Interviewer Spencer Mizzen (3:14)

And why did you decide to adopt that approach, the approach of tracing the evolution of the Holocaust year by year? What are the advantages of exploring these terrible events chronologically rather than, say, thematically?

Frank McDonagh (3:27)

I think the big advantage is for the general reader. This book is aimed at a general reader, so it's not aimed at an academic. So with an academic, you could do the book thematically and assume they know all of the chronology. But with an ordinary general reader, that's not the case. And I believe that this format assists the general reader because people watch things in box sets now. So they watch one episode, then another episode, then another episode. So it mixes that. Also, this book is very different. It's got 100 photographs. There are not history books with a hundred photographs. So it's vivid. You've got two things going on. You've got the chronology going on, so the reader can follow that, and you've got tons of photographs to illustrate the points that are being made. So it's like a writing experience and a reading experience, really very different in that way. And I think that especially with the Holocaust, it does develop slowly. There's a slow buildup. It's impossible to predict in 1933 that we're going to end up in 1943 with extermination camps. So it tells the story through the years when these things happened, and I think it has a greater impact. And definitely the readers of the other volumes in this series, the Weimar Years, the Hitler Years, Volume 1, 1933-1939. The Hitler Volume 2, which is called Disaster, covers 1940 to 1945. Now, I wanted to have a book separately from that on the Holocaust, because I think it's so important to Hitler's ideology. Antisemitism, you know, it goes back to the years that he was in Munich when he became obsessed with the Jewish question. Members of the Nazi Party who were interviewed in the 1930s by a guy called Theo Able, they tell what attracted them to the Nazi Party, and it was anti Semitism. They wanted Jews removed from society. They felt that if Jews were there, they'd go against them in the war, they'd be traitors. So they wanted Jews removed from society. That's clear. They all say they want them killed at that stage, but they're pretty much indifferent to what happens to them. First of all, they'd like them out of Germany. And Hitler, of course, falls in with that. He's obsessed with antisemitism as well.

Interviewer Spencer Mizzen (5:55)

So where was he precisely when he came to power in 1933? To what extent had his thinking on the persecution of Jewish people? To what point did it evolve?

Frank McDonagh (6:06)

By then, Hitler came to power with not a big plan about what he was going to do about the Jews. You know, he had no big legislative plan, but he had two things in his mind. The first was he wanted Jews removed from German society. So he was going to encourage emigration, not extermination. And he had this idea that he would gradually try and remove Jews from the economy. Those were the two things that he had in mind. Now, on April 1, 1933, he has a boycott of all Jewish businesses. But it doesn't go down very well. He has his storm troopers who stand outside shops picketing them, telling people, you know, you're not a proper German if you shop in a Jewish shop. But ordinary German people do want to shop in Jewish shops because they sell goods that are good value, cheap. They run, for example, the department stores, and they're very popular. Hitler says he wants to get rid of them, but he's very slow to get rid of them. So that fails. The boycott fails because there's an international outcry. So he pulls back from that. Then he says to his elite, I'm going to try and introduce some legislation against Jews. Let's clear them out of certain areas. So introduces in 1933, he introduces the civil service law, which excludes all Jews except those who fought in the First World War, who had parents who fought from their jobs. He also brings in the law for overcrowding in German schools, and that limits the number of Jews who can go to state schools to 5%. And the same is true of universities. So he's trying to clear them out of those. So that's what happens in 1933. So underneath that, he's proceeding slowly because the Jewish question takes something of a backseat in Hitler's mind. He's interested in foreign policy. He wants to overturn the Treaty of Versailles, and he doesn't want to get into big rows with the Allies over this. So obviously, outright anti Semitism wouldn't go down well. Not that he wouldn't like it. It's just that he can't do it.

Interviewer Spencer Mizzen (8:16)

So on that note, Frank, in the book you relate an incident in 1934 in which the German foreign minister summoned will US ambassador in Berlin to complain about a mock trial that took place in New York in which Hitler had been accused of crimes against civilization. How aware were Western governments of what was going on in Germany at that point? And how sensitive were the Nazis to opinion in the West? I mean, judging on what you've just said, they were actually were quite sensitive.

Frank McDonagh (8:48)

To it, their work, many ways. You could hear about what was going on in Germany back then. Newspapers had Berlin correspondence, German correspondence. So the Times, Telegraph, all those papers, the Guardian, they all had reporters in Germany reporting on this. New York Times carried umpteen articles. I think it's over 400 articles about persecution in 1933. So really, you know, people did know what was going on. And there were demonstrations held in New York, for example. There was a big demonstration at Madison Square Garden. Over 15,000 people turned out for that. So, you know, people did know about this persecution.

Interviewer Spencer Mizzen (9:31)

And what does your research into, like the memoirs and letters and communications written by Jewish people in the mid-1930s, how did that change your view of how they were reacting to what was going on around them?

Frank McDonagh (9:44)

Well, the book draws on lots of Jewish responses to their own persecution. So in that way you get a vivid idea of what the Jews were feeling. So there's letters, there's diaries, there's also reports of what's happening. I think the book shows that in the peacetime period, 33 to 39, there was a lot of persecution going on of Jews. But it was at the local level. The national government sort of stepped back. They allowed the local toughs, you know, the Storm Troopers, the Hitler Youth. In all these reports, we always hear about the Hitler Youth and the Stormtroopers Troopers, and we hear vivid descriptions about the violence that goes on. I mentioned the pillory marches. I don't know if your listeners would know about these. These went back to medieval times when people would be paraded through the streets in a humiliating exercise. Now, that came back that wasn't sanctioned by Hitler's government. That was something that was done at the local level. So what you have is antisemitism is going on at the local level, and it gradually percolates itself up to the national level and the bureaucracy. And in the end, the Hitler government takes over the Jewish question. But it's slow in the early 30s. They're just allowing these stormtroopers to carry on carrying out violent attacks. You know, there's many instances. There's one instance I mentioned in 1934, where an Aryan, meaning a German person who's not Jewish, is accused of going to a pub and drinking in it. And so the bartender, who's also an Aryan, is castigated by some of the local community. And one of them, Stormtrooper, goes to the beer hall and he attacks the two owners. He has a fight with them and starts attacking them, drags them on the street. And a crowd gathers, and then the crowd goes off and runs amok through the town, attacking everyone who lives, who's Jewish, who lives in any house randomly. So you see that that kind of thing is going on. It's happening at the local level.

Interviewer Spencer Mizzen (11:55)

So do you think we've sometimes in the past been guilty when telling this terrible story of focusing too much on the figure of Adolf Hitler?

Frank McDonagh (12:03)

I think so. I mean, I think that Hitler. Anyway, when you look at it, Hitler is a figure who's not at the forefront of Jewish policy. He devolves power to other people. So if you were saying, oh, you know, what about Hitler and the Holocaust? Isn't there an order that he gave? We can't find an order. But we know that he gave full responsibility for Jewish policy to the SS and Heinrich Himmler and the head of the security service of the ss, Reinhard Heydrich. Those two ran the policy. And Hitler, you know, expected them to get on with it. He wasn't an interfering leader in that way. I mean, Hitler has this idea he's a dictator, but he wasn't a kind of micromanager. That's what people can't understand. That's why a lot of people actually in his government liked working with him. He left you alone, you could do what you wanted. So all the initiatives in Jewish policy really come from either below. A good example of that is 1935, when they introduced the Nuremberg Laws. Now, what's been going on at the local level, there's been a lot of complaints from activists saying, well, why isn't he doing more about Jews owning shops? Why is he allowing Jews to still marry Germans? Why is he allowing Jews to have sexual relationships with Germans? And that percolates its way up. So by September, Hitler decides to enact a law that does ban Jews from having citizenship, does ban them from having marriages to German people, and does ban them from having any sexual relations with German people. So, for example, a Jewish person can't have a woman under 45 working in their household from then. But you see, that wasn't something that Hitler did. It was something that was forced on him in that way. Not to say he didn't believe in it, he did, but he had other preoccupations he was more concerned with making sure he pushed his foreign policy at that stage.

Podcast Host Spencer Mizzen (14:07)

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Frank McDonagh (15:19)

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Interviewer Spencer Mizzen (15:50)

You cite the chilling statistic that 95% of all Jewish murders in the Holocaust occurred in after the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. How did Operation Barbarossa shape Hitler's thinking then on the fate of Europe's Jewish population?

Frank McDonagh (16:06)

Well again, it was the planning of Operation Barbarossa because they decided that they were going to have these killing squads that were going to go in behind the troops. They were called the Einsatzgruppen and they were created by the ss. And these were really bands of SS men who were recruited, a lot of them from, from the police force in the Gestapo. And they became these sort of massacres, mass killings of Jews that went on after they invaded the Soviet Union. They call it the Holocaust by bullets. So people were getting killed. I mean, you know, the usual thing was, you know, the army would go ahead, then the Einstatzgruppen would round up all the Jews who lived in a particular area. They were initially supposed to round up political commissars of the Soviet Union, but it's very hard to find such people. Now what's the easiest way? Well, a lot of these Jews dress in a very Orthodox Jewish way. The beard, the hat, the dark clothes so they could be spotted. They're walking around like this in the villages. So they rounded those people up. And then on the report you can see they start killing Jews. Now it's unclear whether this was an order from Himmler and Isaac probably was, but we can't find it. But this starts to happen. We know this by looking at the Einsatz group and I list them, the reports of how many people they're killing and they start to go up dramatically. And then we start to see the children and Jewish women are getting murdered as well. So it really flows like that. The Holocaust through bullets starts with the invasion of the Soviet Union. What happens then is the people doing the killing are reporting back to the SS that, you know, this is really hard, this is hard work to get a load of people, bring them to the edge of town, strip them naked and then machine gun them down, including babies. So Himmler says we need to find a better way to do this. You know, what's a better way to do this? And this is the James of them coming up with the extermination camp where they create a camp that just has a railway link and it has a gas chamber and it has crematoria facilities and that's completely different. And that happens in 1942. For example.

Interviewer Spencer Mizzen (18:29)

How important was a Wanzi Conference of 1942 in the formulation of the Final Solution? Had Hitler already decided by that point that all European Jews should be exterminated?

Frank McDonagh (18:42)

Well, we think that Hitler came up with the idea that all European Jews should be exterminated sometime in 1941, probably late 1941, probably the autumn of 1941. So all historians are agreed that he made the decision. And then we get the Wannsee conference, it was actually chaired by Heydrich. He was given an order by Hermann Goering and he said, organize the final solution of the Jewish question. When he got to the conference itself, he invited all the people involved in local government with Jewish policy. And in the Wannsee conference they specifically say they've got two kind of policies. One is to take all the Jewish people who are able bodied and work them to death. It's called death through annihilation. Knowing that they would die because of the meager rations they were being given. But other people, like, you know, children, pregnant mothers and so on, they said that they should be taken away for what was called special treatment. And that was a euphemism that was used throughout the Nazi system, meaning extermination. So the Wannsee conference sort of predicates the start of the real final solution, really. In the extermination camps, you could say the two are linked. Because what we see is that the camps, which are called the Operation Reinhard camps, start to come into full operation after Fanse. So there's obviously an impetus to get on with this. So what we see after Vanse is the creation of these extermination camps. And they are at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. And they are just pure and simple extermination camps. All they have is a railway track that goes to them. They sort of branch off from a main line. And at these camps, all there is is a center where they welcome the victims. They take away their clothes. They say they're going to be deloused and go through to a shower, and then they're going to be moved on to work camps. But of course, they're going to be gassed using carbon monoxide. I mean, we have this thing, it's all Cyclone B, you know, because of the Schindler's List and all that. But in actual fact, most people in the extermination camps were killed by carbon monoxide gas, which was piped in to the gas chamber itself. Started a bit trial and error. Some of it was chaotic at the beginning with, you know, with hundreds of corpses lined up in mountains before it was sorted out by the middle of 1942. But then we get in those three camps, you know, we get near enough. Two million people killed. That's the height, if you like, of the Final Solution. The other big camp that kills people is, of course, Auschwitz Birkenhaus. But that's not a pure and simple extermination camp. It's also a slave labor camp. And they have factories connected to IG Farben, which operates in Birkenhauer as well. So that's different, because you can go to Auschwitz and not be immediately killed. You can't go to Treblinka or Sobibor or Belzec and not be immediately killed.

Interviewer Spencer Mizzen (21:56)

You describe in your book in detail the Warsaw ghetto uprisings of 1943. To what extent was the uprising and similar ones elsewhere driven by a knowledge of the grim fate of those deported to the death camps? Did that in some way motivate Jewish people to rise up against the German occupying forces?

Frank McDonagh (22:17)

We are Talking about early 1943, when there's risings in the Warsaw Ghetto. People knew by then, you know, they knew that if they were being resettled somewhere, they'd be resettled to a gas chamber at one of these camps. So they were going to try and clear them. So what happened was there was a lot of brave Jews in these camps who decided they'd fight it. So in January, they actually stop the SS getting into the camp and taking away all the remaining Jews. But they come back in April to do exactly the same. And there's a bitter battle that goes on for about a month. And eventually the Jews have to give in. They're forced to give in. You know, they flood the cellars where they're operating. For example. You know, they use flamethrowers and things like that. And in the end, taken off and taken away to these extermination camps, mainly Treblinka. These people from the Warsaw Ghetto are killed. So, yes, that showed how much people knew. They did know what was going on by then.

Interviewer Spencer Mizzen (23:17)

You point out also that the nature of the persecution differed from country to country across Europe, that there was a difference in mortality rates even among Western nations such as, say, France and the Netherlands. What drove those differences?

Frank McDonagh (23:31)

I think what drove them is the officials who were in charge of those places. For example, in Vichy France, the local officials were able to negotiate a limitation on the numbers who were sent to the death camps, although they did participate in it. But less people died in Vichy France than other places. Now, the Netherlands, the local officials cooperated in giving them names. So I think in the Netherlands, there's nearly 100,000. Nearly the entire Jewish population of the Netherlands ends up in death camps because of that. Then you've got a place like Denmark where they leave the existing monarchy in charge. They don't interfere. And hardly anyone goes to a death camp in Denmark because they're protected by the local administration. So it depended, for example, Greece. They occupied Greece, and the local government helped them. 250,000 Jews were killed like that. Hungary tried to hold out against sending their Jews. But in 1944, the Germans insisted that Hungary give over their Jews. So we get the Hungarian Holocaust, which is the last big murder operation. And you're talking about 440,000 people are exterminated from Hungary in that period. So it depended on where you lived. There's studies as well that show the people who got out of Germany were more affluent the people they killed tended to be at the bottom of the social rung, really. They were Jewish, but they weren't the Jews that they were describing who had massive houses and businesses and that they were just ordinary Jews eking out a living. That's what you found in Eastern Europe. They were mainly just ordinary Jewish people, really. It wasn't the sort of big wigs that they claimed were running everything who got killed. They managed a lot of the times to get out of Germany, get to America, for example.

Interviewer Spencer Mizzen (25:26)

How did the slow collapse of the Third Reich, of the advance of Soviet and Western Allied forces, impact the German attitude to the fate of Europe's Jews? Did the military reversals that the Germans suffered in any way impair their efforts to commit mass murder, or did it in some way act as a motivation to redouble their efforts?

Frank McDonagh (25:46)

I think really obviously the impact of the bombing of Germany made things difficult. The killings weren't getting carried out in Germany at that time. Once the Red army started to advance, then it became problematic also. The Allies themselves, from early 1943 had said that they wanted unconditional surrender from the Germans. And they mentioned specifically war crimes. So they do mention that they're killing people in these camps. They know about it. It's common knowledge. The Polish government in exile, for example, brings out reports that are going on. So the Allies know, you know, Roosevelt knows, Churchill knows. There are letters from them talking about it saying, you know, we're going to have to have a. A war crimes trial. So that's when Jordan Berg comes in. They've already decided they're going to have this war crimes trial. How that affects the perpetrators is that Himmler gets worried. He gets really worried. And what we see, it's in the book as well, is that he orders the digging up of the corpses that haven't been been incinerated and to incinerate them. So all these camps, Sobibor, Treblinka, Maginek, all the corpses are dug up and they're then sort of burned on these sort of big railway tracks and, and fires underneath them. So. So they try and cremate them, if you like. So that goes on. There's kind of like this fear that they're gonna get found out and they're gonna go on trial. And they're not just gonna go on trial, they're gonna get killed, they're gonna get executed. So there is a fear running through the administration. Oh, God, we need to cover this up. So they do dismantle the three big extermination Camps Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, they are completely destroyed. All of the crematorium is destroyed. All of the entrances are destroyed. You know, if you went there, it's just a waste ground. That's what it is. And of course, the corpses have gone to dust because they've been turned into dust by these cremations. So they are worried yet towards the end of the war. But it's amazing that they do this Holocaust in Hungary, you know, because everyone knows what's going on there. There is a revolt in Auschwitz in 1944 by what's called the Sonderkommando. These were a group of Jewish prisoners, as very strong Jewish prisoners. And they helped with the whole process of disposing of the bodies of the dead. Now they rise up in this rising, about 200 of them. It's easily put down. But it shows that by now the whole thing is starting to crack up a bit. I think after. After the summer of 44, you could say that the Holocaust is over, really. The abuse goes on in concentration camps and people continues to be starved to death and so on. But the sort of formal Holocaust is over by the.

Interviewer Spencer Mizzen (28:40)

Now, Frank, in order to produce his books and the other books you've written, you've had to spend an enormous amount of time studying in great detail some of the worst crimes, some of the greatest acts of barbarism in human history. But what impact does studying these events have on you as a human being? Do you find you become desensitized to them in some way?

Frank McDonagh (29:01)

No, that's the problem. I think it has a big impact on me. And it's not a good impact because especially writing this book. I mean, I just read some of those descriptions of the camps and what people were doing, and it just. It makes you feel ill, you know, in a way. So I'm glad it's over. I mean, I know I'm supposed to be the person who pushes the buzz. Oh, read this book. It's fantastic. Now, the problem is that a lot of people don't feel like that. They feel they want to understand this story. It's the same with, you know, there's a fascination with. With evil people as well. We have to admit this. You know, there's like, real crime series, and they actually bring out, you know, the terrible crimes of some of these people who've killed people, serial killers and people like that. And they get huge ratings. And books about those people get huge ratings. So the public aren't frightened by the horror of the Holocaust. Even though for the author, I find it quite harrowing, you know, and I'm glad that I've completed now this, this series. But it's there. It needs to be. You know, I say it's, it's horrible, but it's necessary. It's necessary that we know. And as you can see, there is tons and tons of evidence in this to show what happened. So for those who are arguing that the Holocaust didn't happen and all the rest of it, well, read all this and you'll find out that it did. It's, it's, you know, the, the evidence from the, the ghettos, for example. The eyewitnesses there tell you about the starvation, don't they? The people who survived Auschwitz and the extermination camps. They also tell you what happened as well. And the trials of them bring out the perpetrators and what they did. Some of them gave vivid testimony as well.

Interviewer Spencer Mizzen (30:47)

And finally, Frank, is it because there are people around today who do deny that the Holocaust happened? Is that what makes for you this book and your research so important? Is that why, you know, we need to keep telling this story, this terrible story, 80 years after the events that it describes?

Frank McDonagh (31:05)

Yes. For all the liars, we need someone to tell the truth. And the truth is important in history. That's what history is about, searching for the real answer, the real truth about what happened. So I think that that's the important role of the historian.

Podcast Host Spencer Mizzen (31:23)

That was Frank McDonagh speaking into Spencermism. Frank is an internationally renowned expert on the Third Reich whose books include the Gestapo, the Myth and Reality of Hitler's Secret Police. His latest book is the Hitler years Holocaust 1933-1945.