Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (62 page)

279

occurred in August 1941. On a visit to Minsk Himmler is believed to have issued the

order to seek killing methods that would put less of a strain on the perpetrators, SS

men and Police than the mass executions.
11
Shortly after this visit Bach-Zelewski, the HSSPF for Russia Centre, tried—presumably in vain—to call Herbert Lange,

the leader of the Sonderkommando that had for a long time been murdering

patients in gas vans, to a ‘presentation’ in Minsk.
12
Nebe, the leader of Einsatzgruppe B and at the same time Chief of the Reich Criminal Police Office, who was

also likely to have been present at the meeting with Himmler, turned to the

Criminal Technical Institute with a request for appropriate support. Experts

from the institute then came to Belarus. After a further attempt to kill mentally

ill people near Minsk with explosives had led to terrible results,
13
patients were killed in walled-up rooms with car exhaust fumes introduced from outside in a

mental institution in Mogilev as well as in Novinki and Minsk (Himmler had

visited the latter on 15 August).
14

On the basis of these experiences, amongst other things, the decision was made

to create transportable gas chambers for the Einsatzgruppen. The model for this

was one already used by Lange’s Sonderkammando to murder Polish mental

patients in the winter of 1939/40, except that now, instead of using carbon

monoxide from gas canisters the exhaust from the vehicle was introduced directly

into the closed vehicle body itself. The requisite conversion of the vehicles was

undertaken by the Criminal Technical Institute.
15
Early in November 1941, during an experiment in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, around thirty prisoners

were killed in one of these vehicles.
16

In the occupied Soviet territories the gas vans were first used to murder people

around November, early December. By the end of 1941 an estimated total of six of

these original-series gas vans was deployed by all four Einsatzgruppen.
17

At around the same time, from October/November 1941, gas vans were also

deployed in the murder of Jews in the Warthegau by Sonderkommando Lange.

For 8 December there is evidence of the use of gas vans in Chelmno, a gas-van

station that had been built in the meantime.
18
In this territory, as already described in detail, they were familiar with this killing technology, since as early as 1940 and

again in the summer of 1941 mental institution inmates had been murdered using

gas vans.
19

In parallel with the development of gas vans, however, steps were taken to set

up stationary gas chambers in the occupied Eastern territories. There exists a

letter, dated 25 October 1941, from the Adviser on Racial Issues in the Eastern

Ministry, Wetzel, to Reichskommissar Lohse concerning these preparations.

Wetzel was responding to a report from Lohse on 4 October ‘concerning the

solution of the Jewish question’:
20

With reference to my letter of 18 October I wish to inform you that Oberdienstleiter Brack of the Führer’s Chancellery has already declared himself willing to work on the production 280

Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941

of the required accommodation as well as the gassing apparatus. At present, the apparatus in question is not available in sufficient numbers. It must first be manufactured. Since in Brack’s view the manufacture of the apparatus in the Reich presents far greater difficulties than on the spot, Brack considers it most expedient to send his people, especially his

chemist Dr Kallmeyer, to Riga forthwith, and take charge of everything else.

Lohse was to request this staff from Brack. Eichmann had agreed to the procedure:

‘According to Sturmbannführer Eichmann, camps for Jews are to be set up in Riga

and Minsk to which Jews from the Old Reich may also be sent. At present, Jews

are being evacuated from the Old Reich, to Litzmannstadt but also to other camps,

before later being sent to the East, if fit for work, for work deployment.’ According

to ‘circumstances . . . there is no objection to those Jews who are not fit for work

being removed with Brack’s aids’. Those ‘fit for work, on the other hand, will be

transported East for work deployment. It should be taken as read that among the

Jews who are fit for work men and women are to be kept separate.’

In fact, however, in Riga it was not gas chambers (described as ‘accommodation’)

that were used but, as mentioned above, gas vans.

The decision to build a first extermination camp in Belzec in the district of

Lublin, where murder was to be carried out with exhaust fumes from a solidly

mounted engine, may be assumed to have been made in mid-October, and

building work began in early November. At the end of 1941, the construction of

a second extermination camp in the district of Lublin, Sobibor, may have been

prepared.
21
It is possible that in November/December 1941 the installation of a further extermination camp in Lemberg (district of Galicia) was being considered.
22
In fact Brack made staff from the T4 Action available for Belzec, Sobibor, and the camp at Treblinka which was built later—the extermination camps of

what would later be known as ‘Aktion Reinhardt’. There were around ninety-two

people whom Brack sent to the General Government in stages. The basic agree-

ment that this work should go ahead appears to have been made with Himmler on

14 December 1941. In December 1941 Christian Wirth arrived in Lublin, further

groups in March 1942, and in June 1942, a time when the systematic murder of the

Jews in the districts of Lublin and Galicia had already begun, or was being

extended to the remaining districts of the General Government.
23

While in Belzec, the Warthegau, and the occupied Eastern territories mass

murders were in preparation or had already been carried out using engine

exhausts, the leadership of Auschwitz concentration camp chose a different path.

Various categories of prisoners were systematically murdered in Auschwitz in

the autumn of 1941: Soviet prisoners of war who had already been shot or beaten

by guards since first arriving in the summer, also, from the summer of 1941, sick

prisoners (as part of Action 14f13), Jewish forced labourers from Upper Silesia who

were regularly handed over as ‘unfit for work’ by ‘Organisation Schmelt’, and

Poles handed over for execution by the Kattowitz Gestapo.
24
The plan to expand Autumn 1941: Deportation and Mass Murders

281

Auschwitz concentration camp to a capacity of 30,000 prisoners was followed, at

the end of September 1941, by the order to construct another camp for prisoners of

war in Auschwitz and, early in October, its capacity was raised from an initial

50,000 to 100,000 prisoners.
25
In the wake of these measures the camp leadership decided to undertake a far larger number of executions.

To this end, alongside experiments with fatal injections,
26
tests were begun with the poison gas Zyklon B, which had been used in Auschwitz for disinfection since

July 1941
.27
It appears that in early September 600 Soviet prisoners of war who had been deemed by a Gestapo commission to be ‘fanatical Communists’, as well as

250 sick prisoners, were murdered with Zyklon B in a cellar in block 11. Later,

presumably in the middle of September 1941, a further 900 Soviet prisoners of war

were murdered with the gas after the ‘morgue’ (‘Leichenkammer’) in the crema-

torium had been provisionally converted for this purpose.
28
There is a series of indications that even before the end of the year several smaller groups of Jews were

also murdered in Auschwitz with Zyklon B; presumably they were the ones who

had been selected from the Schmelt camps as no longer fit for work.
29

The commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höß, states in his memoir written in

Cracow prison that the question of a suitable poison gas was discussed during a

visit by Eichmann. However, the dating of this visit is uncertain. Some statements

by Höß suggest the autumn of 1941, others suggest a later time, such as the spring

of 1942
.30
While he himself was not in Auschwitz, Höß wrote, his deputy used Zyklon B on his own initiative to murder Soviet prisoners of war; later he agreed

with Eichmann to use this gas in future.
31
This plainly self-exculpatory account, which, for understandable reasons, was in fact disputed by Eichmann during his

hearing in Jerusalem,
32
makes it clear once again that Höß is hardly an ideal witness for the history of Auschwitz concentration and extermination.

In the course of the planned expansion of the camp complex and with regard to

the high number of prisoners killed and those who lost their lives in other ways as

a result of the disastrous conditions of imprisonment, on 21 and 22 October the

construction of a new and considerably larger crematorium facility, consisting of a

total of fifteen cremation chambers, was discussed with representatives of the

specialist firm Topf & Söhne.
33
The American historian Michael Thad Allen has indicated that there were already plans at this time to incorporate a ventilation

system along with the aeration system that was already a standard part of such a

facility. He takes this as proof that there were already plans at this point to use the

room as a gas chamber because the introduction of warm air—which fundamen-

tally contradicts the task of a ‘morgue’—was plainly intended to distribute the

Zyklon B more quickly. Aside from this, the plans indicate that the pipes in

question were to be cemented in; Allen presumes that they were thus to be

protected against damage from victims struggling against death. Robert Jan van

Pelt and Deborah Dwork, on the other hand, date the conversion of the ‘morgue’

into a gas chamber only to September 1942, when the building was already under

282

Final Solution on a European Scale, 1941

construction.
34
If we accept Allen’s dating—the current state of research does not allow the question to be definitively resolved—one cannot conclude that a

decision was made a short time previously (in October 1941) to murder the

European Jews. The installation of a gas chamber in the new crematorium

corresponded to what had already been done provisionally in the old cremator-

ium; it was nothing really new, and it was primarily used on non-Jewish victims

who were being murdered at this time. There was also the fact that time was being

taken over the construction of the crematorium: it was not started until August

1942, not in the old camp, but in Birkenau, and the crematorium was finally

completed in March 1943. Similarly, it was only in August 1942 that the decision

was taken considerably to extend the capacity of the crematorium. It was decided,

on the basis of the same plans, to build a second crematorium in Birkenau, which

was finally completed in June 1943. Auschwitz played no part in the planning for

the murder of the European Jews in 1941; the advocates of a radical Judenpolitik

seem to have become aware of its potential only in January 1942, in connection

with Himmler’s order to confine Jews from Germany in concentration camps.
35

Hence, it would be wrong to assume that the conversion of Birkenau camp

complex would have gone ahead at full speed immediately after a decision by

the Führer in the summer or autumn of 1941 to murder the European Jews.

In November 1941 the same firm, Topf & Söhne, also received a commission to

construct a gigantic incineration facility with thirty-two chambers in Mogilev

(Belarus). The reason given to the firm was that such a facility was needed for the

hygienic removal of corpses because of the great danger of epidemics in the East.

As the construction was not completed, the superfluous ovens came to Ausch-

witz.
36
It is not inconceivable that this planned crematorium facility was actually intended for the construction of an extermination camp in Mogilev, whose

function was assumed in the course of the coming months by Auschwitz and

the extermination camps in Poland.
37

Thus, in Auschwitz, in the autumn of 1941—still independent of the plans for the

‘Final Solution’ that were going on at the same time—various developments were

under way which would only a few months later make the camp seem practically

predestined to assume a central role in the murder of the European Jews: the

expansion of the camp, for which a new purpose had to be found when it proved

after a few months that because of the mass deaths among Soviet prisoners of war

the original numbers of prisoners would not be reached; the hitherto unparalleled

expansion of the capacity of the crematoria; and finally the experiments with

poison gas.

Accordingly, late in 1941, preparations were made to construct extermination

camps in Riga, in the area around Lodz (Chelmno), in Belzec, and in Auschwitz,

presumably in Mogilev near Minsk, and possibly in Lemberg (Lvov).
38
Hence, facilities for mass murder with gas were prepared near all the ghettos that had

been selected as destinations for the first three waves of deportation from the

Autumn 1941: Deportation and Mass Murders