Voices from the Holocaust

by Jon E. Lewis

  In this capacity I was visited on 8 June 1942 by the until then unknown to me SS-Sturmführer Günther from Reichssicherheitshauptamt Berlin, Kurfürstenstraße. Günther arrived in civil clothing. He gave me the order immediately to obtain 100 kilograms of prussic acid for a very secret Reichs order, and to drive with it by car to an undisclosed location which would be only known by the driver. Then some weeks later we drove to Prague. I understood little of the nature of the order but accepted it because here was an accidental opportunity to do something which I had longed for a long time – to be able to view inside these objects. In addition I was recognized as such an authority and considered so competent as an expert on prussic acid, that in every case it would have been very easy for me to declare on some pretext that the prussic acid was unsuitable – because of decomposition or the like – in order to prevent its use for the real killing purpose. Together with us travelled – merely by chance – Professor Dr med. Pfannenstiel, SS-Obersturmbannführer, full Professor of Hygienics at the University of Marburg/Lahn.

  Then we drove by car to Lublin where SS-Gruppenführer Globocnik awaited us. In the factory in Collin I had intentionally intimated that the acid was destined for the killing of human beings. A man appeared in the afternoon who was very interested in the vehicle and, after being noticed, promptly fled at a breakneck tempo. Globocnik said: ‘This whole affair is one of the most secret things of all in this time, one can say the most secret of all. Whoever talks about it will be shot on the spot. Only yesterday two blabbers had been shot.’ Then he explains to us: ‘Actually’ – that was on 17 August 1942 – ‘we are running three facilities’, namely:

  1. Belzec, at the country road and railway line Lublin–Lemberg, at the demarcation line with Russia. Maximum output 15,000 persons daily.

  2. Treblinka, 120 kilometres north-east of Warsaw. Maximum output 25,000 persons daily.

  3. Sobibór, also in Poland, I don’t know exactly where. 20,000 persons maximum output daily.

  4. Then in preparation – Majdanek near Lublin.

  Belzec, Treblinka, and Majdanek I have visited personally in detail, together with the leader of these facilities, Polizeihauptmann Wirth.

  Globocnik consulted me alone and said: ‘It is your task in particular to disinfect the extensive amounts of textiles. The whole Spinnstoffsammlung [collection of spun material in Germany] has only been gathered in order to explain the origin of the clothing material for the Ostarbeiter [eastern workers] etc., and to present it as an offering of the German nation. In reality the yield of our facilities is ten to twenty times larger than that of the whole Spinnstoffsammlung.’

  Thereafter I discussed with the most efficient companies the possibility of disinfecting such amounts of textiles – it consisted of an accumulated stock of approximately 40 million kilograms = sixty complete freight trains – in the existing laundries and disinfection facilities. However, it was absolutely impossible to place such huge orders. I used all these negotiations to make known in a skilful way, or at least to intimate, the fact of the killing of the Jews. In the end it was sufficient for Globocnik that everything was sprinkled with a bit of Detenolin so that it at least smelled of disinfection. That was then carried out.

  ‘Your other and far more important task is the changeover of our gas-chambers which actually work with diesel exhaust fumes into a better and quicker system. I think especially of prussic acid. The day before yesterday the Führer and Himmler were here. On their order I have to personally take you there, I am not to issue written certificates and admittance cards to anybody!’

  Then Pfannenstiel asked: ‘What did the Führer say?’ Glob.: ‘Quicker, carry out the whole action quicker.’ Pfannenstiel’s attendant, Ministerialrat Dr Herbert Lindner, then asked: ‘Mr Globocnik, do you think it is good and proper to bury all the corpses instead of cremating them? A generation could come after us which doesn’t understand all this!’

  Then Globocnik said: ‘Gentlemen, if ever a generation will come after us which is so weak and soft-hearted that it doesn’t understand our task, then indeed the whole of National Socialism has been in vain. To the contrary, in my opinion one should bury bronze plates on which it is recorded that we have had the courage to carry out this great and so necessary work.’

  The Führer: ‘Good, Globocnik, this is indeed also my opinion!’

  Later the alternative option was accepted. Then the corpses were cremated on large grids, improvised from rails, with the aid of petrol and diesel oil.

  The next day we drove to Belzec. A small special station had been created for this purpose at a hill hard north of the Lublin–Lemberg road, in the left angle of the demarcation line. South of the road [were] some houses with the inscription ‘Sonderkommando Belzec der Waffen-SS’. Because the actual chief of the whole killing facilities, Polizeihauptmann Wirth, was not yet there, Globocnik introduced me to SS-Hauptsturmführer Obermeyer (from Pirmasens). That afternoon he let me see only that which he simply had to show me. That day I didn’t see any corpses, just [noticed] the smell of the whole region. [It] was stinking to high heaven in a hot August, and millions of flies were everywhere.

  Near to the small double-track station was a large barrack, the so-called ‘cloakroom’, with a large counter for valuables. Then followed the barber’s room with approximately 100 chairs. Then an alley in the open air below birches, fenced in to the right and left by double barbed wire with inscriptions: ‘To the inhalation- and bathrooms!’ In front of us a sort of bath house with geraniums, then a small staircase, and then to the right and left three rooms, each 5 × 5 metres, 1.90 metres high, with wooden doors like garages. At the back wall, not quite visible in the dark, larger wooden ramp doors. On the roof as a ‘clever, little joke’ the Star of David. In front of the buildings an inscription: Hackenholt-Foundation. More I couldn’t see that afternoon.

  The next morning, shortly before 7 a.m., someone announced to me: ‘In ten minutes the first transport will come!’ In fact the first train arrived after some minutes, from the direction of Lemberg: 45 wagons with 6,700 people of whom 1,450 were already dead on arrival. Behind the barred hatches children as well as men and women looked out, terribly pale and nervous, their eyes full of the fear of death. The train comes in: 200 Ukrainians fling open the doors and whip the people out of the wagons with their leather whips. A large loudspeaker gives the further orders: ‘Undress completely, also remove artificial limbs, spectacles, etc.’ Handing over valuables at the counter, without receiving a voucher or a receipt. The shoes carefully bound together (to aid the Spinnstoffsammlung), because on the almost twenty-five-metre-high heap nobody would have been able to find the matching shoes again. Then the women and girls to the barber who, with two, three scissor strokes is cutting off all hair and collecting it in potato sacks. ‘This is for special purposes in the submarines, for seals or the like!’ the SS-Unterscharführer who is on duty there says to me.

  Then the procession starts moving. In front a very lovely young girl; so all of them go along the alley, all naked, men, women, children, without artificial limbs. I myself stand together with Hauptmann Wirth on top of the ramp between the gas-chambers. Mothers with babies at their breast, they come onward, hesitate, enter the death chambers! At the corner a strong SS man stands who, with a voice like a pastor, says to the poor people: ‘There is not the least chance that something will happen to you! You must only take a deep breath in the chamber, that widens the lungs; this inhalation is necessary because of the illnesses and epidemics.’ On the question of what would happen to them, he answered: ‘Yes, of course, the men have to work building houses and roads, but the women don’t need to work. Only if they wish they can help in housekeeping or in the kitchen.’

  For some of these poor people this gave a little glimmer of hope, enough to go the few steps to the chambers without resistance. The majority are aware, the smell tells them of their fate! So they climb the small staircase, and then they see everything. Mothers with little children at the breas
t, little naked children, adults, men, women, all naked – they hesitate but they enter the death chambers, pushed forward by those behind them or driven by the leather whips of the SS. The majority without saying a word. A Jewess of about forty years of age, with flaming eyes, calls down vengeance on the head of the murderers for the blood which is shed here. She gets five or six slashes with the riding crop into her face from Hauptmann Wirth personally, then she also disappears into the chamber. Many people pray. I pray with them, I press myself in a corner and shout loudly to my and their God. How gladly I would have entered the chamber together with them, how gladly I would have died the same death as them. Then they would have found a uniformed SS man in their chamber – the case would have been understood and treated as an accident, one man quietly missing. Still I am not allowed to do this. First I must tell what I am experiencing here!

  The chambers fill. ‘Pack well!’ Hauptmann Wirth has ordered. The people stand on each other’s feet: 700–800 on 25 square metres, in 45 cubic metres! The SS physically squeezes them together, as far as is possible.

  The doors close. At the same time the others are waiting outside in the open air, naked. Someone tells me: ‘The same in winter!’ ‘Yes, but they could catch their death of cold,’ I say. ‘Yes, exactly what they are here for!’ says an SS man to me in his Low German. Now I finally understand why the whole installation is called the Hackenholt-Foundation. Hackenholt is the driver of the diesel engine, a little technician, also the builder of this facility. The people are brought to death with the diesel exhaust fumes. But the diesel doesn’t work! Hauptmann Wirth comes. One can see that he feels embarrassed that that happens just today, when I am here. That’s right, I see everything! And I wait. My stop watch has honestly registered everything: fifty minutes, seventy minutes [?] – the diesel doesn’t start. The people are waiting in their gas-chambers. In vain! One can hear them crying, sobbing ... Hauptmann Wirth hits the Ukrainian who is helping Unterscharführer Hackenholt twelve, thirteen times in the face. After two hours and forty-nine minutes – the stop watch has registered everything well – the diesel starts. Until this moment the people live in these four chambers, four times 750 people in four times 45 cubic metres! Twenty-five minutes pass. Right, many are dead now. One can see that through the small window in which the electric light illuminates the chambers for a moment. After twenty-eight minutes only a few are still alive. Finally, after thirty-two minutes, everyone is dead!

  From the other side men from the work command open the wooden doors. They have been promised – even Jews – freedom, and some one-thousandth of all valuables found, for their terrible service. Like basalt pillars the dead stand inside, pressed together in the chambers. In any event there was no space to fall down or even bend forward. Even in death one can still tell the families. They still hold hands, tensed in death, so that one can barely tear them apart in order to empty the chamber for the next batch. The corpses are thrown out, wet from sweat and urine, soiled by excrement, menstrual blood on their legs. Children’s corpses fly through the air. There is no time. The riding crops of the Ukrainians lash down on the work commands. Two dozen dentists open mouths with hooks and look for gold. Gold to the left, without gold to the right. Other dentists break gold teeth and crowns out of jaws with pliers and hammers.

  Among all this Hauptmann Wirth is running around. He is in his element. Some workers search the genitals and anuses of the corpses for gold, diamonds, and valuables. Wirth calls me to him: ‘Lift this can full of gold teeth, that is only from yesterday and the day before yesterday!’ In an incredibly vulgar and incorrect diction he said to me: ‘You won’t believe what we find in gold and diamonds every day’ – he pronounced it (in German Brillanten) with two Ls – ‘and in dollars. But see for yourself!’ And now he led me to a jeweller who managed all these treasures, and let me see all this. Then someone showed me a former head of the Kaufhaus des Westens in Berlin, and a violinist: ‘That was a Hauptmann of the Austrian Army, knight of the Iron Cross 1st Class, who is now camp elder of the Jewish work command!’

  The naked corpses were carried on wooden stretchers to pits only a few metres away, measuring 100 × 20 × 12 metres. After a few days the corpses welled up and a short time later they collapsed, so that one could throw a new layer of bodies upon them. Then ten centimetres of sand were spread over the pit, so that a few heads and arms still rose from it here and there. At such a place I saw Jews climbing over the corpses and working. One told me that by mistake those who arrived dead had not been stripped. Of course this has to be done later because of the Spinnstoffsammlung and valuables which otherwise they would take with them into the grave.

  Neither in Belzec nor in Treblinka was any trouble taken over registering or counting the dead. The numbers were only estimates of a wagon’s content … Hauptmann Wirth asked me not to propose changes in Berlin re his facilities, and to let it remain as it is, being well established and well tried. I supervised the burial of the prussic acid because it allegedly had decomposed.

  The next day – 19 August 1942 – we drove in the car of Hauptmann Wirth to Treblinka, 120 kilometres north-north-east of Warsaw. The equipment was nearly the same as, but much larger than, in Belzec. Eight gas chambers and real mountains of suitcases, textiles, and clothes. In our honour a banquet was given in old German style in the communal room. The meal was simple but everything was available in sufficient quantity. Himmler himself had ordered that the men of these commandos received as much meat, butter and other things, especially alcohol, as they wanted.

  Then we drove in the car to Warsaw. I met the secretary of the Swedish legation in Berlin, Baron von Otter, in the train when I tried in vain to get a bed in a sleeping car. Still under the immediate impression of the terrible events, I told him everything with the entreaty to inform his government and the Allies of all of this immediately because each day’s delay must cost the lives of further thousands and tens of thousands. He asked me for a reference, as to which I specified Generalsuperintendent Dr Otto Dibelius, Berlin, Brüderweg 2, Lichterfelde-West, an intimate friend of the pastor Martin Niemöller and member of the church resistance movement against Nazism. I met Mr von Otter twice again in the Swedish legation. Meanwhile he had reported to Stockholm and informed me that this report has had considerable influence on Swedish-German relations. At the same time I tried to report to the Papal Nuncio in Berlin. There I was asked if I am a soldier. Then any further conversation with me was refused and I was asked to leave the embassy of His Holiness. While leaving the embassy, I was shadowed by a policeman on a bicycle who shortly passed me, got off, and then absolutely incomprehensibly, let me go. Then I reported all this to hundreds of personages, among others the company lawyer of the Catholic bishop of Berlin, Dr Winter, with the special entreaty to forward it to the Holy See. I must also add that SS-Sturmbannführer Günther from the Reichssicherheitshauptamt – I think he is the son of the Race-Günther – again demanded from me very large amounts of prussic acid in early 1944 for a very sinister purpose. On the Kurfürsten-Street in Berlin he showed me a shed in which he intended to store the prussic acid. I consequently explained to him that I cannot take sole responsibility. It was approximately several wagon loads, enough to kill millions of people. He told me that he himself doesn’t know whether the poison would still be needed; when, for whom, in which way, etc. But it has to be permanently kept available.

  Later I often thought about the words of Goebbels. I can believe that they wanted to kill a majority of the German nation, surely including the clergy or the unpopular officers. It should happen in [places resembling] reading rooms or club rooms, so far as I gathered from the questions re the technical realization that Günther asked me. It could also be that he intended to kill the foreign workers or prisoners-of-war – I don’t know. In every case I managed to ensure that the prussic acid disappeared for some purpose of disinfection after arrival in the two concentration camps, Oranienburg and Auschwitz.

  That was somewhat dangerous for
me but I could easily have said that the poison had already been in a dangerous condition of decomposition. I am sure that Günther tried to get the poison in order to probably kill millions of persons. It was sufficient for approximately 8 million people: 8,500 kilograms. I have authorized invoices for 2,175 kilograms. I always allowed the invoices to be authorized in my name, allegedly for the sake of discretion, but in truth because of being free to dispose of the poison and being able to allow it to disappear. Above all I avoided presentation of invoices again and again, delaying payment and putting off companies until later.

  As for the rest I avoided appearing in concentration camps too often because it was sometimes usual to hang people or to carry out executions in honour of the visitors.

  All my statements are true, word-for-word. I am fully aware of the extraordinary tragedy of my record before God and the whole of mankind, and take it on my oath that nothing of all this that I have registered has been made up or invented but everything is exactly the truth.

  On the Run, Poland, 1944

  CHAIM PRINZENTHAL

  Below is an extract from a farewell letter from Chaim Prinzenthal to his children, who had found refuge in Palestine.

  I am alone now in my misfortune, my comrade in distress was caught by the murderers on the second day of Rosh Hashana [the Jewish New Year], in full daylight; he had not been cautious enough. They tortured and then shot him. They searched for me, too, they even trod on me in the stack of straw where I was hiding. Yet, for the time being, they have not succeeded. Since then I have been wandering alone at night from village to village, from tent to tent, from forest to forest. But the forest, unfortunately, has started balding, and I also am naked and barefoot, hungry and sleepy. I am walking like a sleepwalker without seeing my own shadow, I am wandering – where to, I myself do not know. Shall I succeed in staying alive? I am not at all sure, it is very improbable.