The Holocaust: A New History

by Laurence Rees

  The Hlinka Guard now had the Jews in their power – and the opportunity to humiliate them. ‘Some of those Slovak soldiers behaved in a really silly way,’ remembers Silvia Veselá, another young Jewish woman taken by the Hlinka Guard in March 1942. ‘For example, they deliberately crapped on the floor and we had to clean the dirt manually. They called us “Jewish whores” and they kicked us. They behaved really badly. They also told us, “We will teach you Jews how to work.” But all of us were poor women that were used to work … It’s a really humiliating feeling when your personality is being taken away. I don’t know whether you can understand it. You suddenly mean nothing. We were treated like animals.’44

  Michal Kabáč was one of the Hlinka guards who guarded the Jewish women and later forced them on to freight wagons for their journey north to Poland. He was in his early thirties, a staunch Slovak nationalist who believed the anti-Semitic propaganda of his party. ‘It was all politics,’ he says. ‘The state was telling us the Jews were liars and were robbing the Slovaks and never wanted to work, but live an easy life. That is why we were not feeling sorry for them.’ Kabáč’s own anti-Semitism was more opportunistic than ideological. ‘Look,’ he says, ‘I used to date this Jewish girl. Her father used to have a huge store. He gave me a gift. It was a portrait of a Jew. I knew I’d get imprisoned if they found out I had such a portrait. I had to throw it into the river.’45

  Kabáč says he had a ‘good life’ in the Hlinka Guard: ‘We had a good salary, accommodation and canteen. We could not complain.’ The guards also had the opportunity to steal the possessions of the Jews. Kabáč himself admits he stole a pair of shoes. ‘When the Jews came to the camps we used to take their belongings and clothes,’ he says. ‘All Jews had to show us their belongings and the guards took the more valuable things from them.’46 Kabáč is relaxed about his role in the Holocaust. ‘I was not transporting them to the gas chambers! I was only transporting them to the Polish borders where Germans took over the transport. God knew where they were transported afterwards.’47

  While in the custody of the Hlinka Guard, Linda Breder clung to the belief that she would be sent to Germany to work. But on 26 March when she was taken to the station to board a train, she saw ‘only cattle cars’. ‘Where is the regular train?’ she asked. ‘We already started to feel that something is not right. In the cattle car when you came in there were two buckets there. One with water full, the other one empty to use like a toilet.’ Shortly afterwards she realized, ‘We are not going to Germany, we are going to Poland.’

  Linda Breder was part of the first transport from Slovakia to Auschwitz at the end of March. They were also the first female prisoners to enter the camp. On arrival they were marched under the ‘Arbeit macht frei’ – ‘Work makes you free’ – gate at Auschwitz main camp and crammed into one of the prison blocks. There was a struggle, as hundreds of Slovak women were ‘screaming and pushing’ in an attempt to use the handful of toilets in the block. She and the other women slept on the bare floor, huddled together for warmth since ‘it was bitter cold in March in Poland’. The next day she had to undress in front of the SS and a ‘gynaecologist’ probed her most intimate parts to check if she was ‘hiding gold’, before she was forced to bath naked in disinfected icy water: ‘The SS said to us, “You Jews are dirty, you have lice, you have to be clean.” ’48

  All of the Slovak women were admitted directly into the camp. The infamous process of selection on arrival at Auschwitz, by which a proportion of each new transport was sent directly to be killed, had not yet begun. That was not just because the first transports contained only Jews who had been judged fit for work before they left Slovakia, but also because the only gas chamber at Auschwitz in the crematorium of the main camp was an impractical method of killing people on a large scale. One difficulty the Nazis had, as we have seen, was that it was impossible to conduct the killings discreetly in the crematorium because the building was close not just to SS administrative offices, but to the barracks where the prisoners lived.

  This ‘problem’ was about to be solved by the SS at Auschwitz, because a new camp was under construction a mile and a half away from Auschwitz main camp, at a village the Poles called Brzezinka and the Germans Birkenau. In September 1941 Himmler had ordered the creation of a camp at Birkenau capable of holding 100,000 prisoners. Birkenau had originally been intended for Soviet prisoners of war, but at the end of October 1941 Hitler had decided that the Soviet POWs should be used elsewhere in the Reich as forced labour. As a consequence Himmler now said that Birkenau could be a place to send Jews. Subsequently, on 27 February 1942,49 the commandant of the camp, Rudolf Höss, met with other SS officials and resolved to move the location of the proposed new crematorium from the cramped surroundings of the main camp to the wide spaces of the new Auschwitz Birkenau.

  While they waited for the new crematorium to be built at Birkenau, the SS at Auschwitz conceived a stop-gap measure – one designed not just to increase the number of prisoners who could be gassed, but to ensure that the murders could be conducted in greater privacy. In a remote corner of Birkenau, far away from any other habitation, the SS bricked up the windows of a small cottage – known as the ‘Little Red House’ or ‘Bunker I’ – and converted two rooms inside so that they could be used as gas chambers. High up in the walls of the cottage they fashioned hatches, through which they could throw Zyklon B crystals. It was a primitive killing machine, but unlike the gas chamber within the crematorium in the main camp, here no one would hear the screams of the Jews as they were asphyxiated. But while the SS had solved one of their problems, they had created another – how to dispose of the dead. Bodies from the Little Red House could not be burnt in the ovens of a crematorium as there was not one near by. The only answer appeared to be to bury them in pits, but that was labour intensive and a potential health hazard for both the inmates and the SS – especially since the ground at Birkenau had notoriously bad drainage.

  Notwithstanding the difficulties the SS encountered in disposing of the bodies, the creation of the Little Red House meant that they could murder larger numbers of ‘unproductive’ Jews than before. Especially when, a few weeks after the killings began in the Little Red House, another cottage about a hundred yards away, known as the ‘Little White House’, was converted in a similar way into gas chambers.

  In early summer 1942, family transports began to arrive from Slovakia for the first time. The SS now began a selection process on the dusty ground next to the railway line, halfway between Auschwitz main camp and Auschwitz Birkenau. In this area, known as the ‘ramp’, SS medical personnel spent a few seconds assessing each new arrival, and sent those picked to work as forced labour to one side, and those they had chosen to die to another.

  In July 1942, Eva Votavová arrived at Auschwitz as a seventeen-year-old with her family. It was the culmination of years of persecution. As a schoolgirl she had heard the Hlinka guards celebrate Slovak independence by shouting ‘Slovakia belongs to Slovaks, Palestine belongs to Jews.’ ‘It was obvious at first sight’, she says, ‘that they were militants with no moral values.’50 She felt rejected by the country of her birth and was distraught. ‘I could not cope with this,’ she says, ‘even today, I can’t.’ In 1942, a commander of the Hlinka Guard lived in her village and wanted her family’s house. So he arranged that they would be one of the first Jewish families to be deported. As a result, Eva, together with her father and mother, left Slovakia on 17 July, crammed into ‘animal cargo trucks’.

  Once on the ramp at Auschwitz her father was selected to join one line and Eva and her mother another. ‘From that moment I heard nothing about my father,’ she says. ‘When I saw him for the last time he looked worried, sad and hopeless.’51 Her father was taken away and murdered in the gas chamber, while Eva and her mother were assigned to a construction commando. The work was physically demanding and the prisoners received little food or water. As a result, Eva’s mother became sick: ‘She had a fever and a dark film on her upper
teeth – which was an unmistakable sign of deadly typhoid fever. Of course, I did not know this at the time. She told me that evening she needed to go to the hospital [in the camp]. I cried and begged her not to go there at least for one more day. No one ever came back from there.’ By now Eva knew that ‘people were taken straight to the gas chambers’ from the hospital. When Eva came back from work the following day she learnt that her mother had, despite her pleas, been admitted to the hospital. Three days later someone who worked in the hospital told Eva that her mother ‘had gone’. Shortly afterwards, Eva was assigned to the ‘corpse commando’ and collected bodies from all over the camp. Among the pile of human remains, Eva found a pair of glasses. ‘I knew they were my mother’s – the left glass was broken after my mum had been slapped by a German Kapo.’ Holding the glasses, Eva cried, and saw ‘all of her [mother’s] pain, sickness and misery in front of my eyes’. She kept ‘the glasses as the last memory of my mother until stomach typhoid fever infected me. Then they had to burn the pillow I used to hide them in. That is how I lost the last memory of my mother.’52

  Even if they had been selected for work, many of the new arrivals were now dying at Auschwitz in a matter of weeks – particularly in the newly created women’s section of the main camp. Auschwitz had become in a short space of time, and with little or no preparation, one of the biggest women’s camps in the Nazi system. Over 6,700 women were held in the main camp in April 1942 and by the time the women’s camp was moved to Auschwitz Birkenau in August 1942, an estimated one in three of these women were dead.53 At Birkenau, conditions were no better. Disease was rife, the Kapos could be brutal, the food was inadequate and the work was often back-breaking – especially for those forced to dig massive ditches to help the drainage.

  ‘We found ourselves in Birkenau,’ says Frico Breder, a male Slovak Jew who was sent to Auschwitz in 1942. ‘I didn’t know anything about that camp at that time. However, as soon as I saw it I thought I was in hell.’ One night, shortly after Frico’s arrival in Birkenau, his Kapo approached him and said he needed someone ‘to do loading’ – without mentioning what was to be ‘loaded’. He promised Frico that those who completed the task would receive some bread. Frico soon discovered that the task was ‘loading dead bodies’ on to a cart. As he began moving the corpses, he saw the body of a ‘very beautiful woman’. ‘She is still in my head,’ says Frico. ‘She must have come to the camp very recently – she must have committed suicide or something like that … It was a clear night and the moon was shining on her … It was very beautiful.’54

  From the moment the camp was established in spring 1940, death had been a constant presence at Auschwitz. But the arrival of the Slovak families and the consequent selections held on the ramp heralded a new era of horror. Those chosen to die were the most temporary visitors imaginable. The old, the sick, the children, all waited by the converted cottages to be gassed. ‘They used to sit there,’ says Otto Pressburger, a Slovak Jew who worked on the ‘corpse commando’. ‘They must have been eating their food from home. SS men were around them with dogs. They, of course, didn’t know what was going to happen to them. We did not want to tell them. It would have been worse for them. We were thinking that the people who brought them here were not humans but some wild jungle creatures.’55

  Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, wrote in his memoirs that Jews walked to their death under the ‘blossom-laden fruit trees of the cottage orchard’. He recorded that one woman, who clearly realized what was about to happen to her, whispered to him, ‘How can you bring yourself to kill such beautiful, darling children? Have you no heart at all?’56 Höss claimed he found such scenes ‘shattering’, but these incidents made no difference to his absolute commitment to the killing process.

  Jews from Slovakia were not just deported to Auschwitz. At least 24,000 Slovak Jews were transferred to a new murder facility at Sobibór, about 50 miles north-east of Lublin. Sobibór was, after Bełżec, the second camp built as an extermination centre with fixed gas chambers. Like Bełżec the camp was close to a railway line, but the location was even more remote – in forest and marshland a few miles from the River Bug. The countryside around Sobibór was peaceful and picturesque, and the camp was designed to look inviting. ‘I imagined Sobibór as a place where they burn people, where they gas people, so it must look like hell,’ says Toivi Blatt who was sent to the camp in April 1943, at a time when ‘rumours’ about the true function of the place had been circulating for months. ‘And now what I see is actually nice houses, plus the commandant’s villa, painted green with a little fence and flowers.’57

  In May 1942, when the first large transports of Jews arrived to be gassed, the commandant of Sobibór was a thirty-four-year-old veteran of the T4 euthanasia action called Franz Stangl. Before taking charge at Sobibór he had visited Bełżec and been struck by the ‘smell – oh God, the smell. It was everywhere.’ He saw pits with ‘thousands of corpses’ in them, and learnt first hand the practical problems of managing a death camp. He was told that ‘one of the pits had overflowed. They had put too many corpses in it and putrefaction had progressed too fast, so that the liquid underneath had pushed the bodies on top, up and over, and the corpses had rolled down the hill.’58

  At Bełżec, Stangl became reacquainted with Christian Wirth, whom he had known – and disliked – from the euthanasia actions. Wirth was now Stangl’s boss, and when he had visited Stangl during the construction of Sobibór he had been dissatisfied with the way the work was progressing. Stangl learnt that Wirth had arrived, ‘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 work-Jews: get them up here” ’. Wirth ordered the Jews pushed into the gas chamber and murdered. According to one of Stangl’s colleagues, ‘Wirth behaved like a lunatic, hit out at his own staff with his whip to drive them on. And then he was livid because the doors hadn’t worked properly.’59

  Stangl claimed after the war that he had been shocked by the task that had been assigned to him, and that he hadn’t wanted to complete it. But eyewitnesses who saw him in the camp at the time tell a different story. ‘What was special about him was his arrogance,’ said Stanislaw Szmajzner, a Jewish survivor of the camp. ‘And his obvious pleasure in his work and his situation. None of the others – although they were, in different ways, so much worse than he – showed this to such an extent. He had this perpetual smile on his face … No, I don’t think it was a nervous smile; it was just that he was happy.’60 Erich Bauer, the SS man at Sobibór responsible for the working of the gas chambers, offered another perspective on Stangl, which also contradicts the notion that the commandant did his work unwillingly. ‘In the canteen at Sobibor I once overheard a conversation between Frenzel, Stangl and Wagner [all members of the SS at the camp]. They were discussing the number of victims in the extermination camps of Belzec, Treblinka [the last death camp to be built] and Sobibor and expressed their regret that Sobibor “came last” in the competition.’61

  Despite the experience they had gained in the construction and operation of the death camp at Bełżec, the SS did not create an efficient killing installation at Sobibór. While the remote location was an advantage for them, the railway had only one track. This obviously limited the capacity of the line. An even bigger issue was the nature of the countryside. During August and September 1942 no train could travel to Sobibór because sections of the railway had sunk into the marshland and repairs had to be made.

  Even when the camp had been functioning, the SS had created a bottleneck in the killing process. In the early days of the camp’s operation, when a train arrived at Sobibór station the SS waited until the Jews who were capable of walking unaided had entered the camp and then gathered up those who were left – the old, the disabled and the injured – and put them on to a horse-drawn cart. The SS told these Jews who were unable to walk that they were to be taken to a hospital. This was said in an attempt to calm them, but it was also a black joke.
Because the ‘hospital’, 200 yards into the forest, consisted of a group of executioners standing by a pit. All of those who had been taken to the ‘hospital’ on the horse and cart were murdered in sight of each other.

  This process did not work as well as the SS wanted. It was time-consuming to get the old and sick on to the horse-drawn cart and for the cart to get to the ‘hospital’, so the SS made a change to their operating procedure. They constructed a narrow-gauge railway track from Sobibór station up to the killing zone of the ‘hospital’ so that the weaker Jews could be carried more efficiently to their deaths. The horse and cart were now redundant, replaced by more modern technology.62

  Only thirty or so SS were needed to staff Sobibór, supported by just over a hundred former Soviet prisoners of war. Many of these men were from Ukraine and had been offered the chance to leave their POW camps, where they stood a high chance of dying of disease or starvation, to work for the Nazis. Trained at Trawniki camp, south-east of Lublin, they were often the most brutal of all the guards. Partly this was because the Germans were keen to give the Ukrainians the bloodiest jobs.63 At Sobibór, for instance, most of those who shot the Jews at the ‘hospital’ were Ukrainians.

  Just as at Bełżec, the largest category of people working in the camp were the Jewish Sonderkommandos. Every major extermination camp utilized prisoners who were selected from the new arrivals and made to perform a variety of tasks related to the killing process – from the ‘Bahnhofskommando’ who took the Jews from the station up into the camp, to the most horrific jobs of all which were undertaken by the Sonderkommandos who were forced to empty the gas chambers of the bodies and bury them. Again, as at Bełżec, all of the Sonderkommandos were just a moment away from death themselves. Any of the Sonderkommandos who did not perform as the SS required were murdered and replaced by selected Jews from a new transport.