History That Doesn't Suck - 204: The Holocaust: Anne Frank, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, & Auschwitz

Episode Date: April 27, 2026

“Everybody’s dead. Don’t ask me about anybody. Everybody’s dead.”  This is the story of the Final Solution.  From Anne Frank’s annex to countless ghettos, Jews who have thus far avoided the concentration camps are increasingly being funneled there. Jewish leaders like Chaim Rumkowski face impossible dilemmas—who should be sent to the camps? On the other hand, some Warsaw Ghetto inhabitants choose to fight back, their last ditch efforts to resist and escape living on in the words of only a few survivors.  Even as the ghettos and their inhabitants are liquidated, Dr. Josef Mengele and others at Auschwitz continue their own work of death. We’ll witness, in order, how people go from cramped cattle car to crematoria; and keep in mind, Auschwitz is but one of many. All together, these accounts from survivors will hopefully provide as complete an overview of the Holocaust’s extermination camps as one episode can.  ____ Connect with us on HTDSpodcast.com and preorder Prof. Jackson’s new book go deep into episode bibliographies and book recommendations join discussions in our Facebook community get news and discounts from The HTDS Gazette  come see a live show get HTDS merch or become an HTDS premium member for bonus episodes and other perks. HTDS is part of Audacy media network. Interested in advertising on the History That Doesn't Suck? Contact Audacyinc.com To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, my friends. This is Professor Jackson. I've been considering America's 250th anniversary that's so quickly approaching. And as we come to this remarkable milestone, I understand how some may fear our hyper-partisan discord today means our republic is failing. But I see things a bit differently. Don't get me wrong. Our political divisions absolutely suck sometimes. Yet this is nothing new. And in my new book, Been There, Done That. I explore how our history shows. that. I demonstrate that fake news, contested elections, and sadly, political violence, are nothing new. My book is a candid and earnest history, yet a hopeful one, as we consider how our predecessors overcame these challenges, and how we can learn lessons from them to

overcome our similar challenges today, as we continue to strive toward making our nation into a still more perfect union. The book publishes June 16th, and you can pre-order now from your preferred retailer. I'm also signing copies pre-ordered through my local independent bookstore, the King's English. And I'm excited to share this book with you, my friends, whom I've had the pleasure of accompanying in an audio way on so many walks, runs, road trips, and commutes. Details are at htdspodcast.com slash book. And as always, thank you for supporting HDDS. It's about 10.30 in the morning, Friday, August 4th, 1940. We're in the capital of the Netherlands in Amsterdam, where a car is just pulling up to one of the city's many multi-story row houses running along the Prinzenkrat Canal.

The dark-haired 33-year-old Austrian-born SS sergeant, Carl Zilberbauer, steps out of the vehicle. He's careful, not to crease, his crisply pressed uniform, along with a few plain clothes and armed Dutch security police officers. Carl enters the house, or office rather, at number 263. At this moment, a brown-eyed, brown-haired, 15-year-old girl deep inside the building feels as though her heart is going to beat right out of her chest. The yelling, the overturning of furniture, it's all so easy to hear through the wall, and she knows what those sounds mean. This is a raid, a Nazi raid looking for Jews, like her,

like her mother, Edith, her father, Otto, her older sister, Margo, and the four others hiding in this annex. The girl knows the Nazi force is but one step away, or one bookcase away, rather, from finding them. And that, if they do, an awful, if not deadly fate awaits. Yes, young Anne Frank understands the stakes. But before we see how this raid ends, let's get some background. Otto and Edith Frank had a good life in Germany. Otto served as an officer in the Great War. He was even awarded Imperial Germany's Iron Cross.

Edith hailed from a well-to-do family. They married in 1925 and two daughters followed. Margot in 1926 and Anne in 1929. But then Adolf Hitler rose to power in 1933. For seeing a grim future if they remained in their native land, the Franks moved to the Netherlands the next year. The family of four rebuilt, settling as comfortably as possible in Amsterdam. On June 14, 1942, Anne celebrated her 13th birthday.

Edith and Otto took her to a local bookshop where she picked out a red and white-chequered diary. In it, she began writing two imaginary friends, particularly to one named Kitty. But not even a month later, on July 5, 1942, do. 16-year-old Margo received a notice that she was to report to a labor camp. The Franks knew better than to obey. Indeed, always seen ahead better than others, the brilliant pectin businessman had already begun turning the backside of his office building at Prinzenkrant, 263, into a hiding place or a secret annex. The day after Margot's notice, July 6th, the family moved in.

Anne was careful to remember to pack her diary. Settled in the annex on July 8th, Anne wrote to her dear imaginary friend. It seems like years since Sunday morning. So much has happened, it's as if the world had suddenly turned upside down. But as you can see, Kitty, I'm still alive. More residents followed. Otto's Jewish employee, Herman Van Pels,

his wife, Augusta, and their 15-year-old son, Peter. Then came Fritz Feltz. A local Jewish dentist with a son safe in England, thanks to the Kinder Transport Program we learned about in the last episode. Together, these eight souls would share cramped rooms, no more than 500 square feet, relying on Otto's non-Jewish employees to bring food, keep the business going, and not betray them. Yet, despite the fear, they carried on, surviving. As Anne told Kitty on November 19, 1942, We're so fortunate here away from the turmoil. I feel wicked sleeping in a warm bed while somewhere out there my dearest friends are dropping from exhaustion or being knocked to the ground.

I get frightened myself when I think of close friends who are now at the mercy of the cruelest monsters ever to stalk the earth, and all because they're Jews. By December, Anne was out of room in her original diary. And joined the respite that Kitty gave, she got a hold of other notebooks and continued right. Though much of her writings from 1943 would later be lost, surviving entries indicate that she poured her soul onto the page. On February 3rd, 1944, she wrote, I've reached the point where I hardly care whether I live or die. The world will keep on turning without me, and I can't do anything to change events anyway. Yes, in page after page, Anne showed the raw, real emotions that arise when eight people are all but cut off from the world,

and hunted for two years. Business, schooling, arguments, loneliness, longing, and love, all features strongly in Anne's pages from 1944. And that March, she found even more inspiration to write. The Dutch cabinet minister announced that, after the war, the government would collect diaries and letters about this tragic conflict. Almost 15-year-old Anne was ecstatic. She began to rewrite the past two years' entries under a new time.

title, Pet Uctahush, or the Secret Annex. Nonetheless, the summer of 1944 proved especially strenuous. On July 15th, Kitty heard, It's difficult in times like these. Ideals, dreams, and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. I still believe in spite of everything that people are truly good at heart. I feel the suffering of millions, and yet, When I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better,

that this cruelty too shall end, and that peace and tranquility will return once more. In the meantime, I must hold on to my ideals. On August 1st, Anne penned one more entry, in which she described herself as... A little bundle of contradictions. Anne then explained how she felt forced into two personalities, depending on the context or her surroundings. I keep on trying to find a way of becoming what I would so like to be

and what I could be if there weren't any other people living in the world. Oh, Anne, if only I could promise you such an uninhibited life, if only you got the chance to experience the goodness of the world and not the horrors of Nazi rule. But unfortunately, those lines are the last and will ever write to Kitty. And yes, that means it's time we got back to that raid. The muffled voices and cacophon upended furniture is growing lower.

The Nazi raiding party is drawing closer. Then they find it. The door disguises a bookcase, flies over. Nazi officers pour into the secret annex. They tear through the place, making a quick mess as they seize and arrest all eight of the secret annex's terrified residents, including 15-year-old Anne Frank. Welcome to History That Doesn't Suck.

I'm your professor, Greg Jackson, and I'd like to tell you a story. I wish I could tell you that all of the secret annexes inhabitants survive the war. But I can't. Everyone is deported to that most infamous death camp, known as Auschwitz-Birkenau. Edith Frank dies there, while Anne and Margo are sent to Bergen-Belsen, where the sisters die weeks apart from one another in early 1945. All three of the Van Pels and Fritz Fephyr also perish before the war's end. Anne's father, Otto, is the only one to survive the war.

Well, him and Kitty. Although the Nazi raid left Anne's writings in disarray, Otto's employee, Neep Geese, saved the diary and other notes. Otto then honored his deceased daughter by editing and publishing her diary in 1947. We'll never know for certain who betrayed the inhabit. of the secret annex. But at least we have Anne's brilliant insights, perspective, and prose, up to that terrible moment. As we turn the page from Anne's tale to continue our multi-episode story of the Holocaust, today our story picks up squarely in the concentration stage, as Nazi Germany concentrates Jews and ghettos and fully invests in its quote-unquote final solution, moving away from its

Einzatzgolpen, or mobile killing squads we encountered in the last episode, to embrace mechanized killing centers. We'll witness that embrace by following the liquidation process from the ghettos to the camps. And since our time is finite, we'll focus on just one camp, the most infamous of all the extermination camps, Auschwitz-Birkenau. To this end, we'll start in the ghettos where Jewish leaders are forced to make impossible decisions. But as the deadly finality of the Nazi's intention settles in, we'll also find that not everyone will go without a fight, especially in Warsaw, Poland. After this scene of brave resistance, though, we'll encounter the horrors of Auschwitz, which I intend to present to you in order. As such, we'll go from a cattle car

to the sorting process, the gas chambers, the crematoria, and finally, we'll familiarize ourselves with a Nazi doctor known as the Angel of Death. Collectively, I hope these tales from actual Auschwitz survivors will provide as complete an overview of the Holocaust's extermination camps as one episode can. It's another challenging story to hear, one that I do believe everyone needs to hear, but will nonetheless suggest that parents previewed this one before letting the kids listen. And if they do listen, certainly discuss it with them afterward. And with that, let's return to the steadily intensifying Holocaust in late 1941 and early

1942, starting with life in the ghettos. Rewine. As we learned in our previous episode, the Nazi regime's ghettoization of Jews in Europe is becoming faster and more systematic by the early 1940s. In fact, the Nazis are so systematic, they've figured out how to keep the ghettos orderly while simultaneously absenting themselves from them. The majority of these ghettos, all recently established in Nazi-ruled Eastern Europe,

are governed by a Yuddinrat, that is, a Jewish council of elders and religious leaders appointed by local Nazi officers to manage day-to-day operations. At first, this is comforting. The Yudenrat is well-respected, trusted, and familiar. The Yudenrat is a direct descendant, of the historic Cahela that ran Europe's Jewish communities before full citizenship, as we know from episode 185.

But soon enough, these council's dictatorial powers, in the face of impossible situations, will garner contempt. And we'll get to that in a minute, but first, more on life in the ghetto. It's challenging. Strike that. It's downright horrible. Ghetto landscapes are reminiscent of prisons. No greenery, no public land, no public land, no problem.

proper plumbing or sewage and extreme overcrowding. Inhabitants feel the deprivation keenly. On September 6th, 1941, a 13-year-old Lithuanian, Yitzhak Rudashevsky writes in his diary, I feel that I have been robbed. My freedom is being robbed from me, and my home, and the familiar Vilna's streets I love so much. Hunger is rampant.

Maintaining the laws of Kashrut, that is keeping kosher, is nearly impossible. Many observant Jews struggle with the decision to transgress kashrut or eat non-cosure food. In this situation, one rabbi declares, Hakua nefesh, which, in simplest terms, is the fundamental principle asserting that saving a Jewish life takes precedence over abiding any other religious law. In Warsaw, Poland's ghetto, Yehuda Elberg complains that,

A Dibouk, or a Jewish folkloric wandering and hostile spirit, quote, has entered my belly, my belly talks, shouts, even has complaints, and drives me mad, close quote. Children are often tasked with smuggling food and supplies into the ghetto. A popular song goes, over the wall, through the holes, and past the guard. Through the wires, ruins, and fences. Plucky, hungry, and determined. I sneak through, dart like a cat. Disease is deadly, typhus, dysentery, tuberculosis, and winter brings cold on top of everything else.

Reflecting on miserable conditions, one anonymous female diarist questions, does this deserve to be called life? And yet, as we know from the previous episode, an even worse fate awaits ghetto residents by mid-1942, the new extermination camps. Let's recall that the ghettos are now but the last stop in a funnel system leading to these places of mass murder. And in a cruel punishment before the punishment, Nazi leaders force the Udnrat to compile deportation lists. A sickening situation for any leader, especially as by now, everyone knows what deportation really means. It's September 4, 1942. We're in the central square of Poland's. Wuch Ghetto, her Jewish residents are gathered, waiting to hear the elder of the Jews.

The head of the Yuddinwat, Khaym Mordecai Rumkowski, speak. They don't know what this is about, only that this meeting, called with little notice, is urgent. And now, Chahim takes his place before them. But first, a brief time out. Every word, every reaction you're about to hear is historically accurate. The text of Chaim's speech will be found in his personal archives after the war, and the stenographer documenting this meeting is writing down the crowd's reactions to each of the leader's phrases. So when you hear words and bitter sobs, know that none of this is artistic license.

Okay, back to the story. Speaking in Yiddish in front of several thousand Jews, Chaim explains he's been tasked with the unthinkable, deciding who among them to surrender to the Nazis. He announces, The ghetto has been struck a hard blow. They demand what is most dear to it, children and old people. I was not privileged to have a child of my own and therefore devoted my best years to children.

I lived and breathed together with children. I never imagined that my own hands would be forced to make this sacrifice on the altar. In my old age, I am forced to stretch out my hands and to beg, brothers and sisters, give them to me. Fathers and mothers, give me your children. Yesterday, in the course of the day, I was given the order to send away more than 20,000 Jews from the ghetto. And if I did not, we will do it ourselves. The question arose.

should we have accepted this and carried it out ourselves or left it to others? But as we were guided not by the thought, how many will be lost, but how many can be saved, we arrived at the conclusion, those closest to me at work, that is, and myself, that however difficult it was going to be, we must take upon ourselves the carrying out of this decree. I must carry out this difficult and bloody operation. I must cut off limbs in order to save the body. I must take away children, and if I do not, others too will be taken. God forbid, I cannot comfort you today.

Nor did I come to calm you today, but to reveal all your pain and all your sorrow. I have come like a robber to take from you what is dearest to your heart. I tried everything I knew to get the bitter sentence canceled. When it could not be canceled, I tried to lessen the sentence. There are many people in this ghetto who suffer from tuberculosis, whose days or perhaps weeks are numbered. I do not know. Perhaps this is a satanic plan, and perhaps not, but I cannot stop myself from proposing it. Give me these sick people, and perhaps it will be possible to save the healthy in their place. I know how precious each one of the sick is in his home, and particularly among Jews,

that at a time of such decrees, one must weigh up and measure who should be saved, and who can be saved, and who may be saved. Common sense requires us to know that those must be saved, who can be saved, and who have a chance of being saved, and not those whom there is no chance to save in any case. And yet, even Chaim's list is of no use. On September 5th, the Germans begin their infamous Geishper Aksion, rounding up nearly 16,000, children under 10, adults over 60, and other sick and emaciated people, to deport them to death camps.

Chaim Rukovsky will later be remembered as one of the most controversial Jewish Holocaust figures, as he was often seen as cozier with the German leaders than his fellow Jews. Is he a collaborator and traitor, or a man in a terrible situation trying to save as many as he can? We'll never know. Chaim will never be able to speak to his choices. In late August, 1944, he and his family will be deported to Auschwitz. Let's not get ahead of ourselves. As we move into 1943, and deportations liquidate, as the Nazis put it,

ghettos all across Eastern Europe. Their Jewish residents haven't given up on finding meaning in their lives. Education and culture sustain life. Jewish schools impart a sense of Jewishness and identity amidst the chaos of the ghetto. On Sunday, March 14, 1933, high school students in Vilna, Lithuania's ghetto open an exhibit to celebrate Yahsh, the Yiddish poet who translated the Hebrew Bible into Yiddish. Materials are smuggled in via the Yiddish Scientific Institute, or Yievo, and it's a huge success. Almost 16-year-old Yitzhak Rudeshevsky writes in his diary that, quote, looking at the exhibition, at our work, your heart fills up with pride and enthusiasm. You really do forget that we are in a somber ghetto, close quote. Yitzhak continues with his schoolwork through the month, and he's, dare I say, content?

As he notes in Yiddish on Thursday, March 18th, I often think this is supposed to be the ghetto. Yet, I have such a full life of cultural activity. I study, I read, visit the club circles. Time flies by so fast and there is so much work to do. Lectures, cultural evenings. I often forget that I am in the ghetto, close quote. But reality comes crashing in as more and more Vilna ghetto Jews are deported.

or worse, shot under the pretense of transport. On April 7th, Yitzhak pens a final entry. We are prepared for everything. We must trust nobody, believe nobody. At any moment, the worst can happen to us. Yeah. It's a sentiment felt in ghettos across Eastern Europe. But perhaps nowhere is this prepared for anything feeling stronger than in Warsaw, Poland.

The largest of all the ghettos and home to more than, than 400,000 Jews at its peak, it's hard to say just when Warsaw's dwindling Jewish population began thinking of fighting back. But I'll begin in the year prior to our current point in the narrative at precisely 11 a.m. on a.m. on a. Tuesday, July 22nd, 1942. That's when the SS, assisted by the Jewish Order Service or the Jewish ghetto police, yes, Jewish officers, men who, like the Yulenrat are in an impossible situation, carried out the first deportation of Warsaw ghetto inhabitants to the new Treblinka extermination camp, whose gas chambers began ending lives en masse the very next day. Only getting started, this great deportation, action, marked a key moment for Jews who suddenly

realized that survival in the ghetto did not necessarily mean ultimate survival. Guilt and loneliness permeate the ghetto's dilapidated walls. the younger, fitter, often single Jews left behind. No, they have to defend themselves. As Warsaw resident and Holocaust survivor, Shimon Ragozinski, will recall years afterward, quote, when the truth about Treblinka came home to us, we lost our faith. And then the idea of armed resistance began to take concrete form, close quote. And so, only days after the first deportations in July, 1942, several Jewish resistance

organizations combined to form the Jewish combat organization, or to use its Polish acronym, the ZOB, which turned to Mordecai and Iliovic for leadership as the year war on. Another group, the Jewish military union, or the ZZW, also formed. It's commanded by Pavel Frankl and Leon Rodal. They prepared as the action continued into late September, 1942, leaving the Warsaw Ghetto operating more like a labor camp, a ghostly, eerie, sometimes half-abandoned labor camp. Returning to the year 1943, January brings another action, another grand deportation. But this time, Warsaw's Jews fight back. It's a small-scale act of resistance.

Nonetheless, it's a helpful experience for the resistance fighters, and it leads the Nazis to avoid the ghetto at night for fear of an ambush. From January to April, the ZOB keeps organizing. weapons training, military preparations, carving out secret tunnels between buildings, digging bunkers, and more. Through the black market, they purchase guns, ammunition, grenades, and anything else they can get their hands on. Yes, Warsaw's remaining Jews, roughly the last 10%, only 40,000, according to historian Yisrael Gutman, are ready to fight. And on April 19th, the day before another grand deportation, possibly planned for Adolf Hitler's birthday the next next.

day. The Nazis learned that firsthand. It's about four in the dark morning, April 19th, 1943, the eve of Passover. We're in Warsaw, Poland, where 830 grenadiers and SS cavalry officers, 234 German policemen and officers, 59 Vermacht artillery and sappers and officers, and 337 Ukrainian soldiers and officers are preparing for a fight, armed with rifles, automatic pistols, machine guns, armored cars, tanks, flamethrowers, and cannons. The troops are well prepared to liquidate the Warsaw Ghetto. Soon enough, the German soldiers move out in two columns. Approaching from the south, they travel north on Nalewski Street.

But as they do, the Jewish Combat Organization and the Jewish Military Union are patiently waiting for the right moment to strike. Upon reaching Geisha Stream, the Nazi columns are shocked to find Maltau cocktails in hand grenades flying at. A skirmish ensues, and after two hours, the tired, hungry Jewish guerrilla fighters forced the well-fed, well-armed, and well-trained Germans back.

It's a decisive Jewish victory. But the fight is far from over. The first two days go squarely in the Jews' favor. But by April 21st, the Nazis changed their strategy, moving through the ghetto in smaller groups, thereby making themselves harder targets for resistors. Then the Nazis resort to arson. They burn houses, forcing those hiding in the elaborately constructed bunkers to reveal themselves.

Truly, it's hell. As an unknown female diarist writes, likely on April 23rd, The enemy bombards us with grenades without a break, and sounds of machine gunfire are heard without end. Despite all the dangers, Jews are running through the streets in order to save their bare life. It looks as if the end of the world is taking place. save yourselves if you can. It's terrible. Everyone wants to save himself. Colossal struggle. Hell has come to Earth. Dante's Inferno, unbelievable and indescribable.

Three weeks later, likely on May 10th, the unknown woman writes again, succinctly summarizing the feelings of many survivors. I myself wonder, how was it possible that we could live and endure for three weeks in such conditions? We know very well what kind of axione this is, since it was announced in advance. This is the liquidation of the Warsaw Jewry and therefore our end and destruction. But many like her are still alive, either hiding in undiscovered bunkers or the sewer. Some managed to escape to the Aryan side of the walls. German commander Juergen Strupp's report states that from April 20th to May 16th, the Nazis liquidate 631 bunkers, comprising 15,

56,065 Jews. Huh, but as we know, destroying Israel Gutmann's figures suggest that the Nazi officer is grossly exaggerating. Regardless, the uprising is drawing to an end. It's now 8.15 p.m. May 16, 1943.

The Urigan's troops' Nazi soldiers have just set the great synagogue on Flomacia Street, aflame, and the unknown female diarist is likely reflecting on the scene when she steps out of the bunker for the first time since the beginning of the uprising. She writes, Everything around is on fire.

The entire ghetto is a sea of flames. The fire expands so fast that people don't have time to flee the houses and perish inside in a tragic manner. The woman watches as Jews stream out of bunkers from street to street, house to house, clutching bundles of their last remaining possessions. They seek desperately, nothing.

No rest. No protection. Death prevails everywhere. She hears terrible screams and cries from those who still have the strength to well. She hears prayers to God. God, show your power. Have mercy on us. But as she will sarcastically quip on the page, God is silent as a sphinx and does not reply. The unknown woman's diary ends as abruptly as it begins. Last line poetically reads,

And you the nations, why are you silent? Don't you see how they seek to destroy us? Why are you silent? Yes, the Jews ultimately lost the Warsaw uprising. That was expected. But the way they stared death in the face and held the Nazis back, Warsaw will never be forgotten, forever fixed in history as a testament to the Jewish spirit.

And yet, the Nazi's work of death continues. From Warsaw, Poland, to Berlin, Germany, and beyond, the funneling of Jews to the camp, in the East via Europe's railways is incessant. And perhaps no camp is better known for its work of death and horror than Auschwitz. It's Friday afternoon, March 12, 1944. Along with his wife, three and a half year old son, and thousands of others, former Kinder Transport Organizer, Norbert Volheim, is aboard a cattle car traveling from Berlin to Auschwitz.

It's a step in the deportation process that officially began days ago, when the Gestapo showed up at this family of three's door, ordering them to prepare for mandatory relocation. Norbert sees an older lady lighting a Shabbat candle and saying Sabbath prayers. He encounters old friends from the Jewish youth movement, a consolation in this stifling cattle car. He's hopeful, as he'll recall later. He said, now it's a new chapter. And we were actually looking forward to that chapter with optimism and hoping or leaving, envisioning that we would be taken to some kind of a labor camp and so where we would work, but survive and wait for the end of the war.

But when the train comes to a stop, 24 hours later, reality sets in. At Ozzy Chem Station, the passengers are forced out of the cattle car into the cold march air. They're instructed to leave all luggage behind and split into three groups. Men, women with children, and women without children. Norbert says a brief goodbye to his wife and son. He'll later recall his wife's words. This is actually the moment I have feared most that they would separate us. The three columns passed by well-fed, elegantly dressed SS officers.

One asks Norbert about his age, occupation, and health. The SS officer then indicates with his thumb for Norbert, to step to the right. The third group of women and children are loaded immediately onto special trucks and driven away. My wife somehow had found a place at the end of the truck,

so we waved to each other, and it's the last I've ever seen of her. Norbert watches as the women without children are loaded onto yet another truck and taken away by female SS officers. Finally, fully realizing his fate, he turns to his children, Jewish youth movement friends, whom he happened to encounter on the cattle car, and remarks,

May God help us to get out of your life? Norbert's story of an initial arrival at Auschwitz is fairly standard. The majority of survivors will have a similar tale, regardless of the year in which they arrive. Well, perhaps there's one noteworthy difference. Those arriving two months after Norbert, in May, 1943, are frequently sorted by the camp's most notorious doctor, Joseph Mangala. Since we're still making our way into the camp, we'll save the details of his torturous work on prisoners for the end of the episode. But Dr. Mangala, aka the Angel of Death, loves to help sort new arrivals with an eye toward his medical examinations.

Indeed, 14-year-old Aggie Rubin will never forget experiencing his cruelty when she arrived at Auschwitz in April, 1944. We were ordered very quickly to get off or jump off the cattle car. I was still with my mother and lined up five or six in a line holding on to each other. Things just happened so quickly after the lineup. We came to the selecting, where Mangala was standing, looking down on us and nodding with his finger, left and right, to live or die. I was the only one from the row, which, as I said, was five or six of us to be sent to the other side. But I ran back three times wanting to be with my mother. I needed her protection.

I was only 14 at the time, and Mangala threw me back three times. He practically threw me to the ground. It still didn't phase me. I still ran to my mother. The third time when the gravel hit me, and my mother obviously worried about her child said, Go, my child, go. With the nod of her hand and her permission to go, I did.

Whatever Mangala threw me down and ordered me to go to that side, unknown to me as to my fate. And this is how I live all my life in my mother's nod of hand, go my child, go, and I went. Those who make it through selection are herded into barracks, stripped of possessions, and led to the next room, where heads and bodies are shaved and disinfected. Then comes the number, which is tattooed on the left chest, or more frequently by 1943, on the left arm.

Auschwitz is actually three camps. Auschwitz one, which is the oldest main camp. Auschwitz two, or Beer Canal, which is the largest, and houses the gas chambers. and Auschwitz, a.k.a. Monowitz, which is a forced labor camp built around the Bunavirka synthetic rubber plant, as well as other smaller satellite camps spread across the region. The camps are encased by two parallel running electrical and barbed wire topped fences, with watchtowers manned by armed SS guards sprinkled throughout. The Nazis also patrol the grounds regularly. Most prisoners at Auschwitz are tasked with working for German production at one of

the smaller labor camps. But studies of scale after the war suggest, as you might expect, malnourished, physically and mentally exhausted prisoners, did not produce enough to significantly aid the Nazi's war efforts. Yet, labor is a core part of the Nazi camp system. Above the gate at the entrance of Auschwitz-1, a sign composed of raw iron letters infamously reads, Arbite-macht-frey, work will set you free. The Nazi's force, Polish political prisoner and gifted blacksmith, Jan Lievach, and others to forge it, which they did while showing their defiance by purposefully flipping the letter B upside down. The three words also appear at other camps. The quality of life at Auschwitz is abysmal. As historian Yisrael Gutman puts it,

quote, every day in the life of a prisoner was filled with unbearable tension and superhuman effort, emotional turmoil and terror, continuing without respite, for months on end. The prisoner's day was also hollow, empty, and mirthless, lacking any novelty and enveloped in everlasting gloom. Close quote. Even though there's no privacy, memoirs and oral testimonies are marked with distinct feelings of loneliness, solitude, and survivor's guilt, among other things. Camp Slang makes up terms to describe dejected prisoners who hover between life and death. They're called Musalmana, that is, the walking, dead. On the flip side, for the amusement of SS officers at the expense of prisoners, the camp boasts

a soccer field, library, photo lab, theater, swimming pool, and orchestra, as well as a brothel called the puff. Notably, the brothel isn't entirely used by Nazi officers. Though visited by them, The brothel at Auschwitz, like those at nine other camps, was built under SS Breitschfueur, Heinrich Himmler's express command to serve as a quote-unquote reward for top-producing non-Jewish male prisoners. Yes, non-Jewish. Because of the anti-megenation Nuremberg laws, Jewish men are excluded from the brothels. For those same reasons, the girls and women officially forced into sex work at execution and labor camps. are not Jewish. Nonetheless, let's not make the mistake of thinking that, between the deportations,

ghettos, and camps, Jewish women are ever spared from sexual assault during the Holocaust. A day at Auschwitz begins at 4.30 a.m. prisoners wake up in their cramped, lice-ridden, block, and have roughly half an hour for morning washings. Then they venture outside to stand and be counted for morning roll call. Afterward, work details, or labor squads, known as Commando, head to work, marching in rows of five through the metal gate. Under the direction of Capos, that is, imprisoned foreman, Auschwitz prisoners labor outside, regardless of weather, sometimes working 12-hour shifts without rest.

After work, evening roll call is also required. Once again, prisoner numbers must match up with official records. If someone is missing, the entire group will wait until the person is found, or the Nazis know why that person is missing. Sometimes this takes hours. Through frigid winters and blistering summers, prisoners stand at attention before returning to their block for bread rations and watery soup.

As Jewish and Italian survivor and author, Primo Levy writes in The Drowned and the Saved, Thirst tormented us. Thirst is more imperative than hunger. Hunger obeys the nerves, grants remission, can be temporarily obliterally. By an emotion, a pain, a fear, not so with thirst, which does not give respite. In those days, it accompanied us day and night, by day on the work site, whose order was transformed into a chaos of shattered constructions.

By night in the hut without ventilation, as we gasped the air, breathed a hundred times before. When curfew arrives, prisoners returned to their blocks, propping their heads on rolled clothing and shoes. for comfort and to prevent theft. But not all prisoners are treated the same. A distinct hierarchy exists based on country of origin, reason for imprisonment, role within the camp, and connections to the outside.

To quote Prima once more, the weekly hour when our political companions received mail from home was for us the saddest, when we felt the whole burden of being different, estranged, cut off from our country. Indeed, from the human race, It was the hour when we felt the tattoo burned like a wound, and the certainty that none of us would return overwhelmed us like an avalanche of mud. In any case, even if we had been allowed to write a letter, to whom would we have addressed it?

The families of the Jews of Europe were submerged or dispersed or destroyed. destroyed indeed. Between 1943 and 44, the work of eradication of Jewish life at Auschwitz only accelerates an acceleration facilitated by expanding facilities. Want to go electric without sacrificing fun? That's the Volkswagen ID4, all electric and thoughtfully designed to elevate your modern lifestyle.

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SUVW, German-engineered for all. In April, 1944, two Slovak Jews, Rudolph Verba and Alfred Vetzler, escaped from Auschwitz. Within weeks, they published one of the first eyewitness accounts of life in this death camp.

the Auschwitz report. It offers horrific insights on the camp's increasing capacity for and methods of killing, which I'll now break down for you. Building on last year's new gassing plant and crematoria, the report tells us that Auschwitz-Birkenau has a total of four crematoria by the spring of 1944, too large and too small. Each breaks down into three parts, the furnace room, the large halls and the gas chamber. According to the Auschwitz report, the larger crematoria have a capacity of 2,000, the smaller of 1,000.

Yes, we're now to the point of seeing how the industrial death machine of Auschwitz works. Here we go. Prisoners first arrive in a reception hall, organized like the changing area outside a bathing establishment. Prisoners are instructed to undress and to continue the ruse, they're sometimes given a towel and small piece of soap. Oftentimes, Zondercommendos, Jewish prisoners forced to work in gas chambers,

answer questions from their co-religionists. Leon Cohen will later recall versions of, Where will we be sent after the disinfection? And what plans do the Germans have for us? But he never shares the truth. As he later explains, how could I tell people that they were about to be murdered? It was impossible to tell anyone this terrible truth.

You have to realize that the system was too sophisticated for us to interfere in any way. The people were doomed to die, and we couldn't do a thing about it. The Germans lied in the cruelest ways. We had no choice but to do as we were told. No one survived. Escape was impossible.

I repeat, Impossible. After undressing, prisoners are led through a door, down roughly 15 stairs, into a long, narrow gas chamber, disguised as a shower room. Sometimes the white coat-clad officers will fire shots to force the prisoners

to jam closer together. When all prisoners are inside the chamber, it's sealed with heavy, airtight doors from the outside. Then SS men open windows in the same, ceiling and pour blue-green pebbles out of gas canisters reading cyclone for use against vermin. Yes, this is the cyclone B we learned about in the last episode. Victims scream for help, but it's no use. It's all over in about 15 minutes, after which the Nazis check to ensure everyone is dead. Once the mass death is confirmed, the chamber is opened and aired out. Bodies are transported

by quote-unquote special squad carts via a flat truck over to the furnace room. In the larger crematoria, the Auschwitz report describes it as being composed of one large chimney connected to nine smaller furnaces. Each of the nine has four openings which accommodate three corpses. After 90 minutes, the bodies are burned to ash, and the process repeats itself. The smell of burning flesh and scorched hair permeates the air. It's inescapable, regardless of where you work. But some are even closer to the crematoria than the average prisoner. It's an unspecified day, likely in late-1943 or early 1944.

Greek-born Jewish prisoner, Leon Cohen, is on the ground floor of the 50-6-meter building that makes up crematorium 2 at Auschwitz Bierkenau, or Auschwitz 2. With instruments at the ready, he's in the middle of one of his 12-hour shifts as a forced worker, or Zondar Commando. As the bodies of just-mured Jewish prisoners are transported from the gas chambers to the furnace, Leon is tasked with ensuring they have no more valuables. See, while most prisoners' belongings are removed before death, some things, like gold teeth, remain in the dead bodies.

And harvesting the gold for the Nazis is the young Greek Jews job. Called a dentistin, or dental-techno. Leon has 10 minutes to check 60 to 75 corpses within the half hour that bodies arrive before the furnace operators yell, Ein Sheeben, or push in. First, he prized the supine body's mouth open. It takes pliers, since the jaw is tightly shut. If they don't have any gold teeth, it's on to the next.

If they do, he uses a second pair of dental pliers to rip the tooth out. The work is absolutely brutal. and he has no choice. As he'll later recall, the bodies gave off an unbearable stench. But bear it or not, I had to do the work. It was repulsive, but I did it. You've got to realize that there was no way to evade it. While participating in an oral history conducted many years after the war,

Leon responds to his interviewer's question about how he put up with such horrible work. What would you do if you were? in my shoes. Look, I didn't have a choice. I couldn't behave differently. During that time, we had no emotions. We were totally drained. We blocked up our hearts. We were dehumanized. We worked like machines. We were human beings devoid of human emotion. We were really animals, not people. It's frightening, but that's how it was. A tragedy. In October, 1944 uprising of Zonde Commando prisoners is one of the only forms of armed resistance at Auschwitz. Like the Warsaw uprising, it too is doomed from the start. All the participants are shot and cremated in the way that they knew

so intimately. The Auschwitz report estimates that, quote, the total capacity of the four cremating and gassing plants at Birkenau amounts to about 6,000 daily, close quote. Modern historians support this number. Some have gone higher. And of course, the total number. murdered daily in such chambers across Nazi-occupied Europe is still higher. Let's not forget that, though smaller in scale than Auschwitz, there are five other extermination camps in Poland, and nearly identical methods of murder are being used across Nazi-occupied Europe. But that's not to say that everything always goes as planned. While the gas chambers and crematoria function as mechanized killing centers, the process does occasionally go awry.

It's an unspecified day, likely September, 1945. for. We're at Auschwitz, where Judith Becker is standing naked, waiting on selection. See, Judith has been through this before at other camps, so she's well aware of the process. Looking around, she sees women speaking with the Zondercommendos, so she goes up to one and asks, Would you mind taking our shoes across on the other side? The unnamed man replies, what makes you think you'll ever go to the other side? I don't know, but I want to protect the shoes. You know what it took me to get these shoes?

Would you mind doing it? The two chat a bit more. And Judith asks about some of her friends. Man gives her an alarming report. Everybody's dead. Don't ask me about anybody. Everybody's dead. Finally, the zone de commandos acquiesces.

I'll take your shoes. I don't think you'll need them again, but I'll take your shoes. But I want you to promise me that if you live, you'll tell our sloth, story. Judith considers, then responds, matter-of-factly. You've got a deal. You don't believe I'll live, and I don't believe that I'll see these shoes again, but we'll try. Then, Judith works up the courage to ask the Zonde commandal, to signal her if,

when she walks into the chamber, it'll be gas. But the two have to part ways before he can answer. It's now a few minutes later. The brutal selection is over with, and Judith, her mother and sister, are hustled into the chambers. Judith sees a small glass-enclosed booth in the corner. In it is the Zonde Commando from earlier. Making eye contact, the man gives her the dreaded signal. Gas. Understandably, Judith calls this...

The hardest moment of my life. She distracts her mother. But it's impossible, as Judith puts it. To know we're going to die, and yet act so that we don't make a spectacle for the Germans to give them more enjoyment. The women in the gas chamber begin to pray, saying the shaman, an affirmation of faith in God, and arguably the most essential Jewish prayer. Her mother asks them to recite pieces of Vidui, the prayer acknowledging sins to God,

often said during Yon Kippur, or by or forced someone on a deathbed. As Judith will later recall, I didn't tell her that it was going to be gas, but it was so hard not to scream, not to jump, not to do something. It was the hardest thing ever. I must have used up kilos of energy in those few minutes. And then, just as the switch is flipped for Zyclan B to flood the chamber, a miracle happens.

Instead of gas, water comes rushing down on Judith, her family, and the other women crammed into the chamber. The SS did intend to gas the women. The issue was that the Zyclan B's delivery system had suffered damage, so when the switch was flipped, the water valve opened instead. luck? A miracle. Call it what you will, but Judith's story is truly unique. Only in the event of a fluke such as this does anyone walk out of a gas chamber alive. In fact, very few will walk out of Auschwitz alive, period. Now that we've come to understand the mechanics of that reality, let's go a little deeper on one of the most infamous men responsible for that dark reality.

Dr. Josef Mangala. I trust you recall Dr. Mangala from his earlier mentions in this episode. Arriving at Auschwitz in May, 1933, this angel of death is about one of many doctors here. He's not even the highest ranking, but he often performs the sorting of newly arrived Jewish prisoners, and with a flick of his wrist, he can sentence you to immediate death. And yet, even if sent to the right, that is, to prison life, this is arguably just a longer worse death. At least that's how Jewish Hungarian-Romanian prisoner and assistant to Dr. Mangala Mikulosh Nisi sees it, quote,

he was still a candidate for death, but with this difference, that for three months, or as long as he could endure, he had to submit to all the horrors that the KZ had to offer till he dropped from utter exhaustion. Close quote.

But the angel death's most disgusting contributions to Nazi ideology are in his medical experiments. With the focus on racial purification and hygiene, he conducts torturous experiments on Jewish prisons, These include unanesthetized surgery, experiments with forced sterilization, and reproductive organs, attempts to change eye color through pigment injections, and feeding prisoners poisoned meals. But his longest running trials are on twins. His goal?

To unlock the genetic and medical secrets of having two Aryan children at once. Twins live in the zoo, Barrack 14 of Camp F in Birkenau. Initially, they're given food, beds, and hygienic conditions, kept healthy for later experiments. Then Uncle Pepe, as Dr. Mangala's affectionately known by the children, moves his subjects into Camp B2F for stage 2 in vivo. While here, precise measurements are taken of each child's features before they're taken to yet another room to be examined in detail by the doctor. Then the real torture begins. His methods include amputating healthy limbs. injecting prisoners with diseases like typhus and performing lumbar punctures.

Again, everything happens without anesthesia. One of Dr. Mingola's most outlandish experiments involves trading blood between twins, transferring blood from the one to the other. We also have records of the doctor purposefully killing children in order to conduct autopsies for his scientific research. If one twin dies during experiments, Dr. Mangala then murders the other, in order to explore why the first died. It's for these and many other reasons that later post-war investigations into the doctor

will say he's experimenting purely for personal gain and not for the Nazi war effort. While we don't know how many sets of twins Dr. Mangala experimented on, post-war findings will cite 200 cases. And that number does not include the hundreds of other patients experimented on, murdered, and posthumously dissected, not to mention perhaps, the most horrific of accusations, that he ordered 300 children to be burned alive in an open fire. We'll never have official confirmation since Dr. Mingula escapes prosecution by hiding in South America until his death in 1979. It's still six years after this that the disgraced

Dr.'s son, Rolf Mangala, confirms that the corpse, very near Sao Paulo, Brazil, is indeed his father. Well, we've done it. We've walked with Auschwitz survivors. whose stories have given us a meaningful overview of the Nazi's most notorious extermination camp. That's no small thing, and I won't minimize the dehumanizing atrocities we're still digesting. But I will remind you, this is but a glimpse into the camp's horrors. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that 1.1 million people died at Auschwitz, one million of whom were Jews. And of course, Auschwitz is only one of the Nazi's six extermination.

camps in Poland, and they are but a handful of the Third Aish's total 44,000 places of incarceration, ranging from ghettos to labor, concentration, and extermination camps that dotted Europe during World War II. Indeed, today's tales were as small a slice of Auschwitz's mechanized murder as they were a meaningful view of equally horrible tales from so many other camps. But, after several collective episodes on the Holocaust, going as far back as episode 184. It is time to close this chapter, for a while at least, as World War II's story continues. As we do, let's take a moment to reflect. In the previous episode, we leaned on historian Raul Hilberg's three-stage framing of Nazi

annihilation, definition, expropriation, and concentration, the last of which ends here in the killing centers. But this isn't to say, The Holocaust was cleanly organized from the start. No. As we saw in episodes 184, 185, 195, and from 202 to this current one, the Nazis harnessed long-standing anti-Semitism more haphazardly than that. European Jews in the 1930s had no way of knowing

Nazism would create the attempted extermination event we now know as the Holocaust. But as millions found themselves trapped in this machine, resistance happened. Warsaw fought back, inspiring a Treblinka revolt that involved roughly 1,000 prisoners and enabled about 25% of those to flee. Only 100 participants in this revolt survived the war. At Auschwitz, Jan Lievach flipped the bee on Arbite-Macht-Fri and Zondercommendors revolted. Many other examples exist. Tales for a Future Episode

The world was complicit, if not by overt anti-Semitic action. than by being a bystander to the violence. Collaborationist governments, like Marshal Philippe-Petans, Vichy France, barely even paused before implementing the Third Reich's policies, even arresting and deporting the country's Jewish population. In some, nearly 77,000 Jews in France died during the Holocaust. Contrast that to Sultan Muhammad VIII of Morocco, who, despite Vichy France's power over his nation,

then a colonized protectorate, stood up for his Jewish subjects. While many were still interned in North African Vichy labor camps, the Sultan's actions spared Moroccan Jews from extermination camps. Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Authority, has a specific designation to recognize non-Jewish individuals who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. They're known as the righteous among the nations.

As of 2024, 28,707 people have made that list. But that number pales in comparison to all that were lost. The 1945 Nuremberg trials, which will cover in a later episode, estimate that 5.7 million Jews were killed in the Shoah. This nearly a century-old estimate proves shockingly accurate for an immediate calculation. The widely accepted number in our 21st century is 6 million. To break things down a bit more, 2.7 million are murdered at killing centers. 2 million by mass shootings, 1 million in ghettos, concentration, and forced labor camps, and roughly 250,000 in other bursts of violence.

Most Nazi-touched countries lost upwards of 50% of their Jewish citizens. In Poland, 90% of their pre-war Jewish population perished. And the aforementioned numbers don't account for the many non-Jewish victims of this violence. Groups including but not limited to Jehovah's Witnesses, Romani, prisoners of war, non-heterosexual individuals, those with disabilities, and resistance members. For many survivors, descendants of survivors, and other Jews across the world, questions of faith and religiosity run rampant. Perhaps survivor Miles Lerman said it best on August 1, 1979,

while at the Rima Synagogue in Krakow, Poland, calling God to a Dean Torah, a traditional formal court hearing, he asks, God, how could you stay here when next door are Auschwitz and Plashchoff? Where were you when all over Europe your sons and daughters were burning on altars? What did you do when my sainted father and mother marched to their deaths? When my sisters and brothers were put to the sword? Another survivor we heard from in these episodes, Primo Levy, would in part concur. He famously quipped,

there is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God. Aside from questioning God's omnipotence, protection, and even existence, many also wonder, why didn't the Allies do more? Hell, why didn't anyone do more? Well, that's a very good question, one that will never get the answers to. I will add, however, that much of the Allied war effort believed that militarily defeating Germany would be the best way to help the Jews. You can do with that what you will.

But to close, I'll leave you with the words of Romanian-born Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor, LEDCell. And I quote, the opposite of love is not hate. It's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness. It's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy. It's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death. It's indifference. History that doesn't suck is created in how long. by me, Greg Jackson. Episode researched and written by Greg Jackson and proud descendant of Holocaust survivors, Riley Newbauer.

Production by Airship. Audio editing by Muhammad Shazade. Sound design by Molly Bach. Theme music composed by Greg Jackson. Arrangement and additional composition by Lindsay Grand of Airship. For bibliography of all primary and secondary sources consulted in writing this episode, visit htbspodcast.com. HTVS is supported by fans at HTVS Podcast.

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