Auschwitz: A History
Page 6
The management of IG Farben at first assumed a work-force of 3,000 Reich Germans, then 5,500, but this figure soon rose to about 15,000. As plans progressed, the figures mounted. In June 1941 Stosberg had anticipated a total work-force of 30,000, but this soon rose, first to 40,000, then to 60,000 and finally, in the ‘ideal plan’ of January 1943, to between 70,000 and 80,000 people.
The plans were pursued even when Stosberg, after two and a half years of work on the project, was called up to the Wehrmacht in September 1943; a district building officer now took over his tasks.
During the development of the town, Party and civilian authorities never came into conflict with the SS over the crimes in the camp. Instead, arguments tended to break out over the political competition for land and areas of influence, because the vast town development plans came into conflict with the concentration camp’s extension projects, which the Lager-SS were designing at the same time. They argued over the issue of whether the left or the right bank of the Soła marked the border between the town and the camp, and whether the SS would build a sewage treatment plant where the Soła branched off from the Vistula, or the civilian authorities would set up a central water supply complex on the same site. The question of the extent to which the SS zone of interest would penetrate the land belonging to the town, and whether Oppeln would be drawn into the station extension by the directors of the Reichsbahn, was an additional source of conflict. In order to clear up the issue of the regional boundary, late in September 1942, in the Waffen-SS building, Himmler called a meeting between representatives of the SS Economic Administration Central Office, Lager-SS, IG Farben and the provincial and urban administration, at which he was represented by Oswald Pohl, the head of the SS Economic Administration Office. The debate reached a grotesque climax at a meeting in Berlin in January 1943, when representatives of the civilian authorities demanded the transfer of the SS zone of interest for reasons of landscape design. The concentration camp, they suggested, should be rebuilt somewhere else, where it would fit less ‘inorganically’ into its surroundings.
When the boundary was definitively fixed in June 1943, this established the administrative autonomy of the SS zone of interest. Himmler thus achieved his goal of withdrawing the camp compound from the formal administrative control of the civilian administration, and making it the sole responsibility of the SS. With the agreement of the civilian authorities the SS zone of interest now became an official district in its own right. The commandant of the parents camp – and this was unique among the commandants of the concentration camps throughout the Reich – received the rank of Amtskommissar (‘Official Commissar’), comparable to the office of mayor, and was thus awarded certain powers in the civilian administration. Both Höss, who had already been a member of the Labour Chamber in the Gau of Upper Silesia since 1941, and his successors Liebehenschel and Baer acted as Amtskomissare, and the guard unit of the Waffen-SS acted as a police force in the SS zone of interest.
The town of Auschwitz drew certain advantages from its connection with the SS, because the fixing of the boundary delivered the privilege it had long desired of a German Gemeindeordnung (‘community law’). The bestowal of this privilege demonstrated that the process of ‘Germanization’ was almost concluded, as did the new town coat of arms: an eagle with a large ‘A’ on its chest, standing proudly on the medieval Piast castle: the innocent symbol of the town of mass extermination.
Mass crimes and the civilian population
By October 1943 more than 6,000 Reich Germans had moved to Auschwitz. The first to settle there were mostly officials working in the newly created town offices, the Schutzpolizei (‘Security Police’) were reinforced, and in January 1943 the new Gestapo office moved into the former vicarage of the church of the Assumption. Craftsmen and businessmen were also among the new arrivals, but most came to Auschwitz as workers and employees of the IG Farben works. The bulk of the new inhabitants moved from towns where the company had its main factories: Ludwigshafen, Hüls, Leuna and Frankfurt am Main. Both men and women were drawn to Auschwitz, and there was a high proportion of young people, clearly carrying out part of their training in the new factory. Generally, at first, existing employees of IG Farben came, and their families followed in the course of time. It is not clear what criteria were employed in choosing the workers for the Auschwitz plant; political reliability as well as specialist qualifications might have played an important role, and, in the service of securing the ethnic German future, age must have played a part as well.
Despite the future development programme for the town, living conditions remained difficult, and unattractive to the German inhabitants.
Neither the water supply nor sewage disposal were properly sorted out. Because of insanitary conditions, spotted fever, dysentery and typhus flourished. From the start of 1942 the camp administration forbade SS men and their families to enter the town, lest they bring disease back into the camp. And accommodation was uncertain as well, because housing in the IG staff estate was still being built and factory workers often had to move into houses and apartments a long way away.
But the Reich Germans were not deterred, and their numbers actually rose when the air raids over the Old Reich became more severe in the second half of 1943. Auschwitz, in the Reich’s Silesian ‘air raid shelter’, was for a long time spared attacks from the air. But in July and August 1943 the town residents’ report office recorded 2,400 moves to Dwory and a further 650 to the villages around Auschwitz. By now German settlers were no longer coming only from towns where IG Farben had bases, but from all part of the Old Reich, from Hamburg, Essen, Cologne, Münster, Magdeburg and Munich, and even from Vienna.
Nowhere in the twenty-four towns in the district of Bielitz was the number of new Reich German citizens higher than it was in Auschwitz. The settlers were distinguished by a pioneering spirit, a belief in the future, their efforts to bring ‘German culture’ to the East, as well as a high level of business efficiency. Concentrating on their livelihoods, they were indifferent to the camp; but they did notice its existence when, for example, the Lager-SS, on Wehrmacht Day at the end of March 1943, invited them to a ‘communual feast followed by entertainments in the afternoon’.
The fact that the private lives of the Reich Germans in Auschwitz remained untouched by mass murder is also demonstrated by the noisy New Year festival in 1943, which German residents celebrated in the Ratshof pub in the market square, the first building in the square. The landlord and hotelier, who had moved to the town from Wuppertal, wrote to a friend in the Old Reich to tell him about the preparations: tickets were as much in demand as for ‘the press ball in Berlin’. In the middle of the war – and in full view of the camp – 200 Reich German guests supped heartily on goose liver and oxtail soup, blue carp in aspic, roast hare and biscuit roulade, Sekt and pancakes, and in the early hours of the morning there was herring salad and coffee. The festivities were cordial, there was dancing, a master of ceremonies from Vienna guided everyone through the evening, a dance-band played, and a comedian entertained the room.
Unaffected by events in the camp, garden designers, landscape architects and botanists turned Auschwitz into an experimental research zone. As a fanatical nature-worshipper, Himmler wanted to see procedures for recycling refuse and sewage, for biological waste processing, the growth of plant cultures and technical innovations in the use of slurry and composting. In the shadow of the gas chambers these projects became reality. Among the visitors who came several times to Auschwitz was Heinrich Wiepking-Jürgensmann, professor of landscape and garden design at the agricultural college in Berlin, and also special representative for landscape design and landscape care in the staff headquarters of the Reich Commission for the Strengthening of German Nationhood. Employed in an advisory capacity in the development of landscape design in the annexed Eastern regions, he was deeply involved with projects in Auschwitz; one of his students wrote a dissertation on the redesign of the town.
The people who were aware of
the details of mass extermination, apart from the SS leadership, were above all the employees of the Reichsbahn who directed the freight trains carrying Jews from the whole of Europe to Birkenau. In the timetables of the Reichsbahn the transports were listed as special passenger trains, but were de facto sent out as goods trains. The client was the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or RSHA (sometimes represented by regional Gestapo offices), but the process was overseen by the Reich Transport Ministry. The Reichsbahn had the journey paid for as traditional freight transport. The money came from the victims themselves, who had to buy a third-class ticket for their journey to the death camp: 4 pfennigs per person for every kilometre of track; for children under the age of ten, 2 pfennigs. The Reichsbahn granted the SS a group rebate – half-price for transports of 1,000 people or more – and the empty train journeys on the way back were free, surely one of the most breathtaking details of the organization of mass murder.
There was a great deal of effort involved, because when a train arrived at Auschwitz station it had first to be shunted into a siding. The locomotives were swapped over, and the railway staff took over the carriages. A team of three, sometimes four, officials accompanied the transports to the camp. The railwaymen were present when the SS drove the inmates out of the carriages. They saw the selection process, watched the prisoner units unloading the luggage and the columns going to the crematoria. They brought the empty carriages back to the station, where the duty foreman of the goods dispatch office was already waiting for them.
Attacks on trains and railway lines on the stretch to Auschwitz increased after 1943, presumably deliberate acts by Polish resistance fighters, trying to stop or at least to hinder the prisoner transports. Tracks were loosened and freight trains derailed, locomotives and carriages blown off the line by explosive devices. The attacks reached such a pitch that Germans no longer felt safe in the area around Auschwitz – and began to apply for gun licences.
When corpses were found along the tracks, the authorities assumed that they were Jews. The gendarmerie made no further inquiries, and the Lager-SS had the bodies removed. The finding of corpses provoked horror among the general public, but less and less the more frequently such findings occurred. The fact that passengers rose from their seats and crossed to the windows when Birkenau camp could be seen in the distance suggests that it gave them a certain thrill.
Partial information, rumours and suppositions circulated among the civilian population of Auschwitz. People suspected the worst when they noticed the sweetish smell of burning flesh, too pungent to be ignored – though anyone who wanted to could find reassuring explanations for it; for example, there was quite naturally a high mortality rate in the camp, and the corpses had to be incinerated. Certainly, there was a latent anxiety which meant that no one asked any questions. The grimmest suspicions were forced to the back of people’s minds by everyday concerns and private matters. Indifference was everywhere apparent; how far people agreed with what was happening is unclear. But any protests were muted; quiescence was far more typical.
After the end of the war railway employees said they knew nothing of the mass extermination until 1943. But no one had asked to be moved to another location because, they said, they did not have the enthusiasm to do so, and they thought they were doing a valuable job. Their indifference meant the railwaymen could go about their murderous business as if it were quite routine. Out of a sense of obedience, and also stamped by the pedantic precision of their profession, they showed no misgivings about their own actions. That the burden of knowing about the systematic killing that was happening had no consequences for them shows how people were able to come to terms with mass murder.
5
The ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’
Extermination policy
What Himmler, Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of German Nationhood, proudly called a ‘modern mass migration’, and began to put into effect without any restraint; what, in the language of the German occupying forces, with utter contempt for humanity, was known as ‘the removal of human ballast’ and ‘racial cleansing’; and what, in the official reports from the offices of the Reich Commissar, was listed under ‘significant population-related structural cleansing’ was the brutal uprooting and violent expulsion of hundreds of thousands of people. The deportation programme was not a military experiment undertaken by irrational fantasists. Rather, based on sound power-political interests, it formed the defining political and ideological leitmotif of German policy in conquered Poland. The ‘new racial order’ was aimed at moving masses of ‘alien’ and ‘racially good’ human beings back and forth, regrouping them, resettling, settling and repatriating them, in order, in the name of ‘bringing in valuable German blood’, to usher in the victory of the ‘Aryan’ race over Jews and Slavs.
The planners in the RSHA did not react to drawbacks in the settlement programme by reducing ‘evacuation quotas’, or by extending the planning period, but rather by insistently pushing ahead with their campaign. Obstacles were overcome ‘maximally’, which is to say in the most radical way imaginable. Inherent necessities were created that made it possible to continue the deportation programme as before, despite growing difficulties. A process of continuous radicalization came into operation, given concrete form in strategic plans of increasingly immoderate scope.
The ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’ cannot be separated from the context of the racist Eastern policy any more than it can be from the resettlement programme of the ‘ethnic Germans’ from eastern and southern Europe. Radicalized to an extreme degree, the dynamic of resettlement and settlement in the service of racial restructuring led to the systematic mass murder of the Jews, even if that had not been the goal of the plans from the outset. ‘Resettlement’, ‘clearance’ and ‘evacuation’ were, between 1939 and 1941, still meant literally, and only gradually became synonyms for mass murder.
After earlier economic and logistical delays, military priorities put a definitive end to systematic population restructuring on 15 March 1941, when the Russian campaign which would tie up all resources ceased to be compatible with ethnic-policy operations. Until that point ethnic-policy measures in conquered Poland had been directed against both Jews and Poles. Their goal was to clear the territories that were to be settled by Germans of ‘alien ethnicities’, to make room for ethnic Germans and Reich Germans. Earlier instances of expropriation and disenfranchisement had involved expulsion and deportation, but not killing.
For the removal of the Jews to ghettos and extermination camps the procedures carried out during the settlement operations were of crucial importance, because the development of the human transports as an administrative act – with precise timetables, cost calculations and contingency plans – was already routine long before the systematic murder of the Jews began. The division of labour, demarcation of duties and the fragmentation of responsibility were established as basic structural principles in the policy of extermination.
On 22 June 1941, when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, his goal was to defeat his enemy in a Blitzkrieg (‘lightning war’), to secure Germany’s lasting hegemony in Europe and finally to realize the national utopia of ‘Lebensraum in the East’. In the climate of victory euphoria and political megalomania, the regime set its course against ideological enemy number one: the Jews. If the strategists of the previous resettlement policy had had to accept that their plans would face stagnation, checks and dead-ends, the vision of the conquest of the Soviet Union opened up a new dimension to the racial New Order of Europe. The radicalization of anti-Jewish policies took its course with unheard-of brutality.
The goal of the ‘liberation of Lebensraum in the East’, thestrategic guiding principle that the head of the RSHA, Reinhard Heydrich, had worked out at the end of March 1941 on Hitler’s behalf, was the transfer of the Jews from the German sphere of power into the conceptually and geographically nebulous East. The principle of forced deportation still prevailed in the sense of the ‘territorial
final solution’, but the death of the victims, in contrast to earlier clearance projects, was factored in as a fixed planning dimension. The Jews were to be driven to Siberia or towards the Arctic Ocean, where they would die of supposedly natural causes: they would starve or freeze or fall victim to the murderous policy of forced labour.
Exile and extermination were interlinked, and became the means sanctioned by Nazi racial policy to ‘make room for German people’ in the conquered area. In connection with the radicalized programme of ‘Germanization’ of the East, anti-Jewish policy acquired its true impetus.
The plan for the systematic murder of the European Jews was, to all appearances, not the result of a single ‘order’, but the product of a lengthy decision-making process, which found concrete form in autumn 1941, and was then put in motion step by step, before being systematically completed in the early summer of 1942. Not so much directed from above as the result of a gradually radicalized policy, intensified to an extreme, that probably came into being spasmodically, in a process of ‘cumulative radicalization’ (Hans Mommsen), mass murder was equally influenced by complex plans and actions that had already been carried out. Hitler, although his role in this cannot be clearly and individually explained in detail, acted as the most senior moral and political legitimizing authority for it. The Führer granted his inferiors, in the polycratic system of government of the Nazi state, room for manoeuvre, to develop and realize their own plans autonomously, so that the decisive impetus in the implementation of the Final Solution came from regional initiatives. These initiatives on the part of lower-ranking bodies, and the administrative perfectionism of the Berlin headquarters, merged in the end into a criminal extermination programme.