Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (15 page)

Albert Hartl, the former chief of the Church Information Service at the Reich Security Office, who had been sent to Russia in January 1942 with a commission from Heydrich to “report on the cultural and spiritual condition of the population”, told me of the day he was invited to dine at the
dacha
– the weekend villa outside Kiev – of Brigadeführer (Major-General) Max Thomas, the higher
SS
and police leader who was his nominal superior. “I was going with Standartenführer (Colonel) Blobel,” he said. “I hardly knew him but he was invited to dinner too, so we went together. It was evening and just getting dark. At one moment – we were driving past a long ravine. I noticed strange movements of the earth: clumps of earth rose into the air as if by their own propulsion – and there was smoke: it was like a low-toned volcano; as if there was burning lava just beneath the earth. Blobel laughed, made a gesture with his arm, pointing back along the road and ahead of us, all along the ravine – the ravine of Babi Yar – and said, “Here lie my 30,000 Jews.”
*
(Hartl, a few months after that, had, or faked, a nervous breakdown, was first hospitalized in Kiev and then sent for six months to a convalescent home in the country. After this he was returned to Germany and, by request, invalided out of active, including administrative, service with the
SS
.)
†
;

But in spite of its hideous effectiveness in Russia, shooting was soon rejected as inefficient for what Himmler was to call “the enormous task ahead” in Poland. It was also too dangerous, in that too many German soldiers from the ranks of the Wehrmacht as well as from the
SS
had to be involved. New techniques were called for, and here the euthanasia personnel (some of whom had already been involved in the “work” in Russia) found a new role.

What was different, and of unprecedented horror, in the Nazi genocide of the Jews as it now developed, was the concept and organization of the “extermination camps”. Even today there is still widespread misunderstanding about the nature of these very special installations of which there were only four,
*
all of them on occupied Polish territory and all of them existing for only a short time.

Ever since the end of World War II these extermination camps have been confused in people’s minds with “concentration camps”, of which there were literally dozens, spread all over Greater Germany and occupied Europe, and which have been the primary subject of descriptions in fiction and films.

There are two main reasons for the persistent confusion between these two kinds of Nazi installations; the first is that appallingly few people survived the extermination camps, and those who did are neither necessarily particularly articulate, nor anxious to relive their horrifying experiences. The second reason – far more subtle – is a universal reluctance to face the fact that these places really existed.

There is a somewhat similar confusion – in the sense of one concept being marginally more acceptable than the other – between “War Crimes” and “Nazi Crimes”. (Although the misinterpretation, or misapplication, of
these
two terms is far more deliberate and politically motivated.) For the truth is that “Nazi Crimes” (“
NS
Crimes” in Germany), although their perpetration was facilitated by war, had in their origins nothing whatever to do with the war.

In
Mein Kampf
, written in 1923, Hitler had already committed himself to a concept of a new Europe based on racial theories according to which the whole of Eastern Europe was to become a “service population” for the benefit of the “superior races” (in addition to Germany: Scandinavia, Holland, some of France, and Britain). Even if there had been no war, or if Germany had won the war after the fall of France in 1940, the conditions under which this programme could have been implemented would have had to be created. It would still have been found necessary to kill, or at best sterilize, all those in Eastern Europe most likely to resist: the intellectuals and the social and religious élite. Racially “pure” children would still have been shipped to Germany in infancy and brought up by German foster-parents or in German institutions. (A beginning to this particular phase was in fact made during the war, when 200,000 Polish infants were forcibly removed from their parents. A large number of them were returned to Poland through the efforts of
UNRRA
in 1945–6, but by no means all of them were found.)
*

Hitler’s new Europe was entirely based on this concept of superior and inferior peoples. Whether by annexation or by war, he was determined to create machinery for putting into practice the decimation of Eastern Europe. Equally, war or no war, as no other practical solution offered itself, he would eventually have had to find ways of physically exterminating the Jews; the only logical conclusion of the psychological defamation campaign on which most of his programme was built.

The “concentration” camps were originally set up as extended prison services to deal with those resisting the New Order, and to eliminate them, with bogus legality, as “traitors” or “spies” if their “re-education” proved impossible. From 1941, most of these camps became vast slave-labour markets, but even then they still varied a good deal in severity, largely depending on the nationality of the prisoners they catered for. And even in the worst of them, however terrible the conditions, they offered at least a slim chance of survival.

The “extermination” camps offered no such chance. They were created for the sole purpose of exterminating primarily the Jews of Europe, and also the Gypsies. There were four of these installations, planned
exclusively
for extermination; first, and as a testing ground, Chelmno (Kulmhof), set up in December 1941. Then, following the Wannsee Conference of January 1942 which, chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, put the official seal of approval on the extermination programme, Belsec (March 1942), Sobibor (May 1942), and the largest of them, Treblinka (June 1942). All were within a two-hundred-mile radius of Warsaw.

The decision to place all of them on Polish soil has been attributed widely to the well-known anti-Semitism of large segments of the Polish population. Although this fact may have marginally influenced the choice, it is more reasonable to assume that it was mainly prompted by tactical considerations. Poland’s railway system covered all of the country, with stations in even the smallest towns; while large tracts of the Polish countryside, densely forested and very thinly populated, made isolation possible. In this sense – and this sense only – the war did contribute to making this huge and sinister operation possible, for it is unlikely that it could have been attempted in any other region of Europe.

None of the extermination camps existed for longer than seventeen months when, one after the other, they were totally obliterated by the
SS
. The official Polish estimate – the most conservative, and not universally accepted – is that approximately 2,000,000 Jews and 52,000 gypsies (children made up at least one–third of this total) were killed in these four camps during that period.

The concentration camps too had gas-vans, gas chambers, crematoriums and mass graves. In them too people were shot, given lethal injections, gassed, and apart from being murdered, hundreds of thousands died of exhaustion, starvation and disease. But – even in Birkenau, the extermination section of Auschwitz (where 860,000 Jews are believed to have been killed)
*
– there was in all of them a chance of life.

In the extermination camps, the only people who retained this chance from day to day were the pitifully few who were kept as “work-Jews” to operate the camps. Eighty-seven people–no children among them–survived the four Nazi death-camps in Poland.

But it was not only the policy behind the Nazi murder of the Jews which distinguished it from other instances of genocide. The methods employed, too, were unique and uniquely calculated. The killings were organized systematically to achieve the maximum humiliation and dehumanization of the victims before they died. This pattern was dictated by a distinct and careful purpose, not by “mere” cruelty or indifference: the crammed airless freight-cars without sanitary provisions, food or drink, far worse than any cattle-transport; the whipped-up (literally so) hysteria of arrival; the immediate and always violent separation of men, women and children; the public undressing; the incredibly crude internal physical examinations for hidden valuables; the hair-cutting and shaving of the women; and finally the naked run to the gas chamber, under the lash of the whips.

“What did you think at the time was the reason for the extermination of the Jews?”
I was to ask Stangl.

“They wanted their money,” he replied at once. “Have you any idea of the fantastic sums that were involved? That’s how the steel was bought, in Sweden.”

Perhaps he really did believe this, but I doubt it. Globocnik’s final accounting disclosed that the
Aktion Reinhard
(named after Heydrich) netted the Third Reich
DM
178,745,960. To one man, in relation to his monthly wage, this may seem a lot of money. But what is it in the context of a nation’s normal income and expenditure, in war or in peace? It is a trivial sum.

“Why,”
I asked Stangl, “
if they were going to kill them anyway, what was the point of all the humiliation, why the cruelty?”

“To condition those who actually had to carry out the policies,” he said. “To make it possible for them to do what they did.” And this, I believe, was true.

To achieve the extermination of these millions of men, women and children, the Nazis committed not only physical but spiritual murder: on those they killed, on those who did the killing, on those who knew the killing was being done, and also, to some extent, for evermore, on all of us, who were alive and thinking beings at that time.

*
As Reitlinger says in
The Final Solution,
page 85, “Even those to whom it was passed were not all informed at the same time.”

§
A further document, from the same source, now establishes that
Einsatzgruppe
3 (EK 3, for
Einsatzkommando
, in official language) began their executions on July 4, 1941, and, carefully listing places, dates and number of victims, allows the conclusion that this one killing-command murdered at least these 138,272 people in seven months.

*
The movement of the earth was caused by the thaw releasing the gases from the corpses.

†
; “Anybody who really wanted to, could get out by faking a nervous breakdown,” Hartl told me.

*
Five if we include Birkenau, the extermination section of Auschwitz – which, however, also functioned partly as a labour camp. See map at front of book.

*
When working as a child-tracing officer for UNRRA in Germany in 1945–6, I found that numerous German foster-parents were honestly unaware that their adopted children had been stolen from Poland as infants.

*
Reititlinger,
The Final Solution
, pages 500–501, estimates that of the approximately 851,200 Jews deported to Auschwitz, probably some 700,000 were gassed and cremated in Birkenau.

2

W
E BEGAN
on the Polish part of Franz Stangl’s story on the morning of the fourth day. Everything he had told me up to now had led up to this moment. His description of his childhood and youth had frequently been interrupted by deep emotion and tears, so the prospect of having to begin the account of his work in the Nazi death-camps would, I was sure, be even more daunting to his spirits. I too was apprehensive about the coming hours.

I waited for him outside the door and watched him walk down the long corridor towards me. He smiled from far away and the closer he came the more noticeable was a subtle – and yet not all that subtle – change in his bearing; where before there had been a mixture of eagerness and slight diffidence in his morning greeting, there was now a curious kind of bland composure, and when he bowed from the waist, an overdone
bonhomie
.

When seated at the table, he began instantly, without being urged or requestioned, to talk about his arrival in Poland in the early spring of 1942. He sounded brisk and confident, speaking like an objective observer who can describe macabre and terrifying events with feeling and yet fluency and detachment.

“There were twenty of us travelling together,” he said, “all from the Foundation. I was put in charge.”

“And none of you knew what awaited you in Poland?”

“Later I found out that three or four of them had known, but at the time they said nothing – they didn’t let on.

“I reported to the
SS
HQ
Lublin,” he went on, “as soon as I arrived. It was very strange. The
SS HQ
was in the Julius Schreck Kaserne – a kind of palace surrounded by a large park. When I gave my name at the gate, I was taken through the building into the park. They said the general would meet me there.” (This was Gruppenführer (Lieutenant-General) Odilo Globocnik, who directed the extermination of the Jews in Poland and who was to commit suicide on June 6, 1945, when about to be arrested by a British patrol in Carinthia.)