I have no idea where cm gets the idea from that the Jews had any ability to counteract the German transports. What could they have done?
Clayton is deeply ignorant and/or making things up. The evidence for the force used by German police and security forces in these operations is overwhelming and exists just about anywhere you want to look.
Since we've been watching Clayton blow smoke with regard to gas vans, let's take the case of Chelmno.
Nearly 70,000 Jews were taken by German forces from Lodz ghetto for gassing at Chemno. Of these, over 15,000 were transported to the deaths in early September 1942 in an action known as the "Gehsperre" (curfew) or Children and Old People's Action. Here are some details - you know, the kinds of things which Clayton is allergic to - on how the Germans conducted the roundups of the victims in Lodz ghetto:
"[T]he operation proceeded as follows--block after block was surrounded by the Jewish police and then each building surrounded by a host of police and Jewish firemen and entered by a representative of the authorities (the Gestapo). A shot was fired as the signal to assemble. . . . In the meantime, the Jewish police were searching the apartments and bringing out anyone who had been hiding or people who were ill. . . . Since this operation took place at an extremely rapid pace and wagons were constantly leaving from and arriving at the hospital, the clerical workers sent to the assembly points to make lists of the deportees were unable to list all the people brought there. . . . When the wagons were being loaded, there were incidents in which people, either because of a misunderstanding or intentionally, attempted to join the group that was remaining here; retribution was very swift in such cases (people were shot without warning), and took place right before the eyes of the assembled tenants of a building. That, however, did not prevent people from escaping from the wagons or while en route, or from being rescued from the hospital by means both legal and illegal. . . . To encourage the Jewish police and the firemen to conduct the operation conscientiously, promise that their closest relations would be spared had been made. . . . Escape attempts came to a bloody end. Anyone who attempted to save himself by fleeing and was spotted by the authorities had to pay for that attempt with his life. . . . At 38 Zgierska Street, an elederly woman from Sieradz did not understand if she had been ordered to go to the left or the right and, instead of going to a wagon, she walked over to a group of "remainers." This the authorities interpreted as an escape attempt. The woman was shot to death on the spot. At 3 Zgierska Street, Rozenblum, a 13-year-old boy, attempted to hid in a dustbin; he was seen and shot dead. There were many such victims but even more numerous were cases of people who were wounded when a crowd was fired upon. . . ." [Lodz Chronicle]
"Everybody is convinced that the Jews who are deported are taken to destruction. . . .
People ran here and there, crazed by the desire to hide the beloved victims. But nobody knew who would direct the Aktion: the Jewish Police, the Gestapo in the ghetto, or a mobile unit of the SS. The President, in coordination with the German authorities (Biebow) decided in his area of responsibility to carry out the deportation [with his own forces]. It was the Jewish Police that had to tear the children from the mothers, to take the parents from their children. . . . It was to be expected that parents and relatives would try in this situation to make changes and corrections in registered ages. Errors and inaccuracies that had not been corrected up to now did exist. Something that gives you the right to live today may well decide your fate tomorrow. There was a tendency to raise the age of the children, because a child from the age of 10 up could go to work and so be entitled to a portion of soup. Other parents lowered the age, because a younger child had a prospect of getting milk. Yesterday the milk and the soup were the most important things, today there is literally a question of staying alive. The age of the old people also moved up and down for various reasons. . . .
On Saturday the Gestapo already began on the operation [deportation], without paying any attention to the feverish work of registration that had been going on at No. 4 Church Square. Everyone had supposed that the Order Police [Jewish Police] would not stand the test. It could not itself carry out the work of the hangmen. . . ." [Oscar Singer]
"The hunger and constant fear of being caught drove many Jews to turn themselves in for deportation. They thought that it could not be worse than it was in the ghetto. Many were soothed since the deportations summonses indicated that, in contrast to the prior deportations, people were traveling for work." [Lodz Chronicle]
"Rumkowski . . . attempted to trick [deportees] with 'concessions' and rewards. First, whole families could travel together . . . Second, those reporting voluntarily would receive a set of clothing, shoes, and underwear and be able to take along 15 kilos of baggage. They would be permitted to write letters, and, finally, they would be able to pick up their food allotments without waiting in line. . . . Rumkowski also saw to it that the candidates for Chelmno or Auschwitz should be able to sell their last few possessions to his purchase points at prices determined by expert appraisers. . . . In order to reinforce the illusion that they were going to work, Biebow directed the Central Purchasing Office to pay for the household goods sold in German marks 'so that the money can be used in the German cities where they are going' . . ." [Isaiah Trunk in his study of Lodz]
"Not only the ill were hauled away to unknown destination for unknown purposes. Children at the Institute of Preventive Medicine and all prisoners in the central lockup were also removed. . . . In the meantime, the Jewish police move from house to house and gather up the ill who miraculously slipped out of the hospitals yesterday. . . . 'Will it end with that?' -- Jews from neighboring towns who had recently reached the ghetto laughed bitterly at the naivete of that question. They have already experienced this. They know, but refrain from saying, that things began this way in all the neighboring towns. First they marked the victims, then they took the patients from the hospitals, afterwards they made off with children and the elderly. Only at the end did they reduce everyone else to dust and ashes -- by deportation, execution by gunfire, or dispersion to the seven seas, separating wives from husbands, husbands from wives, children from parents, and parents from children. They were murdered in bizarre ways, as if one form of death were not enough for the worn-out, tortured Jewish population. How well they knew the formula, these Jews from the outlying towns! The tragedy was staged the same way everywhere. . . ." [Josef Zelkowicz]
Roundups by force and intimidation also occurred in small towns in the Warthegau. To take but one example, described by Oskar Rosenfeld in his Notebook E: In Brzeziny, on 15 May 1942 Jewish policemen delivered mothers and their children to the Gestapo, who separated out the children (“beating with whips”) and threw them onto trucks for dispatch along with some infirm elderly Jews. The victims were sent by truck and car to Galkuwek where they were beaten bloody and “thrown into the railway car”; from there, historians have them shipped to Chelmno and gassed there. Two days later, according to Rosenfeld, “all Jews” of Brzeziny were assembled on the town’s market square; about 1,500 turned out and were separated into women, children, and men. These groups were moved by wagon to Galkuwek: “Here in Galkuwek they were all, in the same groups, chased onto the train with their baggage, the cars were sealed, the windows closed, German police served as guards.” By six the morning of 18 May the train left for Lodz; these provincial Jews arriving in Lodz were housed in barracks vacated by western European Jews who had been shipped out that same month to Chelmno and were joined subsequently by 3000 more Jews (“older men and women, disabled for work, and children over ten”) from Brzeziny. Twelve hundred of the Brzeziny Jews in Lodz were shipped almost immediately out; of these Rosenfeld reported that 360 were sent on “to somewhere for forced labor.”
In some places the members of the Judenrate of the Jewish communities targeted for liquidation were killed before actions began, leaving the Jews without their leaders. Two examples from early 1942 are the ghettos Zychlin and Kutno. In addition, as at Gostynin in the same period, Jews not capable of work were sometimes shot before roundups began, in public view of the Jews ordered to take transports.
The final liquidation of Lodz ghetto in 1944 was conducted again using a mixture of deception, division, threats, violence, and force:
- Lodz ghetto had 78,000 Jews in summer 1944, about 90 percent of whom were ill, nearly all were on the verge of starvation, most were broken down by their long ghetto confinement
- deportations robbing the ghetto of those individuals who might have organized resistance, we have the commitment of a ghetto population to survival through labor
- the Gestapo intervened more directly in the ghetto during 1944 than before, making the Jewish leadership, already the transmission belt for German direction, less and less a factor
- in the period before the evacuation
the leader of the ghetto was arrested and held twice by the Gestapo
- there were numerous outsettlements ostensibly for labor in the months leading up to the dissolution of Lodz ghetto
- Germans directly organized and propagandized for the evacuation, mixing promises and threats in meetings with Lodz Jews, trying to get them to depart without need for direct violence; among the arguments used by the Germans were threats of bombing raids, promises of good jobs, warnings of reprisals from the Soviets, and direct statements that the Jews were to be ousted violently if they did not cooperate
- Jews, led by the tailors ressorts (workshops), resisted the deportation, many going into hiding
- the Gestapo and other German police units took over the hunt of Jews, conducting major cordoning-off actions, shooting recalcitrant Jews whom they've hunted down
- witnesses wrote about rifle shots, murders of Jews in the roundups, and noting that the units involved were German
- witness reports noted that food supplies into the ghetto were cut off to force resisting Jews to give up; there were simultaneous reports that the German authorities made food available to those who came to assembly points
- a trickle only of "voluntary" deportees, even under these conditions of debilitation and starvation, compulsion, and violence
We also have a great deal of evidence concerning how the transports themselves were conducted.
Wilhelm Schulte described a transport from Lodz to Chlemno in 1942: "There were Jews in . . . six or seven [train] carriages. As I recall, a railway employee had locked the doors of those carriages. I cannot remember if there was a special police or SS squad to watch the Jews. . . . The train went to Kolo. The Jews had to leave the train there and get into carriages of a narrow gauge train. It proceeded under control of SS men and young policemen." At the mill in Zawadka, where Lodz Jews were held temporarily before their final journey to Chelmno, Schulte said that SS Hauptsturmfuhrer Hans Bothmann was present overseeing the operation carried out by a unit of German police. There were about 15 armed policemen for this particular operation, and no more than 300 Jewish victims. The policemen guarded the Jews "so that they did not run away" until trucks arrived to take the victims to Chelmno for gassing. Schulte also described other stages of the operation and how each time they were moved the Jews slated for execution were guarded by German police officers. Gestapo officers brought the Jews from Lodz to transit points, where they were handed over to police units who guarded them in holding sites and then moved them to the execution site in Chelmno. According to Schulte, the policemen working at Kolo and other transfer points were given leather whips to use against the Jews they guarded and transported.
Heinz May recorded some of the conduct of the police during the transports. In one case, he described how a Jewish child tripped while being marched under escort and a German policeman "grabbed the child by one leg and threw it on the vehicle [carrying those too sick to walk] like a piece of wood." Another time, according to May, German police forced with rifle butts sick Jews having difficulty marching to get up. A bystander had been helping these Jews and objected, whereupon, according to May, "One of the officials raised his pistol against the person who made the remark. I thought that he wanted to frighten him but a shot could be heard right then. The man collapsed. He tried to get up but fell down again and remained lying with his head on the tracks. Bright red blood and foaming blood came from his mouth. Terrified, the sick pulled themselves together and staggered to the column" of Jews being marched by the German police. "One man could not make it and fell down again. Another shot; he did not rise anymore either."
It is difficult to understand what Clayton is going on about, given the heaps of evidence from a variety of witnesses in various forms, recorded at the time and in the years following the actions - unless he is ignorant of how the operations were conducted. The questions and challenges Clayton raises certainly make him sound ignorant, because anyone with even the slightest knowledge of the how the Germans conducted roundups and transport operations is aware of how deception, terror, and force were used to compel the victims to obey the orders given them. Even so, the record is replete, as anyone who's read even a few accounts of the actions is aware, with examples of Jewish resistance, from hiding to resistance.