Today in WWII History
World War II History for July 22
1942 - Deportations from Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka begin
Deportations to Treblinka
On this day in 1942, the systematic deportation of Jews from the Warsaw ghetto begins, as thousands are rounded up daily and transported to a newly constructed concentration/extermination camp at Treblinka, in Poland.
On July 17, Heinrich Himmler, head of the Nazi SS, arrived at Auschwitz, the concentration camp in eastern Poland, in time to watch the arrival of more than 2,000 Dutch Jews and the gassing of almost 500 of them, mostly the elderly, sick, and very young. The next day, Himmler promoted the camp commandant, Rudolph Hoess, to SS major and ordered that the Warsaw ghetto, (the Jewish quarter constructed by the Nazis upon the occupation of Poland, enclosed first by barbed wire and then by brick walls), be depopulated-a “total cleansing,” as he described it and the inhabitants transported to what was to become a second extermination camp constructed at the railway village of Treblinka, 62 miles northeast of Warsaw.
Within the first seven weeks of Himmler’s order, more than 250,000 Jews were taken to Treblinka by rail and gassed to death, marking the largest single act of destruction of any population group, Jewish or non-Jewish, civilian or military, in the war. Upon arrival at “T. II,” as this second camp at Treblinka was called, prisoners were separated by sex, stripped, and marched into what were described as “bathhouses,” but were in fact gas chambers. T.II’s first commandant was Dr. Irmfried Eberl, age 32, the man who had headed up the euthanasia program of 1940 and had much experience with the gassing of victims, especially children. He compelled several hundred Ukrainian and about 1,500 Jewish prisoners to assist him. They removed gold teeth from victims before hauling the bodies to mass graves. Eberl was relieved of his duties for “inefficiency.” It seems that he and his workers could not remove the corpses quickly enough, and panic was occurring within the railway cars of newly arrived prisoners.
By the end of the war, between 700,000 and 900,000 would die at either Treblinka I or II. Hoess was tried and sentenced to death by the Nuremberg Tribunal. He was hanged in 1947. [1]
1943 - American forces led by Gen. George S. Patton captured Palermo, Sicily.
[1] “Deportations from Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka begin,” History.com, http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history.do?action=Article&id=6527 (accessed Jul 22, 2009).
De leugen regeert
August 16, 2009 at 11:00 am
In 1943 Germany was at war against the Soviet Union. Twenty-five years earlier, at the end of the First World War, when communist revolutionaries were attempting to take over Germany, Adolf Hitler had sworn to devote his life to fighting communism. He was only a corporal at the time, recuperating from his war wounds in a military hospital, but 15 years later, in 1933, he became chancellor of Germany, and in 1941 his army invaded the Soviet Union with the aim of destroying Soviet communism. The German Army pushed far into the Soviet empire and liberated all of Ukraine from the communists.
In May 1943 units of the German Army were stationed in the Ukrainian city of Vinnitsa, a community of 100,000 persons in a primarily agricultural district. Ukrainian officials in Vinnitsa told the Germans that five years earlier the NKVD — the Soviet secret police, very similar to our FBI — had buried the bodies of a number of executed political prisoners in a city park. The Germans investigated, and within a month they had dug up 9,439 corpses from a number of mass graves in the park and a nearby orchard.
Unlike the Poles murdered in the Katyn Forest, all of these bodies found at Vinnitsa were those of civilians, most of them Ukrainian farmers or workers. The bodies of the men all had their hands tied behind their backs, like the Polish officers at Katyn. Although the men’s bodies were clothed, the bodies of a number of young women were naked. All of the victims had been shot in the back of the neck with a .22 caliber pistol, the trademark of the NKVD executioners.
The Germans called in an international team of forensic pathologists to examine the bodies and the mass graves. The international team, which included pathologists from Belgium, France, Netherlands, and Sweden, as well as from several countries allied with Germany, examined 95 mass graves and conducted a number of autopsies.
Including the autopsies already performed by Ukrainian medical personnel in Vinnitsa, 1,670 of the corpses were examined in detail. The identities of 679 of them were established either through documents found in their clothes or through recognition by relatives, who flocked to Vinnitsa from the surrounding countryside when they heard that the graves had been uncovered.
The authorities estimated that in addition to the 9,439 bodies exhumed, there were another 3,000 still in unopened mass graves in the same area. The international team concluded that all of the victims had been killed about five years earlier — that is, in 1938. Relatives of the victims who were identified all testified that the victims had been arrested by the NKVD in 1937 and 1938. The relatives had been told that those arrested were “enemies of the people” and would be sent to Siberia for 10 years. None of the relatives had any idea what the reason was for the arrests and testified that those arrested had committed no crimes and were engaged in no political activity. As I said earlier, nearly all of the victims were farmers or workers, although there were a few priests and civil servants among them.
By interviewing a large number of people who had some knowledge of what had happened in Vinnitsa and the surrounding region in 1938, the Germans were able to piece together the following picture. In 1937 and 1938 gangs of the NKVD’s jackbooted thugs roamed the villages and towns of Ukraine, arresting people in a pattern that seemed almost random to observers. One victim’s wife reported that as the NKVD goons dragged her husband away they said only, “Hey, you dog! You’ve lived too long.” Other observers thought they saw a pattern. A Ukrainian who was renting a part of his house to a Jewish lawyer refused to sell the whole house to the Jew when he offered to buy it at an unreasonably low price. A few weeks later the Ukrainian homeowner was arrested by the NKVD. Another Ukrainian who had threatened to beat up a minor communist functionary who made a crude pass at his sister was arrested shortly thereafter. It seemed that many of the arrests were the settling of personal scores and that anyone who had crossed a Jew was especially likely to be arrested.
All of this was nothing new for Ukrainians. They had borne the brunt of the communization of the Soviet Union for nearly two decades. Ukraine was primarily an agricultural nation, a nation of farmers and villagers, and as such was regarded with suspicion by the Jews and the urban rabble who filled the ranks of the Communist Party. The communists championed the urban workers, but they wasted no love on farmers and villagers, who tended to be too independent and self-sufficient for communist tastes.
During the civil war which followed the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Ukrainians wanted to opt out. Ukrainian nationalists wanted no part of the Soviet Union. In 1921 and 1922 the Red Army occupied Vinnitsa, and Ukrainians were butchered wholesale by the Reds in order to kill the Ukrainian nationalist spirit. The craving for Ukrainian independence nevertheless kept flaring up, and further massacres followed, notably in 1928.
Ukraine was the stronghold of the kulaks, the independent farmers and small landowners, always regarded with special hatred by the communist bosses. Stalin gave the job of exterminating the kulaks to his right-hand man in the Kremlin, Lazar Moiseivich Kaganovich, known later as the “Butcher of Ukraine.” Kaganovich, the most powerful Jew in the Soviet Union, supervised the collectivization of Ukrainian farms, beginning in 1929. To break the spirit of the kulaks, Ukraine was subjected to an artificial famine. The NKVD and Red Army troops went from farm to farm, confiscating crops and livestock. The farmers were told that the food was needed for the workers in the cities. None was left for the farmers. And in 1933 and 1934 seven million Ukrainians died of starvation, while Kaganovich watched and gloated from the Kremlin.
Perhaps in 1937 and 1938 the bosses in the Kremlin simply thought that it was time to apply the lash to the Ukrainians again. In any event, the NKVD was given the task this time. The NKVD was even more Jewish than the rest of the Soviet communist apparatus. The commissar of the NKVD until September 1936 had been the Jew Genrikh Yagoda, and he had staffed his instrument of terror and repression with Jews at every level. And those who were not Jews were the worst sort of Russian and Ukrainian rabble, the resentful louts and ne’er-do-wells who saw in communism a way to get even with their betters. In any event, the Ukrainians were fully aware of the preponderance of Jews in the secret police, and they suspected that there was a Jewish angle to the pattern of arrests in 1937 and 1938. And indeed, it did seem as if the Talmudic injunction to “kill the best of the Gentiles” were being followed, for those who were arrested seemed to be the most solid, steadiest, reliable, and irreproachable of the Ukrainians.
Thirty thousand were arrested in the Vinnitsa region alone, and most of these eventually were sent to the NKVD prison in the city of Vinnitsa. This prison had a normal capacity of 2,000 prisoners, but during 1937 and 1938 it was packed most of the time with more than 18,000 prisoners. Throughout much of 1938 a few dozen prisoners were taken from the prison each night and driven to a nearby NKVD motor pool area. There their hands were tied behind their backs and they were led, one at a time, a few hundred feet to a concrete slab in front of a garage. The slab was used for washing vehicles, and it had a drain at one side with an iron grating over it. Just as the prisoners reached the edge of the slab they were shot in the back of the neck, so that when they fell onto the concrete their blood would run into the drain. This was what the NKVD men jokingly called “mokrii rabota” — “wet work” — and they had had plenty of experience at “wet work.” A truck parked next to the slab kept its engine racing so that the noise of the engine would cover the sound of the shots. While the next prisoner was being led up, a couple of NKVD men would throw the corpse of the previous prisoner into the truck. When the night’s quota of victims had been murdered the truck would drive off with its load of corpses to the fenced-in park or to the nearby orchard, where new graves already were waiting. And this “wet work” went on night after night, month after month.