Hitler, Stalin and the Destruction of Poland by Nick Shepley

Author:Nick Shepley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Hitler, Stalin, Molotov, Ribbentrop, Pact, World War Two, Poland, Finland, Winter War
ISBN: 9781783331437
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2013
Published: 2013-07-18T00:00:00+00:00

He said:

“A grievous blow has struck the ghetto. They are asking us to give up the best we possess - the children and the elderly. I was unworthy of having a child of my own, so I gave the best years of my life to children. I’ve lived and breathed with children, I never imagined I would be forced to deliver this sacrifice to the altar with my own hands. In my old age, I must stretch out my hands and beg: Brothers and sisters! Hand them over to me! Fathers and mothers: Give me your children!”

Eventually Rumkowski and his own family were transported to the death camp in 1944, the ghetto king volunteered to join the transport, knowing there was no way of avoiding his fate. It is speculated that he may well have been murdered by other Jews en route to Auschwitz.

During October 1941, Auschwitz Birkenau began to be built as a dual purpose facility, a site of mass killing with gas chambers and crematoria but also a place of mass imprisonment and slave labour with hundreds of thousands of prisoners crammed into acres of wooden huts. Soviet prisoners of war were set to work building the camp and the gas chambers would be tested on them first, they were treated with horrific brutality and died of hunger and cold as they worked on through the winter, their plight closely modelling that of the Jews who would soon be sent to Auschwitz to die. Rudolf Hoss explained at his trial at Nuremberg the process by which he was ordered to build the new camp:

“In the summer of 1941 I was summoned to Berlin to Reichsführer-SS Himmler to receive personal orders. He told me something to the effect - I do not remember the exact words - that the Führer had given the order for a final solution of the Jewish question. We, the SS, must carry out that order. If it is not carried out now then the Jews will later on destroy the German people. He had chosen Auschwitz on account of its easy access by rail and also because the extensive site offered space for measures ensuring isolation.”

At the same time a series of camps designed solely for the purpose of extermination were also constructed, under the umbrella term of the Reinhard Aktion. The pioneers of mass killing in Germany, the Nazis who had devised the T4 Aktion, were chosen to run and develop camps at Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka, and later Majdanek and Chelmno. Whilst Hoss had been instructed over the summer of 1941 to make preparations to build Auschwitz Birkenau, Lublin’s SS and police leader Odilo Globocnik received orders for the creation of the first camp, Belzec in October 1941. The camps were fully operational in 1942 and accounted for some two million victims, they were much smaller facilities containing virtually no prisoners at all, simply a railway siding made up to look like a small Polish station, barracks where victims were forced to

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