We have no verbal evidence from Wirth, who disappeared with Globocnik, allegedly killed by Istrian partisans. But from Hoess we have a good deal; and it is best to hear in his own words what an extermination camp of the most up-to-date kind was like, and how it functioned.
Hoess described how after a year at Auschwitz, originally an ordinary concentration camp, he was called to Berlin in the summer of 1941 by Himmler.
“He told me something to the effect—I do not remember the exact words—that the Fuehrer had given the order for a final solution of the Jewish question. We, the S.S., must carry out that order. If it is not carried out now, then the Jews will later destroy the German people. He had chosen Auschwitz on account of its easy access by rail and also because the extensive site offered space for measures ensuring isolation.”
It should be recorded in this connection that no written order for the extermination of European Jewry is known to exist. The Fuehrer’s order of March, 1941, for the killing of Russian Commissars was put on paper. But when it comes to the Jews the order seems to have been transmitted verbally to the relevant executives from Hitler all down the line. It was during the course of transmission that the term “final solution” came to be accepted by an increasing number of authorities as the proper term for the elimination of European Jewry as a whole, and the terms “special treatment” and “resettlement” as the code names for murder.
Hoess went back to Auschwitz full of his new mission:
“The Auschwitz camp as such was about three kilometres away from the town. About twenty thousand acres of the surrounding country had been cleared of all former inhabitants, and the entire area could be entered only by S.S. men or civilian employees who had special passes. The actual compound, called ‘Birkenau,’ where later on the extermination camp was constructed, was situated two kilometres from the Auschwitz camp. The camp installations themselves, that is to say, the provisional installations used at first were deep in the woods, and could from nowhere be detected by the eye.”
It was to a siding specially built at Birkenau that the trains would come from all over Europe:
“During the whole period up until 1944 certain operations were carried out at regular intervals in the different countries, so that one cannot speak of a continuous flow of incoming transports. It was always a matter of four to six weeks. During those four to six weeks two to three trains containing about two thousand persons each, arrived daily. These trains were first of all shunted to a siding in the Birkenau region and the locomotive then went back. The guards who had accompanied the transport had to leave the area at once, and the persons who had been brought in were taken over by guards belonging to the camp.
“They were there examined by two S.S. medical officers as to their fitness for work. The internees capable of work at once marched to Auschwitz or to the camp at Birkenau, and those incapable of work were first taken to the provisional installations, then later to the newly constructed crematoria.”
The “certain operations … carried out at regular intervals in the different countries” referred to by Hoess were the systematic round-ups of Jews carried out by Eichmann and his subordinates and agents of Section IVA4b of the R.S.H.A. They were rounded up for deportation and resettlement. They were dragged slowly in their box-cars, packed to suffocation, starved, filthy, frozen in winter, baked in summer, dying by the score, across the breadth of Europe. Those who were plainly incapable of work, and all children, were disembarked at Birkenau and sent straight to the gas chambers, undressed completely, naked, stripped of all their valuables, having been told that they were going to undergo a delousing operation, and assisted by other internees, members of the Jewish Sonderkommandos, whose turn was yet to come. Those who went to work were driven until they were too ill or exhausted to be of any use, and then packed off to the gas chambers themselves.
In his outline of what happened at Auschwitz as a defense witness for Kaltenbrunner at Nuremberg, Hoess was matter-of-fact enough in manner but unreliable as to figures. In an affidavit he had dictated before the trial he was more eloquent and detailed, but still inaccurate:
“I commanded Auschwitz until December 1st, 1943, and estimate that at least two million five hundred thousand victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning, and at least another half million succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total dead of about three million. This figure represents about seventy to eighty per cent of all persons sent to Auschwitz as prisoners, the remainder having been selected and used for slave labor in the concentration camps industries; included among the executed and burned were approximately twenty thousand Russian prisoners-of-war (previously screened out of prisoner-of-war cages by the Gestapo), who were delivered at Auschwitz in Wehrmacht transports operated by regular Wehrmacht officers and men. The remainder of the total victims included about one hundred thousand German Jews, and great numbers of citizens, mostly Jewish, from Holland, France, Belgium, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Greece, or other countries. We executed about four hundred thousand Hungarian Jews alone at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944.…”
These figures, as Mr. Reitlinger has proved, were, like Eichmann’s, exaggerated, in spite of the fact that Hoess had the mind of a book-keeper and maintained the most meticulous records. (The proper figure seems to be in the neighbourhood of one million.) But when Hoess gets on to ways and methods he is more reliable, and his testimony is confirmed by others. First his actions on returning to Poland after receiving Himmler’s instructions:
“At that time there were already in the General Government three other extermination camps: Belzek, Treblinka, and Wolzek. These camps were under the Einsatzkommandos of the Security Police and S.D. I visited Treblinka to find out how they carried out their exterminations. The Camp Commandant at Treblinka told me that he had liquidated eighty thousand in the course of one half-year. He was principally concerned with liquidating all the Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto. He used monoxide gas, and I did not think that his methods were very efficient. So when I set up the extermination building at Auschwitz, I used Cyklon B, which was a crystallized prussic acid which we dropped into the death chamber from a small opening. It took from three to fifteen minutes to kill the people in the death chamber, depending upon climatic conditions. We knew when the people were dead because their screaming stopped. We usually waited about a half-hour before we opened the doors and removed the bodies. After the bodies were removed our special Commondos tock off the rings and extracted the gold from the teeth of the corpses.
“Another improvement we made over Treblinka was that we built our gas chamber to accommodate three thousand people at one time, whereas at Treblinka their ten gas chambers only accommodated two hundred people each. The way we selected our victims was as follows: We had two S.S. doctors on duty at Auschwitz to examine the incoming transports of prisoners. The prisoners would be marched by one of the doctors, who would make spot decisions as they walked by. Those who were fit for work would be sent into the camp. Others were sent immediately to the extermination plants. Children of tender years were invariably exterminated, since by reason of their youth they were unable to work. Still another improvement we made over Treblinka was that at Treblinka the victims almost always knew that they were going to be exterminated and at Auschwitz we endeavored to fool the victims into thinking that they were to go through a delousing process. Of course, frequently they realized our true intentions, and we sometimes had riots and difficulties due to this fact. Very frequently women would hide their children under their clothes, but of course when we found them we would send the children in to be exterminated. We were required to carry out these exterminations in secrecy, but of course the foul and nauseating stench from the continuous burning of bodies permeated the entire area, and all of the people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going on at Auschwitz.”
During Hoess’s examination at Nuremberg he was asked:
“Did you yourself ever feel pit
y with the victims, thinking of your own family and children?”
“Yes.”
“How was it possible for you to carry out these actions in spite of this?”
“In view of these doubts which I had, the only one and decisive argument was the strict order and the reason given for it by the Reichsfuehrer Himmler.”
Dr. Gilbert, who, as a psychiatrist, spent a great deal of time behind the coulisses at Nuremberg trying to find out what made the prisoners tick, had this to say about Hoess:
“There was nothing about this apathetic little man to suggest that he was the greatest murderer who ever lived. The only clue to the nature of the personality that had lent itself so readily to such a thing was that apathy, the hallmark of the schizoid personality.… There was no indication of emotional reaction of any sort as he calmly related how he had received and executed Himmler’s orders to exterminate Jewish families by the trainload. Only a certain air of remoteness in his expression, the cold eyes gazing out into space when he looked at you, gave outward evidence of a personality that was not entirely of this world.”
Since to say that a man has a schizoid personality is to tell one as much, or as little, as to say that he has red hair, this is not as illuminating as it might be: the tendency of psychiatrists to attach a life of their own to technical terms which are simply labels, like black and white, can be misleading. Mr. Reitlinger’s description of the man as revealed in his photographs, on the other hand, seems to mean something:
“In the photographs, taken in his prime, the political enthusiast, who had found his way to murder even in 1923, looks like an adequate lance-corporal but with the pale, rather dilated eyes of those who find life hard to understand.”
That is enough of S.S. Lieutenant Colonel Hoess. And here it must be emphasised strongly that Hoess’s narrative is not introduced as evidence of the number of Jews and others destroyed at Auschwitz (which we are not concerned with here) but as an example of the sort of thing that went on within the purview of the Gestapo and was made possible by the Gestapo. Those who are concerned to find out whether the Germans killed six million Jews or four, and where, and how, must refer to Mr. Reitlinger and others. Hoesss is a highly unreliable witness. He had to destroy all his records, and Mr. Reitlinger thinks he was simply repeating Eichmann’s boasts uttered to impress Himmler with his, Eichmann’s efficiency and indispens ability. Hoess may be caught out in many particulars. For example, although he told the Tribunal, that he had accounted for two and a half million men, women, and children, he reduced this figure, speaking to Dr. Gilbert, to one million three hundred thousand. Even his chronology is wrong. Treblinka was dealing with the deportees of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942, not 1941, and, in fact, most of the victims of this particular action were shot, or clubbed to death, as they arrived at Treblinka, because the gas chambers were not ready.
In fact, the mass gassing of Jews did not begin until the summer of 1942, after Heydrich’s death; and it took place under the aegis of his successor, Kaltenbrunner, the Austrian lawyer who, at Nuremberg, did not know anything about anything. But, when it came to practical detail, Hoess’s mind functioned more accurately. It is desirable to be clear about this because the evidence of Hoess, and of others equally unreliable, has been treated as factual by too many investigators. For example, in his book Human Behavior in the Concentration Camps, Dr. Elie Cohen accepts the Hoess figure of two and a half million gassed or burned and another half million dead of exhaustion and disease. So long as there are Germans (and there are still many) who believe that all they have to do to prove that the Nazis were not as black as they were painted is to show that they did not kill quite as many as was originally believed, it is important to be conservative about the numbers.
The evidence here presented in this affair of mass murder has come entirely from Germans. It is better that this should be so, because it might be considered that the stories of the survivors who escaped the gas chambers are likely to be biased. It may even be thought that the evidence of Germans at Nuremberg is questionable. And so, as a final contribution to the record, let us take an item from the great mass of evidence contained in diaries and reports written by those who participated in these murders while they were in progress, and long before it had occurred to them that they might one day fall into enemy hands.
Here are excerpts from the diary of Professor Dr. Hans Kremer of the University of Westphalia. He was one of the doctors, referred to by Hoess, who stood on the platform as the new arrivals were unloaded from the trains and, as they filed past, made the sign which was to send the majority to the gas chambers, the minority to forced labor. He was suddenly plunged into the middle of it all, having, as a member of the S.S., been sent off to deputize for another doctor who had fallen ill:
“September 2nd, 1942—Present for the first time at a special action at three in the morning. Compared with this Dante’s Inferno seems a comedy. It is not for nothing that Auschwitz is called the extermination camp.
“September 5—Present this afternoon at a special action from the women’s camp (Musselmen).1 The most horrible of horrors. Thilo, the Troops’ M.O., was right when he told me this morning that we were at anus mundi. In the evening at approximately seven o’clock again present at a special action from the Netherlands. Men all want to take part in these actions because of the special rations they get, consisting of a fifth of a litre of schnapps, five cigarettes, one hundred grams of sausage, and bread. Today and tomorrow on duty.
“September 6—Today, Sunday, excellent lunch: tomato soup, half a hen with potatoes and red cabbage, sweets and marvellous vanilla ice.… In the evening at eight o’clock outside for special action.
“September 9—This morning the most pleasant news from my lawyer, Profesor Dr. Hallermann in Muenster: I was divorced from my wife on the first of this month. (Note: I see colors again: a black curtain has been drawn back from my life.) Later on, present as M.O. at a corporal punishment of eight prisoners and an execution by shooting with small caliber rifles.… In the evening present at my fourth special action.
“September 10—Present in the morning at my fifth special action.
“September 20—Listened to a concert of the prisoners’ band this afternoon in bright sunshine. Bandmaster: conductor of the Warsaw State Opera. Eighty musicians. For lunch We has pork, for diener baked tench.
“September 23—Present last right at sixth and seventh special actions. In the morning Lieutenant General Pohl [Chief of the Concentration Camp Administration under Himmler] arrived with his staff at the house of the Waffen S.S.… At eight o’clock in the evening dinner with Lieutenant General Pohl in the Fuehrerhaus, a real banquet. We had baked pike, as much as we wanted, good coffee, excellent ale and rolls.”
Professor Dr. Hans Hermann Kremer stayed at Auschwitz until November 18th, returning then to normal duty. He took part in fourteen special actions all told, and cared less and less about them, although the eleventh was tiresome—a special action againt Dutch women on a cold, wet, Sunday morning, some of whom so far forgot themselves as to beg for mercy: “Shocking scenes with three women, who beseech us for bare life.” But he was settling down to his new existence, enjoying the food, and conducting interesting experiments with liver, spleen, and pancreas taken from living prisoners. On November 1st he had to fly off to Prague, but he got back six days later and felt happy to be home at Auschwitz, “where I had a really good meal again and ate myself good and properly full.” His last special action was on November 8th. “In the evening we had a good time in the Leaders’ Club, invited by Colonel Wirth. We had Bulgarian red wine and Croatian plum-schnapps.”
It is of interest to note that Professor Dr. Kremer of the University of Westphalia was sentenced to death by a Polish Court at Cracow and was duly executed. It is not certain that this would have happened had he been tried farther West.
There are no extant descriptions by Germans of the horrors of the special actions, so to picture the scenes which Professor Kremer
had to witness before getting back to his comfortable meals we must put together the evidence of survivors. When pressure was not too great the proceedings were orderly. Naked and shorn, the prisoners were marched to the gas chambers, some of which were sunk in the ground, others on the same level as the crematoria which disposed of the corpses. It was all very clean and tidy, with a neat lawn all around, broken only by what might have been ventilation shafts, but which, in fact, were the orifices through which the blue crystals of Cyklon B were dropped into hollow columns of perforated sheet metal, which ran down to the floor of the chamber. There were douches in the ceiling to maintain the impression of a bath-house, but these were dummies, and there were no drainage channels in the floor, which was level and not sloped.
It was through these perforated columns that the gas made its way into the chamber, and, whatever the people may have felt while they waited, they knew in their last minutes what was happening, and then they would stampede away from the columns and pile up against the great metal door, shrieking, and fighting in mass panic, even in the moment of death. The shrieks would die down to nothing, and then, as Hoess said in his affidavit, those outside would wait perhaps half an hour; the great metal door would slide back, and the Jewish Sonderkommandos would go into action with hoses to wash out the blood and excrement and with hooks and ropes to drag the intertwined mass of naked corpses apart. But sometimes it was not as orderly as this. When Auschwitz was working at its highest pitch, in the summer of 1944, when, in a last maniacal effort, Eichmann was trying to sweep all the Jews left in Europe into his gas chambers before it was too late, the pressure was too great.
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