After the pits had been cleaned out, the bones were broken up. This was done by prisoners from the camp: the bones were placed on a cement floor and pulverized with heavy wooden hammers. What remained was then loaded on to lorries, taken to the River Weichsel, and thrown in.
The above description has been taken from a statement which Höss himself made in March 1946 and refers to the methods used at the temporary gas chambers while waiting for the new chambers to be constructed. What follows is a description, from the same source, of the improved methods which came into force after two of the four large new crematoriums had been completed at the end of 1942.
Mass transports from Belgium, France, Holland, and Greece now began to arrive and the arrangements for their reception were as follows. The train drew up alongside a specially-built ramp situated midway between the camp store and Birkenau camp. On this ramp the prisoners were sorted out and their baggage taken away. Prisoners fit for work were taken to one of the various camps; those who were unfit and were to be exterminated were taken to one of the new crematoriums.
The victims were first conducted to a large underground dressing-room adjoining the gas chamber. This room was fitted with benches and coat hooks, and the prisoners were told by interpreters that they were going to have a bath and be deloused, and to remember where they had hung their clothes. From there they proceeded to another room which was fitted with showers to give verisimilitude to the instructions which they had received from the interpreters. These precautions were intended to prevent panic and two Unterführers remained with the prisoners until the last moment to deal with any unrest.
Nevertheless, occasionally the prisoners knew what was going to happen, particularly if they had come from Belsen. There were no gas chambers in Belsen and when prisoners from Belsen, which is in Western Germany, found themselves travelling many miles eastward and reached Upper Silesia their suspicions became deeply aroused.
When a convoy arrived from Belsen, therefore, safety measures were strengthened and the prisoners were split up into smaller groups and sent to different crematoriums to prevent disturbances. SS men formed a strong cordon and forced resisting prisoners into the gas chamber. Disturbances were, however, infrequent and the measures taken to put new arrivals at their ease were usually successful.
One occasion on which there was serious trouble was thus described by Höss in his statement:
I remember one incident especially well. One transport from Belsen had arrived and two-thirds of it, mostly men, were in the gas chamber and one-third still in the dressing-room. When three or four armed SS Unterführers entered the dressing-room to make the prisoners hurry undressing, mutiny broke out. The light cables were torn down, the SS men overpowered and disarmed and one of them stabbed. As the room was in complete darkness wild shots were exchanged between the sentry at the exit and the prisoners inside. When I arrived I ordered the doors to be shut and I had the process of gassing the first party finished and then went into the room with the guard, carrying small torches, and we forced the prisoners into one corner from where they were taken out singly into another room in the crematorium and shot, by my order, with small calibre weapons.
Women often hid their children under their clothes as they hung them up on the pegs and did not take them into the gas chamber. The men of the Kommando used, therefore, to search the clothing, under supervision of the SS, and any children found hidden were then put into the gas chamber. In the new improved gas chambers, after half an hour had elapsed from the time the gas was turned on, the electric air-conditioner was started and the bodies taken up to the cremating ovens by lift. The cremation of approximately two thousand corpses in five cremating ovens took twelve hours.
All the clothing and other property of the prisoners was sorted out in the store by a Kommando of prisoners permanently billeted and employed there. Valuables were sent monthly to the Reichsbank in Berlin. Clothing, after being cleaned, was despatched to armament firms for the use of slave labour. Gold from teeth was melted down and sent once a month to the medical department of the Waffen-SS.
In December 1943 Höss left Auschwitz, but this inhuman destruction went on. Höss himself took up an SS administrative appointment in Munich under Obergruppenführer Pohl. In that appointment he made frequent inspections of the concentration camps and much of the information which we possess to-day about those institutions was given by him. It is from him that we know that not less than 3,000,000 people were put to death at Auschwitz, 2,500,000 of them by means of the gas chambers.
It is from him we know that, in pursuance of one instruction alone, during the time he was Commandant of Auschwitz 70,000 Russian prisoners of war were put to death there. And it was he who at one time in 1943 was putting 10.000 prisoners through the gas chambers every day.
Death transports arriving at Auschwitz included 90,000 from Slovakia; 65,000 from Greece; 11,000 from France; 20.000 from Belgium; 90,000 from Holland; 400,000 from Hungary; 250,000 from Poland and Upper Silesia; and 100.000 from Germany.
Thus did Auschwitz earn its name, ‘The Camp of Death.’ ‘Arbeit macht frei’ proclaimed the scroll over its main gate. Dante’s Inferno had a more suitable inscription: ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here.’
An SS man who was employed at Auschwitz has given this description of it:
The mere view of the tightly drawn high double barbed wire fences with sign-boards reading ‘Attention! Danger!’, the towers manned by sentries with machine-guns and machine carbines, and the lifeless bleak brick blocks, put every newcomer into a hopeless state of mind as he realized that from there he would never return to freedom. And there were indeed few who did not come to a tormented end there. Many committed suicide after a few days. When out on a working party they would run through the chain of sentries in order to be shot or they ‘went into the wire’, as it was termed in camp jargon. A high voltage shock, a burst from a machine-gun, and death spared them from the tortures to come. Whenever shots were heard during the night, everyone knew that once again despair had driven yet another human being into the wire and that he now lay there, dressed only in rags, a lifeless bundle within the so-called neutral zone. This was a strip of gravel two metres wide which ran along the inner wire obstacle and anyone entering this strip was fired on.
Others were found hanged by their belts at their bedsides in the morning. In such cases the prisoner responsible for order in the block would report the number of suicides to the Camp Commandant. The ‘Identification Service’ would then hurry to the scene and photograph the corpse from all angles and statements would be taken from the other occupants of the room to ascertain whether the wretched suicide had not perhaps been murdered by other camp inmates. The farcical hypocrisy displayed on these occasions was unsurpassed. As if the SS authorities of a camp in which thousands of people were systematically murdered daily were the least interested in the fate of one unfortunate man.
In all concentration camps the minor appointments were generally held by professional German criminals taken from the civil prisons and specially trained for their work by experienced SS concentration camp staff.
Auschwitz was no exception, and the first arrivals there were thirty criminals selected to form the nucleus of the junior staff. Camp seniors (Lagerälteste); block seniors (Blockälteste); room orderlies (Stubendienst), and the Kapos or foremen.1 These men were chosen from the worst type of criminal and were generally serving long sentences for crimes of violence. What better agents for the execution of Himmler’s criminal plans?
A fortnight later the first transport of Poles arrived, and for some time only Poles were imprisoned there. During the period of the camp’s existence there were prisoners of twenty-six different nationalities and towards the end of that time, when the camp was almost wholly used for extermination, the majority were Jews. Few of them had committed any offence; they were there simply because they were Poles, Jews, Gipsies, or Soviet prisoners of war.
Those who were not earmarked for immediat
e extermination were registered and given numbers. These numbers were sewn on the prisoners’ clothing and from 1942 were tattoed on their forearms. There were also special badges for certain categories of prisoners, a red triangle for political prisoners, green for professional criminals, pink for homosexuals, black for prostitutes and female perverts, and violet for the clergy. The Jews wore the Star of David, and later a yellow stripe above the triangle.
From the moment they were registered they lost all trace of individuality and became mere cyphers. They had no personality and no property. All their belongings were confiscated and stored, except for certain items about which there were special instructions and the articles looted by the SS staff and guards for themselves or their families.
In this camp were thirty-five special buildings for sorting and storing these belongings, and it will convey some idea of the quantity of property confiscated if it is realized that although the Germans succeeded in burning, together with their contents, twenty-nine of these stores before they evacuated the camp, the following articles were found in the remaining buildings after the enemy had retreated—348,820 suits; 836,255 women’s complete outfits; 5,525 pairs of women’s shoes; thousands of tooth and shaving brushes and spectacles; all kinds of kitchen utensils, and even artificial limbs.
When life was normally so hard in Auschwitz Camp, punishment, to be made effective, had to be still more severe. In making it so, the camp staff do not appear to have encountered any difficulties. The following punishments were regularly awarded by the Commandant. Flogging, transfer to a penal group, standing or kneeling for hours on end, and confinement in a dark narrow cell.1 These cells were so small that the prisoners could not move and had to stand up the whole time. In Birkenau the entrances to them resembled the opening in front of a dogkennel and there was only just room for a human being to crawl inside.
Stehzelle was accompanied and enlivened by sundry forms of torture such as the removal of finger nails, pouring water into the ears, deprivation of all food for days except for over-salted vegetables in order to produce greater thirst.
Flogging was administered in public during evening rollcall on a specially constructed whipping block. It was inflicted on the buttocks with a leather whip. Although the regulations stipulated that the buttocks should be clad, the prisoners were, in fact, whipped on the bare skin until the blood flowed. If the prisoner fainted he or she was revived and the punishment completed.
The standing punishment which was designed especially for women consisted of standing to attention for long periods during which time the women had nothing to eat. The kneeling punishment involved kneeling down with the hands outstretched, a heavy stone on each. If the prisoners lowered their hands or dropped the stones they were beaten.
In the famous Block XI lived the penal company. The following is a description of this block by a former member of the camp staff.
Outwardly, it hardly differed from the other twenty-eight buildings in which the prisoners lived or which were used as kitchens and hospitals. A few innocent looking stone steps led to the entrance at the front. Unlike the other blocks, the door of Block XI was always shut. When the bell was rung an SS sentry would appear, his steps already echoing from afar in the apparently deserted building. He regarded every caller suspiciously through the little grill before admitting him. In the semi-darkness of the corridor one could now recognize a massive iron grid gate which seemed to seal off the main part of the building. Even from outside one was struck by the fact that the windows were almost completely walled-in, admitting light through a narrow slit only. Noticing that the windows of the adjacent block were covered by oblique wooden bars one was convinced that thereby hung a special tale.
In this dark, forbidding-looking building lived the members of the penal company when they were not out on working parties. Their work was always in the open, in all weathers, and often in water to the waist. When they were not at work they lay all night in freezing rooms on bare floors. The sick rate in these conditions was very high and as the sick in Block XI were not allowed to be admitted to hospital many of them died.
A still greater number, however, died of violence. The blockleader, named Krankenmann, killed many with his own hands. Lining the prisoners up against a stone wall he would strike their jaws so hard that they fractured and the backs of their heads struck the wall and were smashed in.
As the inmates became unfit to work they were weeded out and murdered. The selection was made on special parades. The sick and the aged who knew the object of the parades tried to appear healthy and younger. They held themselves upright and threw out their chests. When selected, they were put into separate blocks which the prisoners called ‘blocks of death’.
Gassing was not the only means by which the useless were put to death. A method of killing prisoners by injections of phenol1 was devised by SS Obersturmführer Dr Endredd: he was assisted by others of the camp medical staff and between them they murdered not less than 25,000 prisoners in this way. These injections were administered thus:
The condemned man was seated in a chair similar to a dentist’s, and two prisoners seized his hands while a third blindfolded him with a towel and held his head. Then Dr Klehr approached him and drove a long needle into his chest. The prisoner did not die immediately but everything turned dark before his eyes. Then other prisoners who had assisted at the injection led the half conscious victim into an adjoining room, and laid him on the floor where he died in less than half a minute.1
The third method of extermination was by shooting, and such executions were carried out by the political department under SS Untersturmführer Grabner, a man personally responsible, perhaps, for more murders than any other individual in the whole SS. The following is a description by someone who knew him.
In the office of the political department all the department officials and clerks are assembled. The boss, SS Untersturmführer Ernst Grabner is having a talk with them on official business. Behind his massive writing desk, this man of medium height is ‘talking big’ in his Austrian accent with an assumed air of importance. His disjointed sentences and bad German make it obvious that one is confronted by a totally uneducated man in spite of his silver epaulettes. Those in the secret know that his civilian job was shepherding cows on some Alpine pasture. Now he proudly wears the lapels of the Sicherheitsdienst…. He is dissatisfied with the work done by his section. There are too few denunciations of prisoners, too few recommendations for execution. He reproaches his subordinates for leniency. His order to be more brutal in future is answered by a dumb clicking of heels. Grabner has become the first man in the camp on account of his unscrupulous ruthlessness, his ambition, and his craving for esteem. Even the Commandant Höss himself, hardly backward in any way as regards sadistic cruelty, and entirely free from scruples, carefully refrains from getting on bad terms with him.
Grabner initiated daily mass executions and also introduced the practice of shooting victims in the back of the head2 so generally employed by the SS throughout Europe. His principal assistants were Fritsch, Palitsch, and Aumeier. Fritsch used to address new arrivals in the following words: ‘I warn you that you have not come to a sanatorium but to a German concentration camp from which there is no way out save by the chimney I1 If you don’t like it you had better throw yourself on the high tension wires.’ Grabner and his assistants tortured inmates during interrogations which took place frequently on almost any pretext. If a man, they would prick his testicles with needles, if a woman they would introduce a burning suppository into her vagina.
Executions by shooting were carried out by the posts which were outside the camp fence. The prisoners were tied to these posts with their arms behind them, and then were shot in batches of ten, the last batch having witnessed the shooting of all the others. Palitsch did the actual shooting but Grabner gave the order and 25,000 prisoners were shot by them at Auschwitz in this way.
The fourth and last method of extermination in general use was hanging. This wa
s used principally in cases where prisoners had attempted to escape and had been recaptured. The executions took place in the presence of all the other prisoners so as to deter them from escaping. Before being hanged the victims were flogged. Their bodies were left hanging all night, and the following morning the whole camp was made to file past them.
Such was Auschwitz, the ‘Gamp of Death’; but it is only half the story. Were everything to be written it would not be read. If read, it would not be believed.
BELSEN
Near the village of Bergen on the road from Celle to Hamburg was Belsen concentration camp. Originally small, it was later enlarged and in November 1944 Joseph Kramer, a concentration camp executive of great experience, was sent there from Auschwitz to open it as a convalescent depot for sick persons from the concentration camps, factories, and farms, and for displaced persons from the whole of North-west Europe.
The camp was staffed like any other, the master and prefect system being used. That is to say, all appointments in which the word ‘Führer’ occurs were held by members of the SS—the masters—whereas the appointments in which the word ‘Altester’ occurs, such as Blockältester, were generally held by habitual criminals brought from the civil jails for that purpose—these were the prefects.
There were no gas chambers in Belsen but thousands were nevertheless exterminated by disease and starvation. During the last few months of the camp’s existence the shortage of food was so acute that the prisoners (the camp staff were still well fed) resorted to cannibalism, and one former British internee gave evidence at the trial of the Commandant and some of his staff that when engaged in clearing away dead bodies as many as one in ten had a piece cut from the thigh or other part of the body which had been taken and eaten, and that he had seen people in the act of doing it. To such lengths had they been brought by the pangs of hunger.
The Scourge of the Swastika Page 19