by Dan McMillan
Many SS adopted this or that prisoner as a kind of mascot, and the prisoner then often received special privileges. At Chelmno the Germans had thirteen-year-old Simon Srebnik stand in a boat on the Narew River and sing to them. Simon sang sentimental airs and Prussian marching songs while the SS supervised the unloading of gas vans and the burning of bodies. In the winter of 1942–1943, the celebrated conductor Artur Gold arrived on a train from Warsaw, and was plucked at the last moment from a crowd of naked men about to enter the gas chambers. Organizing the camp orchestra on orders from the SS, he became a favorite of the Germans, who fed him special rations and even threw a party for his fortieth birthday. The SS brought drinks and pastries from their kitchen, and the orchestra performed a special repertoire, the musicians dressed in their best clothes. Select prisoners and all the SS were invited. Only in the Holocaust have we witnessed such a grotesque spectacle: murderers and murder victims “celebrating” together in an atmosphere of apparent jollity.19
It seems clear that many Germans felt comfortable in their daily interactions with people whom they had condemned to death, just as Franz Stangl did. Some could even enjoy contact with their victims, not out of sadism, but rather out of indifference: they believed these Jews were less than human, hence nothing to get upset over. Murdering them was simply a job. Many SS men, however—perhaps the majority—treated their victims in a flagrantly sadistic manner. Paradoxically, this behavior may have reflected some residual belief in their victims’ humanity. Seeing them as human could have aroused anger at Jews, because it would force the SS to see themselves as murderers. In most cases we will never know, since the killers have left so few diaries, letters, or other documents that might illuminate their state of mind. Still, the few surviving sources indicate that many were fully comfortable with their actions and even enjoyed their style of life in the death camps.20
By bringing their wives or mistresses to the scene of their crimes, the killers displayed an unforced acceptance of their own actions, an acceptance perhaps made easier by their denial of their victims’ humanity. Every summer, hundreds of wives and girlfriends would visit their men of the SS in Auschwitz, often staying for weeks at a time. Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss lived in the camp with his wife and children; his fifth child was born there. Felix Landau, who helped lead a shooting squad in Ukraine in 1941, strove mightily to get his mistress transferred out to his base of operations. Captain Julius Wohlauf, who directed a shooting unit, brought his pregnant wife out to his base in Poland for their honeymoon. On August 25, 1942, she sat beside him as his men rounded up several thousand Jews in Miedzyrzec and crammed them into trains headed for Treblinka. His men deported roughly 10,000 Miedzyrzec Jews in the course of two days and acted with extraordinary brutality, shooting dead nearly 1,000 who were too frail to travel or who did not comply quickly enough with their orders.21
A medical doctor and SS officer, Johannes Paul Kremer, illustrates the killers’ emotional detachment from their victims. Kremer served as a medical officer in Auschwitz from the end of August 1942 until mid-November of that year. His detailed diary devotes a comparable amount of space to mass murder by cyanide and the pleasures of Auschwitz social life. On September 9 he hears that his divorce is final: “I can now see life in all its colors again. A black curtain has risen from my life! Was later present as the doctor at corporal punishment of eight prisoners and an execution with small-bore rifle.” Kremer happily records the receipt of some soap, right along with his fourth gassing. The diary continues for weeks in this vein, moving between routine medical issues, Kremer’s own medical research, mass murder, and the fine meals and cultural entertainments he enjoyed in the camp. On September 23 he records his sixth and seventh gassings and a festive dinner in honor of a visiting SS general: “There was baked pike, as much as you wanted, real ground coffee, excellent beer and open sandwiches.”22
Kremer most fully revealed his emotional detachment from his victims when he testified after the war, at his trial in Poland, about his medical research in Auschwitz. He had wanted to study the effects of starvation on the human body by taking live tissue samples from badly malnourished prisoners. He found his subjects in the Auschwitz Infirmary, prisoners who would be sent to the gas chambers because they could not regain their ability to perform slave labor. After Kremer selected a prisoner, an orderly would put this “patient” onto a dissection table. “I would go up to the table,” Kremer testified, “and ask the patient to give me some details essential for my research.” Superficially this interaction resembled a conversation between patient and doctor. How much had the patient weighed before his “detention”? How much weight had he lost in Auschwitz? Was he taking any medication? Once Kremer had gathered this information, a medical orderly would kill the “patient” with a poisonous injection. Kremer then took tissue samples from the victim’s liver, spleen, and pancreas. In his diary he mentioned doing this on five occasions during the two and a half months he stayed at Auschwitz.23
Kremer’s “research” offers a harsh illustration of how thoroughly the perpetrators denied their victim’s humanity: he viewed these prisoners as nothing more than sources of tissue samples, and he conversed with them—at least in his own telling—calmly and with little affect. He probably was comfortable in these conversations, judging from the diary entries that record his actions as routine.
Among Holocaust survivors, none have shed a more penetrating light on the killers than the Italian Primo Levi. A trained chemist, Levi was spared the gas chambers so that he could assist German engineers at a synthetic rubber plant that had been built with slave labor at Auschwitz. His life hung in the balance as he entered the office of a Dr. Pannwitz, who would test his knowledge of chemistry. If Levi passed the test, he could avoid the hard physical labor that killed most prisoners and go on to work in the shelter of the plant’s laboratory. With bated breath he entered Pannwitz’s office, took a seat in front of the German’s desk, and waited. “When he finished writing, he raised his eyes and looked at me,” said Levi.
Levi wrote that he hoped someday to see Pannwitz again, not to take revenge upon him, but “merely from a curiosity about the human soul.” He was curious “because that look was not one between two men; and if I had known how completely to explain the nature of that look, which came as if across the glass window of an aquarium between two beings who live in different worlds, I would also have explained the great insanity of [Nazi] Germany.”
“One felt in that moment, in an immediate manner, what we all thought and said of the Germans. The brain which governed those blue eyes and those manicured hands said: ‘This something in front of me belongs to a species which it is obviously opportune to suppress. In this particular case, one has to first make sure that it does not contain some utilizable element.’”24
Many of the leading perpetrators of the Holocaust—men such as Franz Stangl, Rudolf Höss, or Adolf Eichmann—later insisted that they harbored no personal feelings of animosity toward their victims, that they did not hate Jews. While such claims strain credulity, it may be true that the emotion of hatred played only a small role in driving their murderous actions. After all, they would have said, what is the point in hating a virus? For that is exactly what they thought they saw when they looked at a human being of Jewish ancestry: a dangerous microbe or insect pest that only appeared to be human. Today people marvel at what they imagine to have been a boundless hatred that fueled the Holocaust. Yet the truth was often something far more frightening: not hot, passionate hatred, but rather indifference so cold that mass murder provoked no more emotion than the disgust one feels when stepping on a beetle.
The Holocaust differed from other genocides in another important respect as well: the degree of power the killers exercised over their victims. In other mass slaughters, power usually has been limited to the brief moment in which the killer took the victim’s life. In the Holocaust, because the Germans stayed among their Jewish victims for extended periods of time, their power
was not just briefly used, but rather lived, hour by hour, day by day, month by month, year by year. And this power assumed forms and dimensions that can only be characterized as grotesque.25
The killers’ central power, and the basis of all other power, was their absolute control over life and death. In the camps, the SS exercised this power most obviously in “selection”: that ritual in which they assigned some Jews to slave labor, and the remainder—usually the great majority—to the gas chambers. Prisoners faced their first and most important selection when they tumbled out of the densely packed cattle cars that had brought them to a death camp. Disoriented and exhausted from an arduous journey, very few understood what came next. At Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor, and Treblinka—all pure extermination camps with no large slave-labor population attached—the SS took at most a handful of Jews from the mass of prisoners. The rest went directly to the gas chambers. From Auschwitz, in contrast, the SS provided the slave labor for a large network of satellite camps, a workforce consisting of more than 100,000 Jews. Overwork and malnutrition steadily consumed the lives of these prisoners, so the SS chose a large fraction of the captives from each trainload to replenish this workforce. According to Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, the SS selected, on average, 25 to 30 percent of new arrivals for slave labor. The rest of the incoming prisoners met their deaths in the gas chambers within a few short hours.26
SS medical doctors, including the notorious Josef Mengele, stood at the railway siding and made the selection. Guards would form the prisoners into a line that would file past the doctor, who would simply motion each one to his right or his left, one side for murder by poison gas, the other side for slave labor. Robust men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five had the best survival chances, as they would have the longest useful life as slaves. Healthy young women might also avoid the gas chambers for the moment, provided they had no children with them. The SS concluded that separating children from their mothers caused too much disruption during selection. Since all children younger than sixteen or thereabouts went to the gas chambers, the SS sent their mothers with them to avoid disorder at the rail siding. The aged, the infirm, the sick, the children and their mothers—all were condemned to die within hours. And this selection was only the first.27
Few prisoners understood the meaning of the first selection until they arrived in their barracks, where experienced prisoners would tell them why heavy smoke was always belching from the crematorium chimneys. At this point they learned that their loved ones, who had arrived with them on the train, had all been reduced to ash. Now they understood that their own lives were forfeit should they ever displease their Nazi masters, and the foundation for the Germans’ power was firmly laid. Gerhard Erren, an administrator of occupied territory, made this point with brutal clarity in a January 1942 report. The SS had shot several thousand Jews in his district the preceding November, and he had put the remaining 7,000 Jews to work for the Germans. “They are working willingly,” he wrote, “because of the constant fear of death. Early next year they will be rigorously checked and sorted for a further reduction.” In the camps, such “further reduction” took place on an almost daily basis, repeatedly underscoring the Germans’ total domination.28
When Auschwitz prisoners became weak from overwork and grew emaciated on their limited rations, guards would cull them and send them on to the gas chambers, which they had to enter fully knowing their fate. At Treblinka, Kurt Franz frequently staged selections at the evening roll call as the camp’s prisoners stood at attention and were forced to watch. Prisoners who had broken camp rules, or whose physical vigor had become suspect, had to engage in “sport”: running in circles, then dropping to the ground on command, then getting up to run again until at least some of them had collapsed from exhaustion. Those who failed to complete the sport were taken straightaway to the Infirmary and shot, to be replaced by healthy young men from the next trainload.29
Selection established the Germans’ absolute power, and thereafter the guards lived among their victims with no fear of retaliation. Only on a few occasions did the victims rise in armed rebellion against the Germans: in the Warsaw and Bialystok ghettos and in prisoner uprisings at Auschwitz, Sobibor, and Treblinka. In the years since 1945, countless people have asked why Jews did not lash out more often at their tormentors, since they knew their own deaths were all but certain anyway. The answer is collective punishment: an individual act of rebellion would provoke the deaths of many other prisoners. At Treblinka, an Argentinian citizen who had been stranded in Warsaw, Meir Berliner, stabbed an SS man to death. In retaliation the guards shot ten men on the spot, then shot another 150 the following morning. Although any prisoner’s chances of surviving a camp were extremely slim, open rebellion meant certain death, not only for the rebel but for hundreds of others as well.
Moving easily and comfortably among the condemned, the SS used them for numerous personal services: as maids, cooks, tailors, bootblacks, barbers, even doctors and dentists. Most remarkable of all, some had themselves shaved by Jewish barbers. Consider for a moment how shocking a scene this is. A murderer lets his victim, a man he has condemned to death and whom he inevitably will kill, hold a straight razor to his throat, relaxing in a barber’s chair as the blade glides over his carotid artery. He is so fully in command of the situation, so confident in his absolute domination of this man whom he has compelled to serve him, that he prefers being shaved by his victim to shaving himself.30
Perhaps the ultimate expression of the killers’ unlimited power was forcing Jewish prisoners to assist in the murder of their own people, including their families and friends. At Treblinka these prisoners were assigned to one of several established work details. Forty to fifty prisoners with blue armbands stood on the platform when the death trains arrived, removing the bodies of those who had died during the journey. Working in teams of two or three to a freight car, they cleaned the cars and removed any trace of the victims; the whole train had to be cleaned within fifteen minutes. About forty other workers, wearing red armbands, helped victims undress, then took the victims’ clothing and luggage to a storage area. Those who were too weak to make the walk uphill to the gas chambers were carried into the Infirmary, where they were shot. Once undressed, the women went to the “Gold Jews,” a squad of nearly twenty men, most of them former jewelers or bank clerks, to surrender their valuables. While the SS harried the naked men uphill to the gas chambers, the women entered the haircutting barracks, where a detail of sixteen or seventeen professional barbers awaited them. Working quickly with shears, the barbers removed the bulk of each woman’s hair so that the Germans could use it to make textiles. This “haircut” typically lasted a minute or two.
Driven about a hundred yards to the gas chambers, the men died first, the women second. After murdering a batch of prisoners, the SS turned their bodies over to several other prisoner teams. About a dozen men removed the bodies from the chambers and laid them on a concrete platform, from which the much larger “Body-Transport Detail”—about a hundred strong—carried the bodies away to burial ditches, and after a later date to a huge metal grill, atop which the bodies would be burned. Another team cleaned the gas chambers, while the twenty to thirty “dentists” yanked gold teeth from the corpses using pliers.31
Using Jewish labor to run the death factories allowed the SS to kill effortlessly, without having to witness violent death, and spared them unpleasant contact with the corpses. The victims removed their clothes on instructions that were often transmitted by Jewish prisoners who spoke the victims’ language. The doomed Jews were told the soothing cover story that they needed to take a shower that would remove lice and disinfect them. Many victims had doubts at this point, but they had little choice but to obey, and who could imagine the reality of the gas chambers, unprecedented in history? So they walked into those windowless bunkers under their own power and died in the darkness, their death throes hidden from their killers. A single guard at Treblinka could extinguish more than 2,00
0 lives with no more effort than that needed to throw a switch, thereby starting a panel of engines that pumped carbon monoxide into a row of six chambers.32
As the death factories proceeded with their bloody work, some Jewish communities in German-occupied Eastern Europe clung to life, hoping to survive by making themselves useful to the German war economy. The German authorities confined them to badly overcrowded, unsanitary ghettos and appointed councils of Jewish elders to govern these ghettos for the Germans. While employment in war industries gave tens of thousands a temporary reprieve, the SS exerted constant pressure on the Jewish councils, demanding that those unable to work be surrendered for “resettlement,” that is, shooting or murder in a death camp. Sometimes the ghetto elders knew the true fate of those who were “deported.” Others had been warned but could not believe fantastical-sounding stories of mass murder by poison gas. Others lacked any concrete information, but even they had every ground for terrible doubts about the Germans’ intentions.33
On a regular basis, the SS would demand that the ghetto authorities surrender some fixed number of residents for “resettlement”—1,000, or 2,000, sometimes 5,000 or more, as when the SS sent the bulk of the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka from July 23 to September 21, 1942. Each time, the Jewish councils would have to draw up the lists of residents who would be deported, a task that caused them terrible anguish and which prompted Adam Czerniakow, leader of the Warsaw ghetto, to kill himself on the eve of the first deportation. At the beginning of September 1942, the German authorities informed Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, the ghetto elder of Lodz, that he would have to surrender all adults over the age of sixty-five and all children under the age of ten. They were to be “resettled” to work camps, a cover story that made little sense: how could small children and the elderly work in war production? On September 4, Rumkowski announced the Germans’ decision, standing before the ghetto residents as a “broken Jew,” in his words. “In my old age I must stretch out my hands and beg: Brothers and sisters, hand them to me, give me your children!”34