The Holocaust: A New History

by Laurence Rees

  For Mengele, Auschwitz was an enormous medical playground. He could devise whatever medical experiments he liked in pursuit of his ‘racial’ research, limited only by his imagination. His special interest was always genetics, and how genes were passed on within families – he was thus particularly keen to experiment on twins. Vera Alexander, a Kapo who looked after twins selected by Mengele, recalls how they often returned to the block screaming with pain after his attentions. Having observed him at close quarters, she says that she simply cannot ‘understand his cruelty’.3 The overwhelming advantage for Dr Mengele of studying twins was that once an experiment had been completed on one twin, both could be murdered and their bodies dissected to compare the two. As Dr Miklós Nyiszli, a prisoner who assisted Dr Mengele, said, ‘Where, under normal circumstances, can one find twin brothers who die at the same place and at the same time?’ But at Auschwitz ‘there were several hundred sets of twins, and therefore as many possibilities of dissection.’4

  Mengele was not the only Nazi doctor who conducted medical experiments at Auschwitz. In a specially equipped medical block, for instance, Professor Carl Clauberg and Dr Horst Schumann both conducted research into sterilization. Wilhelm Brasse, who took photos for Mengele, also took photographs of women under anaesthetic who had been subjected to these sterilization experiments. The women were placed in a special gynaecological chair and the doctors ‘would stretch the vagina and take the uterus out with forceps, and I would take photos of it. Not the whole person but just the sexual parts and the uterus. In several cases I used colour film. We didn’t develop it in our lab as we didn’t have a colour film lab, we sent it to Berlin … For me it was the worst – seeing this terrible sight. I had information that in many cases such operated women were [subsequently] given a shot [an injection] and killed.’5

  Carl Clauberg had previously held the post of professor of gynaecology at the University of Königsberg, and was, like Mengele, a committed National Socialist. Himmler had taken an interest in his work and had personally approved his use of Auschwitz as a human research laboratory. As we have seen earlier in this history, sterilization was a subject of considerable interest for the Reichsführer SS. In pursuit of his experiments, Clauberg injected various substances into women in order to prevent fertilization. ‘Those women were in horrible pain, and had high temperature,’ says Silvia Veselá, a Slovak Jew who assisted Clauberg. ‘I measured their temperature, did X-rays, and so on.’6

  While Clauberg experimented with the use of injections, his colleague Dr Schumann gave his subjects massive doses of radiation. Silvia Veselá recalls that ‘the impact of X-ray intensity on [the] small intestine was tested on them. It was more than awful. Those women were throwing up all the time. It was really terrible.’7 During her time in Auschwitz, Silvia confesses that she became emotionally numbed to suffering: ‘If you are beaten too hard, after a while you feel nothing. Do you know that feeling? No, you don’t, because you haven’t experienced such a treatment. But as I said before: if you are beaten too hard, after a while you feel nothing, because you are apathetic. That was the only rescue … To become apathetic.’8 She herself was forced to take part in one of Clauberg’s medical trials. ‘I was ill and they carried out some experiments on me … Unfortunately, after the war when I got married, in spite of those experiments I got pregnant. I had to undertake a very loathsome abortion. Doctors told me, “That’s enough! Don’t dare to be pregnant any more.” ’9

  Medical experiments on inmates were not confined to Auschwitz. Doctors in other concentration camps also participated. Soon after the war began, doctors at Sachsenhausen exposed prisoners to mustard gas in order to measure the effect of the poison. But it was at Dachau that some of the most infamous experiments took place, supervised by Dr Sigmund Rascher. In 1942 prisoners were locked in airtight chambers and tested to see how much pressure their bodies could endure. Other prisoners were thrust into icy water to assess how long downed aircrew could survive in a freezing sea.

  The potential value to the Luftwaffe of these experiments was obvious. But not everyone in the German Air Force was content that human beings had died in the course of the trials. When, in October 1942, Dr Rascher presented his findings to senior figures in the Air Ministry, he detected an element of disquiet among his audience. Just before the meeting Himmler had stated his own position on the subject in a letter to Dr Rascher: ‘I believe that people objecting to these human experiments still today, who would rather German soldiers died of the consequences of this hypothermia, are high traitors, and I shall not refrain from mentioning the names of these gentlemen to the authorities in question.’10 There is even evidence that Himmler sought Hitler’s approval for this research, and that Hitler took the view that ‘in principle as far as the welfare of the state is concerned, human experimentation has to be tolerated.’11

  In one of the most bleakly bizarre episodes of Nazi human experimentation, Dr Rascher attempted to revive a prisoner who was unconscious as a result of exposure to freezing conditions, by placing him between two naked female prisoners. Himmler had been the one who had suggested the idea, because he thought that ‘a fisherwoman could well take her half-frozen husband into her bed and revive him in that manner.’12

  In Dachau and Sachsenhausen many of the prisoners selected to be tortured for medical experimentation were non-Jews, but that wasn’t so surprising given that by the start of 1943 there were fewer than 400 Jews in the concentration camps in the Reich that had been built before the war.13 Even in Auschwitz, as we have seen, Dr Mengele could choose Sinti and Roma to die just as easily as he could choose Jews. For someone like Mengele, Nazi ideology justified a raft of murderous schemes: from the extermination of the Jews to deadly medical experiments. It was all part of a world in which medical professionals were the arbiters of life and death within the racial state.

  Auschwitz had by now become a vast enterprise that encompassed many different functions and goals – and the lines between them all were sometimes blurred. That was certainly the case with the treatment of Polish political prisoners. The personal history of Tadeusz Smreczyński, for instance, demonstrates how the suffering of non-Jewish Poles became linked in the gas chambers of Birkenau with that of the Jews. Tadeusz was fifteen years old when the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939. He lived with his family in Zator, only a few miles from Auschwitz. The Germans prevented Poles like him from receiving any further education and he was forced to leave school. In September 1940, at the age of sixteen, he was sent to Germany to work as a forced labourer, but in November he escaped, and fled to Kraków where he lived with an aunt. Five months later he returned home to Zator in the hope that the Germans had forgotten about him. He now started, on his own initiative, to work against the Germans. He helped people cross the nearby border between Upper Silesia, which had been incorporated into the Reich, and the General Government. He also produced leaflets criticizing the Germans. In December 1943 he developed a plan to help Poles imprisoned in the nearby camps and, as a first step, passed on several bread-ration cards to a friend. ‘He was planning to get some bread,’ says Tadeusz, ‘and give it away to the prisoners when SS men were not around. I arranged these coupons for him. Unfortunately he had a tendency to drink alcohol and he got involved in a brawl at the railway station in Auschwitz. He was subsequently arrested and those coupons were found on him. He told me later that he was beaten and had no choice but to disclose that I had fled Germany and that I had distributed the leaflets and assisted the fugitives.’14

  Tadeusz was found, arrested and taken to Mysłowice prison – a place where inmates were ‘beaten and forced to confess’. Here, he signed the confession the Germans put in front of him since ‘there was no point in denying anything.’ At Mysłowice assessments were made in order to decide where the prisoners should be sent next. The place Tadeusz most feared was Auschwitz, because he knew that a ‘police court’ with a terrifying reputation was held inside Block 11 in the main camp. In the spring of 1944, he le
arnt his fate. He, and fifty or so other prisoners, were loaded on to a truck and driven out of the prison, escorted by police on motorbikes. ‘After the convoy turned left,’ he says, ‘we knew we were going to Auschwitz. We were all sitting quietly, thinking about our fate and our families because we knew that this was the last day of our lives.’

  They arrived at Auschwitz main camp and marched under the entrance gate, inscribed ‘Arbeit macht frei’. They turned right, past the red-brick buildings where the inmates lived, until they reached the walled courtyard between Blocks 10 and 11. Here they were joined by more than a hundred prisoners who had been taken up from the cells in Block 11. Shortly afterwards, says Tadeusz, ‘The Gestapo commander, a Doctor of Law from Katowice, with two officers in tow arrived and the administration of justice began. Each one of us was called to report individually. We had to climb a few stairs leading from the courtyard to the block and then wait in a corridor. When my turn came I went into the room and was asked to provide my personal details. All the charges against me were read out.’ He was then told to join one of three groups of prisoners. There was no ‘trial’, no chance for him to defend himself; the ‘court’ merely announced which group each individual prisoner should join. ‘They [the members of the court] were taking lunch breaks and dinner breaks and so it all lasted till evening.’ Once the selection of all the prisoners was over, the first of the three groups was sent immediately to Birkenau and gassed. Among this group was a schoolteacher who had shared his cell at Mysłowice prison. ‘Before they left he said to me,’ says Tadeusz, ‘ “If you survive, tell Poland how we died.” ’15 The second group of prisoners was sent to the gas chambers of Birkenau two days later. Only the small number of prisoners in Tadeusz’s third group were admitted to the camp.

  By this point in the evolution of Auschwitz the gassing of Polish political prisoners was not unusual. On 29 February 1944, for instance, 163 Poles who had been sent to Block 11 from Mysłowice prison were transported to Crematorium IV in Birkenau, along with forty-one other prisoners from Auschwitz. Among the condemned was a young Polish woman who, once she reached the crematorium, told the SS that everyone knew they were about to die in the gas chambers so the secrecy that had once surrounded this crime was no more. The Germans, she said, would one day be called to account for what they had done. As they entered the gas chamber, the Poles sang ‘Poland Is Not Yet Lost’ and ‘To the Barricades’.16 It is a reminder, both of the bravery of these individuals when faced with certain death, and that not only Jews perished in the gas chambers of Birkenau.

  As for Tadeusz Smreczyński, he was ‘surprised’ that he had not been killed immediately after his ‘trial’ in Block 11. Once admitted to the main camp he benefited from a piece of luck. He encountered two prominent prisoners who felt a personal connection to him. The first was a Kapo: ‘That man apparently recognized me from Mysłowice where I used to carry pots of food around to various blocks. The man told me he was going to take care of my safety which was something extraordinary and which made me stronger psychologically.’

  On the following day Tadeusz met the second man who would offer him support: ‘He introduced himself and said that he had known my father who he had worked with when my father was a mayor. He gave me his daily bread ration which was an extremely valuable gesture … and he said to me, “Do not let them kill you. Remember never to stand on the sides or at the front or at the back of the columns when marching or during assemblies. This is where they hit most often. So stick to the middle of the column,” and he repeated “Do not let them kill you” before he departed. He did not survive the camp. The beginning was in a psychological sense very favourable to me because I became aware that I was not alone.’ Tadeusz also soon learnt that it was vital to try and work ‘inside’ the camp. The work commandos that marched outside to dig ditches or build roads had to suffer in the freezing cold or the pouring rain and few survived for long. Tadeusz was assigned to a building commando that stayed within the confines of the main camp and so managed to avoid this fate.

  Tadeusz Smreczyński was well aware that one of the functions of Auschwitz was to murder Jews. Indeed, once in the middle of the night he witnessed the emotional aftermath of a mass killing when he heard ‘some commotion’ outside his block: ‘I peeped through the window very discreetly so as not to be seen and shot. There were men – only young and middle-aged – all naked. Their families had been gassed and they were brought to the main camp. They were ordered to stand in compact groups of five but they were in panic and each wanted to be close to his nearest relative: brother, father or a friend. SS men with dogs and Kapos were beating them. It was a teeming mass of human bodies reflected in the light of the lamps. It was a horrible sight.’ He imagined how he would have felt if ‘my parents had just been gassed and I stayed alive. It must have been a terrible experience – that sense of helplessness in the face of fate. One could do absolutely nothing to save one’s loved ones.’

  He tried to understand how the SS could be responsible for the appalling cruelty in front of him and yet still consider themselves civilized. In Birkenau he heard ‘the camp’s orchestra playing masterpieces by German, Austrian and Italian composers. SS men were sitting by the crematorium where children, mothers, women and men were burning, but they were just sitting there. Now I think that they were pleased to have properly completed their work and were due for a cultural entertainment. They had no dilemmas. The wind from Birkenau blew the smoke from the death camp in but they were just sitting and listening to Mozart and others. This is what a human being is capable of …’ Experiences like this confirmed the view of the world that he had formed as a child. ‘As a thirteen-year-old boy I used to read a lot and I listened to the radio, and I had the conviction that Earth is embraced by crime and there is so much evil among people. I came to a conclusion that life has no sense.’17

  But for Oskar Groening, a member of the Auschwitz SS garrison, what was happening in the camp made at least a kind of sense. In 1943 he was twenty-two years old, and worked in the economic department of the camp, counting the money stolen from the arriving Jews. A committed nationalist, he had absorbed the key principles of Nazism: ‘We were convinced by our world-view that there was a great conspiracy of Jewishness against us, and that thought was expressed in Auschwitz – that it must be avoided, what happened in the First World War must be avoided, namely that the Jews put us into misery. The enemies who are within Germany are being killed – exterminated if necessary. And between these two fights, openly at the front line and then on the home front, there’s absolutely no difference – so we exterminated nothing but enemies.’18

  It was one thing, however, to believe this in theory, quite another to watch mass murder in practice. Normally Oskar Groening could avoid the horror as most of his working hours were spent in an office, but when he saw the bloody evidence of the killings he was shocked. Once he came across bodies being burnt in the open at Birkenau: ‘The fire was flickering up and the Kapo there told me afterwards details of the burning. And it was terribly disgusting – horrendous. He made fun of the fact that when the bodies started burning they obviously developed gases from the lungs or elsewhere and these bodies seemed to jump up, and the sex parts of the men suddenly became erect in a kind of way that he found laughable.’19 But for the most part life in the camp was comfortable for Groening – almost luxurious compared to the other postings that he might have received. He, like many of the 3,000 SS serving in the Auschwitz complex, never had to bloody his own hands since only a tiny number of SS worked in the murder factories of the crematoria. For him, this ‘distance’ from the killing was ‘the decisive thing’ that enabled him to carry on working in a relatively contented way.20 So much so that in his leisure time he liked to participate in sports. For instance, he represented the Auschwitz SS athletics team at the high jump.

  In many respects Auschwitz was thus an attractive posting for a member of the SS. Not only was there little danger of getting killed, but the food and drink
were excellent – much of it stolen from the arriving Jews. There was also the opportunity to get rich. An SS officer tasked with investigating corruption in the camp in 1943 later said that ‘The conduct of the SS staff was beyond any of the standards that you’d expect from soldiers. They made the impression of demoralized and brutal parasites. An examination of the lockers yielded a fortune of gold, pearls, rings, and money in all kinds of currencies.’21

  But it wasn’t just the chance to get rich that motivated the SS to work at Auschwitz. As Oskar Groening says, they were told that their work was important for the security of the Reich, that the Jews were behind Bolshevism, and that it was necessary to keep fighting in this war to prevent the Red Army destroying Germany. As a result, Groening and his comrades remained committed to participating in the mass murder of civilians – from the very old to the very young.

  Oskar Groening would have likely understood the reasoning behind the sentiments Adolf Hitler expressed in a speech on 30 January 1944 – the eleventh anniversary of his appointment as Chancellor. Hitler chose to deliver his speech at his headquarters in East Prussia and to have his words broadcast on the radio. Gone were the days of the fawning crowds at the Berlin Sportpalast. There was little good news to celebrate, and so Hitler preferred to hide himself from the masses. In his speech he still seemed bemused that ‘England’ – as he persistently called Great Britain – had chosen to side with the Soviet Union rather than Germany. ‘The victory of Germany means the preservation of Europe,’ he declared, ‘and the victory of the Soviet Union means its annihilation.’ The problem was, according to Hitler, that ‘the guilty war criminals in London’ now found they had no way of ‘liberating themselves from their own entanglement’ because their ‘way back’ had been cut off by ‘their Jewish wire-pullers’. They had made a mistake in dealing with the Jews, said Hitler, as ‘every state, once it has devoted itself to Jewry like England, will die from this plague, unless it pulls itself together at the last minute and forcibly removes these bacteria from its body. The view that it is possible to live peacefully together or even reconcile one’s own interests and those of this ferment of the decomposition of peoples, is nothing else than hoping that the human body is able to assimilate plague bacilli.’22