The shift, Friedländer writes, came in late 1941, occasioned by the event that transformed a pan-European war into a world war: “the entry of the United States into the conflict.” Roderick Stackelberg summarizes: “Although the ‘Final Solution,’ the decision to kill all the Jews under German control, was planned well in advance, its full implementation may have been delayed until the US entered the war. Now the Jews under German control had lost their potential value as hostages.” On December 12, 1941, Hitler confirmed his intentions in a talk before Goebbels and other party leaders. Goebbels, in his diary, summarized Hitler’s remarks: “The world war is here. The annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence.”
Chelmno, the first killing factory, had already commenced operation on December 8, 1941: Jews from the ghetto in a town called Kolo were suffocated with exhaust gasses in sealed trucks. Beginning in March 1942, the Lublin ghetto in Poland was liquidated: Jews by the thousands were taken to a second extermination camp, Belzec, and gassed there. More Jews, including orphaned children and old people who had until then been excluded from the camps, were taken from Vienna at the beginning of June. Leonhard Friedrich, a German Quaker arrested in May for helping Jews, later wrote: “In the six months after the United States entered the war, the Gestapo felt under no restraints.”
It was an open secret in the United States. On June 2, 1942, a story ran in many American newspapers about Hitler’s plan. It was written by Joseph Grigg, a United Press journalist who had been interned by the Germans for five months, then freed with other Americans as a result of negotiations. “There apparently was an effort to create a ‘Jew-free’ Reich by April 1, as a birthday gift for Hitler,” Grigg reported, “but due to transportation and other difficulties the schedule could not be maintained.” The massacres in Russia, Poland, and the Baltic states were, Grigg said, “the most terrible racial persecution in modern history.”
Meanwhile, that June, the United States was “fighting Hitler” by doing — what? By battling the Japanese navy, by building big bombers, and by having war parades. On June 13, 1942, with the Allied land assault on Europe still two years away, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia threw an enormous war parade in Manhattan. It went on for a full day. There were tanks, planes, and picturesque international costumes, but there were also floats meant to stir emotions of enmity and fear. A float called “Death Rides” moved slowly by: it was a giant animated skeleton beating two red swastika-bearing drums. There was a huge mustachioed figure in a Prussian helmet and body armor, riding a Disney-style dinosaur that strode heedlessly through corpses — the float was called “Hitler, the Axis War Monster.” There was a float called “Tokyo: We Are Coming!” in which American airplanes set fire to the city, frightening off a swarm of large yellow rats. The New York Herald Tribune’s reporter wrote that the only thing missing from the parade was subtlety. This is what the United States was doing during the early phase of the Holocaust: beating big red toy death drums on Fifth Avenue.
During this same mid-war period, the Royal Air Force’s attacks on German civilian life crossed a new threshold of intensity. The militarily insignificant city of Lübeck, on the Baltic Sea, crowded with wood-timbered architectural treasures, was the target of the first truly successful mass firebombing, on the night of March 28, 1942, which burned much of the old city and destroyed a famous, centuries-old painting cycle called Totentanz (“The Dance of Death”). “Blast and bomb, attack and attack until there is nothing left,” said the Sunday Express. “Even if ‘Lübecking’ does not crack the morale of Germany, it is certainly going to raise our spirits,” said the Daily Mail. “We have no hesitation on any humanitarian grounds in writing over the whole map of Germany, as we have done at Lübeck and Rostock, ‘This was once a city.’” Vera Brittain, reading through a pile of these newspaper clippings, exclaimed: “We are Gadarene swine, inhabited by devils of our own making, rushing down a steep place into the sea.”
Operation Millennium was the RAF’s next large-scale fire raid, at the end of May. Nearly a thousand bombers flowed toward the city of Cologne, where they dropped about 1,600 tons of bombs — more firebombs than high explosives — in half an hour, destroying tens of thousands of houses and apartments and more than twenty churches. The area around the city’s main cathedral was a roasted ruin. “You have no idea of the thrill and encouragement which the Royal Air Force bombing has given to all of us here,” wrote Roosevelt’s personal aide, Harry Hopkins, to Churchill. He added: “I imagine the Germans know all too well what they have to look forward to.”
No doubt the Germans did know — in any case, they promptly blamed the Jews for the bombings. On the radio, Goebbels said that Germans were now fighting for their very skins. Then again came the overt threat: “In this war the Jews are playing their most criminal game and they will have to pay for it with the extermination of their race throughout Europe and, maybe, even beyond.” American newspapers gave wide coverage to Goebbels’s speech. GOEBBELS SAYS JEWS WILL DIE FOR R.A.F. RAIDS, said the New York Herald Tribune. NAZIS BLAME JEWS FOR BIG BOMBINGS, said the New York Times. JEWS FACE MASS EXTERMINATION BY ENRAGED NAZIS, said the headline in the Altoona Mirror. GOEBBELS THREATENS TO WIPE OUT JEWS, said the Pittsburgh Press.
The Jewish press took the threat seriously, too. “The Jews were to be used, Hitler often promised, as hostages to assure the good behavior of the democracies,” said Opinion: A Jewish Journal of Life and Letters. “The terrific RAF poundings of Cologne, Essen, Emden, Rostock and other German cities are being answered by the nazis with threats of reprisals — against the Jews.” And Rabbi Louis I. Newman, of Temple Rodeph Sholom, devoted part of his sermon that Saturday to Goebbels’s speech. “The dastardly threat of Goebbels that the Nazis will exterminate the Jews if the R.A.F. continues its bombardment of German cities should be clear evidence that the Jews of Germany and occupied countries have been and are merely hostages in the hands of brigands and gangsters,” Newman said, as reported in the New York Times. “Jews have been martyrs before in the annals of mankind, and if the slaying of Jews is necessary to redeem humanity from the blight of nazism those who are the victims will prove again the stuff of which the prophet and the martyr race is fashioned.”
In the Warsaw ghetto, that same June of 1942, Emanuel Ringelblum read the reports and remembered an old story about a profligate nobleman. Shlomo, the nobleman’s moneylender, auctioned the man’s land in payment for debts. The nobleman, enraged, bought a dog, named him Shlomo, and beat him daily. The same thing, wrote Ringelblum, was happening to the Germans: “They are being defeated, their cities are being destroyed, so they take their revenge on the Jews.” Ringelblum and his friends, although of several minds about the need for retribution, agreed on one thing: “Only a miracle can save us: a sudden end to the war, otherwise we are lost.”
A sudden end to the war, otherwise we are lost. This, then, was the context for Abraham Kaufman’s June 16, 1942, talk at the Union Methodist Church. First worry about the saving of lives, his logic went — everything else is secondary. In July, the SS began the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto, loading six thousand people onto freight cars every day. The head of the Jewish Council, Adam Czerniaków, committed suicide rather than comply; the Germans were holding his wife hostage. Knowing what we know now, wouldn’t we all have stood and said what Kaufman said?