The Holocaust: A New History

by Laurence Rees

  There was also the problem, for the Nazis, of the smell. The air around the camp was filled with noxious odours. Eugenia Samuel, then a schoolgirl who lived close by, remembers that ‘the smell of the disintegrating corpses was just terrible. You couldn’t open a window or go out because of the stench. You cannot imagine such a stench.’20

  Oskar Berger was one of the Jews who arrived at Treblinka just as the fabric of the camp was collapsing. When he disembarked from the train, on 22 August 1942, he saw ‘hundreds of bodies lying all around’.21 The SS and their Ukrainian helpers attempted to control the new arrivals by shooting at them from the roofs of buildings. This only made the panic worse, as the ‘air was filled with screaming and weeping’.

  Another new arrival, Abraham Krzepicki, was ‘confronted’ in the camp ‘by a staggering sight: a huge number of corpses, lying one next to the other. I estimate there were 20,000 corpses there … most of whom had suffocated in the freight cars. Their mouths remained open, as if they were gasping for another breath of air.’ He was selected by the SS to help clear up this nightmare scene. But, notwithstanding the terrible situation at the camp, the relentless train schedule did not stop: ‘At night another transport arrived at the camp. We ran toward the cars. I was shocked. All the cars were filled only with the dead – asphyxiated. They were lying on top of one another in layers, to the ceiling of the freight car. The sight was so awful, it is difficult to describe.’22

  Irmfried Eberl’s immense over-confidence, as well as the increase in the numbers of transports in August, was behind this horror. ‘Dr Eberl’s ambition’, said August Hingst, a member of the SS at Treblinka, ‘was to reach the highest possible numbers and exceed all the other camps. So many transports arrived that the disembarkation and gassing of the people could no longer be handled.’23 There were also rumours that discipline had broken down at Treblinka and that some valuables stolen from the Jews had not been sent back to the Reich but taken by the guards at the camp – even that Dr Eberl, when he was drunk, ordered a female Jew to dance naked for him.24

  When reports of the disintegration of Treblinka reached Dr Eberl’s superiors they decided to pay him a visit. Towards the end of August, Odilo Globocnik travelled to the camp together with a group of senior officers, including Christian Wirth, the first commandant of Bełżec and the newly appointed inspector of the Operation Reinhard death camps. ‘In Treblinka, everything was in chaos,’ said SS man Josef Oberhauser, who worked for Wirth and saw what happened when the delegation arrived at the camp. ‘Dr Eberl would be dismissed immediately … Globocnik said in the course of this conversation that if Dr Eberl were not his fellow countryman, he would arrest him and bring him before an SS and police court.’25

  Wirth chose Franz Stangl, currently commandant of Sobibór, to replace Dr Eberl. Because Sobibór was temporarily closed while the railway line that ran next to the camp was repaired and the gas chambers enlarged, Stangl was free to take over almost at once. Even so, Wirth decided to stay on at the camp for a few weeks to oversee the cleaning-up process, together with Stangl. This was a major undertaking, as witnessed on his arrival by one of the cruellest of all the SS figures working in the death camps, SS Oberscharführer (Company Sergeant Major) Kurt Franz, an SS officer nicknamed ‘Doll’ because of his supposed baby-faced looks: ‘In the camp there were bodies lying everywhere … These bodies were dragged through the camp to the upper section by Jews. The working Jews were forced to keep moving by the [Ukrainian] guards, also by the Germans … There was tremendous confusion and a horrible din … During my walk I established that some of the guard squads were with girls and had put down their rifles.’26 Kurt Franz’s specialty at Bełżec had been dealing with the auxiliaries – guards who had been selected from Soviet POWs to work at the death camps – collectively known, as we have seen, as ‘Ukrainians’. So he now tried to establish order among them.

  Transports to Treblinka had to be suspended between 28 August and 3 September while the camp was cleared of thousands of corpses. The dead bodies were burnt in ditches and the smoke that filled the sky was noticeable for miles around. Throughout this process, Christian Wirth was the dominant force. ‘Wirth conducted talks with the German staff, mainly at 11 o’clock in the evening,’ said SS Scharführer (Sergeant Major) Franz Suchomel. ‘These talks took place in the presence of Stangl … His [Wirth’s] instructions were detailed.’27

  Just as there had been at Sobibór, there were tensions between Stangl and Wirth. According to Suchomel, after Stangl had examined the extermination operation at Treblinka, he recommended that buckets should be placed in the tube – the path that led from the arrival area of the camp to the gas chambers – because the women ‘all defecated you know, while they ran, or stood there, waiting’. Stangl said he had previously put buckets in the tube and it had proved helpful. Wirth answered, ‘I don’t care a damn what you did with the shit in Sobibor. Let them beshit themselves. It can be cleaned up afterwards.’28

  Christian Wirth, like Dr Eberl, gave every indication that he revelled in his work. His adjutant, Josef Oberhauser, remarked that ‘His most outstanding features were iron relentlessness, unconditional obedience, belief in the Führer, absolute insensitivity and ruthlessness. These traits already characterized him in the euthanasia [action], where I got to know him; but he really was in his element when it came to the extermination of the Jews.’29 With Wirth ‘in his element’, the extermination process at Treblinka began again with the resumption of transports from the Warsaw ghetto on 3 September.

  Kalman Taigman was one of the Jews from the Warsaw ghetto crammed into a freight wagon that September en route to Treblinka. While some Jews on the train believed that they were being sent to their deaths, he still thought that the Nazis might have spoken the truth about what lay ahead. ‘We were told when we were still in the ghetto’, he says, ‘that we were going to the east to work in all kinds of factories. So I thought that I was a young and healthy man and that I was probably being taken to work.’30 But on arrival at Treblinka these illusions were swiftly shattered. ‘It was unbelievable,’ he says. ‘They opened the freight cars and started yelling, “Get out!” in German, of course, yelling, and many of the people who were still standing and breathing came out, but there were some who were already corpses inside the freight cars and they didn’t come out.’ From the healthy Jews who arrived, the SS made a selection and Kalman Taigman was one of those they picked. A relatively large number of Jews were chosen to work in the camp from these early transports to Treblinka in September, in order to ensure that the camp was kept clean and the chaos of Eberl’s regime was not repeated. Out of those chosen from Kalman’s transport, one group started emptying the freight wagons of bodies and another began sorting out the belongings of the Jews who had been taken to the gas chambers.

  Kalman was later part of a commando that cleaned out the barracks where the women had their heads shaved before entering the gas chambers. ‘When we cleaned these barracks of the clothing,’ he remembers, ‘there were cases where we found babies underneath these piles. I guess the mothers left them there, maybe so they might be rescued.’ When he and his comrades found these babies they carried them to a fenced-off area of the camp where the sick were taken, known as the Lazarett (German for military hospital). But when Jews arrived at the Lazarett they discovered that, just as at Sobibór, it wasn’t a hospital at all but an execution area where the sick were shot and then thrown into a pit. ‘There was a white fence around it,’ says Kalman, ‘and on this fence there was a sign of the Red Cross, so people who came there didn’t know where they were going at all … such things are hard to describe.’ He remembers that the babies found in the barracks were either shot and thrown into the pit or – if bodies were already being burnt – thrown directly on to the fire. ‘How did I feel?’ says Kalman. ‘I didn’t feel anything … I became an automaton. No thoughts. I only worried about not getting beaten and sometimes I worried about having a full stomach and that’s it. I didn’t think and
I didn’t feel. I saw hell if such a thing exists.’31

  The new SS regime at Treblinka ensured that the camp was kept as spotless as possible. ‘The path that led to the gas chambers had to be clean and tidy,’ says Kalman. ‘Each time we had to bring new clean yellow sand and scatter it.’ During his time at the camp, he says, ‘the death machinery worked there very efficiently.’

  By the end of the third week of September most of the Warsaw Jews had perished in the gas chambers of Treblinka. The German authorities now decided temporarily to halt the deportations from Warsaw after a final mass selection that allowed 35,000 Jews to remain for the moment in the ghetto – around 10 per cent of the pre-deportation ghetto population. There were also more than 25,000 other Jews left in the ghetto – those who had managed to hide themselves, often in cellars, in attics and behind walls.

  The pause in the deportations from Warsaw allowed the Nazis to send Jews from other ghettos in Poland to die in Treblinka. The biggest ghetto clearance during this new phase occurred in Częstochowa, west of Lublin, where about 35,000 Jews were forced on to trains and sent to Treblinka. Jews were also sent to the death camp from many other ghettos, large and small. Samuel Willenberg, for instance, then nineteen years old, was caught in Opatów in south-east Poland and transported to Treblinka during this new phase. By now – the autumn of 1942 – rumours about the fate of the Jews were widespread, and as his train passed through a station he heard Polish children shout out, ‘Jews! You’ll be turned into soap!’32 But, like many other Jews transported to the death camps during the Holocaust, those crammed into Samuel Willenberg’s freight car found it difficult to accept that the Nazis wanted to kill them all. Many still hoped that such a place could not really exist. ‘It was hard to believe,’ says Samuel. ‘I was here [Treblinka] and still I could not believe it at first.’

  Almost everyone on Samuel Willenberg’s transport died within a few hours of arriving at the camp. He survived only because of a chance encounter. One of the Jewish Sonderkommandos, already working in the camp, asked him where he was from. Samuel, who thought the man looked familiar, answered that he was from Opatów, but had also spent time in Warsaw and Częstochowa, where he had been born. ‘Częstochowa,’ echoed the prisoner, who was obviously from the same place. The prisoner asked Samuel for his name, and added cryptically, ‘Say you are a bricklayer.’

  As a result of this short conversation, Samuel Willenberg escaped the gas chambers. The SS lined up the Jews who had just entered the camp and asked if there were any bricklayers among the new arrivals. Samuel immediately volunteered. He thought, correctly as it turned out, that he could acquire enough of the trade quickly enough to fool the SS. So he became a member of the Sonderkommando.

  Samuel observed first hand how efficiently the SS dealt with new arrivals. He saw that when the women had their heads shaved they ‘gained hope, for if they are going to have their hair cut, it means there is going to be some life after … for hygiene is necessary in a camp’. Making the incoming Jews take off their clothes also worked to the advantage of the SS. ‘A man who takes his shoes off and then is ordered “Strip!” and is naked – that man is no longer a human being,’ says Samuel, ‘no longer a master of himself. He covers certain parts of his body, he is embarrassed. Suddenly, he has a thousand problems of which he has not been aware in his normal life, which he did not have as he was never forced to walk about naked – except perhaps as a child – among people, among friends. Suddenly everyone is naked! And the Germans, you see, took advantage of that. And on top of that, the lashing, “Quick! Schnell!” At that point one wanted to run somewhere as fast as one could, run somewhere, no matter where.’

  At Treblinka, Samuel spent much of his time sorting out the belongings of the murdered Jews. ‘It looked like a Persian bazaar,’ he says, ‘open suitcases, spread-out sheets, and on each sheet lay different things. Trousers separately from shirts, from woollen things, it all had to be sorted. The gold lay separate in the bags … Each of us had a sheet spread out next to him where we put photos, documents, diplomas.’ Samuel and the rest of his commando were often supervised by Kurt Franz. He remembers Franz as ‘The worst of them [of the SS] … He was a handsome man, posing as Napoleon and demanding constant admiration. Those were his happiest days! He had a great time here. He was a bandit, a real bandit.’33

  Franz took pleasure in setting his dog, a massive St Bernard called Barry, on the prisoners. He also enjoyed personally administering pain. ‘He was an expert at whipping, twenty-five or fifty lashes,’ wrote Oskar Strawczynski, another Sonderkommando. ‘He did it with pleasure, without hurrying. He had his own technique for raising the whip and striking it down.’34

  Franz was a committed Nazi and had worked at Buchenwald concentration camp before the war. Like a number of other guards in the death camps, he had also spent time in the T4 euthanasia programme. He had thus been working for many years in an environment, and for an organization, that preached absolute hatred of Jews and asserted that it was legitimate to kill those the state thought ‘unworthy of life’. As a result, he almost certainly thought the people he was dominating, torturing and killing were not really ‘human’ at all. But that can’t be the whole explanation for his sadistic actions, since some other SS in the same situation did not appear to take the same pleasure in inflicting the pain that Franz did. It is a reminder that members of the SS who decided to carry on working in a death camp still had a choice about how to behave – one between becoming a sadistic murderer, or merely a cold-hearted one. Kalman Taigman’s view, having observed the SS and their Ukrainian helpers closely at Treblinka, is that ‘each person has the instincts of an animal, but since we live in a normal way we don’t show it – it doesn’t come out. But there are times when a person turns into something else and what comes out of him is what was hidden [all along].’

  Only a fraction of all those sent to the death camps of Sobibór, Bełżec and Treblinka survived the war – perhaps not more than 150 people. And each of these individuals owed their survival to a large extent to good fortune. Samuel Willenberg, for instance, says, ‘It could have turned out differently in a thousand different ways. It did not matter what I said or did – I could have been burnt just as well. I would have ended up in the ash. It was all a question of luck … and maybe a bit of hot-headedness.’35 Luck was part of the reason why he survived, but it was not the whole reason. Both Samuel Willenberg and Kalman Taigman also possessed particular attributes that helped them endure their experience at Treblinka. Both were young at the time – in their late teens when they arrived at the camp – and both were strong and determined. Both were also men – far fewer women were selected for Sonderkommando work. Taigman coped in part, as we have seen, by turning himself into an ‘automaton’, while Willenberg had an extraordinary ability to look on the positive side – even in a death camp. After the war, he remarked that ‘others suffered more. It wasn’t like I was actually one of those forced to work in the gas chambers. They worked in terrible conditions. They had to drag the corpses out of the gas chambers as fast as they could.’36 So, surprising as it may seem, he drew some comfort from the fact that other Jewish workers at Treblinka were suffering even more than he was. Both he and Taigman were eventually to escape from the camp during the revolt in August 1943.

  In addition to Treblinka, Sobibór and Bełżec, a fourth murder camp under the aegis of Odilo Globocnik was in operation during 1942. This place, called Majdanek, was situated just 3 miles away from Globocnik’s office in Lublin. Majdanek was an unusual camp within the system: neither a prisoner-of-war camp nor a concentration camp, nor a specialized death camp, nor a massive combination of concentration and death camp like Auschwitz, but a mixture, on a smaller scale, of all of them. Even the Nazis seemed unsure how to label the camp. Until early 1943 the place was officially the ‘Prisoner of War Camp of the Waffen SS in Lublin’, while other German documents at the same time called it a ‘concentration camp’.37

  Majdanek’s evolution
mirrored in many ways the development of the Nazis’ Final Solution. Like Auschwitz Birkenau, it was originally conceived as a camp for Soviet prisoners of war. Construction began in the autumn of 1941, and barracks for around 20,000 prisoners were completed by the end of the year. From the start Majdanek was a place where death was commonplace. Starving prisoners slept on the bare ground in unheated barracks through the freezing Polish winter of 1941–2. They were at risk from a range of infections, including typhoid. But by the time new arrivals came to the camp in the spring of 1942, Majdanek’s function had changed. No longer a prisoner-of-war camp, it had now become a sorting centre for the Final Solution. Several thousand Slovak Jews were sent to the camp between the end of March and the middle of June 1942. Occasionally trains transporting Jews to Sobibór would stop near by and a selection would be made, with some Jews diverted to Majdanek as forced labourers.

  Gas chambers were constructed behind the shower blocks at Majdanek. No other camp had the gas chambers so close to the genuine showers used by arriving Jews who had passed the initial selection. The position of the gas chambers meant that, just as with the gassings at the crematorium in the main camp at Auschwitz, the SS had difficulty in keeping the killings secret, and – as at Auschwitz – the SS had to rev motor engines at Majdanek next to the gas chambers in order to drown out the screams of those trapped inside.38