No one present could doubt that what was
being planned was, indeed, mass murder. Adolf
Eichmann of the SS, who was present and was one
of the principal organisers of the Holocaust, later
testified that the atmosphere was one of general
agreement; no one raised difficulties or moral
objections. The eastern ghettos now became tran-
sit stations as the plans were implemented. The
construction of the Auschwitz extermination camp
had already begun before the Wannsee Confer-
ence. Others followed, among them Chelmno,
Belzec, Sobibór, Treblinka. These camps of mass
murder were specifically equipped to kill thousands
every day, generally in large gas chambers. The
‘selection’ of those to be murdered as unfit to work
was done on arrival from the rail transports arriving
straight at the camps; the remainder, a smaller
number and never the old, the sick or children,
were allowed to survive some weeks longer. There
were very few long-term survivors.
Mass murder was so huge in extent that his-
torians cannot tell for certain even to the nearest
million how many people perished. Despite the
virtual hopelessness of their situation in some
ghettos and camps, a few Jews did resist, and with
such weapons as could be smuggled in fought
against German troops, thus at least selling their
lives dearly. The whole world learnt of the Jewish
rising of the Warsaw ghetto in April and May
1943 and its destruction. Less well known were
risings in a number of extermination camps, in
Treblinka in August 1943 and Sobibór in
October of the same year, for instance. A few
thousand more Jews were able to escape into the
forests in Poland and the Ukraine, and operated
as partisan units. They were not always welcome,
and they were sometimes killed by their compa-
triots as well as by the Germans. Before the war
was over, between 5 and 6 million Jews had been
murdered. Nazi ideology was so widespread that
it is unrealistic to limit responsibility for these
crimes to Hitler and his henchmen. While
Germans, soldiers, the SS and officials were over-
whelmingly responsible, they were aided in their
work of destruction by some sections of the con-
quered peoples of Europe in every country.
In Germany knowledge was widespread,
brought home by soldiers and SS on leave from
the east. How much the Germans were actually
told can be seen from an article written by
Goebbels and published in the ‘respectable’
weekly journal Das Reichon 16 November 1941.
That world Jewry started the war, he wrote, was
proven beyond dispute:The Jews wanted their war, and now they have
it. What is now coming true is the Führer’s
prophecy of 30 January 1939, in his speech to
the Reichstag, when he said that if inter-
national Finance Jewry once more succeeded
in driving the peoples into a world war, the
result would not be the bolshevising of the
world and thereby the victory of the Jews, but
the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe.
We are now witnessing the fulfilment of that
prophecy, and a destiny is being realised which
is harsh but more than deserved. Feelings of
sympathy or pity are entirely inappropriate...
[Jewry] according to its law, ‘an eye for an eye,
a tooth for a tooth’, is now perishing.The demand of the German authorities that all
Jews be handed over for the terrible Final
Solution being prepared for them was one of the
deepest moral challenges faced by occupied
Europe and Germany’s allies during the Second
World War. There was not one response that was
uniquely French, Polish, Dutch or Hungarian.
The response was multi-faceted. There was the
‘official’ collaboration of governments – and even
this was not uniform – and then there was the
response of institutions, the churches above all,
and of ordinary people. In every corner of Europe
there were some individuals who risked their lives
to shelter Jews. The Jews who survived in
Germany were mainly those in mixed Jewish–
Christian marriages. They, too, were on the list
for incarceration, possibly murder but they came
last in the plan for the ‘Final Solution’ and the
war was over before they could be dealt with.
Several hundred Jews were hidden from human-
itarian motives or managed with forged papers to
pass themselves off as Aryan. The Christians who
protected Jews in Germany were heroic, their
number pitifully small – far fewer than in Poland
or other occupied countries. In Germany the