Читаем The World полностью

Auschwitz-Birkenau became the killing and slavery centre for European Jews outside Poland and the USSR. Heydrich’s system called for local police to register their Jews, then summon them for entraining for ‘evacuation to the east’, yet the reaction of Hitler’s vassals was unenthusiastic and defiance was entirely possible: Mussolini had passed Racial Laws but refused to deport any Italian Jews; the Hungarian regent Horthy, who had persecuted Jews through a series of Nazi-style Jewish Laws from 1938 and was fully informed about the Final Solution, sent 100,000 Jews to the killing camps but refused to surrender the majority of his large Jewish community. There were 300,000 Jews in France plus another 400,000 in Algeria. Few were touched in Algeria, but in the metropolis, ordinary French police rounded up 75,000 Jews and sent them to the killing camps, where virtually all were killed, a particularly horrific record in the home of the Enlightenment. The Danes managed to hide virtually all their Jews, saving 90 per cent by spiriting them to Sweden. The Dutch on the other hand cooperated with the killing: 107,000 out of 140,000 Jews were deported and virtually all were killed – a higher proportion than in any other country in western Europe including Germany.

On arrival at Auschwitz, the Jews faced the ‘selection’ by an SS doctor, Joseph Mengele, who determined who could be forced to work and who should be exterminated at once. Mengele, an elegant ghoul who conducted vicious ‘experiments’ on Jewish children, would send children, women and elderly to the ‘showers’ (sealed and fitted with invisible gas siphons) where they were stripped of their belongings and clothes, then gassed, their bodies dragged out by Jewish slave workers who, after extracting gold teeth, fed them into the crematoria that coughed sickly smoke out of towering chimneys.^* In July 1942, Himmler watched Mengele make a selection of Dutch Jews in total silence before dining with the commandant in ‘the finest, radiant mood’. One Viennese family personifies the intricate scale of trans-European murder: four of Sigmund Freud’s elderly sisters were now dispatched on death trains to be slaughtered in distant killing camps – Mitzi and Paula Freud were gassed at Maly Trostenets (Belarus), Rosa at Treblinka, and Dolfi was starved at Theresienstadt.

Between 5.9 and 6.1 million Jews were killed in total, including the near million murdered by Einsatzgruppen. An entire world was destroyed, a culture vanished. Romani and Sinti (denounced as ‘mongrel Gypsies’) were also targeted: 500,000 were killed in the Porajmos (Devouring) along with 5,000–15,000 homosexuals and several million Gentile Poles and Russians. Although trains and barbed steel had made possible vast deportations and concentration camps since 1890s, and although other regimes particularly Stalin’s in Russia and later those in Communist China and Cambodia killed many, none did so on such a scale and using industrial means. It was a crime, based on race, unequalled in history, for which no word existed: in 1944, a Jewish Pole invented ‘genocide’ to describe its enormity – a word that like the Holocaust itself should never be misused.

There is always money in mass murder: Nazi viceroys living in luxury enjoyed sadistic and sexual control over innocent people whose property they looted. But they also enforced slavery on Slavs and Jews. The Krupps, consuming businesses all over conquered Europe, were typical of the German businesses that embraced this diabolic order. Krupp owned factories in twelve nations from Dnepropetrovsk (Dnipro) in Ukraine to Paris where he seized Jewish firms, colluding in sending one of their owners to the death camps. In April 1942, visiting Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair, Krupp praised the liquidation of Jews, ‘but could see no reason they shouldn’t contribute before they went’, requesting an assignment of slaves and offering the SS a commission per slave.

In three years, twelve million slaves – Poles wearing ‘P’ on their clothes, Russians ‘SR’ (Soviet Russian) or ‘OST’ (for Ostarbeiter – eastern worker) and Jews ‘Judenmaterial’ (Jewish property), later superseded by the yellow star – were imported to the Reich or worked in slave camps. Some 30,000 Slavic women toiled in German military brothels. The numbers are imprecise but colossal. After the war, 5.2 million slaves were repatriated to Russia and Poland.