The course was set towards genocide in the summer of 1941. The ideological equation of Bolshevism and Jewry both gave the impetus to and legitimized anti-Jewish policy. The SS and the police were given instructions to shoot Russian Jews ‘in Party and state positions’, and to encourage pogroms. The ‘solution of the Jewish question’ was to some extent improvised: in Lithuania, from July 1941 onwards, the units under the higher orders of Himmler and Heydrich shot Jewish men, women and children without distinction. Mass liquidations also occurred in Belorussia, in the western Ukraine, in Serbia and in the district of Galicia in the General Government. In the Warthegau functionaries within the civilian apparatus of occupation expressly factored in murder as part of their ‘policy towards the Jews’. Large sections of the Wehrmacht implemented and supported the policy of murder.
In the Old Reich the deportation of the Jews began in the autumn of 1941, particularly from the large cities, but also from the Ostmark (annexed Austria) and the protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The Jews were to disappear on Hitler’s wishes, and the Old Reich was to be judenfrei (‘Jew-free’) by the end of 1941. The obligatory wearing of the Star of David (the Judenstern), the prohibition on emigration and the removal of German nationality became part of the administrative preparations for deportation in autumn 1941. Trains holding some 20,000 Jews rolled into the already overcrowded ghetto of Łódź from mid-October 1941. In Minsk, Kaunas and Riga Jews were shot immediately upon arrival.
But the mass executions proved to be impracticable, since in view of the great numbers of victims it was hardly possible to organize them, let alone keep them secret; the men in the execution squads also complained of ‘mental and nervous strain’. In mid-August 1941,on a visit to Minsk, Himmler ordered that alternative methods of killing be tried out. Experiments at killing the mentally handicapped were undertaken using explosives and poison gas. This all clearly demonstrates one thing: the regime was busy trying to find a means of murder that was as efficient as it was discreet and anonymous – and which minimized the psychological burden on those carrying out the executions.
It is difficult to place the Wannsee Conference (first planned for 9 December 1941, but deferred to 20 January 1942 after the USA entered the war) in the decision-making process concerning the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’. This meeting of the representatives of the ministerial authorities, the National Socialist Party and the SS apparatus, organized by Heydrich, served the cause of the administrative coordination of mass murder. Its purpose was to organize the division of labour, to integrate and assign roles to the various offices that would implement the programme of murder. That ‘Lebensraum in the East is the solution’ was set down as the guiding principle for future plans, and the policy of selection into those who were and those who were not able to work was established. Heydrich managed to demonstrate his competence as a coordinator of the ‘Final Solution’, and to confirm the practice of murder at a bureaucratic level. But the systematic murder of the Jews was not decided at Wannsee, because at the time of the conference the shootings in the Soviet Union were already under way, and other methods of killing had been under discussion for a long time.
In autumn 1941 – presumably because the war was not going as planned, because a speedy victory had failed to materialize, because rapid deportations were not possible and the German army was suffering setbacks – the occupied Soviet Union fell out of consideration as a prime site for murder within the context of the plans for a ‘New Order’ under Germany’s Jewish policy, although mass shootings continued to take place, and plans for the construction of an extermination camp in the Belorussian town of Mogilev existed, which we must suppose were not put into effect because of the war situation. The geographical focus of the extermination of the Jews was transferred to the west, to the politically and militarily secured former Poland, where between late autumn 1941 and spring 1942 all mass extermination camps were set up: Chelmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz–Birkenau.
The extermination camps differed fundamentally from the concentration camps in both administrative and functional terms. While concentration camps served as places of imprisonment, and of re-education through terror, punishment and economic exploitation, as well as being training-grounds for the SS, the extermination camps had only a single purpose: the swift murder of the prisoners who arrived there. Auschwitz–Birkenau and Majdanek, which were both concentration camps and extermination camps, were special forms of these.
Chelmno in the Warthegau, which, like Auschwitz, belonged to the German Reich, was the first extermination camp. From 7 December 1941 Jews from the Łódź ghetto were murdered there, and later also Roma from the Burgenland and other non-Jews, 152,000 people in all. In March 1943 Chelmno was temporarily closed, but the following year, when the Łódź ghetto was destroyed, the mass murder there began all over again.
In Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka, the Operation Rein-hard camps under the supervision of SS and police chief Odilo Globocnik, some 1.75million Jews were murdered between the spring of 1942 and autumn 1943.Bełżec, in the district of eastern Galicia on the border of the district of Lublin, was ready for operation after a five-month building period in March 1943, and Sobibórin May 1942 and Treblinka in July 1942, both after about eight weeks of construction. In Bełżec, by the time of its closure in December 1942, around 600,000 Jews from the south-east Polish districts of the General Government had died. In Sobibór, on the eastern border of the district of Lublin, by August 1943 between 200,000 and 250,000 Jews from the district of Lublin, the Old Reich and various European countries had been killed. In Treblinka, east of Warsaw, between 750,000 and 900,000 Jews from the Warsaw district died, most of them from the ghetto, and also Jews from Białystok, Lublin, Radom, Bulgaria and Greece. Hardly anyone survived the Operation Reinhard camps: no more than fifty-four prisoners survived Treblinka, and only three Jews are believed to have managed to escape Bełżec.
In Majdanek mass murder began in August 1942.Ofa total of some 180,000 victims between 50,000 and 120,000 were Jews, most of them from the district of Lublin, but many from Slovakia, Bohemia and Moravia, the Old Reich, Hungary, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Greece, and also from Warsaw and Białystok. Except in Auschwitz, they were murdered with carbon monoxide.
Experiments in killing
The first mass killings in Auschwitz were not yet a part of the systematic policy to murder the European Jews. Rather they took place in the context of the experiments of the SS, the so-called ‘euthanasia programme’, which had been discontinued in August 1941, in the wake of ‘Aktion 14f13’, to be resumed in the lawless space of the concentration camps across the Reich. In many camps experiments were carried out into different methods of killing: in Buchenwald the SS installed a piece of equipment that delivered a shot to the back of the neck, in Mauthausen ‘death baths’ were introduced, in Dachau prisoners were made victims of large-scale medical experiments – and in Auschwitz the guards busied themselves with the cyanide gas Zyklon B.
The poison gas was stored in airtight sealed metal tins, and was initially deployed from July 1941 in the battle on vermin, to disinfect housing and clothes. The manufacturer was the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Schädlingsbekämpfung (Degesch) (German Pest Control Company) in Frankfurt am Main, a subsidiary company of IG Farben. The poison was delivered by the Hamburg firm Tesch und Stabenow, whose employees, equipped with gas masks, initially undertook the fumigations, but were later trained as SS medical orderlies. At the end of August or the beginning of September 1941,theexacttimecannot be precisely identified, Zyklon B was used at first experimentally, but soon regularly, to murder prisoners. From a temperature of about 26°C the cyanide granules turn into gas on contact with air, and are deadly even in small quantities.
The first victims were prisoners of war from the Soviet Union, and also sick and weak prisoners of other categories, including Jews from forced-labour camps in East Upper Silesia. Around 5 September 1941 the first mass ki
llings took place in Auschwitz, when some 900 Soviet prisoners of war and sick prisoners of other categories were murdered in the cells in the basement of the punishment block (block 11). They also included members of the punishment squad, among them many Poles, who had to pay for the escape of a prisoner. The division of labour in the removal and use of the corpses was soon perfected. Prisoners had to drag the corpses from the cellar to the courtyard of the punishment block, undress them, heave them on to trolleys and bring them to freshly dug mass graves. Partly to keep events secret from the other prisoners, and also because the removal of the corpses from the cellar was hard work, in 1941 the murder operations were transferred to the crematorium of the parent camp, which had been put into action in 1940, and which was later called the ‘old crematorium’, or ‘crematorium I’. The mortuary was turned into a gas chamber: the doors were sealed and openings made in the ceiling for Zyklon B to be poured in. By December 1942 the crematorium served as a place of extermination, and by July 1943 it was used to incinerate the bodies of the murdered prisoners. The parent camp was closed off every time a killing operation was in progress; noisy engines ran and horns blared to drown out the cries of the dying.
Birkenau
In Birkenau, formerly Brzezinka, about 2 kilometres away from the parent camp, the construction of a camp of gigantic dimensions began in autumn 1941. For his expansive settlement plans Himmler wanted to intern tens of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war here and engage them in forced labour. There were plans for a ‘prisoner of war camp’ for 50,000 inmates, which could later be enlarged first to 150,000, and later to 200,000 prisoners.
Birkenau, before the German invasion a place of around 3,800 inhabitants, many of them Jews, was at this point deserted. Since the beginning of the war the Jews had been brought to ghettos in the surrounding area, and the Poles had also been deported in the wake of the settlement policy in the spring of 1941. Contrary to what Rudolf Höss said in his notebook and statements towards the end of the war, the day on which the decision was taken was not 1 March 1941, when Himmler visited Auschwitz for the first time. The order for the construction of the new camp was in fact given on 26September 1941.
Early October 1941 saw the arrival of SS-Hauptsturmführer Karl Bischoff, the head of the hastily founded central building administration of the Waffen-SS and the police in Auschwitz, whose chief task was to coordinate the building work. The site originally selected was not Birkenau, but a tract of land in the Auschwitz district of Zasole, adjacent to the parent camp. It was Höss who drew the planners’ attention to Birkenauwhile walking around the site; on 4 October 1941 the location was agreed upon and work began a few days later.
The conceptual similarity with the Majdanek camp near Lublin, built at the same time (the decision to build was made the day before the Birkenau decision), is striking: Majdanek, not far from the major settlement project of Zamość in the General Government, was built as a prisoner of war camp, and served at first as a source of labour.
With the construction of Birkenau administrative innovations came into force in Auschwitz: for the arriving Soviet prisoners of war the SS issued a new set of prisoner numbers, but also retained in parallel the numbering system introduced in 1940, so that there were two series of numbers in operation; a third was added in 1942, for re-education prisoners. The Soviet prisoners of war had to have their prisoner numbers tattooed on their left breast with a metal stamp fitted with needles. Jews who arrived from mid-1942in mass transports from the whole of Europe had the number tattooed on their forearms with a single needle. From spring 1943 this regulation applied to prisoners of all categories (with the exception of Reich Germans and re-education prisoners), both for the new arrivals and for those already registered. Only in the case of those deported to Auschwitz in large numbers, and Jews who were generally murdered upon arrival, did the SS forgo tattoos. In other camps prisoners wore their numbers on metal tabs around their necks, or on a chain or cord around their wrist; tattooing was the practice only in Auschwitz. When, from September 1943, babies born in the camp – supposedly around 700 in all – were not killed immediately, but registered as ‘new arrivals’, they too, unless they were Reich German children, received tattoos on their thighs or buttocks.
Living conditions in Birkenau were even more catastrophic than they were in the parent camp. On the boggy ground stood brick-built barracks, without paved floors, heating or electric light. The sleeping-places were three-tiered bunks of 4 square metres. The barracks were designed for 180 people, but the SS squeezed in more than 700. Most of the prisoners were housed in windowless wooden stables, sheds cobbled together out of thin wooden boards with two little hatches. The stables consisted of fifty-two horse-boxes; at least 400 prisoners slept on three-tiered wooden bunks that had been brought in. There were at first no sanitary arrangements, either in the brick buildings or in the wooden stables. The place was crawling with vermin; a constant lack of water made the situation worse, leading to epidemics such as spotted fever and typhus. It was only the epidemics, which not only sent the death-rates in the camp soaring but also affected the SS estate, that led the camp administration to build washing and latrine blocks in 1943, and sanitary installations were also fitted in some of the brick buildings.
MAP 5 Auschwitz II (Birkenau) as of 1944
About 10,000 Soviet soldiers arrived in Auschwitz in October 1941. They were initially housed in a separate part of the parent camp, which was reached through a gate bearing the inscription ‘Russian prisoner of war labour camp’. The supply of Soviet prisoners of war was initially thought to be inexhaustible. For economic and nutritional reasons, hundreds of thousands of them were thus abandoned to starvation. Of a total of 5.7million Soviet prisoners of war, 3.3 million died, 2 million of them by February 1942.
After just a month fewer than half of the Soviet soldiers were left alive. In February 1942 their numbers had fallen to 2,000, and in March 1942 the remaining 945 were transferred to Birkenau. In May 1942, 186 of those prisoners were still alive. When it became clear that Soviet prisoners of war were not going to be supplying the massive numbers of workers expected, Birkenau camp was transformed, in a sequence of decisions that cannot be reconstructed, into an extermination camp.
After the mass deaths of the Soviet soldiers it would seem that Jews were to be brought in as a work-force for the expansive settlement projects ‘in the East’, and sent to Auschwitz–Birkenau in their tens of thousands. In January 1942 Himmler announced the arrival of 150,000 Jews, a third of them women. The plan was not realized in its entirety, but the first mass transports of women occurred in March. Ten blocks in the parent camp, separated off by a wall, served as the women’s camp; at first it fell under the administration of the Ravensbrück camp, where the women had come from. When they were transferred to Birkenau in mid-August 1942, a new women’s camp was set up in sections BIa and BIb (all the areas of the camp had shorthand names consisting of letters and Roman numerals). Some 13,000 women moved into the barracks, by which time around 5,000 had already perished. With the female prisoners the first female warders arrived at the SS site of Auschwitz. Commandant Höss, who did not think the female guards were entirely suitable, ordered an SS man to each position, so that all the main camp, report and command positions in the women’s camp were always filled twice over.
The Birkenau camp remained at first a sub-camp of the much smaller parent camp; in November 1943 it was made an autonomous camp in the wake of the administrative restructuring after Höss’s transfer.
6
The extermination centre
The equipment and technique of mass murder
Mass extermination in Auschwitz–Birkenau occurred in phases, according to technical installations and logistical plans. There is much to suggest that Höss was mistaken when he said in hearings after the end of the war that Himmler had ordered him to Berlin ‘in the summer of 1941’, and given him the task of murdering the European Jews. For the systematic killing of the Jews in the camp did
not begin before 1942. Auschwitz–Birkenau became the centre of mass extermination only in 1943, when Bełżec was already abandoned; the murders in Sobibór and Treblinka had been stopped after the attempted uprisings of 14 August and 1 October 1943, and the deportations to Majdanek, where the remaining 8,000 or so Jews were shot early in November 1943, had also been brought to an end.
It cannot be clearly established whether the first temporary gas chamber in Birkenau, where the mass killings began, was used at the start of the year or only from the spring of 1942. It was installed in the house of a resettled farmer, which the SS called the ‘red house’ because of its unwhitewashed brickwork, and later also ‘bunker 1’. Not far from it a second temporary gas chamber was set up in the (whitewashed) ‘white house’, also known as ‘bunker 2’, which was probably used for the first time in May 1942.
The trains of deportees at first stopped about 2.5kilometres away from the two houses, level with the Birkenau camp, by a siding of the Auschwitz goods station that ended in an open field. Here the people were unloaded, after journeys that had often lasted for days and weeks, which they had survived in cattle trucks, crammed together, hungry, thirsty and in appalling sanitary conditions, beaten and shouted at by the SS. Separated according to sex, they marched in columns past SS doctors and other functionaries. Anyone who was not selected as fit for work had to walk on foot to the two bunkers; at night trucks went there. Under the pretext that they were to be showered, they were led inside naked. ‘Bunker 1’ had the capacity for about 800 people, ‘bunker 2’ for 1,200. When the rooms were full, the air-tight doors were closed, and SS fumigators poured in Zyklon B through openings in the side walls. SS doctors supervised the murder operations, but had to be especially sure that SS men were not poisoned themselves, something that happened before an odoriferous substance was mixed with the poison to prevent that kind of accident.
Auschwitz: A History Page 7