By war’s end, Auschwitz-Birkenau’s gas chambers would claim an estimated 1,100,000 men, women, and children.20
Belżec was another forced labor camp that in 1941–42 was expanded into an extermination center as part of Aktion Reinhard, the program for the liquidation of the Jews living in Poland that was named after the assassinated Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich. Wirth served as the camp’s first commandant, supervising the construction of six gas chambers with a huge capacity of 1,200 people. As the commencement of Belżec’s large-scale extermination program approached, a flood of prisoners arrived via rail. Then, on August 1, 1942, Wirth and his colleagues conducted a demonstration in one of Belżec’s new gas chambers using Zyklon-B.21
Most historians assert that Hitler’s order for the Final Solution, or the destruction of European Jewry, which he had publicly vowed for years would happen and which his henchmen had been carrying out piecemeal for years, was formally put into action sometime in the latter part of 1941, after failures in the Russian campaign and the entry of the United States into the war. Although pains were taken to keep written proof of Nazi actions to a minimum, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary on December 12, 1941, “With respect to the Jewish question, the Führer has decided to make a clean sweep. He prophesied to the Jews that if they again brought about a world war, they would live to see their annihilation in it. That wasn’t just a catchword. The world war is here, and the annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence.”22
One of the enduring controversies of the Holocaust has been whether the Allies could and should have done something to try to disrupt the gassings. Within a few months after the first gassings, detailed reports about the Nazis’ use of gas-chamber executions had begun to leak out to Allied countries. In The Holocaust in American Life (1999), Peter Novick claims “few Americans” during the war “were aware of the scale of the European Jewish catastrophe.” Even many of the most informed, such as longtime foreign correspondent William L. Shirer, who later would write The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, didn’t grasp “for sure” what the Nazis had done until 1945.23 But that doesn’t mean that the Americans weren’t told. They were informed, just as millions of Germans knew of the mass slaughters, despite the regime’s halfhearted attempts to keep the genocide out of sight.24 (How could the Germans living near the camps not have known given the “unmistakable odor of death hanging in the air for miles”?)25
American government officials had innumerable sources of reliable intelligence that kept them apprised of the Nazis’ plans and actions almost as soon as they happened. News organizations also reported on many atrocities shortly after they occurred. From the early months of America’s involvement in the war, dispatches from Europe warned about the Nazis’ escalating atrocities, including their gassing of helpless civilians, although many readers may have dismissed them as exaggerated war propaganda. On December 7, 1941, the New York Times reported that Thomas Mann, the famous German author, had broadcast a radio appeal to his countrymen, urging them to “make the break while there is still time before the ‘ever-growing gigantic hatred engulfs you.’” Mann was quoted as saying, “In German hospitals the severely wounded, the old and feeble are killed with poison gas—in one single institution two or three thousand, a German doctor said.”26
In June 1942 the British Broadcasting Corporation announced that Germans had slain seven hundred thousand Jews in Poland. “To accomplish this,” a Polish communiqué stated, “probably the greatest mass slaughter in history, every death-dealing method was employed—machine-gun bullets, hand grenades, gas chambers, concentration camps, whipping, torture instruments and starvation.”27 According to some early reports, the Germans’ killing methods included a “mobile gas chamber for wholesale executions.”28
In response, members of the Polish government in exile and the Polish resistance made frenzied efforts to convince Allied forces to threaten retribution against the “Nazi terrorists” for the “systematic campaign of extermination being carried out in German-occupied Poland.” But the Allies demurred, believing they did not yet possess the strength to coerce the German war machine, and many Americans discounted the reports of atrocities. “A Jew,” one old world saying went, “did not ‘make rishis’” (did not stir up a fuss) for fear of waking a sleeping giant.29
Around Thanksgiving in 1942, in an effort to refute German propaganda claiming that the Polish people were “grateful” to have their country cleansed of Jews, Polish exiles stepped up their outcries. Refugees confirmed the existence of “human slaughter houses” where Germans used “technical means” to liquidate masses of hapless civilians, including women and children. Smuggled reports increasingly described the Germans’ use of gas chambers in “death camps.”30 By July of 1943, official estimates by the Polish resistance placed the number of Poles executed at an astonishing 3.2 million, including 1.8 million Jews. Władysław Banaczyk, the Polish minister of home affairs, asserted to a reporter in London that one death camp alone, established at Majdanek in the Lublin district of his homeland, was executing more than three thousand persons a day in gas chambers.31 (Final estimates set the number of Polish Jews gassed from March 1942 to November 1943 at around two million.)32
In the wake of such dire intelligence, Allied officials were divided over how to respond. Britain’s Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, played down the reports. “It is true that there have been references to the use of gas chambers in other reports,” he acknowledged in the summer of 1943, “but these references have usually, if not always, been equally vague, and since they have concerned the extermination of Jews, have usually emanated from Jewish sources.” He added, “Personally, I have never really understood the advantage of the gas chamber over the simple machine gun, or the equally simple starvation method. These stories may or may not be true, but in any event I submit we are putting out a statement on evidence which is far from conclusive, and which we have no means of assessing.”33 Representative Emanuel Celler of New York, who was Jewish, publicly criticized the United States government for its continued silence regarding the Nazis’ treatment of European Jews. Similarly, the American Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (Fries’s former nemesis and the first critic of the American gas chamber) reiterated that Germans already had murdered millions of Jews in Poland, and it bitterly concluded that Americans must share the guilt—because, the activists said, Americans were “complacent cowards” covered “with a thick layer of prejudice.”34
The political climate became so agitated in some quarters that even politicians who were not considered friendly to Jewish interests began to voice their concern. At a ceremony held at the Hotel Roosevelt on March 28, 1944, New York governor Thomas Dewey condemned the Nazi campaign to wipe out Polish Jewry—this only a few days after he had refused to stop the high-profile electrocution of Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, the Jewish gangster. “We as a people are spending the blood of our soldiers, our toil and our substance in the fight against the beasts in human form who seek to exterminate a race,” Dewey said. “But what is going on daily in the gas chambers of Poland and what impends because of the Nazi occupation of Hungary and Rumania requires even more.” Americans, he urged, needed to rouse themselves against anti-Semitism and extend to the victims every kind of assistance.35