Extermination
FROM A CORRESPONDENT
SPEAKING AT LEIPZIG on February 25, 1942, Hitler announced that "the Jew will be exterminated". "Whatever this fight may bring, however long it may last, this will be its final result." And again at the Sportpalast, on September 30th: "There was a time when the Jews of Germany laughed at my prophecies. I don't know whether they are still laughing today, or whether they have forgotten how to laugh. I can only say they will stop laughing everywhere, and again I shall be correct in my prophecies". How many Englishmen, hearing or reading these words, sensed their diabolic repercussions! The Nazis, and especially their youth, have been trained to take every word of that homicidal maniac for law and for a command to be followed by immediate action: and the same night of September 30th, wild pogroms raged in the ghettos of Poland, superimposed on the organized horrors already in full swing.
Himmler, during his visit to Warsaw, in July 1942, recited as Hitler's slogan, "Jews are to die in torture"—and the order is being carried out with all the organized, systematic refinement of which Germans are capable. Again and again the question was asked whether any Germans in Poland—soldiers, civilians, S.S., or Gestapo—have turned in horror against such tasks assigned to them, or carried out under their eyes. Not one case is known: in Warsaw, during a pogrom, a small squad of Latvian Fascists, after having taken part in slaughter and been given a few hours' rest, refused to resume the work; Nazis—never. The idea is firmly planted in their minds that the Jews are poisonous vermin and have to be exterminated. The Hitler Youth in Poland (mainly sons of German residents) from the age of 15 upwards have been armed with revolvers, allegedly because they are in danger from "Polish bandits"; it is a regular pastime of these youths to go to the Warsaw ghetto (probably to others, too, but it is from Warsaw that the information reaches me), where they start hunting Jews, and practise shooting at them. There is in Warsaw a Gestapo agent who makes murdering Jews a game, a sport, and a profession: when he kills an individual, he marks the serial number on the corpse; having exterminated an entire family, he chalks it on the door of the house. At the time when the report from which I quote was drawn up, he had reached the figure 1,006: one thousand and six murders committed on helpless men, women, and children by a heavily armed Gestapo man—and nothing but amused, indulgent smiles on the part of his chiefs and colleagues!
The story of a tiny fraction of the horrors has been told in the Press: and yet there is hardly an incident or a practice which, when recounted in full by reliable eye-witnesses, does not grow still farther in its inhuman evil. I therefore say no more about new cases, and shall merely re-touch a few already recorded in the report of the Polish Ministry of Information, or the Polish diplomatic note published last week. It is known that on July 23, 1942, German police officials demanded from Mr Czerniakow, chairman of the Jewish Council in Warsaw, the delivery on the next day of 10,000 Jews for "deportation", that is, extermination, and that Mr Czerniakow, a man known for his character and integrity, went to the adjoining room and took poison. What appears now is that the Germans demanded from him, in the first place, the delivery of the children in the Jewish communal orphanages, and of the inmates of the homes for the aged; and threatened him, should he refuse to demean himself by handing over these most helpless creatures in his care, to exterminate his family. Children, the old, the sick, were singled out by the Germans as first victims for slaughter! The story of Mr Janusz Korczak, a doctor and distinguished educationalist who devoted his [life to children, and who refused to leave them when the final hour of his last march—which is spoken of with veneration by Poles, as much as by Jews—it has reached me from a non-Jew. Korczak headed the procession from the orphanage to the station where the death-train awaited them: he walked calm and collected...]
