Face-To Face : Holocaust Enabler and Holocaust Survivor

Irmgard Furchner (pictured in white), a typist who has been dubbed the 'secretary of evil', heard from the first Holocaust survivor (Josef Salomonovic, shown left) to testify at the trial in Itzehoe, northern Germany

 

"Maybe she has trouble sleeping at night. I know I do."

"It is not easy to go over all this again. It's a moral duty. It's not pleasant." 

"I was classified as a parasite. Everyone who couldn't work was a parasite."

"The worst was the hunger and the cold."

Josef Salomonovic, Holocaust survivor

In this file photo taken on July 21, 2020 a woman is seen next to a gas chamber at the museum of the former Nazi Death Camp Stutthof, in Sztutowo, July 21, 2020. (Wojtek RADWANSKI / AFP)

 

The 83-year-old was given the opportunity to cast his mind back a lifetime at the trial of a 96-year-old German woman being prosecuted as guilty, however indirectly of atrocities perpetrated at a Nazi concentration camp where she was employed at age 18, as a typist. The court in Itzehoe, near Hamburg, heard the testimony of a man who at age 6, was interned in one camp after another. Too young to be of use as a slave labourer, he nonetheless managed to survive his years of death-camp deprivation.

Speaking to the court while facing Irmgard Furchner who had attempted to flee to avoid appearing at trial, Josef Salomonovic detailed his memory of his father kissing him goodbye for the final time and then he was no more, his life taken with a lethal injection to the heart in Stutthof concentration camp, Poland. The six-year-old boy within the 83-year-old man, deprived of his father, acutely recalls the event and his subsequent aching loss.

There will be others to testify at the trial. Others prepared to give their accounts, condemning the woman accused of being an accessory to the murder of 11,412 people between 1943 and 1945 at Stutthof, one of a myriad of slave labour, concentration, and death camps operated by Nazi Germany in its campaign-within-a-campaign; prosecuting a world war while tending to the business of exterminating Europe's Jewish population.

Irmgard Furchner (in 1944) was just 18

Ms.Furchner was 18 years of age when she began her work as a typist and stenographer for the camp commandant working in an office outside the main camp. Her defence is that she claims to have been completely unaware of the systematic slaughter that occurred within the camp. A claim that the testifying witness scorned dismissively. She was indirectly guilty, the defence of knowing nothing somehow not squaring with her stamping of his father's death certificate.

With him was a picture of his father which he held up to the former stenographer while testifying. As a child, he informed the court, he had witnessed his mother forced to strip off her clothing, setting aside her possessions. The Nazi attendants shaved her head, and he failed to recognize her as his mother. He had  himself been assigned to eight concentration camps, Auschwitz among them, but in his experience, Stutthof had been the direst.

It was in Stutthof that he was deprived of his father, separated from him, and sent on to Auschwitz, the death camp, in view of his youth identifying him as a body too immature to be put to hard physical labour. In the end, miraculously, through the agony and the uncertainty, pain, fear and hope, he survived. And he discovered that his mother and an older brother had also survived, after liberation. Originally from the Czech Republic, they were slated as Jews, to perish.

He described to the court how he would crouch between his mother's legs in hopes of being warmed. Toward the end of the war he was sent to work in a munitions factory in Dresden, and he thought at that time  he was about to die. "But then there was the bombing in Dresden, and that's why I'm still alive", he explained.

The 96-year-old defendant Irmgard F. sits in an ambulance chair behind a plexiglass screen in a courtroom in Itzehoe, Germany, Oct. 19, 2021 (Christian Charisius/DPA via AP, Pool)

Germany's Extermination Laboratory

Nazi parade in Amsterdam, early in Germany’s occupation of the Netherlands. ‘The Beehive’ department store, Jewish-owned before the occupation, is seen in the background. (public domain)

"The Dutch armed forces surrendered on May 14, 1940, the fifth day of the German invasion. The Netherlands securely in the hands of the German army, the Nazi regime appointed Arthur Seyss-Inquart as Reich Commissar for the country. His most important subordinate and rival was Hanns Albin Rauter, the General Commissar for Security, a Higher SS and Police Leader dispatched by Heinrich Himmler. These two Austrians, both executed as war criminals after the Third Reich’s defeat, could rely on the National Socialist Movement, an indigenous fascist party led by Anton Mussert, for enthusiastic support."

"The 140,000 Jews residing in the Netherlands thus had good reason to be afraid. Among them were 25,000 foreign, mostly German Jews, who had sought refuge there, including Anne Frank and her family. Over the next several months, the expected anti-Semitic measures came. Seyss-Inquart and Rauter passed legislation barring Jews from holding public office. In October, all Dutch civil servants had to complete forms—one specifically designed for Jews, the other for Aryans. At the same time, Jewish businesses were also forced to register with the government. The process of removing Jews from the civil service then ensued in early November. In January 1941, the Nazis demanded registration of all Jews, as well as people of mixed ancestry. This insidious process, gradually and methodically implemented, of identifying and separating Jews from everyone else, relegated them to pariah status in their own country."

"Following this wave of reactionary legislation, two incidents in February 1941 demonstrated that the Jewish population in Amsterdam would not hesitate to protect themselves. Feeling emboldened, the Defense Division, the paramilitary arm of Mussert’s organization, openly attacked Jews in Amsterdam. Young Jewish men fought back fiercely and, in one confrontation, killed a Dutch National Socialist." "On February 19, German police entered a popular ice cream parlor in South Amsterdam owned by Erich Cahn, a German Jew and refugee. Mistaken for Dutch Nazis, this patrol was sprayed by ammonium gas from an improvised device in the parlor. In retaliation, the Germans arrested, tortured, and sentenced Cahn to death by firing squad."

"Ever mindful to send a message, Seyss-Inquart’s government additionally seized 425 Jews, literally grabbing them from Amsterdam’s streets, and deported them to Buchenwald.  Of them, 389 were sent from there to Mauthausen. Only a few survived. The brutality displayed in these roundups not only shocked people but stirred them to act."

Opposition took shape around the radical Left. The Communist Party of the Netherlands (CPN), banned by the German authorities, gave voice and organization to these stirrings. A meeting organized by the Communists and attended by trade-union representatives happened on the 24th. Two CPN militants, Piet Nak and Willem Kraan, called for a general strike. Leaflets were distributed, emblazoned with the words: 'Strike! Strike! Strike! Shut down all of Amsterdam for a day'!" 

Dr. Jason Dawsey, research H\historian, The Institute for the Study of War and Democracy, The National WWII Museum, New Orleans

‘February Strike’ in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 1941 (public domain)

 "We always thought the first deportation train departed in July 1942. These razziamen were already deported on 27 February 1941, so that's much earlier."

"It was a kind of laboratory [for the Nazis] to improve their knowledge of everything that we see at Auschwitz on a much, much bigger scale."

"[Those in command at Mauthausen, where the Dutch Jewish men were temporarily incarcerated could select whether to gas people] during the bus ride, halfway to the castle -- and then at Hartheim, there was a kind of place where no one could see what was going on."

Historian Wally de Lang

Dutch Jews board the train that is to take them to Auschwitz. Photograph from 1942 or 1943. Photographer: Rudolf Breslauer. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Rechten: Public domain

Hundreds of Dutch Jews wee rounded up in a razzia in early 1941, taken off the streets of Amsterdam, marking the first Nazi raids on Jews in Western Europe. This was the beginning of an operation and transport to a killing site that became a training camp for German military personnel who would specialize in the exacting necessity of exterminating European Jews. The fine points of gassing people to death in large numbers on an experimental basis to fine-tune and expedite the process needed a living laboratory for success, and the Netherlands was chosen as the initial round-up site.

This roundup (razzia) was occasioned in particular by the death of a Dutch Nazi collaborator who had been killed in a violent confrontation between Dutch fascists in alliance with the German military which had entered the Netherlands the spring before, and young Jewish Dutchmen who had determined to defend themselves. Aboard a deportation train on 27 February 1941 the men disembarked at the site of a 17th century castle-cum-'hospital' in upper Austria, Hartheim Castle.

The castle had, a year earlier, been transformed into a killing centre with the installation of a gas chamber retrofitted in a room especially adapted for the purpose. According to writer-historian Wally de Lang in her newly published book, the castle was destined to become a training camp preparatory to large-scale gas chamber operations to handle an anticipated expulsion of Jews from all points in German-occupied Europe to the Final Solution death camps.

 

In Amsterdam's Jodenbuurt, Jewish men are rounded up and arrested by German soldiers in February 1941. (Public domain)

These experimental test chambers for gassing prisoners of war at Hartheim pre-dated the creation of the Final Solutio,n in January 1942. Of the group of 340 Jews who had been transported from Amsterdam, 108 were murdered at Hartheim in a three-day period in August 1941. Efficiency was a German byword. The families of these men were sent notices of death, attributed to fictional causes. This, at a time when the full agenda of the extermination of Europe's Jews was not yet openly being carried out.

 

The castle was not meant to be the venue of such a ignominiously horrendous rehearsal for genocide. It had been donated by heirs to the local welfare society decades earlier, to be dedicated to the care of mentally and physically afflicted people, but by 1940, 30,000 of those individuals became afflicted in a eugenics network of annihilation courtesy of the Third Reich, to rid the world of the mentally unstable and physically disabled.

 

German pogrom on Amsterdam’s Jewish Quarter in February 1941 (public domain)

And although the Nazi Eugenics program came to a halt when the public became aware of the situation and reacted with outrage in 1940, the castle went on to lend its premises to the deaths of 12,000 prisoners of war from 1941 to 1944, in accordance with Action 14f13, an ordinance to eliminate concentration camp prisoners no longer capable of performing slave labour. Poles and Spaniards were among the national and ethnic groups that were targeted for elimination by gassing, though Jews remained the primary target.

Mauthausen, Dachau and Gusen concentration camps, all associated with Hartheim, saw their staff handle logistics and administration. Mauthausen qualified as one of the most brutal of Nazi concentration camps, its complex including some 100 sub-camps spaced throughout Austria, holding a total of 85,000 people by 1945. When researching her book The Raids of 22 and 23 February 1941 in Amsterdam, Ms.De Lang discovered that the Dutch Jews were taken frist from Amsterdam to Camp Schoorl, a prison camp in the Dutch dunes.

Of the 525 men originally seized 388 were dispatched to Buchenwald where many died, and 350 were sent on from there to Mauthausen where many others perished. Three months on, 108 of the original group were gassed at Hartheim. As a percentage of their Jewish population that died in the Holocaust, the Netherlands had a higher rate than other Western European countries, partially attributed to the aid given the Nazi occupiers (which was by no means unique to the Netherlands) by fascist Netherlanders.

Organizing the ‘February Strike’ in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1941 (public domain

Reframing, Readjusting Historical Accuracy

"This is a fairly unprecedented verdict which strikes at the heart of what I as a historian do. This verdict, if upheld on our appeal, which will follow, means an end to independent research of the history of the Holocaust and, I would argue, of many other parts of Polish history which run contrary to the official myths and legends espoused by the Polish state today."

"I became sort of a face to hate. There are bad people out there, with vast support from different states, who want to write themselves a new history."

"The damage probably has already been done.The authorities in Poland have already won."

"Their goal was not actually to talk about history, it was to frighten people."

Professor Jan Grabowski, Holocaust Historian, University of Ottawa

The "Arbeit Macht Frei" gate at the former Nazi German concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz.   Credit: Kacper Pempel/ REUTERS

"Anyone suggesting that Poland was complicit in the Holocaust could face fines or even imprisonment of up to three years under a controversial new law approved by president Andrzej Duda. The law makes it illegal to accuse the Polish nation of having taken part in the atrocities and the systematic mass murder of the Jews committed by the Germans during World War II."

"A milestone was reached when scholars felt able to move away from simplified categories of German perpetrators and Jewish victims. They shone light on the complicity of non-German citizens in German occupied territories. Scholars such as Jan Tomasz Gross and Jan Grabowski played a key role in studying Poland. With the help of testimonies from Holocaust survivors, Gross revealed in 2000 that Polish citizens took part in a 1941 massacre in the small town of Jedwabne, helping German occupiers to murder their Jewish neighbours."

"The Polish law gives the government the right to restrict different interpretations of the past. It aims to rewrite that history according to nationalist political aspirations. It will question academic achievements in the field of Holocaust studies and represents a danger to academic freedom, openness and critical reflection."

"The law is an insult to Holocaust survivors and the recognition of their suffering – which was, and still is, a painful process on the individual as well as on the collective level. It could allow powerful political institutions to anchor their narratives on the past and silence those who were not given a voice during the Holocaust."

"Allowing politically motivated, whitewashed versions of history to take hold is the first step in legitimising Holocaust denial. Only by confronting the difficult and painful aspects of the past can we understand how to prevent events like the Holocaust happening in the future."

The Conversation, February 16, 2018

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Poland's Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and museum director Piotr Cywinski at Auschwitz, December 6, 2019. Credit: KACPER PEMPEL/Reuters

"Of course, anti-Semitism was not some foreign ideology imported to Poland by the Nazis in 1939. Many individual Poles participated in pogroms, assisted in turning Jews over to the Nazi authorities, and profited from blackmail and the plunder of Jewish property, while some Polish agencies were used in the management of ghettos and concentration camps."

"On the other hand, thousands of Poles are recognized by Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial, as “righteous among nations” for their efforts to resist the Nazi occupation and rescue Jews from the Holocaust."

Jonah Shepp, Foreign Affairs, Intelligencer

When the new law criminalizing linking Poland and its citizens to aiding and abetting Nazis in the Second World War round-up of Jews for annihilation during the Holocaust was signed into law, it was feared then, several years ago, that the law's threat would have a stultifying effect on future historians writing of the reality of Jewish existence in Poland, the fragility of living among neighbours long accustomed to slandering Jews who on occasion launched themselves into deadly pogroms to let off steam. The law was a blatant device to disassociate Poland and Poles from accusations of complicity in the death of Jews.

It has never been a secret that Polish society has always been anti-Semitic. Which also does not seek to deny that not all Poles subscribed to the demonization of Jews as set out in the Elders of the Protocols of Zion, a masterwork of racist slander out of Russia at the turn of the 20th Century. It became part of the German school curriculum, and was widely published and distributed, aided by some like Henry Ford who himself subscribed to its anti-Semitic fictional claims. Among Poles and Jews, who lived together mostly in small towns and villages for a thousand years, there was some amity as well as enmity.

During the Holocaust years Poles suffered under German occupation, targeted themselves for exile from Poland and mass murder at the hands of the Third Reich which considered them, like Jews, to be sub-human. They were far from the German Nordic ideal. Many Poles betrayed their Jewish neighbours for a variety of reasons; simply to see them dead, to be able to loot Jewish property, take over their abandoned hovels, to cleanse Polish villages from a Jewish presence.

 

Survivors walk in Auschwitz-Birkenau in Oswiecim, Poland, in 2017.Agencja Gazeta / Reuters

Renowned Holocaust scholar Professor Jan Grabowski in professional tandem with a Polish scholar Barbara Engelking, co-edited a lengthy tome whose contents they had researched with the assistance of nine researchers to produce 1,700 pages for a book titled Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in Selected Counties of Occupied Poland. The book, which took years of work, was released in Poland the very year the new law came into effect, raising the heated outrage of Polish nationalists among whom the name of Grabowski became a battlecry.

A Polish court recently ordered the pair of scholars to issue an apology to the niece of a Polish man who was mayor of a small town who had been accused of betraying the presence of 22 Jews hiding in a nearby forest, who were then killed. A trial had taken place in 1950 when the mayor had been accused of complicity in the death of the fugitives, with a Jewish woman attesting to his innocence. He was acquitted. When the woman was years later interviewed for the book she admitted having been beholden to the mayor and as a result giving false testimony. Telling her interviewer that the mayor had indeed betrayed the Jews and was complicit in their deaths.

It was that passage in the lengthy book that caught the eye of the mayor's niece who launched a lawsuit against the two co-authors. "The results of this research (for the book) have been greeted warmly by academia, and they were greeted with absolute fury by the nationalists governing in Poland right now and of course their electorate", Professor Grabowski stated, who himself had been born and raised in Poland, and whose father was a Holocaust survivor.

In the lawsuit, the woman claimed that her uncle had been defamed, demanding financial compensation and an apology. She had the support of a nationalist group (funded by the Polish government) formed to defend Poland against any such accusations of aiding the German occupation and most specifically, collaborating with the Germans in their hugely successful bid to rid Europe of the presence of Jews. A week ago the judge ordered a written apology be made for "providing inaccurate information" and "violating his honour". She deliberately failed to order financial compensation as being inappropriate.

 

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and German Chancellor Angela Merkel at Auschwitz, December 6, 2019. Credit: Krystian Maj / KPRM

"[Dr.Jan T.] Gross told me he didn’t think the law would have many practical consequences for established historians, although he worried that it might prevent younger ones from studying the Holocaust. Above all, he was concerned about the teaching of history in Polish schools."

“'No one will dare to teach the Holocaust,” he said. “The ignorance in Polish society about the Holocaust is extraordinary. There were surveys made and the majority of the people who were asked the question ‘Who suffered more during World War II under German occupation, Poles or Jews?’—the majority of the people responded ‘Poles.’ How ignorant do you have to be?”

Rachel Donadio, The Atlantic, February 8, 2018