The War Germany Tried Hardest to Win: No, it was not its war against Europe, Russia and the U.S.
Anniversary of Kristallnacht and review of a new film -- "Resistence: They Fought Back"
This past week marks the anniversary of Kristallnacht. The night of broken glass on November 9-10, 1938, resulted in the destruction of Jewish businesses and synagogues and the ransacking of Jewish homes throughout Germany. Thousands of Jewish men were imprisoned and tortured because of their religion. Most would return to their families in a month or two but would never be the same.
It also was the beginning of what might be thought of as Germany’s war within a war, a war separate from its military action against Russia, Europe, and ultimately, the United States.
This would be a War Against the Jews, and the only outcome that would satisfy Germany would be the extermination of the Jews.
The War Against the Jews also stood alone in an important way. Germany wanted to win this war so much that it was willing to divert resources from the battlefields — money, munitions, and manpower — to exterminate the Jews.
Germany, in effect, had no higher priority than its War Against the Jews.
This point is part of the foundation of a new documentary film, Resistance: They Fought Back, by co-directors Paula S. Apsell and Kirk Wolfinger. The film has been shown so far mostly at festivals and special events. Abramorama, of New York, now has acquired the distribution rights and the film will be opening more broadly early next year.
The overt purpose of the film is to definitively establish — despite the uninformed conventional wisdom to the contrary — that the Jews did fight back against the Germans in large and small ways, both in battle and their daily lives, throughout the Holocaust years.
The side point, however, regarding the resources Germany devoted to this war is highly relevant. At a time when Germany was under major military pressure from the Allies, it moved resources from its military offensives to develop a new kind of gas to make mass murder in the death camps efficient, to maintain an internal rail transportation system capable of moving tens of thousands of persons to the death camps every day, and to construct new crematoriums at a breakneck pace. It also diverted tens of thousands of troops and officers to maintain security and fulfill the purpose of its death camps.
The impact of this enormous commitment to the extermination of the Jews was to ensure that the many uprisings and revolts mounted by the Jews would have limited success.
The Jews soon learned that if they managed to kill one German guard, 1,000 Jews would be killed in return. The Germans had easy access to all the weapons and ammunition they needed to maintain control of the death camps. The Jews had to smuggle weapons into the camps one at a time and at risk of death if they were discovered. Then, they had to find ways to hide their cache of weapons until enough had been accumulated to mount a respectable battle.
In the end, many of the Jews knew they would give their lives, but they also would work to ensure that their children might survive. The Germans would discover that it would be easier to kill the body than the soul even though they were determined to destroy both. And yet, the Jews of the Holocaust worked tirelessly to give their children as much comfort and support as possible. They continued to engage in prayer and to cherish reading, writing, and music to the fullest extent possible. Mothers fought to save their babies. Fathers fought to keep their families together. Parents took care of their children until the last breath.
These efforts to preserve Jewish identity and humanity were, in effect, a kind of resistance.
There also were numerous efforts to practice aggressive resistance despite the overwhelming odds against success.
Some of the more dramatic actions:
· The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising – The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest in Europe, 500,000 Jews sealed into confinement within the city of Warsaw in October 1940. The Ghetto Uprising, on the eve of Passover in 1943, coincided with German troops and police entering the ghetto to begin deporting its surviving inhabitants. The 700 young Jewish fighters who participated in the uprising mounted one of the largest military responses to the Holocaust. The ragtag bunch of untrained fighters lasted 27 days, longer than the better-trained-and-equipped French or Belgian armies had when the Nazis invaded their countries. At least 7,000 Jews died in the fighting or in hiding by the time the Germans brought the Uprising under control. Thousands more were deported to killing centers. An unknown number of Nazis died as well.
· The Vilna Ghetto Resistance – An armed revolt of the imprisoned Jews was quashed in short order by the Nazis. But many of the fighters escaped through the sewers of Vilna and were able to join partisans in the forest outside the ghetto. They formed a formidable obstacle for the Nazis. One of these units of fighters destroyed five bridges, 180 miles of train tracks, and 40 enemy train cars, while killing 212 Nazis.
· The Sobibor Revolt – Jewish prisoners at the Sobibor killing center began planning a revolt in the summer of 1943. They worked out a detailed plan. The revolt began that October with a deputy commandant being invited into the tailor shop to be fitted for a suit. He never would wear a suit again after being slain with an axe; the prisoners took his uniform and weapons. Similar axe killings of about 10 more SS officials, one at a time, occurred within an hour or so. When the 600 prisoners assembled for roll call that evening, Jews masquerading as the SS killed the guards at the gates and in the towers. Soon, more than half of the prisoners were able to flee the death camp. The Germans pursued them. Many were killed, but about 200 Jews were able to escape. Of these, about 50 survived the war – men and women who would have died in the gas chambers had it not been for the revolt.
· The Revolt at Auschwitz-Birkenau – For months in 1944, young Jewish women prisoners assigned to work in the camp’s munitions factory smuggled small amounts of gunpowder, wrapped in small pieces of paper and cloth and hidden on their bodies, to the squad of prisoners forced to work in the camp’s crematoria. The gunpowder was fashioned into crude grenades encased in sardine tins. On October 7, 1944, the workers of Crematorium 1 began the revolt. Workers in the other three crematoria quickly followed. A hated, sadistic Nazi guard in Crematorium 1 was forced into an oven and burned alive. The heavily armed Nazis counterattacked and quelled the revolt – but not before the Jews in Crematorium 4 took their make-shift grenades into the oven rooms and detonated them in a defiant suicide event. The revolt was put down, but Crematorium 4 was damaged beyond repair and never used again. The revolt had reduced the camp’s killing capacity by 25 percent. Thousands of Jewish lives were saved.
Jews who were able to avoid the death camps also assisted in the uprisings. Young Jewish women using Christian-Polish identities were able to move around to obtain guns and food and secretly deliver them to the underground.
Ultimately, the film concludes with the answer to a question many non-Jews have asked over the years, “Why didn’t the Jews resist the Nazis?”
The film answers the question with a bold headline on the screen near the ending: Before they died, they fought back
Not only did they fight, they meticulously recorded their efforts and the stories of their imprisonment in hand-written manuscripts, which they then buried in tall, cylindrical, steel milk churns for future discovery.
It was, perhaps, the ultimate act of resistance by and for those who would not survive – the six million victims, one-third of the world’s Jews.
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