The Holocaust: A New History

by Laurence Rees

Hitler had similar problems with another ally in the spring of 1943 – Bulgaria. The official communiqué after the meeting between Hitler and King Boris of Bulgaria on 3 April stated that they had ‘a long and cordial talk’, which was characterized by ‘the spirit of traditional friendship’ that existed between Germany and Bulgaria.14 But the reality was that the Bulgarians, like the Romanians and Hungarians, were wavering in their support – especially over the question of the Jews. In February 1943, Alexander Belev, the Bulgarian government’s Commissar for the Jewish Question, had agreed with Eichmann’s representative, Theodor Dannecker, that the Bulgarians would hand over 20,000 Jews to the Germans. Just like the French, the Bulgarian authorities found it much more acceptable to offer up Jews who were not Bulgarian citizens. The Bulgarians knew – or at least must have strongly suspected – that they were sending these Jews to their deaths, especially in the wake of the public statements of the Allies the previous December about the Nazis’ extermination programme. Notwithstanding this knowledge, towards the end of March 1943 the Bulgarians cooperated in the deportation of around 11,000 Jews from the Bulgarian-occupied territory of Thrace and Macedonia. Virtually every single one of these Jews perished in the gas chambers of Treblinka.

  However, when the authorities moved to deport Jews from inside the old borders of Bulgaria, there were public protests. Anti-Semitism had never been much of a tradition in Bulgaria, and the government’s introduction of legislation that persecuted the Jews in late 1941 had been motivated less by ideological conviction and more by an attempt to please their German ally.15 Now, faced with the deportation of Jews who lived among them, many Bulgarian citizens and members of the government were unhappy – knowledge that the Germans had just lost at Stalingrad would almost certainly have played a part in their unhappiness, of course. Instead of sending the Jews to their deaths, the Bulgarian authorities now passed legislation that expelled Jews from their homes in the capital Sofia and distributed them around various provincial towns. This made it almost impossible for them to be deported, but also caused the Jews considerable hardship. After the war a number of Bulgarians sought to portray their country’s history as a noble one in which ‘their’ Jews had been saved. It was anything but an honourable history, especially given what happened to the Jews from Thrace and Macedonia.

  During April and May 1943, Hitler was aware not only of the attitude of his allies towards the Jews, but also of the resistance that the Jews themselves were demonstrating in Warsaw. On 19 April German forces entered the ghetto to begin the deportation of the remaining Jews. They were met with small-arms fire, grenades and home-made bombs. Marek Edelman, then twenty-four years old, was one of the Jews who fought back against the Germans, and he reveals that he and his colleagues in the Jewish Combat Organization were motivated by the knowledge that the Germans wanted to transport them to their deaths – knowledge they had gained from a witness to events at Treblinka who had managed to return to Warsaw and told them what awaited at the camp. ‘It was difficult to believe that you were killed for nothing,’ says Marek Edelman. ‘But that’s the way it was.’16 After the initial shock of hearing the news about Treblinka, Marek and his comrades resolved to fight back. ‘It’s obvious’, he says, ‘that the death camps were the factor that caused the resistance.’ The decision of the Germans to split up families and send old people and children to Treblinka, leaving just healthy, fit Jews within the ghetto also played a part. The resistance fighters could now fight free of any family responsibilities.

  Members of the resistance within the ghetto had armed themselves with guns obtained from the Polish Home Army and stolen from the Germans. They also, says Marek Edelman, ‘made grenades out of metal pipes and gunpowder’. Initially, the German forces entering the ghetto were surprised at the level of resistance and made little progress towards their objectives. As Marek Edelman puts it, ‘The first few days were our victory.’ Many of the resistance fighters, like Aharon Karmi, another young Jewish man, were exhilarated by the opportunity to confront the enemy: ‘I shot with my pistol into the mass [of Germans] that was passing by. The Germans yelled, “Help!” and took shelter behind a wall. It was the first time we saw Germans running away. We were used to being the ones who ran away from the Germans. They had no expectation of Jews fighting like that. There was blood and I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I said, “German blood.” ’17

  Neither Marek Edelman nor Aharon Karmi, nor most of the other Jews who attacked the Germans in the ghetto, had previously been trained as soldiers. But this did not hold them back. ‘It’s very easy to learn how to shoot,’ says Marek Edelman. ‘You don’t need to be trained. It’s not the front where the general plans a battle. This is guerrilla warfare. The German goes walking down the street and when there’s an opportunity you shoot at him. And if he doesn’t see the person who’s shooting all the better. You just have to have the will to fight and the weapons, that’s all.’18 Against the superior firepower of the Germans, the resistance fighters knew they had no chance of eventual victory. ‘Yes,’ says Marek, ‘we knew we wouldn’t win but we had to show the Germans that we’re human beings like everybody [else]. During the war you’re a human being when you kill the enemy.’

  Under the command of SS Brigadeführer (Brigadier) Jürgen Stroop, German forces entered the ghetto and began setting fire to buildings, block by block. Marek Edelman remembers flames engulfing the ghetto as the Germans tried to burn them out, and that he and his comrades had to move from house to house as the fire pursued them. ‘Until we left the ghetto there was no peace, [but] the Germans couldn’t say they had won before we left.’ Both Marek Edelman and Aharon Karmi eventually managed to escape from the ghetto, just two of the handful of Jews who were able to cross to the non-Jewish side of Warsaw – most of them smuggled out via sewers or tunnels.

  The ghetto uprising was suppressed by the middle of May, and in his report Stroop claimed that he and his soldiers had captured 56,065 Jews – a figure that appears to be an overestimate19 – at a cost of only a hundred or so German casualties. In purely military terms the Warsaw Jews had achieved little, other than to postpone for a short time the inevitable destruction of the ghetto and the murder of the majority of the Jews. But symbolically the importance of their resistance was enormous. The Jews had fought back in large numbers and demonstrated tremendous courage. ‘When they started liquidating the ghetto we had to resist,’ says Marek Edelman. ‘It was not an uprising, it was a defence of the ghetto. When the Germans wanted to liquidate us then they met with resistance, that was the point … What would you like me to say [to them]? Please kill me immediately?’

  Just days before the Germans entered the Warsaw ghetto in an attempt to clear the area of Jews, an event of enormous importance occurred in the development of Auschwitz. In March 1943, the first of a series of new killing facilities opened at Auschwitz Birkenau. Originally, as we have seen, the SS intended to place this crematorium/gas chamber in the main camp, but they subsequently changed its location to Birkenau. During the design stage various changes were made so that the building could function not just as a crematorium but also as a gas chamber. In August 1942 three more crematoria had been ordered – one virtually the same as the existing commission, and two of a different design. These two new crematoria, eventually to be known as Crematoria IV and V, marked a radical change.

  The revolution encapsulated in the design of Crematoria IV and V was simple. They were the first buildings at Auschwitz that from the initial design stage were intended to function solely as places of murder. They had undressing rooms, gas chambers and crematoria ovens all on one level – a kind of conveyor belt of death. The other two new crematoria still betrayed in their design their origins as places to burn human remains, rather than to kill them as well. Crematoria II and III had the undressing room and gas chamber in the semi-basement, because the function of these rooms had originally been to store dead bodies. Now that they had been converted, it meant that once people had been murdered their bod
ies had to be transported in a corpse lift up to the level of the crematorium to be burnt.

  These four buildings at Auschwitz Birkenau – numbered Crematoria II to V, since Crematorium I still existed in Auschwitz main camp – represented a new stage in the evolution of the Holocaust. In part this was because they were solid and looked from the outside like factories. By contrast, the Reinhard death camps of Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka were all temporary places, and once their murderous work was completed, they would be destroyed. The new red-brick crematoria/gas-chamber buildings at Auschwitz, however, were an integral part of a growing SS presence in Upper Silesia. They were at the centre of a vast network of nearly thirty Auschwitz sub-camps which provided forced labour for a range of industrial operations, including cement works, armaments factories and – biggest of all – the IG Farben chemical plant at Monowitz in the suburbs of Auschwitz town. The crematoria/gas chambers of Birkenau were – in essence – the physical manifestation of the idea of extermination through labour. Once Jewish workers at Monowitz, for example, could no longer function as required, they were transported the short distance to Birkenau for annihilation. These buildings were something more than a means of killing the men, women and children the Nazis hated and feared; they symbolized a system in which only the productive deserved to live. They were inhumanity memorialized in brick.

  All four of the new crematoria/gas-chamber complexes at Birkenau were working by the summer of 1943. Karl Bischoff, the SS officer in charge of their construction, wrote that in total the ovens could dispose of 4,416 corpses in twenty-four hours – that is to say that Auschwitz Birkenau now had the capacity to turn 1.6 million people into ashes in one year.20 This, it should be said, was a low estimate. According to eyewitness testimony, the number burnt could be as high as 8,000 bodies a day, by the simple expedient of putting more than one corpse into an oven at a time.21

  The process of killing was broadly similar to that employed in the Operation Reinhard camps. New arrivals were ushered into the undressing room and told that they had to take their clothes off before having a shower. They were then directed into the gas chamber, which they were told was the shower room. Once the hermetically sealed door was closed, and everyone was trapped inside, crystals of Zyklon B were inserted through hatches in the roof (in the case of Crematoria II and III) or high in the wall (in the case of Crematoria IV and V). After everybody had been murdered, the residual gas was cleared, and Sonderkommandos entered. Only the means of gassing, Zyklon B as opposed to carbon monoxide, and the fact that the women’s hair was shaved after death rather than before, marked a significant difference from the way in which the operation was conducted in the Reinhard camps.

  Just like the Reinhard camps, the murder factories in Birkenau needed only a handful of SS men to oversee the whole process. The manual labour – including the horrendous task of untangling the dead from the gas chambers – was performed by Sonderkommandos. But, revealingly, it was always SS personnel who dropped the Zyklon B into the gas chambers.

  Henryk Mandelbaum, a Polish Jew, worked as one of the Sonderkommandos in the new Auschwitz crematoria/gas chambers in 1944. ‘You can’t really think about it,’ he says. ‘I thought I was in hell. I remember that sometimes when, if I did something wrong at home, my parents would tell me don’t do it because you’ll go to hell. But when I saw many human corpses, people who were murdered through gassing and they were being burnt … It was beyond anything I could imagine and I didn’t really know what to do. If I refuse [to work there] then I’ll be gone right? I knew they would kill me. I was young. I lost my family. They were gassed – my father, my mother and my sister and brother. So I was aware of it and I wanted to live and I fought. I struggled to live all the time.’

  Henryk Mandelbaum remembers that, despite the efforts of the SS to keep an atmosphere of calm as the Jews were ushered into the gas chamber, sometimes people ‘started to sense something was wrong. There were too many people and some wanted to withdraw, but the SS men would hit them on the head with sticks and blood was flowing. So there was no chance of withdrawing or getting out, but by force they would be pushed into the gas chambers. When it was full they would lock the door – the doors were hermetic like in refrigerators.’ He recalls that behind every transport ‘there was an ambulance with a red cross [on it]’ and, in a cynical act, ‘in that red cross ambulance they [the SS] had Zyklon B gas [crystals].’ Once the crystals had been thrown into the gas chamber, ‘the gassing lasted about twenty minutes to half an hour. After the gassing, after the twenty or thirty minutes, we opened the doors. You could see how these people died – standing. Their heads were to the left or to the right, to the front, to the back. Some vomited or had hemorrhaged, and they would shit with loose bowels. Before the burning we had to cut their hair and pull out the gold teeth. And also had to look whether people kept anything in their nostrils, or valuables in the mouth – women in their vaginas.’22

  Eventually, in the spring of 1944, a railway spur would be constructed, right into the heart of Birkenau, which allowed trains to deliver transports to within easy reach of the gas chambers in Crematoria II and III. Before that transports still arrived at the ramp – the unloading area halfway between Auschwitz main camp and Auschwitz Birkenau. For many of those arriving at Auschwitz, this was the first stage in their journey to the gas chambers. Günther Ruschin, a young German Jew, remembers that when he arrived at the ramp and saw women with children separated out, ‘I was thinking, a fool that I was, that they were going into a family camp.’ Selections at the ramp were always conducted by an SS doctor. This preserved the fiction that Auschwitz was an institution governed by scientific principles – that those to be murdered were chosen not out of arbitrary vindictiveness but by medical criteria. It was a lie, of course, even in Nazi terms, as there was never any proper medical examination, merely a glance at each individual. The SS would also trick new arrivals by asking if anyone wanted a lift in a vehicle to Birkenau, rather than walk to the camp. Sometimes fit young men and women would accept the ride. But everyone who chose not to walk to the camp was sent straight to the gas chambers.23 They had, the SS thought, betrayed their weakness and so did not deserve to live.

  Günther Ruschin was taken with others who had been selected for forced labour to the camp at Monowitz, next to the IG Farben works. Several days later his father, who had also been selected for work, was injured in an accident. Günther was told that his father would be sent to ‘hospital’ for ‘an X ray’. But shortly afterwards a Polish Jew told him that his father would not receive medical treatment, but would be ‘gassed’ instead. Günther’s immediate reaction was that he wanted to be selected for Birkenau so as to be near his father since maybe by some miracle he still lived. ‘This is the feeling’, he says, ‘of a boy who was very close to his father.’ But the Polish Jew convinced Günther that his father was dead and that he should remain working at Monowitz. So Günther decided to stay where he was and vowed to try and survive. ‘We went to work in lines of five men in groups,’ he says. ‘I always tried to be in the middle, so as not to be hit by the SS, and that helped. And I tried always not to be seen by the troops. I am not a man who says I must do something, some sabotage or something, no. I wanted to stay alive, to try to help others.’

  En route to Auschwitz, when Günther’s train had stopped at a station in eastern Germany, the Jews in the freight wagons had shouted out, ‘Please give us some water.’ But ‘the people who were there [said], “Damned Jews! Didn’t they kill you yet?” ’ Günther was ‘depressed and upset’ by what happened at the station, but he still didn’t believe that his fellow Germans could possibly want to murder him. ‘We knew that we weren’t going first class,’ he says. ‘But we didn’t know that the majority of us would go into the gas chambers. We didn’t know of the existence of the gas chambers.’24

  The SS did what they could to keep the new crematoria/gas-chamber buildings at Birkenau separate from the rest of the camp. The buildings were fenced of
f and the Sonderkommandos lived on site. Paradoxically, the Sonderkommandos – who had the worst jobs in the whole of Auschwitz – lived in better conditions than most of the other prisoners. ‘We had nice quarters, with beds,’ confirms Dario Gabbai, one of the Sonderkommandos who worked at Birkenau in 1944. ‘We ate well. We didn’t need the soup from the camps.’25 The SS usually allowed the Sonderkommandos to keep the food left behind in the undressing room by the Jews taken to the gas chambers. This led to an atmosphere of plenty in the Sonderkommandos’ quarters in the crematorium. Dr Miklós Nyiszli, a Romanian Jew imprisoned at Auschwitz, described a memorable dinner with them. ‘The table awaiting us’, he wrote, ‘was covered with a heavy silk tablecloth … The table was piled high with choice and varied dishes, everything a deported people could carry with them into the uncertain future: all sorts of preserves, bacon, jellies, several kinds of salami, cakes and chocolate.’26

  Some Sonderkommandos took the valuables of the Jews who were killed – in particular jewellery that had been secreted either in their clothes or within the orifices of their bodies. They then tried to exchange these valuables for other goods they wanted. They could do this because, despite the isolation of the crematoria, contact between the Sonderkommandos and other prisoners in the camp was still possible. Otto Pressburger, sent to Auschwitz in 1942 from Slovakia, remembers how he had an opportunity to visit the Sonderkommandos because he drove a horse and cart transporting various goods around Birkenau. And he was always keen to do ‘business’ with them. ‘They [the Sonderkommandos] wanted alcohol and cigarettes, and they had plenty of gold [to pay for them]. The “business” in the crematorium was the best. I always wanted to be delivering cargoes to the crematorium. You could always buy things there … Once I came to the crematorium asking if they had something to sell. I got offered a jewelled spider. Very rich Jews who used to have jewellery stores came to the camp at that time. I asked what they [the Sonderkommandos] wanted for the spider. They said a hundred cigarettes. I said if the spider is worth it then I will bring the cigarettes. We used to trust each other. The spider was beautiful. There was a big stone in the middle and the legs were covered in brilliant [jewels]. I took the spider to our Polish civilians [construction workers who lived outside the camp but worked inside during the day] and offered it to them … Each of us made a profit.’