Acting on the orders of Hitler and Himmler,
the Nazis killed as many European Jews as they could between 1941 and 1945.
When it became too difficult and too stressful (for the executioners, of course)
to simply shoot them in batches, they looked for other methods. Ultimately they
settled on the use of poison gas, and the death camps were established. By the
time the Soviets advanced into Poland and the Americans and British advanced
into the heart of Germany, the Germans had murdered millions of Jewish men,
women and children. The exact count will never be precisely known, but six million
has been a widely accepted number.
The world began to learn something about
what was happening in the late spring of 1942. Both British and American newspapers
published stories in June, but the stories were often downplayed or treated
with skepticism by editorial writers. In August 1942, the World Jewish Congress
office in Switzerland passed on to Britain and America information it had received
from a German businessman to the effect that the Nazis had decided to carry
out the wholesale killing of European Jews. This information was confirmed by
other sources, the most important being official German communications that
had been intercepted and decoded by Allied intelligence. Some of these communications
included details as to where the Jews were being sent and how they were being
killed. Because of security reasons, these facts were naturally not shared with
the public, but by the middle of 1942, government officials were aware of Hitler's
Final Solution.
In August 1943, the Polish government-in-exile
asked the American and British air forces to consider bombing the rail lines
leading to the death camps. This proposal was renewed several times in 1944
by the Polish government-in-exile and Jewish organizations. But it was always
rejected on the grounds that the Allied air forces could do more to end the
war sooner by carrying out its regular missions, and that bombing damage would
do little to slow down the killings. (These decisions have since become a
matter of continuing debate.)
Only after the war ended in Europe did
the full extent of the Final Solution become common knowledge. The films and
photographs of the death camps and concentration camps, made by photographers
of the U.S. Army, probably did more than anything to convey the full extent
of the tragedy to the American public.
Learning about the victims
If it was obvious by the fall of 1945
that the Nazis had murdered millions of Jews, it would still take many months,
even years, before individual families could learn the fate of a loved one.
In the cases of those who Herman Stern
had helped, few had not lost at least one family member:
Tea Eichengruen had been able to get her parents
to America in 1941. Tea's brother Erwin had not received permission to join
them, however, and remained in Holland. They knew that Erwin had joined a
group of young Dutch and German Jews who hoped to emigrate to Palestine (provided
the Dutch government, which was overseen by the Germans who had occupied the
country in 1940, would give them permission to leave). Tea and her parents
lost contact with Erwin early in 1942 and, not receiving any information that
he had indeed left for Palestine, began to fear the worst. Only in 1948 did
they finally learn what had really happened -- the Dutch Red Cross informed
them that Erwin had been taken to Auschwitz in July 1942 and had died there
in September. The cause of death was unknown, commented the Dutch Red Cross
letter, but "experience gathered in the search for missing deportees"
suggested he had died from "disease, exhaustion, or asphyxiation."
Hilda Jonas' parents and her sister continued to
live in Troisdorf until sometime in the late 1930s, when they were forced
to move with other Jewish families into a small apartment in Koln. At some
point after that, they were deported to one of the camps in the east and never
heard from again.
Erika Kann's father and uncle remained in the French
internment camps until March 1942, when the German government pressured the
French to turn the interned Jews over to them. They were then all taken to
Paris and from there were deported to Auschwitz. Fritz and Sally Kann died
at Auschwitz, probably within hours of arriving at the death camp.
Gustav Stern had managed to get his family and
his parents to America. But Gustav's wife Gertrud lost several members of
her family -- the Vasens -- in the Holocaust. Gustav's uncles Julius and Moses
died in the camps as did several of his cousins.
Moses and Julius Stern were also Lotte Henlein's
uncles. She also lost cousins in the camps, and often thinks about the neighbors
she and her parents had known in Bad Schalbach, most of whom were unable to
leave Germany and died in the camps. Then there was her father, who had lost
a lung during World War I as the result of a gas attack. "He had but
one lung, and then [in 1939] he had caught a cold, he got pleurisy, it moved
to the lungs with pneumonia. And they didn't have antibiotics at that time.
It moved to his heart and then he died." Having given a lung for his
country, Hugo Henlein was driven from a Germany that no longer accepted him
as a citizen, then died three years later in America.
Sources: Richard Breitman, Official
Secrets: What the Nazis Planned. What the British and Americans Knew (1998);
Richard Breitman and Walter Laqueur, Breaking the Silence (1986); Walter
Laqueur, The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth about Hitler's Final
Solution (1998 rev. ed.); Deborah Lipstadt, Beyond Belief: The American
Press and the Coming of the Holocaust (1986); Michael Neufield and Michael
Berenbaum, The Bombing of Auschwitz: Should the Allies Have Attempted It?
(2000); Robert Ross, So It Was True: The American Protestant Press and
the Nazi Persecution of the Jews (1980)