Until this new cremation complex in Birkenau was operational, the SS decided, the dead would be put into flaming pits. Shortly after his mid-July 1942 visit to Auschwitz, Himmler decreed that all the rotting corpses in Birkenau had to be dug up and burned. Standartenführer Paul Blobel, an SS expert in open-air cremation, was sent to teach the Auschwitz guards. A former commander with the murderous task forces in the occupied Soviet Union, Blobel had recently been appointed by Himmler to run a secret SS unit devising the most efficient way of destroying corpses of Holocaust victims. Experimenting in the Chelmno death camp, where huge numbers of corpses had accumulated, Blobel quickly arrived at an effective procedure: burning the dead in holes, grinding their bones, and scattering the remains. On September 16, 1942, shortly after Blobel’s visit to Auschwitz, Commandant Höss himself traveled to Chelmno to watch the mass cremations in action. He was so impressed that he immediately placed an order for the necessary equipment, including a heavy bone-crushing machine. Within days, the new procedures were in place, largely modeled on Chelmno.
For several weeks in autumn 1942, the SS forced Special Squad prisoners to unearth all the corpses buried in Birkenau, working day and night with their bare hands. By the end, the prisoners had pulled out more than one hundred thousand bodies (by the estimate of Rudolf Höss). One of the Special Squad prisoners, Erko Hejblum, later described the task: “We waded in a mix of mud and decaying bodies. We would have needed gas masks. The corpses seemed to rise to the top—it was as if the earth itself was turning them back.” Many Special Squad prisoners could not bear the nightmare. After one week, Hejblum “felt like I was going mad” and decided to kill himself; he was saved by a friend who engineered his transfer to a different work detail. Several prisoners who refused to carry on were shot point-blank. The others had to continue to stack the decomposing bodies for burning, first in huge pyres, later in long rectangular ditches. Meanwhile, the bodies of new victims deported to Auschwitz for mass extermination were cremated in other pits, near bunkers 1 and 2. Ash and bone fragments were dumped into rivers and marshes. They were also used to grit the roads in winter and to fertilize the surrounding fields, where Himmler’s cherished agricultural experiments were under way. The roots of Germany’s future settlements were supposed to grow from the remains of its slaughtered victims.115
The Birkenau Killing Complex
The new facilities in Birkenau—four huge crematoria with integral gas chambers—promised state-of-the-art genocide. But the construction of the new killing complex took much longer than anticipated. The Camp SS continued to push for its completion, blaming the persistent problems on Topf & Sons, the private contractors building the incinerators. After months of delays and recriminations, the four crematoria became operational between March and June 1943.116 At the end of June 1943, the head of the Auschwitz SS construction authority, Sturmbannführer Karl Bischoff, reported to his superiors in Berlin that the four crematoria could turn 4,416 corpses into ash within twenty-four hours.117 So pleased was Bischoff, he even displayed pictures of the crematoria in the Auschwitz main building, for all visitors to see.118 Senior SS officials were proudly shown around the new site. In March 1943, WVHA officers attended the first incineration in crematorium II, and once the entire complex was ready for use, SS tours often included the new facilities. When Oswald Pohl came to Auschwitz in August 1943, for one of his regular visits, he carried out a thorough inspection of the new crematoria area. Himmler also sent leading party and SS men to watch and learn. “They were all deeply impressed,” Rudolf Höss recalled.119 Following the hurried initial conversion of Auschwitz into a death camp, the SS had now created more lasting and methodical procedures. In the words of Primo Levi, the camp became an inverted factory: “trains heavily laden with human beings went in each day, and all that came out was the ashes of their bodies, their hair, the gold of their teeth.”120
This image of Auschwitz as a factory of death evokes its modern nature, with the reliance on bureaucracy, railways, and technology.121 The use of machinery even extended to the bookkeeping of the dead. After each selection on arrival, an SS man from the Auschwitz political office—which oversaw the process of mass extermination at the crematoria—established how many Jews had been sent to the gas chambers. He then raced back by motorcycle to his office to prepare a statistical report noting the transport’s date of arrival and place of departure, the total number of Jews on board, and the number of men and women selected for forced labor and for “special accommodation” or “special treatment” (the Camp SS continued to use camouflage language in documents, with only rare slips). The Auschwitz political office then transmitted these details by telex to the RSHA and the WVHA, mostly within a day of the killings; sometimes the officials added a brief explanatory note, such as the following from a February 1943 telex: “The men were specially accommodated because of excessive frailty, the women because most of them were [with] children.”122 In this way, SS managers in Berlin, such as Adolf Eichmann and Richard Glücks, gained an immediate picture—almost in real time—of the progress of the Holocaust in Auschwitz.
But assembly-line mass murder was not smooth, automatic, and clean, as some historians have suggested.123 The Birkenau killing complex was less efficient than the SS men had hoped.124 And however much routine they developed, killing did not become a purely mechanical process, devoid of agency and emotion. Every victim had perpetrators.125 The doomed prisoners’ last hours—between arrival and death—were marked by exhaustion, fear, and torment. Following the traumatic separations by the SS at the ramp and the transfer to Birkenau, the doomed faced humiliation and violence outside the gas chambers. Women who refused to undress were assaulted, the clothes ripped from their bodies. Anyone who refused to enter the gas chamber was shot on the spot or beaten inside.126 What happened next, when dim suspicion became horrible certainty—with prisoners squeezed against one another in the darkness of the gas chambers, barely able to breathe even before the gas pellets were inserted—cannot be described. Standing outside, inmates from the Special Squad could hear that the death struggle lasted for several minutes; some of the dying threw themselves against the doors, sometimes smashing the glass peepholes and grilles protecting them, and crushing others who already lay on the ground.127 On occasion, the gas chambers were so packed that the SS forced some prisoners to wait nearby until it was their turn. They listened to the agony of those inside and waited for hours for their own deaths, suffering “the most terrifying pain in the whole world,” as Lejb Langfus wrote in his secret notes. “If you have not experienced it, you cannot picture it, even remotely.”128
Another myth—also attached to the image of Auschwitz as a factory of death—is that of wholly passive victims.129 Here, the doomed appear like inert objects, drifting to their deaths without disrupting the steady flow of industrialized mass murder. This view was taken to the extreme by the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, himself a survivor of the prewar KL (having been held in Dachau and Buchenwald between June 1938 and May 1939). In a brief paper written in 1960, still unsettling decades later, he launched an all-out attack on the victims: the Jews of Europe had given up the will to live and then, “like lemmings,” voluntarily walked “themselves to the gas chambers.”130
Bettelheim was grievously wrong. To start with, only a small number of Jews arriving at the Auschwitz gas chambers were certain that they were about to die. The burning ditches and smoking chimneys of the crematoria were ominous signs, but even those who feared the worst often clung to hope. Such hopes were continually fanned by SS men. Despite flashes of violence, the Camp SS tried to deceive its victims to the end, in order to prevent any defiance by the doomed. Before the killings began, SS officers normally made a brief announcement outside the gas chambers, along the following lines: “Stay calm, you are about to take a bath—so get undressed, fold your clothes neatly and then walk into the shower-room. Afterwards, you will receive coffee and something to eat.”
To further reassure the doomed
, prisoners from the Special Squad generally repeated the same story, well aware that anything else might lead to their own death (in summer 1943, a Special Squad prisoner, who had informed a young woman that she would be gassed, was burned alive in front of his comrades). Racked by their helplessness, the Special Squad prisoners concluded that telling the truth would only add to the agony of the victims.131 “It was all lies, what we said,” one of them told an interviewer after the war. “I always tried not to look into [people’s] eyes, so that they wouldn’t catch on.”132 Some inmates elsewhere in the Auschwitz complex understood only too well the impossible dilemma of the Special Squad.133
Even when prisoners were told about their impending death, an organized uprising was impossible. They were disorientated—tired, famished, hurried along by guards—and had no time to think or confer. After a transport of Jews from Tarnów ghetto heard from Special Squad prisoners at the gas chambers that they were about to be killed, they “became serious and silent,” according to one of the Special Squad. Then, with broken voices, “they started saying the Vidui” (the ritual confessional prayer before death). Not everyone could believe that they had been condemned, though; a young man stepped on a bench to calm the others, telling them that they would not die, as the wholesale slaughter of innocents, in such barbaric fashion, could not happen anywhere on earth.134 All this anguish—which would sometimes turn into spontaneous defiance—was a long way from “a voluntary walk into the Reich’s crematoria,” as Bettelheim had claimed.135
GENOCIDE AND THE KL SYSTEM
The Holocaust transformed the concentration camp system as a whole in 1942–43. Geographically, it was split in two. In the western KL, there were soon hardly any Jewish prisoners left at all, after the SS made its camps inside Germany’s prewar borders almost entirely “free of Jews.” In the eastern KL, by contrast, Jews selected for murder through labor (instead of immediate extermination) now often made up the largest group among registered inmates. By autumn 1943, many tens of thousands of Jews were held in the east (hundreds of thousands more had already been murdered), not just in Auschwitz, but also in Majdanek and in several new concentration camps, which had been established solely for Jewish prisoners.
The Majdanek Death Camp
Majdanek in the General Government was the only other KL, apart from Auschwitz, which also operated as a Holocaust death camp. Its conversion followed a rather similar trajectory. Just as in Auschwitz, mass deportations of Jews began in spring 1942, initially to replace Soviet slave laborers for the projected SS settlements. In all, around 4,500 young Slovak Jews came to Majdanek between late March and early April 1942. One of their first tasks was to flatten the mass graves of Soviet POWs who had died during the previous months—a grim harbinger of the Jews’ own impending fate.136 Over the coming months, thousands more Jewish men arrived from Slovakia, as well as from the General Government, occupied Czech territory, and the German Reich.137 Majdanek now grew at a rapid rate. On March 25, 1942, the camp had stood almost empty, with little more than one hundred prisoners, none of them Jewish. Just three months later, on June 24, 1942, some 10,660 men were held inside, almost all of them Jews. Soon, they were joined by women. Following the example of Auschwitz, Himmler ordered in July 1942 that a camp for female prisoners should be set up in Lublin; the WVHA attached it to Majdanek. The first prisoners arrived in October 1942, and by the end of the year, some 2,803 women were held in the camp, again overwhelmingly Jews.138 As Majdanek was pulled into the current of the Holocaust, it turned into a concentration camp for Jews.
Majdanek was still a big building site, spread across dirty fields. There was no electricity, sewer system, or proper water supply, and most prisoners were packed into bare, crowded, windowless wooden barracks, freezing in winter, baking hot in summer (only in 1943 did the situation improve somewhat). One of these prisoners was Dionys Lenard, a Slovakian Jew who had been deported to Majdanek in April 1942. After a few months, he fled and recorded his experiences later that same year. Lenard writes graphically how the prisoners were forced to build the camp, erecting more barracks, leveling the ground, and performing other grueling tasks, always hounded by the SS. The frantic pace was set by Commandant Karl Otto Koch, who had arrived in early 1942; he was joined by trusted SS veterans from the Buchenwald Commandant Staff, fresh from participating in the mass execution of Soviet “commissars.” It says much about slave labor in Majdanek that prisoners volunteered for the “shit commando” to escape from the construction details; in Majdanek, Lenard notes, heaving buckets full of feces was still better than being chased across the yard while carrying heavy loads of brick or wood.
Prisoners like Dionys Lenard were forever tormented by hunger and thirst. The food in Majdanek was as disgusting as it was meager, consisting mostly of thin soup with weeds. There was barely anything to drink, either, since inmates were initially forbidden to use the only well, which stood right next to the overflowing latrines and was said to be contaminated. The desperate water shortage also meant that prisoners could only clean themselves once a week. Lenard did so more often by using the warm liquid (so-called coffee) prisoners received in the mornings: “one could not use it for anything else, anyway.” Fleas and lice spread everywhere, and half the inmates, Lenard observed, were suffering from diarrhea. And then there was the dirt. As soon as it rained, even a little, the whole camp was submerged in sludge. “Anyone who has not seen the mud in the Lublin camp, has no idea what mud really looks like,” wrote Lenard. He could barely walk across the soggy fields without getting stuck with his wooden clogs. A slip could be fatal. Once, an old Slovakian Jew tripped and brushed the trouser legs of a passing SS man, who instantly “drew his gun and shot him.”139
Lenard was one of a small number of registered Jews who survived Majdanek in 1942. Most succumbed to neglect and abuse; that year, more than fourteen thousand registered Jewish prisoners died in the camp, as well as around two thousand other inmates. As a WVHA official noted after an inspection in January 1943, the two incinerators in Majdanek could “barely keep up” with all the dead.140 Many prisoners were murdered after SS selections in the infirmary and the main compound. As typhus spread in summer 1942, for example, thousands (mostly Slovakian Jews) were isolated and shot by the SS. In a secret message dated July 14, 1942, following the mass selection of some 1,500 prisoners, a Polish inmate noted that the victims had been driven to a nearby forest, shot, and buried. “This is how the typhus epidemic is fought in Majdanek,” he added.141
Even though death was ever-present by mid-1942, the SS did not yet use Majdanek as a death camp (hence there were no selections on arrival). When it came to the so-called Final Solution in the General Government, the SS looked to Globocnik’s death camps instead, even if this meant longer transports. As the SS decimated the Lublin ghetto in spring 1942, leading away some thirty thousand of the thirty-six thousand inhabitants, it routed the transports not to Majdanek, just a short march away, but by train to Belzec. Over the following months, the functional separation between Majdanek (detention and lethal forced labor) and Globocnik’s death camps (immediate extermination) continued. In fact, deportation trains en route to Belzec and Sobibor occasionally interrupted their journey in Lublin. Here, Jewish men considered fit for labor were pulled out and sent to Majdanek for construction work; the others remained on the trains to death camps.142
The position of Majdanek only changed during the second half of 1942. Since summer, the local Camp SS had planned to build gas chambers, and the new building was completed around October. Despite the secrecy of the SS, which designated the small stone building by the camp entrance as “baths,” everyone soon knew what really was inside. Unusually, the gas chambers were equipped for both Zyklon B (like Auschwitz) and carbon monoxide (like the Globocnik death camps). In the first months, most of those murdered inside were typhus-ridden registered Majdanek prisoners. But the Camp SS also carried out its first selections on arrival, picking out weak and sick Jews from Lublin labor camps and the
local Majdan Tatarski ghetto (which had replaced the old Lublin ghetto).143
The transformation of Majdanek into a death camp was completed from late 1942. This was linked, apparently, to the sudden end of mass deportations to Belzec, in mid-December 1942.144 Over the next two weeks, until December 31, many thousands of Polish Jews were taken to Majdanek instead and murdered in its gas chambers.145 Further extermination transports arrived from spring 1943, bringing the first children to the camp, as the SS stepped up the liquidation of the remaining ghettos. Entire families from Warsaw and elsewhere were deported to Majdanek, where SS men now carried out regular selections upon arrival. First and foremost, the SS sent children, women, and the elderly to the gas chambers, as in Auschwitz. Rywka Awronska came in spring 1943 from Warsaw with a transport of several hundred women and children. In the baths, they had to undress. The SS then picked out those “who looked healthy enough for labor,” registered them, and escorted them to the camp; the others, Awronska recalled, “were immediately taken away; I think they were gassed.” In all, at least sixteen thousand Jews died in Majdanek between January and October 1943, many of them in the new gas chambers. Their corpses were burned in large pyres in a forest, some distance away. To learn how this was done, the Majdanek crematorium chief, SS Oberscharführer Erich Muhsfeldt, had traveled to Auschwitz in February 1943 to seek inspiration from his SS colleagues.146
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