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Overview
“A riveting tale of the previously unknown and fascinating story of the unsung angels who strove to foil the Final Solution.”—Kirkus starred review
On November 25, 1944, prisoners at Auschwitz heard a deafening explosion. Emerging from their barracks, they witnessed the crematoria and gas chambers—part of the largest killing machine in human history—come crashing down. Most assumed they had fallen victim to inmate sabotage and thousands silently cheered. However, the Final Solution's most efficient murder apparatus had not been felled by Jews, but rather by the ruthless architect of mass genocide, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. It was an edict that has puzzled historians for more than six decades.
Holocaust historian and New York Times bestselling author Max Wallace—a veteran interviewer for Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation—draws on an explosive cache of recently declassified documents and an account from the only living eyewitness to unravel the mystery. He uncovers an astounding story involving the secret negotiations of an unlikely trio—a former fascist President of Switzerland, a courageous Orthodox Jewish woman, and Himmler's Finnish osteopath—to end the Holocaust, aided by clandestine Swedish and American intelligence efforts. He documents their efforts to deceive Himmler, who, as Germany's defeat loomed, sought to enter an alliance with the West against the Soviet Union. By exploiting that fantasy and persuading Himmler to betray Hitler's orders, the group helped to prevent the liquidation of tens of thousands of Jews during the last months of the Second World War, and thwarted Hitler's plan to take "every last Jew" down with the Reich.
Deeply researched and dramatically recounted, In the Name of Humanity is a remarkable tale of bravery and audacious tactics that will help rewrite the history of the Holocaust.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781510734975 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Skyhorse |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2018 |
| Pages: | 496 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.30(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
THE LIFEBOAT IS FULL
Early in the morning of November 25, 1944, prisoners at Auschwitz- Birkenau heard a deafening explosion. Emerging from their barracks, they witnessed the gas chambers and crematoria — part of the largest killing machine in human history — reduced to rubble. Most assumed they had fallen victim to inmate sabotage and thousands silently cheered. However, the Final Solution's most efficient murder apparatus had not been felled by Jews, but rather by the ruthless architect of mass genocide, SS chief Heinrich Himmler.
On his first morning in Germany — April 20, 1945 — Norbert Masur woke up in a cold sweat. From all corners of the Fatherland, leading Nazis were already converging on Berlin for a celebration of Adolf Hitler's fifty-sixth birthday, set to take place that evening in the Führerbunker where Hitler had retreated while his Thousand Year Reich crumbled around him. Among the invited guests, in fact, was the man whom Masur had secretly flown to meet.
As he anxiously waited for the meeting to take place, Masur couldn't help but wonder why he had agreed to make the trip, which had been undertaken the night before in the strictest of secrecy. It was a journey fraught with danger and not just from the nearly constant strafing of Allied aircraft while he was driven from Berlin's Tempelhof Airport to the lavish estate of the host who had arranged the historic meeting.
Norbert Masur had traveled from Sweden as a representative of the World Jewish Congress to meet the man who had almost singlehandedly been responsible for the decimation of his people. If the FÀ1/4hrer, holed up in his bunker, were to discover that a member of the hated race was waiting nearby to meet with his most powerful lieutenant, the consequences would almost certainly be catastrophic.
As Masur waited, he had no idea of the events that had led to this improbable journey, nor the role played by an ultra-Orthodox woman he had never heard of in bringing about his fateful mission.
For Hitler, only one task remained before he and his mistress took the cyanide capsules that had been stashed in the bunker ahead of the approaching forces — a Red Army intent on capturing the man responsible for unleashing years of unimaginable suffering. But if the Reich was doomed, the FÀ1/4hrer was determined as his last act to take every last Jew with him and complete the Final Solution, which had not yet achieved its ultimate aim.
The systematic extermination of European Jewry had come to a halt five months earlier with the destruction of the Auschwitz gas chambers on November 25. Since that time, tens of thousands more Jews had succumbed during brutal death marches, or from the disease and hunger that ravaged the remaining concentration camps. Now, those left alive faced the same fate as the nearly six million who had already fallen victim to the Nazis' monstrous genocide, unless something was done to countermand Hitler's orders.
Masur's mission, then, was no less than preventing the imminent extinction of European Jewry. The burden weighed heavily on him as he spent the day awaiting an unlikely encounter that few could have imagined possible. When he was still waiting at midnight, however, it appeared that his trip had been undertaken in vain. Finally, at precisely 2:30 a.m., he heard a car pull up. As the front door opened, Norbert Masur came face-to-face with the Devil.
The fact that there were any Jews left at all to save at this stage of the war could be explained by an extraordinary confluence of events and a disparate cast of characters. Heroes and villains alike came together at history's darkest hour for a variety of motives that historians still struggle to explain.
Today, visitors who flock to St. Gallen, Switzerland, can't help but feel that they've been transported into a picture postcard. Nestled in a valley between Lake Constance and the spectacular snowcapped mountains of the Appenzell Alps, the small city is surrounded by quaint timbered cottages, verdant rolling fields, and medieval architecture that harkens back to the village's seventh-century founding by an Irish monk. An eighth-century abbey still towers over the city, its library designated a UNESCO heritage site. In the tenth century, the abbey housed a Benedectine nun named Wiborada, who warned locals of an imminent Hungarian invasion and lost her life saving the abbey. For her heroic efforts, Saint Wiborada was the first woman ever canonized by the Roman Catholic Church. Nine centuries later, an equally brave woman would make her mark on the city.
When Recha Sternbuch arrived in St. Gallen in 1928 to settle with her new husband, the city hardly looked different than it does today. She had imagined the town as a safe and prosperous place to raise a family. But as in Wiborada's day, there were dark clouds looming over the border.
Recha was born in Kraków, Poland, in 1905, the daughter of Rabbi Markus (Mordechai) Rottenberg, a respected Ultra-Orthodox scholar whose Talmudic interpretations were known throughout Europe. At the beginning of the twentieth century, many Orthodox communities, especially in Western Europe, were succumbing to pressures from the younger generation toward a more liberal or modernized approach. This worried the elders, concerned about the encroaching influence of the Conservative and Reform movements sweeping Jewish communities throughout the world. The Belgian city of Antwerp, in fact, was one of the few Western communities where the ultra- Orthodox — or Haredim — still dominated Jewish life. During the Middle Ages, virtually all Jews had been expelled from the city as "usurers" or had been massacred during the 1309 Crusade of Pope Clement V. When Austria took over the country in 1713, Jews were allowed to return in small numbers, though it took the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century to restore nominal rights. Full religious freedom only came in 1830 when the country achieved independence.
Antwerp had been known as one of the world's great diamond centers since the fifteenth century, when Lodewijk van Bercken pioneered a revolutionary diamond-cutting technique. By the time the first diamond bourse was established in 1893, the industry had been mostly taken over by Orthodox Jews — traders, cutters and polishers — many of whom had fled pogroms in Eastern Europe. By the eve of the First World War, the Jewish population of Antwerp had mushroomed to approximately thirty-five thousand, most of whom had some connection to the diamond trade. And while the community was thriving financially, the elders worried that its spiritual needs were not being met. Jewish religious life had to be preserved and nurtured, lest the community suffer the same fate as Brussels, a metropolis whose Jewish community was dominated by largely assimilated French ÉmigrÉs.
To that end, they issued a plea eastward to Poland, where word of a rabbi from Galicia known for his strict orthodoxy and compassionate wisdom had reached all the way to Belgium. In 1912, Markus Rottenberg arrived in Antwerp with his wife, Dvora, six sons and three daughters — including seven-year-old Rachel (Recha) — to take up the post as chief rabbi of the city's Haredi community. Only weeks earlier, Rabbi Rottenberg had attended the founding conference of Agudath Israel in Katowice as a representative of the Council of Torah Sages. The goal of this historic gathering had been to strengthen Orthodox institutions throughout the world in the face of perceived threats from the growing liberal and Zionist movements. Recha's father's role in the founding of the Agudah would later provide her with crucially important credentials.
Growing up in a religious community with rigidly defined gender roles, Recha had few opportunities for furthering her formal religious education. But the young girl had an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and would quiz her brothers when they returned home from yeshiva each day. As there were no Jewish schools in Belgium open to girls at the time, Recha attended a public school, where she learned French and a little Flemish. The Rottenberg household had become known as a gathering place for lively religious discourse. And when the learned scholars came to discuss the sacred books, young Recha took it all in — often lying in her bed listening to her father passionately interpret the midrash for the visitors who came from far and wide seeking his spiritual guidance. By the time she was a teenager, those same visitors were often surprised to find a girl participating fully and knowledgeably in their discussions.
In 1905, the same year that Recha Rottenberg was born in Poland, Naftali Sternbuch arrived in Basel, Switzerland, with his wife and seven children, including his ten-year-old son Yitzchok (Isaac). He came not from the old country but from the United States, to which his family had fled after a pogrom in Moldova eight months earlier. New York at the time was not a welcoming environment for an Orthodox Jewish immigrant. Sternbuch decided to book passage to Switzerland to start a new life in a quaint medieval metropolis on the Rhine known as Basel. The city's tiny Jewish community traced its roots to the French Revolution, when the town granted a request by France to allow the temporary settlement of a handful of Jewish families fleeing anti-Semitic violence in Alsace. By 1805, Basel's Jewish community numbered some 128 people. The relative peace lasted a short thirty years before the Jews were expelled en masse when the separatist canton of Basel Land was established. It wasn't until 1866 that Jews were allowed to settle in the area for good. Two years later, the region saw the establishment of its first synagogue.
Only eight years before Sternbuch's arrival, Basel had played host in 1897 to the first ever Zionist Congress, chaired by the founder of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl. In the decades before the Second World War, most Haredim — including Recha's father, Markus Rottenberg — were rigidly anti-Zionist. Some believed that Jews were forbidden to establish a Jewish state in Palestine before the coming of the moshiach (messiah) while others believed that the movement's secular nationalist direction was a threat to religious observance.
It is possible, in fact, that it was the location of this historic Zionist conference that inspired Naftali to settle in Basel as his own one-man religious mission — determined that his piety would act as a counterpoint against the secular Zionist threat. Indeed, his arrival in 1905 — sporting the long beard and black garments favored by the Chassidim — must have been quite a sight to the largely assimilated Jewish community who preferred not to call too much attention to themselves for fear of provoking anti-Semitism. Sternbuch soon founded Switzerland's first shtiebel (small communal prayer house), which would serve the growing community of ultra-Orthodox who followed him to Basel in the years to come. His presence was initially met with suspicion and animosity, but he quickly succeeded in winning over his neighbors with his tremendous community spirit, generosity, devotion, and warmth. Many a neighbor — Jew and gentile — took note of the sheer joy that exuded from the Sternbuch household. Exuberant Eastern European dances, music, drinking, and merriment were part of the Chassidic tradition, but few Jews had experienced these living among the staid Swiss community.
As with the Rottenberg house in Antwerp, distinguished Orthodox scholars came from all over Europe to confer with Sternbuch and to assist him in his mission. He had gradually softened his stance against a Jewish state in Palestine in favor of a new movement known as religious Zionism, which sought to bring religion to the mostly secular settlers who had traveled to the Holy Land to establish a Jewish state. One of the movement's founders was the future chief rabbi of Palestine, Abraham Isaac Kook, who happened to be staying with the Sternbuchs when war broke out in Europe in 1914. He ended up residing with the family for nearly two years, though by this time they had already moved from Basel to St. Gallen. Despite his embrace of Zionism, Kook continued to have strong reservations about its secular direction. When Theodor Herzl died in 1904, Rabbi Kook delivered a eulogy that pointed out what he called the fundamental failure of the Zionist enterprise, the fact "that they do not place at the top of their list of priorities the sanctity of God and His great name, which is the power that enables Israel to survive." Kook's long stay with the Sternbuchs likely had a strong influence on the family's unusually flexible attitudes toward Palestine and would play a significant role in their later rescue efforts.
In 1928, tragedy struck the Rottenberg family when Recha's aunt died suddenly, leaving a four-year-old daughter, Ruth. Recha couldn't bear to see the young girl brought up without a mother. Still single, she startled her family by announcing her intention to adopt Ruth if she could find a man who was willing to marry her and raise the girl together. Word soon spread through Haredi circles. The daughter of the great Rabbi Rottenberg was available, but there was an unusual catch. Intrigued, Isaac Sternbuch — having failed to find a wife in the largely assimilated Swiss Jewish community — embarked on the journey to Belgium to meet the rabbi and his daughter. Such an expedition was perfectly in keeping with the Orthodox tradition of shidduch — a form of matchmaking from the Middle Ages — which had long been used to bring Jewish couples together. Still, most men would have been taken aback by the unusual condition that Recha had imposed for her hand. Charmed by the worldly young woman, however, Isaac had no hesitation. They were married within weeks. By the time the couple returned to Switzerland, they were accompanied by a young girl whom they would raise as if she were their own.
Switzerland came as something of a culture shock to Recha at first. Having grown up surrounded by Haredi Jews in Antwerp as the daughter of a celebrated rabbi, she was surprised to arrive in St. Gallen and find only a tiny Jewish community, numbering around 650. Most of them didn't share her Orthodox ways, despite Naftali Sternbuch's best efforts. The first Orthodox Jews had only settled in the canton in 1919 and, although there were two synagogues, both were too liberal for the Sternbuchs to attend. Instead, they worshipped at the makeshift schul that Naftali had set up in his home for the tiny Orthodox population. Fortunately, the Rottenbergs had spoken German at home and Recha attended a French school as a child, so when she arrived in Switzerland, she already spoke two of the country's three main languages without a trace of an accent.
St. Gallen was the capital of the Swiss textile trade at the time. Its close proximity to both the German and Austrian borders helped facilitate trade with its European neighbors that was critical to Switzerland's economic prosperity. Sternbuch had originally traveled there from Basel to open an embroidery factory. His sons, Isaac and Elias (Eli), ran the successful business with their father and each was prosperous. The success of the business had allowed Isaac to purchase a spacious and comfortable modern apartment, suitable for raising the large families that the Haredim, then as now, considered their obligation in order to ensure the future of the Jewish people. As a married woman, Recha was expected to keep her head covered for religious reasons. In later years, many ultra-Orthodox women wear a wig to comply. But in that era, women were more likely to wear headscarves or hats. Shortly after her wedding, Recha crafted a fashionable head covering that she described as a turban — and which would not have been out of place on the streets of Paris. It would become her trademark. Unlike the Orthodox men whose beards and black garments made them immediately stand out as religious Jews, her appearance often proved useful in her skillful dealings with both gentiles and secular Jews, for which she would soon become known. As a result of her insular upbringing, Recha had never before experienced genuine anti-Semitism. It is not that Belgians were necessarily more welcoming of Jews than the Swiss. But in Antwerp, Recha had had little contact with the goyim (gentiles) except in school. To preserve their culture, the Haredi preferred to keep to their tight-knit religious community, except in matters of commerce.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "In the Name of Humanity"
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Copyright © 2018 Max Wallace.
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Table of Contents
Author's Note xi
1 The Lifeboat Is Full 1
2 The Swiss Schindler 18
3 Betrayed 27
4 Strange Bedfellows 39
5 The Reichsführer-SS 65
6 Evacuation to the East 77
7 Saving the Guardians of the Torah 89
8 The Sternbuch Cable 109
9 March of the Rabbis 124
10 The Rescue Committee 146
11 The Spy Chief and the Devil's Doctor 167
12 Blood for Trucks 194
13 An Unlikely Ally 226
14 Fall of the Killing Machine 250
15 Forty Tractors 261
16 Deal with the Devil 281
17 Waiting in Vain 300
18 Dithering 306
19 Agreement "In the Name of Humanity" 323
20 At Daggers Drawn 333
21 Race against Time 351
Epilogue 373
Appendix 387
Chronology of Events 390
Primary Sources 398
Notes 403
Bibliography 451
Acknowledgments 459
Index 462