The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

by William L. Shirer

If this were done, it was argued, the Bolshevik regime itself might collapse and the Red Army disintegrate, as the Czarist armies had done in 1917. But the savagery of the Nazi occupation and the obvious aims of the German conquerors, often publicly proclaimed, to plunder the Russian lands, enslave their peoples and colonize the East with Germans soon destroyed any possibility of such a development. No one summed up this disastrous policy and all the opportunities it destroyed better than a German himself, Dr. Otto Bräutigam, a career diplomat and the deputy leader of the Political Department of Rosenberg’s newly created Ministry ...

In the Soviet Union we found on our arrival a population weary of Bolshevism, which waited longingly for new slogans holding out the prospect of a better future for them. It was Germany’s duty to find such slogans, but they remained unuttered. The population greeted us with joy as liberators and placed themselves at our disposal.

There were two other developments, Bräutigam declared, which had turned the Russians against the Germans: the barbaric treatment of Soviet prisoners of war and the shanghaiing of Russian men and women for slave labor. It is no longer a secret from friend or foe that hundreds of thousands of Russian prisoners of war have died of hunger or cold in our camps… We now experience the grotesque picture of having to recruit millions of laborers from the occupied Eastern territories after prisoners of war have died of hunger like flies… In the prevailing limitless abuse of the Slavic humanity, “recruiting” methods were used which probably have their origin only in the blackest periods of the slave traffic. A regular man hunt was inaugurated. Without consideration of health or age the people were shipped to Germany…*

It was in the plunder not of material goods but of human lives that the mercifully short-lived New Order will be longest remembered. Here Nazi degradation sank to a level seldom experienced by man in all his time on earth. Millions of decent, innocent men and women were driven into forced labor, millions more tortured and tormented in the concentration camps and millions more still, of whom there were four and a half million Jews alone, were massacred in cold blood or deliberately starved to death and their remains—in order to remove the traces—burned.

By the end of September 1944, some seven and a half million civilian foreigners were toiling for the Third Reich. Nearly all of them had been rounded up by force, deported to Germany in boxcars, usually without food or water or any sanitary facilities, and there put to work in the factories, fields and mines.

They were not only put to work but degraded, beaten and starved and often left to die for lack of food, clothing and shelter.

In addition, two million prisoners of war were added to the foreign labor force, at least a half a million of whom were made to work in the armaments and munitions industries in flagrant violation of the Hague and Geneva conventions, which stipulated that no war prisoners could be employed in such tasks.* This figure did not include the hundreds of thousands of other POWs who were impressed into the building of fortifications and in carrying ammunition to the front li...

Army Group Center intends to apprehend forty to fifty thousand youths from the age of 10 to 14…. and transport them to the Reich. The measure was originally proposed by the Ninth Army… It is intended to allot these juveniles primarily to the German trades as apprentices…. This action is being greatly welcomed by the German trade since it represents a decisive measure for the alleviation of the shortage of apprentices. This action is not only aimed at preventing a direct reinforcement of the enemy’s strength but also as a reduction of his biological potentialities.

But rounding up the slave workers was only the first step.* The condition of their transport to Germany left something to be desired. A certain Dr. Gutkelch described one instance in a report to Rosenberg’s ministry on September 30, 1942. Recounting how a train packed with returning worked-out Eastern laborers met a train at a siding near Brest Litovsk full of “newly recruited” Russian workers bound for Germany, he wrote: Because of the corpses in the trainload of returning laborers a catastrophe might have occurred… In this train women gave birth to babies who were thrown out of the windows during the journey. Persons having tuberculosis and venereal diseases rode in the same car. Dying people lay in freight cars without straw, and one of the dead was thrown on the railway embankment. The same must have occurred in other returning transports.25

The clothing of the Eastern workers was likewise completely inadequate. They worked and slept in the same clothing in which they had arrived from the East. Virtually all of them had no overcoats and were compelled to use their blankets as coats in cold and rainy weather. In view of the shortage of shoes many workers were forced to go to work in their bare feet, even in winter… Sanitary conditions were atrocious. At Kramerplatz only ten children’s toilets were available for 1,200 inhabitants… Excretion contaminated the entire floors of these lavatories… The Tartars and Kirghiz suffered most; they collapsed like flies [from] bad housing, the poor quality and insufficient quantity of food, overwork and insufficient rest.

These workers were likewise afflicted with spotted fever. Lice, the carrier of the disease, together with countless fleas, bugs and other vermin tortured the inhabitants of these camps… At times the water supply at the camps was shut off for periods of from eight to fourteen days…

Their overwhelming concern was to survive the war. If they were Russian the odds were greatly against them. There were more Soviet war prisoners than all others put together—some five and three-quarter million of them. Of these barely one million were found alive when Allied troops liberated the inmates of the POW camps in 1945. About a million had either been released during the war or allowed to serve in the collaborator units set up by the German Army. Two million Russian prisoners of war died in German captivity—from starvation, exposure and disease. The remaining million have never been accounted for and at Nuremberg a good case was made that most of them either had died from the above causes or had been exterminated by the S.D.

At that time [1941] we did not value the mass of humanity as we value it today, as raw material, as labor. What after all, thinking in terms of generations; is not to be regretted but is now deplorable by reason of the loss of labor, is that the prisoners died in tens and hundreds of thousands of exhaustion and hunger.35 They were now to be fed enough to enable them to work.

Sometimes captured flyers were simply turned over to the S.D. for “special treatment.” Thus some forty-seven American, British and Dutch flyers, all officers, were brutally murdered at Mauthausen concentration camp in September 1944. An eyewitness, Maurice Lampe, a French inmate at the camp, described at Nuremberg how it was done.

The forty-seven officers were led barefooted to the quarry… At the bottom of the steps the guards loaded stones on the backs of these poor men and they had to carry them to the top. The first journey was made with stones weighing about sixty pounds and accompanied by blows… The second journey the stones were still heavier, and whenever the poor wretches sank under their burden they were kicked and hit with a bludgeon… in the evening twenty-one bodies were strewn along the road. The twenty-six others died the following morning.37

On October 22, 1941, a French newspaper Le Phare published the following notice: Cowardly criminals in the pay of England and Moscow killed the Feldkommandant of Nantes on the morning of October 20. Up to now the assassins have not been arrested. As expiation for this crime I have ordered that 50 hostages be shot, to begin with… Fifty more hostages will be shot in case the guilty should not be arrested between now and October 23 by midnight.

The proportion, publicly proclaimed by the Germans, was invariably 100 to 1—a hundred hostages shot for every German killed.

In all, 29,660 French hostages were executed by the Germans during the war and this figure did not include the 40,000 who “died” in French prisons. The figure for Poland was 8,000 and for Holland some 2,000. In Denmark what became known as a system of “clearing murders” was substituted for the publicly proclaimed shooting of hostages. On Hitler’s express orders reprisals for the killing of Germans in Denmark were to be carried out in secret “on the proportion of five to one.”41 Thus the great Danish pastor-poet-playwright, Kaj Munk, one of the most beloved men in Scandinavia, was brutally murdered by the Germans, his body left on the road with a sign pinned to it: “Swine, you worked for Germany just the same.”

Harris, a lawyer by training and by this time something of an intelligence authority on German affairs, knew quite a bit about the Einsatz groups. So he asked promptly: “During the year you were chief of Einsatzgruppe D, how many men, women and children did your group kill?” Ohlendorf, Harris later remembered, shrugged his shoulders and with only the slightest hesitation answered: “Ninety thousand!”

An eyewitness report by a German of how a comparatively minor mass execution was carried out in the Ukraine brought a hush of horror over the Nuremberg courtroom when it was read by the chief British prosecutor, Sir Hartley Shawcross. It was a sworn affidavit by Hermann Graebe, the manager and engineer of a branch office in the Ukraine of a German construction firm. On October 5,1942, he witnessed the Einsatz commandos, supported by Ukrainian militia, in action at the execution pits at Dubno in the Ukraine. It was a matter, he reported, of liquidating the town’s 5,000 Jews.

…My foreman and I went directly to the pits. I heard rifle shots in quick succession from behind one of the earth mounds. The people who had got off the trucks—men, women and children of all ages—had to undress upon the order of an S.S. man, who carried a riding or dog whip. They had to put down their clothes in fixed places, sorted according to shoes, top clothing and underclothing.

saw a heap of shoes of about 800 to 1,000 pairs, great piles of under-linen and clothing. Without screaming or weeping these people undressed, stood around in family groups, kissed each other, said farewells and waited for a sign from another S.S. man, who stood near the pit, also with a whip in his hand. During the fifteen minutes that I stood near the pit I heard no complaint or plea for mercy… An old woman with snow-white hair was holding a one-year-old child in her arms and singing to it and tickling it. The child was cooing with delight. The parents were looking on with tears in their eyes. The father was holding the hand of a boy about 10 years old and speaking to him softly; the boy was fighting his tears. The father pointed to the sky, stroked his head and seemed to explain something to him.

At that moment the S.S. man at the pit shouted something to his comrade. The latter counted off about twenty persons and instructed them to go behind the earth mound… I well remember a girl, slim and with black hair, who, as she passed close to me, pointed to herself and said: “twenty-three years old.” I walked around the mound and found myself confronted by a tremendous grave. People were closely wedged together and lying on top of each other so that only their heads were visible. Nearly all had blood running over their shoulders from their heads. Some of the people were still moving. Some were lifting their arms and turning their heads to show that they were still alive. The pit was already two-thirds full. I estimated that it contained about a thousand people. I look...

The people, completely naked, went down some steps and clambered over the heads of the people lying there to the place to which the S.S. man directed them. They lay down in front of the dead or wounded people; some caressed those who were still alive and spoke to them in a low voice. Then I heard a series of shots. I looked into the pit and saw that the bodies were twitching or the heads ly...

The next batch was approaching already. They went down into the pit, lined themselves up against the previous victims and were shot. And so it went, batch after batch. The next morning the German engineer returned to the site. I saw about thirty naked people lying near the pit. Some of them were still alive… Later the Jews still alive were ordered to throw the corpses into the pit. Then they themsel...

Ohlendorf’s Einsatzgruppen D, with its 90,000 victims, did not do as well as some of the other groups. Group A, for instance, in the north reported on January 31, 1942, that it had “executed” 229,052 Jews in the Baltic region and in White Russia. Its commander, Franz Stahlecker, reported to Himmler that he was having difficulty in the latter province because of a late start “after the heavy frost set in, which made mass executions much more difficult. Nevertheless,” he reported, “41,000 Jews [in White Russia] have been shot up to now.” Stahlecker, who was disposed of later in the year by Soviet partisans, enclosed with his report a handsome map showing the number of those done to death—symbolized by coffins—in each area under his command. In Lithuania, alone, the map showed, 136,421 Jews had been slain;

All in all, according to Karl Eichmann, the head of the Jewish Office of the Gestapo, two million persons, almost all Jews, were liquidated by the Einsatzgruppen in the East. But this is almost certainly an exaggeration; it is strange but true that the S.S. bigwigs were so proud of their exterminations that they often reported swollen figures to please Himmler and Hitler. Himmler’s own statistician, Dr. Richard Korherr, reported to his chief on March 23, 1943, that a total of 633,300 Jews in Russia had been “re-settled”—a euphemism for massacre by the Einsatzgruppen.51 Surprisingly enough this figure tallies fairly well with exhaustive studies later made by a number of experts. Add another hundred thousand slain in the last two years of the war and the figure is probably as accurate as we will ever have.*

Hoess then explained how the victims were “selected” for the gas chambers, since not all the incoming prisoners were done away with—at least not at once, because some of them were needed to labor in the I. G. Farben chemical works and Krupp’s factory until they became exhausted and were ready for the “final solution.” We had two S.S. doctors on duty at Auschwitz to examine the incoming transports of prisoners. These would be marched by one of the doctors, who would make spot decisions as they walked by. Those who were fit to work were sent into the camp. Others were sent immediately to the extermination plants. Children of tender years were invariably exterminated since by reason of their youth they were unable to work. Always Herr Hoess kept making improvements in the art of mass killing.

Still another improvement we made over Treblinka was that at Treblinka the victims almost always knew that they were to be exterminated, while at Auschwitz we endeavored to fool the victims into thinking that they were to go through a delousing process. Of course, frequently they realized our true intentions and we sometimes had riots and difficulties. Very frequently women would hide their children under the clothes but of course when we found them we would send the children in to be exterminated. We were required to carry out these exterminations in secrecy, but of course the foul and nauseating stench from the continuous burning of bodies permeated the entire area and all of the people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going on at Auschwitz.

Hoess’s blunt description may be added a brief composite picture of death and disposal at Auschwitz as testified to by surviving inmates and jailers. The “selection,” which decided which Jews were to be worked and which ones immediately gassed, took place at the railroad siding as soon as the victims had been unloaded from the freight cars in which they had been locked without food or water for as much as a week—for many came from such distant parts as France, Holland and Greece. Though there were heart-rending scenes as wives were torn away from husbands and children from parents, none of the captives, as Hoess testified and survivors agree, realized just what was in store for them. In fact some of them were given pretty picture postcards marked “Waldsee” to be signed and sent back home to their relatives with a printed inscription saying:

We are doing very well here. We have work and we are well treated. We await your arrival. The gas chambers themselves and the adjoining crematoria, viewed from a short distance, were not sinister-looking places at all; it was impossible to make them out for what they were. Over them were well-kept lawns with flower borders; the signs at the entrances merely said BATHS. The unsuspecting Jews thought they were simply being taken to the baths for the delousing which was customary at all camps. And taken to the accompaniment of sweet music! For there was light music. An orchestra of “young and pretty girls all dressed in white blouses and navy-blue skirts,” as one survivor remembered, had been formed from among the inmates. While the selection was being made for the gas chambers this unique musical ensemble played gay tunes from The Merry Widow and Tales of Hoffmann.

To such music, recalling as it did happier and more frivolous times, the men, women and children were led into the “bath houses,” where they were told to undress preparatory to taking a “shower.” Sometimes they were even given towels. Once they were inside the “shower-room”—and perhaps this was the first moment that they may have suspected something was amiss, for as many as two thousand of them were packed into the chamber like sardines, making it difficult to take a bath—the massive door was slid shut, locked and hermetically sealed. Up above where the well-groomed lawn and flower beds almost concealed the mushroom-shaped lids of vents that ran up from the hall of death, orderlies stood ready to

into them the amethyst-blue crystals of hydrogen cyanide, or Zyklon B, which originally had been commercially manufactured as a strong disinfectant and for which, as we have seen, Herr Hoess had with so much pride found a new use.

Surviving prisoners watching from blocks nearby remembered how for a time the signal for the orderlies to pour the crystals down the vents was given by a Sergeant Moll. “Na, gib ihnen schon zu fressen” (“All right, give ’em something to chew on”), he would laugh and the crystals would be poured through the openings, which were then sealed. Through heavy-glass portholes the executioners could watch what happened. The naked prisoners below would be looking up at the showers from which no water spouted or perhaps at the floor wondering why there were no drains...

It was then that they usually panicked, crowding away from the pipes and finally stampeding toward the huge metal door where, as Reitlinger puts it, “they piled up in one blue clammy blood-spattered p...

In the end even the strenuous efforts of German free enterprise, using the best material and providing faultless workmanship, proved inadequate for burning the corpses. The well-constructed crematoria fell far behind at a number of camps but especially at Auschwitz in 1944 when as many as 6,000 bodies (Hoess put it at as many as 16,000) had to be burned daily. For instance, in forty-six days during the summer of 1944 between 250,000 and 300,000 Hungarian Jews alone were done to death at this camp. Even the gas chambers fell behind and resort was made to mass shootings in the Einsatzkommando style. The bodies were simply thrown into ditches and burned, many of them only partly, and then earth was bulldozed over them.

How many hapless innocent people—mostly Jews but including a fairly large number of others, especially Russian prisoners of war—were slaughtered at the one camp of Auschwitz? The exact number will never be known. Hoess himself in his affidavit gave an estimate of “2,500,000 victims executed and exterminated by gassing and burning, and at least another half million who succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total of about 3,000,000.” Later at his own trial in Warsaw he reduced the figure to 1,135,000.

The Soviet government, which investigated the camp after it was overrun by the Red Army in January 1945, put the figure at four million.

Reitlinger, on the basis of his own exhaustive study, doubts that the number gassed at Auschwitz was “even as high...

estimates that about 600,000 died in the gas chambers, to which he adds “the unknown proportion” of some 300,000 or more “missing,” who were shot or who died of starvation and dis...