I'm reading the Swedish book on Rumkowski. He transformed the ghetto into a large industrial park that employed 70000 workers and generated 2.2 million Reichsmark profit for the German administration. It was an enormous sum. More than 90% of production was on orders from the Wehrmacht and the police: uniforms, coats sheepskin coats, warm jackets, caps, shoes, straw boots, knapsacks, rucksacks etc. Approximately 10% of the ghetto’s production was for orders by Berlin department stores. Himmler decided to liquidate the ghetto in early 1944 but it was of such economic importance that the Minister for Armaments Speer delayed till he could. Lodz ghetto almost outlasted the war. Almost. Pic.: A typical ghetto workshop.
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16 comments:
The Lodz ghetto did not make armaments - it made clothes and hairbrushes and such (Lodz was the textile center of Poland - Jews have always been skilled in the needle trades, which is why the US clothing industry was centered in the garment district of NYC). So it was in no way central to the German war effort and when the time came they had no problem liquidating the ghetto. Didn't slow the war down one bit.
My father worked in an honest to goodness weapons factory in Radom. The Germans had problems with the Polish workforce - they kept smuggling weapons out to the resistance. And then the Germans would have to hang some of the Polish workers in front of the factory to set an example to the others.
http://fb.pawelec.info/img/straceni.gif
My father used to make bitter jokes about his employment in the factory because before the war, not a single Jew could get a job in the (Polish state owned) factory even though the population of Radom was maybe 1/4 Jewish.
The Germans were not about to let the Jews go no matter what. When the Russians approached Radom in the summer of '44, they took the Jewish workforce to Auschwitz and those that survived the march to the rail head and selection on to camps in Germany. The only thing that save the prisoners of Radom was Patton's Third Army.
K
In Auschwitz (near the extermination camp) the Nazis built a large industrial complex which produced vital petroleum products. It is not clear to me if the Allies bombed the industrial complex and not the gas chambers, or they could not reach the place because it was deep in Poland.
Anyway, the Allies did everything to avoid saving Jews. The Nazi propaganda slandered the Allies of sending naive Christian boys to die for Jews, and Americans were receptive to that message.
My mother worked for a time on a metal working machine. Elderly German supervisors served as trainers (my Mother spoke German). She received salary/compensation for the time she worked - about fifty years late. Jews also worked on the secret V rockets.
In the pic one can see a boy about 12 working on a shoe. Obeying the Nazi order that everyone not working would be deported, Rumkovski recruited all the children over 9 to work in the factories. All the children under 9 and elderly and sick people were killed.
I purchased the book myself and was learning a lot. Then I found out Sandberg mixes documented truth with fiction and lies. The true stories of the victims were pitiful enough and the rulers (Jewish and German)were horrible enough without added make-believe. Unfortunately, I can't return an electronic book.
Matthew
the Jews didn't exactly try to save themselves. they overwhelmingly accepted their fate. yet gentiles were supposed to put in extra effort to save them? and Jews wonder why non-jews are skeptical of their motives.
Allies flew over Auschwitz and took aerial photos but did not bomb. In fact they didn't even bother looking closely at the photos because it was clear that there was no war industry there. Only long after the war was over did they realize they even had photos of the camps in operation.
http://www1.yadvashem.org/exhibitions/album_auschwitz/air_photographs.html
The IG Farben facility nearby (a.k.a. Buna/Monowitz or Auschwitz III) was bombed because war materiel was being produced there. The Auschwitz area was well within the reach of Allied bombers flying from Italy, at least from the middle of '44 onward.
I agree that Sandberg's work, being "faction" (mixed fact and fiction) is worthless as history. There are serious works of history available concerning Lodz Ghetto. Usually, you can get a used print edition of a book for cheaper than the ebook.
K
...the Jews didn't exactly try to save themselves
With all due respect (none) - go fuck yourself. It's bastards like you who made it impossible for the Jews to survive.
K
Bombing Auschwitz would at the very least have generated an ethical problem; how many Jews were housed there at any given time?
Anon.
I'm not sure bombing Auschwitz would have saved that many lives. Instead of deporting Hungarian Jews to be gassed, the Nazis's would have just rounded up the Jews and shot them on the spot like they had done after invading the Soviet Union.
Things were different in the Soviet territories - I'm not sure they could have gotten away with mass shootings on Hungarian territory.
The bombing precision of the time would not have allowed for the bombing of just the gas chamber/crematoria structures (which were really not that big, considering how many people they were able to kill). Most of Birkenau was barracks, so bombing them would have only killed prisoners. Along the perimeter of the camp were little bomb shelters for the guards in the watch towers.
K
Sandberg mixes history and fiction. He does not falsify history, it is a legitimate way of dramatizing what happened.
K
Sadly, the Germans did "get away" with machinegunning Jews in Hungary. When the Hungarian army was retiring from the Eastern front back to Hungary, mostly walking and in horse carriages, some Jewish forced labour brigades attached to the Hungarian Army were delivered to the SS and machinegunned in open fields. The retreat was organized in successive groups, the famous "stairs", my father was lucky that he was in the last group and liberated by Tito's partisans. Later, accounts were settled, if that is possible.
The one small satisfaction that was had at the end of the war was that the Soviets and their allies were not shy about punishing fascists. In the West, the pattern was that a lot of war criminals were sentenced to death at the end of the war, then their sentences were commuted to long terms of imprisonment and then after a few years they just let them go. The commandant of my father's camp, who by father's telling was not the worst of them, received a 20 year sentence and was let free after 10.
K
The worst case was the Einsatzgruppen trial in 1947. 24 were put on trial, 14 were sentenced to death, and only 4 were hung. No justice. Kinda makes me wish the Soviets had kept pushing West and had their own way with post war Europe.
Lets face it K. Roosevelt had serious difficulties to join the war against the Germans, because America in that time was isolationist and did not want to fight. Many saw the Nazis as patriotic Germans fighting the common communist menace. No one sympathized Jews.
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