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IF HEYDRICH’S EINSATZGRUPPEN, the SS, and the Gestapo had acted monstrously during the invasion of Poland, they were to surpass themselves in the months after Operation Barbarossa in Russia. Jews were slaughtered in the thousands, on the grounds that they were suspected of looting or acting against the provisions of martial law or were just in the wrong place at the wrong time—and the security apparatus actively encouraged racial pogroms carried out by eager-to-please local populations. But it was not until the end of July 1941 that the Nazis began taking purposeful steps toward the total annihilation of the Jewish people.
There are many reasons why that summer can be identified as a turning point. One is that, following the first sweeping successes against the Red Army, Hitler’s rhetoric became ever more messianic—emphasizing again and again his determination to eradicate the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy against the fatherland. Almost certainly, Himmler, Hitler’s most loyal and sycophantic lieutenant, interpreted such statements as a sign that his leader was willing to act without restraint against the Russian Jews and that it was his personal responsibility to realize the Führer’s wishes.
Himmler’s actions may also have been influenced by the outcome of a meeting on July 16, when Hitler confirmed decisions, taken before the invasion, about who would have administrative charge for the newly conquered territories in the East. To Himmler’s chagrin, overall responsibility for civil affairs was given to Alfred Rosenberg, a ponderous Baltic German who was considered by some of his contemporaries to be one of the Nazi Party’s leading intellectuals.* This appointment did not impinge directly on the Reichsführer’s SS and police roles but the question of who was to be in charge of the long-term colonization and resettlement of Russia—a job Himmler saw as a natural extension of his activities in Poland—had been left unresolved. Thus, Himmler looked for indirect ways of increasing his territorial brief—perhaps in the hope of reminding the Führer of his suitability for the resettlement role. Resolving the Jewish “question,” in other words, may have been an obvious way to impress his leader.
Strictly speaking, jurisdiction over specifically “Jewish matters” lay with Hermann Göring, but in 1939 he had delegated to Reinhard Heydrich the task of expelling all German Jews—an order that was reinforced in early 1941 when Hitler instructed Heydrich to develop a scheme for deporting them somewhere under German control and then on to exile in the geographically nebulous East. It occurred to Himmler that if Heydrich now went back to Göring and asked for an extension of his powers to deal with the Jewish situation in Russia, that authority would, by default, confer on Himmler, as his superior, the ultimate executive responsibility.
A letter, drafted by Heydrich and signed by Göring on July 3, was all that was required.
Supplementing the task that was assigned to you on 24 January 1939, which dealt with the solution of the Jewish problem by emigration and evacuation in the most suitable way, I hereby charge you to submit a comprehensive blueprint of the organizational, subject-related, and material preparatory measures for the execution of the intended final solution of the Jewish question.
A few days later the Einsatzgruppen—sometimes supported by the Wehrmacht—began their slaughter of Jewish men women and children across the eastern territories. Over the next few months, mass liquidations occurred in Lithuania, Belorussia, the Ukraine, Serbia, and the General Government. August 1941 also saw the beginning of deportations eastward of Jews from Germany, Austria, Bohemia, and Moravia—a move that was marked administratively by the removal of the German Jews’ nationality and the imposition of an obligation to wear the yellow Judenstern (Star of David). Their treatment thereafter depended on the priorities, resources, and initiative of local SS and Nazi commanders. Thus, Jews arriving at Minsk, Riga, and Kaunas were shot as soon as they got off the train. But in October 1941 trains brought twenty thousand Jews to Lodz, too many to dispose of easily, so they were added to the city’s already overcrowded ghetto. To cope with the numbers, Wilhelm Koppe, the area’s SS chief, began transporting Jews by truck to the village of Chelmno, where they were loaded a hundred at a time into sealed vans and gassed with exhaust fumes. This new method was in line with general orders from Himmler, issued after a visit to Minsk in August 1941, which called for investigation into means of killing other than mass shootings, so as to relieve the “nervous and mental strain” on the executioners. The October murders at Chelmno were the start of a more systematic type of slaughter. Within two years more than 360,000 Jews and Gypsies had been killed at that location alone.
By the late autumn of 1941 it was clear to Himmler that Hitler considered the deportation program a success and that the fate of the Jews after their removal to the East was of no further interest. Yet the process was becoming a little unwieldy. Many different agencies and individuals were now involved in killing Jews on their own initiative and it was time, Himmler realized, to coordinate all the different programs and establish his overall authority.
Heydrich was therefore prevailed upon to send out invitations to bureaucrats from all the relevant Reich ministries and agencies, including officials from the Ministries of Justice, the Occupied Eastern Territories, and the Interior; the Reich Chancellery; the Party Chancellery; the Foreign Office; the Offices of the Four-Year Plan and the General Government; and the various SS and RHSA agencies under Himmler’s control (such as the Office of the Reich Commissioner of the Consolidation of the German Nation, and the Race and Settlement Main Office). They were asked to gather at the old Berlin Interpol office at 56 Am grossen Wannsee, on December 9, to develop a “uniform view among the relevant central agencies of the further tasks concerned with the remaining work on this final solution.”
The meeting—hastily deferred to January 20, 1942, after the United States entered the war—became infamous as the Wannsee Conference. Its purpose was to organize the division of labor and to assign roles to the various state organs charged with carrying out the official program of mass murder. Heydrich’s “Jewish expert,” SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann, kept the minutes, which were later sanitized for wider distribution.
Heydrich explained to his audience that eleven million Jews were involved—a figure that included those in countries such as Britain and Ireland not yet under Nazi control. All were to be brought by train to transit ghettos in the East. The fit and healthy would then be selected for work, although their numbers would be reduced through inevitable natural attrition. Those not chosen would be murdered immediately: “The remnant that survives all this must be regarded as the germ cell of a new Jewish development and therefore destroyed. In the course of this final solution, Europe is to be combed for Jews from west to east.”
No one at the meeting expressed dissent; instead discussions focused on such matters as the exact legal definition of “Jew” and what should be done with “half Jews” or those married to Aryans. One suggestion about the latter was that they should be sent to a special ghetto at Theresienstadt, near Prague, to be housed alongside high-profile Jews whose deportation directly to the East might draw too much public notice. Another debate seems to have centered on the specific methods of extermination, although in Eichmann’s heavily edited minutes this is reduced to a discussion about “various possible solutions.”
The conference achieved its central purpose. At the outset, Heydrich had made plain that “primary responsibility for the handling of the final solution of the Jewish question … is to lie centrally, regardless of geographic boundaries, with the Reichsführer SS and chief of the German police.” No one objected; everyone got the message: Himmler was in charge.
Three days later Himmler met with Hitler. No record of their discussion now exists but the SS leader would undoubtedly have kept his Führer informed of his activities—it would have been too dangerous not to. In any event, his full authority over the disposition of the Jews was obviously confirmed at the meeting because shortly afterward Himmler sent a message to Richard Glücks, the SS inspector of concent
ration camps, telling him that because no more Russian POWs were available he would be receiving a large contingent of Jews instead—some of whom were clearly intended for Auschwitz: “Will you therefore make preparations to receive within the next four weeks 100,000 Jews and up to 50,000 Jewesses.”
On January 30, Hitler came to a microphone at the Sports Palace in Berlin to speak of his confidence in ultimate victory. “The war will not end as the Jews imagine it will, namely with the uprooting of the Aryans,” he announced.
The result of this war will be the complete annihilation of the Jews. Now for the first time they will not bleed other people to death, but for the first time the old Jews’ law of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth will be applied. And—world Jewry may as well know this—the further these battles spread, the more anti-Semitism will spread. It will find nourishment in every prison camp and in every family when it discovers the ultimate reason for the sacrifices it has to make. And the hour will come when the most evil universal enemy of all time will be finished, at least for a thousand years.
Even as ordinary Germans were absorbing these words through the radio, newsreels, and in their newspapers, new death camps were being prepared to operate alongside the gas vans of Chelmno. Three of them were to be located near remote villages on the old Polish-German border, at Belzec, Treblinka, and Sobibor—names that would one day become synonymous with the destruction of European Jewry.
A fourth was established amid a birch wood and the still incomplete barrack blocks of a Soviet POW camp and within a couple of miles of the largest industrial construction site in Europe. As many as half of those transported there were to be “selected” immediately for forced labor; the other half—the old, the sick, the crippled, and the very young—were to be marched into a gas chamber to be slain with pesticide and then cremated. Auschwitz-Birkenau, which owed its existence in no small part to IG Farben’s contract with Himmler’s SS and which would now provide the human fodder for the chemical company’s gigantic Buna-Werke, was set to embark on the murder of one and half million people.
12
IG AUSCHWITZ AND THE FINAL SOLUTION
For a few weeks in the spring of 1942 things seemed to improve at the Buna-Werke (or IG Auschwitz, as it was sometimes called)—from its managers’ point of view at least. Building materials began arriving on time, and some Jewish deportees and fresh influxes of labor from France, Belgium, and the Ukraine were added to the workforce. The Organisation Todt, the Reich’s civil engineering agency, was also persuaded, albeit temporarily, to lend some extra muscle to the peripheral but necessary construction of the plant’s waterworks and railway halt.* But the IG’s optimism didn’t last. In May the government announced that munitions were to be given priority over all other commercial traffic on the railways—immediately reducing the flow of iron, timber, cement, and bricks to the Buna-Werke to a trickle. By then the SS had also begun moving Polish political prisoners from Auschwitz to Germany, to free up space for the much larger number of Jews arriving from the other direction. To accommodate these incoming prisoners, the construction of Birkenau—which as yet consisted of only a few barrack blocks—had to be stepped up, diverting some of the additional supplies of inmate labor that Himmler had promised the cartel. In fact, the SS had told IG managers to expect between four and five thousand prisoners in 1942, but for much of the first six months of the year it had to manage with around half that number. The weekly construction reports from Walter Dürrfeld and Max Faust resumed their previously discouraging tone, and Otto Ambros and Heinrich Bütefisch set off on more wearisome journeys across the Reich to discuss with their Auschwitz colleagues what might be done to get things back on track.
In casting around for ways to improve productivity, the IG didn’t take long to identify one major logjam. The Buna-Werke lay over four miles from the concentration camps, but the construction site itself was huge, extending another mile and a quarter from the main gates. The prisoners had to cover this distance on foot and, in order to be onsite and at their allotted workplaces at first light, they were woken for roll call at 4:00 a.m. Half starved and brutalized as they already were, this routine left them utterly exhausted and unfit for labor, especially as on the return trip in the evening the prisoners were often burdened with the bodies of those who had died during the day. The IG had always known that physical weakness would be an issue; during negotiations with the SS over how much to pay for labor, the company had estimated that the productivity of a concentration camp prisoner would be, at best, around 75 percent that of a free German worker. But it hadn’t bargained on the time and energy that would be wasted in all the marching to and fro. As Ambros pointed out to colleagues, if the daily journey could be shortened by bringing the prisoners nearer to the site, the concern might stand a better chance of getting the labor it was paying for.
Ambros’s insight had absolutely nothing to do with prisoner welfare, a subject to which the company always remained sublimely indifferent. Not once, for example, did it ever propose that the workers should be given suitable clothing (at the IG’s expense, if necessary) or that they should be fed properly to keep up their strength. Such suggestions might well have drawn the wrath and suspicion of the SS and other Nazi authorities, but the IG could have made a reasonable enough case on the grounds that the Buna-Werke was vital to the war effort and that a fit and healthy workforce was necessary for its completion. Yet the concern never considered such steps, not even to reject them for fear of repercussions; it simply ignored the issue of prisoner welfare altogether. Instead of vigorously protesting about the state prisoners were in, the concern simply found a faster way to get them to the Buna-Werke so that the little energy they had was at least being drained in the service of the IG, not the SS.
Thus, in late June 1942 the Vorstand arrived at a solution that in the distorted logic of the times must somehow have made sense to its members but that actually made the concern directly complicit in mass murder. IG Farben decided to build and run its own concentration camp at Auschwitz.
Of course, the idea wasn’t completely new because there were already seven other small “construction camps” attached to the Buna-Werke by this time, including a Luftwaffe-run stalag for twelve hundred British POWs (where Denis Avey was incarcerated) and other barrack-style accommodations for conscript Polish and foreign laborers and free German workers. But none of these facilities, bleak and unpleasant though some were, could remotely compare to the undertaking the cartel was now contemplating: a huge IG Farben–owned prison for thousands of Jewish slave laborers. No private company had ever attempted such a thing before, and there were several tricky issues to consider. The camp would clearly cost millions of marks to construct, and careful thought would have to be given to how much, or how little, the company spent on security, housing, and all the other specialized elements of concentration camp infrastructure. Another issue was the danger of alienating the Reich’s security apparatus, whose specialists might view the plan as an encroachment on their territory. The idea would have to be raised very carefully with the top echelons of the SS.
Fortunately, an opportunity was just around the corner. In mid-July, Commandant Höss got in touch with Walter Dürrfeld. The IG’s Auschwitz staff should prepare themselves, he said. The Reichsführer himself wanted to pay them a visit.
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HIMMLER’S ARRIVAL ON July 17, 1942, came at the end of a busy few months that had seen the assassination of his energetic deputy Reinhard Heydrich (killed by the Czech resistance in Prague) and his subsequent assumption of personal control over the Reich Security Main Office. He was now determined to demonstrate to the Führer his complete mastery of the mechanics of the Final Solution, while at the same time making full use of the additional opportunities for racial cleansing that the war with Russia had opened up and that Hitler had finally agreed fell within his purview.
Auschwitz was therefore now part of a much wider vision. Himmler’s plans for turning the town into a model German se
ttlement had been put on hold—materials for the construction of high-quality domestic housing were simply not available—and he had decided instead that its camps could be used to help establish a presence for the SS in the armaments industry.* He had ordered the expansion of Birkenau to 200,000 inmates and had told Adolf Eichmann (head of the RHSA’s Jewish Office and in charge of transporting Jews) that it should be filled with prisoners who could be worked until they dropped. Himmler’s commitment to the IG was still extant and would have to be met, but the company’s needs would have to take their place amid his other plans for Auschwitz. The most significant of these was his decision to make it a center for the industrialized annihilation of European Jewry.
Experiments in mass murder techniques had been going on at Auschwitz since the previous year, initially as part of an SS “euthanasia program” intended to eliminate sick inmates. The most “promising” of these trials involved the use of Zyklon B, a hydrocyanic, or prussic, acid that had been introduced into the camp in July 1940 for use as a pesticide to fumigate lice-infested buildings and prisoner clothing. Deadly to humans in even small quantities and normally stored in sealed metal containers, the cyanide granules turned into gas on contact with air at temperatures around 79 degrees Fahrenheit. It was manufactured by an IG Farben subsidiary, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung (Degesch), or German Pest Control Company, of Frankfurt am Main, and had been tested on prisoners in August 1941. The first mass killings involving Zyklon B at Auschwitz took place around September 5, 1941, when some nine hundred Soviet POWs and sick prisoners of other categories were gassed in the basement cells of the camp’s punishment block. But although the gas had proved effective, both its administration and the subsequent cleanup—the corpses had to be undressed, heaved onto carts, and dragged to freshly dug mass graves—were deemed inefficient. To improve matters Commandant Höss ordered subsequent gassing operations transferred to the camp crematorium (later called the “old crematorium,” or “crematorium 1”). There the mortuary was made into a gas chamber by sealing off the doors and knocking openings in the ceiling through which the cyanide pellets could be poured. Zyklon B was next used in February 1942, to murder four hundred elderly Slovak Jews considered unfit for work.
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