by Yitzhak Arad
The bodies of victims brought to Treblinka in transports arriving after the body-burning began were taken directly from the gas chambers to the roasters and were not buried in the ditches. These bodies did not burn as well as those removed from the ditches and had to be sprayed with fuel before they would burn.
The body-burning went on day and night. The corpses were transferred and arranged on the roasters during the day; at nightfall they were lit, and they burned throughout the night. When the fire went out, there were only skeletons or scattered bones on the roasters, and piles of ash underneath. Another special prisoner team, known as the “ash group” (Aschkolonne), had the task of collecting the ash and removing the remains of the charred bones from the grill and placing them on tin sheets. Round wooden sticks were then used to break the bones into small fragments. These were then run through a tightly woven screen made of metal wire; those bone fragments which did not pass through the screen were returned for further smashing. Unburned bones which proved difficult to fragment were returned to the roaster and reignited with a new pile of bodies.
The camp command was confronted with the problem of disposing of the large piles of ash and bits of bone that remained after the process was completed. Attempts to mix the ash with dirt and dust proved unsuccessful as a means of concealing the ash. Ultimately it was decided to dump the ash and bits of bone into the ditches that had previously held the bodies and to cover them with a thick layer of sand and dirt. The ash was scattered in the pits in several layers, interspersed with layers of sand. The top 2 meters of the pit were filled with earth.
A few prisoners who worked inside the pits from which the corpses were removed and who were engaged in cleaning the pits of solid human remains and scattering the ashes decided to leave some evidence of the Germans’ mass murders. Abraham Goldfarb relates:
. . . we secretly placed in the walls of the graves whole skeletons and we wrote on scraps of paper what the Germans were doing at Treblinka. We put the scraps of paper into bottles which we placed next to the skeletons. Our intention was that if one day someone looked for traces of the Nazis’ crimes, they could indeed be found. . . .14
In the Lower Camp the body-burning could be both seen and felt. Occasionally the prisoners there would see the shovel scoop raised high with corpses inside. Smoke from the roasters often blanketed the Lower Camp; the smoke, and the smell of charred flesh, caused the prisoners breathing difficulties. Moreover, the fire and billowing smoke from the roaster could be seen for miles around. They were evident even at Treblinka Penal Camp 1, located 3 kilometers away. A prisoner at “Treblinka 1” described what he saw:
The spring winds brought with them the smell of burning bodies from the nearby extermination camp. We breathed in the stench of smoldering corpses. . . . We heard the clatter of the excavators for days and nights on end. . . . At night we gazed at skies red from the flames. Sometimes you could also see tongues of flame rising into the night15
The burning of the bodies, the scattering of ashes, and the refilling of the ditches went on for months. The mass graves, emptied of the victims’ bodies and refilled with the victims’ ashes and bits of their bones, were covered with a thick layer of earth. The cremation of the corpses in the death camps of Operation Reinhard continued until the last days of activity there.
In Sobibor, which was the first Operation Reinhard camp to go ahead with the cremating, the number of corpses that had to be unearthed was much smaller than in Belzec and Treblinka. Only one-third of the 250,000 victims in this camp had been killed and buried there before the cremating began. Those who were gassed there afterward, in the period between October 1942 and October 1943, were taken directly from the gas chambers to the cremating sites. The ample time allowed for the cremation and the relatively small number of victims enabled the cover-up in Sobibor to be carried out without haste.
In Belzec and Treblinka the situation was different. In Belzec, all 600,000 victims had been buried already when the cremation started. During a period of four to five months they had to be unearthed and burned. This was the sole reason for the continued existence of the camp, along with its entire personnel, until the spring of 1943, in spite of the fact that the last transports with Jews had arrived and were liquidated there at the end of November 1942. The fact that during the cremation operation no transports arrived made it easier for camp authorities to accomplish their task.
In Treblinka, the camp command faced the most difficult task—unearthing over 700,000 corpses and cremating them while at the same time continuing to receive new transports with Jews for extermination. In this camp the entire cremation operation lasted about four months, from April to the end of July 1943. To accomplish the task, the cremating took place simultaneously in a number of sites and the largest number of Jewish prisoner-workers were put to work in the various required stages.
The vast number of corpses and the limited available time were the main reasons that open-space “simple” crematoria were used in the Operation Reinhard death camps. The type of enclosed crematorium used in Auschwitz, for example, would have been totally inadequate for the task that the commanders of Operation Reinhard faced. Constructing crematoria with large ovens in permanent structures required months of labor, special equipment, and skilled craftsmen—none of which were available in Operation Reinhard camps. Moreover, the system of burning corpses in ovens inside buildings was comparatively slow. Auschwitz’s modern crematorium, with eight furnaces, could burn approximately 1,750 bodies in a day. To speed things up, four such crematoria were put into operation there. At Belzec and Treblinka, in contrast, a system had to be found to cremate 150,000 to 200,000 corpses within one month and 5,000 to 7,000 in one day. By using excavators to unearth the corpses of the victims, employing Jewish prisoners in large numbers, and operating simply built, huge, open-spaced crematoria, which were activated in the shortest possible time, the Operation Reinhard staff was able to complete its mission of cremation and the erasure of their despicable crimes.
PART TWO
LIFE IN THE SHADOW OF DEATH
24
Portraits of the Perpetrators
The German extermination machine, which geared itself to the concentration and transport of the Jews of Poland and other European countries to Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, included in its ranks thousands of people—government officials and SS personnel of the highest ranks in the Third Reich, who made the decisions and published the orders to transport the Jews to the extermination camps; local administrative and police personnel, whose job was to round up the people and have them brought to the trains; the executives and workers of the Reich railway; and the security personnel who accompanied the deportees to the camps.
The suffering and hardships that the hundreds of thousands of Jewish deportees experienced while still on their journey to the camps were the direct result of the attitude and treatment that was meted out to them by the Germans and the collaborators of other nationalities, who were all part of this very complicated network. But the most excruciating experiences that the deportees went through, in the final hours of their lives, when they finally reached their destination, were determined above all by the local SS personnel, and especially by the commanders. This was likewise true with regard to the daily routine set for the prisoners who were kept on in these camps.
Sources and pertinent material on the daily lives of the SS men in the Operation Reinhard camps, on their personal feelings about the tasks that they carried out—the murder of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children—and on their relationship to their innocent victims are almost nonexistent. SS men, who were more than anxious to cover up their past, were not about to sit down and record their memoirs. Even at the trials at which some of them were forced to attest to their deeds, very little was brought out about their personal feelings and experiences. A notable exception in this regard is Franz Stangl. As a result of the conversations that Gita Sereni conducted with him while he was under arrest, Stangl also ex
posed his thoughts to her, and Sereni has recorded them in her book, Into the Darkness. Otherwise, the primary sources on the behavior of the SS men in the camps and their actual relationship to their victims are the testimonies of those who survived the camps, as well as some material and testimonies that were exposed during the trials of the war criminals who served in these camps.
Members of Operation Reinhard
Among themselves, the prisoners used to nickname the various SS men, and these names were also indicative of their reputations and activities in the camp. These nicknames were also a type of code to be used as a warning when a particular SS man happened into the area.
Christian Wirth, Inspector of the
Operation Reinhard Death Camps
Christian Wirth was born in Oberbalzheim, Württemberg, in November 1885. During World War I he served as a noncommissioned officer on the western front, distinguished himself in battle, and was highly decorated. After the Nazi party came to power in Germany, he served in the Württemberg police force, and in 1939 he attained the rank of commissar in the Stuttgart criminal police. At the end of 1939, along with other police officers, he was appointed to the euthanasia program at the Grafeneck Psychiatric Clinic in Württemberg. Shortly afterward, he was transferred to the euthanasia institution at Brandenburg an der Havel in Prussia as administrative director. (The medical director was Dr. Irmfried Eberl, the first commander of Treblinka.) In December 1939 or January 1940, the first known gassing experiment using carbon monoxide was carried out in this institution. The victims were twenty or thirty German mental patients. It was there also that the idea of disguising the gas chambers as shower rooms was introduced.
Wirth’s involvement with killing Jews can be traced to September 1940, when crippled and insane Jews were brought to the Brandenburg euthanasia institution to be gassed.1
In mid-1940, Wirth was appointed as a kind of roving director or inspector of a dozen euthanasia institutions throughout the Third Reich. In this capacity he often visited the euthanasia institution in Hartheim, where some discipline problems had arisen. Stangl, who was in Hartheim at that time, said:
Wirth was a gross and florid man. My heart sank when I met him. He stayed at Hartheim for several days that time and often came back. Whenever he was there he addressed us daily at lunch. And here it was again this awful verbal crudity: when he spoke about the necessity for this euthanasia operation he was not speaking in humane or scientific terms . . . he laughed. He spoke of doing away with useless mouths, and that sentimental slobber about such people made him “puke.”2
In the middle of 1941, Wirth was active in the euthanasia Aktionen carried out in the western areas of Poland annexed to the Third Reich. His activities during this period are obscure until his appearance in Belzec at the end of 1941.
The experience gained by Wirth in the euthanasia institutions, his enthusiasm for National Socialism, as well as his innate cruelty were all put to use when he assumed command of Belzec and later was appointed inspector of the Operation Reinhard death camps. Not only was he the inspector of the death camps and, in this capacity, the actual commander, but it was he who also developed the entire system of the extermination machine in these camps.
SS Scharführer Franz Suchomel, who served under Wirth’s command, testified:
From my activity in the camps of Treblinka and Sobibor, I remember that Wirth in brutality, meanness, and ruthlessness could not be surpassed. We therefore called him “Christian the Terrible” or “The Wild Christian.” The Ukrainian guardsmen called him “Stuka” [a kind of dive-bomber]. The brutality of Wirth was so great that I personally see it as a perversity. I remember particularly that on each occasion, Wirth lashed Ukrainian guardsmen with the whip he always kept. . . .3
Human lives, and particularly Jews, had no value in Wirth’s eyes. He called the Jews “garbage.” Stangl described Wirth’s arrival in Sobibor during the final construction stage and the gassing experiment carried out there:
Wirth stood in front of the building [of the gas chamber] wiping his sweat off his cap and fuming. [Hermann] Michel [the sergeant-major of the camp] told me later that [Wirth] had suddenly appeared, looked around the gas chambers on which they were still working, and said: “Right, we’ll try it out right now with those twenty-five working Jews. Get them up here.” They marched our twenty-five Jews up there and just pushed them in and gassed them. Michel said Wirth behaved like a lunatic, hit out at his own staff with his whip to drive them on. . . .4
It was Wirth who introduced the regime of terror and death in the Operation Reinhard camps and influenced the daily life—and sufferings—of the Jewish prisoners there more than any other commander. The day-to-day selections among the prisoners and the decision who among them would be sent to death were based mainly on his guidelines. Stangl testified: “In relation to the working Jews, Wirth constantly stressed that those who do no work had to be taken away. Each leader of a working group and each camp commander could send to the Lazarett every prisoner who did not work or behave satisfactorily.”5
Wirth’s guidelines and policy toward the prisoners gave each SS man in the camps the right to do anything he wanted to the Jews there. It allowed a free hand to the wild and sadistic character of many of the SS men in the Operation Reinhard camps.
The survivors mention Wirth very little. This is explained by the fact that no prisoners survived from the period when Wirth commanded Belzec, and his presence in Sobibor and Treblinka was very infrequent. As officially announced by SS authorities, he did not survive the war. He was killed in Italy by partisans in the Trieste area.
Franz Stangl, Commander of Treblinka
Franz Stangl was born on March 26, 1908, in Altminster, Austria. Although he was the commander of Treblinka, he had very little direct contact with the people he had sent to their death or with the Jewish prisoners; he was seen only on rare occasions. He ran the camp and supervised the extermination actions that were carried out through his assistant, Kurt Franz, and the other SS men under his command. In his testimony, Jacob Wiernik mentions several times that while the various structures were being built in Treblinka, Stangl would come and inquire about the work that was being done. Wiernik writes: “When the new gas chambers were completed, the Hauptsturmführer [Stangl] came and remarked to the SS men who were with him: ‘Endlich is der Judenstadt fertig’ (Finally the Jewish city is ready).”
Stangl regarded his job as commander of a death camp as he would have viewed any other job. He wanted to succeed at the task and mission that had been assigned to him, that is, to eliminate the people who had been sent to the camp and to dispose of their property in accordance with the directives that he had received from his commanders, and to make certain that this be carried out quickly and efficiently. “That was my profession. I enjoyed it. It fulfilled me. And yes, I was ambitious about that, I won’t deny it.”6 He wanted the camp that he commanded to look attractive, so he ordered the paths paved and flowers planted along the sides of Seidel Street, near headquarters, and near the SS living quarters.
Kurt Franz
Franz Stangl
Christian Wirth
Odilo Globocnik
He accepted the extermination of the Jews as a fact. About his attitude to the extermination activities and the victims, he said:
To tell the truth, one did become used to it . . . they were cargo. I think it started the day I first saw the Totenlager [extermination area] in Treblinka. I remember Wirth standing there, next to the pits full of blue-black corpses. It had nothing to do with humanity—it could not have. It was a mass—a mass of rotting flesh. Wirth said, “What shall we do with this garbage?” I think unconsciously that started me thinking of them as cargo. . . . I rarely saw them as individuals. It was always a huge mass. I sometimes stood on the wall and saw them in the “tube”—they were naked, packed together, running, being driven with whips. . . .7
This attitude toward the victims—absolute apathy toward them, seeing them as inhuman, seein
g them as a cargo that must be destroyed—was what characterized Stangl’s image and activity in the camp. This apathetic attitude also expressed itself in Stangl’s noninterference in what happened in the camp and his withdrawal from any contact with the prisoners, even with regard to the most cruel acts that were perpetrated upon them. This outlook, that the Jews are not within the realm of humanity, was a complete identification with the Nazi racial ideology and in this respect Stangl was the perfect embodiment of and instrument for the German extermination machine. In justification of his activities in Treblinka, he said:
What I had to do while I continued my efforts to get out was to limit my own actions to what I—in my own conscience—could answer for. At police training school they taught us that the definition of a crime must meet four requirements: there has to be a subject, an object, an action, and intent. If any of these four elements is missing, then we are not dealing with a punishable offense. . . . I could apply this to my own situation—if the subject was the government, the “object” the Jews, and the action the gassing, I could tell myself that for me, the fourth element, “intent,” (I called it free will) was missing.8