Oskar Groening, however, was most certainly one of the majority who had taken part in the process of mass murder during 1942. Once he had been working at Auschwitz for several months, his work, he says, had become “routine.” He sorted out the various currencies that had been taken from the new arrivals, counted the moneys and sent it to Berlin. He still attended selections, not to participate in the decision-making process about who should live and who should die—those decisions were made by SS doctors—but to ensure that the belongings of the Jews were taken away and held securely until they could be sorted. This was done in an area of the camp that came to be called “Canada,” because that country had become a fantasy destination—a land rich in everything.
Groening had thus manufactured for himself what he considered to be a tolerable life at Auschwitz. In his office he was insulated from the brutality, and when he was walking around the camp he could avert his eyes from anything that displeased him. In normal circumstances he had nothing to do with the crude mechanics of the killing process—there was generally no reason for him to visit the remote corner of Birkenau where the murders took place. The only reminder that different nationalities were coming to the camp was the variety of currencies that crossed Groening’s desk—one day French francs, another Czech korunas, the next Polish zlotys (and always American dollars)—plus the array of liquor taken from the new arrivals—Greek ouzo, French brandy, and Italian sambuca. Says Groening,When there was a lot of ouzo, it could only come from Greece—otherwise there was no reason for us to distinguish where they came from. We didn’t feel any empathy or sympathy towards one or other Jewish group from any particular country unless you were keen on getting a particular kind of vodka or schnapps—the Russians had a lovely type of vodka.... We drank a lot of vodka. We didn’t get drunk every day—but it did happen. We’d go to bed drunk, and if someone was too lazy to turn off the light they’d shoot at it—nobody said anything.
Although Groening does not exactly use the word “enjoyable” to describe his time at Auschwitz, it is hard to see how that is not an apt description of the life he paints.
Auschwitz main camp was like a small town. It had its gossip—it had a vegetable shop where you could buy bones to make broth. There was a canteen, a cinema, a theatre with regular performances. There was a sports club of which I was a member. There were dances—all fun and entertainment.
And then there was the other “positive” side of life at Auschwitz for Oskar Groening—his comrades: “I have to say that many who worked there weren’t dull, they were intelligent.” When he eventually left the camp in 1944, he went with some regrets:I’d left a circle of friends who I’d got familiar with, I’d got fond of, and that was very difficult. Apart from the fact that there are pigs who fulfil their personal drives—there are such people—the special situation at Auschwitz led to friendships which, I still say today, I think back on with joy.
But one night, towards the end of 1942, Groening’s comfortable life at Auschwitz was disrupted by a sudden glimpse into the nightmare of the actual killing operation. Asleep in his barracks in the SS camp on the perimeter of Birkenau, he and his comrades were woken by the sound of an alarm. They were told that a number of Jews who were being marched to the gas chambers had escaped and run to the nearby woods. “We were told to take our pistols and go through the forest,” says Groening. “We found no one.” Then he and his comrades spread out and moved up towards the extermination area of the camp.
We went in star formation up towards this farmhouse—it was lit from outside in diffused light, and out in the front were seven or eight bodies. These were the ones who had probably tried to escape and they’d been caught and shot. In front of the door of the farmhouse were some SS men who told us, “It’s finished, you can go home.”
Overcome by curiosity, Groening and his comrades decided not to “go home” but to hang about in the shadows instead. They watched as an SS man put on a gas mask and placed Zyklon B pellets through a hatch in the side of the cottage wall. There had been a humming noise coming from inside the cottage that now “turned to screaming” for a minute—followed by silence. “Then one man—I don’t know whether he was an officer—stood and came to the door where there was a peep-hole, looked in and checked whether everything was OK and the people were dead.” Groening describes his feelings at this moment, when the crude mechanics of murder were placed in front of him, “as if you see two lorries crashing on the motorway. And you ask yourself, ‘Must it be that way? Is this necessary?’ And of course it’s influenced by the fact that you said before, ‘Yes, well, it’s war,’ and we said, ‘They were our enemies.’”
Later, Groening witnessed the burning of the bodies.
This comrade said, “Come with me, I’ll show you.” I was so shocked that I stood at a distance—perhaps seventy meters away from the fires. 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.
The sight of the gassing installations and the burning cremation pits momentarily shattered the cozy life that Oskar Groening had created for himself at Auschwitz. So much so that he went once more to his boss, an SS Untersturmführer (lieutenant) who was “an Austrian and basically an honest bloke” and poured out his feelings. “He listened to me and said: ‘My dear Groening, what do you want to do against it? We’re all in the same boat. We’ve given an obligation to accept this—not to even think about it.’” With the words of his superior officer ringing in his ears, Groening returned to work. He had sworn an oath of loyalty, he believed the Jews were Germany’s enemy, and he knew that he could still manipulate his life at the camp to avoid encountering the worst of the horror. And so he stayed.
As a rank-and-file member of the SS, Oskar Groening lived in a comfortable barracks with several of his comrades. But life for officers was better still. Many stayed with their families in requisitioned houses in the center of the town of Auschwitz, or in the immediate vicinity of the main camp by the Sola River, and enjoyed a standard of living that far surpassed anything they could have achieved had they been attached to a fighting unit. The officers lived as conquerors—and as conquerors they needed domestic slaves to cook their meals, clean their houses, and look after their children. But this posed a problem—in Nazi racial theory, Jewish and Polish prisoners were far too inferior to the Germans to make ideal servants and be allowed intimate access to their comfortable private lives and, in any case, the prisoners might use the opportunity of work outside the camp wire (albeit still within the guarded sections of the Auschwitz Zone of Interest) to try and escape—or, worse still, to attack the German families they served.
Ever ingenious, the Nazis hit on a solution to their servant problem. They would employ a category of prisoners who were for the most part German, and who could be guaranteed never to try to hurt their masters or to flee—Jehovah’s Witnesses. Known in Germany as “Bible Students,” in 1933 the Jehovah’s Witnesses had declared that, in broad terms, they had little against the Nazi state—ideologically they also opposed Jews and Communists (although not in the overtly hostile way the Nazis did). Serious problems only arose when, as pacifists, they refused to join the German armed forces, and as a result they were imprisoned in concentration camps.
Else Abt38 was one of several hundred German Jehovah’s Witnesses sent to Auschwitz. Born in 1914 in Danzig, she was brought up as a Lutheran but introduced to her new faith by friends. She married another Jehovah’s Witness, gave birth to a daughter in 1939, and tried to live as peacefully as possible. Her family’s troubles began when her husband refused to employ his engineering skills to help the Nazi war effort. He was arrested and she escaped imprisonment only because she was nursing their child. When her daughter was two and a hal
f, however, the Gestapo came for her. In a heartrending scene, with her little girl calling out, “Leave me my mummy! Leave me my mummy!” and grabbing at the trousers of the Gestapo officer, Else Abt was taken away, her child left in the care of friends.
When she arrived at Auschwitz Else noticed a transport in front of her that contained Jewish women. “They were treated worse than animals, from what we could see. These SS men came and treated us humanely, but the Jewesses weren’t treated humanely—that was a shock.” Before Auschwitz, Else Abt had scarcely ever encountered Jews.
I never went to Jewish shops and I didn’t like it when I heard that my mother was going there because they always had high prices. That’s why I never bought anything from a Jewish shop, because they always [charged] higher prices and then they’d give a discount and the stupid people thought they were only paying half-price. That’s true, I saw it in Danzig—they’d calculate prices in a certain way. That’s personally my opinion. But I don’t have anything against the Jews. When we were in the camp, when I was sick a Jewess came and wanted to wash my coat. She wanted to do something good.
Once at Auschwitz, Else Abt was told that all she had to do to secure immediate release was to renounce her faith—the Jehovah’s Witnesses were thus the only category of prisoner in the concentration camp system who simply had to sign a declaration to obtain their freedom. But the majority did not, for many, like Else Abt, believed Auschwitz was a test:I’d read in the Bible the story of Abraham. And he was told to sacrifice his son. And the Bible says he was willing to do it. But then our creator Jehovah saw that he was willing to and so he didn’t allow it. He just wanted to test his faith. And that’s what I thought.
And so the German Jehovah’s Witnesses became the perfect house-servants for German officers at Auschwitz—much preferred to Poles, who were only used when there weren’t enough Witnesses to go around. Else Abt worked in the home of one of the senior SS members, his wife, and their small daughter. She cleaned the house, cooked their meals, and looked after their little girl. Her attitude was that “it wasn’t the child’s fault [that she was in Auschwitz]. It wasn’t the wife’s fault.” She performed her duties conscientiously and with compassion—even devotedly nursing the little girl when she fell sick and earning the thanks of her parents.
It was scarcely any wonder, then, that the Jehovah’s Witnesses were the prisoners Rudolf Höss liked best—and not just because of their troublefree behavior. He had first come into contact with them in substantial numbers at Sachsenhausen in the late 1930s, when they were sent to the camp for refusing to do military service. Höss’s records the extraordinary power of their belief—something that made a huge impression on him. When they were flogged because they did not conform to the rules of the camp he says that, far from begging for mercy, they asked to be thrashed again so that they could suffer more for their faith. He witnessed the execution of two Witnesses by firing squad, and was astonished to see that they held their hands up to the sky with blissful expressions as they awaited their fate. Höss imagined that the early Christian martyrs must have gone to their deaths the same way.
The behavior of the Jehovah’s Witnesses had a huge impact not just on Höss, but on his superior officers as well. “On many occasions,” Höss records,Himmler as well as Eicke offered the fanatical faith of the Jehovah’s Witnesses as an example. SS men must have the same fanatical and unshakable faith in the National Socialist ideal and in Adolf Hitler that the Witnesses had in Jehovah. Only when all SS men believed as fanatically in their own philosophy would Adolf Hitler’s state be permanently secure.39
At Auschwitz, Höss and his wife employed two Jehovah’s Witnesses in their own house, and were touched by the care they lavished on their children. Höss describes many of the Witnesses as “wonderful beings.”40 Significantly, Höss also records that he believes the Witnesses felt it was “right” that the Jews should be exterminated, as their ancestors had been the ones who had handed Jesus over to be killed; this, however, is an attitude that Else Abt denies. She believed that the SS was doing wrong—serving a “demon”—by murdering the Jews. However, she thought she should show her own faith by her “attitude.” This created an odd situation—she was faithfully, almost lovingly, looking after the daughter of an SS officer at Auschwitz, while the Nazis denied her access to her own little girl. She explains how she attempted to rationalize her circumstances by saying she felt she had to “do good for any person,” including members of the SS. Indeed, she admits that she would have worked dutifully in Hitler’s house had she been told to. And to add further to this complex emotional mix, she could walk away from the camp and return to her own daughter at any moment she chose, just by signing a paper that stated she had renounced her faith. But Else Abt never signed: “That would have meant compromising. I never did it.”
In a further twist to this strange story, when Else Abt was eventually able to return home after the war, she discovered that her little girl had been looked after by one of the few Jehovah’s Witnesses who had renounced their faith in order to gain freedom. “We came to visit him and his wife because they had brought up our daughter, and he cried like a little child because he was a coward.” Else Abt was not particularly grateful to him for taking care of her daughter because “I wouldn’t have been worried [about her]. There would always be people who would have helped. We weren’t dependent on one person—our creator knows to send us what we need when we need it and will always intervene.” Her daughter became a Jehovah’s Witness herself. As a result, Else Abt says,She knew and was happy that I stayed faithful—not to a human being, but to our creator Jehovah, because he looked out for us, as I found out during my time in Auschwitz. He is able to change all people. People that hated us started to think and stopped hating us—quite the opposite, in fact.
To those who lack the certainty of faith expressed by Else Abt, it is hard to see how a creator was “looking out” for the Jehovah’s Witnesses who Höss describes as being shot in Sachsenhausen. Nor does he seem to have been “looking out” for the Poles, Soviet prisoners, the sick, Jews, and countless others who lost their lives so cruelly at Auschwitz. But one of the intriguing aspects of the theological position taken by Else Abt is that such atrocities are immediately explicable to her—simply evidence of the will of a higher power whom we cannot fully understand but in whom we must have absolute faith. If God permits this to happen, then it is for a reason—it is only that we do not yet fully understand what that reason is.
One must be careful of making an immediate and glib comparison—as Himmler did—between this attitude of mind and the fanaticism of the Nazis, not least because Jehovah’s Witnesses—unlike the Nazis—believe in treating people with compassion and kindness. Nonetheless, if one substitutes “Hitler” for “Jehovah” in Else Abt’s testimony the words do bear a striking resemblance to the ideological position taken by SS men like Höss.
As 1942 came to an end, the SS had created a settled environment for itself at Auschwitz. The SS members had their servants, they had their jobs, and, for the most part, they had found a successful way of distancing themselves from the killing. And it was not just at Auschwitz that this process of turning mass murder into an ordered profession was taking place.
Treblinka was transformed during the same period. Franz Stangl had replaced the incompetent Eberl as commandant in September 1942 and had immediately set about reorganizing the camp. Transports were stopped while the bodies that lay littered around were removed and the camp was cleaned up. Both Stangl and Wirth also identified at once the fundamental problem that Eberl had faced in making the killing operation function smoothly—the capacity of the gas chambers. As a result, a much larger gassing facility—a brick building with a central corridor off which ran eight separate small gas chambers—was built immediately. In the new facility, each of the individual chambers could also be accessed from outside, which meant that clearing them of corpses would be much easier than before. The new gas chambers had a total capac
ity of over 3,000 people, more than six times greater than the previous complex.
Along with the construction of the new gas chambers, which were ready for use by October, Stangl initiated a number of measures that were all calculated to lull the suspicions of the arriving Jews. The hut by the platform where the Jews arrived was painted to look like a normal railway station, with signs for waiting rooms. Flowers were planted in tubs, and the whole reception area was kept as clean and ordered as possible.
Until recently, no one knew exactly how many people were killed during 1942 in death camps like Treblinka. The Nazis destroyed any documentation that would have revealed the truth, and as a consequence estimates varied widely. But a few years ago a discovery was made in the Public Record Office in London that raised our level of knowledge.41 It is the text of a German cable, intercepted and then decoded by the British, which contains the statistics of the killing tally of the Operation Reinhard death camps as of December 31, 1942. (After the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in June 1942 the killing operation in Poland had been named “Operation Reinhard” in his “honor.”)
The German cable reveals that Treblinka, Bełźec, Sobibór, and Majdanek (a much smaller-capacity camp in the Lublin district) had so far murdered a total of 1,274,166 people. That figure is further broken down as 24,733 at Majdanek, 101,370 at Sobibór, and 434,508 at Bełźec. The figure given in the intercepted cable for Treblinka is 71,355, but that is obviously a typing error, as to reach the total of 1,274,166 the number killed at Treblinka must be 713,555. Treblinka was thus—officially—the largest killing center in the Nazi state during 1942. Auschwitz was left far behind.
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