In November 1940, Himmler told the commandant that ‘Auschwitz was to become the agricultural research station for the eastern territories . . . Huge laboratories and plant nurseries were to be set out. All kinds of stock-breeding were to be pursued there.’266 The camp grew still further after Barbarossa. On 26 September 1941 Himmler ordered the building of a vast new camp at Birkenau (Brzezinka), 2 kilometres from the main Auschwitz camp, to house Soviet prisoners of war and use them for labour projects: up to 200,000 were to be imprisoned there according to his plans, though these were never fully realized. 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war arrived in October 1941. Ḧss put them in a separate compound in the main camp, and tried to use them to build the new camp at nearby Birkenau, but he found them too weak and malnourished to be of any use. ‘They died like flies,’ he later noted, especially in the winter. There were many cases of cannibalism. ‘I myself,’ he recalled, ‘came across a Russian lying beween piles of bricks, whose body had been ripped open and the liver removed. They would beat each other to death for food . . . They were no longer human beings. They had become animals, who sought only food.’ It evidently did not occur to Ḧss to give it to them. Of the 10,000, only a few hundred were left alive by the following spring.267
The new camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau was one of a pair, paralleled by the construction of another labour centre for Soviet prisoners in the eastern part of the city of Lublin. This was unofficially known as the Majdanek camp. But the project did not go well, and the camp only ever reached a fifth of its projected extent (even more grandiose plans for it to hold a quarter of a million inmates were quickly abandoned). Instead of the planned 50,000 Soviet prisoners, only 2,000 arrived to construct the camp. As it developed, Majdanek took on a variety of functions, holding not only prisoners of war but also members of the Polish resistance, hostages, deportees, and later on sick prisoners transported from other camps to be killed there. It contained a wide variety of workshops and small factories but the camp management never managed to integrate them into German war production, and the employment of Jews was treated mainly as a means of killing them by forcing them to work long hours at exhausting tasks. When Himmler decided to quicken the pace of the extermination of the Jews in July 1942, some seven gas chambers were constructed at Majdanek, of which at least three were in use by September 1942. Some 50,000 Jews were put to death in these gas chambers by exhaust fumes over the following months. In addition, following the revolt at Sobibor, 18,000 Jews were shot in the camp as part of the ‘Harvest Festival’ operation. Altogether 180,000 people were eventually to be killed at Majdanek; up to 120,000 of these were Jews, not only from the Lublin district but also from further afield, including Western Europe. That Majdanek did not become larger was in part at least the consequence of its continual maladministration. The camp administration soon became widely known for its corruption and brutality. Two of its commandants, Karl Otto Koch and Hermann Florstedt, not only stole on a massive scale but also completely neglected their administrative duties, preferring to enforce their commands by naked terror. They eventually went too far even for the Reich Security Head Office, and were arrested and executed. Their successor, Max Koegel, had convictions for peculation and deception dating from the 1920s and was not much better. Many of the guards were Croatians and Romanians, who were difficult to control. Their cruelty towards the Jewish inmates was notorious. As an unstable, badly run and inefficient camp, Majdanek never achieved its originally intended potential as a multifunctional centre of labour and extermination. That achievement, if achievement it was, belonged to Auschwitz.268
Auschwitz was destined, indeed, to become the largest mass killing centre in the history of the world, larger even than the killing centres at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. Summoning Ḧss to see him, according to the latter’s subsequent recollection, some time in the summer of 1941, but most probably several months later, at the very end of the year or the beginning of 1942, Himmler informed the camp commandant that, since the existing extermination facilities in the east were not extensive enough to carry out the final solution of the Jewish question, he was designating Auschwitz as an additional centre, most notably because of its combination of good communications and relative remoteness from major centres of population. Shortly after this, Eichmann arrived at the camp and discussed the plans in more detail. Whereas the Reinhard Action camps had been set up to kill the Jews of Poland, the eventual function of Auschwitz was to kill the Jews brought from the rest of occupied Europe, including not only neighbouring parts of the former Poland but also, once these Jews had been killed, from Germany, the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and western countries like France, Belgium and Holland. From the outset, the methods used in Auschwitz differed from those employed in the other camps. Initially, this was a matter of a chance discovery; but soon it became systematic.269
In July 1941 a team of prisoners and their SS guards was disinfecting some clothes and bedding with the chemical pesticide known as Zyklon-B, the main constituent of which was sulphuric acid, when they noticed that a cat that strayed into the room was rapidly killed by the gas. One of the guards speculated that the chemical might be useful for killing people too. The idea, which had been briefly considered by the T-4 team in 1939 but rejected as impractical, was taken up by the camp management. Early in September 1941 it was tried out on some 600 Soviet prisoners of war who had been classified by a Gestapo commission the previous month as ‘fanatical Communists’, along with 250 sick inmates of the camp. They were taken into a cellar in Block 11, in the main camp, and gassed. The experiment was then repeated later the same month with 900 healthy Red Army prisoners in the camp morgue.270 Ḧss later remembered observing the gassing. The men were herded into the room, the doors were sealed, then powdered Zyklon-B was shaken down through holes in the roof. The warmth generated by the bodies packed into the chamber below quickly turned it into a deadly gas. ‘For a little while,’ he recalled, ‘a humming sound could be heard. When the powder was thrown in, there were cries of “Gas!”, then a great bellowing, and the trapped prisoners hurled themselves against both the doors. But the doors held.’ All the prisoners died.271 On Eichmann’s next visit to the camp, it was agreed to use the gas in a systematic way. But the camp morgue was so close to the main administration building that when the Soviet prisoners were killed, their screams in the gas chamber could be heard by the personnel. So Ḧss decided that the killings would have to be carried out away from the main camp, at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Soon there were two provisional gas chambers ready for operation there, in buildings known as Bunker I and Bunker II, or the ‘red house’ and the ‘white house’. They killed their first victims on 20 March 1942.272
On arriving at the camp, the surviving deportees were roughly bundled out of the trains by SS guards and auxiliaries with dogs and whips, yelling at them: ‘Out! Out! Fast! Fast!’ They were made to line up - in the early months by an open field 2.5 kilometres from the camp, at the end of a goods siding, and in the later stages of the camp’s existence, on the infamous ‘ramp’ leading from the railway siding to the camp - and undergo a ‘selection’. ‘The process of selection,’ Ḧss later remembered without a trace of self-consciousness, ‘. . . was in itself rich in incident.’273 Selections were carried out by SS doctors, who asked the arrivals a few questions and gave them a cursory medical examination. Those under the age of sixteen, mothers with children, the sick, the old and the weak were moved to the left, loaded on to lorries and taken straight to the gas chambers, after being told they were to be ‘disinfected’ there. Families, recalled Ḧss, tried to stick together, and rushed back from one line to rejoin one another. ‘It was often necessary to use force to restore order.’ Able-bodied men and women were taken to the camp, tattooed with a serial number on the left arm, and registered. In many transports they were in a minority. In the main camp and the labour camps, periodic ‘selections’ were carried out, to eliminate those deemed no longer fit to work. Unlike many of the new arrivals, t
hese victims knew what lay in store for many of them; terrible scenes often followed, as they wept, begged for mercy, or tried to resist attempts to push them into the gas chamber. 274
Those selected for killing were marched over to the gas chamber from the selection area. The two bunkers had a capacity of 800 and 1,200 people respectively. Over the course of 1942-3, the gassing facilities at Auschwitz-Birkenau were extended and refined. A purpose-designed gas chamber already ordered for the main camp in October 1941 was delivered to Birkenau instead, and three more crematoria were also built. All four were redesignated Crematoria I, II, III and IV when the two gas chambers in the main camp were closed down in July 1943 (one was destroyed, the other mothballed). More were planned but never built. All the new crematoria were located some distance from the prisoners’ barracks. They were disguised by trees and shrubs. Two of them were known by the SS as the ‘forest crematoria’. The new gas chambers were completed between March and June 1943. Small transports of fewer than 200 people were taken into a washroom in Crematorium II or III after ‘selection’ and shot in the back of the neck. Larger groups were gassed. In each facility, the gas chamber was mostly below surface level, disguised in the usual fashion as a shower and sealed by an airtight door with a peephole. The Jews selected for killing were taken to a disrobing room, told they would go into a disinfecting shower, and made to undress. ‘It was most important that the whole business of arriving and undressing should take place in an atmosphere of the greatest possible calm,’ Ḧss wrote later. Members of the Special Detachments of Jewish prisoners detailed to deal with the bodies after the gassing chatted to the victims and did their best to reassure them. Those who were reluctant to undress were ‘helped’, and the refractory were ‘calmed down’, or, if they began to shout and scream, taken out and shot in the back of the neck. Many were not deceived. Mothers sometimes tried to hide their babies in the piles of clothes. Children often cried, but most ‘entered the gas chambers, playing or joking with one another and carrying their toys’, Ḧss noted. Occasionally Jews would address him as he stood supervising the procedure. ‘One woman approached me as she walked past,’ he recalled later, ‘and, pointing to her four children who were manfully helping the smallest ones over the rough ground, whispered: “How can you bring yourself to kill such beautiful, darling children? Have you no heart at all?” ’275
Once the victims had been herded into the gas chamber, SS men standing on the reinforced concrete roof lowered canisters of Zyklon-B pellets through four openings into wire-mesh columns, which allowed the pellets to dissolve into deadly gas as soon as the body-heat of the victims had warmed up the air. After twenty minutes or so, the canisters were pulled up again, to remove the possibility of any more gas escaping, while the chamber was ventilated and a Special Detachment of Jewish prisoners dragged the corpses out into another room, pulled out gold teeth and fillings, cut the women’s hair off, removed gold rings, spectacles, prosthetic limbs and other encumbrances, and put the bodies into elevators that took them up to the crematorium room on the ground floor, where they were put into the incinerating ovens and reduced to ashes. Any remaining bones were ground up and the ashes used as fertilizer or thrown away in nearby woods and streams. These facilities, designed and supplied by the firm Topf and Sons of Erfurt, were patented for future use by their inventor, the engineer Kurt Pr̈fer, who came to Auschwitz on numerous occasions to supervise their construction, testing and initial operation. He introduced numerous small technical innovations, including, for example, the installation of heating in Crematorium II to speed up the dissolution of the Zyklon B on cold winter days. His plans have survived and have provided historians with important documentary evidence for the Crematorium’s modus operandi.276 Yet Pr̈fer’s designs did not withstand the test of constant use. Very soon, the numbers of corpses proved too great for the crematorium ovens to deal with. The brickwork began to crack, and the ovens were damaged by overheating. Before the construction of the new facilities, most corpses had been buried in the ground, but from September 1942 onwards the SS, under the command of Paul Blobel, who was in charge of similar operations at other camps, began to have them dug up by the Special Detachments of prisoners and burned on metal grilles laid over ditches, in the manner followed in the Reinhard Action camps shortly afterwards. By the end of the year, he had disposed of 100,000 bodies in this way, in an attempt to conceal the traces of the murder from posterity. This method also had to be used whenever the crematorium ovens proved unable to cope with the numbers of corpses arriving.277
In Auschwitz, as in the Reinhardt Action camps, the Special Detachments were killed at regular intervals and replaced by other young, able-bodied prisoners. Some of these, including former members of the French resistance and the Polish Communist underground, formed a clandestine prisoners’ organization that managed to make contact with a larger secret resistance movement among the regular prisoners some time during the late summer of 1943. A rebellion aimed at opening the way for a mass breakout was frustrated by the drafting-in of SS reinforcements. However, in 1944, after the SS camp guards had killed 200 members of the Special Detachments following an unsuccessful escape attempt, a further 300 who were selected for gassing on 7 October 1944 attacked the SS men as they approached Crematorium IV, using whatever they could lay their hands on, including stones and iron bars. They set the building alight and destroyed it. The smoke alerted other members of the camp resistance, and some managed to break through the barbed wire surrounding Crematorium II, though none succeeded in reaching freedom; they were all killed, including a group who had sought shelter in a barn and were burned alive by the SS. Meanwhile, the SS had set up machine-gun positions in the camp and started firing indiscriminately; altogether some 425 Special Detachment prisoners were murdered over the next three days.278
IV
The first transports to arrive at Auschwitz, in March 1942, were from Slovakia and from France. Initially they were registered and admitted, in the belief that they might be used for labour purposes; but before long, in May 1942, systematic extermination began, killing not only the French and Slovakian Jews but also other Jews from Poland, Belgium and the Netherlands. It was a transport from Holland that Himmler watched being selected and murdered during his visit on 17 and 18 July 1942. ‘He had no criticisms to make,’ recorded Ḧss; indeed, the visit ended with the Reich Leader of the SS awarding the camp commandant a promotion. At an evening reception, Ḧss noted that Himmler ‘was in the best of spirits, took a leading part in the conversation and was extremely amiable, especially towards the ladies’. The next day Himmler went to the women’s camp, ‘attended the whipping of a female criminal’ and ‘talked with some female Jehovah’s Witnesses and discussed with them their fanatical beliefs’. In his final address before departing, Himmler ordered an intensification of the killing and urged Ḧss to complete the construction of the new camp at Birkenau as quickly as possible.279 From July onwards, German Jews began to arrive, first from Vienna and then, in November and December, from Berlin. Trains began to deliver Jews from Romania, Croatia, Finland, Norway, then Bulgaria, Italy and Hungary, Serbia, Denmark, Greece and southern France.280
Most of the Jews were transported directly to Auschwitz from their country of origin, but some came from a special camp set up in the northern Czech town of Terezin, known to the Germans as Theresienstadt, where the central prison of the Gestapo in the Protectorate had been established. Work began on this new camp in November 1941, and the first 10,000 Jews arrived at the beginning of January 1942. Its initial purpose was to act as a collection centre for Czech Jews, and it was organized on the lines of a ghetto, with a Jewish Council led by an Elder, the Zionist Jakob Edelstein, who was well known to Adolf Eichmann as a leading figure among Czech Jews. Under Edelstein’s leadership, the camp developed a wide range of cultural and sporting activities, established a welfare system, and received sufficient money from the German authorities to function as a kind of model ghetto, to be filmed for internatio
nal newsreels and displayed to visiting delegations of organizations like the Red Cross. One movie completed towards the end of November 1944 showed parks, swimming pools, sporting activities, schools, concerts and happy faces everywhere. Entitled The Leader Gives the Jews a Camp, it was never actually shown. Its director was the German-Jewish actor Kurt Gerron, who had achieved fame towards the end of the Weimar Republic by singing the part of Mack the Knife in the first recording of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera and starring with Emil Jannings opposite Marlene Dietrich in the film The Blue Angel. In 1933 he had fled first to Paris and then to Holland, where he continued making films; but following the Nazi invasion he was interned along with other Jews and sent to Theresienstadt. Gerron organized a cabaret show in the camp, entitled The Carousel, an enterprise so successful that he seemed a natural choice to direct the film, which he did under duress. After it was completed, Gerron was taken to Auschwitz on the last transport to leave the camp, on 18 October 1944, and gassed.281
The portrayal of the ghetto-camp’s active cultural life, unlike other aspects of the movie, did not lie. On the same transport as Gerron in October 1944 was the Czech-Jewish composer Viktor Ullmann, a follower of Arnold Schoenberg, who had been taken to Theresienstadt two years previously. Among other things Ullmann composed an opera, The Emperor of Atlantis, that was performed successfully in the camp, along with chamber music and piano works. Later on, Ullmann was reduced to writing his compositions on the back of lists of inmates slated for deportation to Auschwitz. Friends somehow managed to preserve many of them until the war was over. Jewish artists in the camp gave drawing and painting lessons to the children among the inmates; many of their drawings too have survived. Despite such cultural activities, conditions in the camp were generally poor and deteriorated as time went on. From July 1942, trainloads of elderly Jews from the Reich began to arrive in the camp. Many were weak, exhausted or sick, and they died in their hundreds. In September 1942 alone, 3,900 people died out of a total of 58,000. The inmates of Theresienstadt also included Jewish veterans from the First World War with their families, and Jewish spouses from ‘mixed marriages’ that had been dissolved. On 8 September 1943, no fewer than 18,000 inmates were taken to Auschwitz. They were allowed to keep their clothes and effects. They were housed there in a specially designed ‘family camp’ with a school and a kindergarten, living in relatively superior accommodation which they were allowed to decorate. The purpose of the ‘family camp’ was to impress visitors and provide material for international propaganda. After six months it was closed down; in two separate actions in March and July 1944, the inmates were almost all taken to the gas chamber, except for 3,000 who were transferred to another camp.282 Then in October 1944 twelve transports alone left Theresienstadt for Auschwitz, leaving a population of just over 11,000 where there had been nearly 30,000 in mid-September. Within a few weeks, however, the numbers had risen to 30,000 again with a fresh influx of deportees from Slovakia, the Czech lands and the Reich, many of them ‘mixed-race’. In February 1945 the camp authorities built a huge hall that could be hermetically sealed, and an enormous covered pit. The remaining inmates could all be exterminated on the spot if it was felt desirable or necessary. In the event this did not happen. Nevertheless, out of just over 140,000 people who had been transported to Theresienstadt in the course of its existence, fewer than 17,000 were left alive by the end of the war.283
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