ACommandantsView DecidingtoAct ResearchStage41 DifficultChoicesinPoland BystandersatHartheimCastle
Social Studies 11 – The Table
A Commandant’s View
In 1971, journalist Gitta Sereny interviewed Franz Stangl, who had been the commandant of
the death camp at Sobibór and, later, the camp at Treblinka.
“Would it be true to say that you were used to the liquidations? (mass murder)”
He thought for a moment. “To tell the truth,” he then said, slowly and thoughtfully, “one
did become used to it.”
“In days? Weeks? Months?”
“Months. It was months before I could look one of them in the eye. I repressed it all by
trying to create a special place: gardens, new barracks, new kitchens, new everything:
barbers, tailors, shoemakers, carpenters. There were hundreds of ways to take one’s mind
off it; I used them all.”
“Even so, if you felt that strongly, there had to be times, perhaps at night, in the dark,
when you couldn’t avoid thinking about it.”
“In the end, the only way to deal with it was to drink. I took a large glass of brandy to bed
with me each night and I drank.”
“I think you are evading my question.”
“No, I don’t mean to; of course, thoughts came. But I forced them away. I made myself
concentrate on work, work, and again work.”
“Would it be true to say that you finally felt they weren’t really human beings?”
“When I was on a trip once, years later in Brazil,” he said, his face deeply concentrated and
obviously reliving the experience, “my train stopped next to a slaughterhouse. The cattle in
the pens, hearing the noise of the train, trotted up to the fence and stared at the train. They
were very close to my window, one crowding the other, looking at me through that fence. I
thought then, ‘Look at this; this reminds me of Poland; that’s just how the people looked,
trustingly, just before they went into the tins . . . ’”
“You said tins,” I interrupted. “What do you mean?” But he went on without hearing, or
answering me.
“ . . . I couldn’t eat tinned meat after that. Those big eyes . . . which looked at me . . . not
knowing that in no time at all they’d all be dead.” He paused. His face was drawn. At this
moment he looked old and worn and sad.
“So you didn’t feel they were human beings?”
“Cargo,” he said tonelessly. “They were cargo.” He raised and dropped his hand in a
gesture of despair. Both our voices had dropped. It was one of the few times in those weeks
of talks that he made no effort to cloak his despair, and his hopeless grief allowed a
moment of sympathy.
“When do you think you began to think of them as cargo? The way you spoke earlier, of
the day when you first came to Treblinka, the horror you felt seeing the dead bodies
everywhere—they weren’t ‘cargo’ to you then, were they?”
“I think it started the day I first saw the Totenlager [death camp] in Treblinka. I remember
[Christian Wirth, the man who set up the death camps] standing there next to the pits full
of blue-black corpses. It had nothing to do with humanity—it couldn’t have; it was a
mass—a mass of rotting flesh. Wirth said, ‘What shall we do with this garbage?’ I think
unconsciously that started me thinking of them as cargo.”
“There were so many children; did they ever make you think of your children, of how you
would feel in the position of those parents?”
“No,” he said slowly, “I can’t say I ever thought that way.” He paused. “You see,” he then
continued, still speaking with this extreme seriousness and obviously intent on finding a
new truth within himself, “I rarely saw them as individuals. It was always a huge mass. I
sometimes stood on the wall and saw them in the tube. But—how can I explain it—they
were naked, packed together, running, being driven with whips like . . . ” The sentence
trailed off.
. . . “Could you not have changed that?” I asked. “In your position, could you not have
stopped the nakedness, the whips, the horror of the cattle pens?”
“No, no, no. This was the system. . . . It worked. And because it worked, it was
irreversible.”
Deciding to Act
In 1942, Marion Pritchard was a graduate student in German-occupied Amsterdam. She was
not Jewish, but she observed what was happening to the Jews of her city. One morning, while
riding her bicycle to class, she witnessed a scene outside an orphanage for Jewish children that
changed her life:
The Germans were loading the children, who ranged in age from babies to eight-year-olds,
on trucks. They were upset, and crying. When they did not move fast enough the Nazis
picked them up, by an arm, a leg, the hair, and threw them into the trucks. To watch grown
men treat small children that way—I could not believe my eyes. I found myself literally
crying with rage. Two women coming down the street tried to interfere physically. The
Germans heaved them into the truck, too. I just sat there on my bicycle, and that was the
moment I decided that if there was anything I could do to thwart such atrocities, I would
do it.
Marion Pritchard holds Erika Polak, one of the children she saved from the Nazis.
Working with the Dutch resistance, Pritchard helped to save more than 150 children
during World War II.
Some of my friends had similar experiences, and about ten of us, including two Jewish
students who decided they did not want [to] go into hiding, organized very informally for
this purpose. We obtained Aryan identity cards for the Jewish students, who, of course,
were taking more of a risk than we were. They knew many people who were looking to . . .
“disappear,” as Anne Frank and her family were to do.
We located hiding places, helped people move there, provided food, clothing, and ration
cards, and sometimes moral support and relief for the host families. We registered
newborn Jewish babies as gentiles . . . and provided medical care when possible.
The decision to rescue Jews often led to other difficult choices. Pritchard described what
happened when she agreed to hide a Jewish family:
The father, the two boys, and the baby girl moved in and we managed to survive the next
two years, until the end of the war. Friends helped take up the floorboards, under the rug,
and build a hiding place in case of raids. . . . One night we had a very narrow escape.
Four Germans, accompanied by a Dutch Nazi policeman came and searched the house.
They did not find the hiding place, but they had learned from experience that sometimes it
paid to go back to a house they had already searched, because by then the hidden Jews
might have come out of the hiding place. The baby had started to cry, so I let the children
out. Then the Dutch policeman came back alone. I had a small revolver that a friend had
given me, but I had never planned to use it. I felt I had no choice except to kill him. I
would do it again, under the same circumstances, but it still bothers me. . . . If anybody
had really tried to find out how and where he disappeared, they could have, but the general
attitude was that there was one less traitor to worry about. A local undertaker helped
dispose of the body, he put it in a coffin with a legitimate body in it. . . .
Was I scared? Of course, the answer is “yes.” . . . There were times that the fear got the
better of me, and I did not do something that I could have. I would rationalize the inaction,
feeling it might endanger others, or that I should not run a risk, because what would
happen to the three children I was now responsible for, if something happened to me, but
I knew when I was rationalizing.
In reflecting on her choices and those made by others during the war, Pritchard was troubled
by a “tendency to divide the general population during the war into a few ‘good guys’ and the
large majority of ‘bad guys.’ That seems to me to be a dangerous oversimplification . . . The
point I want to make is that there were indeed some people who behaved criminally by
betraying their Jewish neighbors and thereby sentencing them to death. There were some
people who dedicated themselves to actively rescuing as many people as possible. Somewhere
in between was the majority, whose actions varied from the minimum decency of at least
keeping quiet if they knew where Jews were hidden to finding a way to help when they were
asked.”
Research Gathering Stage 4
Holocaust and Human Behaviour
Unit Essential Question: What does learning about the choices people made during the
Weimar Republic, the Nazi regime and the Holocaust teach us about the power and impact of
our choices
today?
The goal of our unit is to learn about the power and impact of the choices made during this
history in order to teach us about the power and impact of our choices today.
Stage 4: Conformity to Persecution
What choices were made by perpetrators/collaborators, bystanders, upstanders that
contributed to the persecution and genocide of outsiders?
What do these choices teach us about the power and impact of our choices today? Think about
how their choices teach us how we participate in a democracy and embrace democractic
values like rights and freedoms, or how their choices teach us how individuals or societies
determine their obligation toward others (universe of obligation), or how our choices affect
our social responsibilities, or how our choices shape our identities or the identities of others.
Consider the readings on Kristallnacht and the Holocaust — you are gathering the choices that
perpetrators, bystanders and upstanders made during Kristallnacht and the Holocaust, the
motivations behind those choices (pressures to conform and indifference), and the
consequences of those choices.
What choices and
decisions were made by
perpetrators, bystanders,
and upstanders during
Kristallnacht and the
Holocaust? (Be clear
about the motivations
behind those choices such
as the pressures to
conform, indifference,
survival and empathy).
So what? What were the
consequences or impacts of those
choices?
What is the moral of the story? What
do these choices teach you about the
power and impact of our choices
today?
Difficult Choices in Poland
Throughout Europe, in occupied countries and in those that collaborated with Nazi Germany,
people witnessed the persecution and murder of Jews. Some people spoke out or attempted to
help Jews. Others helped the Nazi regime carry out its murderous activities. Between these two
extremes were a range of responses. Some people did nothing in response to what they saw
because they feared punishment for interfering or were preoccupied with their own wartime
difficulties. Doing nothing could also indicate tacit approval of the persecution and killing of
certain groups. Some people used the opportunities opened up by the war for revenge or
personal gain. For instance, some people stole from the homes of victims, and many informed
on their neighbors or colleagues for actions forbidden by the Germans, such as hiding Jews.
The stories of Karolcia Sapetowa and Zygmunt Klukowski reveal some of the difficult choices
people were forced to make in these circumstances.
Karolcia Sapetowa lived in a small village near the Polish city of Wadowice. Before the German
occupation, she worked as a maid for a Jewish family, and once the Germans arrived she
sheltered two of the family’s children in her house. The rest of the family was confined in a
ghetto and then deported to a concentration camp. Sapetowa’s neighbors grew fearful of the
Jewish children’s presence in their neighborhood. It was very risky to protect Jews in Poland
because the punishment could be death for the family or even the entire town. After the war,
Sapetowa recalled:
At the beginning the children would go out of the house, but when relationships got more
tense, I had to hide them inside. But even this did not help. Local people knew that I was
hiding Jewish children, and threats and difficulties began from all directions—that the
children should be handed over to the gestapo, that the whole village might be burned in
reprisals, or murdered, etc. The village head was on my side, and this often gave me peace
of mind. People who were more aggressive and insistent I appeased with an occasional
gift, or paid them off.
But this did not last long. SS men were always looking around, and again protests started
until a certain day they told me that we had to remove the children from this world, and
they put together a plan to take the children to the barn and there, when they fell asleep, to
chop their heads off with an ax.
I was walking around like mad. My elderly father completely stiffened. What to do? What
am I to do? The poor miserable children knew about everything, and before going to sleep,
they begged us: “Karolciu [sic], don’t kill us yet today. Not yet today.” I felt that I was
getting numb, and I decided that I would not give up the children at any price.
I got a brilliant idea. I put the children on a cart, and I told everybody that I was taking
them out to drown them. I rode around the entire village, and everybody saw me and they
believed, and when the night came I returned with the children . . .
Zygmunt Klukowski was a doctor in the Polish city of Szczebrzeszyn. He was a member of the
Polish underground resistance and was hostile to the German occupiers. But when the
Germans began to massacre Jews in his city on May 8, 1942, he had to choose whether or not
to help the victims. He wrote about these events, and the dilemma he faced, in his diary:
May 8 [1942] Today we survived a terrible day. . . . The Jews are terrified. Women are
crying and tearing their clothes. Men went with shovels to dig graves in the cemetery, and
the dead were transported there by horse-drawn wagon. Dr. Bolotny, the only Jewish
physician in town, came to me begging for help. He could not do the work alone with so
many wounded, some critically. I am saddened that I had to refuse to give any help at all. I
did this only because of strict orders by the Germans. This was against my own feeling and
against a physician’s duties. With my eyes I can still see the wagons filled with the dead,
one Jewish woman walking along with her dead child in her arms, and many wounded
lying on the sidewalks across from my hospital, where I was forbidden to give them any
help.
May 9 [1942] I learned that yesterday’s search of my hospital was because of a
denunciation. A man named Wojtowicz told the Germans that I hid several Jews in the
hospital. He even gave names. The way some Poles behave is completely out of line.
During the massacre some even laughed. Some went sneaking into Jewish houses from the
back, searching for what could be stolen
Bystanders at Hartheim Castle
While the Nazis loudly proclaimed the campaigns to demonize and isolate Jews and “Gypsies”
(the name Germans gave to two ethnic groups known as the Sinti and Roma) in newspapers
and magazines, on billboards, and over the radio, they attempted to keep secret the program to
murder mentally and physically disabled “Aryans.” And yet by the end of 1940, most Germans
were aware of some if not all aspects of the killings.
As historian Gordon J. Horwitz investigated the history of Mauthausen, a small Austrian town
90 miles from Vienna, he uncovered evidence of what the residents of a nearby village had
known about the “euthanasia,” or medical killing, program taking place there.
Soon after Austria became part of the Third Reich in 1938, the Germans built a labor camp for
political prisoners in Mauthausen. As the camp expanded, German officials took over buildings
in a number of nearby villages. One of those buildings was Hartheim Castle, which was a home
for mentally handicapped children. In researching the history of Hartheim Castle, Horwitz
discovered a letter written by a man he identified as “Karl S.” The letter recalls events in 1939.
[The] house of my parents was one of the few houses in Hartheim from which one could
observe several occurrences. After Castle Hartheim was cleared of its inhabitants (around
180 to 200 patients) in the year 1939, mysterious renovations began which, to an outsider,
however, one could hardly divine, since no [local] labor was used for it, and the
approaches to the castle were hermetically sealed. Following completion of the renovation
work, we saw the first transports come and we could even recognize some of the earlier
residents who showed joy at returning to their former home.
Karl S. watched the buses arrive from a window in his father’s barn. He recalled that groups of
two or three buses came as frequently as twice a day. Soon after they arrived, “enormous black
clouds of smoke streamed out of a certain chimney and spread a penetrating stench. This
stench was so disgusting that sometimes when we returned home from work in the fields we
couldn’t hold down a single bite.”
A woman called Sister Felicitas, who had formerly worked with children kept in the castle, had
similar memories:
My brother Michael, who at the time was at home, came to me very quickly and
confidentially informed me that in the castle the former patients were burned. The
frightful facts which the people of the vicinity had to experience first hand, and the terrible
stench of the burning gases, robbed them of speech. The people suffered dreadfully from
the stench. My own father collapsed unconscious several times, since in the night he had
forgotten to seal up the windows completely tight.
Horwitz notes, “It was not just the smoke and stench that drew the attention of bystanders. At
times human remains littered parts of the vicinity. In the words of Sister Felicitas, ‘when there
was intense activity, it smoked day and night. Tufts of hair flew through the chimney onto the
street. The remains of bones were stored on the east side of the castle and in ton trucks driven
first to the Danube [River], later also to the Traun.’”
As evidence of mass murders mounted, Christian Wirth, the director of the operation, met with
local residents. He told them that his men were burning shoes and other “belongings.” When
they asked about the strong smell, he told them it came from a device that turned old oil and oil
byproducts into a water-clear, oily fluid that was of “great importance” to German submarines.
Wirth ended the meeting by threatening to send anyone who spread “absurd rumors of burning
persons” to a concentration camp.
The townspeople took him at his word. They did not break their silence.
The castle at Hartheim was one of six facilities, most of which were hospitals, that the Nazis
outfitted with gas chambers and ovens in 1940 and 1941 in order to murder physically and
mentally disabled people and burn their remains. Between May 1940 and May 1941, 18,269
patients were murdered at Hartheim.
