Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (91 page)

further insistence on a continuation of the deportations threatened to become

counter-productive, as it must inevitably lead to the end of the Horthy regime and

possibly to the loss of their Hungarian ally.

However, the situation changed fundamentally in mid-October, after Horthy

had declared Hungary’s withdrawal from the war as the result of secret ceasefire

negotiations with the Soviet Union, and the Arrow Cross Party under Ferec

Szàlasy seized power with German support.
224
Now the Germans tried once again to set the deportations in motion: their new Hungarian partners were to

be irresistibly bound to their allies as accomplices of mass murder. But, as the

complete deportation of the Budapest Jews to Auschwitz could no longer be

carried out because of the transport situation and the destruction of the gas

chambers in Birkenau undertaken in the autumn of 1944,
225
Eichmann, who had returned to Budapest immediately after the putsch, now once again demanded

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

that Hungary put 50,000 workers at the disposal of the Reich, although he in fact

intended to double this figure at a later date.
226
In negotiations with the Hungarians, an agreement was reached for 25,000 Jewish ‘loan workers’, then revised to

50,000, and, at the end of October, the people in question were marched to the

Austrian border in the most cruel and extreme conditions.
227
However, because of the high death rate, Szàlasy had the marches suspended on 21 November. On

the same day Ribbentrop instructed Veesenmayer, at his next meeting with the

Hungarian prime minister, to urge him to ‘press ahead energetically with the

evacuation of the Budapest Jews’.
228
In December the Jews who had remained in Budapest were confined in a ghetto. There, along with the inhuman living

conditions, they were exposed to the terror of the Arrow Cross supporters, until

Budapest capitulated in February.
229

The End of the Holocaust

Removal of Traces

In 1942 the SS initiated the strictly secret ‘Action 1005’. The goal of this enterprise

was to destroy the traces of the mass murders, in particular to remove the human

remains of the victims in the mass graves.
230
The man appointed to lead the action was Standartenführer Paul Blobel. As a pioneer officer in the First World War, as

well as a former Einsatzkommando leader, he no doubt appeared well qualified for

the task. The Sonderkommandos under him consisted of members of the Security

Police and the SD as well as the Order Police. The removal of the corpses

themselves had to be undertaken by prisoners, who were in turn murdered after

a certain amount of time and replaced by new prisoners. In June 1942 the

first attempts were made to burn the remains in Chelmno extermination camp,

and this activity was then extended to the other extermination camps as well.

In Sobibor this had been happening since the summer of 1942, and in Auschwitz-

Birkenau, where the first crematoria had not been built until July 1942, in the

autumn of 1942, in Belzec, which had been closed in December 1942, between the

end of 1942 and the spring of 1943, and in Treblinka since the spring of 1943.
231

In June 1943 the commandos began to open the mass graves in the occupied

Soviet territories, first in the Ukraine, then in White Russia, and finally in the

Baltic states. To remove the traces of the murders in occupied Poland, in 1944

Sonderkommandos were established under the five commanders of the Security

police and the SD in the General Government, and under the HSSPF responsible

for the annexed Polish territories. Aktion 1005 Sonderkommandos can also be

identified in Yugoslavia.
232

The Sonderkommandos were extraordinarily thorough in the removal of the

corpses: the mass graves were opened up, the corpses were burned on piles of

Murders and Deportations, 1942–3

411

wood or steel grilles, then the ashes were examined for valuable objects, gold teeth

above all, before the bones were ground and the ashes scattered or buried. Then all

other traces that could have indicated the places of execution were removed, and

the murder scene dug over and planted.

According to the wishes of the perpetrators, no traces of the extermination

camps themselves were to remain either. The so-called palace, in which the

installations of Chelmno extermination centre were housed, was blown up in

the spring of 1943.
233
On the grounds of Belzec and Treblinka, all buildings were removed after the end of the mass murders, the grounds were planted, and a farm

was built. The same was done in Treblinka, where the murders in the gas

chambers continued until August 1943. In summer 1943, after the mass murders

there were ended, Sobibor was temporarily turned into a concentration camp,

where the prisoners were deployed in the sorting of captured ammunition. After

the uprising of October 1943 this camp too was closed, and here too the grounds

were planted and an agricultural establishment constructed.
234

During the German retreat in July 1944, Majdanek was set on fire, but the gas

chambers and other traces of the mass murders remained, so that as early as the

summer of 1944 the Soviets could begin to document the procedures in this

extermination camp, the first to be seized by Allied troops. In Auschwitz in

November and December technical installations were removed from the gas

chambers and crematoria; the crematoria were blown up and the remains covered

with soil and planted.
235

The fundamental intention of the SS was to clear not only the mass murder sites

but the concentration camps, and where possible to destroy them; all proof of the

crimes was to be destroyed, no witnesses were to fall into the hands of the Allies.

That meant that the prisoners were either to be murdered or ‘evacuated’ from one

camp to the other. The SS saw the prisoners who were ‘fit for work’ as living

capital that would be exploited to the bitter end.

Himmler reserved a special policy for the Jewish prisoners: beginning in mid-

1944 he offered them to the Western Allies as barter, presumably to open up

channels of negotiation which might be used in peace feelers. The extent to

which the SS would really have been prepared to release large numbers of Jewish

prisoners on a quid pro quo basis, which would have meant returning to the

pre-war policy of expulsion, or whether they only appeared to offer such

negotiations in order to construct a dialogue with the Western Allies is impos-

sible to establish beyond doubt. It is also unclear whether Himmler was acting

in accord with Hitler in these complicated manoeuvres, or whether he was from

the outset pursuing a policy of his own to secure his position against the

threatening collapse of the Third Reich, and it is equally unclear whether the

negotiations undertaken by Eichmann and Wisliceny were fully in accord with

Himmler’s plans. But it is also entirely imaginable that these efforts to establish

contacts with the West were part of a double game: if the Western Allies agreed

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Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

to enter negotiations with the Nazi regime over the surviving Jews, either one

could extend such negotiations to other ‘humanitarian’ issues and use them as

peace feelers, or one could abandon the negotiations and effectively compromise

the other side, sowing suspicion between the Western Allies and the Soviet

Union or revealing the USA and Great Britain as stooges of Jewish interests,

thus bolstering the claim of German military propaganda that Germany was

waging a war against world Jewry.
236

Thus, Himmler saw the Jewish prisoners as hostages with whom one could, in

one way or another, exert an influence on the Western Allies. This attitude was

not new: it can already be demonstrated in connection with Kristallnacht; the

reason for taking Jews as hostages to prevent the Americans from entering the

war seems to have played a part in starting the deportations of the German Jews

in the autumn of 1941, and from 1942 the SS leadership repeatedly allowed

individual Jews to travel to neutral countries abroad in return for high payments

in foreign currency.
237
Himmler had received express permission from Hitler for this in December 1942, and in that context pursued the project of holding

around 10,000 Jews back in a special camp as ‘valuable hostages’.
238
It was in accordance with this idea that the ‘holding camp’ at Bergen-Belsen was set up,

which Himmler placed under the control of the Business and Administration

Head Office, to rule out the possibility of agencies outside the SS having access

to the camp.
239
Finally, the German Jewish adviser in Slovakia, Wisliceny, had in 1942 accepted a large sum in dollars from the Jews. It remains unresolved

whether this payment had any causal connection with the suspension of

deportations from Slovakia. Thus, treating Jewish prisoners as negotiating

counters was not a new procedure.
240

In March 1944, representatives of the Vaada Aid and Rescue Committee,

supported by Zionist organizations, contacted Wisliceny, who had by now

begun preparations for the deportations in Budapest as a member of Sonder-

kommando Eichmann. Negotiations were carried out concerning the depart-

ure from the country of a large number of Hungarian Jews in return for

foreign currency or goods; the SS’s desire for 10,000 lorries proved to be at

the core of this. The Jewish negotiators made several large advance payments

in dollars. In compliance with an agreement made with Eichmann, Vaada

representatives went to Istanbul to make contact with the Allies, since the

possibility of as many as several hundred thousand people leaving the country

and the receipt of material benefits in return was only imaginable with Allied

support. But the mission failed: the two Vaada emissaries were arrested by

the British in Syria, and the British steadfastly refused to get involved in

bartering of this kind.
241

Meanwhile Vaada, represented by Rudolf Kastner, continued to negotiate

with the SS in Budapest. Two operations emerged out of this. On the one

hand, at the end of June 15,000 Jews, rather than being sent to Auschwitz,

Murders and Deportations, 1942–3

413

were deported as forced labourers to Austria where, as Kastner said, quoting

Eichmann, they were to be ‘put on ice’, to be kept ready for further barter

negotiations. It seems probable that this step was not a substantial concession

on Eichmann’s part, but that he was only responding to an urgent request from

Kaltenbrunner to send forced labourers to the area around Vienna. Also, at the

end of June, in accordance with an agreement made between Kastner and

Eichmann, 1,684 Hungarian Jews were taken to Bergen-Belsen on a special

transport. From there they travelled to Switzerland in two groups, in August

and December. In the meantime, Kurt Becher, the head of the equipment staff of

the HSSPF in Hungary, the man responsible for the exploitation of stolen Jewish

property, took over the negotiation of the benefits to be expected in return from

the Jews, first with the representatives of Vaada, then, from August 1944, also

with the representative of the JDC in Switzerland, Saly Mayer. Until January 1945

further discussions were held in Switzerland between representatives of the SS

and Jewish organizations, covering large-scale barter deals of people for money

or goods. Becher succeeded in securing the attendance of a representative of the

War Refugee Board, an American government body, at one of these meetings

early in November in Zurich; he had thus achieved the goal that Himmler linked

with these negotiations, namely contact with official American agencies. But

these discussions produced no results whatsoever, either in terms of further

rescue projects or of possible peace feelers.
242

But in the meantime negotations on another plane had achieved a concrete

success: as a result of direct discussions between former Swiss President Jean-Marie

Musy and Himmler—they were held in Vienna in October 1944 and in Wildbad

(Black Forest) in January 1945—in February 1,200 Jews were released from

Theresienstadt to Switzerland.
243
In the last phase of the war, Himmler would once again try to use the fate of the Jewish concentration camp inmates as a starting

point for making contact with the Allied side.

The negotiations concerning the release of Jewish prisoners show once

again how flexibly Judenpolitik could be administered. Even if the goal of the

systematic murder of the European Jews was of prime importance to the SS,

at the same time Himmler was prepared to make tactical concessions in the

form of the release of smaller contingents of prisoners, if other targets—the

shortage of foreign currency, the SS’s need of equipment, the possibility of

establishing negotiating channels with the Western Allies—were temporarily

of prime importance. Himmler also seems to have been prepared to nego-

tiate seriously over the release of larger groups of Jews, if it meant that the