The Holocaust: A New History

by Laurence Rees

  The answer is that men like Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler and Heydrich did not see this as a contradiction at all. They believed that the Jews behind the front line were just as much an enemy as the Red Army soldiers the Wehrmacht was fighting outside Moscow. Perhaps more so, since the Jews had already demonstrated during the First World War, so Hitler and his colleagues maintained, that they could undermine morale at home and ‘stab’ the German Army ‘in the back’.

  As Hermann Göring said: ‘This is the great racial war. In the final analysis it is about whether the German and Aryan prevails here, or whether the Jew rules the world …’27 Göring was parroting Hitler’s core belief. Hitler had always maintained that this war was not a conflict like any other, but an existential struggle for the future existence of the German nation. ‘We are clear in our minds that the war can only end with either the eradication of the Aryan peoples, or with Jewry vanishing from Europe,’ said Hitler in a speech in Berlin on 30 January 1942, the anniversary of his appointment as Chancellor. ‘I have already spoken out about this on 1 September 1939 in the German Reichstag.’ Hitler had not, of course, made this ‘prophecy’ on 1 September 1939 but seven months before, on 30 January. He found it convenient to redate it to 1 September because that was the day the German Army had invaded Poland and brought about the war. For Hitler the link between the war and the fate of the Jews transcended any desire he might have had for historical accuracy. ‘The outcome of this war will be the annihilation of Jewry,’ he continued on 30 January 1942. ‘This time, the genuine old Jewish law will apply for the first time: “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth!” And the more the fighting expands, the more – world Jewry may mark these words – anti-Semitism will spread. It will find nourishment in every prison camp, in every family whose members are informed about why they have to make their sacrifices at the end of the day. And the moment will come when the most evil enemy of the world of all time will be finished with for at least a millennium.’28

  Those who had attended the Wannsee conference, held just ten days before Hitler’s speech, would thus have been well aware of the importance of their work – they were playing a part in confronting ‘the most evil enemy of the world’. Not that the Wannsee conference resulted in a sudden outburst of activity far away from the serenity of the villa at Am Grossen Wannsee. While the gas vans continued to operate at Chełmno, and the first fixed gas chambers built to kill Jews remained under construction at Bełżec, at Auschwitz there was no action taken in January to construct new killing facilities. The crematorium in the main camp, which had been the location for experimental killings in the autumn, carried on functioning as an improvised gas chamber.

  By now, in addition to selected Soviet prisoners of war, Jews from the local area who had been identified as unfit to work were also dying in the Auschwitz crematorium. No one knows for sure when the first transport of these Jews arrived, but it was some time between the autumn of 1941 and the start of 1942. Their deaths marked a change in the function of Auschwitz, as these Jews were never formally admitted to the camp as prisoners, but were taken to the gas chamber directly from the surrounding district.

  Józef Paczyński, a Polish political prisoner, witnessed how a group of male Jews were killed in the crematorium in the main camp. He worked in the SS administrative building directly across from the crematorium, and managed to climb up to the attic, push aside a roof tile and see what was happening below. ‘They [the SS] were very polite with these people,’ he says. ‘ “Please take your clothes, pack your things.” And these people undressed, and then they made them go in [to the crematorium] and then the doors were locked behind them. Then an SS man crawled up on to the flat roof of the building. He put on a gas mask, he opened a hatch [in the roof] and he dropped the powder in and he shut the hatch. When he did this, in spite of the fact that these walls were thick, you could hear a great scream.’29 Because of the screaming, the SS started up ‘two motorcycles’ to try and drown out the noise, but still he heard ‘people yelling for fifteen or twenty minutes and becoming weaker and weaker. If someone had seen me I would have been gassed as well.’30

  Hans Stark, a member of the SS at Auschwitz, told interrogators after the war that in October 1941 he had been present at just such a killing. Indeed, he had been ‘ordered’ to ‘pour Zyklon B into the opening’ himself as ‘only one medical orderly had shown up.’ He said that since the Zyklon B ‘was in granular form, it trickled down over the people as it was being poured in. They then started to cry out terribly, for they now knew what was happening to them … After some time had passed … the gas chamber was opened. The dead lay higgledy-piggledy all over the place. It was a dreadful sight.’31

  The gas chamber in the main camp at Auschwitz was, as we have seen, improvised within a mortuary in the crematorium. The site always presented problems for the SS of noise, secrecy and capacity. These were issues that Christian Wirth, late of the adult euthanasia scheme and now overseeing the construction of the gas chambers at Bełżec, would have hoped to avoid.

  Since Bełżec would become the model for the other specialized death camps – Sobibór and Treblinka – it is worth spending time examining the thinking behind its construction. In conception, Bełżec was very different from the place that would become the most infamous of the camps – Auschwitz Birkenau. Bełżec, unlike Auschwitz, was small. The camp was roughly square, with each side about 300 yards long, and with one side built parallel to the nearby railway line. Within that space the camp was divided into two. The area nearest to the railway contained a roll-call square, barracks where the arriving Jews undressed, accommodation for guards and a small Jewish workforce, and a storage area for the goods stolen from the Jews. The second part of the camp was the place of extermination. This was separated by a fence from the arrival area and connected to it by a narrow passageway known as the ‘tube’. Within the extermination section of the camp was space for bodies to be burnt and buried, as well as the three gas chambers themselves. These had been placed in wooden huts disguised as shower blocks and – in an attempt to seal the space hermetically – the double walls had been filled with sand and lined with tin on the inside.

  Wirth and his construction team had clearly drawn on their experience in the adult euthanasia scheme in the construction of the camp. Like the patients in the euthanasia centres, the Jews to be murdered at Bełżec were told that they were to take a shower. The only difference was that the gas that came through tubes to kill them was not from bottled carbon monoxide, but from a diesel tank engine placed outside the fake shower blocks.

  Unlike Auschwitz, Bełżec was solely a place of murder. The camp had a singularity of purpose that Auschwitz always lacked. That, of course, explains why Bełżec could be so small. There was no need for space given that virtually all of the people who arrived at the camp would be dead within a matter of hours. Equally, since there was a finite number of people that the Nazis wanted to kill, a specialized death camp like Bełżec would inevitably have a finite period of existence. Unlike Auschwitz, which was planned as a near-permanent feature of Nazi rule, Bełżec was a temporary place. Many of the structures at Auschwitz were built of solid brick, those at Bełżec mostly of wood. All of the specialized death camps would have a transient feel to them – places that were botched together.

  In addition, unlike Auschwitz, the Nazis wanted to keep the existence of Bełżec and the other death camps totally secret. Auschwitz, in the tradition of concentration camps like Dachau and Sachsenhausen, was built near a large town. There was no pretence at concealment. Indeed, as a place of terror, it was a positive advantage for the Nazis if the general public knew of its existence. Only when the camp also became involved in mass murder via gas chambers was it necessary to hide part of the function of the place. Bełżec, on the other hand, was a clandestine place from the very beginning. So much so that the 150 Jews who had been forced to build the camp were murdered after they had completed their work. They were the first to die in a test of the n
ew gas chambers.32

  Just as Chełmno was created to murder the ‘unproductive’ Jews from the Łódź ghetto, so Bełżec was created to murder the ‘unproductive’ Jews from the Lublin area, stretching as far as Kraków in the west and Lwów in the south-east. By March 1942 the camp was ready to start killing. Jews were deported from both Lublin and Lwów to Bełżec that month and by the middle of April around 45,000 Jews had been murdered in the gas chambers of the camp and their bodies buried near by.

  Bełżec functioned as a killing centre from March 1942 until the end of 1942. No one knows exactly how many people died at Bełżec, but one reliable estimate is that between 450,000 and 550,000 lost their lives there. The vast majority of them were Polish Jews, though a number of Sinti and Roma also perished in the Bełżec gas chambers. Only a handful – some reports say just two – of those sent to Bełżec managed to survive the war. That marks another difference with Auschwitz. For a variety of reasons – not least that the complex of camps we know collectively today as Auschwitz were both work and death camps, and Auschwitz was never focused entirely on the destruction of the Jews – many thousands of people survived incarceration there. But virtually the only chance of emerging from Bełżec alive was to be one of the tiny number selected to work in the camp on arrival and then somehow to effect an escape.

  Rudolf Reder, sent to Bełżec from the Lwów ghetto in August 1942, was the only person to write a personal account of the camp. By the time he was travelling in a freight wagon to Bełżec, he believed he knew what awaited him. Despite the desire of the Nazis to keep their activities secret, there were rumours about ‘what was going on at Bełżec’.33 On board the train en route to the camp, ‘No one said a word. We were aware that we were headed for death, that nothing could save us; apathetic, not a single moan.’ Once they arrived at Bełżec they were ordered to jump down from the trucks – more than 3 feet off the ground – in one huge mass. Some, particularly the elderly and young children, ‘broke arms and legs’.

  The Jews were gathered together and an SS man gave a speech. ‘Everyone wanted to hear,’ wrote Rudolf Reder, ‘hope dawned suddenly in us – “If they are speaking to us, perhaps we’re going to live, perhaps there will be some sort of work, perhaps after all …” ’34 The Jews were told by the SS that first they would have to take a bath, and then they would be used as forced labour. ‘It was a moment of hope and delusion. For an instant, the people breathed easy. There was total calm.’

  Men were separated from women. The men were told to undress before they were forced straight through the ‘tube’ to the gas chambers. The women were taken to a barracks where their hair was cut. The Germans used the women’s hair after their deaths in a variety of industrial processes – for example, in the making of felt. It was as their heads were shaved, says Reder, that the women realized that they were to die, and ‘there were laments and shrieks.’

  Once their hair had been cut, the women followed the men into the gas chambers. Just like death in the back of a gas van, death in the gas chambers of Bełżec was not quick. Reder remembers hearing the ‘moans’ and ‘screams’ of those trapped inside the gas chambers for up to fifteen minutes’.35

  Reder was spared immediate death only because he was selected to become one of the team of several hundred Jews who were forced to work in the camp, performing tasks like emptying the gas chambers of the dead and burying the bodies. If the SS felt any workers had not performed adequately during the day, they were taken in the evening to the edge of a mass grave and shot. The next day a few more Jews would be selected from an incoming transport to take their place.

  The work was the stuff of nightmares. As Reder and the other Jewish workers tried to bury the dead, ‘We had to walk across from one edge of a grave to the other, to get to another grave. Our legs sank in the blood of our mothers, we were treading on mounds of corpses – that was the worst, the most horrible thing …’36 The effect of all this was that ‘We moved around like people who had no will any more. We were one mass … We went mechanically through the motions of that horrible life.’37

  News about the extermination of the Jews soon reached Goebbels. In his diary, on 27 March 1942, he gave an insight into not just the extent of his own knowledge of the fate of the Jews, but the overall context in which the decision to kill them was taken. Crucially, he points to Hitler’s role as the driving force behind the genocide: ‘A rather barbaric procedure, that is not to be spelt out, is applied here, and there is not much that remains of the Jews themselves. All in all, we can say that 60% of them have to be liquidated, whereas only 40% can still be used for work … A judgement is executed upon the Jews that is indeed barbaric, but which they fully deserve. The prophecy in which the Führer said what they would receive in case of a new world war begins to become reality in the most terrible manner. One must not let sentimentality rule in these matters. If we didn’t ward off the Jews, they would destroy us. It is a life-and-death struggle between the Aryan race and the Jewish bacillus. No other government and no other regime would be able to muster the strength to resolve this question in such a wide-ranging manner. Here, too, the Führer is the steadfast champion and spokesman for a radical solution that is necessary under the circumstances and therefore seems inevitable. Thankfully, we have a whole raft of possibilities now during the war that would be blocked in times of peace. The ghettos that become free in the towns of the General Government are now being filled with the Jews deported from the Reich, and after a certain period of time the procedure is supposed to be repeated here. The Jews’ life is no bed of roses, and the fact that their representatives in England and America today organize and propagate a war against Germany has to be paid for very dearly by their representatives in Europe; that is only appropriate.’38

  After the Wannsee conference, the first Jews from a foreign country to be handed over en masse to the Nazis came from Slovakia. But the history of why Slovak Jews were crammed on to freight trucks on their way to Auschwitz in the spring of 1942 demonstrates once again that the development of the Nazis’ Final Solution was anything but straightforward.

  We have already seen how Slovakia was formed only in the spring of 1939 as Czechoslovakia disintegrated under Nazi pressure. The Slovak government was, from the beginning, supportive of the Nazis in general and their anti-Semitic views in particular. As early as 20 October 1941, for instance, Himmler had suggested during a meeting with the Slovak President and Prime Minister that it might be possible to deport some of the 90,000 Jews in the country to the General Government.39

  In a parallel initiative, the Germans were keen for the Slovaks to hand over workers who could be used as forced labour. The Slovak government were not that eager to help – until they thought of an alternative. They asked if perhaps 20,000 of these workers could be Jews. The Slovak government, strongly anti-Semitic, would be glad of the opportunity to deport them. The German Foreign Office replied to this proposal on 16 February 1942, saying that they would be prepared to accept these Jews ‘in the course of the measures taken toward a final solution of the European Jewish question’.40 But it subsequently transpired that the Slovaks wanted to hand over entire Jewish families, and the Germans had no desire to take them. They just sought Jews who could work. In the light of the Wannsee conference, this appears a curious development. Didn’t the Nazis want to have all the Jews they could find deported to the east? But it is still part of a pattern. Eichmann and others charged with the practical application of the strategy outlined at Wannsee were well aware that there simply wasn’t the current capacity in camps in Poland to accept non-working Jews from Slovakia. In February 1942, for example, Bełżec was still a month away from opening.

  The Slovak authorities held firm. The matter was discussed at a meeting that February between Eichmann’s representative in Slovakia, Dieter Wisliceny, and the Prime Minister of Slovakia, Vojtech Tuka, together with Dr Izidor Koso, the chief of his office. The Slovaks maintained that it was ‘unChristian’ to separate families. Wi
sliceny understood this to be a hypocritical remark that actually meant that it would be expensive and troublesome for the Slovak authorities to look after those Jews left behind once their breadwinners had been deported.41 Perhaps, suggested the Slovaks, they might reimburse the Germans for the ‘expenses’ incurred in taking not just those who were fit to work but whole Jewish families?

  The two sides eventually hammered out a deal that was breathtaking in its cynicism. The Slovaks would pay the Germans 500 Reichsmarks for every Jew they took. In return, the Germans promised that they would not assert ownership over the property the Jews left behind, and that the Slovak Jews would never return to Slovakia. This meant that a European country, whose head of state was a Catholic priest – Jozef Tiso – agreed to pay the Nazis to take their Jews away on condition they never came back. Although, at the time they discussed this deal, the Slovak authorities did not have detailed knowledge of precisely what was going to happen to these Jews, they did know that they were being sent into appalling danger. How could the Slovaks pretend otherwise, since just days before their meeting with Wisliceny, Hitler had said in a speech in the Berlin Sportpalast, ‘The outcome of this war will be the annihilation of Jewry’?42

  Heydrich did not finally sign the agreement with the Slovaks until 10 April, and so the initial transports sent to Auschwitz from Slovakia contained only the young and the fit. Linda Breder, an eighteen-year-old Slovakian Jewish woman, was one of the first to be forcibly deported. ‘On 24 March 1942,’ she says, ‘the Hlinka guards [the Slovak People’s Party militia] came to every house and collected all the girls from sixteen to twenty-five.’ Linda and the other girls were held in a hall in the town of Stropkov in eastern Slovakia. She wasn’t ‘scared’ because ‘they told us you are going to Germany to work and you will send money to your parents and then they will join you. So what can I feel? I was happy. Because we would work and then they will have money and then they will come with us.’43