I am going to try to obtain a train for T2 [Treblinka] tomorrow. Otherwise liquidation will be carried out here tomorrow.
Often it was, on the spot. The next day Stroop informed his superiors: “1,330 Jews pulled out of dugouts and immediately destroyed; 362 Jews killed in battle.” Only thirty prisoners were “evacuated.”
Toward the end of the rebellion the defenders took to the sewers. Stroop tried to flush them out by flooding the mains but the Jews managed to stop the flow of water. One day the Germans dropped smoke bombs into the sewers through 183 manholes but Stroop ruefully reported that they failed to “have the desired results.”
The final outcome could never be in doubt. For a whole month the cornered Jews fought with reckless courage though Stroop, in one daily report, put it differently, complaining about the “cunning fighting methods and tricks used by the Jews and bandits.” By April 26 he reported that many of the defenders were “going insane from the heat, the smoke and the explosions.”
During the day several more blocks of buildings were burned down. This is the only and final method which forces this trash and subhumanity to the surface.
The last day was May 16. That night Stroop got off his last daily battle report.
One hundred eighty Jews, bandits and subhumans were destroyed. The former Jewish quarter of Warsaw is no longer in existence. The large-scale action was terminated at 2015 hours by blowing up the Warsaw synagogue …
Total number of Jews dealt with: 56,065, including both Jews caught and Jews whose extermination can be proved.
A week later he was asked to explain that figure, and he replied:
Of the total of 56,065 caught, about 7,000 were destroyed in the former ghetto during large-scale operation. 6,929 Jews were destroyed by transporting them to Treblinka; the sum total of Jews destroyed is therefore 13,929. Beyond that, from five to six thousand Jews were destroyed by being blown up or by perishing in the flames.
General Stroop’s arithmetic is not very clear since this report leaves some 36,000 Jews unaccounted for. But there can be little doubt that he was telling the truth when he wrote in his handsomely bound final report that he had caught “a total of 56,065 Jews whose extermination can be proved.” The gas chambers no doubt accounted for the 36,000.
German losses, according to Stroop, were sixteen killed and ninety wounded. Probably the true figures were much higher, given the nature of the savage house-to-house fighting which the general himself described in such lurid detail, but were kept low so as not to disturb Himmler’s fine sensibilities. The German troops and police, Stroop concluded, “fulfilled their duty indefatigably in faithful comradeship and stood together as exemplary models of soldiers.”
The “final solution” went on to the very end of the war. How many Jews did it massacre? The figure has been debated. According to two S.S. witnesses at Nuremberg the total was put at between five and six millions by one of the great Nazi experts on the subject, Karl Eichmann, chief of the Jewish Office of the Gestapo, who carried out the “final solution” under the prodding hand of its originator, Heydrich.* The figure given in the Nuremberg indictment was 5,700,000 and it tallied with the calculations of the World Jewish Congress. Reitlinger in his prodigious study of the Final Solution concluded that the figure was somewhat less—between 4,194,200 and 4,581,200.71
There were some ten million Jews living in 1939 in the territories occupied by Hitler’s forces. By any estimate it is certain that nearly half of them were exterminated by the Germans. This was the final consequence and the shattering cost of the aberration which came over the Nazi dictator in his youthful gutter days in Vienna and which he imparted to—or shared with—so many of his German followers.
THE MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS
There were some practices of the Germans during the short-lived New Order that resulted from sheer sadism rather than a lust for mass murder. Perhaps to a psychiatrist there is a difference between the two lusts though the end result of the first differed from the second only in the scale of deaths.
The Nazi medical experiments are an example of this sadism, for in the use of concentration camp inmates and prisoners of war as human guinea pigs very little, if any, benefit to science was achieved. It is a tale of horror of which the German medical profession cannot be proud. Although the “experiments” were conducted by fewer than two hundred murderous quacks—albeit some of them held eminent posts in the medical world—their criminal work was known to thousands of leading physicians of the Reich, not a single one of whom, so far as the record shows, ever uttered the slightest public protest.*
In the murders in this field the Jews were not the only victims. The Nazi doctors also used Russian prisoners of war, Polish concentration camp inmates, women as well as men, and even Germans. The “experiments” were quite varied. Prisoners were placed in pressure chambers and subjected to high-altitude tests until they ceased breathing. They were injected with lethal doses of typhus and jaundice. They were subjected to “freezing” experiments in icy water or exposed naked in the snow outdoors until they froze to death. Poison bullets were tried out on them as was mustard gas. At the Ravensbrueck concentration camp for women hundreds of Polish inmates—the “rabbit girls” they were called—were given gas gangrene wounds while others were subjected to “experiments” in bone grafting. At Dachau and Buchenwald gypsies were selected to see how long, and in what manner, they could live on salt water. Sterilization experiments were carried out on a large scale at several camps by a variety of means on both men and women; for, as an S.S. physician, Dr. Adolf Pokorny, wrote Himmler on one occasion, “the enemy must be not only conquered but exterminated.” If he could not be slaughtered—and the need for slave labor toward the end of the war made that practice questionable, as we have seen—then he could be prevented from propagating. In fact Dr. Pokorny told Himmler he thought he had found just the right means, the plant Caladium seguinum, which, he said, induced lasting sterility.
The thought alone [the good doctor wrote the S.S. Fuehrer] that the three million Bolsheviks now in German captivity could be sterilized, so that they would be available for work but precluded from propagation, opens up the most far-reaching perspectives.72
Another German doctor who had “far-reaching perspectives” was Professor August Hirt, head of the Anatomical Institute of the University of Strasbourg. His special field was somewhat different from those of the others and he explained it in a letter at Christmas time of 1941 to S.S. Lieutenant General Rudolf Brandt, Himmler’s adjutant.
We have large collections of skulls of almost all races and peoples at our disposal. Of the Jewish race, however, only very few specimens of skulls are available … The war in the East now presents us with the opportunity to overcome this deficiency. By procuring the skulls of the Jewish-Bolshevik commissars, who represent the prototype of the repulsive, but characteristic, subhuman, we have the chance now to obtain scientific material.
Professor Hirt did not want the skulls of “Jewish-Bolshevik commissars” already dead. He proposed that the heads of these persons first be measured while they were alive. Then—
Following the subsequently induced death of the Jew, whose head should not be damaged, the physician will sever the head from the body and will forward it … in a hermetically sealed tin can.
Whereupon Dr. Hirt would go to work, he promised, on further scientific measurements.73 Himmler was delighted. He directed that Professor Hirt “be supplied with everything needed for his research work.”
He was well supplied. The actual supplier was an interesting Nazi individual by the name of Wolfram Sievers, who spent considerable time on the witness stand at the main Nuremberg trial and at the subsequent “Doctors’ Trial,” in the latter of which he was a defendant.* Sievers, a former bookseller, had risen to be a colonel of the S.S. and executive secretary of the Ahnenerbe, the Institute for Research into Heredity, one of the ridiculous “cultural” organizations established by Himmler to pursue one of his many lunacie
s. It had, according to Sievers, fifty “research branches,” of which one was called the “Institute for Military Scientific Research,” which Sievers also headed. He was a shifty-eyed, Mephistophelean-looking fellow with a thick, ink-black beard and at Nuremberg he was dubbed the “Nazi Bluebeard,” after the famous French killer. Like so many other characters in this history, he kept a meticulous diary, and this and his correspondence, both of which survived, contributed to his gallows end.
By June 1943 Sievers had collected at Auschwitz the men and women who were to furnish the skeletons for the “scientific measurements” of Professor Dr. Hirt at the University of Strasbourg. “A total of 115 persons, including 79 Jews, 30 Jewesses, 4 ‘Asiatics’ and 2 Poles were processed,” Sievers reported, requesting the S.S. main office in Berlin for transportation for them from Auschwitz to the Natzweiler concentration camp near Strasbourg. The British cross-examiner at Nuremberg inquired as to the meaning of “processing.”
“Anthropological measurements,” Sievers replied.
“Before they were murdered they were anthropologically measured? That was all there was to it, was it?”
“And casts were taken,” Sievers added.
What followed was narrated by S.S. Captain Josef Kramer, himself a veteran exterminator from Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Dachau and other camps and who achieved fleeting fame as the “Beast of Belsen” and was condemned to death by a British court at Lueneburg.
Professor Hirt of the Strasbourg Anatomical Institute told me of the prisoner convoy en route from Auschwitz. He said these persons were to be killed by poison gas in the gas chamber of the Natzweiler camp, their bodies then to be taken to the Anatomical Institute for his disposal. He gave me a bottle containing about half a pint of salts—I think they were cyanide salts—and told me the approximate dosage I would have to use to poison the arriving inmates from Auschwitz.
Early in August 1943, I received eighty inmates who were to be killed with the gas Hirt had given me. One night I went to the gas chamber in a small car with about fifteen women this first time. I told the women they had to go into the chamber to be disinfected. I did not tell them, however, that they were to be gassed.
By this time the Nazis had perfected the technique.
With the help of a few S.S. men [Kramer continued] I stripped the women completely and shoved them into the gas chamber when they were stark naked.
When the door closed they began to scream. I introduced a certain amount of salt through a tube … and observed through a peephole what happened inside the room. The women breathed for about half a minute before they fell to the floor. After I had turned on the ventilation I opened the door. I found the women lying lifeless on the floor and they were covered with excrements.
Captain Kramer testified that he repeated the performance until all eighty inmates had been killed and turned the bodies over to Professor Hirt, “as requested.” He was asked by his interrogator what his feelings were at the time, and he gave a memorable answer that gives insight into a phenomenon in the Third Reich that has seemed so elusive of human understanding.
I had no feelings in carrying out these things because I had received an order to kill the eighty inmates in the way I already told you.
That, by the way, was the way I was trained.74
Another witness testified as to what happened next. He was Henry Herypierre, a Frenchman who worked in the Anatomical Institute at Strasbourg as Professor Hirt’s laboratory assistant until the Allies arrived.
The first shipment we received was of the bodies of thirty women … These thirty female bodies arrived still warm. The eyes were wide open and shining. They were red and bloodshot and were popping from their sockets. There were also traces of blood about the nose and mouth. No rigor mortis was evident.
Herypierre suspected that they had been done to death and secretly copied down their prison numbers which were tattooed on their left arms. Two more shipments of fifty-six men arrived, he said, in exactly the same condition. They were pickled in alcohol under the expert direction of Dr. Hirt. But the professor was a Utile nervous about the whole thing. “Peter,” he said to Herypierre, “if you can’t keep your trap shut, you’ll be one of them.”
Professor Dr. Hirt went about his work nonetheless. According to the correspondence of Sievers, the professor severed the heads and, as he wrote, “assembled the skeleton collection which was previously nonexistent.” But there were difficulties and after hearing them described by Dr. Hirt—Sievers himself had no expert medical or anatomical knowledge—the chief of the Ahnenerbe reported them to Himmler on September 5, 1944.
In view of the vast amount of scientific research involved, the job of reducing the corpses has not yet been completed. This requires some time for 80 corpses.
And time was running out. Advancing American and French troops were nearing Strasbourg. Hirt requested “directives as to what should be done with the collection.”
The corpses can be stripped of the flesh and thereby rendered unidentifiable [Sievers reported to headquarters on behalf of Dr. Hirt]. This would mean, however, that at least part of the whole work had been done for nothing and that this unique collection would be lost to science, since it would be impossible to make plaster casts afterwards.
The skeleton collection as such is inconspicuous. The flesh parts could be declared as having been left by the French at the time we took over the Anatomical Institute* and would be turned over for cremating. Please advise me which of the following three proposals is to be carried out: 1. The collection as a whole to be preserved; 2. The collection to be dissolved in part; 3. The collection to be completely dissolved.
“Why were you wanting to deflesh the bodies, witness?” the British prosecutor asked in the stillness of the Nuremberg courtroom. “Why were you suggesting that the blame should be passed on to the French?”
“As a layman I could have no opinion in this matter,” the “Nazi Bluebeard” replied. “I merely transmitted an inquiry from Professor Hirt. I had nothing to do with the murdering of these people. I simply carried through the function of a mailman.”
“You were the post office,” the prosecutor rejoined, “another of these distinguished Nazi post offices, were you?”
It was a leaky defense offered by many a Nazi at the trials and on this occasion, as on others, the prosecution nailed it.75
The captured S.S. files reveal that on October 26, 1944, Sievers reported that “the collection in Strasbourg has been completely dissolved in accordance with the directive. This arrangement is for the best in view of the whole situation.”76
Herypierre later described the attempt—not altogether successful—to hide the traces.
In September, 1944, the Allies made an advance on Belfort, and Professor Hirt ordered Bong and Herr Maier to cut up these bodies and have them burned in the crematory … I asked Herr Maier the next day whether he had cut up all the bodies, but Herr Bong replied: “We couldn’t cut up all the bodies, it was too much work. We left a few bodies in the storeroom.”
They were discovered there by an Allied team when units of the U.S. Seventh Army, with the French 2nd Armored Division in the lead, entered Strasbourg a month later.†77
Not only skeletons but human skins were collected by the masters of the New Order though in the latter case the pretense could not be made that the cause of scientific research was being served. The skins of concentration camp prisoners, especially executed for this ghoulish purpose, had merely decorative value. They made, it was found, excellent lamp shades, several of which were expressly fitted up for Frau Ilse Koch, the wife of the commandant of Buchenwald and nicknamed by the inmates the “Bitch of Buchenwald.”* Tattooed skins appear to have been the most sought after. A German inmate, Andreas Pfaffenberger, deposed at Nuremberg on this.
… All prisoners with tattooing on them were ordered to report to the dispensary … After the prisoners had been examined the ones with the best and most artistic specimens were killed by injections. The corpses
were then turned over to the pathological department where the desired pieces of tattooed skin were detached from the bodies and treated further. The finished products were turned over to Koch’s wife, who had them fashioned into lamp shades, and other ornamental household articles.78
One piece of skin which apparently struck Frau Koch’s fancy had the words “Haensel and Gretel” tattooed on it.
At another camp, Dachau, the demand for such skins often outran the supply. A Czech physician prisoner, Dr. Frank Bláha, testified at Nuremberg as to that.
Sometimes we would not have enough bodies with good skin and Dr. Rascher would say, “All right, you will get the bodies.” The next day we would receive twenty or thirty bodies of young people. They would have been shot in the neck or struck on the head, so that the skin would be uninjured … The skin had to be from healthy prisoners and free from defects.79
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich Page 155