The difficult transport conditions did not prevent the RSHA from deporting Jews from Rhodes, Corfu, Crete and other Greek islands to Auschwitz–Birkenau. From 60,000 to 70,000 Jews from Łódź, the last ghetto to be destroyed in occupied Poland, came to the camp in September and October 1944, as did Jews from Slovakia. On 30 October 1944 a train carrying around 2,000 Jews from Theresienstadt was the last Jewish mass transport, and presumably also the last to undergo ‘selection’.
Other groups of victims
Sinti and Roma, the so-called gypsies, were persecuted for racial reasons in the Old Reich even before the beginning of the war, and locked up in concentration camps. In December 1942 Himmler ordered that they be detained for the duration of the war; shortly afterwards Auschwitz–Birkenau became the central collection point. On 26 February 1943 the first transport arrived from the Old Reich; in stages, by 1944, a total of around 22,600 gypsies were brought to Auschwitz–Birkenau, about half of them children and young people.
About 1,700 gypsies were murdered shortly after their arrival, supposedly as they were suspected to have spotted fever, and the others were registered with ‘Z’ series prisoner numbers. The SS introduced series of numbers with symbols and letters only in the wake of the mass receptions. ‘A’ and ‘B’ designated Jews. The gypsies were, like the Jews of Theresienstadt, crammed together in families in a separate section of the camp (BIIe), which was also called a ‘family camp’, and for a while they had similar privileges: they kept their civilian clothes, did not have to cut their hair short, were allowed to keep their luggage, and for the children a barracks building was transformed into a kindergarten. The gypsies were not, unlike other prisoners, obliged to do forced industrial labour, but were instead assigned to heavy digging and building work, and were employed, for example, in the building of the ramp and the laying of the tracks in Birkenau. Living conditions in the gypsy camp were disastrous, and within a short space of time about 7,000 men, women and children died, most of them from typhus, but many, especially the youngest, died of the malnourishment disease noma (gangrenous stomatitis), which was unknown in other parts of the camp.
In May 1944 Himmler ordered the murder of the gypsies; about 3,000 had by then been transferred to other camps. Many now fell victim to deliberate killing by phenol injections to the heart, a method that the doctors and medical orderlies called abspritzen (‘to inject to death’). On 2 August 1944 this section of the camp was dissolved, and the last gypsies were killed at night in crematorium V.
Another major group of victims was made up of non-Jewish Poles. Especially among the Polizeihäftlinge (‘police prisoners’), a separate category under the supervision of the political department, their numbers were very large. They were arrested for violation of the Polish Special Punishment Directive, and locked in basement cells in the punishment block of the parent camp. Police prisoners came before the police court, which was regularly presided over in the punishment block by the head of the Kattowitz Gestapo (until September 1943 SS-Sturmbannführer Rudolf Mildner, and then SS-Obersturmbannführer Johannes Thümmler). Sessions of the court, which turned the Auschwitz camp into a legal centre, were regularly held at intervals of four to six weeks from January 1943. In many instances, more than 100 rulings were passed after summary proceedings, nearly all of them ending with a death sentence, which was immediately carried out in the courtyard of the punishment block, by the ‘Black Wall’. Among those condemned by the police court were young people, children and old people, and also Soviet prisoners of war. Camp Commandant Liebehenschel had the Black Wall demolished in December 1943, although that did not mean the end of the executions, which were carried on in crematorium IV by shooting in the back of the neck.
Doctors in Auschwitz
Many National Socialist concentration camps served as sites for ‘medical research’. Auschwitz was the centre of the human experiments that the regime encouraged in the service of studies important to the war effort. Specialists in many areas of medicine came to Auschwitz, including noted scientists. They set up examination rooms, laboratories and operating theatres; they mutilated, murdered and dissected the prisoners. And those who survived the experiments generally died of the after-effects.
The gynaecologist Carl Clauberg was the senior doctor at a women’s hospital in Königshütte in Upper Silesia. From late 1942, in some rooms on the upper storey of block 10 of the parent camp, he used hundreds of women to study methods of mass sterilization and artificial fertilization. The camp doctor Eduard Wirths and his brother, a gynaecologist from Hamburg, also carried out experiments on women. SS-Sturmbannführer Horst Schumann ran the institutes of Grafeneck and Sonnenstein near Pirna, where mentally and physically handicapped people were murdered as part of the so-called ‘euthanasia’ programme. He was in the Auschwitz camp in July 1941, as part of ‘Aktion 14f13’, where he led a medical commission and organized the removal of more than 570‘invalids’, chronically ill and elderly prisoners, to the killing institution of Sonnenstein. Schumann came to the camp as a doctor in 1942 and spent as much as one and a half years experimenting with X-rays to render men and women infertile. Johann Paul Kremer, Professor of Anatomy and Human Genetic Theory at the University of Münster, carried out research on weakened prisoners from August to November 1942, in a series of studies into hunger, examining the consequences of food withdrawal for the human organism. Also interested in the connection between hunger and life expectancy was SS-Obersturmführer Hans Münch, a physician and late in 1943 Bruno Weber’s deputy at the Hygiene Institute of the Waffen-SS in Auschwitz. The institute, which employed chemists, biologists and doctors, was created between 1942 and 1943 as part of the Berlin SS-Sanitätsamt (‘SS Medical Board’). Most of the so-called research concentrated on infections such as spotted fever, malaria and syphilis. Experiments were performed on dead and living prisoners: body-parts from murdered prisoners were used for bacteriological studies, and for haematological investigations living prisoners were employed, many of whom bled to death.
In May 1943 SS-Hauptsturmführer Josef Mengele came to Auschwitz. The 32-year-old was qualified in medicine and anthropology (he had been made a doctor of philosophy for his work in the latter field). He had been fighting, with the SS Division ‘Viking’, on the Eastern front, probably until the beginning of that year. He was wounded and ordered back to Berlin, before once more being transferred to the East. The assistant to Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Anthropological Institute in Berlin-Dahlem, Mengele clearly found ideal conditions for his lecturer’s dissertation in Auschwitz. Mengele’s specialist field was genetics, above all research into twins, as well as with the physiology and pathology of dwarfism. Using around 1,000–1,500 pairs of twins, he experimented in the laboratories set up for him in the gypsy family camp and the prisoner infirmary buildings of Birkenau. His preferred subjects were children. He sent internal organs, eyes – especially those with differently coloured irises – as well as the heads of gypsy children suffering from noma as anatomical preparations to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.
SS-Hauptsturmführer August Hirt, director of the Anatomical Institute at the Reich University in Strasbourg, devised anthropological studies – lethal to their subjects – to prove the superior value of the ‘Aryan’ race in Auschwitz: Hirt arranged for dozens of prisoners, almost all of them Jews, to be measured in the summer of 1943, and then brought to Natzweiler–Struthof concentration camp in Alsace, where they were killed. He made their skeletons part of his large anatomical collection. In December 1944 the Hamburg doctor Kurt Heissmeyer had Jewish children brought to the Neuengamme camp for what were referred to as investigations into tuberculosis; at the end of his studies they were dead, Heissmeyer having had them hanged in April 1945 in an attempt to cover up his human experiments. Other doctors, including Friedrich Entress, Helmuth Vetter and Eduard Wirths, infected prisoners with spotted fever to test vaccines, or tried out newly developed medicines, particularly on behalf of IG Farben. The Wehrma
cht used Auschwitz prisoners for experiments with toxic substances, which produced tumours and inflammations. The doctors were supposed to be using them to examine ways of detecting those, like soldiers at the front, who were faking illness.
7
The final phase
Auschwitz and the Allies
An extremely fast information network that had been built up by local and regional clandestine organizations in cooperation with the secret resistance group in the camp made sympathizers in the area around Auschwitz very important. Using messengers and radio transmitters, they managed to send messages about the crimes as well as lists of the names of SS men to Cracow and London. The Polish government in exile, which had reported on the brutality in Auschwitz since November 1941 in the English-language Polish Fortnightly Review, was able to publish reports on gassing experiments in the camp as early as 21 July 1942.
The first horrific news had been reaching the international public via the BBC in London since autumn 1943. By then at the very latest the Allies, the Vatican and some neutral states were informed of the crimes. Through Gerhart Riegner, a representative of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva, who had received reliable information through connections in Breslau, the Americans and the British had already been alerted by telegram in August 1942. Riegner’s information came from an industrialist who had attended the reception for Himmler in the Gauleiter’s private house, where it would appear that people had spoken openly about the mass murder. The telegram warned that all Jews from the countries occupied and controlled by Germany were tobe concentrated in the East and eradicated there. ‘Methods, including cyanide, under discussion,’ it said. But the authorities gave no credence to Riegner’s telegram.
Reports about the systematic murder of the Jews also reached the public directly from the camp. They were based on the accounts of Alfred Wetzler and Rudolf Vrba (Walter Rosenberg), two Jewish prisoners from Slovakia who had managed to escape to their homeland on 7 April 1944 with the help of the resistance movement within the camp. They urgently warned representatives of the Slovakian Jewish Council about the liquidation of the transports from Theresienstadt in their ‘family camp’, and about the imminent killing of the Hungarian Jews. They gave a precise account of the course of the extermination process, described the way the crematoria worked, and provided information about the organization of the camp, the everyday life of the prisoners, and the interconnection between the SS and industrial companies; they gave dates, departure points, numbers of prisoners and numbers of deaths. From Slovakia via Hungary and Switzerland their report reached the World Jewish Congress, a complicated and protracted journey. But the paper was not used to warn and save the Hungarian Jews, not even after it had been completed and updated by Czesław Mordowicz and Arnošt Rosin, two Slovakian prisoners who had also managed to escape from Auschwitz on 27 May 1944. The dossier or abbreviated versions of it reached Allied positions in mid-June 1944, and before long had travelled as far as neutral Sweden and the Vatican. The BBC broadcast some details, and the Swiss press published articles, as did American newspapers and radio stations. In mid-1944, in the countries opposing Germany in the war and in neutral states, more and more was published about Auschwitz in the press.
Despite the interest of the public, the political effect of such descriptions was slight. The Allies took no action against the mass extermination. Appeals and demands by the Polish government in exile (from as early as August 1943) and Jewish organizations in Great Britain and the USA fell on deaf ears; the killing institutions were not bombed.
After American reconnaissance flights the Allies had their first aerial photographs of Auschwitz in April 1944, and from the end of June 1944 the pictures were so detailed that it was possible to make out the extermination sites, and even see the ramp and people walking towards the crematoria – presumably prisoners on their way to the gas chambers. Since the construction of an air force base in Foggia in Italy early in 1944 Auschwitz was no longer outside the range of the Allied bombers. The strategic and technical conditions for bombing crematoria and railway lines were thus in place. But the Allies paid no apparent attention to the murders happening there. The American War Department resolutely rejected the idea of any operation because the camp was not seen as a military installation. And what was more, according to the British, an attack could not be carried out for lack of air power. But Allied squadrons regularly flew over Birkenau camp, when the nearby synthetic oil refineries were bombed between July and November 1944.On five occasions the IG Farben plant had been the target of Allied attacks: on 20 August, 13 September, and 18 and 26 December 1944, and on 19 January 1945. A stray bomb fell not far from the parent camp, damaged a siding (not used for death transports) and killed forty prisoners and fifteen SS men. But gas chambers and tracks leading to Birkenau were left undamaged.
The Sonderkommando uprising
No other group in the camp was so closely confronted with mass murder as the prisoners in the Sonderkommando. Although their ‘work’ led to desensitization, apathy and despair, Sonderkommando prisoners had, in summer or autumn 1943, formed a circle of their own, including many who had fought with the French Resistance and the communist underground in Poland. Their goal was to capture weapons, destroy the extermination centres and organize a break-out. They managed to establish contact with the general resistance movement in the camp and the leaders of Combat Group Auschwitz. But conflicts of interest emerged, because the military council of the Combat Group hesitated, wanting to risk an uprising only after careful preparation. For that reason the Sonderkommando independently pushed ahead with its plans for an uprising that was to spread from the crematoria to the camp and unleash a mass escape among the prisoners. However, because of the arrival of large numbers of SS troops, the planned rebellion had to be postponed. An SS prisoner selection finally prompted the uprising: after an attempted escape the SS had murdered 200 members of the Sonderkommando with cyanide in a storage room used for personal effects. Three hundred further prisoners were to follow, and it was the responsibility of the Sonderkommandos of crematoria IV and V to make the selections. When, on the morning of 7 October 1944, the SS announced that those selected were to be transferred to another camp the same day, the same message as had been given to prisoners murdered in the past, the uprising broke out: just before half-past one in the afternoon prisoners attacked approaching SS men in crematorium IV with stones, axes and iron bars, set the building on fire with smuggled hand-grenades and fled. The smoke alarmed the prisoners in the other crematoria. The SS set up machine-guns in crematorium IV and fired into the crowd of prisoners; those who were not hit immediately were forced into crematorium V, which faced crematorium IV. The rebellion spread to crematorium II, where the prisoners managed to part the barbed wire and flee, at least temporarily. Beyond the ‘outer cordon’ some made it to the adjacent forests, and others to the fish-breeding plants and agricultural estates in Rajsko, where they were able to arm themselves and attack the SS. Some of them hid in a barn, where they were locked in and burned alive.
The uprising was not quelled until the evening; crematorium III alone was left untouched, because during the fighting SS men surrounded the building and locked the prisoners in. The losses among their own ranks show that the SS had not expected violent resistance: three camp guards were dead and at least twelve injured; the Sonderkommando suffered about 425 casualties. The SS continued with their murders for about three days. The victims included Ester Wajcblum, Regina Safirsztajn, Ala Gertner and Roza Robota, the Jewish women who had smuggled explosives from their work-place in the Weichsel Union Metallwerke into the camp under their clothes, and given them to the Sonderkommando to make hand-grenades. After a week of torture they were hanged in the parent camp on 6 January 1945.
No prisoner managed to escape during the uprising, but the rebellion was not in vain: crematorium IV was in ruins, and even before that the Sonderkommando prisoners had managed to take photographs and smuggle the film out of the camp with the help
of Combat Group Auschwitz. Early in September 1944 it reached the Polish resistance movement in Cracow. Two pictures show Sonderkommando prisoners standing by burning corpses in the courtyard of crematorium V, and in a third only the tall tops of the trees can be seen around the killing installation; another shows women having to undress in the open air before going to the gas chamber.
The dissolution of the camp and the death march
In July 1944 Soviet troops marched into Galicia and south Poland through German lines, liberated the camp of Majdanek, hastily evacuated by the SS guards, crossed the Vistula and were just 200 kilometres away from Auschwitz. The systematic dissolution of the camp began. Thousands of prisoners and huge amounts of personal effects from the warehouses, as well as building material and equipment, were transported in trains and lorries to the Old Reich during the first clearance phase between summer 1944 and January 1945. About half of the 155,000 or so prisoners who were held captive in summer 1944, the period of the highest level of occupation, most of them Poles and Russians, were brought to concentration camps in the west by the autumn: Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Ravensbrück, Dachau, Mauthausen, Gross-Rosen, Bergen–Belsen, Natzweiler, Sachsenhausen and Neuengamme. Many prisoners who had survived Auschwitz died now from hunger, epidemics and the deadly conditions they had to live in. In March 1945 in the already overcrowded camp of Bergen–Belsen some 18,000 deaths were recorded. The victims included Anne Frank and her sister Margot, who had been deported in September 1944 with the last transport from Westerbork in Holland, and brought to Bergen–Belsen with an evacuation transport late in October 1944.
Nothing changed in the daily routine in Auschwitz, even while the camp was being broken up. Prisoners still had to turn up for forced labour, new buildings were under way in the parent camp, development work was beginning in the sub-camps, and even a series of new external camps was coming into being. In Birkenau work had started on the construction of a new section, called BIII, or in prisoner slang ‘Mexico’. The grounds were so enormous that it would nearly have doubled the size of the camp, a clue to the regime’s further megalomaniac plans for murder. But ‘Mexico’ was never completed, because all building work stopped in October 1944.
Auschwitz: A History Page 9