The Holocaust: A New History

by Laurence Rees

  Dr Karl Brandt, who personally witnessed the gassing at Brandenburg, did not mention any of these advantages for the Nazis when talking about the decision to gas patients at his trial after the war. Instead, he claimed that he had talked to Hitler about the choice between killing by injection and by gas and Hitler had asked, ‘Which is the most humane way?’47 For Brandt the answer was ‘clear’ – gassing. A number of other Nazis who were aware of this method of murder later claimed that they thought the same. They fantasized that the killers were being kinder to their victims by sparing them the torment of anticipating their own deaths, and that by deceiving them until the moment that gas came from the pipes above them, they were demonstrating an element of humanity. But the idea that death in a gas chamber was necessarily less horrific than death by any other method was a lie, as subsequent testimony from those involved in the gassing at the extermination camps makes clear.48

  Dr Brandt also maintained that the ‘experiment’ of killing the disabled by gas was ‘just one example of [what happens] when major advances in medical history are being made. There are cases of an operation being looked on at first with contempt, but then later on one learned it and carried it out.’49 And so, believing that he was part of a ‘major advance in medical history’ and with a ‘good conscience’, Brandt pushed forward with the adult euthanasia scheme.

  No doctor was compelled to participate in this project. Those who objected could excuse themselves – for instance, by saying they were too ‘weak’ for the task – but the majority of those who were asked went along with the scheme with various degrees of enthusiasm. Some made the argument that by killing the most severely disabled they released more funding for other patients. Others subscribed to the official belief that the role of the doctor in the Nazi state was to look after the wellbeing as much of society as of the individual patient – especially at a time when the country was at war. Whatever excuse the doctors gave themselves, they knew that without their participation this murderous scheme could not function. Medical professionals were central to the whole process – from initially selecting the patients to die, to reassuring the patients as they prepared to enter the gas chamber, to turning on the gas valve, to certifying that the patients were dead, and to inventing fake causes of death to write on the official documentation that was sent to the relatives of the deceased.

  The Nazis created six euthanasia centres, five in Germany – Brandenburg, Grafeneck, Bernburg, Hadamar and Sonnenstein – and one in Austria at Hartheim, close to Linz. Typical was the one at Sonnenstein, on a hill in the suburbs outside the town of Pirna, not far from Dresden. Built originally as a fortress, the building was turned into a mental hospital in the nineteenth century. In 1940 work began on converting several rooms in the basement into a killing facility. One small room was made into a gas chamber and disguised as a shower room, with an airtight door linking it to a mortuary. Selected patients were taken in buses from other mental institutions in the area and on arrival at Sonnenstein told to enter the basement to take a shower, as part of the admissions procedure into the new hospital. Once the patients were in the fake shower room the gas valve was turned on and they were murdered. After they had been gassed and pronounced dead, their bodies were taken into the mortuary and any gold fillings or gold teeth in their mouths were removed. The bodies were then moved next door into a room that contained two cremation furnaces made by the Berlin firm of Heinrich Kori GmbH. The corpses were placed on a steel frame – normally two at a time – and pushed inside the furnace. Finally, their ashes were thrown out at the back of the building on to a hillside. During the operation of the Sonnenstein killing centre, from June 1940 to August 1941, an estimated 14,751 people were murdered in this way.50

  The similarities between the process of killing at the euthanasia centres in the Reich in 1940 and the death camps in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1942 were many and varied, as we shall see. Not only were the techniques of killing much the same, but so were a number of the personnel. Present at the first experimental killing at Brandenburg euthanasia centre in January 1940 were two men who in different ways would help shape the Holocaust. The first was a medical professional, Dr Irmfried Eberl, who was the director of the Brandenburg killing centre. He was a twenty-nine-year-old Austrian, born in Bregenz and educated at Innsbruck University. Eberl’s life was devoted to the Nazi cause, from the trivial – he sported a Hitler moustache and wore his hair slicked back – to the criminal – he was intimately involved in the murders conducted in Brandenburg. Eberl ‘always considered’ it ‘his responsibility’51 to turn on the gas valve, according to the testimony of his deputy, Aquilin Ullrich. Another member of the staff at Brandenburg, who was a keen gardener, said that Dr Eberl had told him that just as ‘all weeds needed to be destroyed’ so ‘people not worthy to live ought to disappear.’52 A different T4 official said that Dr Eberl was so enthusiastic about his task that he ‘wanted to gas all the world and his brother’.53

  Dr Eberl believed, like Dr Brandt, that through his work he was furthering medical science. The brains of children killed at Brandenburg were sent to Professor Julius Hallervorden, head of the Neuropathology Department of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research in Berlin. Eberl’s notebook records that Professor Hallervorden even visited Brandenburg and took part in autopsies conducted at the killing centre.54 Hallervorden subsequently said at the Nuremberg trials that ‘those brains offered wonderful material’ and ‘it really wasn’t my concern where they came from …’55

  Eberl’s career was clearly on an upward trajectory within the Nazi state. It is hard to imagine any other circumstances in which a junior doctor like Eberl could have contributed so much to the researches of a famous neurologist like Professor Hallervorden. Dr Eberl, just like Dr Widmann, discovered that killing could be a way to swift advancement.

  The second person who witnessed the gassing experiment that January, and who would later participate in the Holocaust, could not have been more different from Dr Eberl in age, education and life experience. Christian Wirth was fifty-five years old when he was appointed administrative director of the euthanasia centre in Brandenburg. As a young man he had trained as a carpenter before becoming a policeman. He won an Iron Cross in the First World War and after Germany’s defeat joined the Nazi party while still pursuing his career in the police force. Immensely tough and practical, Wirth was a fearsome figure. His behaviour was so infamous that he came to be known as the ‘wild Christian’. Once involved with T4, he had no qualms about participating in the killing process directly – he once personally shot four women patients who had been sent to a euthanasia centre and were thought to have typhus. He told those who worked for him that the ‘mentally ill’ were a ‘burden on the state’ and so had to be eliminated. One of those under Wirth’s command described him simply as ‘a beast’.56 Franz Stangl, another policeman who joined the adult euthanasia programme and who would later go on to command a death camp, described Wirth as ‘a gross and florid man. My heart sank when I met him.’ Wirth spoke with ‘awful verbal cruelty’: ‘He spoke of “doing away with useless mouths” and said that “sentimental slobber” about such people “made him puke”.’57 Wirth and Eberl, who worked together at Brandenburg killing centre in early 1940, would meet again two years later in the occupied east in even more appalling circumstances.

  The disabled were murdered not just in Germany and Austria but in Nazi-occupied Poland as well. In the autumn of 1939 members of the Eimann Special Guard, an SS unit from Danzig, together with the Einsatzgruppen, shot thousands of mental patients in the territory of the newly Germanized area of Danzig/West Prussia. Those targeted were not just unfit for work – every Polish or Jewish patient was killed regardless of the severity of their illness.58

  By early 1940 a new method of killing the disabled was in operation in Poland. A unit under the command of Herbert Lange, a thirty-year-old SS officer, used a mobile killing machine – a van with the words ‘Kaiser’s Coffee Company’ written on the
side. Once selected patients had been locked inside the van, bottled carbon monoxide was pumped in from outside. Lange’s van travelled up and down the roads of Poland and the borderland with Germany murdering several thousand disabled.59 The gas van had an obvious advantage for the Nazis over a fixed gas installation since it could travel to the location where the patients were hospitalized. There were, however, equally obvious disadvantages with this new killing method. There was a risk, for example, of the van becoming notorious – since no one who climbed into the back ever reappeared alive. But as long as the van was not overused in one particular area then secrecy could be preserved.

  Within Germany, to begin with, disabled Jews were selected in much the same way as other patients – the doctors focused on clinical criteria as well as whether the patient could do useful work. But that changed in April 1940 when Herbert Linden, a doctor involved in ‘race hygiene’ and one of the functionaries supporting the T4 campaign, asked local authorities to reveal the names of all their Jewish mental patients. Every one of these patients was then selected to be killed.60

  The outbreak of war also had dire consequences for Jews within the concentration camps that had been established on German territory before the conflict. While there is no evidence of an order from above calling on the Jews in the concentration camps to be murdered en masse, the SS within the camps knew that the febrile atmosphere of the war meant they could act against the Jews more or less as they wished. The arrival of a number of Polish Jews within the system only exacerbated the desire of the SS to torment the Jewish inmates. At Sachsenhausen outside Berlin the SS let their sadistic imagination run wild – thirsty Jewish prisoners were made to swallow their own urine, and those who were hungry had to beat each other up for food.61 At Buchenwald near Weimar, more than twenty Jews were taken out of the camp and shot in November 1939, in revenge for an attempt on Hitler’s life that had taken place in Munich the day before.62

  The war also led to greater abuse of non-Jewish inmates in the concentration camps. In January 1940, for instance, Rudolf Höss, then an SS officer at Sachsenhausen, ordered 800 prisoners to stand for hours in the freezing cold and wind on the roll-call square. The senior prisoner – the camp elder – begged Höss to have mercy, but to no avail. The prisoners had to stand and suffer. Altogether in 1940 around 14,000 prisoners died within the concentration camp system. In 1938, the year of greatest fatalities before the war, 1,300 had lost their lives. The war thus brought more than a tenfold increase in the death rate.63

  The war also led to an expansion in the overall concentration camp system, as the Nazis opened new camps in occupied territory. On 2 September 1939, the day after the Germans had invaded Poland, a concentration camp was established at the town of Sztutowo (Stutthof to the Germans) near Danzig. But it wasn’t until the spring of 1940 that preparations were made to open on Polish soil what would become the most infamous camp within the whole Nazi system – Auschwitz.

  When Rudolf Höss, transferred from Sachsenhausen as the newly appointed commandant of the camp, arrived at Auschwitz in April 1940, he had no idea that the facility he was to create and run would become the site of the largest mass murder in the history of the world. That’s because he had been ordered to build not an extermination camp, but a more extreme version of Dachau – the ‘model’ camp run by Theodor Eicke in which Höss had originally trained. The town of Auschwitz, Oświęcim in Polish, was in Upper Silesia, a part of Poland that the Nazis wanted to Germanize, and the purpose of Höss’s new camp was to strike terror into the local Polish population.

  This camp, the original Auschwitz, was established next to the Sola river close to Auschwitz town, and was based around a collection of red-brick former Polish Army barracks. From the beginning the death rate at Auschwitz was much higher than in pre-war Dachau – more than half of the 20,000 Poles first sent to the camp were dead by the start of 1942.

  Jerzy Bielecki, a Polish political prisoner, was on the first transport into the camp in June 1940. He remembers how the SS guards beat the prisoners all the way from the railway station to the gate of the camp: ‘There was a young boy standing next to me, maybe he was sixteen – fifteen even – and he was crying, tears were falling. And his head was cracked and blood was dripping on his face … We were afraid, we didn’t know where we were. It seemed to me that we found ourselves in hell. You cannot describe it any other way. And it turned out that this was hell.’64 Bielecki, who had been sent to Auschwitz because the Germans believed that he was a member of the Polish resistance, was put to work along with the other prisoners, building the camp.

  Jerzy Bielecki also recalls the brutality of the Kapos – German criminals sent to Auschwitz from Sachsenhausen – who supervised their work: ‘I got used to seeing death, beatings and maltreatment,’ he says. After ‘three or four months I got used to that sight’. When he was part of a construction ‘commando’ he witnessed a Kapo, who was angry at the work of one of the prisoners, take a spade and ‘cut his neck so that blood spouted and the spade was immersed to halfway in his neck. I’ll never forget this … I see it in my dreams.’65

  Only a small percentage of those sent to Auschwitz in 1940 were Jewish, but just as in camps within the pre-war borders of the Reich, Jews who were imprisoned in Auschwitz were liable to suffer appallingly. Kazimierz Ablin, who was also on the first transport into Auschwitz in June 1940, remembers that the Germans ‘fished out’ any Jews from among the prisoners, along with ‘priests and monks’ who ‘were treated almost as badly as the Jews’.66

  Wilhelm Brasse, who arrived in Auschwitz in August 1940, recalls that the Germans selected Jews and Catholic priests and told them to ‘chant religious songs and hymns’. They would ‘beat the priests and then the Jews, and would yell at them that they were lazy because they didn’t chant loud enough. The impression this made on me was just terrifying. I’ve never imagined anything like this [could happen].’67

  From the day the camp opened a variety of techniques were used to torment the prisoners. Punishments were not just cruel – a common one was to tie a prisoner’s hands behind his back and then suspend him by his wrists from a pole – but often arbitrary. Every inmate knew that they were at permanent risk of a beating, or worse, and there was little they could do to prevent it. To exacerbate all of this suffering, the Germans insisted that life be conducted at speed. The sight of all the prisoners scurrying around the camp reminded August Kowalczyk, who was sent to Auschwitz at the end of 1940, of ‘an anthill that someone had kicked. The anthill opens and then you see the ants running in all directions.’68

  In May 1940, just days after Höss had arrived at Auschwitz, Himmler outlined his vision for the whole occupied east. This memo, which Himmler intended to submit to Hitler, was entitled – rather modestly given the sweeping nature of the proposals – ‘Some Thoughts on the Treatment of the Alien Population in the East’.69 A large section of the memo dealt with Himmler’s plans to conduct a search among the Polish population in order to find children that were ‘racially first class’ and who ‘came up to our requirements’. These children would then be transported to Germany and raised as German citizens. Himmler believed this policy would not just allow the Nazis access to more German ‘blood’ but deprive the Poles of the potential for a leadership class. As for the rest of the Polish children, they would receive the most basic education – taught only to count ‘up to 500’ and to write their own names. ‘I consider it unnecessary to teach reading,’ said Himmler. More important, he maintained, was that Polish children should learn that it was ‘God’s commandment to be obedient to the Germans and to be honest, hard working and well behaved’. When they grew up, these children would become part of a ‘leaderless labouring class’ that the Germans could use in ‘road building, quarries’ and ‘construction’.

  Himmler also said in his memo that the idea of ‘physically exterminating a people’ was ‘fundamentally unGerman and impossible’ – a view that he would change once the Holocaust began. But even
though he would not, for the moment, countenance mass murder, his proposal for the Jews was still radical. ‘I hope’, he said, ‘to see the term “Jew” completely eliminated through the possibility of a large-scale emigration of all Jews to Africa or to some colony.’ He obviously had in mind something like the Madagascar plan which, as we have seen, the Poles themselves had been seriously considering just before the war. It was a striking departure from the policy expressed by Heydrich in the autumn of 1939, which was one of deporting the Jews to the eastern part of the new German Empire.

  The reason Himmler felt able to float the idea of sending the Jews to Africa was because of what was happening elsewhere. By 15 May 1940, the date of the document, the German Army was five days into a major offensive against France and the Low Countries. While it was not yet certain if the Wehrmacht would achieve victory, the assumption underlying Himmler’s vision of relocating the Jews to Africa was that once the Germans had triumphed and had occupied France, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, then Britain would make peace. This, in turn, would allow the Germans to use merchant ships, mostly captured from their opponents, to transport the Jews south, either to Madagascar – which the Germans would now lay claim to as former French-controlled territory – or to some other African country.

  At first sight, especially given what happened later, it sounds like a fantasy. But the trail of documents the Nazis left through the summer of 1940 demonstrates that this potential ‘solution’ to the ‘Jewish problem’ was taken seriously. Just over a week after the defeat of France, on 3 July, Franz Rademacher, head of Jewish Affairs in the German Foreign Office, wrote a memo in which he said, ‘France must make the island of Madagascar available for the solution of the Jewish question.’70 Nine days later, Hans Frank remarked that there would be ‘no more transports of Jews into the General Government’.71 This was because the plan now was to send ‘the whole pack of Jews’ to an ‘African or American colony’ and that ‘Madagascar is being considered, to be ceded by France for this purpose.’