Beyond the science fictional plot device, much of this novel is based on fact.
Sayeret is the Hebrew word for scouts, or reconnaissance troops. As in the US. Marines, where a unit like First Reconnaissance Battalion is synonymous with commando troops, so it is with a sayeret in the IDF. The IDF has a great multiplicity of sayerets of which the most famous is Sayeret Matkal, the General Staff Reconnaissance Unit. While Sayeret Yatom is fictional, it’s organization and equipment is similar to that of existing Israeli commando units.
Israeli planes did strike a secret Syrian nuclear reactor in 2007 and reliable sources report that a twelve man Israeli commando sayeret preceded the attack jets, to collect evidence and mark the target. Their insertion by conventional means would have been highly difficult and risky.
Eastern Poland in 1942 was an empire of death, thanks to the establishment of the three death camps that are the focus of the noveclass="underline" Sobibor, Treblinka, and Belzec. These camps were established in the wake of the Wannsee Conference, where the Nazi bureaucracy, under the authority of Reinhard Heydrich, formalized the contours of the final solution. The establishment of these camps is dubbed Operation Reinhardt in the novel, but in fact, this sobriquet was attached to the operation only after Heydrich’s death in June 1942, to “honor” him. The depiction of the ambush of Heydrich’s car is based on the actual attack on Heydrich in 1942, except that in the novel the victim is different.
The descriptions of the death camps, their layout, organization and operation are accurate. The three camps were isolated and sparsely staffed, generally with a platoon of SS men and a company of Ukranian guards. The death camps didn’t require large garrisons, since almost all the people who entered these camps were immediately killed. In this, the death camps were different from the popular conception of “concentration camps” where Jews and other victims of the Nazis were often worked to death over months or years. The vast majority of the people who entered a death camp were killed within hours. Only a few hundred Jews were kept alive for tasks within the camp, and even these were periodically executed and replaced—especially the Sonderkommandos who had the grim job of emptying the gas chambers and disposing of the bodies—sometimes of their own family and friends.
More is known about Sobibor and Treblinka than Belzec. At the two former camps there were partially successful revolts in 1943, and thus hundreds immediate survivors, and several score by the end of the war. Belzac was the deadliest of the camps, from which only two Jews are known to have survived.
As in the novel, the original commander of Sobibor was Franz Stangl, who ran that camp until the summer of 1942, assisted by Der Spiess Gustav Wagner. Stangl then took over for Dr. Erbel at Treblinka, who had made a macabre hash of things there. Christian Wirth was the commandant of Belzac, the most formidable and lethal of the camps. In the novel he is given different duties before taking over at Belzec. Wirth was a psychopathic, cold-hearted gassing expert, who was one of history’s greatest mass murderers. Upwards of 800,000 people were slaughtered at Belzac alone.
The account of the massacre at Biali, in which the fictional Sergeant Mueller participates, is based on the historical destruction of the Jews of Jozefow. The brutal method of execution described in the book is historically accurate. This massacre and many similar ones were carried out by Ordnungs Polizei units during the war, which were essentially ordinary military police units attached to the SS. The men who committed these despicable acts were, in general, ordinary policemen.
General Globocnik was indeed the commander of the Lubin district of Poland and presided over this empire of death A policeman himself, he went by the nickname of Globo. Heydrich, a much younger and more dashing man, was his superior.
Heydrich died in June 1942 near Prague after an attack by Czech commandos who had been infiltrated by the British. In the novel Heydrich escapes assassination, but the description of the attack on his car is essentially accurate. There has been other historical speculation as to what would have happened had Heydrich lived. A clever, popular and ruthless Nazi leader he might have challenged Himmler for power within the Reich. In reprisal for Heydrich’s death, the SS liquidated the Czech town of Lidice, murdering hundreds of innocent people.
The organization, commanders and initial deployment of the Der Fuehrer Regiment of the 2d SS Panzergrenadier Division are as they were in the spring of 1942. 2d SS Panzergrenadier Division (later just 2d SS Panzer) is perhaps the most notorious of the major SS formations that fought in the war. This is not because this division was necessarily more fanatic and brutal than other Waffen SS units, but because its most famous atrocities occurred in France in 1944. All SS units—despite the frequent protestations of veterans that they were just combat soldiers—happily participated in countless atrocities the East.
Colonel Otto Kumm commanded Der Fuehrer in the spring of 1942 and had participated in anti-partisan actions in Russia, where he indeed described his tactics as akin to crushing anthills. Unlike his fate in the book, he survived the war and lived to old age. Kumm’s subordinates, Stadler, Opificius, Horn, and Holzer were generally as described in the novel including Norwegian origins and Stadler’s bad teeth.
The German rail system operated as described, and the approach to the Sobibor death camp, including the changing of crews and the laborious backing up and switching are generally accurate. The transport of millions of innocent men, women and children to their deaths in the most horrendous conditions imaginable has been amply chronicled, and the descriptions of the conditions within the death train heading to Sobibor taken from these.
In May and June of 1942 the death camps at Sobibor, Treblinka and Belzac had only been in operation for a few months. Over the next year they would murder nearly two million people between them.
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by Jonathan F. Keiler
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and/or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-1-938564-49-9