old back then. … I saw a procession of people on the other side of General-Litzmann-Strasse [the former Fuchsberger Allee]. I stood near a tree, it was already getting dark, the air full of snow, and no one could see me. Then I saw in horror that the SS were driving a long procession of prisoners in front of them. Again and again, an SS man raised his arm and a person fell in the snow, though I could not hear a gunshot. I don’t know how long I stood there, as if frozen. At any rate, I saw a lorry following on behind. The dead were lifted out of the snow and thrown into the back of the lorry.

Only 3,000 of the approximately 6,500 to 7,000 Jewish prisoners arrived in Palmnicken later that night on January 26. Around 2,000 to 2,500 marchers where either shot by the accompanying SS guards when they tried to flee or simply fell down, or died from sheer exhaustion during the 50 kilometer march under abhorrent conditions. The following morning up to 300 corpses were found along the final two kilometer stretch between Palmnicken and the village of Sorgenau.

The Anna Grube

Once at the mine site in Palmnicken things did not go to plan for the SS as the site manager refused to allow the disused shaft – the Anna Grube – to be used for mass murder. It was argued that the shaft was needed for the town’s water supply. Instead, the remaining exhausted and freezing victims were allowed to recover from their ordeal by being housed in the mine’s large workshop, and the factory canteen was order to cook for them. On January 30th, however, the site’s estate manager – Hans Feyerabend – was found dead, his own gun in his mouth, but unclear if he had committed suicide or was murdered. He had opposed the SS plans to murder all the prisoners from the moment he found out about it.

That same evening a number of Hitler Youths were ordered by the town’s mayor and the regional Nazi Party group leader to assist the SS at the disused Anna mine site with re-captured Jewish prisoners who had managed to get away during the final stage of the march. One of the Hitler Youths, Martin Bergau – on which much of this account is based – stated the following:

When we left the municipal office with the SS-men, it was already quite dark. … When we reached the northern part of the town, we turned left and went down the path to the closed Anna mine. We reached the squalid buildings, situated at sea level. I noticed a group of around forty to fifty women and girls. They were captured Jews. A diffuse source of light sparsely illuminated what seemed a ghostly scene. The women had to line up in twos, and we were instructed by the SS-men to escort them. Around six to eight SS-men might have belonged to the command. I could not tell whether they were Germans or foreigners, as their commands were extremely terse. Once the line-up was complete, two women at a time were led around the side of the building by two SS-men. Shortly afterwards two pistol shots rang out. That was the sign for two more SS executioners to take the next two victims to the building, which was shrouded in twilight, and shots soon resounded there again. I had had to position myself pretty much at the end of the long line. A classmate stood right across from me with a cocked rifle, watching over the women on the other side. One woman turned to me and asked in good German if she could move two places forward; she wished to walk this last path with her daughter. In a voice nearly choked with tears, I granted this brave woman her request. … Then I accompanied a mother whom I will never forget to her daughter.

Because of the concerns about contaminating the town’s water supply, the SS opted for a different approach. With the promise that the prisoners would now be taken by ship to Hamburg, they were led out of the main complex and through a gate that led directly onto the beach where they were directed to start marching South towards along the icy Baltic seashore towards Pilau. Once on the way, the SS executed their plan kill each and every one of the roughly 3,000 remaining prisoners, by machine-gunning the marchers from the back and herding them into the icy waters. Because of the melee that followed – and the sheer number of prisoners involved – the SS could not murder everyone as systematically as they had planned. Many victims were initially only wounded, or not even hit. Some fainted and froze to death, or became trapped between ice floes and drowned. Others died on the beach after days in agony. But some survived;  Zila Manielewicz, born in 1921 in Ozorkow, recalled the following:

When we arrived on the shore, it was already darkest night. … Suddenly I was hit on my head with a rifle butt and I and I fell into a precipice. I gained consciousness in the water. At this time, dusk had already fallen. The shore was full of corpses and the SS men were still hovering over them. …. Towards morning the SS men disappeared. Around this time we became aware that about 200 of us were still alive. We got up and climbed onto the beach. The path we had taken that night was itself full of corpses and the seawater was red from the victims’ blood. Together with two other Jewish women, I dragged myself to the closest German village; …

Another account, by Pnina Kronisch,born in 1927 in Belzec:

Then they threw the murdered Jews into the water by kicking them. As the seacoast was covered with ice, the murderers pushed their victims into the icy water with their rifle butts. Since I was at the front of the column with my sister Sara, we were the last in line to be shot. I was also laid down on the seacoast together with my sister, though I was not killed by the shot that was aimed at me but only wounded in my left foot, and my face was soaked in the blood of the murdered Jews lying next to me. During this time my sister was killed. I did not wait until the Germans threw me into the sea—I threw myself in and remained lying next to the ice floe, which already was caught up in the water and hit by the waves. The Germans believed I was dead, and since I was alone, to my good luck, and last in line to be murdered, the Germans got into their sleds and drove off. Before dawn I scrambled out of the sea and hid in the coal store of a German farmer who did not live far from where these events occurred.

Because the seashore where the massacre occurred was separated by a broad strip of park and woodland and the town 30 meters above, only a few of the inhabitants of Palmnicken saw what happened that night. But next day it was immediately apparent that a massacre had taken place. Helene Zimmer, a former resident of Palmnicken, stated the following to the Ludwigsburg court:

… Then we went back to Palmnicken on foot, along the shore instead of along the completely congested road. It was a very painful march taking several hours. … Just before Palmnicken, actually between Nodems and Palmnicken, we suddenly saw countless corpses lying on the shore, and also heard desperate screams still coming from the water. As far as I could see, those lying on the shore were all dead, and every now and then we could hear desperate cries coming from the water. … The water along the shore was partly frozen and ice floes floated around, between them were the seriously wounded or dead people. Many of them were dressed in the same striped clothes. There were also many women among them. … I was so shaken at the sight that I covered my eyes with my hands. … We then quickly went on walking because we could not stand the sight.

It is estimated that approximately fifteen of the original group of 7,000 individuals survived death march and final massacre on the beach at Palmnicken. While the crime was reported to the Soviets when they captured Palmnicken ten weeks later, few details regarding this monstrous crime made its way into the West prior to 1994. It was then that Martin Bergau – a former Hitler Youth member from Palmnicken- had his memoir covering the war years published. He had witnessed the crime at the age of sixteen. Shortly after the massacre he had been taken prisoner by the Soviets; after his release he had not been allowed to return to his home in East Prussia.

In 1945 Palmnicken became part of the Soviet Union and Königsberg was renamed Kaliningrad as a result of the Potsdam agreement. After the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1992 it became part of the Russian Federation. While the mass grave in the Anna mine had disappeared into a sand dune, the murder victims’ remains were eventually unearthed by amber excavators in the 60’s. Initially thought to be the remains of Soviet soldiers murdered by the Germans, a memorial stone was erected and wreaths were laid every year at the site until the demise of the Soviet Union in 1992. Finally, in 1994, Martin Bergau was able to convince the regional authorities that the bodies lying at the site were in fact Jewish.

And so ends another incredibly sad tale of man’s inhumanity to man – what an infinitely tragic species we are! Clearly, there can be no almighty god, or at least not one that is capable of compassion, empathy, love or self-respect – and in which case he might as well kill himself. Or perhaps he did that already, realizing what kind of creature he hath wrought here on earth, as we must have started slaughtering each other from the moment we found ourselves capable of it.

Today is January 27 2017, Yom HaShoah, or International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Lest we forget …

This post is based on:
Endlösung on the ‘Amber Shore’:
The Massacre in January 1945 on the Baltic Seashore—
A Repressed Chapter of East Prussian History
BY ANDREAS KOSSERT (2004)
http://leobaeck.oxfordjournals.org/

Maria Blitz

(1) Maria Blitz – one of the last survivors of the the Palmnicken Massacre in January of 1945 died on June 11, 2016, at the age of 98.

Miep Gies in 1998

Miep Gies has died at the age of 100 on January 11 in Hoorn, The Netherlands;  she was born in 1909 in Vienna as Hermine Santrouschitz before moving to Amsterdam in the early 1920s and marrying Jan Gies in 1941.

Miep Gies helped hide Anne Frank and her family from the Nazis for two years in a secret annex of a house on the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam. She also saved Anne’s diaries from destruction, allowing the world a glimpse into the day-to-day realities of Jews during World War II. Of the numerous people who helped the Frank family avoid deportation for two years from July 1942 to August 1944, Miep Gies was the last one still alive.

Despite the heroic efforts of Gies and the others,  a tip off by persons unknown allowed theNazis to raid the Frank’s hiding place on the morning of Aug. 4, 1944 and deport  its residents to Auschwitz. Anne Frank, spared immediate death in the Auschwitz gas chambers, died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen camp just weeks before the end of World War II. She was only 15. Miep Gies recovered Anne’s dairies after the raid and gave them to Otto Frank – Anne’s father and the only member of the Frank family to survive the war — upon his return and he published them in 1947.

Of all the European countries, the Netherlands – together with Poland and Greece – fared the worst as a result of the Holocaust in terms of a decline in their Jewish populations.  The Netherlands lost 75% of its Jewish population, with the Nazis deporting more than 105,000 people primarily to Auschwitz en Sobibor between 1940 and 1945, leaving roughly 35,000 Jewish survivors between those who remained hidden during the war and those who managed to find their way back from the death camps after 1945.

In 1994, Gies was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany as well as the Wallenberg Medal by the University of Michigan. The following year, Gies received the Yad Vashem Righteous Among the Nations medal. In 1997, she was knighted in the Order of Orange-Nassau by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands. The minor planet 99949 Miepgies is named in her honor. She always maintained that while she appreciated the honors, they embarrassed her:

“I am not a hero. I am not a special person. I don’t want attention. I did what any decent person would have done.”

On 30 July 2009, the Austrian Ambassador to the Netherlands, Wolfgang Paul, presented Grand Decoration of Honour for Services to the Republic of Austria to Gies at her home.

Anne Frank House today – museum on the right across from the Westerkerk.

The Diary of Anne Frank is a 1959 film based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same name that was partly filmed at the actual building at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam where Anne Frank and her family were hiding until they were betrayed and shipped off to Auschwitz. 

As it happens, in the summer of 1958 I was in Amsterdam looking for jazz records at a 2nd hand store on the Prinsengracht when I noticed a crowd  of onlookers in front  of one of the buildings on the other side of the canal. Someone told me then that they were making a movie about Anne Frank, a Jewish girl who had lived there during the war. 

I must admit I have never read the Anne Frank’s Diaries – but one day I will summon up the courage for it, to read them in the context of a time really not all that long ago, dominated by those who thought that she should be hunted down and exterminated because for what she was. And what else could a 15 year old girl be? Someone’s sweet daughter –  nothing more and nothing less – capable of innocent hopes and dreams only, until her life was stolen from her through a state-sanctioned act of unimaginable savagery:

Anne Frank was discovered, seized, and deported; she and her mother and sister and millions of others were extinguished in a program calculated to assure the cruellest and most demonically inventive human degradation. The atrocities she endured were ruthlessly and purposefully devised, from indexing by tattoo through systematic starvation to factory-efficient murder. She was designated to be erased from the living, to leave no grave, no sign, no physical trace of any kind.

 Her fault—her crime—was having been born a Jew, and as such she was classified among those who had no right to exist: not as a subject people, not as an inferior breed, not even as usable slaves. The military and civilian apparatus of an entire society was organized to obliterate her as a contaminant, in the way of a noxious and repellent insect. Zyklon B, the lethal fumigant poured into the gas chambers, was, pointedly, a roach poison.

Anne Frank escaped gassing. One month before liberation, not yet sixteen, she died of typhus fever, an acute infectious disease carried by lice. (Excerpted from an article by Cynthia Ozick, The New Yorker Magazine,  September 28, 1997)