The Holocaust: A New History

by Laurence Rees

SS Obergruppenführer (Lieutenant General) von dem Bach-Zelewski claimed that he said to Himmler after the killings in Minsk: ‘Reichsführer, those were only a hundred [that had been shot] … Look at the eyes of the men in this Kommando, how deeply shaken they are. These men are finished for the rest of their lives. What kind of followers are we training here?’62

  Himmler gathered the killers around him after the shooting and made a short speech, explaining that ‘He alone bore responsibility before God and the Führer for what had to happen.’ He said that no doubt his men had noticed that he was not happy that this work had to be fulfilled, but it was a necessary task. Himmler also, according to Bach-Zelewski, told his men that they ‘were supposed to look at nature, there was struggle everywhere, not only for humans, but in flora and fauna as well. Those who didn’t want to fight simply perished … we humans were in the right when we defended ourselves against vermin …’63 Himmler added that although the task they had been set was ‘hard’ he ‘could not see any way round it. They must be hard and stand firm. He could not relieve them of this duty, he could not spare them.’64 That evening, Frentz heard Himmler say: ‘You may be wondering why something like this was done. But if we didn’t do this, what would they do to us?’ Frentz says he thought these words were ‘terrible’.65 Himmler gave a further glimpse into his murderous mentality the following month, when he said: ‘Even the brood in the cradle must be crushed like a puffed-up toad. We are living in an iron time and have to sweep with iron brooms. Everyone has therefore to do his duty without asking his conscience first.’66

  After witnessing the murders in Minsk in August, Himmler drove on to a mental hospital at Novinki and almost certainly gave the order for the patients to be killed. It is also likely that during or shortly after this visit he discussed with Arthur Nebe, commander of Einsatzgruppe B and a former head of the Criminal Police, other potential methods of mass murder. Himmler had just witnessed, of course, in dramatic personal terms, the potential psychological problems that shooting Jews at close range could cause.67

  In the weeks following Himmler’s visit, Nebe experimented with different killing techniques with the help of Dr Albert Widmann of the Technical Institute of the Criminal Police. Widmann’s presence in Minsk was a sign of the growing involvement in the killings in the east of the team that had worked on the T4 euthanasia scheme. Widmann, as we have seen, had helped devise the gas chambers in the euthanasia centres.

  It soon became apparent that the killing techniques of T4 could not easily be replicated in the east. The gas chambers in the killing centres in Austria and Germany had used bottled carbon monoxide gas, and it was impractical – partly because of the expense – to transport canisters of carbon monoxide to the various killing locations spread across the occupied Soviet Union. The mobile gas van had been one way round this ‘problem’, but the physical capacity of the gas van was limited. What the Nazis needed was a cheap and simple method of mass killing that spared the killers the psychological stress caused by facing their victims eye to eye.

  In this context, it is a common misconception that gas chambers emerged as the preferred killing method of the Holocaust simply because of the desire of the Nazis to kill Jews in large numbers. That wasn’t the case. During the infamous murders at Babi Yar outside Kiev in September 1941, for example, a combination of soldiers from SS police battalions, Einsatzgruppen and local collaborators murdered nearly 34,000 Jews in just two days by shooting them. This was killing on a scale that no death camp ever matched over a similar period. What gas chambers offered was not a way of killing more people in a single day than shooting, but a method of making the killing easier – for the killers.

  In the summer of 1941 it wasn’t immediately obvious to the Nazis that gas chambers were the most suitable way forward. Widmann and his team also tried – almost unbelievably – imprisoning mental patients in a bunker and blowing them up. The experiment was not a success from the Nazis’ point of view. ‘The sight was atrocious,’ said Wilhelm Jaschke, an officer in Einsatzkommando 8. ‘Some wounded came out of the dugout crawling and crying … Body parts were scattered on the ground and hanging in the trees.’68 After the failure of this attempt to murder people, Widmann, Nebe and their colleagues turned their attention once again to carbon monoxide. Was there a way of creating this gas, so effective in killing the disabled in Germany, without using the canisters? The answer turned out to be all around them – in the exhaust gases expelled from cars and trucks. At a mental hospital in Mogilev in Belarus, the Nazis locked patients into a sealed room and piped in exhaust gases from a car engine. When this turned out not to produce enough poisonous gas, they tried a larger engine from a truck until they succeeded in murdering everyone in the room.

  Experiments in different methods of killing were not only conducted in the occupied Soviet Union. At Auschwitz, in Upper Silesia, the SS devised another way of murdering prisoners. In the early autumn of 1941, Karl Fritzsch, deputy to the commandant, Rudolf Höss, tried killing sick prisoners and Soviet POWs with a powerful cyanide-based chemical in crystallized form that was used to destroy insects. The crystals, stored in sealed tins, turned into poisonous gas once exposed to the air. The chemical was called Zyklon Blausäure – or Zyklon B for short.

  The SS experimented by locking selected prisoners in the basement of Block 11 in Auschwitz. Block 11 was a prison within a prison, the most feared building in the camp, the place where the SS interrogated and tortured prisoners. But just as initial attempts to kill with carbon monoxide exhaust had not been as effective as the Nazis would have liked, so Fritzsch’s first attempt to murder with Zyklon B was not – from his point of view – completely successful.

  August Kowalczyk, a Polish political prisoner in Auschwitz, witnessed how the SS tried to seal the area in Block 11 where the prisoners were to be gassed by blocking it off with soil and sand. But either the sealing process was ineffective or insufficient Zyklon B was used, because the day after the gassing he saw one SS man running back and forth in an agitated way. It turned out that some prisoners were still alive, so more Zyklon B crystals were poured into the makeshift gas chamber. The terrible agonies faced by these unknown Soviet POWs and sick prisoners as they half suffocated during the night in Block 11 can scarcely be imagined.69

  The SS, by this murderous trial and error, established the exact amount of Zyklon B crystals required to murder a set number of prisoners. In the process they discovered that the gas was more effective the hotter the room, and the more people that were crammed inside. They also found out that Block 11 was far from the perfect place to conduct mass murder. The difficulty they faced, as August Kowalczyk witnessed, was ‘how to evacuate the corpses’. Other prisoners had to enter the basement, disentangle the bodies, carry them back upstairs, place them on handcarts and then push them to the other end of the main camp to be burnt in the crematorium. Not only was this a labour-intensive and time-consuming process, but it was impossible to keep the murders secret from the rest of the camp. After giving the matter some thought, the SS realized that they could short-cut the process by turning one of the corpse-storage rooms in the crematorium into a gas chamber. The prisoners could now be murdered next to the ovens that were used to burn their remains.

  These various experiments in the summer and autumn of 1941 were carried out against the background of another campaign of killing that dwarfed the gassings in terms of scale. For during the second half of 1941 the Nazis murdered a staggering number of Soviet prisoners of war. By the end of 1941, out of the 3.35 million Soviet prisoners taken captive by the Germans since the war began on 22 June, more than 2 million were dead. Around 600,000 had been killed as a consequence of the Commissar Order, the rest died of mistreatment of one kind or another, with large numbers starved to death.70 As one historian of this period remarked, if the war had ended at the start of 1942, ‘this programme of mass murder would have stood as the greatest single crime committed by Hitler’s regime.’71

  Georgy Semenyak was one of t
he minority of Soviet POWs captured at the start of the war who survived. He was imprisoned by the Germans in a camp in the open air along with around 80,000 other POWs and survived on the occasional serving of thin soup, which because the Germans did not issue bowls or cups he had to drink from his forage cap. ‘The forage cap is Soviet Army issue,’ he says, ‘and was intended for summer wear, and the thin soup ran straight through the material.’ After a few weeks he was moved to an even larger camp. Here he faced another problem: an infestation of lice. ‘This brought about an epidemic of typhus. And people started to die of typhus. Furthermore, there were so many lice that many people’s hair was so full of lice that it started to move. Not only were people’s hair, clothes and bodies covered with lice, but if you leant over and picked up a handful of sand, the sand moved because of all the lice in it.’72

  The Soviet prisoners tried to capture rats to eat. ‘Sometimes a man would catch a rat by the tail,’ says Georgy Semanyak, ‘and the rat would bend round and bite his hand. They have two incisor teeth – very strong teeth. So the rat is biting the man’s hand, but he won’t let go of it. He hits it to kill it, to get a piece of meat to boil or fry.’ Soviet prisoners were so desperate that they even ate the dead bodies of their comrades. Semanyak reveals that a number of his comrades cut the buttocks, liver and lungs from corpses and then fried and ate them.

  Semanyak also remembers how the Germans played sadistic games on the Soviet POWs, reminiscent of some of the torments they inflicted on Jews: ‘A German approaches a crowd of people and asks: “Who wants some food?” What an idiotic question! When you can see that people haven’t eaten their fill for months on end, how can you ask: “Who wants food?” Everyone wants food. “OK [says the German], then who can eat a whole bucket of porridge?” Someone raises their hand and says: “I can.” “Come forward then.” And the German gives him the bucket of porridge. But of course he can’t eat the whole bucket. But he stands by the bucket and starts eating. He eats a couple of bowlfuls at the most … That’s already pretty exceptional. He can’t possibly eat any more. And then he says: “That’s it!” And the bucket is still three-quarters full. And then they beat him up. So he has to take a beating, but at least he’s eaten.’73

  Hunger dominated the lives of millions who lived under Nazi occupation in the summer and autumn of 1941. True to the intentions they had expressed in secret that spring, the Nazis murdered those they despised not just by the bullet and the gas chamber, but by starvation. This does not mean, however, that the Nazis had the same attitude to killing Soviet POWs as they did to killing Jews. The mental process that allowed them to justify the murders was different. Wolfgang Horn, for example, was a typical soldier in that while he regarded the Soviets ‘as uncivilized, nearly savages’, he thought the Jews were not ‘savages’ but intelligent. Horn had been told that the Jews were ‘ruling Russia’ and were also the reason that the Germans had lost the First World War.74

  It thus followed logically from Nazi ideology that the Jews were the deadlier enemy – they were not mere subhumans, but a ‘race’ that was clever enough to plot secretly against Germany. As a consequence it was necessary to remove – in one way or another – every single one of them. As for the Soviet POWs, if they could work as beasts of burden then they might be allowed to serve the Nazi state. When they became ‘useless eaters’, it was time for them to die. That mentality explains why the mortality rate of Soviet POWs in German hands decreased after Hitler ordered on 31 October 1941 that Soviet prisoners should be employed in large numbers as forced labourers.75 Significantly, he was not prepared at this stage in the war to countenance the use of Jews as workers within the Reich. In the spring of 1941 Arthur Greiser had been so keen to expel Jews from the Warthegau that he had suggested sending 70,000 Jews to Germany as slave labourers, but Hitler had vetoed the idea.76 The idea was to expel them from the Reich, not to take them back as workers.

  Hitler, of course, was not making every decision about the nature of the killing that took place in the wake of the invasion of the Soviet Union. It is even unclear whether Himmler’s instruction to the Einsatzgruppen, to expand the murders in July 1941 in the Soviet Union to include Jewish women and children, was made as a result of a direct order from Hitler. That Hitler knew what the Einsatzgruppen killers were doing, however, is certain. He received direct intelligence detailing how many people they were murdering. On 1 August 1941 the head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Müller, transmitted a message to the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen: ‘The Führer is to be sent regular reports from here about the work of the Einsatzgruppen in the east. For this purpose particularly interesting illustrative material is required, like photographs, posters, pamphlets and other documents.’77 Equally certain is that Hitler approved wholeheartedly of the killings. Later that same month Goebbels wrote in his diary after a meeting with him: ‘We talk about the Jewish problem. The Führer is convinced that the prophecy he made in the Reichstag – that if the Jews manage to provoke a new world war, it would result in the extermination of the Jews – is now coming true … with almost uncanny certainty. In the east the Jews have had to settle their account; in Germany they have partly paid and will have to pay even more in future.’78

  Most probably, in extending the killings in the occupied Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, Himmler knew that he was acting within an overall mandate given to him by Hitler about the fate of the Jews during this war of extermination. He was also aware that Hitler would be informed once the operation was under way, and if the Führer was unhappy then the action could be stopped. Tellingly, it was not.

  This flexibility in the way the extermination process operated can be detected through the whole chain of command. It is likely, for instance, that when Himmler visited the Einsatzgruppen on location in the east in the summer of 1941 he did not often give written orders, but orally encouraged the Einsatzgruppen to extend the killing where and when possible. And when written orders were issued they could be couched in terms that were imprecise. On 1 August, for example, the 2nd SS Cavalry Regiment, operating in the Pripet Marshes in the occupied Soviet Union, received this message which emanated from Himmler: ‘All Jews must be shot. Drive the female Jews into the swamp.’ SS Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel) Magill replied: ‘Driving women and children into the swamp was not successful because the swamp was not so deep that sinking could occur.’79

  If there had been an explicit written order from Himmler circulating among the SS and Einsatzgruppen units, this kind of ambiguous communication would not have occurred. In this case, Himmler did not want to be explicit in writing about killing Jewish women and children and hoped his men would read between the lines. But then this particular unit took the order they had received too literally. Magill correctly understood this instruction to be a euphemistic way of saying ‘kill the women and children’ and so sent his reply explaining that the method of killing he had been told to use – drowning in the swamp – didn’t work.

  We can learn two important things from this brief exchange. First, that SS functionaries thought it necessary to use camouflage language in writing even between themselves. Second, because orders from the top were sometimes given with an element of ambiguity, some junior officers could be uncertain about what exactly was required of them.

  This level of subterfuge even led to other Nazi functionaries trying to stop what they saw as unauthorized killing actions. Hinrich Lohse, for instance, the Reich Commissioner for the Baltic States, wrote on 15 November 1941: ‘I have forbidden the indiscriminate executions of Jews in Libau because they were not carried out in a justifiable way.’ He asked for clarification whether or not there was an ‘instruction to liquidate all Jews in the east’ because he was unable ‘to find such a directive’.80 The reply he received from the head of the political department of the Reich Ministry for Eastern Territories was careful not to refer to such a ‘directive’ in writing, and merely said that Lohse’s concern about the ‘Jewish question’ ought by now to have been �
��clarified’ via ‘oral discussions’.81

  We cannot know for certain exactly why the Nazis administered their policy of mass killing in this way. But the most persuasive explanation is that they were aware that public knowledge of what they were doing could lead to problems for them. The lesson to take from Bishop von Galen’s protests over euthanasia, as far as the Nazis were concerned, would have been to put more effort into keeping killing projects secret. It was not so much that the Nazis would have been concerned about public protests in Germany – although that remained a risk – as the consequences abroad if the rest of the world knew in detail what was happening. Hitler, in particular, would have been concerned about damage to his prestige. He envisaged a life for Germany after the war was won and it would be diplomatically easier for the German head of state if the extermination of the Jews had been kept secret – or at least that he himself had managed to maintain plausible distance from it. Having decided in 1939 to sign a document authorizing the euthanasia scheme, and subsequently seen the way the church attacked the Nazis, Hitler would have been doubly concerned to keep his name out of any other killing actions that might attract negative publicity. While he could stand in front of the Reichstag and predict in principle the extermination of the Jews if there was a world war, that wasn’t the same as revealing in detail how Jewish men, women and children were being slaughtered. Much better, from Hitler’s perspective, to make sure that no order in his name about this sensitive project ever existed. He was well aware that written orders could come back and haunt the sender. That is one reason he remarked in October 1941, ‘it’s much better to meet than to write, at least when some matter of capital importance is at issue.’82

  But no sophisticated state can function if every order is merely spoken, so on occasion it was necessary to refer to the killings in writing. As a result a whole range of euphemisms came to be associated with the destruction of the Jews. ‘Special handling’, for example, was one way in documents of referring to murder. Equally, the term ‘Final Solution’ came to mean the plan to exterminate the Jews, even though the words had initially meant only their deportation. It still held this original meaning in a document signed by Göring for Heydrich, dated 31 July 1941. ‘To supplement the task that was assigned to you,’ the document read, ‘on 24 January 1939, which dealt with the solution of the Jewish problem by emigration and evacuation in the most suitable way, I hereby charge you to submit a comprehensive blueprint of the organizational, subject-related and material preparatory measures for the execution of the intended final solution of the Jewish question.’83 We know that the ‘final solution’ mentioned in this document was not the mass extermination of the Jews in the death camps, because earlier discussions between Heydrich and Göring about a possible ‘blueprint’ for the ‘final solution’ can be traced to March 1941, at a time when the Nazis planned to deport the Jews east after the war. So by far the most convincing explanation of this July 1941 exchange is that Heydrich was still working on a plan to deport the Jews into the furthest reaches of the occupied Soviet Union, with the vast population movements necessary not taking place until the war in the east was over. This interpretation also fits with the thrust of previous Nazi wartime policy against the Jews, which was one of deportation with genocidal consequences in the medium to long term. Just as the Jews sent to Nisko in the General Government at the start of the war had died in large numbers of starvation, disease and other mistreatment, and the Jews would have perished over time had they been sent to Madagascar, so the fate of the Jews sent to the wastelands of the occupied Soviet Union would have been similarly catastrophic.