The Second World War

by Antony Beevor

  Three days later Manstein, who thought that he had stabilized the front, received a very unpleasant surprise. The Red Army had brought up the 1st Tank and 3rd Guards Tank Armies near Brusilov without being spotted, and on Christmas Day they charged through towards Zhitomir and Berdichev. Shortly afterwards Konev’s 2nd Ukrainian Front to the south also broke through, and soon two German corps still holding the line of the Dnepr south-east of Kiev were surrounded in the Korsun pocket. Hitler refused to allow them to retreat, and their fate was to be among the cruellest suffered by the Wehrmacht on the eastern front.

  34

  The Shoah by Gas

  1942–1944

  The scope of Heydrich’s plan outlined at the Wannsee conference in January 1942 had been breathtaking. As one of his close colleagues confirmed, he possessed ‘insatiable ambition, intelligence and ruthless energy’. The Final Solution was intended to encompass more than eleven million Jews, according to Adolf Eichmann’s calculations. This figure included those in neutral countries, such as Turkey, Portugal and Ireland, as well as in Great Britain, Germany’s undefeated enemy.

  The fact that these deliberations took place within a few weeks of the Wehrmacht’s setback before Moscow and the entry of the United States into the war suggests either that the Nazis’ confidence in ‘final victory’ was unshaken or that they felt impelled to complete the ‘historic task’ before further setbacks rendered it impossible. The answer was probably a combination of the two. Certainly, the prospect of victory in the late summer of 1941 had contributed to the dramatic radicalization of Nazi policy. And now that world events had reached a critical point, there would be no turning back. The ‘Shoah by bullets’ thus advanced to the ‘Shoah by gas’.

  As with the Hunger Plan and the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war, the Final Solution contained a double purpose. As well as eliminating racial and ideological enemies, the other objective was to preserve food supplies for Germans. This was regarded as all the more urgent because of the huge numbers of foreign workers brought back to the Reich for labour. The Final Solution itself would consist of a parallel system of elimination through forced labour and immediate killing, both carried out by the SS Totenkopfverbände (Death’s Head Units). The only Jews exempted for the moment would be those elderly or prominent Jews selected for the show-ghetto of Theresienstadt, those who were workers with essential skills or half-Jews and those in mixed marriages. Their fates could be decided later.

  The extermination camp of Chemno (Kulmhof) was already in operation, Beec soon followed and so did the complex at Auschwitz-Birkenau. At Chemno, gas vans were used for killing Jews from towns in the region. In January 1942, some 4,400 Roma brought from Austria were also taken there and gassed. The corpses were buried in the forest by teams of selected Jews guarded by Ordnungspolizei. Chemno would be the centre for the mass killing of the Jews still packed into the ghetto at Łód, fifty-five kilometres to the south.

  The camp at Beec, between Lublin and Lwów, was considered a step forward, since it had gas chambers constructed to use carbon monoxide from vehicles stationed outside. After the test killing in January of 150 Jews, the gassing of mainly Galician Jews began there in mid-March. The camp of Majdanek was built on the very edge of Lublin.

  Auschwitz, or Owicim in its Polish version, had been a Silesian town near Kraków, with a nineteenth-century cavalry barracks from the days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The barracks had been taken over in 1940 as a prison camp by the SS to hold Polish prisoners. This was known as Auschwitz I. It was here that the first tests of Zyklon B–pellets of hydrogen cyanide designed to gas vermin–had been carried out in September 1941 on Soviet and Polish prisoners.

  At the end of 1941 work began at nearby Birkenau, known as Auschwitz II. A pair of peasant houses were converted into improvised gas chambers, which were put to use in March 1942. Only in May did the killings start on a significant scale, but by October it became clear to the SS commandant Rudolf Höss that the facilities were totally insufficient and that mass burial was polluting the groundwater. A completely new system of gas chambers and furnaces was built during the winter.

  Although Auschwitz was isolated in an area of swamp, rivers and birchwoods, the site had good access to rail communications. This was one of the reasons why the chemical conglomerate IG Farben became interested in establishing a factory there for the production of buna, or synthetic rubber. Himmler, wanting to Germanize the region, promoted the idea enthusiastically, offering labour from the concentration camp prisoners. He even went in person to brief Höss and liaise with representatives of IG Farben. Surprised by the immense size of the project and the large number of slave labourers required, Himmler told Höss that his camp would have to triple in size from its present strength of 10,000 prisoners. The SS treasury stood to gain up to 4 Reichsmark a day for each slave provided to IG Farben. In return, the SS would select violent and ruthless kapos from among criminal prisoners elsewhere to beat the Jewish slaves and make them work harder.

  Construction of the vast Buna-Werke went ahead in the summer of 1941, while German divisions to the east appeared to be triumphing over the Soviet Union. Still short of labour, Himmler arranged to take an initial 10,000 Red Army prisoners off the Wehrmacht in October. Höss himself wrote before his execution for war crimes that they had arrived in very poor condition. ‘They had been given hardly any food on the march, during halts on the way being simply turned out into the nearest fields and there told to “graze” like cattle on anything edible they could find.’ Working through the depths of the winter, with little clothing and reduced in some cases to cannibalism, all of the exhausted and diseased prisoners ‘died like flies’, as Höss wrote. ‘They were no longer human beings,’ he explained. ‘They had become animals, who sought only food.’ Not surprisingly, they had been unable to construct more than a couple of barrack blocks, instead of the twenty-eight laid down.

  The SS strategy of death through labour was even less cost-effective than in Beria’s Gulag punishment camps. The Nazis’ only concession to pragmatism was to build a new camp–Auschwitz III or Monowitz–adjoining the Buna-Werke, so that IG Farben’s slaves did not have to waste time marching so far. Yet SS guards and kapos in this semi-privatized concentration camp continued to beat their labourers, as if that could force them to complete projects far beyond their means and strength.

  After the war the directors of IG Farben, which partly owned the manufacturer of Zyklon B, claimed to have known nothing about the mass murder of Jews. Yet IG Farben’s huge Buna-Werke complex was managed by 2,500 German employees from the Reich, who lived in the town and associated with the SS guards at Auschwitz-Birkenau. One of them, just after he arrived, asked an SS guard about the appalling smell which spread over the whole area. The SS man replied that it was Bolshevik Jews ‘going up the chimney at Birkenau’.

  In May 1942, as ever increasing transports of Jews arrived at Auschwitz, the SS moved the remaining Polish political prisoners to forced labour in Germany. On 17 July, Himmler arrived to inspect the growing Auschwitz complex. As his limousine swept through the gate of Auschwitz I, the camp orchestra of Jewish musicians began to play the triumphal march from Verdi’s Aida.

  The Reichsführer-SS stepped out of the car, halted to listen to the music, and then returned Höss’s salute. Together, they inspected a guard of honour of prisoners in freshly issued striped uniforms. Himmler, with his spectacles and weak chin, contemplated them in cold detachment as he passed. Höss accompanied him to the works office to show him the latest plans for new gas chambers and crematoria. Afterwards, Himmler, with his entourage, went to the railway siding to watch the unloading of a transport of Dutch Jews, as the camp orchestra played again. ‘People were deceived at first by the illusion of order and music being played,’ a Free French officer deported to Auschwitz later testified to the Red Army. ‘But soon they smelt the dead bodies and when prisoners were separated according to their physical state, they soon guessed.’

  First, t
he men were divided from the women and children, a splitting of families which caused much unrest, until dog-handlers and whip-wielding guards dealt with the disturbance. Himmler particularly wanted to see the selection process carried out on the ‘ramp’ by two SS doctors, choosing those who appeared fit for labour, and the unfit who were to be eliminated immediately. Those selected for labour were no more fortunate than those killed immediately. They too would be gassed or worked to death in the next two or three months.

  Himmler followed the group selected for the gas chambers in Bunker No. 1, and watched through a small window as they died. He also looked for any effect on the SS personnel, having been so disturbed by the psychological strain imposed on the Einsatzgruppen the year before. He then observed the Jews in the work commando dispose of the bodies and told Höss that in future he should burn the corpses instead. Himmler, who shuddered at the thought of animals killed en masse in abattoirs, simply took a professional interest in the massacre of what he regarded as human vermin. ‘It is not a Weltanschauungs-question to rid oneself of lice,’ he later wrote to one of his subordinates. ‘It is a matter of hygiene.’ Himmler had the aseptic air of a dentist, although he revelled in neo-Gothic warrior fantasies, trying to portray the SS as an order of knights.

  From Auschwitz-Birkenau, his party drove the short distance to visit the Buna-Werke at Auschwitz-Monowitz. IG Farben was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of forced labourers, yet the huge Buna-Werke complex never managed to produce any synthetic rubber at all. The company also financed the inhuman experiments at Auschwitz-Birkenau of Hauptsturmführer Dr Josef Mengele on children, especially identical twins, but also on adults. Apart from removing organs, sterilizing and deliberately infecting his carefully selected victims with diseases, Mengele was also testing ‘prototype serums and drugs–many of which were supplied by IG Farben’s Bayer pharmaceutical division’.

  Mengele was not alone. Dr Helmuth Vetter, although also a member of the SS, was employed by IG Farben at Auschwitz. He carried out experiments on women. When IG Farben asked Höss for 150 women prisoners for Vetter’s experiments, he demanded a fee of 200 Reichsmark per guinea pig, but IG Farben held the price down to 170 RM. Every single woman died, as the company confirmed in a letter to Höss. Vetter was thrilled with his work. ‘I have the opportunity to test our new preparations,’ he wrote to a colleague. ‘I feel like I am in paradise.’ Dangerous pharmaceutical tests were also carried out on prisoners at Mauthausen and Buchenwald concentration camps. IG Farben was particularly keen to discover an effective method of chemical castration, to be used in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union.

  Himmler also strongly supported the sterilization experiments of Professor Karl Clauberg at Auschwitz. The grotesque perversion of a doctor’s duties under Nazism, in which many leading German medical practitioners acquiesced, provides a chilling example of how the prospect of almost unlimited power and prestige in secret studies can distort the judgement of intelligent people. These doctors tried to justify their needlessly cruel experiments as research to help mankind at large. Significantly, in a conscious or unconscious symbiosis with the medical profession, Nazi Germany and other dictatorships of the period often adopted surgical metaphors, particularly the cutting of cancerous growths out of the body politic. And as an example of the Nazis’ sick sense of humour and compulsive deception, the supplies of Zyklon B were delivered in vans marked with the Red Cross.

  In spite of the oath of secrecy imposed on SS officers and men about their activities word was bound to spread, sometimes in astonishing ways. In the late summer of 1942 Obersturmführer Dr Kurt Gerstein, an SS gas expert, was so disturbed by what he had just seen on a tour of inspection that on a night express from Warsaw to Berlin he poured out everything he knew in a darkened compartment to Baron von Otter, a Swedish diplomat. Otter reported all this back to the foreign ministry in Stockholm, but the Swedish government, unwilling to provoke the Nazis, simply sat on the information. News of the death camps, however, soon began to reach the Allies through other channels, mainly the Polish Home Army.

  Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, could hardly have been more different from the intellectual elite of the SS, mainly concentrated in the Sicherheitsdienst. Höss was a stolid, middle-aged former soldier, who had risen through the ranks of the concentration camp system without ever questioning an order. Primo Levi put him down not as ‘a monster’ or ‘a sadist’, but as ‘a coarse, stupid, arrogant, long-winded scoundrel’. Höss was totally obsequious towards superiors, above all the Reichsführer-SS, whom he regarded as almost as great a god as the Führer himself. The lack of imagination shown in Höss’s own account beggars belief as he upholds family values, with his own exemplary home life, while day after day destroying thousands and thousands of other families.

  Verging on self-pity, he complains about the low quality of the SS personnel sent to Auschwitz and especially the kapos recruited from the ranks of ordinary criminal prisoners. They were known as ‘greens’ because of the colour of their identifying triangle. (Jews wore yellow triangles, political prisoners wore red, Spanish Republicans in Mauthausen wore dark blue, and homosexuals a pinkish mauve.) These kapos, in particular the women criminals in charge of a punishment detachment outside the camp at Budy, were renowned for their cruelty. ‘I find it incredible that human beings could ever turn into such beasts,’ wrote Höss. ‘The way the “greens” knocked the French Jewesses about, tearing them to pieces, killing them with axes, and throttling them–it was simply gruesome.’

  Yet for all his professed horror at the cruelty of the kapos, Höss still provided the male ones with a camp ‘brothel’. This was in a hut where Jewish female prisoners were kept for their sadistic pleasure until they too were sent to the gas chamber. At the other end of the scale, the most privileged female prisoners were Jehovah’s Witnesses, known as ‘Bible-worms’, who had been sent to the camps because their beliefs rejected military service in any form. SS officers used them as servants in their homes and messes. Höss had one working as a nanny looking after his small children. They were so reliable that the SS did not complain when they refused to clean or even touch their uniforms out of their pacifist principles.

  The women inside the camp were kept in order by dog-handlers of the Hundestaffel. Apparently they were more frightened than male prisoners were of the snarling beasts, which handlers let off the leash from time to time for fun. It may well have been the presence of the dog-handlers which deterred women from opting for the easiest way for the male prisoners to commit suicide, which was to ‘run into the wire’ in the hope that the guards would shoot straight. The women were more likely to have the dogs let loose on them instead.

  Women could be more complicated, Höss noted. One of the problems in the changing rooms for the gas chambers was that ‘many of the women hid their babies among the piles of clothing’. So the Jewish labour detail was sent in to check. They had to throw any babies they found into the gas chamber just before the doors were slammed shut and bolted.

  Höss was intrigued by the obedience shown by these Jewish prisoners, whose lives had been temporarily spared in a Faustian pact. He tried to portray them as willing accomplices. In fact, the desperate will to live overcame normal morality, a phenomenon no longer imaginable in the squalor and degradation of Auschwitz, and even eclipsed the certain knowledge of their own imminent death. Few of them ever warned the new arrivals of what was about to happen. The Nazis, through total inhumanity, had created the conditions for that unfettered social-Darwinism in which they professed to believe.

  This crushing of all social instincts and loyalties, combined with the unreal nightmare of their horrific work, was bound to have a brutalizing effect. ‘They carried out all these tasks with a callous indifference,’ wrote Höss, ‘as though it were all part of an ordinary day’s work. While they dragged the corpses about, they ate or they smoked. They did not stop eating even when engaged on the grisly job of burning corpses which had bee
n lying for some time in mass graves.’

  The most privileged male prisoners were those who worked in the warehouse called ‘Kanada’, the department which sorted the possessions, clothes, shoes and spectacles, and bundled up the bales of human hair. Yet they too knew that they were simply the living dead. Eventually, in the summer of 1944, the Kanada Sonderkommando of Jewish prisoners attempted an armed uprising and breakout from Auschwitz-Birkenau. Four SS men died, and 455 prisoners were shot down.

  As well as the extermination camps built at Chemno, Beec and Auschwitz-Birkenau, other killing centres were prepared at Treblinka and Sobibór. This programme was called Aktion Reinhard in honour of the assassinated Heydrich.

  Obergruppenführer Oswald Pohl of the SS Economic-Administrative Main Office (Wirtschaftsverwaltungshauptamt) took on responsibility for supervising and co-ordinating their activities, a difficult task with all the rival Nazi factions. Pohl, a dedicated bureaucrat, was determined to make the whole process as efficient and profitable as possible. All the victims’ valuables had to be collected and accounted for, but the corruption in some of the camps dismayed and horrified Himmler. Gold from their teeth needed to be extracted before the bodies were buried or burned. Clothes, shoes, spectacles, suitcases and underwear were all collected and transported back to the Reich so that they could be reissued to the needy, usually those who had lost everything in a bombing raid. Hair fibre, harvested from victims before they entered the gas chamber, supposedly had better heat-retention properties than wool, so was woven into socks for Luftwaffe aircrew and U-boat personnel, but the bulk of it became mattress stuffing. U-boat crews on their return from the Atlantic would find a crate of watches waiting for them as a present. They soon worked out the source of this largesse.