An Inquiry into the General Lack of Violent Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust
The Holocaust brings to mind visions of docile and helpless Jews being led to their demise in gas chambers, not visions of determined Jews fighting to defend their homes against German aggressors. Why is this? Why did six million Jews allow themselves to be slaughtered like so many sheep? Did they really just submit to the Germans’ orders? The answer, sadly, is yes – the number of violent, planned Jewish revolts against the Nazis can almost be counted on one hand. It is true that many Jews attempted to evade the Germans through passive means – by hiding, adopting new identities, or fleeing – but when they were caught, the vast majority gave up and went meekly to the camps. One must wonder, why did so few resort to violence to save themselves?
For a Jew caught up in the Holocaust, there were many factors to consider when deciding on a course of action. For an individual considering armed, violent resistance, these included:
* Concern for family members and dependants – all those close to a fighter would dbe put at risk by his (or her) actions.
* Access to arms – how is one to fight the Germans? Some sort of weapon is necessary, and would have to be acquired.
* Hope for an easy solution – many believed that their situation would be resolved by itself, and thus to risks one’s life fighting was needless.
* Respected leadership – from both a practical and psychological view, fighting back required leaders to organize and encourage individuals.
* Motivation – be it survival, revenge, or informing the world of the Nazi actions, a goal was essential for a would-be fighter.
By investigating the relative importance of these factors in several instances of armed Jewish resistance, it should become clearer what was required for the average victim to resort to violence.
Cases Under Investigation
The Vilna ghetto. After the first major Aktion in Vilna, the idea of armed resistance spread among youth Zionist groups and Communist groups. They formed an anti-Fascist federation (The FPO, or United Partisans Organization) with the express goal of defending the ghetto against a final liquidation, and at their peak had 300 fighters. When the final liquidations began on September 1, 1943 the FPO issued a general call to arms, but it was completely ignored by the population of the ghetto. After one brief exchange of fire with German troops, the FPO decided to evacuate the ghetto and join partisans in the forests.
The Warsaw ghetto. The best-known example of violent Jewish resistance is the Warsaw ghetto uprising. When mass deportations (300,000 victims total, taken to Treblinka) took place in Warsaw in July and August of 1942, young Jewish activists created the ZOB (Jewish Fighting Organization). Eight months later, when the final liquidation of the ghetto began they held off the Germans for more than a month with firearms and homemade bombs. In the end, the entire ghetto was demolished in an effort to defeat them. Most died, but a few escaped through Warsaw’s sewer system into the forests.
The Treblinka death camp. While Treblinka had no large-scale forced labor program like Auschwitz, the Germans kept about 1200 Jews there to run and maintain the camp. The performed duties such as emptying gas chambers of corpses, moving and burning corpses, maintaining camp buildings, and the like. Having nothing to lose, they organized a plan for revolt. On August 2, 1942 they put their plan into action, shooting guards and lighting the camp aflame. About 300 managed to escape the camp, and about 70 survived to the end of the war. After the revolt, Treblinka never functioned again.
The Sobibor death camp. The situation of Sobibor was similar to that of Treblinka. While Sobibor existed solely to execute Jews, there was a contingent of prisoners kept alive to run the camp. In July 1943 a group of Russian POWs were added to the camp staff. These ex-soldiers were experienced in fighting, and in cooperation with the Polish Jews who knew the ins and outs of the camp, they created a plan to steal weapons form the Germans and revolt. Their uprising took place on October 14, 1943 with mixed results. Several hundred prisoners escaped to the forests, but only about 40 survived the rest of the war. As with Treblinka, the Germans shut down the camp completely in the wake of the revolt.
Concern for Dependants
One of the most significant factors that could keep a Jew from fighting back against his Nazi oppressors was a concern for those dependent on him. As a general rule, Jews came into the ghettos as families. As a result, those most able to fight – the young adult and middle-aged men – very often had wives, children, parents, or grandparents with them whom they felt a responsibility to. Those best suited to fight were also best suited to work, and because of the scarcity of food in the ghettos, their families were dependent on fit workers to keep from starving. For example, according to ghetto statisticians the Warsaw ghetto (at the peak of its population) had 550,000 inhabitants, only 27,000 of whom were gainfully employed (Ainsztein 554). Without the extra food that could be attained by a working family member, many families would be unable to survive. The result was that the few groups willing to fight that did form were almost exclusively composed of youth in their teens or early twenties. They were young enough to not have dependent families, but old enough to be effective fighters. In both Warsaw and Vilna, the main resistance groups were alliances of political activist youth groups, both Zionists and Communists.
While this concern for the well-being of family members was an important issue for the Jews in ghettos, it was no factor at all for Jews farther along in the Nazi system. The usual fate of a Jew in a ghetto was deportation to an extermination camp and death in a gas chamber. The Jews who were used to run these extermination camps had already seen their families murdered (either in the gas chambers or in other places months earlier), and had no such inhibitions about fleeing the camps. There was a similar deterrent to revolt in the camps though – collective responsibility. Camp policies held that in the case of escape or resistance by an individual Jew, the entire camp would be punished, often through summary executions of a large number of prisoners. However, this did not do much to hinder revolt plans. If anything, it may have encouraged the fighters to make foolproof plans to allow as many prisoners as possible to escape, as it was obvious that upon revolt, all the prisoners would be targets for the guards’ rifles.
Access to Arms
Weapons were an essential element in all violent resistance to the Nazis – to prevail against the Germans, some sort of weaponry was required. The Germans, of course, forbade the Jews to possess weapons under threat of death – but even in the harshest of environments willing fighters were able to acquire weapons.
The type of weaponry used by Jewish fighters varied depending on their environment. In the Vilna and Warsaw ghettos, Jewish resistance groups planned to defend the ghetto and drive out German police and military units. In the Treblinka and Sobibor death camps however, the fighters simply wanted to escape and flee. As a result, the ghetto fighters needed weaponry that could be used in a sustained fight – rifles, crew-served machine guns, mines, and the like. In an April 23 letter to Yitzhak Zuckerman, Mordechai Anielewicz (the most prominent leader of the revolt) explained that "...the pistol has no value, we practically don’t use it. We need grenades, rifles, machine guns, and explosives." (Zuckerman 357) The main sources of weapons for the ghettos were smugglers who bought them from local peasants* and sneaked them into the ghettos. Many handguns and some rifles were obtained in this manner. Another source was the local partisan units, but they usually refused to supply any weaponry to the Jews. The weapons they ended up with were not ideal, but the were enough to fight with. In addition to firearms they were able to smuggle into the ghetto, the Warsaw fights also had a large number of Molotov cocktails (homemade incendiary bombs), which they had manufactured inside the ghetto. Once fighting broke out in Warsaw, the fighters were able to augment their stores with weapons and ammunition taken from dead Germans, including at least one belt-fed machine gun. The resistance in the Vilna Ghetto used similar techniques to attain weapons. As well as buying arms from Polish Gentiles, they also stole a significant number of firearms and grenades from local German units where Jews were employed.
The fighters in the death camps were not planning to engage in drawn-out fighting, and as a result they were more flexible in what sort of weapons they wanted. The main sources in both Treblinka and Sobibor were, surprisingly, the German armories. In Treblinka, the prisoners were able to acquire a copy of the key to the armory, and stole a large number of rifles and grenades, which were distributed to the prisoners before the revolt broke out. Another weapon used to great effect at Treblinka was fire. The prisoners had surreptitiously doused the camp buildings in gasoline and oil, and when the revolt began, they set alight virtually the entire camp, adding greatly to the confusion and distracting the guards. At Sobibor, the prisoners were not able to get firearms before acting, but were able to revolt despite this. They began be killing several SS officers with knives and hatchets, and taking their firearms and storming the camp armory, where they acquired a number of rifles and were able to engage the guards and escape.
In all of these cases, weapons were an essential element of revolt, and nowhere were the Jews armed to begin with. However, despite the brutal Nazi control of the ghettos and camps, Jewish prisoners were regularly able to acquire the weaponry they needed. The need for weaponry was an obstacle to revolt, but a clearly surmountable one.
* The collapse of the Polish Army after the German invasion in 1939 and the retreat through Poland of the Red Army in 1941 had left a significant number of military weapons in the hands of Polish commoners.
Hope for an Easy Solution
For a Jew in the Holocaust, the decision to fight back against the Germans was no easy one – it meant abandoning all hope for German mercy and accepting great immediate personal risk. The desire to place their faith in German humanity was very strong among the Jews, although it did decline as they made their way through the extermination process.
In the absence of detailed, confirmed information about their fates, Jews in the ghettos refused to believe that their situation was worth fighting for. Since the Germans would not possibly plan to murder all the Jews, they were better off obeying German authority and thereby avoiding extra reprisals. General Bor-Komorowski, of the Polish underground army, wrote after the war about an incident when, having learned exactly what Treblinka (the destination of deported Warsaw Jews) was, his partisans offered the mainstream Jewish leadership weapons, ammunition, and aid. Their response typifies the common Jewish faith in their German overlords :
The Jewish leaders, however, rejected the offer, arguing that if they behaved quietly the Germans might deport and murder 20,000 or 30,000, perhaps even 60,000 of them, but it was inconceivable that they should destroy the lot; while if they resisted, the Germans would certainly do so. (Ainsztein 585)
So long as a person held this view (or similar ones, like believing that the Germans were dependent on the Jews for labor), revolt was out of the question. The only cure for this ignorance of the true German intentions was information. In this area, many of the youth organizations held a crucial advantage – they already had a network of colleagues in other ghettos through which they could share information via courier. These groups were able to acquire information about German actions across Poland, and synthesize them into a sufficiently accurate overview of the Final Solution. This information made it clear that passive obedience would have devastating consequences, and its importance in their planning can hardly be overstated.
As a general rule, the rest of the general Jewish population of the ghettos either were unaware of German plans, or had seen little enough evidence that they were capable of denying it to themselves. In the Vilna ghetto, this ignorance and denial among the populace never ended. The main resistance group in Vilna, the FPO, had been planning their defense of the ghetto for almost two years, and when the Germans finally sealed the ghetto to liquidate it, they issued a call-to-arms for the populace. "The hand of the hangman will fall upon every person. Flight and cowardice will not save life! Only armed resistance can save our lives and honor. ... (Arad 412)" Sadly, the Jews of Vilna continued to cling to their belief in German benevolence, and there was no response to the FPO’s cry for action. The resistance fighters, knowing that their numbers were too small to be effective without community support, scrapped their plans and fled to the forests to join up with partisan groups.
The Jews of the Warsaw ghetto had an entirely different reaction to the attempted liquidation of their ghetto. Unlike Vilna (with ~40,000 inhabitants at its peak and several small deportations), the Warsaw ghetto housed several hundred thousand Jews, and got a harsh introduction to German plans when over seven weeks from July until September 1942 some 265,000 Jews were deported. This rapid, gargantuan deportation broke the illusions of many inhabitants. The resistance organizations in Warsaw (Mordechai Anielewicz’ ZOB is the best know, but by no means was the only such group) had many more fighters than the groups in Vilna. In addition, the general population of the Warsaw ghetto sympathized and cooperated with the fighters. After the outbreak of fighting on April 19, many residents who were not members of resistance groups desired to fight, but had no weapons due to a lack of preparation.
The Jews who had been deported from their home or ghettoes and were imprisoned in death camps had no illusions whatsoever about the German plans. They watched day after day as trainloads of their fellow Jews were slaughtered – in such an environment they had no misconceptions about their fates.
Respected Leadership
Any sort of organized mass action requires effective leadership, and the armed Jewish revolts during the Holocaust were no exception. The leadership of a revolt was needed for a variety of reasons – to organize sources of money and arrange for its use in purchasing firearms and ammunition, to divide the fighters into units and coordinate their actions, and to give the revolt the legitimacy needed to attract participants. These may seem like daunting tasks, but none of the example revolts suffered from a lack of adequate leadership. Because of their physical concentration, the Jews in captivity nearly always had capable leaders and respected personalities close at hand.
The revolts in the death camps of Treblinka and Sobibor are excellent examples of flexible and spontaneous leadership. The revolts were planned by small groups which were formed for the sole purpose of escaping the camps. There were no rivalries over titles, positions, money, of power (as none of these things existed for the prisoners) and this made for very effective and cooperative planners despite the hardships of their environment. These planning groups were also able to endure the loss of key members without fragmenting. For example, one of the major figures in the Treblinka revolt – Dr. Julian Chorazycki, a well-known medical doctor and former army officer – was caught by an SS guard with a pocket full of money (750,000 zlotys intended for use buying firearms). He took poison and died to avoid being interrogated, and the revolt planning didn’t miss a beat, as another man stepped up to take his place.
Much of the leadership for the ghetto revolts was actually in existence long before the ghettos were even created. The backbones of the ghetto fighting groups were formed by political youth groups, primarily Zionists and Communists. These groups had organized and effective leadership hierarchies before the war and when the decision to form fighting groups was made, the leadership elements of the groups merged fairly easily. For most of the ghetto fighters, their leaders were well known, trusted, and respected from the very beginning.
Leadership for Jewish revolts was an essential element, but not a difficult one to fulfill. In most cases, the necessary leadership already existed or was easily found.
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